Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

“Ft. Worth told you all this nature stuff?”

“Hank. He’s interesting. His great-grandfather was one of only four Cheyennes killed at Little Big Horn. That’s in Montana. Custer bought it there.”

“I know about Custer.”

“Hank says he had it coming.”

“This guy sounds like a mountain of folklore.”

“You know that bucking bronco and cowboy on everyone’s license plate?”

“The ones you think are so stupid?”

“They have names, Steamboat and Stub Farlow. Steamboat is the horse.”

This was too much strangeness all in one day. “Do any of these little items relate to us?”

She snuffed out the cigarette before it was half smoked.

“Sammy, information can be interesting even if it doesn’t affect me personally.”

“That’s not how I was raised.”

I headed for the kitchen to boil mac and cheese water, but something bothered me about the setup. “Did those guys come over here and say ‘Let’s go for a ride’?”

Lydia smiled at me. “I met them at the White Deck. Ft. Worth has a hairy fingertip.”

“You went to the White Deck alone?”

“You don’t expect me to stay in this living room forever, do you?”

“I thought you expected to.”

“Honey bunny, there’s a difference between time out and death. Ask Les, he’s the one told me to get my head off the wall.”

I looked up at Les, wondering if Lydia meant that symbolically or literally. A lot of weird things can happen on a pint of Gilbey’s.

She flipped on the TV. A fuzzy image came on of two people showing the mechanics of a rifle. Lydia went on. “That Dotty’s had a fascinating life. She has a little son she hasn’t seen in two years and a husband in Asia, or somewhere, in the army.”

“You talk to Dot?”

“We have a lot in common.”

You think you’re on top of the deal, then suddenly you find yourself actually over to the side with the view blocked.

I was more disoriented than ever.

Maurey and I discovered a mutual love of reading books. It was like being in Bolivia or someplace foreign and running into the only other person in a thousand miles who speaks English—instant old-home week.

We raved at each other. “Have you read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel ?”

“God, it was great. Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land ?”

Sunday, Maurey and I discussed the sex stuff in Diary of Anne Frank while Petey played fort with the couch cushions. Neither one of us knew exactly what sleeping together meant, we were only sure it meant more than being asleep at the same time in the same place.

“It’s a metaphor,” Maurey said.

“A metaphor for what?”

They were showing the procession as John Kennedy’s body was moved from the White House to the Capitol. It was real sad and dignified. White horses pulled the casket up the street followed by a black horse with empty boots stuck backward through the stirrups.

“Jeeze, what a horse,” Maurey said. “Wouldn’t you love to ride him?”

“Who wouldn’t?” The horse looked like a man-killer to me.

Petey dragged a bunch of dolls and a beat-to-death bear into his fort and pretended they were customers at a drive-up liquor store. Being from North Carolina, I had no idea what that meant until Maurey explained.

“You sure have led a sheltered life,” she said.

“I went to New York City once. I didn’t see any drive-up liquor stores there.”

The literary sex stuff confused us both. Growing up around Lydia, I’d learned the patter early—the hooker laid the John with a Bo Peep fantasy on a half and half—but I didn’t know what went where when the hooker did all this.

Maurey couldn’t even follow it that far. “Bo Peep is about doing it?”

I faked sophistication. “Of course.”

Maurey had read ]ane Eyre and D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy . The virgin gets wet and cold in a flood and the gypsy saves her by doing something peculiar.

I told her about the whores in Catch-22 .

She told me a Hemingway story where an African guide has a double cot and somebody’s wife sneaks out for a couple of hours, then the next day she blows her husband’s head off.

I told her about The Catcher in the Rye , which I read because a teacher told me not to.

We finally found common ground with Tortilla Flat , in which Danny drags every woman in the Flat into a gully, drinks three gallons of wine, and dies.

“But what happened in the gully?” Maurey asked.

I shrugged. “Seems like a lot of book people die afterward.”

Maurey pointed to the TV. “Here’s the killer.”

“Who are all those other people?”

Boom. Oswald bought the big one. Right there, live, in front of me and everyone else, one person murdered another one.

“Holy cow,” Maurey said.

Annabel brought in a huge bowl of popcorn and stood in the middle of the family room, staring blankly at the Dallas police wrestling Jack Ruby to the concrete floor. She turned to us. “Who’s ready for a snack?”

Petey twisted the bear’s head until it tore off its body.

That night I had my first wet dream. It was king-hell peculiar. Lydia and I were in this department store to buy me some new Wranglers. She held a pair of 26-28s up to my waist and said, “Looks right if they don’t shrink much. Maybe you better try them on.”

I went into the changing booth and Annabel Pierce was sitting on this three-legged stool, naked with Kleenex boxes on both feet. She said, “You didn’t eat the popcorn.”

I couldn’t take off my jeans to try on the new ones with her watching, so I just waited there, holding the pants in front of me, embarrassed because Annabel was old and naked.

She stood up and said, “Here’s what the gypsy did to the virgin,” and she pressed herself against me and kissed me on the lips, a real closed-mouth kiss, felt like kissing the seam on a football.

Lydia banged on the door. “Come on, I want to see the waistline.” Then suddenly I was naked from the navel down, except my socks, and something felt really weird and I woke up with this mess on my stomach.

I wiped myself off with a day-old sweat sock and changed pajamas. In the bathroom, I examined my eyes for signs of jaundice. Me Maw died of jaundice caused by cancer and Caspar said it was hereditary. I checked a mole on my right inner thigh, which I’d been told would change color and fall off if I had polio.

No yellow, no rotting moles. I went in, turned off the TV, and woke up Lydia, which I’d never done before.

She still slept on the couch in an askew post-Gilbey’s position, but at least she’d graduated to a white flannel nightgown. No more waking up fully dressed. Out the window, dawn turned the snow from gray to a light pink. That meant she’d had several hours to process the gin and Valium and might be somewhere near coherent.

I stuck the gooey sock up close to her face. “What’s this?”

Lydia blinked twice, stretched her spine, then made a chewing motion. It was my first experience at watching a woman go from asleep to awake.

“Sammy?”

“Lydia, something weird is going on and I demand an explanation.”

Her eyes focused. “You blew your nose on a sock.”

“No way in the world did this stuff blow out my nose.”

Lydia blinked a couple more times. She touched the goo with her index finger and touched the finger to her tongue. Her eyes woke up. “You jerked off. It’s come.”

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.”