Tim Sandlin: Social Blunders

Chet stared at me, unblinking. So did Roger, but his unblinking face sucked in light while Chet’s glowed with emotion. Like the difference between the moon and a black hole.

Nothing to do but plow ahead. “Pete must have been six or seven. He wanted to watch cartoons, but they weren’t on because of the assassination coverage. He and Maurey got into a fight and she smacked him in the nose.”

Maurey was frowning. It seemed awfully important not to disappoint her in this, which meant the story had to go somewhere, mean something.

“I realized then how a family works; the members of a family may fight like cats and dogs, and they almost never understand what the others want or feel, or who they are, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the love that flows without reservation. Without doubt.”

Father Jack shifted his weight on the bench. I wondered what he thought of us behind that beard. Was it just another day’s work for him, like me at the golf cart plant?

“What else do I remember about Pete?” I asked myself and the congregation. Had to be something. “His mother. When Pete’s mother was sick all those years, he took care of her. Pete loved his mother very much.”

The people looked up at me, expecting more. I hadn’t yet said enough to quit. “After she died, he went to New York City and got a job in the theater, managing lights for plays and musicals.”

Chet had stopped watching me and was staring at the box of ashes. His eyes were striking. They showed more than the grief of separation. You could see that he’d received something permanent from Pete, something I had never felt with a woman—friend or lover. It came to me that the funeral wasn’t for Pete; it was for Chet.

“Pete Pierce was gay,” I said.

Maurey moved her hands into her lap. The three guys from New York rustled in their seats. I could tell from some faces farther back that not everyone had known. Instead of addressing the group, I spoke directly to Chet.

“Pete was proud of being gay, and I think that pride is why he chose me to say words about him today. He knew I wouldn’t pretend he was someone he wasn’t. He knew I wouldn’t skip over one of the central elements of his life.”

Almost imperceptibly, Chet nodded. I knew I was going in the right direction.

“We can’t talk about who Pete was without acknowledging his love for Chet, here. They were partners, mates. Lovers in every sense of the word.”

Chet’s lips parted in almost, but not quite, a smile.

I said, “His love for Chet was the truth that made Pete feel unique.”

I looked at Pud over against the window. His face was turned ever so slightly toward Maurey’s, and hers toward him.

“A person would like to think his or her life has significance,” I said.

Shannon’s face was turned to the window, as if she were listening to something outside the rest of us couldn’t hear. She was daydreaming.

“To me, significance means to love, and to be cherished, and to impact creatively the world—large or small—that one occupies. Pete found significance. Through his work and his love he left a legacy that will live into the future with each of us he touched.”

I turned to Father Jack. “Where’s the nearest phone?”

He shifted forward on the bench, confusion in his eyes. “The church offices. Next door.”

I left by the door behind the pulpit. Crossing the snowy yard, I saw that Dothan and the bimbo were gone. Love wasn’t everything. Neither was friendship and family. What I wanted and couldn’t get, even from the three legs of my support stool, was someone to take my dreams seriously.

Gilia answered on the third ring.

“Hello.”

“What do you think of a home for unwed mothers? We could run it. You and I.”

There was a long silence and quiet breathing, then Gilia said, “Where?”

Social Blunders is the third novel I’ve written about the good folks of GroVont, Wyoming, and several reviewers and letter writers have told me I am misspelling the name of my fictional town. This hardly seems fair since I created the place. There once was a real town named and spelled Gro Vont on almost the same spot where I put my version. The real Gro Vont was settled in 1894 near the Gros Ventre River at the base of the Gros Ventre Mountains, which, together with the Gros Ventre Indian tribe, are pronounced the same as the town. Gros Ventre is a French term meaning Big Belly. A translation more in keeping with the spirit of the tribes who named the Gros Ventre Indians would be the Hippy Derelicts.

One group of old-timers claims the early settlers of GroVont changed the spelling because they were sick and tired of correcting outsiders who pronounced it Gross Ven-tray . Another faction, pointing to various maps that spell it Grovont, Gro Vont, or GroVont, say the early settlers couldn’t spell for squat and painted the post office sign in ignorance. No one but the Postal Service ever called the town GroVont anyway; to the people who lived there and those in the surrounding valley, it was always Mormon Row.

Gro Vont’s population peaked in the mid-1920s at more or less fifty, then when the Depression trickled down to Wyoming, John Rockefeller’s agents bought all the land they could get their hands on for thirty-seven dollars an acre. Rockefeller gave the land to the government so they could form what is now Grand Teton National Park. Those who wouldn’t sell were forced to sign life leases. A life lease means when the current title holder dies, the land goes to the government and the children go elsewhere. As the old-timers died or were run off their ranches by the Park Service, Gro Vont’s numbers dwindled until now only Clark and Veda Moulton are left. The Mormon Church was hauled twenty miles closer to the ski area and made into a pizza parlor, the old school is now the shower house at a yurt village, and the last post office was taken to a nearby dude ranch. Interestingly enough, the Park Service is working on a plan to hire actors and actresses to go out on Mormon Row and pretend to do what the real ranchers were doing before the government chased them off the ranches. Only in America.

After finishing Skipped Parts , I discovered I was the third novelist to set books in a fictional town named GroVont or Gros Ventre—a remarkable coincidence when you think about it. How many Yoknapatawpha Counties sprang up independently of each other? The first Gros Ventre belonged to H. L. Davis, whose book Honey in the Horn won a Pulitzer Prize in 1936. Ivan Doig created Gros Ventre number two—three if the real one counts—for his Montana trilogy. Mr. Doig’s Montanans pronounce it GROVE-on. Don’t ask me why. Even God doesn’t understand native Montanans.

Rebecca Stern

Reviewers have variously compared Tim Sandlin to Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Larry McMurtry, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen, and a few other writers you’ve probably heard of. He has published eight novels and a book of columns. He wrote eleven screenplays for hire; two of which have been made into movies. He turned forty with no phone, TV, or flush toilet and spent more time talking to the characters in his head than the people around him. He now has seven phone lines, four TVs he doesn’t watch, three flush toilets, and a two-headed shower. He lives happily (indoors) with his family (wife, Carol; son, Kyle; daughter, Leila) in Jackson, Wyoming.