We chose a light blue Van Heusen shirt with short sleeves and a three-tone sweater Pete and Maurey’s mom knitted while she was in rehab. One look at the sweater and you knew the creator was schizophrenic.
“Nobody’ll see it,” Maurey said. “Pete didn’t want a viewing.”
She chose a pair of white slacks and I accidentally said I wouldn’t be caught dead in those. That got Maurey giggly, which happens to distraught people. Hysteria means the same thing with either laughter or tears.
I wanted Pete to wear dress J. Chisholm cowboy boots; Maurey couldn’t see wasting a pair of boots.
“Pud can have them, he and Petey are the same shoe size.”
“Pud doesn’t want boots off a dead guy, even if Pete was your brother.”
“Is.”
“Why do women always give away dead people’s clothes?”
“Bodies in caskets are barefoot. Everybody knows that.”
“That’s an eighth-grade myth. They’re not going to put a suit on someone and leave off the shoes.”
“Pete asked that you give his eulogy.”
“Oh, Lord.”
Nausea came on so fast I sat down. I clutched the boots to my chest, smelling the leather smell that carried a hint of aftershave. He must have packed toiletries in the boots to save room in his suitcase. The thought of standing up in front of a bunch of mourners and saying “Here’s what Pete’s life meant” scared the wadding out of me. I can’t sum up a person. It’s in my genes that whenever I try to be sincere I come off shallow. The mourners would look up at me and think
“Why not you or Chet?” I asked.
“He didn’t want to put us through that.”
“And he did me?”
She smiled—like a cat. “You writers are supposed to be good with words.”
Pete’s pillow still had sweat stains where his head had lain. You could make out the form of his body in the mattress.
“This is his way of getting back at me for being heterosexual,” I said.
“I’d say it’s more like Pete’s last joke.”
“He always had a dry sense of humor.”
Maurey held a beaded Arapaho belt up to the mirror. “You’ll do it, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
She smiled at me in the mirror. “You think this belt goes with white slacks?”
Pud knocked at the open door. “Telephone for you guys.”
I said, “Someone called us?”
“Not exactly.”
“This is a trick to get me and Lydia talking.”
“It’s your daughter.” Pud looked at Maurey. “Yours too. Hank telephoned her with the news about Pete and she wants to talk to both of you. Sam first.”
I said, “I understand,” even though I didn’t.
There was a phone in Pete’s room. I sat on the bed with it in my hand and one finger holding down the button, preparing myself to communicate. You have to be ready for these things. I’d missed Shannon terribly the last few weeks, but still, talking to her would be difficult. She knew about Katrina Prescott, Gilia, Atalanta, Clark Gaines, Lydia, and everything else I was ashamed of. Lydia had disappointed me so often when I was young, I’d sworn never to disappoint my daughter, and now I’d gone and done it, big time.
I released the button and said, “Hi.”
Hank went through the
She said, “I’m sorry about Uncle Pete.”
“He was a nice man.”
“I’d like to come to the funeral.”
I hadn’t expected that. “He wanted to be cremated.”
“That’s what Hank said.”
“It’s illegal to cremate a body naked.”
Shannon coming to the funeral felt strange. Somehow, I had the idea that North Carolina was way down there and Wyoming way up here and I was the only one allowed to cross between them. I like keeping my separate lives separate.
“Can I come?” she asked.
“Of course you can come. I don’t know what day the funeral is.”
“Friday.”
“Hank told you?”
“He said Thursday is too soon for arrangements and they didn’t want it on Christmas Eve or Day because that would spoil Christmases from now on.”
“That’s true.”
“So I can catch a flight out tomorrow.”
“Put the ticket on my Visa.” I counted to ten. “And bring Eugene if you want to.”
Shannon must have counted to ten also; it took that long before she answered. “Eugene dumped me.”
I held the phone with both hands. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
The worst thing a parent can say at this point is
Her voice was flat. “Eugene is okay. He just can’t handle my family.”
“You were part of it, but Lydia mailed him a thermos jug of buffalo balls.”
Good for Lydia. She’d done the same thing to me after I married Wanda, and Hank told me she had him put together similar packages for Wyoming’s two Republican senators. The balls meant something symbolic to her. I never bothered to ask what.
“Lydia scared off a few of my girlfriends too,” I said.
“Eugene wants children someday; he said our family shouldn’t procreate.”
The pompous bastard. “You’re better off without him,” I said, even though I shouldn’t have.
“It still hurts.” I didn’t say anything. Shannon added, “He has impotency issues to deal with anyway. He’s almost thirty.”
Wasn’t much I could say to that one.
“Gilia’s here,” Shannon said.
“Oh.”
“You want to talk to her?”
Gilia. Sweet, big-boned Gilia. The lifeline I had cut off. “I better not.”
“C’mon, Daddy. If I can get her to talk to you will you talk back?”
“It’s your mom’s turn. I’ll go find her.”
“I’m right here,” Maurey said.
“You were on the extension? Some might call that bad manners.”
“Bad manners is not talking to the girl, Sam.”
“I’m getting off now. You and Shannon can trash me in private.”
Is it unnatural when your masturbation fantasy is a fictional character from the nineteenth century? Maurey says I waste time worrying about what is natural and what isn’t. At some point in my low twenties, I looked at myself as others see me and realized I’m odd, and since then I’ve held my actions and thoughts up to a normalcy standard. Normalcy is hard to standardize. I mean, is it abnormal to fantasize licking Madame Bovary between the thighs as we pass through the dark streets of Rouen in a carriage pulled by matching palomino stallions? And, when does abnormalcy become perversion? We all agree it would be perverted to go down on a 127-year-old woman in a
