Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

Ever since that night, I’ve imagined what it would be like to have your fingers caressing my bare arms and legs. I want you to touch my feet, Sam Callahan. Mom and I will be in your area soon for the filming of Gidget Goes to GroVont, and I would appreciate it if you would touch me at that time. Mom wants you to touch her also. She said

Chuckette slapped me. “That’s my knee.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t ever touch my knee.”

“Is something wrong with it?”

“My body is a temple.”

“Doesn’t look like a temple.”

She sat up stiff. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your body looks like a body. Sort of. A temple is a building, some kind of a church.”

She thought about this awhile, but couldn’t seem to get around the logic. “Time for you to buy me a Black Whip.”

Trading kisses for Black Whips didn’t seem the way to treat your body like a temple. “But the movie is almost over. We’ll get to see which guy she really likes.”

“I want my Black Whip.”

Gidget was going to really like Moondoggie anyway. He was the tallest.

While I was standing at the candy counter in the lobby, Maurey came out of the theater, her lips swollen from all the necking.

“You didn’t come this afternoon,” I said.

“You be home tomorrow?”

I hadn’t considered tomorrow one way or the other, so I hesitated long enough to keep her off balance, then I said yes.

“I want you and your mom both there.”

“Lydia? We don’t need her anymore.”

“I do. I’ll be there after church.” Maurey headed across the lobby toward the ladies’ room. About halfway across, she turned back to me and said, “He doesn’t kiss near as good as you do.”

Sunday, Hank decided to show us the valley. “If you’re going to live here you might as well see the place,” he said.

Lydia blew cigarette smoke in my face. “We live in North Carolina. We’re only here for a lost weekend.”

Hank grinned and drank coffee. He’d been in a fine mood since Lydia let him come back. I guess he thought he’d won a point because she called him instead of him calling her. I knew better.

Outside had warmed up, if that’s the word you use for zero. At least, ear wax no longer froze. Maurey showed up while we were loading the truck with a picnic and enough blankets to avoid death should the Dodge collapse miles from a heat source. She looked at the pile of cardboard boxes in the back of Hank’s truck and said, “You’re not getting me in one of those.”

“What’s she mean by that?” Lydia asked. Her breath put out more fog when she talked than the rest of us. I couldn’t figure out why.

Hank said, “The boxes are for moving goods.”

Maurey reached over the tailgate and scraped a box with her thumbnail. “Why are they waxed, then?”

Hank shrugged and opened the passenger door for us. “Get in.”

Lydia was suspicious. “Since when do you open a door for a lady?”

“Since it won’t shut from the inside anymore.”

Lydia rode next to Hank and Maurey sat on my lap by the door that not only wouldn’t shut from the inside but wouldn’t open that way either. On account of the truck having electrical tape instead of a passenger window, I felt somewhat trapped, though in a pleasant way. I hadn’t been this close to Maurey in several days and I missed it. A person can get used to touching someone.

My head was jammed up against the gun rack, so I kept my nose in the little dent on the back of her neck for most of the ride. Her hair smelled way clean, not a shampoo smell exactly, more like fresh-snow clean. She didn’t have hair spray or any of the other gunk that Chuckette used to make her hair into a helmet. Touching Chuckette’s hair was like reaching into a hole not knowing what lives under the surface.

“There’s no excuse for civilized people living here,” Lydia said. “Not that any do. But look. There’s no trees, there’s no country lanes lined with two-story colonial homes and pickaninny shanties. There’s no pickaninnies. Man should not live without ethnic diversity.”

Hank grunted. “What do you think I am?”

“You’re just a white guy with a nice tan and too long hair.”

Maurey popped me with an elbow. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“You’re coming over after dinner tonight. Ed Sullivan said this week would be a really big show.”

“He always says that.”

“Yeah, but someone told Mom at her AAUW bridge club yesterday that this time it would be big. You want to come over, Lydia? Mom would be glad to have company.”

“Every time I speak to Annabel she works the conversation around to laundry detergent. I’d rather talk to my moose.”

“Mom,” I said.

“Look.” Hank pointed as we crossed the Snake River. It was an army-green color and gave off the impression of cold. “No rivers like that down South.”

“Nonsense,” Lydia said. “The South is full of rivers. And concert halls and department stores and porches. Every house has a proper porch. Here they have mud rooms.”

Discussion deteriorated into the stock West-versus-South and rural-versus-urban canned lecture that Lydia used to fill time. I think she hated silence and Hank was comfortable with it and she couldn’t stand seeing him comfortable when she wasn’t. Much as I liked Maurey on my lap, her butt bones were digging into my thighs. I shifted my weight, trying to find a comfortable divot.

She reached behind herself with her right hand and grabbed my penis hard. I yelped.

“What are you whining about now?” Lydia asked.

“Caught the window knob in my rib.”

“Well, keep it to yourself.”

We started up a steep hill with pine trees on either side. “This is the pass,” Hank said. “From the top we can see the four corners of the world.”

Lydia lit a cigarette. “What difference does it make?”

Maurey went into this pulsating squeeze action. It felt good, kind of bizarre, but I couldn’t block out of my mind the picture of her kissing that grease bag.

Hank said, “I want to be idealistic. I want to believe in things.”

“Like what?” I asked, though my voice came out wrong. I could feel Maurey’s smile clear through the back of her head.

“Like beauty and the nobility of man. Look over there.” We passed a big live moose, Les’s cousin maybe. He was up a little gully, belly-deep in snow, chewing on a bush. Maurey squeezed the hell out of me.

Hank went on giving what, for him, was practically a speech.

“You can believe in whatever you want to believe in up here. Look at the snow on that whitebark pine. People in cities can’t believe in the nobility of man because they see no evidence of it.”

“I love it when he talks like Chief Joseph,” Lydia said.

Maurey said in a deep voice, “I will fight no more forever.”

I kept up my end of the conversation under the direst circumstances possible. “Easy to believe in people when there’s none around.”

Hank hit the steering wheel with one hand. ‘‘That’s what I mean.”

Maurey gave a mighty squeeze and I blew in my pants. Coughed like death to cover the sound and clawed at the window handle, which was a waste; you can’t roll down a window that isn’t there.

“Sam, control yourself,” Lydia said.

“I got hot all of a sudden.”

She turned to look at me. “It’s freezing in here.”

Maurey put her hand back in her lap. “Mrs. Callahan, I came to see you on purpose.”

“As opposed to accidentally?”

We were moving up the mountain. I went into a fear fantasy where the truck broke down and all that come froze around my pecker and it broke off.