Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

“He’s drunker’n a skunk,” Dot said.

Maurey stood next to me. “Hank doesn’t drink, maybe he’s sick.”

Hank lowered the tailgate and sat on it, breathing hard, staring through the window at Lydia. Lydia stared back, both hands tight on the napkin dispenser. A trickle of blood dripped down Hank’s chin from a cut on his lower lip, all his shirt buttons except the bottom one were unbuttoned.

Hank stood and turned around to drag Les to the back of the truck. Then he lifted the moose above his head and ran toward us. Dot screamed, Lydia fell sideways from the booth, and Les came through the window.

Glass flew all over shit, Maurey said, “Jesus,” I took off for the door. I caught Hank as he was climbing back in the truck.

“Hey, asshole.”

His head turned to me without much recognition. I saw a Jim Beam bottle and a pistol on the dashboard.

“Maurey’s pregnant.”

He blinked.

“You could have hurt her, buttface.”

Hank blinked twice more. “Don’t call me buttface.”

“How about drunk fucking Indian.”

Hank nodded in agreement. “And your mother’s a whore.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to get drunk and hurt Maurey.”

His head kept nodding up and down. When it came up, a drop of blood fell off his chin. “I’m sorry.” He pulled himself into the truck and shut the door, then he rolled down the window. “But your mother is still a whore.”

I’d come off the initial adrenaline deal of a stuffed moose coming through the window. All I saw now was a pitiful man screwing himself up because he’d put his hopes on Lydia. I said, “Go on home.”

Hank drove away nodding.

He’d trashed the cabin. Thrown furniture into walls, broken what few dishes we owned, torn up books and scattered the pages. He got into Lydia’s panty drawer and knifed the crotch out of all sixty pairs. I found Alice mewing in my closet. Lydia turned the elk-gut chair upright and sat in it with her eyes closed. I set my typewriter back on the desk, then went into the living room and looked down on her. She looked old and skinny. Even her fingernails were a mess.

“Well, Lydia, you messed it up good this time.”

She didn’t even open her eyes. “Fuck you, Sam.”

“Fuck you too, Mom.”

The weekend before school let out, the fire siren went off about four in the morning. I lay in bed, staring at the dark corner of the room where three lines from the walls and ceiling came together. The siren wailed up and down a minute or so, then came silence except for a pickup truck speeding up Center toward the volunteer fire building. One pumper truck siren kicked in and headed north out of town, soon followed by a second.

Whenever the volunteer alarm sounded, especially at night, I got goosebumps wondering whose place was on fire—Maurey’s, Hank’s, the junior high. A fire siren late at night is about the saddest sound in the world. I pictured the volunteers groaning “Oh, damn,” as they crawled from the blankets to pull on their pants. Their sleepy-eyed wives mumbled “Be careful, honey,” not knowing if it was a false alarm or their neighbor’s children burning up.

That night I closed my eyes to play which-would-you-rather. Which would you rather have happen, 150,000 Chinese die in an earthquake or Lydia die in a car wreck? Maurey have a baby or Maurey marry me? Caspar let us stay in Wyoming or Caspar let us come home? I ended with me dying of cancer or being buried in an avalanche. Cancer would be slow and painful and pitiful, but an avalanche would be heavy and dark; I wouldn’t be able to breathe or move my arms. I pretended I couldn’t breathe or move my arms and two tons pushed down on my head until I got the king-hell creeps and spent the rest of the night reading this teenage sports fiction book.

The next day Maurey and I rode our bikes up to the TM Ranch. We’re talking sixty degrees, sunny, no ice on the road or snow on the valley floor. We’re talking spring.

I wallowed in it. Living without something most of the time means you get a kick when it’s there. By late May, the North Carolina spring is old hat. Nobody cares. But Maurey and I were the weather equivalent of let out of prison. She laughed and tied her hair back in a rubber band. I swerved through every mud puddle on the gravel road so I soon had a wet brown stripe up my back.

“What was the siren about last night?” I asked as we coasted side by side down a hill.

Maurey stood on her pedals. “Probably a grease fire. People dribble grease onto a woodstove and it burns.”

“At four in the morning?”

“Maybe it was creosote.”

“I bet it was worse than that.”

She looked over at me. “What do you want me to say, Sam? The alarm was a trailer fire and eight children were found suffocated dead behind a locked door? Not everything has to be dramatic.”

“Some things do.”

I cut left to scare a squirrel. He stood on his back legs to chew me out.

Maurey giggled. “You and Chuckette were the cutest couple at the sock hop Saturday night. She’s been blooming since that thing came out of her mouth.”

“I don’t want Chuckette to bloom.”

“Face it, Sam. Chuckette’s in love.”

We found Buddy in a pasture below the ranch house, working way off next to a big rock and a small herd of horses. Maurey’s face lit up. “There’s my Frostbite.” She stood on the second rail of the buck-and-rail fence and let out an unbelievable whistle—didn’t put her fingers in her mouth or anything. Just blasted like the lunch siren at the carbon paper plant.

All the horses’ ears jerked up, but only one came trotting toward us. Maurey jumped over the fence. “He’s so beautiful. I get goosebumps every time I see him.”

For the record, skewbald means tan-and-white splotches; kind of like Little Joe’s horse on Bonanza , only with no black. And Frostbite was a lot bigger than Little Joe’s horse. He had nostril flares almost the size of Les’s hooker twats.

When he was about twenty feet from us, Maurey held up her hand and said, “Stop.”

Frostbite stopped, then he turned and faced Buddy and the other horses.

“Let’s see what he forgot over the winter,” Maurey said. She took off toward the horse.

I said, “Should you run in your condition?”

At full speed Maurey jumped, planted both hands on Frostbite’s butt, and flew onto his back—we’re talking the classic Cisco Kid maneuver here—and in the same motion, Frostbite leaped into action.

I’d been to the Ringling Bros. Circus, I’d seen every Gene Autrey movie made in my lifetime, but I’d never seen anything as natural as Maurey on her horse. With one hand on his mane and the other on his back, she kicked her legs over and bounced both feet off the ground, first on the right side, then on the left. At the end of the pasture they made a tight turn and came roaring back with Maurey holding herself up by her arms between her legs and her feet straight out to the sides. Her hair flowed like Frostbite’s tail. Buddy stopped working to watch.

Maurey rotated, so she was facing the back, then she lifted her body and stood right on her hands.

The girl was almost six months pregnant. I should have been scared to crap for the baby, but I wasn’t because of the look on Maurey’s face. It was neater than before, during, or after her orgasm. Sex or death or teen pregnancy—none of that stuff meant squat to Maurey right then. I’m really glad I got to see her face as she rode Frostbite. I learned something important.

Maurey finished by standing on his bare back and galloping right up to me. Frostbite dug in all four legs as Maurey flew backward into a flip. She bounced once and landed with both feet together and her arms out wide.