Tim Sandlin: Social Blunders

“This may sting,” Maurey said, and she stabbed me right in the cut.

“Aighgh! Jesus!”

“What a wienie,” she said.

“Wienie? Let me poke a hole in you and see how it feels.”

“Hank didn’t scream when I deadened his wrist.”

“Hank’s stoic. It runs in his genes.”

“Wieniehood runs in your genes. That’ll numb up in a minute.”

My pain threshold has never been up to cowboy standards. The Callahan nerves are more sensitive than theirs, I think. Some people can see or hear better than other people, it only follows that senses of touch vary also, and mine is highly developed.

“Doctors just give you all these medical supplies?”

“They leave things with me when they go away.”

Another plastic bag held a curved needle, like cobblers use on shoe soles, pre-threaded from a little bobbin of nylon thread. I said, “A doctor recovers from alcoholism and he’s so grateful he leaves behind a home clinic.”

Maurey held the needle between her thumb and index finger as she studied my cut. “Actually, this particular doctor committed suicide.”

She slid the needle into the flap and pulled it out of clean skin. It felt icky. No pain—just icky, like the ultimate in fingernails across a blackboard. “He couldn’t live with or without alcohol,” she went on, “so he hung himself in the barn.”

“And you kept his stuff.”

Maurey tied a complicated knot by dipping the needle through a loop and turning it sideways or something. I couldn’t follow the process. Afterward she snipped the thread and went back into my thumb for a second stitch.

Without looking up, she said, “Pud asked me to marry him.”

“Ouch!”

“Don’t jerk your hand while the needle’s in it.”

“You purposely waited until I was helpless to break the news.”

“I was going to tell you. He only asked last night.”

“I hope you said no.”

Maurey drew the thread through and tied the knot. She pretended to be concentrating so hard I knew she wasn’t concentrating at all. She could easily have sewn my fingers together.

“I said okay.”

“Okay? The kid asks you to marry him and all you can say is ‘Okay.’ Isn’t that a bit halfhearted?”

“Don’t be tacky with me, Sam.”

“But you already married one Talbot and he was a shit.”

“I’ve got the good brother this time.”

Maurey and I had been best friends since before puberty. I thought we would always be the way we had always been, with our romantic lives a hobby we take seriously, but nevertheless, still a hobby. The nuclear family would always be each other.

“You’ve lived with Pud for years. Why change what works?”

Maurey pulled the third stitch. “Why are you freaking out?”

“I think he’s taking advantage of your vulnerability over losing Pete.”

She tied the knot hard and snipped the loose end with her scissors in a crisp snip of anger.

“You’ve been married twice.”

“But that was different. Neither of those women was as vital to me as you are.”

“And they knew that. I don’t blame them for hating me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe—just maybe—putting me first over your wives had something to do with why your marriages failed?”

“They were both emotional cripples. It had nothing to do with you.”

Maurey’s eyes met mine fiercely. “Pud is my partner, Sam. My mate. You are my very good friend. You are important, yet secondary.”

“But we always said friends matter more than lovers.”

“You always said that. Pud is the number-one man in my life, Sam. You have to accept that.”

“Fat chance.”

I kicked on my cross-country skis and headed up the creek. Got to get away. Got to go. Movement eases turmoil. The warm days earlier in the week had softened the snow and today’s cold hardened it, so basically I was skiing on ice. I fell twice before the back fence. A single rail showed above the snow and it was easy to sidestep over. Once across, I made my way into the aspens, where the going was a bit easier.

How could she do this to me? When I got married I didn’t flaunt my true love in her face. I didn’t call her secondary. The first time I sent a postcard: “Got married. Wish you were here.” The second time, Shannon told her.

When Wanda ran off with the illiterate pool man I thought I had a rock-solid support system—mother, daughter, closest friend—stable as a three-legged stool. Okay, the mother wasn’t too supportive, but I knew where she was. If I felt like talking to her, all I had to do was hold on to a check for a couple of days. I never dreamed Shannon would leave so soon. Maybe if I’d stayed in Greensboro after the Katrina fiasco she wouldn’t have discovered how easy I am to live without.

What was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to North Carolina. The Manor House would be an empty tomb without Shannon. Besides, I’d had it with golf carts and serial sex. Gilia changed all that.

For sure, I couldn’t stay in my cell at the TM Ranch forever. Spring would come; Madame Bovary would eat arsenic and die; Maurey would marry Pud.

What I ought to do was move to a small Western town and find a log cabin within walking distance of a video store and a coffee shop, and do nothing for ten years but write novels. Not teenage sports fiction, but literature— Death in Steamboat Springs , Bucky Redux , a rewrite of the New Testament. I would be as serious as Richard Ford. Psychiatrists and doctors take sick people and bring them up to normal. I could take normal and make it better. My readers would stop being miserable; they would tolerate themselves and each other.

Or if that was too ambitious, I could bring Babs and Lynette to Wyoming and set them up with their own Dairy Queen. They’d like that.

The options were boundless. Almost too boundless, like the night I was left alone at the ranch and I tried to watch satellite TV. Four hundred channels gave me so many choices I spent the entire evening switching from satellite to satellite and didn’t watch anything for fear of missing something. When all choices are possible, realistic and unrealistic lose their edges. Here I was torn between writing a book that would make unhappy people happy and opening a Dairy Queen.

When had I been happy in life? When Maurey was pregnant. When Shannon was young and needed me. Looking back at the recent past, I realized helping Babs and Lynette had given me a gut-level satisfaction that had been missing lately from Young Adult novels and sex acts on lost women.

I was almost to the warm springs when I came through a gap in the aspens into a wide clearing covered by virgin snow, and I had a vision. Maybe not a vision in the Cheyenne sense, more like a waking dream—a visualization. It wasn’t something I could ever tell Maurey or Shannon about. They would laugh. Lydia would hoot.

What I saw was a log lodge with a rock chimney next to a white clinic. Individual cabins lay scattered around the clearing connected by smooth paths. Golf carts hummed quietly back and forth between the cabins and the main lodge, carrying my women. A long driveway lined by cottonwoods and red willows looped up from the ranch. At a quaint wooden bridge spanning the brook, a tastefully small sign read Callahan Home for Unwed Mothers.

Why not? I could hire nurses. We’d need a helicopter for hospital runs, but, hell, I had money. Nothing on Earth sounded nicer than to surround myself with pregnant teenagers.

A doughnut of green clover about three feet wide encircles the warm springs all winter. The north side of the doughnut is the actual spring, which steams from the earth like a scene from Shakespeare—one of those Scottish moors haunted by witches. The hot water gurgles into a moss-lined pool, thigh deep at its deepest point, then, already cooling, it empties west into Miner Creek. The Miner Creek approach involves skiing across a log high above the rocks and ice, so my rest and meditation spot was on the east side, the gentle bank.