Sorrow Floats by Tim Sandlin

Author:Tim Sandlin [Sandlin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Humorous, Contemporary Women
ISBN: 9781402241741
Google: c_YmBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2010-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

24

The day John Kennedy got killed, Dothan Talbot beat me up. Technically, I threw the first punch, but I maintain to this moment that Dothan had it coming. After we heard the news, Dothan and that idiot sister of his raced around the playground taunting the way kids will who have been raised by redneck ignoramuses from Alabama.

I wasn’t in the mood. So I decked him.

American folklore considers it quaint when a thirteen-year-old girl hits a boy, he hits back, then they go steady. By Critter’s age, at seventeen, the same scenario is sick. Boys who hit their girlfriends are abusive apes, and girls who stay with boyfriends who hit are spineless chickens.

Dothan never hit me again. After I got old enough to realize the humiliation of violence I always swore that if he ever laid a hand on me I’d be out the door, but that’s one of those blank declarations almost every woman makes while the situation rests in theory. I’m done with blank declarations. Like the death of a father, or alcohol addiction, no one knows for certain how they’ll behave when reality rears up and blows theory to the wind.

Critter, obviously, had given herself an excuse to stay. I’d created an excuse for Dothan to make the decision for us.

We, Critter and I, were supposed to be the vanguard of the first generation of smart women. I was the Be-Here-Now chick of the sixties, she the free-soaring spirit of the seventies, yet neither of us did squat about our cheating, controlling men. It took Marcella, the Betty Crocker of the fifties, to stand erect and shout, “Fuck you, jerk, I’m outta here.”

Or whatever was the cookies-and-milk equivalent of “Fuck you, jerk” in Amarillo, Texas. Maybe she called him a lout.

Whatever she called him, it worked when our way didn’t. Hugo was following like a puppy who’d been slapped in the nose with a newspaper. Where was Hugo now? Had he given up and returned to Amarillo and the cotton flowers of Annette Gilliam, or, like the Shadow, had he simply faded into the night?

I kind of hoped he was lurking in the darkness; I don’t know why. All cheating men should be castrated—the cynic could make an argument that all men should be castrated—but the thought of Hugo Sr. hovering somewhere out of sight, never with us yet always nearby, struck me as kind of sweet.

***

The music changed from Doobie Brothers to Deep Purple—“Hey, Joe,” a song about a man with a gun in his hand. One unassailable truth, Freedom held Critter, not me. Time to get the hell out of Dodge. More coffee—coffee would knock me off my natural state of high center and give me the impetus to get Lloyd and Shane on the road. I needed a liquid impetus.

Inside, Shane was bent over his harmonica, blowing blues notes that didn’t match with Deep Purple. The tanned girl, who’d put on a tank top, sat at his feet next to a very intense-looking young man who held the baby.

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