Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

“We tried to save him, but it came off in my hand,” the doctor said.

Maurey Pierce cried until rivulets ran across her cheeks.

“He’ll never practice again.”

Sam Callahan looked at the emptiness between his legs. “Does this mean I’m a girl now?”

Maurey’s voice cut through the story. “How can you tell if you’re pregnant?”

There’s a conversation stopper for you. We rode a quarter mile up the mountain in silence.

Lydia lit a cigarette. “The game was supposed to stop on your first period.”

“I’ve never had a period. Can you get pregnant if you’ve never had a period?”

Hank rolled the window down a couple of inches. I asked, “What’s a period?”

Nobody pays any attention to me in a crisis.

Lydia blew smoke across Hank at the cracked window, then turned back to Maurey. “What exactly makes you think you might be pregnant?”

“My body is way off, has to be pregnancy or cancer. I get sick sometimes and food smells like poop and my tits hurt.”

“Get sick mostly in the mornings?”

“Right. And after lunch at school. And my dreams have been really weird lately.”

I glanced over at Hank, wondering what he must think of the turn in our Sunday drive. Hank stared out the cracked windshield at the typically majestic terrain. He had on his implacable look that I was starting to take as something of a pain in the ass. I mean, how convenient if in every slightly off-the-norm social situation you could fall back on the Blackfoot stereotype.

“Do you know what cancer feels like?” Maurey asked.

Lydia suddenly scratched her right ear, a very un-Lydia-like thing to do. “I hardly even know what being pregnant feels like. I was only with child once and I was your age, almost. The subject hasn’t come up since.”

I felt Maurey’s stomach through her car coat. Could I have done something to put a little person in there? Lydia’s sex lesson hadn’t included anything about the pregnancy process—other than it might happen so we had to stop when Maurey became a woman. I didn’t know exactly what Maurey and I could have done to cause or not cause a baby.

It was an odd feeling though. A baby, a live piece of me in Maurey.

Hank pulled into a parking area and turned the truck around. “This is the place.”

I leaned to look over Maurey’s right shoulder. The whole valley stretched off beneath us like a waxed linoleum floor. Lines of brown marked the creeks with a wider band at the Snake River. Chimney smoke drifted over the towns of Jackson and Wilson. GroVont was around a corner, too far north to see. The whole thing gave the illusion of being above life.

“God, I hate being practical,” Lydia said.

Maurey’s hair brushed my face when she nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“No use getting agitated until we know for sure. Who’s your doctor?”

“Dr. Petrov in Jackson, but I can’t go to him. He and daddy played football together in high school.”

“Everyone in this state played football together in high school. How about Erickson over in Dubois? He’s a Valium candy store. Does your daddy know him?”

I couldn’t see Maurey’s face, but she shook her head no.

“Then if you are pregnant we can talk abort or not to abort.”

“I’m just a kid, I can’t have a baby.”

“That’s what I thought.”

We sat a minute, staring at the shimmery view and considering the implications. Buddy would castrate me. I’d heard him talk horse castration before and he enjoyed it. Gave me every disgusting detail. Took an “I’ve got my balls and you don’t” attitude. Annabel would be disappointed. Everyone else would get a kick out of the deal because it would give them something to talk about. Wasn’t that much to talk about in winter.

Abortion—I knew what that meant, more or less. Meant keep or get rid of and it was king-hell, kick-in-your-door illegal stuff.

Maurey started yanking at the door handle. “How the hell do you escape this monster, I’ve gotta slide.”

Hank popped open his door. “Only works from the outside.”

As Hank ran around the back of the truck, Maurey threw her shoulder into the door which didn’t budge. “Give me a box, I’m a kid. Kids have fun, dammit, why won’t this door do something.”

Lydia looked at me. “You following this?”

I held Maurey around her waist. We were going out into the cold and I had a crotch full of goo and a possibly pregnant just-friends friend. Other than that, I was lost as ever.

Maurey got me in a cardboard box behind her with her arms up on my knees—almost the same position of Hank and Lydia in the bathtub.

“This smacks of suicidal,” I said.

“Stay loose if we dump.”

By leaning forward I could see way the heck down the mountain. It was like looking down a great, white throat. Hank had every intention of pushing us over the edge and letting us hurtle down the iced-up angle and into the woods. That’s why the box was waxed—so we could go fast and not waterlog out halfway down the mountain.

Lydia lit a cigarette. “Looks like spontaneous fun.”

Hank looked up at her. “We’re next.”

“Over my dead body we are.”

Maurey’s face was a nifty flush-red with white points on the tip-top of her ears. The air wasn’t near as cold up high as it had been in the valley. Hank said it was an inversion. “Same thing that causes smog.”

“Pollution causes smog,” I said.

Maurey’s eyes had a nothing-to-lose glint that worried me. “Whatever happens, don’t bail out,” she said. “You’ll break your neck.”

“I know we have a problem, but death isn’t the answer.”

Her head came back with all that beautiful hair in my face and she laughed and I was charmed to no end. It was the laugh of a child, the laugh of king-hell innocence, not pregnancy and orgasms and jacking-off boys in trucks; not even necking with greasers at the picture show. Maurey’s laugh belonged to a person who had done none of those things.

I’d of said something about it if Hank hadn’t shoved the waxed box and we took off like a cut-loose elevator.

I’m big on control. I like knowing where I am and where I should be next and how to get there and how to escape any situation. Falling is not your control motif. Maurey was hollering into the wind, same note as when she came in my room. My stomach did the up-the-throat thing.

I guess it was no faster than a sled, but the sleds I’d been on were semi-controllable and didn’t fly a half-mile down the ramp. The snow had these hollowed-out dips so there was an up sensation in the midst of the down. Tears froze. Then there was a cliff and we were rolling. I grabbed Maurey as we went through the box. Snow crystals stung while we rolled and rolled and I braced myself for the tree that never hit.

We finally slid to a stop with Maurey in laughter hysterics. I did a four-point and threw up. She shoved snow over the mess as fast as I put it out.

I can’t stand it when someone has a wonderful time doing the same thing that I hate doing. “Holy cow, that was a gas,” she laughed. “You okay?”

I tried to breathe.

“You’d better move fairly quick,” Maurey said.

“Why’s that?”

“Hank and Lydia are fixing to face plant on that same drop off and they’ll land on you.”

I looked back up the hill. Forty yards or so up was a five-foot ledge, not a cliff at all. “No way in hell Hank’s going to get Lydia in a box,” I said.

Famous last words. I heard the scream just before they came flying over the top. It was one of those stop-action memories that freeze in your head and stay there for life, even if you turn senile and can’t remember your own phone number. They floated in the air above the box. Lydia had her arms up, reaching for the sun. Her mouth was an O and I could see the tip of her tongue. One of Hank’s black boots hovered over her legs and his left hand showed on her shoulder. He seemed to be leaning back, as if the box was still behind him.