On the fourth day, it rained. Not an exciting summer thunder-head rain like the storms that used to rip across the city in Houston. This rain was more in the line of a cold mountain drizzle. I woke up completely out of the spiritual enlightenment mood. Maybe it was the dream about Buggie and Ann, or maybe I missed Lana Sue. Maybe I was just hungry. Whatever the cause, all my religious fervor pissed out across the wet ground.
What I really wanted was a hot bath, two giant towels, a steak and eggs breakfast, and to hold Lana Sue for an hour or so. Then I wanted to make love—oral first, then vaginal—and drink three cups of coffee with real cream. Nothing even vaguely connected to a day of Fig Newtons, drizzle, and climbing a mountain.
I hung the daypack in a low Doug fir and draped my wet sleeping bag around the branches. It was fiberfill instead of goose down, so I figured to be somewhat warm the next night, even if I had to sleep damp.
The bag formed a sort of canopy over one spot of almost dry earth. My legs had to stay out in the rain, but I made the rest of myself as comfortable as possible, considering. Five or six Fig Newtons later, I flipped open the Spell-Write notebook and wrote, I now understand why most world religions sprung from the desert climate. I chewed another Newton and watched rain drip off a big whitebark across the ledge. The mist was so fine that the tree seemed to be gathering moisture from the air and manufacturing raindrops.
The whitebark made me think of God, which made me think of Buggie. Where was my son? Even if I could narrow it down to dead or alive, that would be something. Not knowing anything was a pain in the butt which, as time passed, was taking all the kick out of my new life with Lana Sue.
Here I was with a perfect wife, big bucks, a cabin in the woods within the sound of running water, all the time I needed to write or love or do whatever I felt like doing—my life’s goals accomplished and it wasn’t worth stale crap because my brain was stuck in one agonizing rut. Where the fuck was my kid?
I skipped three lines and wrote, Ignorance of an answer is worse than the worst of all possible answers.
I mean, I knew where Ann was. Or at least I knew where Ann’s body was. She’d brought a husband’s worst nightmare to reality. My wife killed herself. Try facing that fact one day at a time.
However, over the last four years, I’d been forced to pay the bills, brush my teeth, tie my shoes, change the oil in the car. I’d taken hundreds of walks in the woods. I’d earned Lana Sue’s understanding. Somehow I’d worked out a way of dealing with Ann’s death—I’d come to a sort of quiet, sad acceptance. But there was no way of accepting Buggie’s fate, no way to deal with it and let go.
So, I worked out my cockamamie theory that God could be finagled into coughing up a few answers. Cheyennes did it. Jesus did it. Confucius, Max Brand. If all those people could weird themselves into visions of truth, so could I. And God owed me more than a simple dead or alive. If Buggie was dead, I wanted some real whereabouts information. No more hocus-pocus; religion is an extensive wine list, pick your vintage and pop the cork. I demanded truth.
Lana Sue let me run with the obsession until I started talking to Buggie and God instead of her. Now she was gone and the purpose of the search was suddenly fuzzy. The entire process had one final goal: freedom to live wholeheartedly with Lana Sue. But to reach that goal, I’d lost her. I was working backwards.
The thing to do was to run to the top of the mountain, get this religious catharsis jive over with, and go find my wife. My live wife. The wife who made me happy and life worth the mess.
I spoke to the dripping whitebark. “God better be there when I make the top of the hill because I’m not hanging around until He shows up.”
The whitebark just dripped. I wasn’t crazy enough yet to hear talking trees. Maybe at the top.
With that, I shrugged on my daypack, then pulled my sleeping bag around my head, shoulders, and back, and trotted off into the wet forest—must have looked like a jogging hunchback in a nylon shawl.
• • •
After Ann’s suicide, I decided that any artificial mind diversion was a cheat and had to go, so I stopped drinking alcohol and watching television. Life suddenly got real. Each morning I woke up on the couch, terrified. I ate a bowl of Corn Chex and half a grapefruit. Then I sat at the kitchen table and worked on Disappearance for eight hours. What had been the facing of one loss became the avoidance of another.
After I finished my day’s work, I fixed a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and popped open a Dr Pepper. I sat on the couch to eat and didn’t get back up until the next day. I could sleep for short periods on the couch in my clothes. Any attempt at the bed or undressing brought on vivid images of Ann in her coffin, then Ann rotting under the ground. I saw her face decompose. The hollows under her cheekbones went first, then the indentations on her temples. Her neck turned stringy. Her eyes opened. I woke up terrified.
This went on about three months. The landlady dropped by for the rent, which I couldn’t pay. She knew the circumstances, however, and didn’t have the heart to throw me into the street. Once she brought a casserole dish of mulligan stew, but I couldn’t eat meat yet. I set the dish out the back door for the neighborhood dogs.
I remember doing a hundred push-ups one night. It took a couple of hours. Another time, Ann’s boss from the day care came over. I pretended she was with the KGB and I was being questioned for thoughts against the state. I found a dead daddy longlegs and buried her in one of Ann’s hanging plant pots. The plant had dried up the summer Buggie left, so I figured I’d get some use from the dirt.
The police called and made me drive downtown to see another dead little boy. It wasn’t Buggie.
I came to hitchhiking in Nevada. The driver was an old lady wearing white gloves and a box hat with a net over her face. She asked why I wanted to see Max Brand’s grave. She said she couldn’t stand graveyards, hadn’t been in one since Mr. Dodd died.
“Who’s Mr. Dodd?” I asked.
“He was my husband.”
I wandered the San Joaquin Valley for several days before a cub reporter on some newspaper told me Max Brand was really Frederick Faust, who was buried in Italy. After that, I wound up in jail in Hannibal, Missouri, on a drunk and disorderly charge. Mark Twain isn’t buried in his hometown either.
I spent three days in jail—with some very strange people—before a deputy decided I couldn’t still be drunk. A psychiatrist was called in and the final upshot was my brother, Patrick, flew up from Texas and took me back to Denver.
By then, Patrick had gone big in Alcoholics Anonymous. It was his life and religion. I think he spent as much time on AA as he used to on alcohol, but at least he got more done and he was easier to be around. He also had more money. Draining swamps for real estate had been lucrative since he sobered up. Patrick paid my back rent and a couple of months to spare. He took me to Kroger’s and bought a shopping cart full of frozen dinners and organic vitamins.
As I drove him out to Stapleton International, Patrick told me to straighten up and join AA, even though I wasn’t necessarily a drunk.
“AA is like having a real family,” he said. “Haven’t you ever wanted a real family?”
“You bet.”
Patrick flew away, I went home and back to Disappearance.
• • •
In late June I hooked back up with the brick cleaning company. I enjoy cleaning bricks. It’s outdoors, physical, yet not too heavy. The hammering is controlled, almost gentle. You can’t just go crazy and start smashing mortar. Even then, I wasn’t into smashing.
After cleaning bricks all day, I wrote in the evenings and on weekends. Nights, I drank beer and watched television. I found a midnight-to-dawn radio talk show that was hosted by a woman whose voice was soothing. Her name was Kathy, like my sister’s. Only cranks and lonely people telephoned her, so I turned the sound off whenever a call came in, then I turned it back up in time to hear Kathy’s voice again. Real late at night, right before sleep, I downed four measured ounces of Jim Beam and three aspirins—not a bad combination.
I’d had to start Disappearance all over after Ann used the manuscript to light the baby-bed fire. The book was probably better for it. The first three-fourths were about Buggie and the last part dealt with how we were treated and what it felt like after he left. I wrote a lot about guilt, anxiety, and loss.
One night it was too hot to sit in the duplex watching Odd Couple reruns, so I climbed into the Chevelle and circled Denver for a few hours. I drifted all over the city, cruising the franchise strips, watching people in the other cars. At a Big Boy on State Street I met a girl who claimed to be a prostitute. I’m not certain how it happened, or if I drove down there looking for a hooker or what. She certainly didn’t try to entrap me. She hardly spoke a sentence.
“Twenty dollars,” she said.
“Are you really a hooker?”
“Do I look like a Girl Scout?”
She looked like someone’s teenage daughter was what she looked like. A baby-sitter maybe, the kind that drinks giant forty-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola and chews gum while she talks on your phone. She was dark, with pretty eyes and a tiny overbite. Long silver earrings dangled from both ears, but the right ear had a second fake diamond post up in the cartilage.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Teresa, listen, I need a yes or a no here.”
“How old are you?”
“You want my life history or you want to get laid?”
She was young and vulnerable and I was old and couldn’t afford her. However, I hadn’t been laid in just over three years. Abstinence that long changes a person’s standards.
“I’ll do it if you’ll wash off some makeup,” I said.
“That’ll cost extra.”
She took me to a hotel room straight out of a bad French movie about artists and heroin addicts. The place was almost too bare to be filthy. I’d have run away if the naked light bulb had been more than forty watts.
“Do you live here, Teresa?”
“You want straight, oral, or half and half?”
When we came to the actual act, I failed. As I fingered Teresa’s little nipple, I remembered the last time I’d had sex, the day Buggie disappeared. That was the last time before she died that Ann and I talked as friends and lovers, the last time she trusted me.
“I’m sorry,” I told Teresa.
“Happens all the time.”
I paid her ten dollars an hour to lie next to me and hold me while I slept. The next morning, I awoke with an erection and finished the job.
Every couple of weeks the rest of the summer and early fall, I drove down to State Street and found Teresa. I looked at it as letting the air out of my tires before the pressure mounted and I blew a tube. She looked at it as business. Even though she hardly ever spoke more than five words, I suppose I would have eventually gotten involved in Teresa’s personal life. I generally do when I sleep with a woman.
However, sometime in October she disappeared. I hung around eating pie in the Big Boy for three nights straight, but Teresa didn’t show. No one answered when I knocked at her room. I tried asking the more obvious hookers on the street if they’d seen her. A couple knew who I was talking about, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone. The women offered to do the task for her, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d grown fond of Teresa. I didn’t feel like trying another whore.
Eventually I wandered home and went back to letting the air out of my tires the old way, by hand.
• • •
I finished Disappearance on a Saturday afternoon in November. The last scene took place in the same graveyard that holds Peter Pym and Mary Louise Wolfe. A backhoe rests behind a canvas canopy. Seven or eight day-care teachers and moms watch as Ann is lowered into the ground. I stare off through the falling snow.
The scene was sad and emotional to write, but to tell the truth, after dwelling on one subject for over a year and then typing four hundred pages on that subject, I was burnt. Anyone who has ever lived day and night for a goal, then reached that goal, knows what I mean about the post-finish depression.
I skipped two lines and typed THE END. My fingers on the keyboard were a strange greenish-yellow color. The keyboard itself was dusty. A dirty thumbprint showed on the space bar. Why hadn’t I seen those things before? I hit the line return a couple more times, then typed WHAT NEXT?
There were me and my ghosts and my manuscript—too many entities for one small duplex. Someone had to leave right away and I had a horrible feeling that if it wasn’t me it would be the manuscript. Five more minutes alone in a room with that book and I would have burned it again. By the time I reached the Chevelle, air came in short gasps. I felt like a family fleeing poltergeists.
I drove all the way to Boulder and back before I could catch my breath enough to think in a straight line. There was a yearning of some kind. I wanted to be near someone I knew. I circled State, searching for Teresa, then I drove up to Denver University just in case some old English professor might be wandering through the parking lot. I got to thinking about Ann. She would have been proud that I finished a book. She always had more faith in my writing than I did. At least until Buggie disappeared.
I cruised the apartment complex where we lived when we met. A light was on in her place. A cardboard skeleton left over from Halloween hung in the window.
One year on my birthday, Ann found a baby-sitter and took me to a gigantic restaurant out by the Interstate named Los Gatos. That would be the place to stop and drink the yearning into nostalgia. Ann had been happy the night of my birthday. Maybe I’d feel close to her there, close to the real Ann that I met, not the dazed Ann that I lost.
I circled the off-ramps until I realized Los Gatos no longer existed. The big rock armory building had been transformed into a country-western nightclub. As a rule, I wasn’t much interested in cowboy music. The words swung back and forth from self-pity to smug, and I don’t much care for that pair of emotions. No one admires the crap he wallows in.
However, I wasn’t familiar with any other nearby bars, and I’d developed a sudden craving to be around people. From the Chevelle, I watched the crowd of men in long-sleeve shirts and women in tight jeans with wide belts as they milled in and out of the horseshoe-shaped front door. They certainly qualified as people—not the sort of people I’d ever talked to, but, by then, I was pretty well out of people I’d ever talked to. Anyhow, whether they would speak to me or not, I could always kill the craving with Jim Beam.
• • •
I spotted Lana Sue Goodwin while she was paying the cover. She’d gained some weight and her hair was styled like a grownup—all swirls and differing lengths. Her eyes were tight, as if the skin had stretched. Much alcohol had been processed since high school, but this was definitely Lana Sue. How could I forget a woman whose name I’d carried on my butt for eighteen years?
She beelined for the back bar to an empty stool three or four down from where I nursed a Jim Beam on the rocks. In the mirror, I watched her order a double something, a single something, and an empty glass. She held the double glass the way people do who need what they’re holding, not the offhand way of a woman at a cocktail party. Same with her cigarette. Something since graduation from Bellaire High had made Lana Sue nervous.
The cowboy on her other side asked her to dance, but she shook her head no without looking at him. When he got up to ask another woman, I slid down the bar and stole his stool. I don’t think Lana Sue recognized me. She didn’t even see me. As she mixed her drinks, then swirled the glass, Lana Sue appeared totally oblivious to her surroundings. For a moment, I thought nothing mattered to her except for what she was thinking about, then I realized her eyes weren’t foggy at all, they were fixated on the band way down at the other end of the room.
It wasn’t a bad band as far as cowboy music goes. I didn’t know squat about country western, but the tune was kind of catchy and familiar. I caught myself tapping my sneaker along to the violin’s melody.
They were an odd-looking group—a pretty girl in a Dale Evans outfit stood out front holding her acoustic guitar way high in front of her, several inches higher than most rock and rollers hold their guitars. Three guys in matching cowboy shirts played behind her and what looked like two old winos held down the sides of the stage. The winos had on clothes like I would wear to shoot pool.
The pretty girl sang a song I recognized called “Echo of an Old Man’s Last Ride.” It’s about suicide. The words are interesting—outside your usual country-western theme.
Lana Sue turned sculpture behind the veil of wispy blue smoke curling up from her cigarette. Her hands didn’t move. She didn’t blink. I watched closely, but saw no sign that she even breathed until after the last note of the song. Then, as the crowd cheered and applauded, Lana Sue exhaled a monumental sigh. Her eyes went all slick and she used both hands to bring her drink up for a sip.
I was staring at her face from about eight inches away, yet she never noticed me. She chewed the corner of her lower lip for a moment, then touched her tongue to the midpoint of the upper lip. As the girl singer gave a little speech introducing the next song, Lana Sue’s face changed. First there was distress, pain. Then her face lit in a smile. Then she chugged down the rest of her drink.
I used the same line I’d tried so many years earlier when she walked me into the stop sign. “You look dejected.”
She stared at me, still not remembering. “I am dejected. That’s my daughter singing that song.”
I looked at Lana Sue’s daughter onstage. The resemblance was a hoot. Same dark, thick hair, same wide mouth and high cheekbones. Same long neck. “You should be proud of her,” I said.
“She ran away from home. That tall sucker on the pedal steel is my old boyfriend and her new one. You ever hear anything so sick?”
What I did next was a cheap shot. I took all the pain and tragedy and realism of Ann and Buggie and turned it into a line. There’s no defense except to say that I really wanted to talk to someone that night.
“My son disappeared and my wife killed herself.”
Again her face changed. The lines beside her eyes softened, her forehead momentarily relaxed. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry, I must sound terrible complaining about my daughter.”
I looked away. “I finished a book about them today. I don’t know what to do next.” She sat staring at me while I watched her daughter sing. I didn’t recognize the song. Lana Sue’s daughter looked young, seventeen or eighteen years old at the most. I started counting the years since high school. How old would Buggie be now—eight and a half, going on nine. How much younger than Lana Sue’s daughter?
“Listen,” Lana Sue said, “you want to go somewhere quieter and have a drink?”
• • •
I have a confession to make about that tattoo. I thought a tattoo would make me look tough. At first I was going with a picture—a lightning bolt or a snake—but then I decided a woman’s name would give me a tragic past that girls in Bellaire High would lather up over. For a week, I was torn between Roberta for Roberta Nesslebaum, the girl who sat in front of me in civics, or Zelda for Zelda Fitzgerald. Still not knowing which one to choose, I made an appointment and waited a couple of days for inspiration to strike, which it did in the form of a stop sign on Bissonnet Road. The truth is, I was on my way down to the tattoo parlor when I met Lana Sue. It wasn’t love at first sight or precognition of the future. Lana Sue was a name more or less pulled out of a hat.
Not that I hadn’t thought of her often over the years. In the shower, I’d soap down her name and wonder where she was and whether or not she remembered me. I used to make up stories about her. For years I had her as an exotic dancer in Las Vegas. Then I gave her a job studying chimpanzees in Zambia. Never in my wildest fantasies was Lana Sue ever a washed-up country singer or a mother.
• • •
Lana Sue took me on a jukebox tour of Denver. She said the wino pervert who stole her daughter was the foremost authority on jukeboxes in the Central and Rocky Mountain Time zones.
“The man’s brain is a Wurlitzer filing cabinet,” she said. “It’s his one redeeming quality.”
“He has good taste in women.”
“Mickey runs on a take-what-he-can-get system. Cassie and I were dumb luck.”
We zipped her Avis rental up Arapahoe to a tavern with the Fontella Bass version of “Rescue Me.” Then down Sheridan to an all-night cafe owned by a guy claiming to be Gene Pitney’s cousin. “Town Without Pity” played three times while we polished off fried chicken blue plates. Then back to the bars for more rusty nails and obscure 45s. A live recording of “Lovesick Blues” on Columbus. “Mack the Knife” at a gay bar on Speer. Lana Sue drove us way the hell up some canyon to a dirty dive that served nothing but Pabst Blue Ribbon and had a jukebox of trucker singles, all by men named Red. Check out this list: “Neon Playboy” by Red Steagal, “Nytro Express” by Red Simpson, “Truckin’ Trees for Christmas” by Red Sovine, “Pin Ball Boogie” by Red Foley, and the last one, my favorite, Red Rubrecht singing “Hold On, Ma’am, You’ve Got Yourself a Honker.”
After the Red inundation, she brought us back all the way from the Speedway to the Coliseum on nothing but Patsy Cline. Lana Sue claimed a spiritual connection to Patsy—said they’d both suffered on their knees before the Nashville cocksuckers. I had trouble picturing the metaphor.
About the fourth version of “I’ve Got the Memories But She’s Got You,” I realized we were both blasted out of our gourds and the situation was shaping up as a definite score. Lana Sue had been singing along with the jukeboxes for forty-five minutes. Between songs and bars, we held hands and she told me about her lousy husbands and darling daughters. She said if I’d find an all-night Eckerd’s she would buy a golf ball and a garden hose and show me a neat trick.
We wound up driving way off down Santa Fe almost to Castle Rock, where she pulled into a nice little motor court featuring a coffeepot in every room and paper cutouts you were supposed to cover the toilet seat with before you sat down. Lana Sue jumped on with an enthusiasm I’d only dreamed of, but I took forever in coming. I guess I was too drunk.
We stayed in the motor court for four days. On Sunday, I suggested we transfer over to my duplex, but Lana Sue said that pain fucks don’t work in a private residence.
“Too much history in a home,” she said.
“But I’ve got a refrigerator.”
Several things Lana Sue said—like “pain fucks”—let me know she was using me as a form of grief therapy, that it wasn’t my wisdom she was after. I don’t mind being used if it’ll get me fucked the way Lana Sue fucks. Jesus, she was an experience.
Monday we drove back to the bar to pick up my Chevelle and see if her daughter was around. The car was okay, but the band had moved on down the road. Lana Sue didn’t seem too distressed. Other than that trip and a couple of lunch breaks at Arby’s, we stayed in the room, mostly in the bed. It was my first shot at marathon sex. I loved it.
• • •
I also didn’t think the sex was quite as impersonal as what Lana Sue had in mind. Sometime Tuesday afternoon I mentioned this fact.
“I think you’re starting to like me.”
Lana Sue gave me a light nip to the ear. “Honey, to me you’re just another dick in the night.”
“That wasn’t my dick you were talking to at six-thirty this morning.”
We were lying naked, side by side, with our heads at the foot end of the bed. A Domino’s Delivers pizza box was on the floor and Wheel of Fortune played on the silent TV screen.
Lana Sue fed me the tip bite off a slice of Italian sausage pizza. “You figure out the puzzle yet?”
“Admit it, Lana Sue. I’m having a good effect on you.” The puzzle was T _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ T _ _ _ _ T _ _ .
“Of course you’re having a good effect on me. We’re setting a Colorado record for orgasms per entry.”
I took another bite of her slice. “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
“What?”
“Tippecanoe and Tyler too. That’s the saying.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Something to do with politics.”
On the show, a contestant got the C. He looked like the old janitor we had back in junior high.
“You were smoking three packs of Larks a day before you met me.”
“So what. Look at this sauce on the sheets. The maid will think we’re perverts.”
“Today you smoked less than one.”
“We’ve either been asleep or screwing all day. When would I have had time to smoke?”
“A true addict would have found the time.”
“Bullshit, Loren. Are you certain it’s Tippecanoe?”
The N came up. “And we’re drinking Dr Peppers right now.” I pointed to the evidence on the floor. “Three days ago it would have been scotch.”
Lana Sue dropped a fat chunk of crust back in the box and rolled onto her side to face me. “What’s the point here, Loren?”
I retrieved the crust. “You talked about your past and your problems for hours last night. You listened when I talked back.” I rubbed her third eye with my thumb. “Your forehead is starting to relax for the first time in days. You should have seen your eyebrows that night in the Powder Keg.”
“Sex relaxes me. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I think it does. Fondness is hard to hide.”
“Watch me.”
“I caught you smiling when I came out of the shower this morning. You were glowing.”
“I don’t glow.”
“Admit it, Lana Sue. You’re beginning to fall in love.”
Lana Sue rolled on over to face the ceiling. Her breasts rose once and fell. I’ve always liked Lana Sue’s breasts. They aren’t very large, but they don’t sag a bit. They look energetic.
“Do you realize the implications of what you’re saying?” Lana Sue asked. “If what you claim is true—it’s not, but if it was—I’d have to get dressed and leave right now.”
The stupid janitor got both P’s but still couldn’t solve the puzzle. “Why?” I asked.
“Why? I’m a married woman. I don’t have affairs.”
“You’ve never done this before?”
“I’ve done this plenty times. This is a crotch form of morphine. What you’re proposing is heightened sensitivity, which is the last thing I want.”
“I can make your life better.”
“Don’t confuse me, Loren. When I get confused I go home.”
• • •
One thing I admire about Lana Sue, she doesn’t use the door as a power play device. She has never once threatened to leave me that she didn’t actually wind up leaving. Sometime that night, Lana Sue must have finally realized a growing fondness for me. Nothing was admitted aloud, but I know she felt something strong because the next day she had me tail her to the airport where we put ourselves through an emotion-packed good-bye scene and Lana Sue flew off to Nashville. I moped around the loading lounge awhile, worked out a reasonable that’s-that attitude, then drove home to my duplex and Buggie’s manuscript.
• • •
I don’t know if Lana Sue would have returned to Denver on her own impetus or not. She had this falling-in-love-and-splitting-up-is-all-timing theory that I don’t, as a rule, buy. My opinion is she would have created the timing and come back anyway. Hell, we were in love. Love is great compared to lonely nights and scotch.
However, this is all conjecture, because, lucky for me, Ace took care of the timing. When Lana Sue arrived home that afternoon, she found Ace in the Jacuzzi performing unnatural acts with the Sugarez Sisters, Carly and Monetta, a singing duo from Ox Point, Wisconsin.
Lana Sue made death threats. She towered over the Jacuzzi like the Statue of Liberty, threatening to bean Ace with a fully charged electric Dust Buster until Carly Sugarez lost stool control and fouled the water. I understand a mass of glassware was broken, phonograph albums fell like rain, counteraccusations were hurled, doors slammed, lawyers phoned—Lana Sue was back in my arms by midnight.