The summer I turned fourteen, I decided dogs and cats were agents of God, angels who spied on us and reported unclean thoughts and screwups to the man up top. Actually, dogs reported to cats, who spoke directly to God. Dogs can’t talk to God. Just cats.
The episode was discovered when I attached notes to Him onto neighborhood dog and cat collars. I know what you’re doing, but it’s okay. You can trust me not to tell anyone. Please let me go.
Neighbors complained to Mom and my stepdad, who sent me to a county extension analyst, who said the problem was artificial flavors and coloring and if I ate better I still wouldn’t be happy, but at least I wouldn’t bother anyone.
We—Lana Sue and I—own two dogs and two cats now: Rocky, Josie, Fitz, and Zelda. I still won’t do anything in front of the animals that I don’t want God or Lana Sue to know about.
• • •
My mother is a beehive hairdo cocktail waitress in a jukebox and bingo club in Victoria, Texas. She wears fake gold earrings shaped like the Texas A&M logo. She keeps Coronet facial tissues between the cups in her bra. She chews three sticks of Trident at once and fries everything she eats.
Mom royally botched the job of raising me and my two brothers. Patrick grew into a real estate magnate in Corpus Christi. He’s a swamp drainer. Garret is a Jesus freak serving ten to twenty-five on a heroin charge in the Georgia State pen in Reidsville. There was also a baby sister, Kathy, who got herself killed by a Texas Ranger during a race riot in Houston. They caught her looting a Woolworth’s department store. She died with her arms full of Barbie dolls.
My stepfather, Don, works on an offshore rig in the Gulf, bowls in the low 200s, and has worn white socks every day of his life. He sleeps in the same underwear he bowls in. Mom told me my real dad was an evangelist for the Southern Ministry, but I don’t believe her. I doubt if she knew.
If I ever sell another book, I’m going to a plastic surgeon to have my navel smoothed over. I don’t want any reminders that I was ever connected to that woman.
• • •
Writing books is what I do—or did. Lately, I’ve been thinking there may be more to life than pretending I’m somebody else. In ten years of almost daily typing I sold two formula Westerns and one of those sentimental novels where you make the readers like a character, then you kill him. After I met Lana Sue, I wrote a vaguely true, mostly lies book called The Yeast Infection. All the carefully veiled characters recognized themselves and I found myself embroiled in two lawsuits and a fistfight. I won the lawsuits. Would have won the fistfight, but Jimmy Stewart doesn’t hit women.
Movie rights sold, amazingly enough, and Lana Sue and I suddenly arrived in Temporary Fat City. Lana Sue’d been raised upper tax bracket, so she handled it okay. I went nuts—Super Bowl tickets, eighty-dollar bottles of sherry, Nautilus machines, personalized license plates on the Chevelle. After a quick trip to Carano, Italy, in search of Max Brand’s first grave—he had two—I still maintained enough cash to support us without hourly work at least through the summer.
A summer in Jackson Hole without money thoughts is the gift of a lifetime and gifts should not be pissed away on idleness. I decided that in order to stay with Lana Sue I had to resolve my past and in order to do that I had to give up Buggie.
Lana Sue said, “Loren, no disembodied voice up in the mountains is waiting to tell you where Buggie is.”
“I’ll force it out of him.”
“Out of who?”
“Whoever’s up there.”
“Wave bye-bye, Loren, ’cause I won’t be here when you come back down.”
Lana Sue’s daddy was a gynecologist and her grandma committed suicide. Her former husband was a country music promoter who used to fake epileptic fits whenever she wouldn’t go down on him, so Lana Sue was well acquainted with insanity before she came to me and she doesn’t care to get involved with purposeful psychosis.
“You’re getting heavy,” she said.
“Don’t you ever wonder about the purpose of life?”
“I wonder about the price of Tony Lamas or how many calories are in frozen yogurt. The purpose of life doesn’t matter, Loren.”
“Does to me.”
As America goes lightweight—light beer, light cigarettes, light margarine—being “heavy” is the last great sin. It replaced saying “fuck” on television.
Lana Sue sang in one of her hub’s bands before I spirited her away to the Wyoming wilderness. She wasn’t good enough to be in the band without balling somebody, and she knew it, and the husband, Ace, reminded her of this fact every night.
Ace said, “You could never be in this band if you weren’t screwing me,” which made her resent him, naturally. Ace is the title character in The Yeast Infection. I came, fell into the picture, and told her I wouldn’t give her anything at all if she slept with me, so she did. I lied, though, because after the last book came out, we got our picture in the Casper Star Tribune’s Sunday Supplement. I have the picture in a frame on my desk. Lana Sue and I are standing by the greenhouse, petting our dog, Rocky, who has just ripped the heart out of a marmot that’s not in the picture. Lana Sue is wearing a dark wool shirt and tight jeans. Her hair is the best part of the picture. I love Lana Sue’s hair.
My face looks like I just woke up with a bad schnapps hangover. The back of my jeans hangs down loose was if my ass has been surgically removed. Even in the grainy newspaper picture, my glasses are noticeably dirty. The caption says Lana Sue and I are a “vibrant young Wyoming couple.” Lana Sue is vibrant. I don’t label well.
• • •
I fell in love with Lana Sue because she fell in love with me. Also, because she sings on the toilet. The morning after our first night, I woke up fuzzy and heard the chorus of “Jambalaya” coming from the bathroom. The song is a list of interesting Louisiana foods. Hank Williams wrote it.
Figuring it was safe, I did my usual blind morning stumble into the can and there sat a beautiful woman, the beautiful woman, my adolescent fantasy woman, with panties around her ankles.
“Nobody sings on the toilet,” I said.
“I do.”
“You’re supposed to sing in the shower.”
“I sing anywhere I want.”
“My God.” I backed out, closed the door, and leaned my forehead on the cool paint of the frame. Seven-thirty on a Sunday morning and she’s singing Hank Williams on the crapper. I decided to marry her and have children.
• • •
Lana Sue is the most self-confident person I’ve ever known. She’s so smooth and…adaptable. And cheerful—how many cheerful people do you meet who aren’t unrealistic to the point of retarded?
More remarkable than that, Lana Sue thinks I’m “hot stuff.” She said so. She said I’m a prize she got for not going nuts or settling for anything less. Isn’t that remarkable, a woman of balance and perspective, not to mention beautiful as the sun rising over the Tetons, swept off her feet by a manic-depressive soul searcher with no ass? There’s no accounting for tastes.
The only thing that worries me is, Lana Sue seems too good to be true, and too good to be true almost always isn’t—true. But so far, up until I obsessed out on this search, Lana Sue has walked that narrow writer’s wife line between taking my artistic temperament seriously and treating me like a learning-deficient cousin. She even listens with a straight face when I babble on about emanations from dead novelists.
“I read Flannery O’Connor a chapter of Erica Jong and she rolled over in her grave,” I said, and Lana Sue answered, “Uh-huh,” and not a question about how I knew without digging her up.
Or one day I said, “Scott Fitzgerald is calling. He wants to explain the ending of The Last Tycoon,” and Lana Sue answered, “Take the Toyota, it’s gassed up.”
Nine days later when I pulled back in the driveway, she asked, “What’s the ending?” and didn’t laugh or anything when I told her Scott changed his mind. God only knows the woman was patient. She put up with an unholy amount of metaphysical fufaw before driving out of my life.
• • •
How long? Four days ago, five maybe, the day before Lana Sue left, I sat out by the creek behind our cabin, inspecting minute plant life. The whole week had been spent either up on a ridge top screaming, “Behold, the Universe,” or down on my hands and knees, gaping in amazement at the infinite detail of a spider’s front legs. My blind spot was the middle view—people, trees.
An aspen leaf with a tiny bug in it fell into my hands. The bug had burrowed a maze around the inside of the leaf, eating every bit of chlorophyll, leaving behind a sort of Pac-Man game with tracers. He had traveled as extensively in one leaf as anyone could ever hope to.
“Neat,” I said. I like to share special things with Lana Sue. That’s one reason I live with her. So, holding the leaf gently in my palm, I walked into the cabin.
“Look what I found,” I said.
Lana Sue sat at the kitchen table. Her hair wasn’t as wavy as usual. Maybe it was dirty, I don’t know. She had on a white T-shirt and a pair of shorts that made her legs look heavy. She held a teaspoon with her fist like a kid would and she was eating sugar straight from the bowl.
I must have surprised her because Lana Sue jerked and her face wasn’t her at all. It was red and torn-looking, a cross between panic and despair, nothing like she ever looked before.
“Yuck,” I said. “You’re eating white sugar.”
The spoon sailed across the room and bounced off my chest. Lana Sue ran out the front door, crying.
Lana Sue never cries. I didn’t think tears were in her. I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, next to the wood stove, looking at the design in the yellow leaf. The next day, she left.