The Liars' Club: A Memoir Page 21

  A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so.

  Best not to look in there.

  —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

  CHAPTER 9

  We moved to Colorado wholly by accident. We were crossing the state, headed for the Seattle World’s Fair, when Mother, who’d been staring blankly out the Impala’s window, cried out for Daddy to stop with such a screech that I figured she was carsick. They were both carsick a lot on that trip, plagued as they were by Smirnoff flu. We eased over. The road sloped down into a broad valley all embroidered with columbine flowers and pink buttercups and white Queen Anne’s lace. Beyond that stood Pikes Peak, which, for a kid reared in the swamp, looked unreal. In my chorus book was a similar mountain on the page facing “America the Beautiful,” a purple peak with a long wisp of cloud dragging across it and a snowcap. Stepping out of the car air-conditioning that day was like entering that picture. How weird, I thought, the air’s so cool, for in Leechfield blue sky meant suffocating heat. Also, the smell of evergreen was dislocating, for it conjured the turpentine in Mother’s studio.

  Being a champion pouter on any car trip, I was pouting, in this instance because we’d stopped. I also pouted sometimes when we didn’t, and would pitch my shoes out the car window to force my parents to stop, if, say, I was dead set on visiting some snake ranch or ice cream store, or didn’t wish to pee squatting over the coffee can in the backseat with passing truckers peering down at my shining ass and pulling their ropes to toot at me like I was public amusement.

  The outdoor pool at the Holiday Inn in Colorado Springs closed at sunset. All day, I’d nagged Daddy to get there in time. While we rode, I positioned my mouth about two inches behind his ear prattling in a low insectlike hum more or less nonstop that, should we get there too late for a swim, I was gonna pitch a screaming cuss fit right in the motel lobby. But Mother wanted to pull over to take in the view.

  I chucked rocks at a tire’s whitewall. In my head, I worked up the fit I’d throw in the motel: I’d tell the clerks this man wasn’t my daddy at all, but had kidnaped me at knifepoint during a bank robbery. The thin air made me dizzy. I looked up. A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird’s black shiny eyes. That set Mother snapping away with her Kodak while Lecia bobbed around like a simpleton waving her arm and yapping about the food chain. Daddy was lifting the hood to check the radiator level when Mother sashayed up to him. She tilted her head against his khaki shirtfront and asked could we stay for a while, honey, please, since this light made her want to paint.

  I wanted to keep going. Lecia and I had unfolded the map from the Esso station to plot our course. We’d drawn red lines in Magic Marker between the black dots of Western towns to make a broad red lightning bolt across the U.S.A. clear to Seattle. I wanted to hit the Space Needle gift shop so I could send Peggy Fontenot a postcard. I’d worked on a draft in my cherry-red diary with the flimsy key that Mother had bought me at the drugstore before we left: Dear Peggy, doesn’t this just beat your old Vacation Bible School with a rubber hose?

  Daddy was occupied with whether to stay or go as he cranked the ignition, so the car bumped onto blacktop, and the chinablue sky started rushing across our windshield again. He finally winked at me in the rearview and announced that he wanted to keep heading west too. But Mother didn’t. She argued, politely at first, and then in terms to make Lecia and me stopper our ears. In no time, the whole tone in that car had shifted away from whether we’d stop or not to more general terms—who always did this and who never did that. Finally, Mother threw a matchbook at Daddy, and he swerved off the road into a little town I’ll call Cascade, where we wound up buying a house.

  The stone lodge Mother bought hung off the side of a mountain like something from a Road Runner cartoon. Pictures confirm this. It looks like a good-working car jack or even a serious nudge with a crowbar on the far side of that house would send it toppling off its log stilts and rolling ass-end-over-elbows down the sharp dirt road into town.

  The house proved how Grandma’s money was fixing to boost our overall comfort level. Back in Texas, we’d had hints. Before leaving, Daddy braced air-conditioners in the window of every bedroom. When we donated our black-bladed fans to the Salvation Army, we moved into the county’s upper echelon socially. Plus in Houston, Mother bought herself a real leopardskin coat with a matching hat like the Cossack on the vodka bottle wore. (Maybe that coat—a torture to wear in our tropical climate—proved Mother never intended to come back to Texas from that trip, though she denied any such plan.)

  But our trip west itself drew the boldest line between our family and the neighbors. Daddy only had three weeks off. He planned to fly back—yes, fly, by plane, Mrs. Fontenot must have whispered across her apron lap of green shelling peas to the other ladies—leaving us without a man to squire us around. That was scandal enough, living in a distant town without your husband. Perhaps more damning was to travel so far in the first place. In fact, I’d never known a family to set off for points farther west than the Alamo or farther east than the crayfish festival in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. New Orleans lay just three hundred miles east, but it existed solely in lyrics from “House of the Rising Sun.”

  The day we pulled out of the driveway pointed at Seattle, neighbor kids lined up the block—first to wave, and then to huck gravel by handfuls. Their parents stood stock-still on their porches as if having our old Impala chased after by marauding kids constituted some just farewell. The luxury of our vacation implied cheating on our part, a betrayal the whole town had every right to take personal.

  In the same way, our mountain house seemed fancy. Nobody we knew had a second dwelling beyond a duck blind or river trailer. A Denver banking family had built the cabin for summers of roughing it. But for me it bespoke untold mystery. Granite stones in the foundation reminded me of some ancient castle. The root cellar would have been an impossibility in the Leechfield swamp, where digging introduced you to the water table after you hurled the first tablespoon of dirt over your shoulder.

  The living area was long enough to bowl in. Right off, Mother bought new sleek and curvy couches in burnt orange, to break up the stretched-out, dog-run feel of that room. The stone fireplace at the far end stood almost as tall as Daddy. Within days, hired workmen clomped in to cut holes in the walls and install picture windows all around, till the house felt like an aquarium. The wood-burning stove got swapped for gas. Mother had new tiles from Architectural Digest grouted together over the bathroom’s rough-hewn lumber.

  For a few weeks, we lived like characters in a Disney movie. At night elk came down to rub their shredding antlers against the jack pine. Mornings, Lecia and I piled into my parents’ separate beds to watch bears through their picture window. A mother grizzly ambled down the slope with her two cubs to root in our garbage every morning. Mother had left across that window the lumberyard’s masking-tape X, looking past which always made me think of our house as a treasure spot marked on some map that bears carried around.

  At first light I sat on Daddy’s twin bed, next to his bony white feet poking from covers. The bottoms were tough as horn. I didn’t want them rubbing against me, plus I resented being exiled to Daddy’s inert form when Lecia got to cuddle with Mother. I was a moist, unwashed child. If I’d tried to slide in with Mother too, she’d have unwrapped my arms from her neck, saying I made her hot.

  One particular morning, we heard the bears scrambling across the pine needles and dust on the forest floor. Then between the vaulted pines, the mother shape appeared in strobelike flashes. She walked with a long stride. Her great shoulder muscles rolled under her fur. My spine instinctively stiffened at the sight. I froze that way, only relaxing once the cubs came scampering into view behind.

  The crash of the first garbage can roused Daddy from sleep. He roared up shouting. In his foggy head, he thought the bear’s hunched-over
shadow a burglar. Before I could grab his leg moving by, he charged straight at that glass and commenced to pounding on it while we all gaped, wordless. Maybe Mother said his name a few times, nothing much more than that. But he kept at it, mired in whatever dream he was acting out. He yelled at that momma bear to get the hell out of his yard with such power that her cubs skittered behind her, leaving a trail of trash and melon rinds.

  This pissed the bear off. She sought to get Daddy’s barking six-foot figure to back up. She reared to her full height, her ears slanted back, and she staggered toward that window, growling with her arms wide and with the great meat of her torso shimmying under glistening fur. For one brief second, she and Daddy stood about three feet apart, with only a sheet of glass and that masking-tape X between them. The bear’s muzzle made a puddle of frost a good foot higher than his black hair, which was all cowlicked around from sleep, making him seem especially goofy. I dove under the covers and prayed us all back to Leechfield, where the Lord sent sneaking water moccasins and black widow spiders to kill you with slow poison.

  At some point during my prayer, Daddy clicked awake, for when I peeked out, he was backing up from the window. The end of the bed hit behind his knees and made his legs bend, so he sat down. He looked addled. Still, the bear held her ground. She growled and showed her teeth and lacquered claws. We all sat breathing shallow till she cocked her head at Daddy, as if making her mind up. Finally, she reeled around and fell over heavy on her front paws and went shambling back up the mountain, her babies scrambling to keep up.

  At the mountain’s base you could rent stable horses for seven dollars a day. Mother was paralyzed with fear of riding anything not equipped with factory air. Still, she sashayed one bright morning into the tack room of this stable where the owner, a young cowboy named Rick McBride, was bent over mending a bridle. She had on her leopardskin coat at the time. She let the tackroom door slam after her so the two of them were alone, which caused a lot of hooting and catcalls among the hands standing around the corral. When she came out, she’d cut a deal to buy the two quarter horses Lecia and I had already fallen in love with, half-brothers. Big Enough was mine and the smaller of the two, a chestnut bay with black points; Lecia got Sure Enough, a dark red roan with a deeper chest and a little more jump.

  If there’s a particular joy that marks that whole dark Colorado time, it starts and ends with those horses. Unless you suffer from a dire case of physical fear (as Mother, in fact, did) you cannot heave yourself on the back of a horse without some jaw-slackening wonder at the animal power of it. In pictures of the time, I look dumbly small perched on Big Enough. I had remembered myself as tall in the saddle, long-legged, and needing only the faint pressure of a knee and the slight flick of rein to turn. In fact, my legs didn’t reach even a third of the way around the horse’s barrellike girth. They practically stuck out sideways in the stirrups, which I always had to buckle up on the shortest length.

  From my first whiff of that stall every morning—horseshit and mud, that pissed-on straw that smells so much like beer—I drew enough horse up into my lungs to be some form of drunk on it. If Mr. McBride was shoeing something nearby, you could hear horsehoe and hammer and anvil clanging together, or the steady rasp of his file against hoof. Otherwise, the only sounds were animal—the plop of green manure at odd intervals; a sleeping mare shifting its weight foot to foot; some pony’s muzzle banging around in its empty feed trough, making a padded thump against the wood bin. We learned pretty quick to leave off the wearing of cowboy boots for the dudes from Chicago and Los Angeles, so my tennis shoes sunk down in the muck and then sucked up with every step. Mud tended to seep over the tops. It wet my white Ban-lon socks. I can still see Big Enough’s shiny chestnut rump as I smoothed my hand over it (I had to climb a few boards up on the stall side to accomplish this) saying easy, easy. I spent some minutes with a currycomb on his broad neck before backing him out of the stall.

  Horses are blessed with an alert expression, this despite the fact they they aren’t half as smart as, say, a pig. Any halfway lonesome child who currycombs some rows in the dust caked on a horse’s broad neck, or takes a minute to rub the white star on his forehead, is prompted by this look to feel that the horse loves and understands her as no one else. This myth is especially easy to fall into if the horse is steady and good-natured enough to take said kid on long rides without trying to scrape her off against a tree or otherwise showing fret over the burden of her.

  I liked to ride bareback, with nothing more than a hackamore. But saddling that horse every morning was a public ritual that proved my competence to any bystanders. Maybe it was my first real competence at anything. I hitched Big Enough to the front stable post beforehand in case any of the cowboys wanted to watch me achieving this.

  First you centered the Mexican blanket across his spine; then you heaved the saddle over that. Actually, I needed Lecia’s help with this. We had to drag two chairs from the office to stand on. The weight of the saddle was such that we had to heave-ho together, so its speed would swing it up across the horse before it fell in the dust. Then you hooked the left stirrup onto the saddle horn in order to buckle the belly cinch, which with my horse always involved whacking him on the stomach a few times, for he had learned to fake a bloat for the tourists in order that the saddle be belted on loose. This caused folks to slide off mid-ride. A few whacks, though, and he’d suck in his gut so you could buckle up. You slipped the remaining strap through a small silver ring on the saddle’s side. You looped this around and knotted a flat knot. Then you let the stirrup flap back down off the horn. Mr. McBride or his wife, Polly, always came around before I rode off to see how many fingers they could wiggle under the cinch, and to tighten the saddle accordingly.

  The bridle came last. For the longest while the McBrides had to do that part. But I finally learned to get my horse to take the bit in his mouth by fishing from my Levi’s pocket a sugar cube I stole each morning from the café where cowboys bought their eggs and where Lecia and I kept a running tab. I held the nickel bit inside a circle I made with my thumb and index finger, between which I also pinched the sugar cube. I can still conjure the feel of his mouth on my fingers: it was both blackly velvet and bristly from his whiskers. It gave off a clover smell when he’d go to bite, which was my cue to slide the bit between his teeth. After you buckled his chin strap, you were ready to head up the mountains.

  That sense of trust I felt on Big Enough’s back was new. Maybe because of that trust, I turned out to be a fairly decent rider. I was stupidly fearless and also had some innate balance built into me. I still have the red ribbon I won on the barrel races that July at the gymkhana. (Lecia took sixth in the Washington pole bendings, though she would have me point out here that the competition in her category was far stiffer than in mine, which was only little kids.) All summer Big Enough never threw me once, though he was spirited enough to rear at a chipmunk or gopher that crossed the trail, and would go into a wild buck at the sight and racket of a bulldozer on the road. A few times we got caught on the bridge that led back to the stable behind that kind of heavy equipment, and I got to fancy myself a rodeo rider. The fact of my never being thrown speaks more to how close I’d paid attention—I’d become a watchful child, prone to clutch the saddle horn at any sign of trouble—than to any real skill on my part.

  We rode every day, higher than I now think was safe. We rode with neither guide nor map; the horses could always find the way back to water and oats. The landscape was various in a way that had never seemed possible under the empty East Texas sky. After every stand of trees, another vista opened up. There were wide meadows we could lope across, scaring up jackrabbits as we went, and narrow paths of rock that our horses took like ballerinas highstepping. There was even a cave with a small muddy opening that widened out into a vast, cathedrallike cavern of red rock. We took bag lunches there, and flashlights we’d tied to the backs of our saddles. Once we built a fire with dead wood and pine needles and paper matches from th
e café. But at some point we figured that the squeaking and clicking noise above us came not from the few high nests of nocturnal birds but from a ceiling hung with fruit bats. The twin circles of light from our flashlights dragged across the mass of them chittering. They were red-eyed as the nutria rats I’d seen. Our Keds, when we finally backed out of that cave, made no more sound than the pair of Indian ghosts we’d been hunting for.

  Another time, we hobbled our horses outside an abandoned mine, followed the cart tracks deep inside, where we found next to a solid wall of fool’s gold a slackened rubber, which I mistook for the skin of a snake. In fact, I toted that rubber back to the stable like a trophy and made the cowboys laugh and hoo-haw. We stumbled onto waterfalls and clear mountain streams too cold for swimming but which we loved for wading and drinking, being a different order of water entirely than the brackish bayous and soggy Gulf of Mexico I’d known. You could see rainbow trout whipping around under the surface, and could drink from two hands till your gullet was full and your ankles and knuckles ached from the blue cold of it.

  Of course, when trouble hit we were on our own. In one rocky pass our horses grazed while we watched a herd of wild goats. All of a sudden both horses started up from chomping in one jangled motion. Their ears pricked forward, and their necks arched high, as if they’d breathed in something evil and hoped to see it coming. At some point, Big Enough flattened his black ears up against his head. Sure Enough started crabwalking. A black cloud slid across the blue sky like some flat plate of steel. When the sky finally broke open, it brought down hailstones the size of baseballs making us double over in our saddles and spooking the horses even worse.