He nodded. "Someone in Salt Lake saw a girl like her in a Teton campground last summer."

There were hundreds of girls like her in Teton campgrounds last summer-size sevens with brown hair aren't exactly unique-but I didn't want to tell Lloyd that. He obviously took the deal seriously. His eyes were probing the darkness beyond our headlights, but I could tell he was watching me.

Behind us, Shane finally broke through the second phrase of "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" and into the meat of the song. I had a terrible intuition he was one of those harmonica players who learns one song and goes no further.

I sipped Scout. "She's pretty."

Lloyd glanced at the picture, then back ahead. "She was FBLA Sweetheart in high school. That's Future Business Leaders of America. Sharon can type ninety-two words a minute with only two mistakes."

She had that secretarial look around the temples. "Was the picture taken a long time ago?"

"June 7, 1966-the day we opened our salvage yard. Las Vegas is paradise if your interests run to redemption of abandoned automobiles." Lloyd stepped on the floor dimmer switch as two semis came at us, then past. He glanced at their rear ends in the mirror and said, "Sharon sure was proud of our junkyard."

"Everybody's proud of something."

Behind us, Shane went quiet, for him, anyway. He muttered under his breath and made a thump sound as he slid to the floor. When I checked it out he was sitting on the pile of unrolled sleeping bags, digging furiously through a blue backpack. Probably searching for food.

"If Sharon was so proud and junk in Vegas is so lucrative, why did she leave?"

Lloyd turned and looked full at me. Without the Jesus eyes, he came off as any other farmer beaten to nonexistence by weather and banks. But the glowing eyes made him appear to know things the people he looked at didn't know. Imagine you go to tip the pizza delivery boy and you suddenly realize the kid is Nostradamus. That's the feeling Lloyd causes.

"You know darn well why she left me," he said. "I'm a drunk. Only a fool stands by a drunk." His eyes went back to the road. "Sharon took it a long time, longer than she should have."

Scout was committing foreplay with my frontal lobe. He caused the white stripes rushing into the headlights and under Lloyd's side of the ambulance to go hypnotic. I really liked that.

Nineteen sixty-six meant Lloyd and Sharon were your basic May-December romance. Or March-October. What would it be like to live surrounded by dead cars with a lover old as your own father? Lloyd had to be at least forty-five, probably hadn't had a hard-on he didn't wake up with in years. I read in Cosmo that girls with old lovers are actually trying to nail their dads.

Lloyd kept his voice noncommittal. "We met at a demolition derby in Prescott, Arizona. I'd been drinking beer all afternoon and got in a fight with a mechanic who said fuel injectors decrease acceleration. Sharon picked me off the arena dirt and three weeks later we were married."

Lloyd swerved to miss a mule deer and just about sideswiped two more. Ever since Dubois, we'd been pa.s.sing antelope, but these were the first deer. One thing I don't understand about Wyoming is why, the minute the plains get dark, all the animals make straight for the nearest asphalt.

"Sharon and I had our junkyard and each other, and nothing else mattered until I betrayed her for the bottle. I blamed the pressure of running a business, or the Nevada heat, or my hangover-a sc.r.a.ped thumb gave me excuse to shoot the whole day. Whenever Sharon gave me her sad look I said 'Be glad you have a husband who doesn't gamble.'"

Lloyd's talk had the rhythm of a rehea.r.s.ed speech. I'd bet my next drink this story usually started with "My name is Lloyd and I'm an alcoholic." You'd never catch me spilling my guts to a bunch of drunk losers turned coffee-swilling losers. "Here's how far down I went. Ain't I princely for not dying so I could sit through this meeting."

I'd rather be interesting and pathetic than boring and pathetic.

"She stuck by me for fourteen months. Then one Sunday while I was breaking an automatic transmission off a brand-new Lincoln wrecked by some high-roller, she packed her overnight bag and ran away. Didn't even leave a note."

"At least Sharon didn't steal your child and throw you into the street."

Lloyd didn't comment on my tragedy. AA people consider it bad form to one-up during the other guy's talk. "I don't remember hardly any of the next two years. I know I stole and ate dog food. I changed my oil without replacing the filter. Once I was hospitalized for drinking transmission fluid.

"One morning I found some whiskey in a couch at a Manpower temporary employment office in Memphis, the next thing I woke up in a hotel room in Mexico City with a broken leg. I'd lost two months."

It's really not so bad driving through Wyoming at night while a gentle man's voice drones from the seat next to you. The towns are mostly eighty, ninety miles apart, so there's no slowing down or speeding up. Cars and trucks came at us one at a time with plenty of gap between lights. Lloyd's voice was calm, like a bubbling stream, only his was a stream with words you could listen to. His pitiful story showed me the degradation of real alcoholism. It rea.s.sured me that I wasn't a real alcoholic.

I got intimate with Scout and waited for more been-there-and-back stuff, but none came for a mile because Lloyd seemed hypnotized himself. I guess he was dwelling on his days of glory.

"So," I prompted, "you woke up in a hotel with a broken leg."

His face snapped back from somewhere. "The management thought since I couldn't walk they'd send Shane to take care of me."

"Our Shane? He couldn't take care of anyone."

Lloyd gave me a some-people-are-naive shrug. "Shane stayed with me every moment for two weeks. He held me together through the shudders and stomach pain, the termite attacks, the suicide waves and night terrors. He convinced me I lost Sharon because I was a drunk and if I stopped being a drunk I could get her back. He's stuck with me through more than three years of searching for her."

"A regular Ralph Nader."

Lloyd took the picture from my hand and returned it to the breast pocket of his overalls. "I chose to live. I'd never have made that choice, or even known I had the choice, without Shane Rinesfoos."

The subject of this Drunks Aglow account had been unnaturally quiet during the testimonial. Could the same grotesque fatso who offered twenty bucks to see my t.i.ts lead a double life as a selfless savior? I turned to look back at the saint and screamed.

Shane had his p.e.n.i.s out. Yuck. He was bent over like a zoo monkey playing with its wienie, only Shane was rolling on a condom.

I screamed again. "Let me out. Pull over, G.o.ddammit, let me go." I clawed the door handle. "f.u.c.king perverts."

At my first scream, Lloyd swerved right, but he didn't slow Moby d.i.c.k. "What's the problem? Are you sick?"

The handle came up, the door popped open, and pavement raced under my eyes, but when the dramatic moment said Bail out, I went chicken. After all, we're talking overweight cripple here. Exposure would be in character, but rape? There was no sense in a road burn death over an exposed p.e.c.k.e.r. I refuse to be killed by a p.e.n.i.s.

I swung my anger back on Lloyd. "You old men are sick with your games. You think because I drink and ride off in your mobile s.l.u.t house that I'm like that. Well, I'm not, Bucko. Like that."

"You lost me," Lloyd said.

"Lloyd," Shane said.

Lloyd glanced at Shane on the floor, then at me. He reached toward my shoulder and I flinched-almost fell out the door.

Lloyd said, "He has to change his plumbing twice a day to stop infection. He's not a pervert."

"I am, too," Shane said, "only not this time."

Bent over, his belly had all these horizontal folds with his little p.e.n.i.s sticking out of one like a zipper on a down-filled parka. How could he hang a rubber around that worm?

This was more insult than threat. "What kind of exhibitionist uses a condom?"

He leered up at me. "This would be easier with your help."

"Yeah, right."

"I could hold it while you tape the root."

"Have you ever priced nursing homes?"

Where most condoms have the ego-boosting large-tip reservoir, this one had a rubber straw. Maybe Shane was into being sucked off from three feet away.

His pink face broke sweat from the exertion. "If I were a pervert, I would certainly pick a girl younger than you."

A plastic bag was taped to the inside of his thigh. Another hose came off the bottom of the bag and ran to a twist clamp taped to his ankle.

"This is how you pee," I said.

"Urinate to you," Shane said, which made no sense when he said it, and still doesn't. His b.a.l.l.s were hairless and the same color as his face.

"You may observe this process," Shane continued, "and say to yourself 'incontinence,' but you would be incorrect. I control when I go and when I don't go, more or less. The problem is simply the world and all its toilets are designed for the ambulatory. Imagine, if you can, finding an acceptable commode every half hour when you are twenty-eight inches wide and on wheels."

Longest speech I ever heard from a man with his p.e.c.k.e.r in his hand. "What's incontinence?"

Lloyd almost smiled. "He p.i.s.ses on himself."

Shane yanked the rubber with both thumbs and index fingers, his b.u.t.t bouncing off the floor with each tug. "I do not p.i.s.s on myself. How dare Lloyd of all people accuse me of helplessness. This is merely a convenience."

As I watched him tape the rubber to the base of his worm that seemed intent on crawling back inside, I understood the lack of hair on the b.a.l.l.s. "Doesn't look convenient to me."

13.

When Lloyd stopped to gas up at a truck stop near Rawlins, I volunteered to drive and he hurt my feelings.

He said, "I've come too far to depend on a drunk driver."

"You brought me because I could drive."

"We brought you because you have a driver's license. You'll get a chance, but only in the mornings before your first drink. One sip of alcohol and you're in no more shape to sit behind the wheel than him."

Shane slept like the world's loudest snoring baby. We're talking cattle trucks on the overpa.s.s. At first, I thought he was shaking the ambulance, until I realized the wind outside whistled along about seventy miles an hour, which is average around Rawlins.

"I am not drunk," I said.

"Same thing I used to tell Sharon every night before I pa.s.sed out."

"I'll d.a.m.n well tell you when I am drunk."

"My words even as she undressed me because I couldn't undress myself."

When it came time to pay for the gas, I found out why they really brought me. "If I have to buy food, he's going on a diet."

Lloyd rubbed his leg and looked in the mirror at Shane the sleeping slug. "An alcohol addict with control over a food addict-should be interesting."

"Just tell him if he wants to eat, he better cover up while he pulls his plumbing."

As Lloyd double-clutched us onto the interstate and into the wind, I saw a grotesque vision of Shane's nail in the night sky, right up near the handle of the Little Dipper. Repulsive sights have a way of burning themselves into my brain.

"You think Shane gets hard-ons?" I asked.

"He talks about them often enough."

"But does he get them?"

Lloyd cracked his window. "Do witches fly and leprechauns pa.s.s out gold?" He seemed to think that answered my question.

I have an ambiguous relationship with the p.e.n.i.s. Love/hate. Make that fascination/disgust. Fascination to touch, disgust to look at. Fascination at what they can do, disgust at what they do do. The d.i.c.k is so comical, dangling in s.p.a.ce like a lost thumb. And so vulnerable. It simultaneously begs to be cuddled and castrated.

Sam Callahan's wasn't the first p.e.n.i.s I ever touched, although I told him it was. When I was seven, almost eight, we went to the county fair and a log peeler named Walt Walsowski started talking to me in the livestock barn, next to the goat pen. He said if I closed my eyes and held out my hands, he would give me some M&M's.

Until I peeked, I thought he'd handed me a trout.

In the car going home, I told Mom what Walt had done. "The second I touched his thing he peed gobbledigook all over my shirt."

She acted as if she didn't hear.

"What was that stuff, Mom? Walt laughed and said next time he would melt in my mouth, not in my hand."

She was furious-at me. "Maurey, you are disgusting and evil. Don't you ever talk like this again."

Can you believe it? The man blows his wad on a seven-year-old girl and the girl is the one made to feel dirty. No wonder I take my romantic episodes from bottles.

Scout and I consummated our love on the downhill side of Elk Mountain, west of Laramie. Weak knees, nauseated stomach, and uncontrollable eyelids-the signs of o.r.g.a.s.m and drunkenness pretty much match. Only difference is you don't have to tell a pint how great he was.

We expressed our pa.s.sion quietly, hiding our secret from Lloyd, who stared unblinking into the Wyoming night. By closing one eye, I could focus on his cheekbone and bare shoulder, at least for a moment, but Moby d.i.c.k had the spins. The red running lights fell through the roadway, and Interstate 80 heaved. I enjoy a good buzz, but Scout was making me sick. After great effort, I cranked the window down and got the vent open. Lloyd glanced over without a question.

Should I throw up? Pa.s.s out? I could always die again. I held Scout to my lips and inhaled from his mouth. Wetness ran off my chin onto my lap, and when I looked down Scout fell to the floor.

The first time I pa.s.sed out from alcohol was Labor Day night before the start of my senior year at GroVont High. Kim Schmidt drove a Ford load of us to a sixteen-man rubber raft padlocked to a dock where Jackson Lake Lodge launches their Snake River float trips.

Dothan mixed this obscene southern half beer-half wine concoction he called a scrotie-oatey. Even more obscene, the beer and wine was Colt 45 and Ripple. Stuff stagnated in your mouth like swamp water.

We leaned on the inflated sides of the raft and laughed too loud while the moon came over Mt. Leidy and put shadows all up and down the river. The boys bragged about other times they'd gotten drunk and told Spanish fly stories. The only other girl there chain-smoked Larks and said her daddy would smash the first boy who tried to touch her. I watched the water until the illusion of our raft moving upstream made me queasy, then I watched clouds cross the moon, but that made me feel funny, too.

After three, maybe four scrotie-oateys Dothan said he'd throw me in the river if I didn't show the guys my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I didn't care. I thought I had okay b.r.e.a.s.t.s because I'd had a baby. Most of the guys had never seen a t.i.t-I made their summer. The girl called me revolting and said she was going to tell the pep club board, which she never did because three minutes later she was barfing her brains into the oar frame. My advice is never mix beer and wine in the same can.

Everyone but Dothan disappeared. He tried to nail me, but I stopped the son of a b.i.t.c.h-threw up right in his face. He called me a frigid s.l.u.t, then I was all alone crying in a half inch of water on the bottom of the boat.

Next thing I remember is looking up to see two Jackson Lake Lodge boatmen and a family of tourists as they started loading for a breakfast float.