Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

In Pinedale, Lydia said, “Need a pee?”

I said no and Maurey stared out the window at the road ahead.

The route was the same as the last two hundred miles of our trip out from Carolina in September. Where before I’d seen miles of Wyoming nothingness, now I picked up on details—a line of willows sticking from the snow marked where an irrigation ditch would be if spring ever happened, cottonwoods way off meant ranch houses, the bruise-colored mountains to the east followed the Continental Divide.

The problem was that I didn’t feel right about this abortion deal. I was torn between reality and wouldn’t-it-be-nice. The reality, and I king-hell well knew it, was that seventh-graders are too young to have babies. Maurey was chock-full of potential of doing something in life, and raising a child would make the next few years predictable. She might become Annabel.

Also, Maurey didn’t love me so us being a couple, as in family, was out. And unmarried pregnant girls in small mid-American villages come in for vicious abuse; they’d probably kick us out of junior high.

Buddy would roast my butt on a branding fire.

On the wouldn’t-it-be-nice side was the baby. I’d always wanted to be needed, and, whenever I looked around at people in grocery stores, it always seemed like being part of a family would be neat. If I couldn’t have a father I could be one. It would be a hoot to teach a kid how to lay a bunt down the third-base line.

With a baby, I’d have a connection to Maurey. Even if she didn’t love me in the right way, if we had a child together the right way might happen, or at the least, we’d stay in touch. I didn’t know true love from Dothan’s moose turds, but I was fond of her hair and eyes and little fingers; I didn’t want to lose her, whatever part of her I had.

The bottom reality of the whole deal was that whether I felt right about the abortion or not, nobody asked my opinion.

An antelope—Pushmi and Pullyu’s cousin—ran along next to the Oldsmobile for a few hundred yards, then crossed the road in front of us. His white bottom made a whoosh blur going over the fence.

“We were moving fifty miles per and he beat us,” Lydia said.

“That’s fast,” I said.

Maurey didn’t say anything.

The clinic was a blond-brick box across the street from a Dairy Queen. Same architecture as a Southern Church of Christ, even had one of those Signs on Wheels out front, but where a Church of Christ sign would read Make your bed in Heaven today for tomorrow there will be no sheets, or some pithy little saying that sounded great but made no sense to anyone, the clinic sign read Red Desert Medical Arts Complex and listed four doctors and an optometrist.

Maurey let go of my hand long enough for us to get out of the car, then she took it back. “Hank says this is a nasty town,” Lydia said. “No place for an Indian.”

The wind was blowing so hard we had to lean together across the parking lot, and when I opened the clinic door it whipped back and whopped against the rubber doorstop.

Lydia checked her reflection in the glass and corrected some stray hair. “No place for a white woman either.”

Maurey’s face looked calm, kind of. She wasn’t panicking or anything. Her tongue pressed against her lower lip making a little bulge in the hard-set line of her mouth. She had on jeans, and the hand that wasn’t holding mine was in her front pocket. Her eyes gave no information.

We stood over by a water fountain while Lydia went to the front desk and talked to a woman with violent orange hair and turquoise jewelry. They studied a sheet of paper and Lydia handed the woman a wad of cash. During the week the clinic was a regular obstetric place for women who wanted babies, so they had this bulletin board covered with snapshots of newborns with each baby’s name and weight written on the white border in blue ink.

Maurey and I stood in front of the bulletin board, looking at the babies. At first, they all seemed the same—wrinkled and rose-colored with squished-up eyes—but then I started seeing differences. Amanda Jen Wayne, 6 lbs. 7 oz., had a widow’s peak. Cody LaMar Jenkins, 9 lbs. 2 oz., had a furrow in his chin you could run a straw through.

Maurey’s hand tightened on mine, but she didn’t say anything. Lydia came back from the desk and tried to get us to sit on this cow udder-colored couch, but Maurey wouldn’t move from in front of the baby bulletin board.

She said, “I’m fine,” which were about the first words she’d said all day.

A door opened behind the desk and a girl not much older than us came through. She smiled. “Come with me and we’ll get you ready.”

Maurey gripped my hand harder and looked at me, then at Lydia. She said, “This is the shits.”

Lydia said, “You’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

I gave her hand a squeeze and let go. The girl pointed to a door off to the right. “The waiting room is through there. She’ll be done in a couple of hours.” Then she led Maurey away.

Three Negro men in white shoes took Me Maw away. I was in the bedroom with the round bed, under the bed, waiting for her to be dead. Bed springs are pretty cool if you lie on your back and look up at them. They grow fuzz. I heard the hearse pull up on the driveway and the men joking, teasing each other about someone named Sylvinie.

When the doorbell chimed I crawled out from under the bed to look out the second-floor window at the dark blue hearse with little flags on the corners. The back doors were open. Across the street, the Otake kids dashed around in their bathing suits, playing on a Slip ‘N’ Slide. The whoops and yells that carried across our yard didn’t quite fit the action. Jesse sprayed his sister with the hose, but her scream lagged behind her open mouth.

Two Negroes carried Me Maw out under a plastic sheet on a stretcher thing, with the other Negro and Caspar coming behind. When they were finished sliding Me Maw into the hearse, Caspar tipped each one a dollar. I could see the pink in the bald spot on his head, and his hand which was also pink stretching out with the dollars. The Negroes looked down at their white shoes.

After they drove away, Caspar turned and saw me in the window. I ducked down and slid under the bed.

Lydia and I went back out through the wind to the car where she picked up a Saturday Evening Post , then we crossed to the Dairy Queen to wait. I had a taco pie, which was this thing like a sloppy joe on a bed of Fritos in a paper boat, and a soft vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate wax. I imagined all the people who had sat in this very Dairy Queen, eating ice cream and waiting for loved ones to finish abortions so they could go home and get out of the wind.

Three high school girls bent over their soda pops watched us and giggled, Titter, titter , like doofy birds. All Rock Springs must know what happened over there on Saturdays. They knew I was the sperm father of a baby who would soon join the city sewer system. I wanted them to stop talking about me. It made me nervous, made my butt itch like king-hell, then my whole back and neck. The woman at the counter knew I’d been in the clinic too. They all knew.

Lydia glanced up from her magazine. “Stop fidgeting.”

“I itch.”

“Well, go to the restroom and scratch then.”

The bathroom was past the boothful of girls who knew, and, much as I needed to pee, I couldn’t walk by them. They’d say something—“ Abortion boy ” or “ Where would you be if your mom… ” Something like that. They might even reach out and pinch me.

“I’m going back over and wait in the waiting room.”

Lydia looked across her magazine and raised one eyebrow. “Just don’t fidget around me.”