Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

“You didn’t have to rope her,” Maurey said.

He looked up at us. “You’d rather the whole county chase her like a calf scramble?”

“I guess not.”

“I figure the sooner this is over the better.”

Annabel put her face up against Hank’s shirt and sobbed.

As the junior high cheerleader drew the clean sheet up to cover her developing bosom, sweat steamed off her forehead. “Sam Callahan, you get me so hot I can scarcely stand it.”

Sam Callahan left the bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen where he opened the freezer. Back in the bedroom, he set an ice bucket on his night stand. “Here, honey,” he said. “I’ll show you what the older women do when I make them hot.”

Hank and Maurey wrapped Annabel in blankets and got her into Hank’s truck. Annabel seemed to have passed through something and come out on the other side dead. She breathed, but that was all. She didn’t move or speak or have any expression on her face. Hank had to arrange her feet around the gear shift, then fold her arms over the blankets.

After I helped Maurey into the passenger side—the door Hank had fixed—they followed Buddy’s tracks off to the hospital in Jackson, and Lydia, Dougie, and I retreated to the White Deck where half the trucks in the county had gathered. I don’t know where Delores and Dothan got off to, I only hoped they hadn’t gone off together.

Lydia sent Dougie around to bum the last three empty chairs in the place, but we had to share a table with two Mormon missionaries in white shirts and skinny ties. Lydia hates all forms of purposeful innocence. She looked around the crowded cafe and said, “Who do you have to fuck to get a cup of coffee in this joint?”

One missionary blushed, but he took it. The other one looked down and opened a Book of Mormon . Lydia would have to try harder than “fuck” to shake these two.

A bunch of college boys from Montana sat on most of the stools, and I could see tension between them and the two booths that held Ft. Worth and his gang of rednecks. Ft. Worth had talked the Rexburgh girls into sitting with him, and, from the drift, I figured the Idaho girls came to the rodeo with the Montana boys and the Montana boys felt infringed. They didn’t say anything out-front ugly, but they acted surly—kept demanding service in loud voices as if they were being put upon.

I decided to help Lydia with the missionaries. “If a girl shaves the curly hair from between her legs, does it always grow back?”

Lydia checked her teeth in the butter knife. “Leg hair comes back faster the more you shave it, but I don’t know about crotch, I never shaved mine. Dougie, you ever shave your pubics?”

“No, I never shaved my pubics.” Dougie had sissy hands. How could a person go to a rodeo and sweat tremendous pit stains yet still come out with manicured hands? The missionaries had rougher hands than Dougie.

“Maurey’s grew back,” I said, “but Annabel was smooth today.”

Dougie blew his runny nose on a napkin. “And what does Annabel’s smooth crotch signify?”

The Montana boys were getting more obnoxious about the lack of service. I hoped for a fight. “When they shaved Ft. Worth’s arm, the hair grew back even though the skin had moved to his finger.”

Lydia breathed on the knife and wiped it on the tail of her shirt. “Maybe Annabel’s been shaving herself ever since the abortion.” She smiled at the missionaries. “Do Mormons shave their groins after abortions?”

The one with the book stood up. “They’ll never serve us here, LaMar. Let’s go someplace where we can avoid religious persecution.”

“I just asked about shaving clitori.”

I noticed something. “It’s not religious persecution, nobody’s been waited on.” Not a table in the room even had menus. Ft. Worth stepped behind the counter and helped himself to the coffeepot, much to the indignation of the Montana boys, so his table had coffee, but I hadn’t seen anyone who worked at the White Deck since we came in.

I pushed back my chair. “Think I’ll go look for the waitress.”

Dougie sniffed. “She’s probably committing unnatural acts with the cook.”

“You just went off my list,” I said. Even if he was Lydia’s boyfriend, I didn’t have to listen to anyone bad-mouth Dot. I’d been considering it for a month, but now I knew the time had come to move Dougie Dupree down the road.

I worked out various ways to handle his expulsion from the family unit as I crossed in front of the cereal pyramid and pushed through the swinging doors, which meant I wasn’t all that alert, but right away I felt something weird in the kitchen. Dot sat on a ten-gallon bucket of burger pickles with her head down so I couldn’t see her face. Max sat in front of her on a same-size bucket of mayonnaise and a man in a uniform stood by the grill, staring down at a burned steak.

The man said, “I hate my job.”

“The restaurant is full of people,” I said.

Max ran his hand over his nearly bald scalp. He looked more lost than ever. “We’re closed. The people should go home.”

My stomach got a real sick feeling. “What’s the matter? Dot, what is it?”

When Dot lifted her face, she had a tear track off her right eye. She looked at me and tried to smile but couldn’t. “They took my Jimmy.”

I sat on the floor. First Annabel and now this, nothing made sense. “Took? Who took Jimmy?”

The man at the grill seemed to be speaking to the steak. “He was killed in action, that’s all I know. The officer accompanying the body sometimes has more details. I just notify the kin. In ROTC they never said anything about notification.”

“Killed?”

Max reached over and touched Dot on her knuckle. She still stared at me. “What do I do now, Sammy?”

I hadn’t even known Jimmy. I was thirteen, about to be a father. I didn’t know what she should do now.

Behind me, Lydia burst through the swinging door. “Who do you have to fuck to get a cup of coffee in this joint?”

This guy Jimmy went to high school with played the saddest version of “Taps” anyone ever played on the harmonica. You can do that with a harmonica if you really feel bad. King-hell despair dripped off each mournful note till, except for Lydia and Dot’s son, there wasn’t a dry eye in the cemetery.

“You ever see the movie Shane ?” Maurey asked. We stood back a ways by the cottonwood tree—same place we’d stood at Bill’s funeral. Everything was the same except that was winter and Maurey wasn’t eight-months-and-some pregnant when they covered Bill.

Clouds blew around over by the Tetons, but I was hot and itchy from my clip-on tie and suit coat. “Sure. Alan Ladd. The kid hollering ‘ Shane, come back. Mother wants you .’”

“That guy played ‘Dixie’ at a funeral in the movie. They filmed it here in this cemetery.”

“Neat.” Although it wasn’t all that neat. Whenever I see something really emotional, I like to think it’s spontaneous and never happened before. This harmonica player had practice at ripping heart strings.

“Who’re the old people?” Lydia asked. Lydia had actually come to the thing for Jimmy. She put on this dark, shiny dress and sunglasses and dragged Dougie away from the gallery. I think she was motivated by loyalty to Dot, which showed how much Lydia had changed since we came to Wyoming. She never had time for Southern women.

Maurey wore this top that looked like an open umbrella and a short skirt. From the knees down she looked thirteen and not a bit pregnant. “That’s Dot’s parents. They used to live here but the Park Service took their house. He sells siding in Moscow, Idaho, now. The shrunk-up old lady is Jimmy’s grandma who raised him.” The mom kept pulling Dot’s son Jacob off the dirt pile, but every time she got him down he scooted right back up. Cute kid, as kids go. Had a lovable chubbiness and dark, dark eyebrows. Reminded me of John-John at Kennedy’s TV funeral.