Tim Sandlin: Skipped Parts

Great. First day of school and I’m being held over to clap erasers.

Next came Miss Flanagan and geography, then Mrs. Hinchman and citizenship. She showed us on the chalkboard how to write a check. I’d been writing checks since the third grade.

At lunch hour I skipped the post-cafeteria baseball game. Figured I’d blown that one yesterday; they’d have stuck me in right field again anyway. Hardly anyone under sixteen can hit to the opposite field, and since there aren’t many left-hand batters, right field in junior high is like let’s-get-rid-of-this-guy-so-we-can-talk-about-him.

Instead, I sat on the cafeteria steps and watched Maurey play volleyball. She was pretty good. She was the only girl out there who could serve and didn’t squeal like a stepped-on cat every time the ball came near. The blue thing I’d seen from the back in Stebbins’s class was a pullover-sweater deal. She had on an off-white skirt that came about mid-knee and rose up when she jumped at the net.

Somewhere in there, she realized I was watching. She glanced over a couple of times, then after a bad serve, she turned and stared right back until I looked off at the Tetons.

Sam felt the rock above for a seam, the tiniest crack with which he could pull himself another foot up the sheer face of the mountain. The calf of his left leg began to quiver. Hundreds of feet below, the waterfall crashed down granite walls, roaring like an angry lion hungry for flesh.

Sam had to move. Suddenly, the fingertips of his left hand felt an edge. No wider than a dime, this must be the next line of safety. Groaning, straining, sweating like August in Charleston, Sam pulled himself up higher, ever higher, until finally he stood on the dime-wide ledge.

Okay, next step. A crack slit the rock vertically. If he could work his way into the crack, his feet braced on one side and back on the other, Sam stood a chance of wriggling his way another stage up the impossible north face of the Matterhorn.

His stomach felt the rock give before his ears heard the tearing sound. The thin ledge began to separate from the mountain. It snapped like water dribbled into french-fry grease. With a cry, Sam leapt for the vertical crack. His hands beat against the side of the mountain, his fingernails seemingly digging into the solid stone. Sam froze there for a moment, like in a Roadrunner cartoon when the ledge gives way under the coyote and he hangs suspended in midair just long enough to look at the camera and swallow once.

Then Sam fell to his death. His grandfather would be sorry now.

After lunch came history taught by Miss Barnett who I knew was senile as those old black guys who sit on their porches in Greensboro with Ping-Pong-ball colored eyes and catheters. I supposed they kept her on because she’d been with the school since Wyoming was run by Indians, and no one had the heart to make her stay home.

I didn’t concentrate much. Mostly because I didn’t have to—everyone in class seemed to be taking naps—but also I was somewhat concerned about this after-school discussion with Howard Stebbins. What if he was weird?

Maybe he was just pissed because I knew more about Mark Twain than he did. Or it could be that thing about Twain blaming his problems on the Jews. Maybe Stebbins was Jewish. We had Jews in North Carolina but you couldn’t tell them from anyone else except when they made a big deal out of a holiday or something. Nobody—unless you count a few Klansmen that I don’t count—cared anyway. Lydia’d been to New York City to see her mama’s mama, and she said there you could tell the difference and it mattered for some reason.

When I was nine or so, I heard Caspar say the government had Jewed him out of something or another. I asked Lydia what that meant and she said they’d circumcised him. I believed her, it wasn’t 10:30 yet.

The Marine washout made a good story, but Howard Stebbins wasn’t nearly that interesting. Nobody is as interesting as the stories I give them. In real life, he was a local boy who’d been a valley sports hero back in the mid-fifties. Still owned county records in the 440- and 880-yard runs. He’d captained the only GroVont basketball team to ever make the state finals.

Then old Howard went off to the University of Wyoming and kind of got lost. He kicked around a few years, doing what it took to get a teacher’s certificate and filling the third or fourth space on depth charts over at the athletic department. He came back home where he was still somebody, married a local girl, and settled into the life.

The high school coach had exactly the same story only he was ten years older.

Howard told me most of this—and I made up the rest—while I stood quietly next to his cluttered desk, wondering if it had any significance. In a varnished walnut frame next to a gift pencil box, I spotted a woman with ratted and sprayed blonde-white hair and glasses behind two miniature versions of Howard. Same hedge-cutter haircuts. The littlest one had glasses with lenses thick as my thumb.

There were three other photos in the room, up above the chalkboard. Abraham Lincoln, Albert Schweitzer, and Kurt Gowdy.

Stebbins leaned back with his hands behind his head and his feet propped up on an open desk drawer. “You watch out for the Pierce girl.”

“I don’t know a Pierce girl.”

“Maurey Pierce, the one you riled this morning.”

I fell back on false bravado. “She better watch out for me.”

“She can ride a horse standing on its bare back.”

“Is that a reason to watch out for her?”

Stebbins touched himself on the top of his nose, then along the hairline. “GroVont’s too small to make enemies.”

He was afraid of her. It was my first experience of a grown-up afraid of a kid. Now I think it’s fairly common, some grown-ups are afraid of all kids, but up until then I looked at the world as an us-and-them situation, with Lydia kind of straddling the line.

I wondered if Maurey was running a bluff on everyone. She didn’t seem that mean. She was pretty in a 1939 movie-vamp way. I’d seen her smile early in the volleyball game. Real earth-eating bitches—such as my mother—don’t have fun during sports. They don’t really enjoy anything.

Stebbins looked down at something really interesting on the back of his hands. “I saw that catch you made yesterday.”

I shrugged, not sure if I was supposed to affect modesty over the catch or contrition about the net deal.

“You’ve got some athleticism, Sam. Ever play on a team?”

Bing , my bullshit bell sounded. He wanted something from me. My auto response when someone wants something is to politely lie. “No, sir. I never had time, what with my studies and all.”

“We’ve got a pretty decent little football team here at GroVont Junior High.”

Football is my least favorite sport to play, as opposed to watch, right down there with soccer and checkers. I like games where you stay upright. I can fake basketball pretty well—no kid comes out of North Carolina who can’t—but baseball is where my rocks come off.

When I didn’t react, Stebbins stopped the beat-around-the-bush. “I want you at practice tomorrow.”

“Gee, I’d like to, sir. But we just moved to town and my mother needs me at home.”

He frowned and continued inspecting each knuckle of each finger, starting at the left and working his way across. “It takes twenty-two players to practice and I’ve only got twenty-one and half of them still suck their mama’s tit at night.”

“I no longer nurse, sir.”

He looked me straight in the eye. “Callahan, I need to explain how I grade in my classes. You know the difference between an A and an F in English?”