Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

Sam stretched his arm around Maurey’s waist and let his hand rest on her round belly, eight months full with the next of their children. “There’s nothing like a family.”

I started into the White Deck but this scattered-looking, gangly man in glasses charged out of the Dupree Art Gallery and said, “You’ve been to the Twenty-one Club.”

He had on dark slacks instead of blue jeans which, in GroVont, made him stick out like a foreigner. I said, “I’ll be fourteen this summer.”

“I mean Fifty-seventh Street, the Guggenheim, the Algonquin Hotel, Baghdad on the Hudson. New York City.”

“I saw a game at Yankee Stadium once.”

“At the very least you are aware of life east of Cheyenne. Come look at my paintings.” He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his long nose and stared down at me eagerly. Any grown-up who wanted to talk to a kid had to be desperate, which made me leery of the deal.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m Dougie Dupree. Perhaps your mother has spoken of me.” He held his hand out for a shake.

“You know my mother?”

The stunned-by-Lydia look came in his eyes. “Come see my works.”

I shrugged and followed his back into the gallery. A card table in the middle of the room was covered by some kind of board game deal involving black-and-white marbles. Paintings of the mid-size type filled the walls. Almost all Teton pictures in this highly visible light, three or four had cheap margarine-colored sun rays pouring down the canyons. One showed a cowboy trying to lasso a skinny little pinto with its ribs showing. The cowboy and horse both looked fairly pitiful.

“I did that one,” Dougie said. The price was $1,300.

“Do you get many customers?”

He pushed up his glasses. “In the summer they move like popcorn. There’s no one at all this time of year, but my uncle owns the place. He doesn’t understand on-season, off-season, so he makes me stay open.”

“Oh.”

“He lives in Florida.”

“That explains it.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit in this room all winter wearing slacks instead of jeans and wishing I was in New York. “How do you know Lydia?”

His eyes got all sly. “We’ve dated casually.”

This surprised me. No one likes a mom who keeps secrets, besides, Lydia never does anything casually. I decided Dougie was lying in his teeth.

He sat at the table and looked sadly down at the board game. “You know the difference between me and your mother?”

I wondered why he played with marbles.

“We both feel superior to the provincial hicks of this area, but she enjoys feeling superior and I don’t. Lydia probably wouldn’t like Manhattan, she couldn’t feel superior there.”

“She could too.”

“I crave intellectual equals, challenging minds. I hate being a snob in this jerkwater outpost of aboriginal quaintness.”

“Lydia likes being a snob.”

He stared at the marbles a long time, as if he’d forgotten I was there. I suppose he was thinking of some flashy club in New York City where the men wore slacks and the women respected brains. I couldn’t decide whether to slip out the door or stay put.

Suddenly, Dougie smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to know go, would you?”

I thought he said “no go,” which didn’t make any more sense than what he did say.

He nodded at the marbles. “Go is an ancient Oriental game which tests the human mind to its very limit—thousands of years older than chess and much more complex.”

I didn’t even know chess. “No, I don’t.”

“That was to be expected. I’ll teach you.”

“I have to eat lunch.”

Dougie pushed his glasses up again. “I’ll be here when you’re ready to learn.”

“Thanks for showing me the paintings. I like the one you did best.”

Dougie beamed. “Give my regards to your mother.”

“Your regards.”

The phone rang and Maurey answered. “Callahan residence.”

“Good day, madam. I was wondering if you would be interested in a complete set of Golden Book Encyclopedias of the World, twenty volumes in only twelve easy installments?”

“You’ll have to wait until my husband comes home from the office and ask him. Sam handles all the details of our life.”

“You look sad,” Dot said. “You’re too young to look sad. I’ll bet a strawberry shake would fix you right up.”

Why do adults think kids don’t have a problem in the world that can’t be solved by sugar? “I’d rather have a cheeseburger,” I said.

Dot settled her body into the booth across from me. “You eat a cheeseburger in here almost every day. Doesn’t your mother feed you?”

“I feed her.”

Dot had two uniforms. They were both mostly white, only one had lime-green trim and the other had pink. I preferred the pink, which is what she had on then. It went better with her smile. She also had two little matching hat deals she wore on the supper shift.

She didn’t show any sign of getting up to turn my cheeseburger order in to Max. “You’re too young to be hangdog, Sammy. Start now and think where you’ll be when you get his age.” She thumb-pointed to Oly who was nodded out in his old booth next to the jukebox. I looked at him and wondered where I would be when I got his age. I could think of loads of places worse than that booth. By the time you were that old, you couldn’t have problems anyway, except it would be tough having people look at you and not care you were there.

Oly’d grown a goiter in his neck since Bill died, which made him more unpleasant than ever to look at, but, other than the goiter, his life seemed the same as ever.

“Something happened that I guess I don’t mind, only someone else does and it’s going to unhappen without any say from me. Did that ever happen to you?”

Dot looked at me awhile. It was nice of her not to treat me my age. “You ought to have a say in what happens,” she said.

“I don’t mind it not happening so much as nobody asking me what I’d do if it happened to me.”

“That is a problem.” We sat a few minutes staring into space. I stared at Dot’s hands, which were pretty much normal except for the color. They were way pink, pinker than the trim on her uniform, more like the pink of a person’s gums.

“Any chance of you telling me what it is we’re talking about?” she asked.

I scratched my nose. “I guess Maurey is pregnant. I guess. She thinks maybe she is. Pregnant.”

One of Dot’s hands flew up around mouth level, but otherwise she took it fairly well. She didn’t say anything so I kept going.

“She and Lydia are over in Dubois at the doctor finding out, but it looks kind of like she is.”

Dot’s hand went from her mouth back to the table. “Those questions weren’t just kid curiosity. I thought you two were playing I’ll-show-you-mine, you-show-me-yours.”

“We took the game another step or two.”

“I guess.”

“Now she wants an abortion.”

I looked up at Dot’s face and her ever-present smile was gone. She said, “Isn’t it funny how people who don’t want it get it and people who do don’t.”

“Do you and Jimmy want your little boy?”

“Let me turn in your ticket.”

Dot went to the kitchen and I sat looking at myself in the napkin box. The shiny sides had a design that made my face all twisted and weird, so it was possible to pretend I was a fetus. I opened my mouth in an O which looked fishy, but then I breathed out and the jaw in the napkin box went milky.

Dot brought us both cups of coffee. I filled mine with sugar and milk; she drank hers black.

“So your mother is helping her?” Dot asked. I nodded and blew across my coffee. “How about Maurey’s parents?”