Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

“I wish you were my mother,” I said.

Atalanta gave me a squeeze on the shoulder and said, “So do I.”

Rule Number One of Being Sam Callahan: In times of torment, fly to Maurey. The evening after Halloween, All Souls’ Night itself, I landed in the Jackson Hole Airport during the first real snowstorm of the year. Because the flight attendant thought I was handicapped, she helped me down the airplane steps and across the runway to the terminal where Hank Elkrunner awaited. I did feel arthritic, especially in the knees and feet. The world looked the way I imagine it would if you’d just survived a plane crash where other people were killed. Objects appeared brand new; I couldn’t come up with the word that went along with the thing.

Hank said, “Welcome home.”

I said, “Oh.”

He drove to the ranch through blowing snow and no heat in his pickup. On the radio, Jimmy Buffett sang “Peanut Butter Conspiracy”—a song glorifying shoplifting. At the ranch, Hank led me to my private cell in the barracks he and Pud built years ago for Maurey’s recovering legions. Without undressing, I crawled between the sheets of a twin bed and lay on my back, neither awake nor asleep. The plywood ceiling had knot whorls in the wood grain that stared down at me like eyes. Pissed-off, judgmental eyes. Female eyes.

Maurey came through the door. She felt my forehead and took off my shoes. “You look like a wreck,” she said.

“I am a wreck.”

“You’re in the right place, I’m a tow truck.”

I closed my eyes, too tired for metaphors.

Every now and then I got up to pee, which meant going outside in the snow and around the building. Twice each day a pregnant teenager who told me her name was Toinette brought food. You can take it as a gauge of how far into my hole I’d sunk that I felt no curiosity as to how and when Toinette became pregnant.

On the third day, Maurey showed up at my bedside, straddling a chair backward, like a cowboy.

She said, “My brother is dying, his lover is losing a lover. I’ve got a pregnant girl disowned by her family and a little boy so traumatized he can’t speak.”

I pulled the sheet over my mouth; she reached across and yanked it back down.

“And you,” she said, “are the only person on the ranch who feels sorry for yourself.”

“Auburn can’t talk?”

“Auburn’s fine.” She knocked wood on the chair. “Roger can’t talk.”

“Who’s Roger?”

“Long story. Are you going to get up or waste away?”

“What about the recovering junkie?” I asked.

“What?”

“When we talked on the phone you had a recovering junkie.”

“He stopped recovering and left.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Win some, lose some. The deal is, you’re the lone refugee out here not pulling your weight in the cheerfulness department.”

“Are you cheerful?” She looked worn out. The veins showed in her arms and her eyes crinkled like she’d been outside too much without sunglasses.

“Fuck, no, I’m not cheerful. Helping family die is hard work, but I’m faking it like a champ, and I can’t do this unless you fake it too.”

I sat up. “You want me to fake being cheerful?”

Maurey’s blue eyes glistened, but she didn’t cry. “I need you, Sam. You’ve got to get up and help me.”

So I did. All I needed was someone to need me.

Mornings, Maurey drove or snowmobiled the boys six miles down to their bus stop while Hank hitched a team of half-breed draft horses to the hay sled, which he skidded around the pasture with Pud and me on back, throwing hay to a herd of forty horses and a half dozen semi-tame elk. I couldn’t help but wonder what Gaylene and Shirley would say if they saw me feeding horses with horses. The TM Ranch was a long way from Callahan Golf Carts, in more than distance.

After feeding, I went back to bed with a carafe of coffee and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Emma Bovary was the sort of woman I once would have found ripe for adultery—bored silly. So desperate for attention that she’ll risk all for one interesting night. I have now sworn off the Emma Bovarys of the world.

I generally took a short nap after lunch, then strapped on the cross-country skis and shuffled up Miner Creek to the warm springs and back. This time segment was set aside for self-flagellation. Going up the hill I pined for Gilia, at the warm springs itself I dwelt on my shameful conduct toward Clark and Atalanta, and coming down I mourned my wasted talent as a novelist—the theory being the best way of coming to terms with guilt is to wallow in it.

Maurey gave me a choice between cooking supper and the daily cleaning of the stud stall. Food won’t stomp you to death, so I chose supper. Cooking can be quite pleasant when it’s cold outside and you’re in a warm place that smells good. As I chopped and blended, Toinette sat in the family room or den or whatever it was called and played her viola. She warmed up with scales and finger exercises, then she practiced Irish Rhapsody by Victor Herbert—“We Roam Through the World” and “My Lodgings on the Cold Ground.” The viola parts weren’t something you’d whistle along with, but they made the day nicer.

Toinette had come from Belgium to Jackson Hole to play in our summer symphony. Under the full moon in the Tetons, she surrendered to love—Maurey suspects a percussionist—and a child was conceived. I can relate to that. When Toinette telephoned Papa he called her a whore in Flemish, French, and English and told her not to come home. He said, From this day forward my daughter is dead. The jerk.

Dinner was a sitcom written by Edgar Allan Poe.

Afterward, Pud and the boys cleaned up. I carried my decaf into the family room and looked through catalogs or read Zane Grey by the wood-burning heater while Chet and Pete played Scrabble and Toinette watched French-language TV off the Canadian satellite. Some nights, during old movies, I watched with her. The strange language wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as seeing Jimmy Stewart open his mouth and speak in a totally non-Jimmy Stewart voice.

By ten-thirty I was back in bed with Madame Bovary.

The third day after I got out of bed, I came in from my afternoon ski and guilt orgy to find Maurey in the kitchen, aiming a hypodermic syringe at the ceiling. Pete sat on a stool beside the wood-block table, playing gin rummy with Chet. I checked out the score; Pete was way ahead.

“Where’d you learn to give shots?” I asked Maurey.

She tapped the syringe barrel with her index fingernail. “You’d be amazed how many doctors are alcoholic.”

“I doubt it.”

“They come here to start recovery and I make them teach me things. Who you think will deliver Toinette’s baby if it comes during a blizzard?”

I opened the refrigerator to pull out a bottle of cranberry juice and perused the options for supper—leftover corned beef and applesauce.

Pete said, “Gin.”

Chet said, “Hell.” He gathered in the loose cards and shuffled. Chet was an adept card shuffler, which is a skill I’ve never been able to pick up. My shuffles tend to explode across the table.

“Roll up your sleeve,” Maurey said to Pete.

As Pete rolled his sleeve up over his mop-handle-thin arm, he turned on the stool to face me. “Maurey says you’re paying my doctor bills.”

I shrugged and drank juice straight from the bottle. It embarrasses me when people act like I’m being generous for giving away bits of the Callahan family fortune. I never did anything to deserve it, except being born.