by Tim Sandlin
His long, bony body lay on top, stripped except for one brown sock. His mouth was up under Lydia’s jaw and the hand on my side was a fist next to her armpit. Lydia had her head thrown back, eyes open, with wet hair stuck to her cheek. She made a sound like she needed air.
I peed without flushing, then went back and stood under Les, kind of absorbing the scene of watching Mom screw. The sound got to me—three rhythms—the couch going sideways and up and down, Dougie making the puppy noise, and Lydia. Dougie’s back had hair across the shoulders and up his thighs right into his butt, with moles and erupted red blemishes making a constellation pattern—Pisces maybe, or Pleiades.
Lydia’s skin showed much paler than Dougie’s. I couldn’t see her tits, only the sides of her legs next to his and her feet. Her toes pointed in at each other.
I was sure I was supposed to feel something here—disgust or jealous or sick, something—but I didn’t; all I felt was odd, like you do when you eat too many aspirins, or it rains while you’re at a matinee and you come outside to stuff you didn’t expect. The three sounds weren’t synchronized, no rhythmic relationship. Their bodies were just stuck together.
Dougie made a deeper, less puppylike grunt, rose on his elbows with his eyes squinched together, then collapsed on Mom like a dead man. Her eyes stared right at me and blinked twice before she closed them.
Back in my room I sat in front of the typewriter, looking out the window at a cloud shaped like home plate sliding past the moon. Lydia hadn’t gotten off. Is a kid supposed to root for his mom to reach orgasm or is this a no-never-mind? Dougie’s sweat was rubbed into her and his squirt dripped through her body. I wondered where they put Delores.
A single headlight turned off Center onto Alpine and eased up the street toward our cabin. When the light shone on Dougie’s Volkswagen, Hank’s truck slowed down and the form behind the wheel leaned forward. He switched his beam to low, then back, then he drove on toward the Jackson highway.
22
“Hank came by last night,” I said.
Lydia didn’t deign to hear me. She was slumped back against the booth with each hand clutching a glass of tomato juice.
“And Caspar called about midnight, several hours before Hank came by,” I added so Lydia would know when Hank came by and what he saw. Her eyes quivered a moment, but the effort to open them was just too much.
“What’d Caspar want?” Maurey asked. She was eating french fries because Dot refused to bring her a chocolate shake.
“You live on coffee and chocolate shakes,” Dot had said. “That’s no food for a growing baby.”
“You’re jealous because of your diet, you can’t have shakes so you don’t want anyone to have them.”
“How about a chef’s salad?”
They compromised on french fries. Dot was on a diet because Jimmy was coming home this summer and she weighed twenty-five pounds more than she did when he left.
“Jimmy can’t stand fat women,” she said. “He won’t want me anymore. He’ll want high school girls that can eat anything and never gain a pound.” I wished she’d hurry up and lose the weight, or else give up. Dot on a diet wasn’t near as cheerful as Dot fat.
Maurey took a whole fry in one bite and repeated, “What’d Grandpa Caspar want?”
“He demanded an explanation about the Indian.”
Lydia moaned real quiet like and got her right eye open. “What did you tell him?”
“I said, ‘What Indian?’”
“He meant Hank,” Maurey said.
“I know he meant Hank.”
“Then why did you say, ‘What Indian?’”
Lydia’s left eye made it open but the right one fell back shut. “Maurey, you want some advice?”
“From you?”
“Don’t wreck your life trying to make your daddy notice you exist.”
“My daddy knows I exist.”
I’d wondered about this deal. “Is that why we took Hank in, because you thought an Indian would get Caspar’s attention?”
Both Lydia’s eyes went closed, but her left hand raised its glass and she took a sip of tomato juice. Behind her, in the next booth, a man reading a newspaper cracked a finger joint. Lydia’s face paled even more, her hand shook so hard she spilled juice.
Maurey touched the window with her index finger. “It’s raining.”
I set down my chicken drumstick to stare at the rain. In Greensboro, it rained all the time, so much that mold grew on walls and fungus between your toes. But GroVont had had nothing but snow or clear and cold for six months. I’d known I missed the ground, but until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I missed rain.
“I think it’s turning to snow,” Maurey said.
“It can’t be.”
“Or hail.”
The man behind Lydia cracked another knuckle. This time both eyes opened and she reached for the napkin dispenser. She stood over the man, holding the dispenser over her head as a weapon. “Do that one more time and you’re dead.”
“Do what?”
“Do not play stupid with me, I’m a desperate woman.”
They went into a stare-off that lasted an embarrassingly long time, until Dot noticed and brought the man a coffee refill. He turned a page in the paper and went back to reading. Lydia slumped into the booth. “God, I hate this place.”
Dot said, “I’m hungry.”
Maurey said, “What’s Hank doing?”
Hank pulled his truck into a parking space at Zion’s Own Hardware, then he came back fast across the street straight for the White Deck. For an instant it appeared the Dodge would crash through the wall. I jumped up as Maurey slid across the booth.
Dot put both hands up to protect herself. “What’s that he’s carrying?”
Lydia said, “Les.”
“Les?”
“The moose. The moose is Les.”
Hank fell from the truck onto the curb. He pulled himself up by the rearview mirror, then moved toward us, keeping both hands on the truck body.
“He’s drunker’n a skunk,” Dot said.
Maurey stood next to me. “Hank doesn’t drink, maybe he’s sick.”
Hank lowered the tailgate and sat on it, breathing hard, staring through the window at Lydia. Lydia stared back, both hands tight on the napkin dispenser. A trickle of blood dripped down Hank’s chin from a cut on his lower lip, all his shirt buttons except the bottom one were unbuttoned.
Hank stood and turned around to drag Les to the back of the truck. Then he lifted the moose above his head and ran toward us. Dot screamed, Lydia fell sideways from the booth, and Les came through the window.
Glass flew all over shit, Maurey said, “Jesus,” I took off for the door. I caught Hank as he was climbing back in the truck.
“Hey, asshole.”
His head turned to me without much recognition. I saw a Jim Beam bottle and a pistol on the dashboard.
“Maurey’s pregnant.”
He blinked.
“You could have hurt her, buttface.”
Hank blinked twice more. “Don’t call me buttface.”
“How about drunk fucking Indian.”
Hank nodded in agreement. “And your mother’s a whore.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to get drunk and hurt Maurey.”
His head kept nodding up and down. When it came up, a drop of blood fell off his chin. “I’m sorry.” He pulled himself into the truck and shut the door, then he rolled down the window. “But your mother is still a whore.”
I’d come off the initial adrenaline deal of a stuffed moose coming through the window. All I saw now was a pitiful man screwing himself up because he’d put his hopes on Lydia. I said, “Go on home.”
Hank drove away nodding.
***
He’d trashed the cabin. Throw
n furniture into walls, broken what few dishes we owned, torn up books and scattered the pages. He got into Lydia’s panty drawer and knifed the crotch out of all sixty pairs. I found Alice mewing in my closet. Lydia turned the elk-gut chair upright and sat in it with her eyes closed. I set my typewriter back on the desk, then went into the living room and looked down on her. She looked old and skinny. Even her fingernails were a mess.
“Well, Lydia, you messed it up good this time.”
She didn’t even open her eyes. “Fuck you, Sam.”
“Fuck you too, Mom.”
23
The weekend before school let out, the fire siren went off about four in the morning. I lay in bed, staring at the dark corner of the room where three lines from the walls and ceiling came together. The siren wailed up and down a minute or so, then came silence except for a pickup truck speeding up Center toward the volunteer fire building. One pumper truck siren kicked in and headed north out of town, soon followed by a second.
Whenever the volunteer alarm sounded, especially at night, I got goosebumps wondering whose place was on fire—Maurey’s, Hank’s, the junior high. A fire siren late at night is about the saddest sound in the world. I pictured the volunteers groaning “Oh, damn,” as they crawled from the blankets to pull on their pants. Their sleepy-eyed wives mumbled “Be careful, honey,” not knowing if it was a false alarm or their neighbor’s children burning up.
That night I closed my eyes to play which-would-you-rather. Which would you rather have happen, 150,000 Chinese die in an earthquake or Lydia die in a car wreck? Maurey have a baby or Maurey marry me? Caspar let us stay in Wyoming or Caspar let us come home? I ended with me dying of cancer or being buried in an avalanche. Cancer would be slow and painful and pitiful, but an avalanche would be heavy and dark; I wouldn’t be able to breathe or move my arms. I pretended I couldn’t breathe or move my arms and two tons pushed down on my head until I got the king-hell creeps and spent the rest of the night reading this teenage sports fiction book.
***
The next day Maurey and I rode our bikes up to the TM Ranch. We’re talking sixty degrees, sunny, no ice on the road or snow on the valley floor. We’re talking spring.
I wallowed in it. Living without something most of the time means you get a kick when it’s there. By late May, the North Carolina spring is old hat. Nobody cares. But Maurey and I were the weather equivalent of let out of prison. She laughed and tied her hair back in a rubber band. I swerved through every mud puddle on the gravel road so I soon had a wet brown stripe up my back.
“What was the siren about last night?” I asked as we coasted side by side down a hill.
Maurey stood on her pedals. “Probably a grease fire. People dribble grease onto a woodstove and it burns.”
“At four in the morning?”
“Maybe it was creosote.”
“I bet it was worse than that.”
She looked over at me. “What do you want me to say, Sam? The alarm was a trailer fire and eight children were found suffocated dead behind a locked door? Not everything has to be dramatic.”
“Some things do.”
I cut left to scare a squirrel. He stood on his back legs to chew me out.
Maurey giggled. “You and Chuckette were the cutest couple at the sock hop Saturday night. She’s been blooming since that thing came out of her mouth.”
“I don’t want Chuckette to bloom.”
“Face it, Sam. Chuckette’s in love.”
***
We found Buddy in a pasture below the ranch house, working way off next to a big rock and a small herd of horses. Maurey’s face lit up. “There’s my Frostbite.” She stood on the second rail of the buck-and-rail fence and let out an unbelievable whistle—didn’t put her fingers in her mouth or anything. Just blasted like the lunch siren at the carbon paper plant.
All the horses’ ears jerked up, but only one came trotting toward us. Maurey jumped over the fence. “He’s so beautiful. I get goosebumps every time I see him.”
For the record, skewbald means tan-and-white splotches; kind of like Little Joe’s horse on Bonanza, only with no black. And Frostbite was a lot bigger than Little Joe’s horse. He had nostril flares almost the size of Les’s hooker twats.
When he was about twenty feet from us, Maurey held up her hand and said, “Stop.”
Frostbite stopped, then he turned and faced Buddy and the other horses.
“Let’s see what he forgot over the winter,” Maurey said. She took off toward the horse.
I said, “Should you run in your condition?”
At full speed Maurey jumped, planted both hands on Frostbite’s butt, and flew onto his back—we’re talking the classic Cisco Kid maneuver here—and in the same motion, Frostbite leaped into action.
I’d been to the Ringling Bros. Circus, I’d seen every Gene Autrey movie made in my lifetime, but I’d never seen anything as natural as Maurey on her horse. With one hand on his mane and the other on his back, she kicked her legs over and bounced both feet off the ground, first on the right side, then on the left. At the end of the pasture they made a tight turn and came roaring back with Maurey holding herself up by her arms between her legs and her feet straight out to the sides. Her hair flowed like Frostbite’s tail. Buddy stopped working to watch.
Maurey rotated, so she was facing the back, then she lifted her body and stood right on her hands.
The girl was almost six months pregnant. I should have been scared to crap for the baby, but I wasn’t because of the look on Maurey’s face. It was neater than before, during, or after her orgasm. Sex or death or teen pregnancy—none of that stuff meant squat to Maurey right then. I’m really glad I got to see her face as she rode Frostbite. I learned something important.
Maurey finished by standing on his bare back and galloping right up to me. Frostbite dug in all four legs as Maurey flew backward into a flip. She bounced once and landed with both feet together and her arms out wide.
I clapped and cheered. Maurey smiled. Her face was red and excited and her breath came in short gasps so I could see her breasts, sort of.
I hopped off the fence. “You never told me you could do that.”
“Yes, I did. Come on, Frostbite, let’s go see Dad.”
I walked fast to keep up as we crossed the pasture. “I mean, you told me, but you didn’t tell me how good at it you are.”
“I’m the best around.”
As we approached, Buddy put both hands on his hips. ‘‘You’re gonna break your neck yet,” he said, but I could tell he was proud. He had on a white T-shirt, jeans, and big black rubber boots with pointed toes. You couldn’t see his mouth for all the beard.
The big rock next to Buddy wasn’t a rock at all. It was a brown horse, lying on her side, hyperventilating. Her belly sucked way in so you could see every rib, then it bloated out. Buddy didn’t seem too disturbed by this so I figured it was a normal horse deal.
Maurey knelt by the horse’s head and scratched her under the chin. “Has Estelle been down long?”
“I was eating lunch and saw her out the window.”
A really odd thing happened. Estelle’s belly rippled and two points shot out of her crotch area, then zipped back in.
Buddy knelt on one knee to peer at her womb. “Damndest thing happened with Lauren Bacall. Her foal came out perfect, except she had no eyeballs.”
The two points shot out again, only farther this time, and when they zipped back they didn’t zip all the way.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Maurey rubbed her hands across the horse’s shoulder. “The front feet. Neat, huh?”
“Neat.”
Estelle’s stomach rippled again and most of two legs and a nose popped out, covered by this white-red puss stuff. It was fairly gross, yet all electric at the same time. Even Buddy’s eyes had a glitter and this mu
st have been everyday stuff to him. My heart was going nuts.
“What happened to Lauren Bacall’s foal?” Maurey asked.
“Had to shoot her. Damndest thing, she had empty eye sockets where the eyeballs should be. Would have been a beautiful horse too.” Buddy reached out and held the two front feet, but he didn’t pull or anything. He seemed satisfied to watch.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the deal. It was amazing, this live thing crawling out of another live thing. I kept thinking about the baby in Maurey, was he in puss, would his feet come out first, would he have eyeballs. Estelle didn’t look in much pain. The whites around her pupils bugged some, and cords in her neck tightened. Once she moved her front legs like she wanted to stand up, but Maurey soothed her back down.
Then her crotch made a slurp sound and the foal slid right out—plop—all alive. I wanted to applaud. As Buddy pulled the pussy stuff away from its eyes, the colt had the most astounded look on its face, as if birth was one king-hell of an unexpected event.
Buddy smiled at Maurey. “You want to name it?”
Maurey had a hand on her own stomach. I guess she was thinking of the baby too. Her eyes were glisteny. “How about Dad?”
Buddy looked from her to me and back, then down at the foal. “If you call it for oats, I might come.”
“Dad’s my choice. What sex is it?”
Buddy did a cowboy-type inspection. “Female. Whoever heard of a female named Dad?”
“I did,” Maurey said.
Estelle’s front feet kicked and she made it upright. The gunk hung from her crotch like she was losing guts. One back leg came up two or three times until she managed to step on the gunk, then she walked forward pulling the stuff out; same technique as when you come out of the John with toilet paper stuck on your shoe and you try to scrape it off before anyone sees.
Maurey scratched her horse on the ridge of his nose. “So how’d Frostbite winter so far?”
Buddy glanced at Frostbite, then his eyes followed Estelle as she nuzzled the colt. “He’s a mean bastard, worse than his daddy ever was. Kicked Simon yesterday, like to broke his neck. Petey get over his cold?”
