Skipped Parts

by Tim Sandlin

  On the other side of Chuckette, both Maurey’s hands showed on Dothan’s hair. What could she see in that Southern turd? He had no redeeming qualities at all—just a mean oily rural kid whose teeth would be bad before he turned nineteen.

  He would hit her someday. I could feel it.

  I leaned sideways and kissed Chuckette, but I didn’t touch her with my hands.

  “You forget how the French kiss?” she asked.

  “I thought you didn’t like it that way.”

  “Once you get used to the spit, it’s okay. Besides, it proves you love me.”

  I thought about denying I loved her, but what was the use. She wouldn’t believe me. Gidget and the happy, well-adjusted kids were dancing around a bonfire on the beach. We’d done that once on Ocracoke Island down on the Outer Banks. Lydia had been with a captain or something from the Coast Guard. The jerk patted me on the head and gave me pinball money. There’d been a girl with red braids named Ursula that I watched for hours but never got up the gall to talk to. She’d had on a yellow two-piece bathing suit and if you stared at the fire awhile, then looked quickly at her, she seemed naked. Sort of. I decided to pretend Chuckette was really Ursula. Maybe she’d had a disfiguring accident or something and had plastic surgery only down inside she was still Ursula just as Gidget was still Sandra Dee.

  The fantasy worked me up enough to do the tongue deal and even to touch Chuckette’s one shoulder. But midway through the kiss I went into a short story and lost track.

  Dear Sam Callahan,

  You don’t know me but my name is Ursula Dee, daughter of Sandra Dee. I caught sight of you a single time at a cast party on the Outer Banks. I didn’t have the courage to speak to you then and that has been a regret I will always have to live with.

  Ever since that night, I’ve imagined what it would be like to have your fingers caressing my bare arms and legs. I want you to touch my feet, Sam Callahan. Mom and I will be in your area soon for the filming of Gidget Goes to GroVont, and I would appreciate it if you would touch me at that time. Mom wants you to touch her also. She said

  Chuckette slapped me. “That’s my knee.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t ever touch my knee.”

  “Is something wrong with it?”

  “My body is a temple.”

  “Doesn’t look like a temple.”

  She sat up stiff. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your body looks like a body. Sort of. A temple is a building, some kind of a church.”

  She thought about this awhile, but couldn’t seem to get around the logic. “Time for you to buy me a Black Whip.”

  Trading kisses for Black Whips didn’t seem the way to treat your body like a temple. “But the movie is almost over. We’ll get to see which guy she really likes.”

  “I want my Black Whip.”

  Gidget was going to really like Moondoggie anyway. He was the tallest.

  While I was standing at the candy counter in the lobby, Maurey came out of the theater, her lips swollen from all the necking.

  “You didn’t come this afternoon,” I said.

  “You be home tomorrow?”

  I hadn’t considered tomorrow one way or the other, so I hesitated long enough to keep her off balance, then I said yes.

  “I want you and your mom both there.”

  “Lydia? We don’t need her anymore.”

  “I do. I’ll be there after church.” Maurey headed across the lobby toward the ladies’ room. About halfway across, she turned back to me and said, “He doesn’t kiss near as good as you do.”

  ***

  Sunday, Hank decided to show us the valley. “If you’re going to live here you might as well see the place,” he said.

  Lydia blew cigarette smoke in my face. “We live in North Carolina. We’re only here for a lost weekend.”

  Hank grinned and drank coffee. He’d been in a fine mood since Lydia let him come back. I guess he thought he’d won a point because she called him instead of him calling her. I knew better.

  Outside had warmed up, if that’s the word you use for zero. At least, ear wax no longer froze. Maurey showed up while we were loading the truck with a picnic and enough blankets to avoid death should the Dodge collapse miles from a heat source. She looked at the pile of cardboard boxes in the back of Hank’s truck and said, “You’re not getting me in one of those.”

  “What’s she mean by that?” Lydia asked. Her breath put out more fog when she talked than the rest of us. I couldn’t figure out why.

  Hank said, “The boxes are for moving goods.”

  Maurey reached over the tailgate and scraped a box with her thumbnail. “Why are they waxed, then?”

  Hank shrugged and opened the passenger door for us. “Get in.”

  Lydia was suspicious. “Since when do you open a door for a lady?”

  “Since it won’t shut from the inside anymore.”

  Lydia rode next to Hank and Maurey sat on my lap by the door that not only wouldn’t shut from the inside but wouldn’t open that way either. On account of the truck having electrical tape instead of a passenger window, I felt somewhat trapped, though in a pleasant way. I hadn’t been this close to Maurey in several days and I missed it. A person can get used to touching someone.

  My head was jammed up against the gun rack, so I kept my nose in the little dent on the back of her neck for most of the ride. Her hair smelled way clean, not a shampoo smell exactly, more like fresh-snow clean. She didn’t have hair spray or any of the other gunk that Chuckette used to make her hair into a helmet. Touching Chuckette’s hair was like reaching into a hole not knowing what lives under the surface.

  “There’s no excuse for civilized people living here,” Lydia said. “Not that any do. But look. There’s no trees, there’s no country lanes lined with two-story colonial homes and pickaninny shanties. There’s no pickaninnies. Man should not live without ethnic diversity.”

  Hank grunted. “What do you think I am?”

  “You’re just a white guy with a nice tan and too long hair.”

  Maurey popped me with an elbow. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re coming over after dinner tonight. Ed Sullivan said this week would be a really big show.”

  “He always says that.”

  “Yeah, but someone told Mom at her AAUW bridge club yesterday that this time it would be big. You want to come over, Lydia? Mom would be glad to have company.”

  “Every time I speak to Annabel she works the conversation around to laundry detergent. I’d rather talk to my moose.”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Look.” Hank pointed as we crossed the Snake River. It was an army-green color and gave off the impression of cold. “No rivers like that down South.”

  “Nonsense,” Lydia said. “The South is full of rivers. And concert halls and department stores and porches. Every house has a proper porch. Here they have mud rooms.”

  Discussion deteriorated into the stock West-versus-South and rural-versus-urban canned lecture that Lydia used to fill time. I think she hated silence and Hank was comfortable with it and she couldn’t stand seeing him comfortable when she wasn’t. Much as I liked Maurey on my lap, her butt bones were digging into my thighs. I shifted my weight, trying to find a comfortable divot.

  She reached behind herself with her right hand and grabbed my penis hard. I yelped.

  “What are you whining about now?” Lydia asked.

  “Caught the window knob in my rib.”

  “Well, keep it to yourself.”

  We started up a steep hill with pine trees on either side. “This is the pass,” Hank said. “From the top we can see the four corners of the world.”

  Lydia lit a cigarette. “What difference does it make?”

  Maurey w
ent into this pulsating squeeze action. It felt good, kind of bizarre, but I couldn’t block out of my mind the picture of her kissing that grease bag.

  Hank said, “I want to be idealistic. I want to believe in things.”

  “Like what?” I asked, though my voice came out wrong. I could feel Maurey’s smile clear through the back of her head.

  “Like beauty and the nobility of man. Look over there.” We passed a big live moose, Les’s cousin maybe. He was up a little gully, belly-deep in snow, chewing on a bush. Maurey squeezed the hell out of me.

  Hank went on giving what, for him, was practically a speech.

  “You can believe in whatever you want to believe in up here. Look at the snow on that whitebark pine. People in cities can’t believe in the nobility of man because they see no evidence of it.”

  “I love it when he talks like Chief Joseph,” Lydia said.

  Maurey said in a deep voice, “I will fight no more forever.”

  I kept up my end of the conversation under the direst circumstances possible. “Easy to believe in people when there’s none around.”

  Hank hit the steering wheel with one hand. ‘‘That’s what I mean.”

  Maurey gave a mighty squeeze and I blew in my pants. Coughed like death to cover the sound and clawed at the window handle, which was a waste; you can’t roll down a window that isn’t there.

  “Sam, control yourself,” Lydia said.

  “I got hot all of a sudden.”

  She turned to look at me. “It’s freezing in here.”

  Maurey put her hand back in her lap. “Mrs. Callahan, I came to see you on purpose.”

  “As opposed to accidentally?”

  We were moving up the mountain. I went into a fear fantasy where the truck broke down and all that come froze around my pecker and it broke off.

  “We tried to save him, but it came off in my hand,” the doctor said.

  Maurey Pierce cried until rivulets ran across her cheeks.

  “He’ll never practice again.”

  Sam Callahan looked at the emptiness between his legs. “Does this mean I’m a girl now?”

  Maurey’s voice cut through the story. “How can you tell if you’re pregnant?”

  There’s a conversation stopper for you. We rode a quarter mile up the mountain in silence.

  Lydia lit a cigarette. “The game was supposed to stop on your first period.”

  “I’ve never had a period. Can you get pregnant if you’ve never had a period?”

  Hank rolled the window down a couple of inches. I asked, “What’s a period?”

  Nobody pays any attention to me in a crisis.

  Lydia blew smoke across Hank at the cracked window, then turned back to Maurey. “What exactly makes you think you might be pregnant?”

  “My body is way off, has to be pregnancy or cancer. I get sick sometimes and food smells like poop and my tits hurt.”

  “Get sick mostly in the mornings?”

  “Right. And after lunch at school. And my dreams have been really weird lately.”

  I glanced over at Hank, wondering what he must think of the turn in our Sunday drive. Hank stared out the cracked windshield at the typically majestic terrain. He had on his implacable look that I was starting to take as something of a pain in the ass. I mean, how convenient if in every slightly off-the-norm social situation you could fall back on the Blackfoot stereotype.

  “Do you know what cancer feels like?” Maurey asked.

  Lydia suddenly scratched her right ear, a very un-Lydia-like thing to do. “I hardly even know what being pregnant feels like. I was only with child once and I was your age, almost. The subject hasn’t come up since.”

  I felt Maurey’s stomach through her car coat. Could I have done something to put a little person in there? Lydia’s sex lesson hadn’t included anything about the pregnancy process—other than it might happen so we had to stop when Maurey became a woman. I didn’t know exactly what Maurey and I could have done to cause or not cause a baby.

  It was an odd feeling though. A baby, a live piece of me in Maurey.

  Hank pulled into a parking area and turned the truck around. “This is the place.”

  I leaned to look over Maurey’s right shoulder. The whole valley stretched off beneath us like a waxed linoleum floor. Lines of brown marked the creeks with a wider band at the Snake River. Chimney smoke drifted over the towns of Jackson and Wilson. GroVont was around a corner, too far north to see. The whole thing gave the illusion of being above life.

  “God, I hate being practical,” Lydia said.

  Maurey’s hair brushed my face when she nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “No use getting agitated until we know for sure. Who’s your doctor?”

  “Dr. Petrov in Jackson, but I can’t go to him. He and daddy played football together in high school.”

  “Everyone in this state played football together in high school. How about Erickson over in Dubois? He’s a Valium candy store. Does your daddy know him?”

  I couldn’t see Maurey’s face, but she shook her head no.

  “Then if you are pregnant we can talk abort or not to abort.”

  “I’m just a kid, I can’t have a baby.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  We sat a minute, staring at the shimmery view and considering the implications. Buddy would castrate me. I’d heard him talk horse castration before and he enjoyed it. Gave me every disgusting detail. Took an “I’ve got my balls and you don’t” attitude. Annabel would be disappointed. Everyone else would get a kick out of the deal because it would give them something to talk about. Wasn’t that much to talk about in winter.

  Abortion—I knew what that meant, more or less. Meant keep or get rid of and it was king-hell, kick-in-your-door illegal stuff.

  Maurey started yanking at the door handle. “How the hell do you escape this monster, I’ve gotta slide.”

  Hank popped open his door. “Only works from the outside.”

  As Hank ran around the back of the truck, Maurey threw her shoulder into the door which didn’t budge. “Give me a box, I’m a kid. Kids have fun, dammit, why won’t this door do something.”

  Lydia looked at me. “You following this?”

  I held Maurey around her waist. We were going out into the cold and I had a crotch full of goo and a possibly pregnant just-friends friend. Other than that, I was lost as ever.

  ***

  Maurey got me in a cardboard box behind her with her arms up on my knees—almost the same position of Hank and Lydia in the bathtub.

  “This smacks of suicidal,” I said.

  “Stay loose if we dump.”

  By leaning forward I could see way the heck down the mountain. It was like looking down a great, white throat. Hank had every intention of pushing us over the edge and letting us hurtle down the iced-up angle and into the woods. That’s why the box was waxed—so we could go fast and not waterlog out halfway down the mountain.

  Lydia lit a cigarette. “Looks like spontaneous fun.”

  Hank looked up at her. “We’re next.”

  “Over my dead body we are.”

  Maurey’s face was a nifty flush-red with white points on the tip-top of her ears. The air wasn’t near as cold up high as it had been in the valley. Hank said it was an inversion. “Same thing that causes smog.”

  “Pollution causes smog,” I said.

  Maurey’s eyes had a nothing-to-lose glint that worried me. “Whatever happens, don’t bail out,” she said. “You’ll break your neck.”

  “I know we have a problem, but death isn’t the answer.”

  Her head came back with all that beautiful hair in my face and she laughed and I was charmed to no end. It was the laugh of a child, the laugh of king-hell innocence, not pregnancy and orgasms and jacking-off b
oys in trucks; not even necking with greasers at the picture show. Maurey’s laugh belonged to a person who had done none of those things.

  I’d of said something about it if Hank hadn’t shoved the waxed box and we took off like a cut-loose elevator.

  I’m big on control. I like knowing where I am and where I should be next and how to get there and how to escape any situation. Falling is not your control motif. Maurey was hollering into the wind, same note as when she came in my room. My stomach did the up-the-throat thing.

  I guess it was no faster than a sled, but the sleds I’d been on were semi-controllable and didn’t fly a half-mile down the ramp. The snow had these hollowed-out dips so there was an up sensation in the midst of the down. Tears froze. Then there was a cliff and we were rolling. I grabbed Maurey as we went through the box. Snow crystals stung while we rolled and rolled and I braced myself for the tree that never hit.

  We finally slid to a stop with Maurey in laughter hysterics. I did a four-point and threw up. She shoved snow over the mess as fast as I put it out.

  I can’t stand it when someone has a wonderful time doing the same thing that I hate doing. “Holy cow, that was a gas,” she laughed. “You okay?”

  I tried to breathe.

  “You’d better move fairly quick,” Maurey said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Hank and Lydia are fixing to face plant on that same drop off and they’ll land on you.”

  I looked back up the hill. Forty yards or so up was a five-foot ledge, not a cliff at all. “No way in hell Hank’s going to get Lydia in a box,” I said.

  Famous last words. I heard the scream just before they came flying over the top. It was one of those stop-action memories that freeze in your head and stay there for life, even if you turn senile and can’t remember your own phone number. They floated in the air above the box. Lydia had her arms up, reaching for the sun. Her mouth was an O and I could see the tip of her tongue. One of Hank’s black boots hovered over her legs and his left hand showed on her shoulder. He seemed to be leaning back, as if the box was still behind him.

  They hit and separated. Hank slid on his chest with his face pushing a great mound of snow before him. Lydia rolled end over end, then fell into a baseball hook slide. Neither one slowed down all that much as they went past Maurey and me. The really weird part was that Lydia went by laughing.