Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (11 page)

Lydia looked at Maurey’s chest. “You haven’t hit puberty yet?”

She shook her head. “Both Smith twins have and they’re treating me like a child.”

I thought puberty was when you could do it and before puberty was when you couldn’t, so none of this made any sense.

“I guess it’s safe then.” Lydia stood up. “If you’re going to play this game, you might as well play it right. Scoot your chair back.”

Maurey looked concerned. “Do I have to undress?”

“That’d be too much even for me. I am his mother, after all.”

“Sometimes I forget,” I said.

Lydia gave me a gruesome look, then she walked to the food cabinet and opened a package of premade taco shells that’d been up there since we moved in. She held it so the slot ran up and down. “Looked like this, right?” she asked me.

“Hairier.”

Delores hiccuped. “I can’t wait to write this conversation in my diary.”

Lydia went over and put the taco shell vertically between Maurey’s legs. “Look at this, Sam. Pay attention.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She ignored the ma’am. “Down here is where you go in. One of you has to grab it and angle it right. It’ll be years before it just slides itself in.”

Maurey nodded, taking in every detail.

Lydia pointed to the bridge at the top of the taco shell. “Right here is a little lump called the pleasure dome.”

“Pleasure dome,” I said.

“Now, don’t go poking right at it, you run your fingers or your tongue lightly around and around the dome and the girl gets wet.”

“Tongue. I thought the girl used her mouth, not the guy.”

“That’s a nasty rumor started by men.”

Delores
oohed
. “Makes me wet just thinking about your young tongue down there.”

I looked at her. “It does?”

Lydia pointed the taco shell at Delores. “Don’t even think of giving lessons.”

“But…”

“This is for the kids.”

“You gonna teach him how to make her come?”

Her come? Jesus, would the revelations never cease. Girls squirted too?

Lydia shook her head. “Sam’s bright. He’ll figure that one out soon enough. The ability to give orgasms every time is too powerful a weapon for a thirteen-year-old to deal with.”

Maurey’s eyes hadn’t left the taco shell. “Why didn’t Jo talk about this in
Little Women
.”

“Two things,” Lydia said. “First, any sign that Maurey is a woman and you stop the game. Got that?” Lydia glared at us. Maurey nodded.

“What’s the first sign she’s a woman?” I asked. No one told me.

“The other is a matter of form. You don’t talk like this in front of grown-ups. At your age, sex is something you sneak around and hide.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Society would fall apart if people were honest about fucking.”

I considered that philosophical stance for a moment, but the idea of a secret weapon that I could use to get girls whether they wanted to get got or not was almost too much. Imagine—high school girls, college girls, baton twirlers, car hops at drive-ins, girl models in the nightie section of the Sears catalogue, girls on TV. I could get Hayley Mills from the Disney movies. I could make Hayley Mills come and, while I was at it, see her tits.

“You want to go in my room and read comic books?” I asked Maurey.

She seemed hypnotized by the taco shell. “Sure, comic books sound like fun.”

Delores picked the cards off the table. “I love crazy 8s. You play crazy 8s?”

Lydia threw the taco shell in the trash, then turned to me. “I always thought you were a little boy. Guess I should pay more attention.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Who?”

“Thanks, Lydia.”

“Go get ’em, tiger.”

As I held her hand and led her away to my bed, Maurey said, “Go get ’em, honey bunny.”

***

So, while my mom Lydia and her new friend Delores sat at the kitchen table playing crazy 8s, Maurey and I exchanged lost virginities. Afterward, we all went down to the White Deck for ice cream, Delores’s treat.

This wasn’t the Hayley Mills from Pollyanna. This was
the older, more aloof Hayley from
The Parent Trap
. In fact, both
The Parent Trap
twins—the long-haired cultured Boston Hayley and the short-haired, perky California Hayley—sat in the spacious backseat of a limousine parked at the Tastee Freeze.

Sam Callahan walked right up to their Rolls-Royce and leaned in the back window. “Where’d you guys go to school?” he asked.

The Boston Hayley put on her sunglasses. “We never talk to common people.”

“Want to see a magic trick?” Sam asked.

“How juvenile,” said the California Hayley.

Then, before they could roll up the window, Sam performed his trick.

The Boston Hayley took off her sunglasses. “What can be your pleasure today?”

“Show me your breasts.”

The girls did as they were told. With their shirts off and their glamorous breasts facing Sam Callahan, they asked, “What may we do next to help you feel like the king you are?”

Sam touched the left nipple on each girl. “Do you know where Maureen O’Hara lives?”

***

“I haven’t gotten laid in four months.” Lydia blew smoke across the table. “My own kid is getting lucky and I can’t.”

“There is a problem we can fix,” Hank Elkrunner said. He was sitting next to Lydia, across from Maurey and me. Maurey and I were playing a game called hangman where you fill in blanks with letters before the other guy draws a hung stick figure. Maurey was in a good mood because she’d aced a test in citizenship that I made a C on. She put a lot more stock in grades than I did.

“You complain of your dry season,” Hank said, “but no one feels sympathy. Each man in this room would volunteer to give you cause to stop complaining.” I liked Hank. He spoke slowly and looked at his fingers when he talked. He hadn’t been at the table five minutes before he told us he didn’t smoke or drink alcohol, just the kind of guy Lydia needed. They seemed real relaxed with each other.

Lydia looked around the White Deck, surveying possible volunteers. Most of the eight or nine guys were dude wranglers on welfare, holing up for winter and waiting for tourist season to kick in. A couple worked for the national park. “I’d rather complain than fool around with these peckerheads. Every one of this rabble is afraid of women.”

Hank had this low, growl-like laugh. You couldn’t really tell he was laughing except his shoulders moved up and down. “They are not afraid of women. They are afraid of you.”

“No challenge in that. Not a man here, this table excluded, that Maurey couldn’t have shaking in his Tony Lama’s in five minutes.”

Maurey looked across at Lydia and smiled. In the last four days since our training session they’d gotten real buddy-buddy. Made me nervous.

Hank picked up his iced tea. “I bet Oly could make you walk the ceiling.”

“Oly is dead, only around here dead people go on drinking coffee for six days. It’s like growing toenails anywhere else.”

This four-months-of-no-sex thing came as kind of a surprise. With Lydia, whenever she leaves the house everyone just figures she’s up to something immoral.

“Dusty Springfield,” Maurey said.

“Heck.” She’d guessed my hangman words. I’d been trying to touch her thigh under the table, and she let me for a minute. Then she picked up my hand and put it on my lap and said, “Keep yourself warm.” She smiled so I figured it was okay to try again pretty soon.

Maurey drew the spaces and the two-line gallows. It felt comfortable, sitting with her and Hank and Lydia in the White Deck—like we belonged for a change. Nobody was pushy or wanted anything. None of the customers avoided looking at us or quit talking when we started. Lydia and I were part of the scene.

Lydia still cleaned the silverware when we sat down and still called locals peckerheads. She used the word
home
in the context of North Carolina, and thought Wyoming women little better than galley slaves, but I could see a change. Now, she treated locals more like slightly retarded, well-meaning children rather than cossack rapists with drool for brains. Some ironic humor had entered the situation.

Just that morning I’d heard Lydia ask Soapley what he had under his Polaris and she seemed to understand the answer. Which I didn’t.

Dot brought over Lydia’s hamburger, Maurey’s shake, and Hank and my blue plates—Swedish meatballs, noodles, and green beans. Hank asked for ketchup.

“Got a letter from Jimmy today,” Dot said. “He’ll be home end of the summer.”

Lydia was doing the looking at her teeth in the butter knife number. In it, she stretches her lips out flat so her teeth look like fangs. “The kids tell me Jimmy likes it four times a day.”

Dot reddened and pinched me on the shoulder. I pointed to Maurey. “Her. She’s the rat, I never said a word.”

“What’s Jimmy doing in Vietnam?” Hank said. Hank was the first nontelevision news person I ever heard use the word
Vietnam
.

Dot propped one hand on her hip. “He says he’s teaching one bunch of monkeys how to kill another bunch. Sounds kind of stupid to me. You want more iced tea?”

Lydia scowled while Dot jacked up Hank’s glass. Southern iced tea came presugared and Lydia took it as a personal affront that nobody in the West could get it right.

After Dot left, I used Hank’s ketchup and caught crap from both the females. “Hank put it on his stuff,” I said.

“Hank’s an Indian,” Maurey said.

“Hank’s a clod,” Lydia said.

Hank just smiled. I flashed on a futuristic ganging-up process where I could be in big trouble.

Maurey sucked vanilla shake through a paper straw. “Hank can shoot a rifle under a horse’s brisket going full blast, just like in the movies.”

“So can you,” Hank said.

“Yeah, but you hit what you’re aiming at.”

“Got kicked in the head last time I tried that trick.”

Lydia turned to stare at Hank’s head. “It shows.”

For some reason, I was looking a couple booths down, right at Bill’s rock of an Adam’s apple. Oly said something I didn’t hear, then Bill stood up and fell into the jukebox. He stuck for a moment, then slid down.

Everybody shut up at once. Oly put down his coffee cup and said, “Bill’s dead.”

***

Me Maw died when I was five. Sometimes I speculate that Caspar wouldn’t have been such a king-hell hard-butt if his wife hadn’t got cancer and spent seven years being sad and then died. I don’t know. Maybe he was always severe. Maybe that’s why she got the cancer in the first place.

I don’t remember all that much about Me Maw before she died. She wasn’t up much. I remember her smell, a cross between rubbing alcohol and paper matches right after you blow them out. They made me go in the library-turned-sickroom to say good-bye. Her eyes were way in there and waxed paper-looking. When I kissed her on the cheek, she was wet. I was scared I’d get the cancer from touching her.

At her funeral, Caspar, Lydia, and I sat together in front. Neither one of those two showed a lick of emotion. That carved look on their faces was the one I recognize now as the look a kid gets when a coach yells at him for something he thinks he didn’t do, like, “You’re not going to get to me, you asshole.”

I sat with my hands in my lap and watched Me Maw’s face in the box, sure she was going to blink or sit up or something that would freak me out. I wondered if she was wearing shoes. Caspar told me to stop moving my legs.

After the cemetery, we went out for ice cream, same as when Maurey and I lost our virginity. Maybe there’s a pattern.

***

That evening Maurey and I lay on my bed and tried to figure out the death thing. We unbuttoned each other’s shirts, and I had mine off, but the impetus to keep going petered out about the time I touched her right breast.

“I wonder what it feels like to be dead?” I asked.

Maurey rolled over to face the ceiling and covered her left breast with her hand. The eye on my side blinked three times. It was kind of funny, her lying on her back with one breast hidden by her hand and the other one hidden by mine. I never could get over how small Maurey’s hands were. “Cold, I guess.”

I tried to imagine Maurey’s tit cold and dead, but I’d only learned what it felt like warm and alive four days ago, so dead was beyond me. With my hand cupped over her chest, you couldn’t even tell Maurey had a breast.

Maurey said, “People sure die easily in books. It’s not that casual in real life.”

“The easiest place to die is in the movies.”

Maurey bit her lower lip and turned to look at me. “I think about being dead all the time. I’ve read every book in the library I can find about girls dying and I can’t figure it out.”

I moved my hand off her breast and touched her cheek. “It’s not like sex, Maurey. The people who write books don’t know any more about being dead than we do.”

***

Bill hadn’t looked comfortable dead. He fell with one leg doubled under his body and his head at an off-angle. His belt was cinched up on his belly so he looked cramped. His eyes were closed, which surprised me. I thought people died with their eyes open.

Nobody in the White Deck went hysterical or anything. The Park Service guys flipped him over and tried what passed for artificial respiration back then—a push on the back, pull on the elbows useless maneuver. Lydia went and sat next to Oly, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at the lump on the floor that used to be his friend. Once, he said it again. “Bill’s dead.”

Dot called Jackson for an ambulance while Hank felt Bill’s neck for a pulse, but anyone could see he was king-hell dead.

Max the owner came out of the kitchen to watch. I’d never seen him in person before. He had hardly any hair and a purple tattoo of a bird and he wore a sleeveless T-shirt. He didn’t talk.

Maurey leaned over me to look, then she sat back and held my hand. It took so long for the ambulance that we tried to play hangman awhile, but neither one of us could concentrate on the letters.

He’d died between the jukebox and their private booth, which meant anyone going to the bathroom had to step over the body, which I wasn’t about to do. That’s what I remember most about my first look at immediate death—having to pee like crazy and not being able to.

***

GroVont has a Mormon church that from the outside looks like a Pizza Hut. And, over by the Tetons, the Episcopal chapel in Moose is more in the way of a tourist trap than a real church. It’s not open in the winter. Baptists and Catholics go to Jackson to be buried.

Bill’s funeral took place in the VFW. I went because Maurey asked me to, and she went because the Pierces and Bill and Oly were connected in some way to do with World War I. Her grandfather served with them in Belgium and, later, when he died in an avalanche, Bill and Oly did the like-a-father gig for Maurey’s dad.

Everyone in the valley is either literally related or spiritually attached. One reason Maurey chose me for the sex practice was because, with me, she knew for certain there would be no hint of incest.

“Besides, I like your hair,” she said.

“I thought it was my Eastern casual demeanor.”

“Fat chance.”

I wish someone would do the like-a-father gig for me.

Lydia wouldn’t come with us. “I don’t do death,” she said. “Les is the only formerly animate object I commune with.”

“It’ll be interesting. Maurey says all the women in town bake things.”

“There was enough competitive cooking after Mama’s funeral. And the phone company man is coming. Those people don’t take excuses.”

So I found myself sitting in a folding chair in a VFW hall with Maurey, Petey, and Annabel. Coach Stebbins and his wife filled out our row.

Annabel had on white gloves, if you can buy that, and this little hat shaped like an Alka-Seltzer with a net over the front. She looked fairly disconcerted, as if a cake had fallen unexpectedly. Petey kicked the chair in front of him the whole service.

Maurey’s father, Buddy, sat up front next to poor Oly. I found myself looking at the back of Buddy’s head, wondering what a guy who spends most of his time alone thinks about death. He had on a brown cowboy hat and a suit I imagined was worn only to this sort of thing. I wondered if he’d be pissed to know I was sticking my thing in his daughter.

The rest of the place was full of old people who go to each other’s funerals, and loggers and a few cowboy types, not too many kids. Rodney Cannelioski was there as a representative of God. Dot smiled at me when I walked in. I’d never seen her out of uniform. She was pretty. Each chair had a number on the back in what looked like red nail polish.

“Trade places with me,” Maurey said.

“I don’t want to sit next to your brother.”

“I can’t see the body. Trade places.”

After we traded she leaned out in the aisle to stare at Bill. “He looks smaller, and almost healthier.”

“That’s the makeup.”

“Wouldn’t Bill be embarrassed if he knew he was going to eternity in Max Factor powder base and rouge.”

Coach Stebbins said, “
Shh
,” which I thought was rude. Petey gave Annabel a running commentary of the deal and nobody
shh
ed him. The brat.

A woman with large breasts and a print dress stood up and sang “Amazing Grace” in a beautiful voice. I was moved. It was nice to think one thing about Bill’s death wasn’t bland. Maurey told me the woman, Irene Innsbruck, sings at most funerals and weddings in GroVont. She’s the town talent.

Then a man in a gray suit went up front and read Bill’s war record. It’s funny, but when you’re young and you see a really old person, you never think of them as having done all kinds of various, creative things when they were young themselves. Bill sat in his booth and nodded over coffee. That’s all I ever thought of him if I thought anything at all, but he’d done a lot of stuff in the war and afterward. He saved some Englishmen from a machine gunner once and got a medal. And he traveled across Russia back when the Communists were killing everyone in sight. Later, he came home and started a lumber company with Oly. All that, I thought, just to fall against a jukebox and die.