THE TREE

I was clipping my fingernails over the toilet when I heard some chirpy, giggly shriek in the other room.  Way out of character for Natalie to be making weird, chirpy shrieks, but she was on the phone with a friend from college.  Her best friend, maybe, who was ga-ga about some pencil-neck-type from New Orleans she introduced us to the last time we were in Wichita.  I heard Natalie say “Oh-my-God-really?-Are-you-kidding-I’d-love-to!-I-am so-excited!” and I thought to myself, standing there, looking into the toilet, “Jesus Christ. . . another fucking wedding.”

            You couldn’t swing a dead cat at Natalie’s last sorority reunion and not clobber somebody on her way to the bridal registry.  We’d been invited to five weddings in one year and Natalie had been bucking for matron-of-honor each time.  As it turned out, Sarah, her best friend who was marrying the pencil-neck, finally granted Natalie’s wish and we were packing our bags and coming up with money for shower gifts and something really special off the list at Dillard’s.

            We’d made the drive from Austin to Wichita enough in the past few years, but with the tollbooths and the bleak and gray December lay-of-the-land I must have gotten confused and shot right past.  Natalie was asleep when I pulled off.

            “Wake up Natalie,” I said.  “We’ve gone too far.”

            “Where are we?” she said, her face lashed with red wrinkles from a hard afternoon nap.

            “El Dorado. City of gold,” I remembered from somewhere.

            “It’s El Door-RAY-dough,” she said.  “How in the hell did we get all the way into El Dorado, Tom? It’s thirty miles past Wichita.”

            “I wasn’t paying attention, I guess. And there’s no place to get off once you miss it.” There’s not. It’s a straight shot to Kansas City.

            “How can you miss Wichita?” she said, like it was Los Angeles.

            I told her I was going to find a gas station and take a break.  El Dorado, an oil-town with refineries near the overpass, smelled bad and was without a convenient gas station.  We drove through the business loop, past a 7-11 with no pumps, past a garage with a cow tethered to the door, and finally to a station near the edge of a raw and funereal cornfield.

            While I pumped, Natalie got out and walked around to the bathrooms.  One of those golden mini-buses for old folks and retarded kids pulled up to the diesel pumps, followed by a white Toyota pick-up with yellow rust stains.

            A man with a very pointy beard and red baseball hat slammed the door of the Toyota hard, SMACK, as he got out and walked real slow over to the bus, shaking his head and looking at a clipboard.  The driver of the bus got out too, a fat, blonde, balding guy with a cherub face and those glasses that get darker in the sun.  The little guy said something about timetables and missed pick-ups and the big guy was saying “Well how in the hell am I supposed to know when they change managers every five days?”  They stood there for a minute or two before the big guy said something like “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.” And the little guy said, “Fine. You’re through. Give me the keys,” real prickly, right out there in front of the pumps.  He paid for the gas, got into the bus and took off, leaving his ratty Toyota behind.

            Natalie came back from the bathroom doing the funny forehead stretches she does when she’s not quite awake, and got into the Bronco.  When I went in to pay, the guy with the fat face was sitting at this orange table with his hands folded not doing anything, his glasses dark from the sun.  A fat young girl with braces and zits behind the counter stared at him dispassionately.

            “I just saw some guy get fired,” I said, as I got back in the Bronco.

            “Who cares?” Natalie said. “Do you know where to go?”

            We drove back the way we came.  We stopped at a light in front of the garage where the cow had been tied up and, just inside the doors, where everybody could see, they had it hoisted by its ankles, its neck cut, and even from across the street I could see the blood.  I tapped Natalie on the shoulder and pointed.

            “That’s so disgusting,” she said, and turned away.

            “Why would they do that to that cow?” I asked.

            “It’s a steer,” she said. “Don’t you know where your meat comes from?”

            “But why right here?” I asked.  I was from cattle-country myself, but in Montana they don’t slaughter cows in town.  “Where everybody can see?”

            “They just do, Tom. Now go.”

            Natalie saw to it that I didn’t miss the turn, signaled early and got the parking place nearest the lobby.  It looked like it was going to be another to-do, the reception at this high-dollar country-club hotel, The Lake View.  Not Lake View, but The Lake View, Natalie said, with Sarah, and Kurt, the pencil-neck, on the marquee.

            Our room was dark green and mauve, wimpy earth tones, but tasteful.  It looked out over the golf course, dead trees and the resin of a snow that had begun to fall.  But no lake.  I turned on the TV and fell asleep.  Natalie’s return to the room woke me.

            “Where’d you go?” I asked.  It was dark.

            “You were asleep,” she said.

            “Yeah . . . And?”

            “And I called Sarah and got in touch with the Maid of Honor and we made plans. We’re giving Sarah a lingerie shower.”

            “I thought you were the Maid of Honor,” I said.  “And what the hell am I supposed to do?” I saw that Natalie hadn’t turned off the TV when she left.

            “I’m the Matron of Honor, not the Maid. There’s a difference. And why don’t you go out with the guys? They’re throwing a bachelor party.”

            “I don’t know those guys.”

            “Suit yourself,” she said, and went into the bathroom and started the shower.

            Natalie left me the best man’s number.  I didn’t really want to go out with a bunch of guys I didn’t know, especially to a bachelor party.  It’s hard enough to get drunk and jeer at a friend, let alone a stranger, as some sad case pretends to go down on him for a couple of bucks.  I watched the beginning of the Magic-Lakers game, stared at the phone, cursed Natalie, and then at nine called the number.

            There was no answer.  The game was a blowout, so I showered, dressed up and found the bar.  I told the bartender to run the credit card through on each drink, just in case Natalie was using it for the shower.

            I was onto my fifth beer when a big group came stumbling into the bar.  “Tom!”

            It was Kurt, the pencil-neck, and his cronies, already disheveled.  “Tom! What are you doing drinking alone?”  They invited me to come along to the best man’s room, and then to the party room they’d rented for the real excitement.  They laughed.

            Kurt made the introductions, Dick-Tom, Tom-Dick, Harry-Tom, Tom-Tom, etc. And then he kind of pulled me aside and said, in a thick-tongued whisper, “I don’t know half these guys . . . Tom.”  And I felt bad.  I don’t know if he just didn’t have any friends, or if his real friends didn’t show up.  But it seemed a bad thing to go through, so I finished my drink and followed them to the best man’s room.

            It was real crowded and some dork with a camera kept elbowing me while loading his film and asking everybody, “Pictures? They’re gonna let us take pictures, right?” I felt like I was at a doctor’s office until somebody started passing around a couple of bottles of Smooth and turned on a VCR with “Babes in Boyland.”  A guy next to me introduced himself.

            “You’re Natalie’s husband?” he said.

            “Yeah. Tom,” I said.

            “I’m David.” He said, “I went to WSU with Natalie. Maybe she’s mentioned me.”

            And she had.  A lot.  They dated for a couple of years.  “Yeah,” was all I could say.  He smelled like expensive cologne.

            “Nice to meet you,” he added and then stared at me with his famous pretty green eyes and big crooked nose.

            “Yeah,” I repeated, bothered by the too personal smell.

            I tried to avoid his gaze by looking at the movie, which featured a woman holding one man’s cock while trying to swallow another.  I excused myself and found Kurt who was leaning against the bathroom door talking to a guy I didn’t know.

            “Hey,” he said. “You two know each other.”  He introduced me to Phil, a thin artsy-fartsy guy who it turned out had gone out with Natalie before David.  I’d never heard of Phil, and I could see why.  But he bugged me nonetheless, and I was sorry that I’d felt bad for Kurt with his smirky face aglow from the Smooth and looking like he might know something more about Natalie.  Once a pencil-neck, always a pencil-neck.

            There I was, though, stuck against the bathroom door while the rest of the gang hooted at the television, a couple of guys even standing up to grab at their dicks.  I started formulating a sorry, Kurt, but I’ve got a migraine kind of thing when the Art-Fart pipes up that he saw I met David and wonders if I met Mike, and before I can get my excuse out to leave he’s dragging Mike away from the television and I’m shaking his hulking, sweaty hand while Art-Fart tells me Mike used to date Natalie too and isn’t it a small fucking little world, what with Mike and David and him and me at the same wedding.

            Mike’s a big, shadow-throwing guy with a flat, wide chin, no neck and a too-short haircut that makes his head like a brick.  He told me he used to be on the football squad, actually called it a ‘squad’ like he’s his own dad or something, before they closed the team down.  “That bastard of a school president” he tells me and I’m thinking this guy went out with Natalie?  Then he told me he’s an architect in Denver and his wife and Natalie were in the same sorority and he actually met his wife through Natalie, and I think to myself, “Okay. An architect. I guess I see it.”  I tried to cut him some slack, it being a bachelor party, but his high-fives and polo shirt made me think what I saw first is what I saw.

            I didn’t get out the door, but I did get into the bathroom to put some water on my face.  I wanted the determination to get out of there before my empathy for the pencil-neck came back, and I started saying ‘pencil-neck, pencil-neck’ over and over.  He was such a schmuck, it felt easy.

            I thought about what I was up against; I had to ask myself if Natalie could have known these guys were going to be here.  But it would be too unlike her not to tell me.  She was always brutally forthright.  Vicious at times.  Like when we went to see “The Piano” and she sees this guy that looks like her old high school boyfriend and she starts giving me details.  Big, hairy details that I never needed.  It totally ruined the movie for me.  That and Harvey Keitel taking his clothes off about fifty times.

            When I got out of the bathroom, the video was already off and everybody was telling everybody to be quiet, the best man was on the phone and Pencil-Neck was standing where I left him with a stupid-naughty look on his face.  The best man hung up and said “We’re on guys,” and everybody put down their drinks and filed out like drunken commandos and I got whisked along, by Brick-head mostly, who kept asking me in a concerned and sinister voice, “So, how is little Natalie?”  I got spindly thinking of him, thinking about Natalie.  And that was better than some of the other ways I was thinking of him and Natalie, how they used to be.

            I was herded into the lobby where we stopped to get directions, and then back the same way to a little room where someone said in an effusive voice “we won’t be disturbed.”  There was a bartender who acted right off like he was on the guest list and there was no place to sit in the whole damned room.

            We stood around and drank until a phone call let us know that the plans had hit a snag, and the girl called next and said she was having trouble getting there because of the snow.  The news took a lot out of everybody, their forced excitement, especially Brick-head who did his best to act outraged, like it was his Constitutional right to have naked woman when he wanted one.  “What kind of chicken-shit deal is this?” he said.  And then he apologized to the best man, assuring him it wasn’t his fault and that they’d make do until she got there, they still had beer, right?

            Mr. David-Pretty-Eyes found me standing by myself, waiting to get a second alone with the pencil-neck and take my leave to go . . . where-to-I-didn’t know.  But not back to the room until I got Natalie’s love-parade out of my head.  He handed me a beer and asked what I thought about all this and for a second I thought I might tell him.

            “I don’t go in for this kind of thing,” I said.

            “Me either,” he said, and then stood there waiting for me to say something clever to break the ice.

            We stood nodding and drinking our beers until David said he had to go to the bathroom, which put me in a pinch since I was about to say the same thing.  I sucked it in and walked back over to pencil-neck who was deep into it with the best man.  “Wichita’s a dying town . . .,” he was saying.

            “What about Old Town? They’ve totally redone it. You’ve got to admit they’ve redone it,” the best man countered.

            “It’s all restaurants and bars and entertainment. You can’t survive on that. You need a stable economic base and industry here stinks.”

            I had no entry into such a conversation and David or no David, it was time to go to the bathroom.

            He was standing in front of the mirror looking at something on his big nose when I walked in.  He smiled into the mirror and said, “Too much for you?”

            “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose so.” The urinal I leaned into was stained, like you’d expect to find in a gas station, but it was full of ice, like a urinal in a high-dollar hotel.

            To my surprise David came over and unzipped next to me.  “I was just thinking of some tactful way of getting out.”

            “I don’t know why I came,” I said.  I found myself trying to get a look at his goods.  I tried to think of something to say, quickly, when the door flew open and the dork with the camera took our picture.

            “C’mon guys! She’s here! She’s here!” The cameraman was with a couple of guys from Kurt’s party, who’d been sent to retrieve us.  It seemed certain that the pencil-neck was as desperate as I had thought.

            A weasley guy with a bi-level haircut and parka was standing outside of the room apologizing all over for being late, the snow’s a bitch on his starter.  He said Ivory was inside and ready to go and did we need change?  The guy with the camera pulled out his wallet and got a twenty and asked if pictures were okay.  What a Kodak moment.

            Ivory was inside flirting with Kurt while trying to find a plug-in for her little cassette player.  She had a coat on, red heels and black hair and was plain but pretty, just like you’d expect a stripper to be in Kansas.  She didn’t seem nervous amongst all these drunks, with just the weasley guy in the hallway to step in if it got ugly, and I wondered if he was maybe some karate expert. 

            After a while she got Pencil-Neck down to his underwear, laid him on his back and I swear he was sporting a boner, laid out on the rug of the hotel, with a big, stupid pretty-cool-huh-guys smile on his lips.  But, I could feel real terror behind his eyes.  His taut body lay there as if strapped to the floor until several minutes after she had finished her performance.  Even if he was a pencil-neck there was no getting around the effusive sense of relief I felt when he got his pants back on and his shirt tucked in.

            Ivory seemed to do pretty well because the camera guy -- I think feeling like he ought to chip in a little more because of the pictures -- went out and broke another twenty.

            David talked to her on her break and came over to tell me she went to Butler Community College and had a baby girl.  She seemed nice, standing there naked beneath a heavy winter coat, and I felt bad for her having to endure guys like the increasingly scary brick-head who kept hitting on her, and Pencil-Neck feeling the need to act happy that someone bought him a whore.

            She gave us a little something special for being late and lay on her back and poured beer into her belly-button for anybody who wanted a drink and then left, only to have the weasley guy come back, even before the high-fives and cattle-calls had ended.  It seemed their car wouldn’t start, and could anybody give them a jump?  There was nothing easy and short tonight. 

            Brick-head, Pencil-Neck, the best man and that skinny art-fart were out there in a flash with no coats, pushing on the back of a snow-covered foreign-job.  The snow was falling in clumps and the four of them looked like a broken down Iwo Jima float in a ticker tape parade.  The rest us stood in the lobby and watched.

            When we went back into our special room, the bartender told us he was only supposed to serve until two o’clock, but he would be happy to keep the bar open, there wouldn’t be any cops out surely, and as long as he was drinking too, he wasn’t serving, right?  The party wore on. 

            I knew I had been too kind to the pencil-neck by the way he hung on me like we were fraternity brothers.  But the second I would take a step away from him he would ask me a really shitty question about being married like ‘So, is the sex still good?’ or ‘You still get to get out and do stuff, right?’  It always seemed like Brick-head or Art-Fart or David was just within earshot and I absolutely had to keep giving noncommittal answers even though I kept sinking into the carpet.  Before long, I found that I had drunk myself into apathetic exhaustion.  The next drink would find its way to my hand, from hand to mouth. I anticipated blackout.

            When David suggested finding something to eat, though, I made my move, telling Pencil-Neck I’d be right back. As I walked away with David and some other guy I could feel the pencil-neck’s eyes on my back.  I figured I was Lot’s wife, and I didn’t turn around.

            The clerk in the lobby told us that we wouldn’t find any pizza places, what with the snow and all, and the kitchen was closed, no room service, but that there were some machines in the pro shop.  And to please be quiet, they were starting to get complaints.  The other guy pulled a couple of dollars out of his pocket and said he couldn’t go on, flopped down on the lobby couch and made a Donner party crack and asked us to bring him Baby Ruths.

            It seemed easy, too easy, to forget who David was as we headed off and I wondered if Natalie was back.  I didn’t know if the lingerie shower was even in the hotel, but I could see our car in the parking lot as we walked by the entrance nearest our room.  But that didn’t mean I knew where she was.

            Just inside the door of the pro shop were the vending machines.  I put the Baby Ruths into my pocket and leaned against a large, coffin-looking box, painted white.  Inside were a few thousand red and white driving range balls.  “You golf?” I asked.

             “I’ve got a set of Pings out in my Trooper.”

            “What the fuck are you doing with golf clubs in December?”

            “I just got back from Florida,” he said, and then we both kind of hit on the same idea at once.  “You right or left-handed?” he asked.

            “Right,” I said and we started filling up a couple of metal buckets with golf balls.

            “My room looks out on the golf course,” I said, remembering Natalie.

            David picked up on my unease. “We don’t want to wake your wife. There’s an exit just down here.”  He left to get his clubs and I thought for a minute how strange it was to hear this guy who could very well have ended up marrying Natalie calling her my wife.  The more I thought about it, the more I thought I ought to can this shit and go to bed, but David was back and I felt mad at Natalie in a way I’m not sure I understand.

            It was a warm Kansas snow, heavy white flakes that melt before you touch them.  We cleared a space a few yards from the hotel, David taking the three wood and giving me the driver to work with.  His reach was a little shorter than mine, but these were damned nice clubs, put my old hand-me-downs to shame.

            David started right in - thhwwwwwip.  The sky was a pale yellow and blue at the same time with staticky dots of snow in the foreground.  You could see the silhouettes of trees, hazards during the spring and summer, but on a snowy December night something to aim away from.  There was a big shadowy tree right in front of us, and David’s shot disappeared quickly into its blackness.  He had terrific form, better than mine.

            I could feel the club connect with the ball, but I couldn’t see it, except for a second, a white trail into the cloudy, yellowy blue.

            We didn’t say much, just listened to the winter snow and the thhhwwwwwwwip of the golf balls shooting into the night like stars.  It didn’t feel cold really, with the exercise, but my feet were getting wet and small.  “Baby Ruth?” I asked.

            David wiped his club down with a towel from his bag.  “Thanks,” he said.

            “Good, huh?”

            “MMmm.”

            “You’ve got a nice swing,” I said.

            “Thanks,” he said.  “I think you just need more follow-through. You’re shanking.”

            “Could be the club, it’s too short,” I said bristling, and felt bad.  He was right, I always shanked.  “Watch me, will you?” I said.

            I concentrated on my follow-through and ripped one.

            “Hey. . . you knocked the hell out of that one,” David said.

            “Yeah,” I said. “I did knock the hell out of it.”  No telling where it went, but we both knew it was great.  I felt excited.  I teed up again and shot another one straight out.

            “Woooo!” I let out a yell, “Get the fuck out of here, baby!”

            A door opened behind us and the silhouette of a woman bundled against the chill stood in the yellow light of the doorway. “Tom?”

            “Natalie?” I said.

            “Tom, is that you?”

            “It’s me. Go on back, honey, I’ll be there in a bit,” I said and looked over at David who was staring blankly and anonymously at my wife.

            “Tom . . . why don’t you come in? You’ll make yourself sick.”  She sounded confused, out of character.

            “In a minute, honey . . .”  Thhhwwwip, I sliced one into the black.

            “Follow through. . . “ David whispered.  I wasn’t watching. But he was staring at the door.

            “Tom . . . I’m going in,” she said, beautiful and uncertain.

            Thhwwwwip, to the right.  Without the snow to take the bounce out of it, maybe 290 yards. 

            David ripped one almost parallel and, like mine, far.

            I teed up a new ball, careful, arm straight, follow through, and TTHHHWWWIIPPPP, took the shell clean off the motherfucker.  “Only a little while more, hon. I’m onto something.”  Knocking the balls into that black mass felt good, better than trying to make sense of Natalie’s past at a wedding where you couldn’t make a scene. Thwipp.  Thudding out above the branches and into the empty night sky.  Or could you?