GroVont: Sorrow Floats Part 16

"Where's Charley?"

"I loathe a woman who talks in riddles."

"My Dan Wesson model 12 .357 Magnum with a four-inch barrel, which is longer than yours, by the way. I want him back."

Shane sputtered and twitched. I never met a man yet couldn't be put at a disadvantage by making sport of his d.i.c.k size.

"I don't have your precious pistol," Shane said. "You probably got drunk and lost it."

"That's impossible. I would never lose Charley."

"You got drunk and lost your baby, why couldn't you get drunk and lose your gun?"

Andrew had to use the bathroom twice between the time we loaded him into Moby d.i.c.k and we left the motel. Right then I could foretell the next 1,500 miles. For some reason, Marcella handed Hugo Jr. to Shane. Hugo Jr. reacted by going into high wail. The kid wouldn't shut up, not even when Shane gave him back. First thing Critter did in Moby d.i.c.k was light incense-smelled like Dothan's hands during his taxidermy period. The kitten peed on a sleeping bag.

Lloyd asked me to drive the first shift. "I have something for you," he said. He leaned in the pa.s.senger door and opened the glove compartment to show me a half-pint of Yukon Jack. "When you need it, tell me and I'll take over the driving."

"Isn't there a rule against you AA guys buying booze for other people?"

"No." He pulled himself up into the seat. "You will stop drinking when you decide to stop. I see no reason for us to repeat yesterday afternoon."

"Good point."

He turned his eyes on me and it was like being under a full moon. "When you are ready to stop killing yourself I will be there to help."

"I'll keep that in mind."

The trip boiled down to a leapfrog from bathroom to bathroom. We didn't even make the Amarillo city limits before Andrew started hopping on one foot and whining.

"Why not hook him up with one of Shane's catheters," I suggested.

Marcella said, "Maurey," and Lloyd cut his eyes at me like I'd made a social blunder.

Critter pretzeled her legs and made her thumbs and index fingers into little O's and hummed into the smoke. Shane explained the s.e.x life of armadillos.

"The egg is fertilized months before the female attaches it to the uterus wall and begins gestation. She always has quadruplets, and they are always all four the same s.e.x. I once saw two armadillos having oral s.e.x, but I don't know if they were the same s.e.x or not. The woman whose car I was riding in refused to stop after we ran over them. I've always regretted not returning to inspect the bodies. h.o.m.os.e.xuality is fairly rare in animals."

"I knew a dog that would hump anything or anyone," I said.

"That's what you said about your husband," Marcella said.

Shane didn't like being interrupted. "We're not discussing dry-humping dogs. We're discussing oral s.e.x in the animal kingdom."

"What's dry humping?" Andrew yelled. He was coloring Moby d.i.c.k's interior walls. Gave the ambulance the feel of a hippy bus, but Lloyd didn't seem to mind. He was staring at Sharon's picture, searching for a clue, I guess.

"Why chase after a wife who's hiding from you?" I asked.

Lloyd didn't answer-just looked at the picture, then out the window, then down at the picture again.

Critter's home was in Comanche, Oklahoma, which she showed me on the map as a dot down south near the Red River. Way the heck out of our way, but I didn't say anything. I didn't really care where we went so long as we didn't get there. Getting somewhere would mean I had to start feeling again and figuring a way to wrest Auburn from his evil p.r.i.c.k of a father.

"Is Hugo still following?" Marcella asked.

I could see the big Oldsmobile in the side mirror. He'd dropped back behind two pickups and a black limousine, tailing us like a detective in the Mike Shane Mystery magazine. "Yeah, he's back there."

"He's just being stubborn. He's afraid losing his family will make him look bad at the Presbyterian church."

"Hugo's a religious adulterer?"

"He joined the church to play softball. The Northside Presbyterians have the best team in the Panhandle."

Critter said, "G.o.d is in us all."

The road was weird. It was a four-lane divided highway but with curbs like a town street instead of shoulders like a normal highway. I kept being afraid the right trailer tire would drift over and sc.r.a.pe, so I tended to keep it close to the middle, which p.i.s.sed off the Texans who wanted to pa.s.s. One man shook his fist at me. After years of watching people flip each other off, his expression of anger seemed almost wholesome.

In Memphis, Texas, we turned east on this state highway about the width of a Ping-Pong table. Every time a semi-truck came at us we about crashed mirrors. Made me tense.

A billboard for Mildred's Manure read "We're Number 1 with Number 2." Four white crosses next to the road marked the spot where four people had died in traffic accidents. In Hollis, Oklahoma, a sign outside a church read "The road to G.o.d is always under construction."

"I know a man in Hollis can cover his entire nose with his lower lip," Shane said. "Maybe we should stop and see him."

I felt fingers on my neck and almost jumped through the windshield.

Critter said, "Relax, think about a cool place where the gra.s.s is green and the water pure and cold."

Home. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing? Did I say you could touch me?"

"These muscles are tight as guitar strings. I've never met anyone so Saturn-squared. Even Freedom isn't this tight after an all-night run to Dallas."

My automatic impulse was to reject kindness from an airhead-it seemed the strong thing to do-but her fingers felt nice. All the way through the muscles and blood to the bones, everything gave an inch. "What's Freedom?"

She kneaded the base of my neck. "He's my man. Freedom is kind and gentle. He travels freely on the sixth level. Wrap your mind around that. I've never even seen past the fog of level five. Sometimes I have corporeal thoughts, jealousy, hunger, yangy stuff like that."

"Nothing wrong with jealousy and hunger if that's how you feel."

"Freedom is immune to pain. He has surrounded himself with an invisible hedge of protection."

Her fingers were firm and strong. Her words were the droolings of a droid whose brains had been scooped at birth, but I ignored the words and heard the voice. Her voice was a ballad sung to a baby by a mother who didn't take her clothes off at rodeos. It was like being in the mountains alone. I must have been starved for human touch because I didn't care that Critter was a girl or, even worse, a girl who said "karma" and "yangy" and had a man named Freedom. You know, sometimes it's good for people to touch each other without s.e.xual undertones. Some of my best friends are people I haven't f.u.c.ked.

Critter's voice drifted into a soft rhythm punctuated by the ba.s.s of Shane's lecture on trucks or truck drivers or whatever. Driving the divide in the geometric design of road, telephone poles, fences, fields, I floated back to Lloyd's offer to be there when I decided to stop. I'd taken the offer as a nose-in-my-business, but he meant well. Lloyd was wise to the point of being guruish when it came to things other than his wife.

Fact: Someday, in the distant future, I would have to face reality and stop drinking alcohol. It would be a pain in the a.s.s but I could stop. I could. Lloyd had stopped. Shane had stopped. Surely if old winos could pull themselves together enough to get off the juice, so could I. But it was such a cheat to be forced to stop. Other people drink whiskey all the time and no one says they are killing themselves.

I would stop as soon as I hit that bottom they all talked about. What could be more bottom than driving with your baby on the roof?

It's just that I couldn't conceive of living every day from now on until I died without a single drink. What would I do with my time? Watch TV? Bowl? I was too young to stop taking risks.

Dothan, the jerk, was divorcing me, and soon I would find myself pushing thirty and single. Alone. Someday I might want male company again. How do non-drinking women find dates? Join a church? Come on, I wasn't the type.

What did non-drinking couples do on dates? I didn't like men who didn't drink. They were boring, insecure, uptight, and often weird; and you know what single men think of non-drinking women-frigid fish.

Lloyd didn't have to tell me I must stop drinking someday; I knew that d.a.m.n well, only today wasn't the day. I had to find a friend first. I'd never find one afterward.

Critter dug into my shoulders with her thumbs. "Freedom could give you a prescription to relax your vibrancy points. He's very good at mixing pharmaceuticals."

"I really would be in trouble if I started dabbling in pills."

"You really are in trouble now."

Shane couldn't handle not being the one being rubbed and consoled. I heard him do the flop-on-the-floor thing, then he said, "My first level needs its plumbing changed. Critter, would you be the angel of mercy and a.s.sist with my catheter?"

"You betcha." Her hands moved off my shoulders, and I almost groaned. My touch neediness is so intense and the pay-out so spa.r.s.e, maybe that's one reason I subst.i.tuted Yukon Jack for affection.

"He doesn't need help with his plumbing," I said. "He's using you to get his crank felt."

"What a sordid accusation," Shane said.

"He can fix it by himself."

Critter had already turned away from me. She said, "I know, but it doesn't harm me and it makes Shaney happy."

"Shaney won't appreciate you. He'll think he took advantage of you and treat you like a fool."

"No, I shan't," Shane said. "I'll think nothing of the kind."

"There's no shame in giving a man what he wants," Critter said.

"Jesus, are you naive."

Andrew shouted, "She's touching Uncle Shane's wienie!"

"Uncle Shane has a disease," Marcella said, "and Critter is a nurse. Nurses are allowed to touch wienies."

"She's no nurse-nurses wear shoes. Someone call the police and throw her in jail for touching Uncle Shane's wienie."

"The p.e.n.i.s is a beautiful and sacred object and should be held in glorification," Critter said.

I repeated, "Jesus, are you naive."

Shane and Marcella hit it in unison. "Don't say 'p.e.n.i.s' in front of Andrew." That's when I decided they really were brother and sister.

Critter's att.i.tude of p.e.n.i.s glorification may be warped, but no more than Shane and Marcella thinking it's okay to whip it out for medical purposes but not okay to call it by its name. I never have figured the shades of decency that say it's kosher to call an object one word but not another that means the same thing. Why is wienie harmless but p.e.n.i.s filth? The thing is still a d.i.c.k. Or take make love and f.u.c.k. What, one's holy and beautiful and the other sc.u.mmy dirt? They feel the same to me. How about pa.s.sed over to San Francisco as opposed to dead? They both mean somebody I need disappeared.

Something brushed my leg and I jumped like I'd been hot-shotted-second time in ten minutes.

Lloyd said, "Only a cat."

I'd forgotten about the no-name kitten. He, or she, I think it was a he, crawled into my lap and broke into heartfelt purrs. Soon as my stomach settled, I scratched the little sucker behind the ears. He was a gray, short-hair, bony thing with normal whiskers on the right side of his nose and minuscule whiskers on his left, the result of Andrew and a pair of nail clippers. I don't know if the whisker amputation caused it, but the cat couldn't walk right. He had a way of lurching and catching himself, not unlike the way Shane described people walking with their big toe cut off.

When the kitten tucked his chin to his chest to receive my scratches, he reminded me of Sam Callahan's old cat. Sam's cat was cool, but she couldn't, or wouldn't, differentiate between a litter box and an open suitcase, which caused no end of unpleasant scenes with guests over the years.

Shane launched into this story about a job he once had driving a school bus in Santa Teresa, California. I missed the front part and came in on the weird section.

"I was driving the football team home from a victory over Palo Alto High. The September evening was incredibly hot, or the tragedy would have been averted."

"What tragedy was that?" Critter asked. "Lift up so I can clean under here. I've never seen one that wasn't circ.u.mcised before."

"I came over a hill directly onto two Best Buy milk trucks parked on opposite shoulders. The Highway Patrol measured later, and they figured the drivers left the bus less than one inch of clearance. The press called it a miracle of driving skill that I slipped the school bus between them going fifty miles an hour without any of the three vehicles suffering so much as a scratch."

"My hero," Critter said. I didn't hear a drop of sarcasm in her voice.

Shane went on. "Unfortunately, all the windows were open. As I flew through the gap, I heard this whap, whap whap sound. Sixteen boys on each side of the bus lost their arms."

Lloyd and I exchanged one of those looks that bind people later on.

Critter said, "Yuck, why are you telling me this?"

Shane seemed oblivious of the fact several people were about to get sick. "The screams didn't start for three or four seconds. I don't think even the boys who'd lost their arms knew what had happened. Then the situation reduced to chaos. If you pinch it some, the rubber slides on easier."

Critter said, "Like this?"

"I thought perhaps some of the arms could be sewn back on, so I jumped from the bus and ran to the milk trucks. I'll never forget the sight if I live to a hundred. Thirty-two arms lying on the highway. They didn't look real, more like broken mannequin parts. Except for the blood and exposed muscles."

"I've heard this story before," Marcella said.

"I haven't," Lloyd said.

Andrew was still fascinated by the wienie. "They'll put you in jail."

"I told the milk truck drivers to throw the arms in their rigs and follow me to the hospital." Shane lowered his booming voice. "Here's the miracle: not one of those poor boys died. We saved every last soul. Of course it took the doctors too long to sort out which arm went with which boy, so they weren't in time to sew any of them back together.

"At graduation that spring the school gave me a special award in appreciation of my quick action. Whenever a boy came onstage for his diploma you could tell which side of the bus he'd sat on by which arm he had left."

Thirty-two arms on the roadway made an interesting image. Even Critter was grossed into a moment of silence. I asked Lloyd, "Why does he tell these lies?"

Lloyd's eyes were closer to Jesus than ever. "What makes you think they're lies?"

"The next spring the California Legislature pa.s.sed a law against school bus windows that open from the bottom. It's been almost twenty years, but the one-armed members of that football team still come together every September on the day they beat Palo Alto. They send me an invitation, but I don't go. It doesn't seem proper since I'm whole and all."