Skipped Parts

by Tim Sandlin

  “Petey never had a cold. He was faking to skip school.”

  Buddy stood with his big hands on his hips. I thought he was about to say something, but he didn’t. He looked over at the shiny Tetons for a few seconds, then down at the foal named Dad.

  “Who’s Simon?” I asked.

  “Dog.” Buddy’s hand went to his beard. “You kids want to come up to the house, have some lemonade?”

  “I think we’ll walk up Miner Creek a ways. Sam’s never seen a beaver dam.”

  ***

  The pasture was all horse turds so you had to look where you stepped. As we walked toward the creek, Hank drove by on the gravel highway. One arm came out of the driver’s window in a wave. I waved back, glad to see him and wishing he’d pull over and talk, but he didn’t.

  “What’s Hank doing?” I asked.

  “He found irrigation work up at the Bar Double R. They’re laying pipe in from the river. He ever start coming around again?”

  I shook my head no. “Took a week to put the cabin together and get Les back on the wall. Lydia won’t allow his name said in her presence.”

  Maurey knelt to pick a yellow flower. “Hank didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know and so does Lydia, but admitting she screwed up is beyond her scope.”

  “Lot of things are beyond Lydia’s scope.”

  “We’ll never mess up stuff like our parents did.”

  ***

  The beavers had built three dams, each one upstream bigger than the last. They were solid, too. I’d have bet dynamite wouldn’t put a hole in any of the dams, except maybe the littlest, bottom one. Maurey said dynamite would cut a hole, but the beavers would only chew down more aspen trees and fix it overnight, so there was no use blowing holes in dams.

  “Only way to get rid of a beaver is to kill it,” she said.

  “Why would you want to get rid of a beaver?”

  “They kill trees.”

  We sat on a log next to the biggest pond, watching the beaver lodge and waiting for one to pop up.

  “Beavers mate for life,” Maurey said. “If you trap the female, the male will die from sadness.”

  “People aren’t like that,” I said.

  “People will find someone else to screw. That’s why there’s more of us than them.”

  She told me the names of all the flowers around the pond and up the hill behind us—larkspur, balsamroot, cinquefoil, bear-berry. Maurey knew what to call everything she saw. I really envied her for that. I hardly ever knew the name of anything I was looking at, and that wasn’t just because I came from North Carolina and didn’t know Wyoming. I hadn’t known what anything was in Greensboro either. We must have had ten or twelve kinds of trees in our backyard at the manor house, and the only one I knew was post oak and Caspar had a Negro cut it down. It would be such an advantage to know what things are.

  “Let’s go.” Maurey stood up and held out her hand. I tried to hug her, but she didn’t buy it. She turned sideways, which left me hugging a shoulder and feeling like a squirrel. The butt on my jeans was wet too, from sitting on the log. Hers wasn’t wet and she’d sat right next to me.

  “Do you think the baby knows it exists?” she asked.

  “How should I know.”

  “I don’t remember anything before I was three, so maybe I didn’t know I existed then.”

  “I knew I existed the first time Lydia blamed me because she couldn’t get a date.”

  ***

  “I want to show you a nice place,” Maurey said.

  “Like a secret spot?”

  She nodded and started upstream.

  “Have you shown this spot to Dothan?”

  She stopped and looked back at me in blue-eyed exasperation. “You never know when to shut up, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “There’s a time to give me crap and a time to keep your mouth shut and this is a time to keep your mouth shut.”

  She headed up the trail. I wondered how I was supposed to know which was which. Girls—Chuckette, Maurey, and Lydia anyway—always knew what I was supposed to be doing, and they expected me to know also. Didn’t seem fair.

  We came to this log across a ravine kind of thing. The log was big around as my waist, with loose bark on the sides and a few drops of water from spray off the rocks below. Maurey hopped on the log and walked across like it was a sidewalk.

  She turned back to me. “This nice place is over here.”

  The creek went fast, white, and noisy through the ravine. It was only eight or nine feet below the log; I probably wouldn’t break my neck on the rocks below, but cracked ribs or a concussion seemed way possible.

  “How about if I slide down the bank and wade across?”

  “The water will freeze your feet off.” She put her hands on her hips—same position as Buddy standing over Estelle. “Come on, Sam. Don’t be a chicken.”

  Chicken, squirrel, every time I turned around she was calling me another animal. Peer pressure is a weird thing. It’ll make even a normal kid like me risk his damn neck over something stupid.

  “You can do it, Sam,” she called. “The nice thing about this nice place is we take our clothes off.”

  That was interesting. I stood on the log with my hands out for balance. If the log had been on the ground, we’d of had a no-sweat deal, but up high there was a risk involved and risk isn’t something I’m comfortable with. I did it right foot forward all the way across. Slide the right foot up a few inches, drag the left foot behind it. Slide the right, drag the left. Took frigging forever.

  About three feet from the far side, Maurey held out her hand. I couldn’t make my arm reach out and I felt myself going over, so I jumped. Hit the bank and would have fallen backward into the creek if she hadn’t caught me.

  “That was easy, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everything is easier than you think it will be.”

  “Do we have to go back that way?”

  Maurey laughed as if I was a funny fellow.

  ***

  Her spot was a pool circled by clover up against a hill. On the hillside, willows grew right up to the bank. Tiny purple flowers made a carpet from the creek to the pool.

  Maurey stepped out of her tennis shoes and peeled off her shirt. She was wearing a bra. “Strip time, Sammy.”

  I wanted to see her body naked, but, lack of snow or not, it wasn’t skinny-dip weather. “Are we going to swim?”

  “Feel the water.” She sat on a clump of grass and leaned back to pull off her jeans. Without her clothes on, anyone could tell Maurey’s belly wasn’t just fat.

  I knelt to run my fingertips over the water. “Jeeze Louise.”

  Maurey’s arms were behind herself, undoing the bra. “Don’t they have hot springs where you come from?”

  “I don’t think so.” I stuck my hand all the way in. Little bubbles rose off the bottom of the pool, filtering up through green fronds, slowly popping on the surface. Small yellow fish darted among the fronds.

  Maurey waded into the pool, bent forward so her hands and wrists got wet as her knees did. “I turned goldfish loose in here when I was seven. Can you believe they live all winter?”

  What I wanted to know, besides how hot water could come out of the ground, was what this group nudity would lead to. Probably nothing, there’d been no indication of anything more than buddies-having-a-baby in months. But I would never stop hoping.

  By the time I undressed and waded in, Maurey had settled back with her head on a rock and the rest of her body stretched out under the semi-see-through surface. The water was way warm, almost as hot as I like a bath. Maurey’s face had a light smile. She was looking at my thing which had shrunk up about the size of a boiled Vienna sausage. I sat down quick so she wouldn’t laugh at it.

&nbs
p; “Has Chuckette touched your peanut yet?” Maurey asked.

  Peanut? “Chuckette doesn’t even know men have peanuts. She thinks my fingers can make her pregnant. Have you touched Dothan’s?”

  Maurey ignored that one. Her hair flowed up by her ears. I touched her foot with mine and she didn’t pull back. “I kind of enjoy being pregnant,” she said, “once you quit being sick. It’s so weird. You men will never know how it feels.”

  “I bet it’s like a football in your tummy.”

  “More like a rotating watermelon.”

  I slid around until I was right across from her and the soles of both our feet pushed against each other. The bubbles made a neat tickle feeling coming up my back and legs, like farting in the bathtub only without the embarrassment. Lydia and Hank took baths together, which I thought was weird, but this wasn’t weird at all.

  Maurey leaned back to look at the sky. “I’m floating in hot water and there’s hot water in me with a baby floating in it. We’re all the same temperature, water and people.”

  This was the first I’d heard about the baby floating. “What does the baby breathe if you’re full of hot water?”

  Her look was nothing but disdain. “Sam, how can you expect to be a father when you don’t know squat about babies?”

  Below me, the bottom felt like wet vinyl. I dipped all the way under to think about her question. No matter how young or old a guy is, he doesn’t know about babies until someone tells him. Knowing what babies breathed in the womb isn’t a stage of development like walking or pubic hair. I needed to be told.

  “When I need to think, this is where I come,” Maurey said. “Even Dad doesn’t know about this spot. Now, if you need to think, you can come here.”

  I tried to think of an occasion when I might need to think. “Thanks.”

  “Isn’t being friends better than being girlfriends and boyfriends? If you were my boyfriend, I’d never show you this spot because we might break up and then where would I be. Someone I don’t like would know my secret.”

  “So if you like someone in the right way and then you stop liking them in the right way, you have to stop liking them at all?”

  “Right.”

  “I wouldn’t want that.”

  She nodded. “See. I told you it’s better to be your friend than it is to like you in the right way.”

  “But I still want to fuck with you.”

  “I can’t fuck with someone I don’t like in the right way.”

  I settled into the hot water up to my ears. To keep her, I couldn’t make love to her, even though I already had, and if I made love to her we wouldn’t be friends anymore. So Dothan got her body and I got the confidences and the secret spot. What a gyp.

  The primary question was: Do all girls think like this? If so, every guy would need two.

  “Want to see something neat?” Maurey sat up so only below her navel was under water. She held her left nipple with her thumb and index finger and squeezed. “I discovered this yesterday.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look, silly.”

  I leaned forward to stare at her nipple. A little watery white drip appeared from nowhere. “What is it?”

  “Milk. I can make milk from my tit.”

  “Jesus.”

  She squeezed until another drop appeared. There wasn’t a slit like on the end of a penis. The milk just oozed through the nipple. Maurey touched the drop with her finger, then touched her finger to her tongue—like Lydia had done with my first squirt. “It’s warm.”

  “Can I taste it?”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “It won’t be foreplay.”

  “I know, I just want a taste.”

  Maurey squeezed her other nipple until a drop of milk appeared. “Okay, but only because it’s so neat.”

  I got to my knees and crossed over next to her. She held her hand under her breast to lift it. I leaned over and licked the warm drop off the tip of her nipple. It didn’t taste like milk at all, more like warm dishwater.

  “You think if I sucked on it, I’d get more than one drop.”

  She lowered her breast back to the normal position. “The milk is for the baby, Sam. Tasting one drop is neat. Drinking me would be too strange.”

  “How do you know what’s strange?”

  ***

  Back at the TM, we fooled around with Frostbite and waited for Maurey’s hair to dry.

  Maurey’s hands moved, touching her ears and nose. Her eyebrows rode higher than usual. “I think I’ll talk to Dad before I bike back in. You go on without me.”

  I was kneeling when she said this, searching for the perfect blade of grass to whistle through. I looked up at her face and a tiny chill ran up my spine. Life, once again, was fixing to turn over.

  “Any chance you might skip the part on who the father is?”

  Maurey smiled right at me. “Let’s just say you and Lydia might want to lock your door tonight.”

  ***

  The best thing about riding a bike from the mountains to a town is, except for a few foothills, the trip is almost all downhill. Maurey’s red Western Flyer had three speeds, so hills didn’t affect her that much, but I’d been in a grunt most of the way coming out. It’s a lot easier to consider alternatives when you’re coasting than grunting.

  Here’s how the alternatives lined up: The best, Buddy would make her marry me. The worst, Buddy would sink to violence—castration, death, or, as Dot predicted, he’d brand my butt.

  The big problem was that Western culture was as foreign to me as Afghanistan. I mean, how much violence would the townsfolk think Buddy deserved? He couldn’t literally kill a little boy, could he? This wasn’t South Carolina. All my life I’d had this confusion as to whether castration is cutting off the thing or cutting out the balls below the thing. Either way made me nauseous and shrivelly.

  So far, Dot’s predictions had all come true. Which meant Buddy would brand my butt, but I didn’t know if that meant metaphorically as in “Somebody gonna kick your ass,” or literally as in imprintation by a red-hot branding iron. Branding would hurt like hell, only less permanently than castration. It might give me a romantic allure, along the lines of a tattoo or a vivid facial scar.

  “I’ve been there and back, honey. Why once in Singapore six crazed Chinamen burned an Oriental devil sign into my ass. See my ass.”

  “TM is an Oriental devil sign?”

  “You can touch it if you want.”

  There was one possibility worse than public branding. Buddy might force her back to the abortion place. Maurey was almost six months along, which made me wonder if there is a moment where a fetus becomes a baby and can no longer be flushed down the toilet.

  If Buddy tried to make her abort, I would offer to fistfight him. If that didn’t do it I would kidnap Maurey and take her to Greensboro and hide her in Caspar’s basement. Nobody was flushing my baby now.

  ***

  At home, Dougie was in the kitchen cooking something called chicken cordon bleu while Lydia sat at the table painting her toenails black cherry. Dougie smoked Tiparillos and puffed smoke straight up at the ceiling. He had fingers like a girl.

  “Lydia, Maurey’s telling her dad today.”

  Lydia blew on her foot. “That’s interesting.”

  “If Buddy comes here will you protect me?”

  “You must be responsible for your own actions, Sammy. You knocked her up.”

  “But you taught me how.”

  “That is irrelevant.”

  Dougie opened a drawer. “Where can I find the tarragon?”

  ***

  At 10:30 I fetched Lydia’s Gilbey’s and locked the doors. Dougie had washed the dishes and gone home in his Volkswagen. The Idaho Falls news, weather, and sports were over and Lydia was into her nightly bitching about the TV not picking
up The Tonight Show.

  “Remember what we were doing a year ago today?” I asked her.

  Lydia carefully measured her first two ounces of gin. “I was drinking my gin and watching Joey Bishop. Now I can’t watch Joey Bishop.”

  “Joey’s not on The Tonight Show anymore, Lydia. He wasn’t on The Tonight Show a year ago either. You’re thinking of when I was eleven.”

  “Joey Bishop will always be on The Tonight Show.”

  I picked both my books off the couch. “Today is May twenty-fourth, my annual trip to the plant. You think Caspar missed us today?”

  “He didn’t miss me.”

  May 24 was the anniversary of Caspar’s first roll of carbon paper. We always had waffles for breakfast on May 24, then I would dress in my Sunday suit and Caspar would drag me through the carbon paper factory. It was awful. May 24 often coincided with freedom from school, a day for being outside, not a day to wander through a hot windowless cave full of loud machines and carbon black, reenacting a someday-this-will-all-be-yours ritual.

  Who wanted it? I was twelve years old my last trip to the plant, torn between professional baseball and fiery novelist fighting off the adoring girls. Both my career choices leaned heavily on adoring girls. Women would love a golden glove second baseman with the soul of a poet. What they wouldn’t love is a pasty-colored carbon paper maker with permanently black fingernails.

  Caspar and I put on hardhats so he could conduct me up and down rows of webs, Shriber carbon coaters, slitter rewinders, core cutters, God knows what all, back into the warehouse mountains of paper waiting and paper done. The big treat came when he let me steer the forklift, which had been a kick when I was six, but come on already.

  I stood in my wool suit and politely shook hands with Caspar’s some-of-my-best-friends-are-Negroes employees. One old guy without a left thumb had been on the same trimmer six days a week for forty-three years. He always grinned like the brain dead in Body Snatchers and called me whippersnapper.

  “How’s the whippersnapper these days?”

  “He’s raring to go, Tommy,” Caspar said every single year. “Can’t wait to take your job away from you.”

  Tommy chuckled and touched my head while I made up stories about how he lost his thumb and what box of carbon paper it surfaced in.