I sat up. “You want me to fake being cheerful?”
Maurey’s blue eyes glistened, but she didn’t cry. “I need you, Sam. You’ve got to get up and help me.”
So I did. All I needed was someone to need me.
Mornings, Maurey drove or snowmobiled the boys six miles down to their bus stop while Hank hitched a team of half-breed draft horses to the hay sled, which he skidded around the pasture with Pud and me on back, throwing hay to a herd of forty horses and a half dozen semi-tame elk. I couldn’t help but wonder what Gaylene and Shirley would say if they saw me feeding horses with horses. The TM Ranch was a long way from Callahan Golf Carts, in more than distance.
After feeding, I went back to bed with a carafe of coffee and
I generally took a short nap after lunch, then strapped on the cross-country skis and shuffled up Miner Creek to the warm springs and back. This time segment was set aside for self-flagellation. Going up the hill I pined for Gilia, at the warm springs itself I dwelt on my shameful conduct toward Clark and Atalanta, and coming down I mourned my wasted talent as a novelist—the theory being the best way of coming to terms with guilt is to wallow in it.
Maurey gave me a choice between cooking supper and the daily cleaning of the stud stall. Food won’t stomp you to death, so I chose supper. Cooking can be quite pleasant when it’s cold outside and you’re in a warm place that smells good. As I chopped and blended, Toinette sat in the family room or den or whatever it was called and played her viola. She warmed up with scales and finger exercises, then she practiced
Toinette had come from Belgium to Jackson Hole to play in our summer symphony. Under the full moon in the Tetons, she surrendered to love—Maurey suspects a percussionist—and a child was conceived. I can relate to that. When Toinette telephoned Papa he called her a whore in Flemish, French, and English and told her not to come home. He said, From this day forward my daughter is dead. The jerk.
Dinner was a sitcom written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Afterward, Pud and the boys cleaned up. I carried my decaf into the family room and looked through catalogs or read Zane Grey by the wood-burning heater while Chet and Pete played Scrabble and Toinette watched French- language TV off the Canadian satellite. Some nights, during old movies, I watched with her. The strange language wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as seeing Jimmy Stewart open his mouth and speak in a totally non-Jimmy Stewart voice.
By ten-thirty I was back in bed with Madame Bovary.
The third day after I got out of bed, I came in from my afternoon ski and guilt orgy to find Maurey in the kitchen, aiming a hypodermic syringe at the ceiling. Pete sat on a stool beside the wood-block table, playing gin rummy with Chet. I checked out the score; Pete was way ahead.
“Where’d you learn to give shots?” I asked Maurey.
She tapped the syringe barrel with her index fingernail. “You’d be amazed how many doctors are alcoholic.”
“I doubt it.”
“They come here to start recovery and I make them teach me things. Who you think will deliver Toinette’s baby if it comes during a blizzard?”
I opened the refrigerator to pull out a bottle of cranberry juice and perused the options for supper—leftover corned beef and applesauce.
Pete said, “Gin.”
Chet said, “Hell.” He gathered in the loose cards and shuffled. Chet was an adept card shuffler, which is a skill I’ve never been able to pick up. My shuffles tend to explode across the table.
“Roll up your sleeve,” Maurey said to Pete.
As Pete rolled his sleeve up over his mop-handle-thin arm, he turned on the stool to face me. “Maurey says you’re paying my doctor bills.”
I shrugged and drank juice straight from the bottle. It embarrasses me when people act like I’m being generous for giving away bits of the Callahan family fortune. I never did anything to deserve it, except being born.
“Thank you,” Pete said.
“We’re family,” I said. “Family sticks together.”
Pete continued staring at me, like he used to when he was ten and wanted to drive me crazy. I tried to look back at him, but it was difficult. He breathed with his mouth open and his gums were swollen to the point of cracking. His skin was a translucent yellow green, like zucchini pulp, and he’d lost so much weight the bones around his temples stood out from his face.
Chet slapped the deck on the table. “Cut.”
Pete said, “Sam, you and I have never liked each other.” It was a quiet statement of fact, not an accusation.
I said, “You were God’s own brat as a child, but since you turned fifteen or so, I’ve liked you.”
Maurey swabbed Pete’s upper arm with rubbing alcohol. The smell filled the room.
“But I haven’t liked you,” Pete said.
“That’s too bad. Why not?”
“To start with, you’re homophobic.”
“I like gay guys as much as the other kind.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Maurey said.
“What else?” I asked.
“Your mother was a snob to my mother.”
“My mother is a snob to everyone—even me. Especially me. It’s not fair to turn on a person because they have snotty parents. What else?”
He blinked twice, thinking. “You knocked up my sister when she was thirteen.”
I held up one hand like a cop stopping traffic. “She made me do it. Have you ever tried saying no to Maurey?”
Maurey pinched loose skin on Pete’s upper arm. “He’s right, Pete. I seduced him. Poor little Sam didn’t know the first thing about sex.”
“That’s not exactly true,” I said.
“You thought you could make a girl pregnant with a French kiss.”
No one ever got anywhere correcting Maurey’s view of history, so I went back to Pete. “There’s enough people in the world with good reason to dislike me, Pete, but you’re not one of them. I’d be real happy if I could call myself your friend.”
He smiled, showing much more of his swollen, bleeding gums. “Okay,” he said, “let’s kiss and make up.”
My face must have shown terror because Chet and Maurey went into hoots of glee. Even Pete laughed. I don’t mind being the butt of a joke if it relieves tension.
“Instead of kissing, how about if I deal you in,” Chet said.
“Great.”
But it never happened. As Chet dealt, Maurey sank the needle into what was left of Pete’s muscle. He picked up his cards and studied them a moment, then his eyes turned dull, his chin dropped to his chest, and the cards in his hand fluttered to the floor. Gently Chet helped Pete walk into the bedroom.
Over the weeks, I got to know Chet fairly well. While Pete rested in the afternoons, Chet would come into the kitchen, sit at the block table, and smoke cigarettes while I cooked. Chet was tall with reddish blond hair. You could tell from how he smiled sometimes that he was basically a pretty happy person, or would have been if his
