Skipped Parts

by Tim Sandlin

  I’d heard come-brains and come in your pants, and knew it was connected to the penis, but I’d vaguely figured it meant peeing on yourself. Jerk-off was a term used in sports to denote a lazy screwup. “I didn’t jerk off, Mom. I woke up with this stuff all over me.”

  Lydia’s eyes left the sock and went to my face. “You had a wet dream, honey bunny. It’s okay. Boys have them all the time.”

  “A wet dream?”

  “Were you dreaming right before you woke up?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe there was a girl in the dream?”

  “She was naked.”

  Lydia smiled. “Did you recognize her?”

  Something told me to skip that one. “She kissed me and I felt funny.”

  Lydia sat up and hugged me. I held the sock out away from her back. “Poor Sammy. It’s a natural stage in life. You just moved a step closer to being grown-up.”

  I couldn’t see how gushing pus on my belly made me a grown-up. “Will you get me a Dr Pepper,” Lydia asked. “My mouth is all dried out.”

  Staring into the refrigerator, I thought about the trauma I’d been through. This was just the kind of information that doesn’t sneak up on boys with fathers. Back in the living room, Lydia was examining her face in the turned-off television screen.

  “Mom, a major fluid is leaking from my body and no one ever mentioned it. Why wasn’t I told?”

  She drank about half the D.P. in one pull. “Don’t boys talk in locker rooms?”

  “Dothan Talbot threw a rubber at Kim Schmidt once. I know how it fits over the end.”

  “Well, that stuff is what the rubber catches. It’s not just for show.”

  Outside, the pink snow was turning a different tinted gray and I could make out the Tetons off across the valley floor. “What exactly is this stuff?”

  “Do something with it. Mothers and sons aren’t supposed to talk about this with a sock full of come between them on the coffee table.”

  I carried the gooey sock into my room and set it on the keyboard of my typewriter. Then I went back and re-asked the question. “Talk, Lydia. I bet every kid my age in the world knows about come and they’re laughing at me, saying I’m a squirrel.”

  Lydia made some eye contact with Les. Then she sipped on her bottle. “Come is like sperm in a runny mayonnaise base. It’s where babies come from. That’s why they call it come.”

  “You give this stuff to a girl and she makes a baby?”

  Lydia thought. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

  “Doesn’t it get the girl all messy? I don’t know of any girl would want runny mayonnaise smeared on her.”

  Lydia looked at me sadly. I guess ignorance is always sad when it has to be set straight. “The come goes in the girl, honey bunny. You really don’t know, do you? It doesn’t get on the girl—until she stands up, then it runs down the inside of her legs and feels icky.”

  I sat down and tried to picture an anatomy I’d never seen. “You stick your dick up where the girl pees? How can millions of people do something they don’t let kids know about?”

  “It doesn’t go up where they pee, there’s another tunnel. And sex is practically all anyone talks about.”

  “I never heard anyone talk about sticking their dick up a tunnel.”

  Lydia lit her first cigarette of the day and blew smoke at the dawn. “People use vague adult terms the kids can’t follow. Make love. Do it. Fuck.”

  This was as major as discovering color or water or something crucial to life that everyone else knows about but I hadn’t dreamed possible. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. “Lydia, this gooey dick and tunnel and sex stuff sounds kind of grotesque.”

  She blew more smoke. “It’s fun once you get the hang of it.”

  She was sixteen, a cheerleader at a large Southern high school, with long legs, blonde hair, and real breasts. She came to Sam Callahan in the early evening, as the sun dipped behind the Tetons. “I hear you can teach me something.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Ramona. She says you revolutionized her life.”

  “Ramona was a quick learner. Are you prepared to trust me?”

  “Yes, Sam, teach me the mysteries of adulthood.”

  “It’s not all pleasant. Icky stuff might run down your leg.”

  “Teach me, Sam Callahan. Teach me everything.”

  ***

  First thing I wanted to do Monday was tell Maurey what happened during the skipped parts of novels. I made Lydia’s coffee, ate a donut, and carefully wrapped my gooey sock in Saran Wrap just in case Maurey didn’t believe me. I thought about taking it over to the Pierces’ as proof—look, come—but it made a lump in my jeans that made me look squirrelly.

  Besides, some things I did know instinctively. How to have sex wasn’t one of them. Knowing enough not to talk dicks and tunnels in front of Annabel was. Not all mothers are equal.

  That day, Monday, Annabel finally took an interest in the national tragedy. She sat in the overstuffed recliner, cross-stitching a Christmas scene all morning. “Look at Jackie. I heard she hasn’t cried once all weekend.”

  On the television, people filed through the Capitol rotunda on each side of the president’s body, four abreast. They’d been standing in line all night so they could do this, but what surprised me was the ones who didn’t look at the casket. They looked straight ahead or into the network cameras filming them. Why had they waited in line ten hours to do something they weren’t doing?

  Maurey noticed it too. “It’s sad,” she whispered. “I don’t see the point.”

  To take a shot at honesty here, by then I was somewhat bored with the assassination aftermath. The television had been droning for four days without a single commercial. No matter how much it affected the rest of our lives, Maurey and I were just too young for sustained somberness. I wanted to go outside and build anatomically correct snowboys and girls so we could figure out this sex thing.

  Maurey was more interested in Friday’s fight. I wanted to smash Dothan Talbot and his sister in their inbred noses, but Maurey was into forgiveness. “Dothan didn’t know what he meant. It’s his Southern jerk-racist parents. I bet all he hears at home is, ‘I wish Kennedy would kill himself and save us the trouble.’ People talk like that and kids buy it.”

  Forgiveness isn’t my deal. “The clown rubbed my face in snow. I want him to die.”

  “See. You don’t mean that literally.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Besides, Dothan sees people die all the time on television. He doesn’t know real death from make-believe.”

  I glanced at Annabel, checking her attention level on the conversation. Her face was blank newsprint. I tried to remember if her breasts had tits on them last night. The only tits I’d ever seen were in Playboy magazine where they looked like bull’s eyes on water balloons. Annabel’s breasts were way smaller than water balloons, at least as far as I could see, so maybe the bull’s eyes would be way smaller too, like little pimples. Imagining Mrs. Pierce’s breasts made me nervous, so I turned back to Maurey. Maurey didn’t have breasts.

  “What are you defending this guy for? He’s king-hell stupid and he’s stronger than us. I don’t like people stronger than me.” Too late, I realized I’d said hell in front of Maurey’s mother.

  Annabel spoke from over her cross-stitch. “The littlest Talbot is a slow, you know.”

  “A slow what?”

  Maurey was leaning back against the end of the couch with her feet between us. Whenever I shifted, one of her bare toes touched my leg. The index toe on her left foot was as long as the big toe.

  She said, “You know what a slow is. Every grade is divided into two classes, quick and slow. We’re in the quick class.”

  “You and I are quick, everyone else seems sort of medium.”

 
Maurey smiled, my discovery that the girl was a sucker for a compliment. “Everyone is put in slow or quick by the second grade and that’s where they stay.”

  “No one ever crosses over?”

  “Wanda Martinez went from quick to slow,” Annabel said.

  Maurey kicked my leg. “That’s because her daddy rolled their Jeep off the pass and turned Wanda into a retard.”

  The television was showing old footage of John and Jackie Kennedy at a dignitary ball. She wore a strapless exotic white thing and leaned toward him, fascinated by what he was saying. John Kennedy looked like a fairy-tale prince. They both had a happy, immortal presence, as if they lived in a special bubble. Then the picture went to a speech John had given in West Berlin. The Germans loved him as much as we did.

  “It must be very hard on the Talbots to have a slow in the family,” Annabel said. “I don’t know what your father would have done if you or Petey had turned out slow.”

  Maurey straightened her right leg so her ankle was draped over my thigh. “Mr. Talbot doesn’t care that Pud’s a slow. Probably makes him feel like real folks.”

  I had some trouble following that. “Pud?”

  Maurey laughed. “They call him Pud. His real name is Montgomery and he’s the stupidest kid in the valley. I saw him in front of Talbot Taxidermy the other day with frozen drool down his shirt.”

  Dothan, Florence, and Montgomery. I made a connection. “They’re all named for towns in Alabama.”

  Neither Annabel nor Maurey knew that and for a while we were all three silent as they digested the information and I watched Kennedy give his Cuban crisis speech. Actually, Annabel probably digested the information and Maurey moped because I’d known something she didn’t know.

  I decided it was time to move around. “You want a Coke? We can catch what’s happening at the Deck.”

  Annabel said, “We have pop here.”

  Maurey stood up. “That’s not the point, Mom.”

  ***

  The light was nice as Maurey and I walked the two blocks down Glenwood to Alpine and over to the White Deck. It has to do with altitude or lack of pollution or something—whatever it is, light in Wyoming can be transparent, energetic. It reflects completely, never losing a bit of brightness, especially after new snow. The light in North Carolina is heavy and absorbent, like a paper towel. You can’t see something three blocks away as clearly as something in your hand. In Jackson Hole, distance is irrelevant.

  The Tetons stood, bing, shining against a sky so blue it appeared artificial. Every snow crystal on the ground was separate from every other snow crystal. It’s easy to believe in beauty when it batters you over the head.

  As we walked along, I gave Maurey the rundown on last night’s revelations, leaving out the part where her mother triggers the mess. She nodded and asked questions at pertinent points. “How much goo?”

  “Say what?”

  “How much goo came out? Two tablespoons? A cup? A quart? Surely it wasn’t more than a quart.”

  “It wasn’t more than a quart.”

  “More than a pint?”

  I tried to remember. “It was all spread out, but I’d say less than a third cup.”

  “Did you taste it?”

  “God, no. But Lydia did.”

  “That may be illegal.”

  This shocked me, the thought that a biological process might be affected by laws. “It was on a sock. I never heard of anyone getting arrested for tasting come off the end of a sock.”

  “You never heard of come till this morning.”

  “I’d heard of come, I just didn’t know what it was.”

  “Knowing a word, but not knowing what it means, is the same as not knowing it.” Maurey’s face was flushed pink from the cold. There were rose spots above each cheekbone.

  She looked down at my zipper. “When your thing is hard, does it point straight out or down?”

  “Up.”

  “Up. Are you sure? Horses’ things point down.”

  “Up. At least mine does. I don’t know about anyone else.”

  We stopped across from the triangle and tried to picture the internal workings of the deal. Maurey’s eyes squinched as she thought. She had the advantage over me in that she knew what male things were shaped like and I didn’t know squat about females except there was a tunnel involved.

  Maurey nodded. “That’s about how I had it figured. The horses confused me. I wonder where kissing comes in.”

  In books people often kissed before things were either skipped or talked about so metaphorically no one knew what was going on. It seemed to be a one, two, three ritual—kiss, skip the weird stuff, fall in love. I thought about kissing Maurey, right there on the street, in hopes that one thing led to another and couldn’t be stopped once begun, but she didn’t seem interested in the romantic end of the deal. Maurey was into the mechanics.

  “Maybe you could show me your thing,” Maurey said.

  “It’s not hard right now.”

  “How can you make it hard?”

  “I don’t know. It just happens sometimes. It’s not in my control.”

  We stood on the curb trying to imagine the unimaginable. This seemed like a big deal—like driving a car—only adults could do and kids couldn’t. It would involve touching a girl in places you weren’t even allowed to look at. How could you touch something you couldn’t see?

  “Do you think it feels good?” I asked.

  Maurey shrugged as we walked on to the White Deck. “People in books usually think so. There must be more to it than making babies.”

  7

  Dot tousled my hair—a nasty habit if ever there was one—and smiled at Maurey. “I thought you two was mortal enemies.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” I asked. Older women were always touching my hair. They think it’s big fun to embarrass kids.

  “Same place I hear ever’thing else.” Dot pointed at the floor. “GroVont ever gets a newspaper I could be the only reporter.”

  Maurey turned sideways in the booth and leaned against the wall. “We’re experimenting with friendship. We could go back the other way any second.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

  Dot laughed like she always does. “Hate is a good way to start being friends. Better than the other way around like those two old farts.” She pointed at Bill and Oly who were back in their regular corner booth. They stared into their coffee cups as if they’d done a freeze-frame in that position.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

  Dot more or less sorted. “They were meat and gravy for thirty years. Had a logging business, you never saw Bill without Oly or Oly without Bill.”

  “You still don’t,” Maurey said.

  “We used to think maybe they’s queer, but who ever heard of a queer logger.”

  “Must get lonesome in the woods,” I said.

  Dot grinned real big. “That’s why God made sheep,” and she went off into a veritable gale of mirth. Maurey and I cut eyes at each other, knowing this had something to do with dicks and tunnels, but not sure how sheep fit in.

  “I have to watch them every minute now. Bill’s punched out Oly three times this month. Almost broke his nose the other day. Oly don’t know what to make of it. He’s gotten skittish. The whole cafe is tense.”

  I studied the two old men nodding over their coffee cups. They didn’t appear skittish, they appeared dead. Their hands wrapped around their cups, as if that was the last possible source of warmth. At one point, Bill swallowed and Oly blinked.

  I ordered a cheeseburger and coffee. Maurey had a vanilla shake. When Dot brought the food, Maurey went right to the point.

  “Dot, do you and your husband have sex?”

  Dot’s head kind of snapped back an inch. She snuck a quick look around for eavesdroppers,
but there were no other customers besides the old men practicing for death. Dot smoothed her apron with her right hand. “Jimmy’s been in the army two years, over in Asia the last six months, so there’s been a dry spell here just lately.”

  I smiled sympathetically. Maurey went right on. “But you used to have sex, right, before Jimmy went away?”

  Dot’s eyes went into a memory mode. “My Jimmy had the appetite. He’d of done it four times a day if I’d let him. I got scared to wash the dishes for fear of him sneaking up behind me.”

  “Then men like it and women don’t?”

  “Oh, I loved it, sugar, better than ice cream and chocolate cake.”

  “Then why were you scared to wash the dishes?”

  “I guess I was more a twice-a-dayer than four times, though if Jimmy’d come back tomorrow, I swear I could adapt.”

  I stared out the window at the sunshine, pretending I had a woman who wanted it twice a day but was willing to go four. I wondered how long each time took. If it was fifteen minutes, that’d mean an hour of fucking a day.

  “My mom won’t be home for another twenty minutes,” Ginger Ann purred. “You want to stick it in?”

  “But that’ll be five times since school let out this afternoon.”

  “Sam, it’s not romantic to keep score.”

  Maurey sucked on her shake straw thoughtfully. “How much come did Jimmy put out each time?”

  Dot sat down at the table behind her. “Maurey Pierce. There are things people don’t compare.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why? Lovemaking is private. We do it but we don’t say how much you-know-what came out.”

  “It’s okay to say ‘came out’ but not okay to say ‘come’?”

  Dot blinked three times—blap-blap-blap. “That’s talking dirty. Kids your age shouldn’t talk dirty.”

  “I don’t see how it can be dirty,” I said. “Lydia told me sex is an expression of affection and love, theoretically, and good, clean fun, practical-wise. Why is doing it clean, but talking about it dirty?”

  Maurey waved her hand as if she were clearing the air. “I just want to know if a third cup is average.”