Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

This wasn’t the Hayley Mills from Pollyanna. This was the older, more aloof Hayley from The Parent Trap . In fact, both The Parent Trap twins—the long-haired cultured Boston Hayley and the short-haired, perky California Hayley—sat in the spacious backseat of a limousine parked at the Tastee Freeze.

Sam Callahan walked right up to their Rolls-Royce and leaned in the back window. “Where’d you guys go to school?” he asked.

The Boston Hayley put on her sunglasses. “We never talk to common people.”

“Want to see a magic trick?” Sam asked.

“How juvenile,” said the California Hayley.

Then, before they could roll up the window, Sam performed his trick.

The Boston Hayley took off her sunglasses. “What can be your pleasure today?”

“Show me your breasts.”

The girls did as they were told. With their shirts off and their glamorous breasts facing Sam Callahan, they asked, “What may we do next to help you feel like the king you are?”

Sam touched the left nipple on each girl. “Do you know where Maureen O’Hara lives?”

“I haven’t gotten laid in four months.” Lydia blew smoke across the table. “My own kid is getting lucky and I can’t.”

“There is a problem we can fix,” Hank Elkrunner said. He was sitting next to Lydia, across from Maurey and me. Maurey and I were playing a game called hangman where you fill in blanks with letters before the other guy draws a hung stick figure. Maurey was in a good mood because she’d aced a test in citizenship that I made a C on. She put a lot more stock in grades than I did.

“You complain of your dry season,” Hank said, “but no one feels sympathy. Each man in this room would volunteer to give you cause to stop complaining.” I liked Hank. He spoke slowly and looked at his fingers when he talked. He hadn’t been at the table five minutes before he told us he didn’t smoke or drink alcohol, just the kind of guy Lydia needed. They seemed real relaxed with each other.

Lydia looked around the White Deck, surveying possible volunteers. Most of the eight or nine guys were dude wranglers on welfare, holing up for winter and waiting for tourist season to kick in. A couple worked for the national park. “I’d rather complain than fool around with these peckerheads. Every one of this rabble is afraid of women.”

Hank had this low, growl-like laugh. You couldn’t really tell he was laughing except his shoulders moved up and down. “They are not afraid of women. They are afraid of you.”

“No challenge in that. Not a man here, this table excluded, that Maurey couldn’t have shaking in his Tony Lama’s in five minutes.”

Maurey looked across at Lydia and smiled. In the last four days since our training session they’d gotten real buddy-buddy. Made me nervous.

Hank picked up his iced tea. “I bet Oly could make you walk the ceiling.”

“Oly is dead, only around here dead people go on drinking coffee for six days. It’s like growing toenails anywhere else.”

This four-months-of-no-sex thing came as kind of a surprise. With Lydia, whenever she leaves the house everyone just figures she’s up to something immoral.

“Dusty Springfield,” Maurey said.

“Heck.” She’d guessed my hangman words. I’d been trying to touch her thigh under the table, and she let me for a minute. Then she picked up my hand and put it on my lap and said, “Keep yourself warm.” She smiled so I figured it was okay to try again pretty soon.

Maurey drew the spaces and the two-line gallows. It felt comfortable, sitting with her and Hank and Lydia in the White Deck—like we belonged for a change. Nobody was pushy or wanted anything. None of the customers avoided looking at us or quit talking when we started. Lydia and I were part of the scene.

Lydia still cleaned the silverware when we sat down and still called locals peckerheads. She used the word home in the context of North Carolina, and thought Wyoming women little better than galley slaves, but I could see a change. Now, she treated locals more like slightly retarded, well-meaning children rather than cossack rapists with drool for brains. Some ironic humor had entered the situation.

Just that morning I’d heard Lydia ask Soapley what he had under his Polaris and she seemed to understand the answer. Which I didn’t.

Dot brought over Lydia’s hamburger, Maurey’s shake, and Hank and my blue plates—Swedish meatballs, noodles, and green beans. Hank asked for ketchup.

“Got a letter from Jimmy today,” Dot said. “He’ll be home end of the summer.”

Lydia was doing the looking at her teeth in the butter knife number. In it, she stretches her lips out flat so her teeth look like fangs. “The kids tell me Jimmy likes it four times a day.”

Dot reddened and pinched me on the shoulder. I pointed to Maurey. “Her. She’s the rat, I never said a word.”

“What’s Jimmy doing in Vietnam?” Hank said. Hank was the first nontelevision news person I ever heard use the word Vietnam .

Dot propped one hand on her hip. “He says he’s teaching one bunch of monkeys how to kill another bunch. Sounds kind of stupid to me. You want more iced tea?”

Lydia scowled while Dot jacked up Hank’s glass. Southern iced tea came presugared and Lydia took it as a personal affront that nobody in the West could get it right.

After Dot left, I used Hank’s ketchup and caught crap from both the females. “Hank put it on his stuff,” I said.

“Hank’s an Indian,” Maurey said.

“Hank’s a clod,” Lydia said.

Hank just smiled. I flashed on a futuristic ganging-up process where I could be in big trouble.

Maurey sucked vanilla shake through a paper straw. “Hank can shoot a rifle under a horse’s brisket going full blast, just like in the movies.”

“So can you,” Hank said.

“Yeah, but you hit what you’re aiming at.”

“Got kicked in the head last time I tried that trick.”

Lydia turned to stare at Hank’s head. “It shows.”

For some reason, I was looking a couple booths down, right at Bill’s rock of an Adam’s apple. Oly said something I didn’t hear, then Bill stood up and fell into the jukebox. He stuck for a moment, then slid down.

Everybody shut up at once. Oly put down his coffee cup and said, “Bill’s dead.”

Me Maw died when I was five. Sometimes I speculate that Caspar wouldn’t have been such a king-hell hard-butt if his wife hadn’t got cancer and spent seven years being sad and then died. I don’t know. Maybe he was always severe. Maybe that’s why she got the cancer in the first place.

I don’t remember all that much about Me Maw before she died. She wasn’t up much. I remember her smell, a cross between rubbing alcohol and paper matches right after you blow them out. They made me go in the library-turned-sickroom to say good-bye. Her eyes were way in there and waxed paper-looking. When I kissed her on the cheek, she was wet. I was scared I’d get the cancer from touching her.

At her funeral, Caspar, Lydia, and I sat together in front. Neither one of those two showed a lick of emotion. That carved look on their faces was the one I recognize now as the look a kid gets when a coach yells at him for something he thinks he didn’t do, like, “You’re not going to get to me, you asshole.”

I sat with my hands in my lap and watched Me Maw’s face in the box, sure she was going to blink or sit up or something that would freak me out. I wondered if she was wearing shoes. Caspar told me to stop moving my legs.

After the cemetery, we went out for ice cream, same as when Maurey and I lost our virginity. Maybe there’s a pattern.