Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

Elliot went first, shaking like an aspen leaf. I’ll never figure out that kid. He had terrible acne and all he cared about was playing the piano. He was like one of those idiot guys who can’t tie their own shoe but can tell you what day of the week January 15, 1631, came on.

Dothan was second and he just smiled as if, boy do I love this stuff. I’d heard his dad was big on licks, so I guess the defiant shiteater grin was his defense mechanism. I didn’t have a defense mechanism.

Stebbins’s paddle was a one-by-four with a carved handle and World’s Greatest Dad woodburned in the flat area. He always swung low, below the butt bones and high on your legs, so sometimes he’d leave a red welt that said Dad backward on your leg.

PE licks are as much a tradition in American values as anything, but I hated every minute of it and if they ever make me president I’m going to make the whole ritual illegal.

Walking uptown Saturday, I dawdled a good deal to work out the ethical implications of the haircut. Stebbins was forcing me to do something by means of fear; therefore I shouldn’t do it because his means sucked. But I had been intending to get a haircut anyway, and not doing something because a jerk tries to force you to is letting the jerk control your life just as much as doing it would be. I could end up like Lydia who dyed her hair platinum a few years ago after Caspar told her he’d kick her out of the house if she did. Lydia couldn’t stand platinum blonde hair and wouldn’t leave her bedroom until it grew out.

At Kimball’s Food Market I helped Mrs. Barnett carry two bags of groceries to her Buick. She called me young man.

“Thank you, young man,” she said, and she pulled this rubber change pouch out of her purse and gave me a nickel. The pouch was shaped like a run-over football with a slit down the center, and if you squeezed the ends the slit opened. Mrs. Barnett came from a generation that thought shiny money was worth more than dull money, so the first nickel laid in my palm wasn’t good enough.

She said, “Just a moment, dear,” and took it back, and poked around in the rubber pouch until she found a good one. I tried to imagine what Mrs. Barnett had been like when she was a teenager, before her cheeks got floppy. Had she worried about the compromise between wholesomeness and popularity? In her whole life, had the thought of birth control ever crossed her mind?

Zion’s Own Hardware store had a window display for National Center Pivot Month. All the pipes, sprayers, nozzles, and general irrigation deals made me feel like spring had to come someday. I mean, somebody expected to see the ground again. The dogwoods would flower in Greensboro in a month, but Maurey had told me Wyoming trees don’t ever flower. They molt.

The Ditch Creek Barbershop was a one-chair deal with three cracked-plastic kitchen chairs for people waiting their turn. There was this gumball machine with a sign saying the Jackson Lion’s Club took the gumball money and gave it to people who needed cornea transplants. The back wall by the sink was covered by photos of young guys in army uniforms standing next to each other, and all these medals, ribbons, certificates, notices from the American Legion, and a map of the South Pacific with needles stuck in it.

Pud Talbot sat in the chair, getting himself burred, so I almost left but the barber said, “Be just a minute, son.” I figured I better wait in spite of Pud’s ugly yap. The barber had called me son. He was telling a story about Okinawa, something about piles of dead Japanese bodies across the road from piles of dead Americans and his job was to keep the flies off the American piles.

“I waved a fan over twenty-two GIs for seventeen hours,” the barber said. “Not a single fly laid eggs on my buddies.”

I picked up a two-year-old Time magazine with John Glenn on the cover. There was a story about how Elizabeth Taylor had eaten a can of bad beans on the Cleopatra set and gotten food poisoning. I wondered what Lydia would say if I told her Elizabeth Taylor ate canned beans.

As soon as the barber—who said his name was March—got me in the chair, he did something that nobody who cuts hair ought to do. He pointed to this brown, mushroomy thing nailed to the wall with all the photos and said proudly, “That’s my ear.”

“Oh.”

“Cut it off a Jap at Corregidor. He wasn’t even dead yet, just lay there with his bottom half blown off by a sub-Thompson. His eyes didn’t flinch or nothing when I took the ear.”

“Oh.”

“Those Japs were tough. Had to give them that, they were tough. Why haven’t I seen you before?”

I gave him the general rundown.

“You’re son of the woman in Doc Warden’s place, huh?”

He’d started clipping away with the scissors, which made me nervous, so I didn’t answer for fear of distracting him.

“I hear your mama’s a real pistol.”

I had no idea what that meant, so again I didn’t answer, but March had his speech worked out and anything I said wouldn’t have mattered.

Since then, I’ve discovered there are some people who think one little spot in their life was real and everything else is just meaningless time killing. I’ve met sports heroes like that, and a couple of women obsessed with late pregnancy and childbirth.

March was that way about World War II. He was in the Twenty-fourth Division in Sydney, Australia, then in New Guinea where he saw Japanese who had been cannibalizing their dead. He spent thirty-one days in a hole with another guy.

“That was on Davao. These officers came along and told us they needed the hole and we had to get out but I said, ‘Forget it, sir.’ Front lines weren’t like Fort Bragg. Officers don’t mean nothing up there.”

“Leave the back kind of long.”

He switched to the electric buzzing razor which at least couldn’t draw blood. “Let me give you some advice, son. You’re not too old to hear advice, are you?”

“Right now I need all the advice I can get.”

“Find yourself a war. Not a police thing like we’re piddling with over in Asia, a real war where you can test your mettle and find true men who are true friends.”

“I don’t know many men.”

“There’s nothing like lying in the mud next to a guy all night, knowing you’ll probably die in the morning, to cement a friendship.” He waved the razor in the direction of his picture wall. “Those are my closest relatives. No one who hasn’t been in a war knows the meaning of trust.”

“Are you leaving some on the back?”

March spun the chair around and stared me in the eye. “You hear me, son.”

“Find a war and make friends.”

“That’s right. Test yourself, son. Life means something when you know it can end with one bullet. Be a man, son.”

“Find a war,” I said.

“You’ll never live till you kill someone who’s out to kill you.”

“That’s true.”

Sam Callahan rode his bicycle up Alpine and turned in at the yellow frame house with the neat yard. As he bounded up the porch steps, he reached down to pick up a toy firetruck blocking the door.

“Honey, I’m home.”

Maurey Callahan smiled sweetly from behind her ironing board. “How was your day at the office, dear?”

“A rat race, honey, a real rat race.”

“Why don’t you relax while I fix us some supper.”

“Got to check on my little pal first.” Sam went into the nursery and lifted Sam Jr. from his playpen. “How’s my son today? Did you learn important new skills?”

The world’s most strikingly beautiful baby cooed contentedly and reached for his father’s thick moustache.

Maurey came up beside her men and put an arm across Sam’s shoulders. “He’s the perfect baby. I’m so glad you convinced me to have him.”