I stop pedaling. “Is that what she wanted from me?”
“You, she want money, fool.”
I ride with a fury—ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Sadistically, I screw the knob that increases the tension in my pedals until my quadriceps and calves scream in pain. When Shannon said it’s not worth a heart attack, she wasn’t speaking metaphorically. My chest pounds like a train. I can hear each gush of blood spurting through my temples. Sweat trickles from the ear where Wanda’s tongue once licked. The saddle digs into my butt, raising blisters on the cheeks where Wanda’s fingernails used to rake.
After five or six hours of riding toward a wall, the brain forgets there was ever a before the bike or may ever be an after the bike. I enter a zone without time, pain, or exhaustion. Some call it coma. If the deal works right, I forget the tongue and fingernails for a moment and reach a point of being so thoroughly wrung out that I sleep.
Before I discovered frenetic exercise, I only knew two other methods of avoiding depression. The first— getting drunk and staying drunk. That’s not my style, and besides, when alcohol fails it fails big time. The second— sleeping with someone else as soon as is humanly possible. That is my style.
Here’s my past pattern: I’d say to myself, next time out, tonight, I’ll choose an impossible woman, an obvious trollop with whom I could never connect in any way outside the crotch. An airhead or a drunk or a married woman, anyone just so she’s impossible. And I’ll be safe.
Only the sex turns out not so empty and I wind up trying to save a lost woman who’d rather not be saved. Starting with the beautiful and wonderful Maurey Pierce at the age of thirteen, I had systematically, purposefully, made certain each woman was worse than the one before, in hopes of protecting myself in the clinches, and finally, upon reaching what I took as the rock bottom of women who could cause me pain, I married Wanda.
Maurey Pierce telephoned.
“You sound out of breath.”
“I’ve been riding the bike.”
“Gus tells me the slut ran out. Congratulations, sugar booger.”
‘‘Maurey, my marriage just blew up. That should call for a little sympathy.”
Pause. “Your marriage was the family joke, Sam. Both your marriages. Nobody’s going to fake sympathy when they blow up.”
“That’s what Gus said.”
“How much did she take with her?”
“The 240Z and my baseball card collection. Me Maw’s jewelry, but I guess I gave her that anyway.”
“You gave her your dead grandmother’s jewelry?”
“We were playing ‘How much do you love me?’ one night in bed. She said ‘Do you love me enough to give me everything you own?’ and I said ‘Yes.’”
“Sam.”
“It was foreplay. I didn’t mean her to take me literally.”
Maurey was quiet a few moments, obviously disgusted. “How’s my baby?”
There was news, but I wasn’t certain how to break it. “I think Shannon lost her virginity. She didn’t come home Friday night.”
“Sam, Shannon lost her virginity after a Carolina-Duke game two years ago.”
I almost dropped the phone. “How do you know?”
“She told me. She bet her virginity on Duke and lost. She was planning to sleep with the geek anyway and figured if she did it on a bet there’d be no strings attached. Doesn’t that just sound like a daughter of ours?”
I looked from the Exercycle to a painting on the wall of some Indians killing a buffalo, then back to my hand on the phone—all those years of protecting my daughter from the rancid gender down the tubes. I muttered, “She’s so young.”
“She waited four years longer than we did.”
“And look how we turned out—maladjusted ambiverts unable to sustain the simplest relationships.”
“Ambiverts, my ass, my relationship is fine.” I shut up on that one. Maurey’s relationship with Pud Talbot was a sore point with us, so sore that when she first took him in, Maurey and I stopped speaking to each other for eight months.
In the silence, Maurey said, “Before you go off the deep end, could you spare a couple thousand? The drought burned half our grass and we’ll have to buy feed this winter.”
“You must think I’m made of money.”
Another sore point—my money. “You’re made of horseshit, Sam. God knows everyone here at the TM Ranch appreciates our allowance; we’re just tired of doing backflips to yank it out of you.”
I didn’t say anything. The first days after your marriage dies, people should cut a little slack. The women in my life don’t know the meaning of
“I’m sorry,” Maurey said.
“I’m sorry too.” I listened to Maurey breathe, but she didn’t say anything more. “How many lost souls am I supporting this week?” I asked.
“Three, counting your mother. I’ve got a recovering junkie out haying with Hank, and an unwed mother who’s supposed to be teaching Auburn French, but so far all she’s done is cry. And Petey called, he’s coming in Wednesday. God knows why.”
“I thought Petey hated all things rural.” Petey is Maurey’s brother. He’s never much liked me and vice versa, although we keep it civil. I never called him a derogatory name, either to his face or back, but he once said I was a
“All I know’s what the letter said—meet him at the airport Wednesday. I suppose you’ll be the next to drag your ass home. Pud wants to change our name to Lick Your Wounds Ranch.”
“I better stay put for now. Wanda might come back and she’d worry if I was gone.”
Maurey made a snort sound. “She’s a bitch, Sam. The woman doesn’t deserve to suck the mud off your sneakers.”
Back to the bike. Now I have two traumas to flee—my botched marriage and my daughter’s lost virginity.
To say that my life began with Shannon’s birth is not the overblown remark you might think. I was thirteen when Shannon was born, three weeks short of fourteen. How much that matters can happen to a person before his fourteenth birthday? Mostly I took care of my mother, Lydia, which is another thing I discovered when I reached what passes for adulthood. Parents are supposed to take care of children, not the other way around. Lydia told me it was normal for a child to cook meals and wash the clothes. How was I supposed to know different? She had me balancing her checkbook when I was ten years old—the ditz never wrote down dates and check numbers—and these days she complains continuously because I won’t let her handle money. I mean, good grief, already.
Lydia now runs the only feminist press in Wyoming. She’s stopped drinking and stopped smoking, and she jogs the county roads wearing a sweatshirt, tights, ninety-dollar sneakers, and a headband that, if you circle it from ear to ear, reads
Oothoon Press publishes books such as
When Maurey gave me the Russell print of the Indians killing the buffalo, she said it reminded her of me. I’d recently ridden several days and several hundred miles directly into the scene, and I still didn’t get the connection. One Indian is shooting the buffalo with a rifle, and one Indian is shooting him with a bow and arrow, while a third
