Western Swing by Tim Sandlin

of.
    â€œLet’s sit naked in the creek,” Loren said.
    â€œI’m not in the mood.”
    â€œI’ll borrow a horse from the VanHorns and we can make it at full gallop.”
    â€œI hate horses.”
    â€œI think I’ll go watch the moon rise.”
    â€œGo right ahead.”
    Loren went out to lie on his back in the yard and discuss life with the moon and I reached for a Milky Way.
    â€¢ • •
    I couldn’t have been more than seven when I became aware of Daddy’s dark clouds. Sometimes, for no reason, he quit talking to me, quit loving me as far as I could see, and I felt so awful that I took comfort in candy. Or maybe I punished myself for letting him down, I don’t know. All I know is, every few months Daddy sat in his chair with no intention of ever doing anything again, and I stuffed myself with cupcakes, soda pop, Hershey bars, anything sweet I could find. I was sneaky about it, hid Ding Dongs in my bottom drawer and chocolate kisses in my dollhouse.
    All through junior high and high school, I remember periodic nightmares of long silences and junk-food blues.
    Now, whenever I feel rejected, I gorge. Who knows why? But the day Loren caught me spooning down white sugar, I knew something was terribly wrong.
    â€¢ • •
    The next day I found a gray hair in my brush, scalded myself on the morning coffee, and my six-hundred-dollar, fourteen-attachment, will-pick-up-anything-from-tenpenny-nails-to-carpet-patterns vacuum cleaner broke. Midway through my own room, it made a clattering sound, smelled like burning rubber, and stopped sucking.
    Even sane, Loren can’t fix a drink, and in his infinite purity, he’d decided mechanical devices were beneath the dignity of him and his buddy God.
    â€œMy mind must be free to roam the skies of enlightenment,” he said the time I asked him to light the oven for dinner.
    So, I had to take the vacuum cleaner apart, figure out the problem, and put it all back together again. Major decisions are ninety percent timing, you realize that? Three hours earlier, before the gray hair and the vacuum trauma, I wouldn’t have left Loren. I’d have brained him, but I wouldn’t have left. There’s no use talking that way, though, because you can’t change timing.
    None of the damn pieces fit. I sat in the center of a dirty rug, surrounded by long tilings and tiny things and clumps of floor crud, right on the narrow edge of screaming and hurling the drapes attachment through the window, when Loren wandered in the door from the kitchen and walked through my nuts-and-washers-and-doodads-that-don’t-go-anywhere pile.
    â€œListen to this,” he said. “A one-eyed man is able to see, a lame man is able to tread. He treads on the tail of a tiger. The tiger bites the man.”
    â€œLoren, you’re kicking my nuts.”
    â€œWhat do you think that means, Lana Sue? It sounds like if everything isn’t perfect and you keep going anyway, you’ll get bit by a tiger. Does that mean handicapped people should just sit down and never move?”
    â€œWhat book is that?”
    Loren turned it around to show the cover. “The I Ching .”
    â€œThe whole damn house is falling apart and you’re reading the I Ching ?”
    â€œIt seems relevant.”
    I picked up a hollow, lightweight metal tube, usually used for vacuuming under things, and swung it as hard as I could into Loren’s temple.
    â€œThat’s it. Crack. You’re off the list, Loren. I hope God can cook, clean, and fuck ’cause you can’t and I won’t.”
    Loren raised his hand to his head, feeling the place I’d whacked. “I don’t understand.”
    â€œThat’s the first truth you’ve found all day. You don’t understand anything and you’re understanding less by the minute.”
    â€œWhy did you hit me?”
    I turned and headed for the door.
    â€œLana Sue, are