Western Swing Read Free Page B

good to be true, and too good to be true almost always isn’t—true. But so far, up until I obsessed out on this search, Lana Sue has walked that narrow writer’s wife line between taking my artistic temperament seriously and treating me like a learning-deficient cousin. She even listens with a straight face when I babble on about emanations from dead novelists.
    â€œI read Flannery O’Connor a chapter of Erica Jong and she rolled over in her grave,” I said, and Lana Sue answered, “Uh-huh,” and not a question about how I knew without digging her up.
    Or one day I said, “Scott Fitzgerald is calling. He wants to explain the ending of The Last Tycoon ,”and Lana Sue answered, “Take the Toyota, it’s gassed up.”
    Nine days later when I pulled back in the driveway, she asked, “What’s the ending?” and didn’t laugh or anything when I told her Scott changed his mind. God only knows the woman was patient. She put up with an unholy amount of metaphysical fufaw before driving out of my life.
    â€¢ • •
    How long? Four days ago, five maybe, the day before Lana Sue left, I sat out by the creek behind our cabin, inspecting minute plant life. The whole week had been spent either up on a ridge top screaming, “ Behold, the Universe ,” or down on my hands and knees, gaping in amazement at the infinite detail of a spider’s front legs. My blind spot was the middle view—people, trees.
    An aspen leaf with a tiny bug in it fell into my hands. The bug had burrowed a maze around the inside of the leaf, eating every bit of chlorophyll, leaving behind a sort of Pac-Man game with tracers. He had traveled as extensively in one leaf as anyone could ever hope to.
    â€œNeat,” I said. I like to share special things with Lana Sue. That’s one reason I live with her. So, holding the leaf gently in my palm, I walked into the cabin.
    â€œLook what I found,” I said.
    Lana Sue sat at the kitchen table. Her hair wasn’t as wavy as usual. Maybe it was dirty, I don’t know. She had on a white T-shirt and a pair of shorts that made her legs look heavy. She held a teaspoon with her fist like a kid would and she was eating sugar straight from the bowl.
    I must have surprised her because Lana Sue jerked and her face wasn’t her at all. It was red and torn-looking, a cross between panic and despair, nothing like she ever looked before.
    â€œYuck,” I said. “You’re eating white sugar.”
    The spoon sailed across the room and bounced off my chest. Lana Sue ran out the front door, crying.
    Lana Sue never cries. I didn’t think tears were in her. I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, next to the wood stove, looking at the design in the yellow leaf. The next day, she left.

3
    I slithered around the willows for an hour or so, camouflaging myself as a snake. At first I heaved rocks way upstream in hopes of drawing fire, but nothing came of it. No shots, no sounds other than the whisper in the creek—the gunman seemed to have disappeared. Or never existed. Truly bizarre events always seem unreal afterwards, especially if you haven’t eaten in three days, so I finally wound up creeping back to the empty Coleman fuel can just to prove I wasn’t lost in a dream sequence.
    It was real all right. The chokecherry still smoked. My nose caught a wet seaweed odor, not something you’d imagine on your own.
    The forest line on both sides of the coulee showed no signs of a sniper. Up on the ridge I’d come down, a deer lowered her head, then raised it, chewing, calmly looking down at me—a standard all-clear signal to any Max Brand reader. I stood up for a better view. The deer was pretty, all innocent and brown and noble, the way wild animals are supposed to be. She stared at me with soft, wet doe-eyes. If I’d had my Ruger I could have nailed her dead.
    One thing I decided for certain: Starvation is