Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

That evening Maurey and I lay on my bed and tried to figure out the death thing. We unbuttoned each other’s shirts, and I had mine off, but the impetus to keep going petered out about the time I touched her right breast.

“I wonder what it feels like to be dead?” I asked.

Maurey rolled over to face the ceiling and covered her left breast with her hand. The eye on my side blinked three times. It was kind of funny, her lying on her back with one breast hidden by her hand and the other one hidden by mine. I never could get over how small Maurey’s hands were. “Cold, I guess.”

I tried to imagine Maurey’s tit cold and dead, but I’d only learned what it felt like warm and alive four days ago, so dead was beyond me. With my hand cupped over her chest, you couldn’t even tell Maurey had a breast.

Maurey said, “People sure die easily in books. It’s not that casual in real life.”

“The easiest place to die is in the movies.”

Maurey bit her lower lip and turned to look at me. “I think about being dead all the time. I’ve read every book in the library I can find about girls dying and I can’t figure it out.”

I moved my hand off her breast and touched her cheek. “It’s not like sex, Maurey. The people who write books don’t know any more about being dead than we do.”

Bill hadn’t looked comfortable dead. He fell with one leg doubled under his body and his head at an off-angle. His belt was cinched up on his belly so he looked cramped. His eyes were closed, which surprised me. I thought people died with their eyes open.

Nobody in the White Deck went hysterical or anything. The Park Service guys flipped him over and tried what passed for artificial respiration back then—a push on the back, pull on the elbows useless maneuver. Lydia went and sat next to Oly, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at the lump on the floor that used to be his friend. Once, he said it again. “Bill’s dead.”

Dot called Jackson for an ambulance while Hank felt Bill’s neck for a pulse, but anyone could see he was king-hell dead.

Max the owner came out of the kitchen to watch. I’d never seen him in person before. He had hardly any hair and a purple tattoo of a bird and he wore a sleeveless T-shirt. He didn’t talk.

Maurey leaned over me to look, then she sat back and held my hand. It took so long for the ambulance that we tried to play hangman awhile, but neither one of us could concentrate on the letters.

He’d died between the jukebox and their private booth, which meant anyone going to the bathroom had to step over the body, which I wasn’t about to do. That’s what I remember most about my first look at immediate death—having to pee like crazy and not being able to.

GroVont has a Mormon church that from the outside looks like a Pizza Hut. And, over by the Tetons, the Episcopal chapel in Moose is more in the way of a tourist trap than a real church. It’s not open in the winter. Baptists and Catholics go to Jackson to be buried.

Bill’s funeral took place in the VFW. I went because Maurey asked me to, and she went because the Pierces and Bill and Oly were connected in some way to do with World War I. Her grandfather served with them in Belgium and, later, when he died in an avalanche, Bill and Oly did the like-a-father gig for Maurey’s dad.

Everyone in the valley is either literally related or spiritually attached. One reason Maurey chose me for the sex practice was because, with me, she knew for certain there would be no hint of incest.

“Besides, I like your hair,” she said.

“I thought it was my Eastern casual demeanor.”

“Fat chance.”

I wish someone would do the like-a-father gig for me.

Lydia wouldn’t come with us. “I don’t do death,” she said. “Les is the only formerly animate object I commune with.”

“It’ll be interesting. Maurey says all the women in town bake things.”

“There was enough competitive cooking after Mama’s funeral. And the phone company man is coming. Those people don’t take excuses.”

So I found myself sitting in a folding chair in a VFW hall with Maurey, Petey, and Annabel. Coach Stebbins and his wife filled out our row.

Annabel had on white gloves, if you can buy that, and this little hat shaped like an Alka-Seltzer with a net over the front. She looked fairly disconcerted, as if a cake had fallen unexpectedly. Petey kicked the chair in front of him the whole service.

Maurey’s father, Buddy, sat up front next to poor Oly. I found myself looking at the back of Buddy’s head, wondering what a guy who spends most of his time alone thinks about death. He had on a brown cowboy hat and a suit I imagined was worn only to this sort of thing. I wondered if he’d be pissed to know I was sticking my thing in his daughter.

The rest of the place was full of old people who go to each other’s funerals, and loggers and a few cowboy types, not too many kids. Rodney Cannelioski was there as a representative of God. Dot smiled at me when I walked in. I’d never seen her out of uniform. She was pretty. Each chair had a number on the back in what looked like red nail polish.

“Trade places with me,” Maurey said.

“I don’t want to sit next to your brother.”

“I can’t see the body. Trade places.”

After we traded she leaned out in the aisle to stare at Bill. “He looks smaller, and almost healthier.”

“That’s the makeup.”

“Wouldn’t Bill be embarrassed if he knew he was going to eternity in Max Factor powder base and rouge.”

Coach Stebbins said, “ Shh ,” which I thought was rude. Petey gave Annabel a running commentary of the deal and nobody shh ed him. The brat.

A woman with large breasts and a print dress stood up and sang “Amazing Grace” in a beautiful voice. I was moved. It was nice to think one thing about Bill’s death wasn’t bland. Maurey told me the woman, Irene Innsbruck, sings at most funerals and weddings in GroVont. She’s the town talent.

Then a man in a gray suit went up front and read Bill’s war record. It’s funny, but when you’re young and you see a really old person, you never think of them as having done all kinds of various, creative things when they were young themselves. Bill sat in his booth and nodded over coffee. That’s all I ever thought of him if I thought anything at all, but he’d done a lot of stuff in the war and afterward. He saved some Englishmen from a machine gunner once and got a medal. And he traveled across Russia back when the Communists were killing everyone in sight. Later, he came home and started a lumber company with Oly. All that, I thought, just to fall against a jukebox and die.

Buddy stood up and turned around. He was really big—not like a giant or a fat person—his presence took up a lot of room. Even in the suit, he was the kind of man when he stood up everyone paid attention. If you were ever in a room with Maurey’s father you’d always know right where he was. If you said anything, you’d wonder what he thought about it.

He told a story about Bill saving his father’s life when a tree twisted and fell wrong. The log lay across Buddy’s father’s legs in such a way one wrong shift would roll it across his body onto his head. Bill had to chainsaw with the steadiness of a doctor cutting with a scalpel. It was a nice story, even though the avalanche got Buddy’s father four years later anyway.

As Buddy told it, he looked straight ahead, and his hands didn’t twitch a bit. His beard was the blackest bush I’d ever seen. You could hardly see a mouth in there. I looked at Maurey and could tell she was real proud.

She whispered, “I’ve heard that story a dozen times. Daddy loves it.”