Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

“Paw Paw can’t hear today,” I said.

He rocked back on his heels and muttered, “Honor sinks where commerce long prevails.”

Lydia took my grapefruit juice and drank it. “He can hear when it’s convenient. Daddy, I need some money.”

Caspar said, “Commerce is America and America is bound together by carbon paper. Without carbon paper there are no records and without records all is chaos and deprivation.”

Lydia smiled at Caspar. “Daddy, have you seen my diaphragm? I’ll be needing it at the cotillion this afternoon.”

Caspar turned and left. Lydia watched while I buttered and syruped the waffle, then she took it away from me. “He can hear fine,” she said.

I sat on the floor surrounded by construction blocks and watched her eat the waffle, wondering what diaphragm meant.

Koreans poured off the hill like sweat off a fat man’s forehead. Lead flowed freely as champagne after the seventh game of the World Series. Men died easily as cornflakes turn soggy in milk.

The lieutenant grabbed his throat, gurgled once, and fell. The men turned to Sergeant Callahan.

“What do we do now?” they asked.

“We become the vengeful fist of God.” Callahan snarled.

Tommy gun at his hip, Callahan stepped from the bunker and began spraying the hillside with the fire of death. Koreans splattered themselves amongst the rocks. Out of ammo, Callahan threw down the tommy gun and picked up a bazooka. Still firing from the hip, he began marching up the ridge, murdering masses of human beings with each stride.

“Want to learn to shoot?” Hank asked.

“Will I have to kill stuff?”

We left Lydia to do whatever Lydia does and drove over to the dump in Hank’s truck. The truck was pretty cool, a ’47 Dodge panel deal with electrical tape for a passenger window and a mountain of tools and animal horns and tires and stuff piled in the back so whenever he hit the brakes, the whole mess slid whump against the cab.

“How old were you when you first fired a rifle?” I asked Hank.

“Four-and-a-half.”

“Gee.”

“My little brother taught me.”

I wasted ten minutes trying to figure if he was kidding. It was stupid. If you don’t know anything about people how can you tell when they’re exaggerating? With Lydia, her face stays straight but she moves her hands when she lies. You couldn’t tell squat from studying Hank.

“What do you do when you aren’t at our house?”

Hank slowed down to pass a hawk tearing at a dead lump of fur. I couldn’t tell what the fur used to be. “I get by. Unemployment now, peel logs in the spring, fight fires some summers. My family is on the Kiowa roles so a government check comes every few months.”

“Lydia said you’re a Blackfoot.”

He nodded. “No money in Blackfoot blood. My grandfather was wise, he traded a bottle of moonshine to get listed as Kiowa. Wish he’d done the trade with a Navajo. Navajo’s the best-paid minority in the West. Get all the girls too.”

“Maybe I can be Navajo.”

He glanced at me. “You’re short enough.”

At the dump, we walked around awhile, looking at the neat stuff. It was like mostly garbage with a second-hand store scattered around. Hank told me that people who dumped something usable would set it away from the muck so other folks could take it home. I saw a lamp I could have used, but dump stuff seemed a little weird at the time. It might have had germs or something. There was a perfectly good Christmas tree.

“Why would someone dump a Christmas tree right before Christmas?” I asked.

Hank shrugged. Sometimes Hank talked like a regular person, then all of a sudden he’d catch himself and go back to Ugh and placid facial expressions. I think he saw too many cowboy and Indian movies; he thought people expected inscrutability. That would be a big plus in Lydia’s eyes. She could babble away without interruption.

The day was way clear, but below zero, which is cold no matter what anyone tells you about humidity and wind chill and all that kind of crap. I had on six layers and a sock hat and I was still cold. Hank wore a jeans jacket over two wool shirts. He kept his hands in his pockets and made me carry the Ruger.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

He pulled a hand from a pocket and pointed north, up the Dubois road.

“In a tipi?”

Hank’s shoulders moved up and down in that silent laugh of his. “Twelve-foot Kozy Kamper. Freeze your butt off in a tipi in winter.”

“Have you ever lived in a tipi?”

“Slept in a Cheyenne lodge at the Sun Dance couple years ago. Guy owned it got drunk and knocked down a flap pole, filled it with smoke. I crawled out the side and slept on the ground. That won’t happen in a Kozy Kamper.”

“Do Blackfeet get drunk a lot?”

Hank didn’t answer. He stepped across some partly burnt mattresses and picked up a blackened bucket. He carried it to a pile of trash down in a gullylike place and set it on a dead washing machine. “Big target. You won’t miss.”

“What if somebody comes along?”

“No law against shooting buckets.”

“The dump road’s back there.”

We walked over and looked behind the line of junk at the plowed out road twisting between dump piles. There was an incredible number of dead cars. They were everywhere. It was like an end-of-the-world movie.

“Any misses’ll go over a pickup,” Hank said.

“What about a dump truck?”

“No dumps on Christmas.”

Hank showed me how to pop out the magazine thing and load cartridges. “Butt first, see. Hard to get it wrong.”

“Can these kill elk and moose?”

He shook his head. “Squirrels, chiselers, beaver if you’re sixty-seventy feet in. People. Kill people dead.”

“But not elk.”

“Lung shot might do it, but they’d run a ways and be in pain. The harmonious man kills the animal without hurting it.”

“Like with the rifles in your gun rack?”

He nodded and snapped in the magazine. He pulled back the bolt, down, up, shoved it forward. “Safety here, red line means it’s off.”

“It won’t fire with the safety on?”

“That is why you call it a safety.”

He handed me the rifle. I felt kind of like I did following Maurey into the bedroom the first time. Sort of. I’d fantasized women’s breasts often, but I’d never fantasized firearms. Most of my violent daydream short stories involved hand-to-hand battles, although if the other guy deserved it sometimes I’d pick up a baseball bat and pound his head. Only real fights I’d been in were nothing like movies or books—more wrestling, less pounding.

“Shoot the bucket,” Hank said. I raised the rifle to my shoulder. The barrel end wouldn’t be still.

“Sight down the bottom of the V.”

I sighted and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Safety’s on,” Hank said. “Remember I told you about the safety.”

I lowered the rifle and pushed the safety button.

“Don’t point at me,” Hank said.

“Sorry.”

I raised the rifle again and waited for the bucket to come into the V.

“Squeeze the trigger instead of pulling.”

I squeezed, the gun jumped and powed in my ear.

A bad yelp came from behind the gully line.

“Shit,” Hank said.

I threw down the rifle and ran forward. Soapley’s dog, Otis, was on the road, scream-yelping and dragging himself after the truck. Soapley hit the brakes and jumped out. “He never fell off before.”

Hank was at my side. “We shot him off.”

“You shot my dog?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Everything kind of froze up on me. Hank was suddenly at the dog, bending over with his bandana out. Soapley looked at me, then he was there too. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go back and start the day again. They worked over Otis’s back end. Soapley said “Aw, hell” once.