Tim Sandlin: Skipped Parts

“I thought maybe PBS wouldn’t come through, but this is modern America. Everybody gets at least three stations.”

We chewed cashews and watched My Three Sons as Mike, Rob, and Chip pushed their dad’s busted Buick up the street. I wondered what it would be like to have brothers. Or a dad. “Maybe if we put in an antenna.”

“I doubt it. We’ve fallen off the edge of the Earth. My destruction is complete. You want the last pickle?”

I settled into my end of the couch with my knees over Lydia’s legs and A Farewell to Arms and the Hardy Boys Mystery of the Haunted Swamp on my leg. The guy in Farewell talked like an idiot, but the war parts were neat. Every time Frederic and Catherine started doing a Punch and Judy act—I love you, Catherine, I love you, Frederic—I switched to a half-hour of the Hardy brothers wholesomely sniffing out clues.

The red phone rang twice. Sam answered, “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Callahan, we’ve got a problem.”

“That’s what I’m here for, sir.”

“The Ruskies are filling Cuba with missiles and I just don’t know what to do.”

“Blockade them, sir.”

“That sounds awfully drastic, Callahan.”

“We must be firm, sir. The Red Menace doesn’t respect wimps.”

There was a long silence. “All right, by golly, we’ll try it. You’ve never let me down yet. Callahan, I have one other question.”

“My time is yours, sir.”

“Why don’t you let your mother and school chums know that you are the principal advisor to the President? Why let them go on believing you’re just another kid?”

“It’s my way of keeping in touch with the little people, sir.”

The cabin was so quiet it was noisy. The toilet ran, the refrigerator kicked on and off like a lawn mower, I opened the back door twice before figuring out the water heater knocked. By 9:30 I knew who was hiding in the swamp and what kind of wine went down in an Italian pool hall.

“Mom?”

Lydia ignored me.

“Lydia?”

“Yes, dear.”

“How can you go so long without peeing?”

“It’s a sign of the upper class.”

“You haven’t moved except to play with the TV in four hours that I know of. Why don’t you go to the bathroom like other people?”

Lydia lit another cigarette, a Lucky Strike this time. “Honey bunny, you read like a guy chasing whiskey with beer.”

Both books lay propped open, face up on my chest. “I like reading two books at once.”

She blew smoke at the moose. “You’re dead,” she said.

The moose stayed cool.

Lydia made her version of a sigh, which is more like the sound you get when you stick a knife in a full can of pop. “I’ve made a decision about this banishment deal, Sam.”

“Should I be told?”

“The way I conducted life back home didn’t work.”

“I’ll say.”

“I’m calling time out. No more connections for a while. I’m declaring myself a temporary emotional catatonic.”

I thought about this. “How’s a catatonic supposed to raise a son?”

Lydia looked down at her long fingers. “We’ll negotiate an arrangement.”

At 10:00 the news came on and we sat watching stories about people in east Idaho. Potatoes were important. Rangers in Grand Teton Park—which GroVont is smack in the middle of—were being plagued by elk poachers. Vice President Johnson was in Vietnam complaining about the food. During the sports, I didn’t recognize the names of any of the teams.

“It’s ten-thirty.”

Lydia smiled. “You mind?”

I went into the kitchen and brought back a pint of Gilbey’s gin and a two-ounce shot glass.

“You be all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine. I think I’ll sleep out here tonight and start unpacking in the morning.”

“I’m going to bed now.” I bent over and kissed her forehead. It was cool and slick. Her hand touched the back of my head.

“Your hair needs cutting.”

“Any barber around here’s going to make me look like one of them.”

“I’ll do it myself. It’ll be like we’re pioneers.”

I did the shower and toothbrush thing, ate a children’s multiple vitamin, snuck one of Lydia’s yellow Valiums, and put on my pajamas. I wore pajamas to bed back then. Before I flipped off my light and lay down to wait for the pill to kick in, I stood behind my open door, looking at Lydia through the crack.

She was at the window with the shot glass in her left hand and her right foot propped up on the sill. She stared out a long time. I could see the blank tightness on the side of her face, the twin knots on her neck, and a tiny throb on her temple visible clear across the room. She lifted her right hand and drew something in the fogginess her breath made on the window. I always wonder what she drew.

I had a dream that I was a fox and a bunch of uniformed people on horses chased me through a Southern hardwood forest.

Sam’s lungs cried out with the pain of charging headlong down the steep hillside. He tripped over a rotting log and sprawled onto his face. Rolling over quickly, he made it to his knees and crawled through the thick, thorny underbrush and into a weed-choked stream.

He turned west, splashing through the frigid water, using his paws and legs to pull himself upstream. Sam heard the dogs running up and down the bank, baying to each other and their wicked masters. Horses thrashed through the trees. He’d fooled them for the moment. Now to find a safe hole. He waded around a corner and came face to face with the blue-eyed Hitler girl astride a giant, sneering bay. She laughed and raised the rifle to her shoulder.

It’s a weird school too. There’s maybe forty, fifty kids to the grade, so seventh, eighth, and ninth are each divided into two classes, slow and quick. It’s a social thing that lasts for life. I got all huffy the first morning because I thought the cowpoke of a principal had slotted me into the slow class, but then I saw the others at lunch hour. I’ve been to South Carolina; I know cousin crossbreeding when I see it.

So right off the bat before I’m even awake, there’s this teacher character with hair he must cut with hedge clippers. I made up a short story in which the guy was drummed out of the Marines for doing something disgusting to a recruit three months ago and his reentry into society hasn’t gone well. The people in charge tucked him away in this God-forgotten valley where nothing he could do would matter.

“He machine-gunned his entire English class, sir.”

“None of those kids would have ever left Wyoming anyway.”

I like to make up short stories; it’s what I do.

The man had the face of a haunted Marine—all hollowed-out surfaces around the eyes, below the cheekbones, the temples. His chin had a cleft you could hang a bra over.

I’d hardly settled into the farthest back desk I could find when he marched over and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Howard Stebbins. I’ll bet you like football.”

“No, sir. I’m from North Carolina.”

Howard laughed like I was a real kidder and slapped me on the elbow. I can’t stand having male people touch me, especially coaches. I never met one yet didn’t like to watch boys take showers.

Along with coaching the junior high team of the season, Stebbins taught seventh-grade English and high school driver’s ed. Lots of coaches teach driver’s ed. I don’t know how he got the English job. Maybe somebody old died.

Howard sat on the corner of his teacher’s desk, looking casual while he talked Huckleberry Finn . “Mark Twain combined high adventure, slapstick comedy, and moral outrage into one monumental work, probably the American novel of the nineteenth century.”