The Son

Chapter Fifty-three. J.A. McCullough

She was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman’s body; look up her skirt and you’ll see a cock. A liar, a schemer, a cold heart with a cunt to match, ridden hard and put up wet, Though she shouldn’t take it personally. No one meant anything by it.

To be a man meant not living by any rules at all. You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye. They all had their winks and nods, code for I fucked that cheerleader or nanny or Pan Am stewardess, that maid or riding instructor. Meanwhile, the slightest hint she was anything but a virgin (excepting the three children), would get her banned for life, a scarlet letter.

Not that she was complaining, but it had never stopped being strange that what was praised in men — the need to be good at everything, to be someone important — would be considered a character flaw in her. This had not been the case when Hank was alive. Perhaps they thought her ambition came from him, perhaps they did not mind a woman if she was under the control of a man.

But why did she care? Most men bored her, people bored her; she’d spent fifteen years watching Hank’s mind grow and change and constantly being surprised. She was not going to give up her freedom for anything less. In the first few years after Hank’s death, she’d slept with only a handful of men and of all of them the only one she’d fallen for was married, and as far as the others, her feelings had faded, or turned off abruptly; they were not Hank, could not be Hank. Most nights, if she had the energy, she reached for her massager and fell asleep.

Yes, she was jealous, there were two sets of rules, a man could have mistresses and abortions, sleep with every cheerleader on the Dallas Cowboys. . to be free that way, to do whatever you wanted, though it was not just about being free, it was about being desired. No matter how old, fat, or ugly you were — you were desired nonetheless. She could not think about it without feeling like a failure, as if she had to live her life in a sort of cage, a narrow and particular path, watching the others sprint about like a pack of children, or dogs, breaking the rules, going in circles, this way and that.

She was not a prude. She’d used a few men for sex, or tried to, but each time it was less than she wanted, it was something half-complete, and even men did not not enjoy being treated that way, no matter what they told their friends, you acted like I was some kind of vibrator, one had told her, they were sensitive creatures, monsters and sensitive creatures, they were whatever they wanted to be.

AND YET THEY had begun to accept her. They were all getting old, they were all getting rich, she didn’t know, but they had begun to treat her like the lady who’d been on the cover of Time, the woman you should have known way back, when she was a looker, a man-eater. Of course, she had never been a man-eater; of course, even at fifty, she was still striking. But that was not part of the agreement. The agreement was she was old and fat, just like them, though being old and fat did not matter for them.

Lucho Haynes invited her to his hunting camp, and she’d immediately turned him down. It was Lucho, not Clayton Williams, who’d come up with the idea of the Honey Hunt: prostitutes hired by the dozen and set out in the woods with a blanket and cooler — as a bird handler would place pheasants before a hunt — at which point Lucho and his friends would go out and find them.

She mentioned the invitation to Ted.

“Well, I doubt they’d rape you or anything,” he said. “They probably have younger girls for that.”

“Sex could be an interesting novelty,” she said.

He faked a hurt look, then went back to his magazine. “I would not mind trying it later.”

“Fat chance.”

“Well, if you are seriously interested in my opinion, I think it’s a terrible idea. They’ll figure out some way to humiliate you or it’ll happen naturally without them even planning it, because they aren’t so stupid that they can’t see what you really want.”

“Which is what?”

“To be like them,” he said. “To be accepted into their little club.”

“There is no club,” she said. “And if there is, I am in it.”

“I suppose that is true.”

“That is ridiculous.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t know what I was talking about.”

The next day she called Lucho and told him she was coming.

THE CAMP WAS three hours northeast of Houston, deep into the Pineywoods. There were families living in shacks, fields of wrecked farm equipment, it was as poor as Mexico, poor as the last century. In her trunk were three days’ worth of clothes and a pair of shotguns: a 28 gauge for quail, a 20 gauge if she needed something heavier, and her normal revolver under the driver’s seat.

She made her way down the sandy road, the car fishtailing the entire time. The vegetation was thick, vines hanging, smells of flowers she didn’t recognize, she thought of white sheets, her father, old longleaf pines and white oaks and magnolias a hundred feet tall. It was like going back in time, mosquitoes and dragonflies and the air so wet and heavy — it did not seem possible this was Texas.

By the time Lucho showed her to her cabin, the sun was going down and most of the men had returned from fishing or shooting. She was wearing heels and a skirt and blouse and cursing herself for forgetting the bug spray. None of the men appeared to have showered or shaved in several days. The average oilman’s ranch had a main house of limestone with heavy wood floors and leather furniture; the lodge here was a crude plank structure with stapled screen windows and unfinished walls. It might have been the hunting camp of some backwoods mayor, jury-rigged electrical cables, old refrigerators and televisions. She knew all of the men present, Rich Estes, Calvin McCall, Aubrey Stokes, T.J. Garnet, a half-dozen others, all dressed in their oldest clothes, pale legs under Bermuda shorts, bellies hanging. She had brought jeans but decided not to change — the worst thing would have been to give off the impression that she cared to fit in, to let them know how flattered she was. They were all good men, but they were the type who demanded submission.

Dinner was beans and tortillas, beef or cabrito, piles of fried catfish caught that morning, a platter of fried squirrel riddled with number-six pellets; if you counted what these men might have been earning had they not been hunting and fishing, it was probably the most expensive meal ever eaten. Travis Giddings was picking out the squirrel heads and methodically sucking them, his shirt covered in gravy. Drinks were Big Red or sweet tea or Pearl beer, but mostly whiskey in a paper cup. Then there were trays of peach cobbler and buckets of ice cream. But there was no loud talk, no cursing; it was like a locker room when the teacher walks in. She let slip that she would only be staying a night or two at most, saw the relief. Lucho began passing a handle of whiskey; she put the bottle to her mouth, lifted it high and held it for a long time as if she intended to drink the whole thing. Of course she kept her tongue pressed to the rim, letting barely any into her mouth, but there were cheers and laughter and within a few minutes a stream of fucks and shits like a dam had broken, everyone likes the drunk girl, she thought. Maybe that was not fair.

She pretended disgust at the mess, laughed at the dirty jokes, and when four women showed up (strippers? prostitutes?) she didn’t react. Lucho gave her a look and she knew it had not been his idea; she winked to show he shouldn’t worry. She was safe — any one of these men would have jumped in front of a train for her — but they were not above making her feel uncomfortable. She wondered who had ordered the girls, maybe Marvin Sanders, who had never really liked her, or maybe Pat Cullen, or maybe it was Lucho himself, whatever he was pretending now. Maybe they had invited her to test her. Or maybe they had presumed she could handle it, or maybe they had not thought of her at all.

Sitting in the dirty armchair, watching the girls circulate, the lights dim, the windows open, a record player going with Merle Haggard, she sipped from her 7 and 7, drunk despite her best efforts. Everyone looked terrible; everyone said what they meant. It was a pleasant feeling of companionship; she had known these men for decades. Many of them had sat with her when Hank died, and despite their behavior since, here she was, safe and protected. She began to relax and then Marvin Sanders looked at her and said something and then the girls looked at her, too. There were three bottles of whiskey circulating. She wondered if any of the men were doing harder stuff, though this was not that kind of place, and these were not, for the most part, those kinds of men. Drinking until your car went into the bar ditch or you blacked out at the controls of your Cessna: yes. Smoking reefer: no. One of the girls was standing next to her, a brunette with theatrical black eye makeup, wearing nothing but a bra and panties. Then she was sitting in Jeannie’s lap. Jeannie could feel the girl’s crotch rubbing somewhere above hers, it was soft and entirely wrong, she wished she had put on pants or something thicker. She started to push the girl off, then stopped, everyone was watching, the girl was watching, did she care what Jeannie wanted? No, the man who was paying her had told her to do this; the girl would see it through. It went on a half minute, then a minute; there was cheap vanilla perfume, there was a strange intensity in the girl’s eyes. She is enjoying this, Jeannie thought, and then the girl kissed her, openmouthed, hard and fake, all for show. Jeannie turned her head. She wondered how much the girl made in a year. What she would do if she knew how much Jeannie made. Then the song ended and the girl climbed off. Jeannie winked at her in solidarity, but the girl ignored her; she was already looking around the room. I was prettier than you even ten years ago, she thought, but she knocked that from her mind, the girl was not the problem, it was Marvin Sanders, red-faced and fat; his comb-over flopped to the wrong side, his pants covered in cherry soda, a ridiculous figure, though it did not matter, he was rich and could buy whatever he wanted.

Not much later she got up and yawned and said it was getting late for an old lady. Everyone stopped what they were doing and shouted good night, raised their drinks. It was very early but no one protested. As for the girls, they ignored her.

She walked in the dark toward her cabin, the pines enormous above her, everything closed in. She wondered if Hank had done things like this; of course he must have, it was likely he had touched plenty of strippers, he’d spent weeks with other operators at their hunting camps and private islands, for all she knew he became an entirely different person. He certainly would not have gone to bed early — it would have been a mark against him — and she was suddenly sure that he had slept with another woman, absolutely sure, he could have done so, at no risk and no consequence, hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, the code of silence would never be broken. She wondered why she had never realized this. A loneliness came over her.

Why it might disturb her so much, he had been dead twenty years, it made no sense, she listened to the cicadas whirring, laughter and music from the main house, who was she to say who her husband had been? She sat in her underwear on the strange, hard cot. She wondered if she ought to get dressed and drive home, home to Ted, who had asked her to marry him twice now, she would see if he was still up for it. She was tired of being alone.

She lay back down. Too drunk, too far to drive. She fell asleep and the next morning washed her face in the stream, put on makeup in the dull cracked mirror, dismissed the thought of marrying Ted, and spent the morning shooting grouse with Chuck McCabe. After which she got in her Cadillac and headed back to Houston. No one asked why. They pretended they were happy she had come.

She was driving. It was hot and she had a sudden memory of the branding fire, defying her father and all the rest, and now here she was, forty years later, desperate to belong. They had broken her. She had given up. She should have given Ted a child, she had been selfish, her entire life for her father and for Hank, but you could not measure yourself against the dead, they retained their perfection while your flesh got weaker and weaker.

And her father had been weak himself, and even Hank, she could see that now. He had been an idea longer than a real person, but he was only an idea, he was no longer real, she had not done badly, there was no one like her. That ought to count for something. She was not like other women. A dozen lifetimes of tennis or polo could not have made her happy, and, as for a child, if Ted had asked she would have given him one. But he had wanted children like he wanted everything else, it was an old song somewhere in his mind, dim and faint. Though he had been right about this. She should not have come. It was a mistake, an enormous mistake, she would learn from it.