Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

A pink fake-silk handkerchief came from somewhere and I found my right ear pinned to one of the monster tits while she jammed blood back up my nose. “He’s wounded, Lydie.”

‘‘Wounded means shot. Sam looks more punched out.” Through the pink haze, I saw Lydia on the couch next to Dougie Dupree. He had on loafers, slacks, and a madras shirt. Lydia was barefoot, as usual, in jeans and a sweatshirt that said Duke. A half-full bottle sat on the stack of Dictionary of American Biography and chunks of lemon were scattered on the coffee table and floor. Obviously, we were chest-deep in an alcohol session.

Dougie spoke through a lemon wedge. “There is one more example of an event that would not occur in New York City.”

“They’d slit your throat for a cigarette, but they wouldn’t punch you out. Why did someone hit you, Sammy?” Lydia’s face held the danger smile, the one that sets off little smoke alarms in my head. Even bent over with my ear up against God’s own tit, I knew trouble was courting the Callahan household.

I decided to lie. “A fella said my mom was a tramp so I hit him and he hit me back.”

“How noble.” Delores clamped me even tighter to her breast. She smelled of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder and I wanted to turn my mouth more into her, only I was afraid I’d bleed down her pink ruffly blouse.

“Sam’s a regular prince,” Lydia said. She knew I was lying. Lydia can always tell, somehow, and I can always tell when she’s lying, but in spite of this mutual curse we both go on lying to each other on a daily basis.

“You must admit Marlon Brando is the dominant tragedian of our time,” Dougie said, I guess resuming something I’d interrupted. Dougie blew my theory that tall men are never full of crap.

“Brando’s eyeballs are upside down,” Lydia said. “He’s like one of those drawings you turn over and they go from happy to sad.”

Delores sighed, which made her breast heave into my face. “I’d let Marlon Brando turn me over. Dougie, did you ever do it from the back? Ray won’t do it that way, says it’s perverse.”

I muffle-mumbled. “I can’t breathe.”

“I bet Sammy likes doing it from the backside. He wouldn’t call it perverse.”

Lydia looked at me and threw down a shot. “Delores, you relate all subjects to your organs.”

“I can’t breathe.”

When Delores let up, the oxygen rush made me dizzy. “I better clean up.”

“Don’t dribble on the floor.”

Dougie was cutting lemons for another round. “The New York–trained actors are so superior to those who matriculate in Hollywood, there is no comparison whatsoever.”

I went to the bathroom to wash off blood, then back to my room to change clothes and look up matriculate . As I passed through the living room, Delores was sitting up close to Dougie with her legs crossed so her pink skirt didn’t cover much of anything. She touched his elbow when she talked. “ Life magazine says Picasso caught gonorrhea from an orgy with colored women.”

Back in my room, I left the door cracked and sat at my desk listening to the grown-ups kill off their fifth of tequila. Dougie was explaining why Andy Warhol was a cheater when Lydia said, “I want to dance.”

“Dance?”

“In Greensboro I used to enjoy dancing.”

I’d been working on a short story about an artist who suspends small dead animals in Jell-O molds. It was inspired by this stuff Max made at the White Deck where he’d start the Jell-O setting up, then dump in canned fruit cocktail and all the grapes and whatever fruit is in fruit cocktail would sink part way to the bottom and stop. Max left his Jell-O in the fridge for a week, so if you ordered it Friday the skin was like rubber. I liked that.

Two of the most famous art critics in Paris scratched their chins as they circled Sam Callahan’s gelatinized sculpture.

“It’s genius,” the one murmured.

“I have never looked at a rat with such clarity,” said the other. “Observe the terror in her eyes. The struggle of the ears juxtaposed against the strawberry Jell-O.”

“I wonder how he makes it so lifelike,” murmured the first critic.

Sam put on his Blackfoot smile. Little did the critics know the rat had been alive when dropped into the Jell-O mold.

Lydia’s head appeared at the door. Her eyes had the bemused yet reckless glitter of a skydiver about to take his two-hundredth leap. I’d never seen Lydia blasted on tequila before, and I’m not sure she ever had been. Tequila was fairly new to serious drinkers back then; they hadn’t realized yet that it’s not the same drug as bourbon or gin.

“You stop bleeding?”

“Yeah, I’m doing my homework,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked why I was sitting at my desk writing on a legal pad.

“We’re leaving for Jackson to dance at the Cowboy Bar. Dougie has a new car.”

“You’re going to ride in a Volkswagen?”

“I’ll make Delores sit in back, otherwise she’ll make obscene advances at Dougie all the way and they’ll sneak off and leave me alone in the Cowboy. I’m not willing to break in new dance talent tonight.”

Her forehead was soft but her eyes buzzed and her mouth kind of twitched. She’d looked like this the week she did whatever she did that got us shipped to Wyoming.

“What do I tell Hank when he calls?”

“Tell him Crazy Horse got what he deserved.”

The phone woke me from a dream where my teeth rotted from the roots and fell into a cube of mixed-fruit Jell-O and stuck there all cluttered and disorganized. I knocked the alarm clock to the floor, then bent down to discover the time was just after midnight. Drunk Dougie must have driven the bug into a frost heave and killed my mother, left her twisted on the pavement with blood trickling from both ears. If I picked up the phone my new life as an orphan without Lydia would begin.

The phone stopped ringing for about thirty seconds before it started again. Those were a rough thirty seconds. The mental picture of Lydia dead made me sick, struck down with a flu attack. Maybe she wasn’t dead but only brainless in a coma. Shoulda-saids and deals with God blitzed through my head, so when the phone rang the second time I went for it.

The voice said, “He that digresseth from the matter to fall upon the person ought to be suppressed by the speaker. No reviling or nipping words must be used.”

“Caspar, you scared the doo out of me. I thought Lydia fell in a frost heave.”

“Your next assignment is to memorize Robert’s Rules of Order , Grandson. Life must be order. Business cannot continue without consistency.”

“Lydia and I are full of order. What was that about progresseth from the matter and nipping words?”

“The matter is carbon paper.”

“Caspar, it’s after two o’clock your time. Did you call to read to me about nipping words?”

“I called to speak to your mother.”

“Your daughter?”

“I demand an explanation about the Indian.”

Lemon peels, juice, and salt lay strewed around the table. A tequila bottle was on its side under the TV. They’d left the front door open so the gas heater was blasting away for nothing. Order was not the Callahan word of the day. “She seems to have moved the Indian along for the moment, but she might listen if you make her dump him permanently. Lydia misses your ultimatums.”

“Put her on the phone.”

“Well, she isn’t home right now. She had a meeting.”

“I control the cash flow.”

“And I respect that.”

There was a short sound of old-man breathing. “Tell me what you think about night and day, Grandson.”