Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (13 page)

“What do we do now?” they asked.

“We become the vengeful fist of God.” Callahan snarled.

Tommy gun at his hip, Callahan stepped from the bunker and began spraying the hillside with the fire of death. Koreans splattered themselves amongst the rocks. Out of ammo, Callahan threw down the tommy gun and picked up a bazooka. Still firing from the hip, he began marching up the ridge, murdering masses of human beings with each stride.

***

“Want to learn to shoot?” Hank asked.

“Will I have to kill stuff?”

We left Lydia to do whatever Lydia does and drove over to the dump in Hank’s truck. The truck was pretty cool, a ’47 Dodge panel deal with electrical tape for a passenger window and a mountain of tools and animal horns and tires and stuff piled in the back so whenever he hit the brakes, the whole mess slid
whump
against the cab.

“How old were you when you first fired a rifle?” I asked Hank.

“Four-and-a-half.”

“Gee.”

“My little brother taught me.”

I wasted ten minutes trying to figure if he was kidding. It was stupid. If you don’t know anything about people how can you tell when they’re exaggerating? With Lydia, her face stays straight but she moves her hands when she lies. You couldn’t tell squat from studying Hank.

“What do you do when you aren’t at our house?”

Hank slowed down to pass a hawk tearing at a dead lump of fur. I couldn’t tell what the fur used to be. “I get by. Unemployment now, peel logs in the spring, fight fires some summers. My family is on the Kiowa roles so a government check comes every few months.”

“Lydia said you’re a Blackfoot.”

He nodded. “No money in Blackfoot blood. My grandfather was wise, he traded a bottle of moonshine to get listed as Kiowa. Wish he’d done the trade with a Navajo. Navajo’s the best-paid minority in the West. Get all the girls too.”

“Maybe I can be Navajo.”

He glanced at me. “You’re short enough.”

At the dump, we walked around awhile, looking at the neat stuff. It was like mostly garbage with a second-hand store scattered around. Hank told me that people who dumped something usable would set it away from the muck so other folks could take it home. I saw a lamp I could have used, but dump stuff seemed a little weird at the time. It might have had germs or something. There was a perfectly good Christmas tree.

“Why would someone dump a Christmas tree right before Christmas?” I asked.

Hank shrugged. Sometimes Hank talked like a regular person, then all of a sudden he’d catch himself and go back to
Ugh
and placid facial expressions. I think he saw too many cowboy and Indian movies; he thought people expected inscrutability. That would be a big plus in Lydia’s eyes. She could babble away without interruption.

The day was way clear, but below zero, which is cold no matter what anyone tells you about humidity and wind chill and all that kind of crap. I had on six layers and a sock hat and I was still cold. Hank wore a jeans jacket over two wool shirts. He kept his hands in his pockets and made me carry the Ruger.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

He pulled a hand from a pocket and pointed north, up the Dubois road.

“In a tipi?”

Hank’s shoulders moved up and down in that silent laugh of his. “Twelve-foot Kozy Kamper. Freeze your butt off in a tipi in winter.”

“Have you ever lived in a tipi?”

“Slept in a Cheyenne lodge at the Sun Dance couple years ago. Guy owned it got drunk and knocked down a flap pole, filled it with smoke. I crawled out the side and slept on the ground. That won’t happen in a Kozy Kamper.”

“Do Blackfeet get drunk a lot?”

Hank didn’t answer. He stepped across some partly burnt mattresses and picked up a blackened bucket. He carried it to a pile of trash down in a gullylike place and set it on a dead washing machine. “Big target. You won’t miss.”

“What if somebody comes along?”

“No law against shooting buckets.”

“The dump road’s back there.”

We walked over and looked behind the line of junk at the plowed out road twisting between dump piles. There was an incredible number of dead cars. They were everywhere. It was like an end-of-the-world movie.

“Any misses’ll go over a pickup,” Hank said.

“What about a dump truck?”

“No dumps on Christmas.”

Hank showed me how to pop out the magazine thing and load cartridges. “Butt first, see. Hard to get it wrong.”

“Can these kill elk and moose?”

He shook his head. “Squirrels, chiselers, beaver if you’re sixty-seventy feet in. People. Kill people dead.”

“But not elk.”

“Lung shot might do it, but they’d run a ways and be in pain. The harmonious man kills the animal without hurting it.”

“Like with the rifles in your gun rack?”

He nodded and snapped in the magazine. He pulled back the bolt, down, up, shoved it forward. “Safety here, red line means it’s off.”

“It won’t fire with the safety on?”

“That is why you call it a safety.”

He handed me the rifle. I felt kind of like I did following Maurey into the bedroom the first time. Sort of. I’d fantasized women’s breasts often, but I’d never fantasized firearms. Most of my violent daydream short stories involved hand-to-hand battles, although if the other guy deserved it sometimes I’d pick up a baseball bat and pound his head. Only real fights I’d been in were nothing like movies or books—more wrestling, less pounding.

“Shoot the bucket,” Hank said. I raised the rifle to my shoulder. The barrel end wouldn’t be still.

“Sight down the bottom of the V.”

I sighted and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Safety’s on,” Hank said. “Remember I told you about the safety.”

I lowered the rifle and pushed the safety button.

“Don’t point at me,” Hank said.

“Sorry.”

I raised the rifle again and waited for the bucket to come into the V.

“Squeeze the trigger instead of pulling.”

I squeezed, the gun jumped and powed in my ear.

A bad
yelp
came from behind the gully line.

“Shit,” Hank said.

I threw down the rifle and ran forward. Soapley’s dog, Otis, was on the road, scream-yelping and dragging himself after the truck. Soapley hit the brakes and jumped out. “He never fell off before.”

Hank was at my side. “We shot him off.”

“You shot my dog?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Everything kind of froze up on me. Hank was suddenly at the dog, bending over with his bandana out. Soapley looked at me, then he was there too. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go back and start the day again. They worked over Otis’s back end. Soapley said “Aw, hell” once.

After a few seconds Otis quit yelping and lay there helpless, which was even worse than the noise. I got down and held his head so he wouldn’t flounder around. His eyes couldn’t understand. They were scared and hurt and trusting and it was my fault.

“Think he’s gone?” Soapley asked.

Hank’s hand held fur under the right hind armpit. There was a lot of blood. “Vet might save him. Worth a try. It’ll cost a lot and you might lose him anyway.”

Soapley looked at the head under my hand. “I’m real attached to the old guy.”

“My grandfather’ll pay any bills it takes to save him,” I said, hating myself for saying it. “I’m real sorry.”

Soapley’s face held what I took as disgust. I don’t know, I’d be disgusted if I was a grown-up and some snot-nosed kid shot my dog and said his grandfather would pay to fix it. I was no better than Pud doing it on purpose.

“Let’s load him in the truck,” Soapley said.

They held arms under Otis and lifted him careful as they could, but he was in pain, you could tell. His tongue was way out and he trembled bad. I ran ahead to open the truck door and help get him in.

I hate it when things happen to me that really matter. I mean, it’s so easy to roll through the days, enjoying the irony of a weird mom or a school full of half-wits, exploring growing up with Maurey. The Kennedy-death thing had mattered, but from afar. This thing with Otis was right up close and my fault. I couldn’t be cool and slightly above the situation, which was awful.

Otis lay across my lap with his head on my left thigh and his wounded hip on Hank all the way to the vet’s. Hank had made a tourniquet out of his bandana, but there was still so much blood. I could see the white bone in the hole and the back side where the bullet came out was ripped and jagged.

But looking at the mess was better than looking at his face. His eyes hurt me. Pain without understanding is torture. Soon his eyes dulled up some and the quivering got worse. Soapley didn’t say anything. I wanted him to cuss me, or talk to Otis or something, but he just drove with his eyes forward and his right hand on Otis’s neck.

The vet was eating Christmas dinner and I doubt if he was happy to see us. His name was Dr. Brogan, he had a widow’s peak hairline and forearms of a wrestler. He was real severe and scared the wadding out of me.

“Who shot him?” Dr. Brogan asked as he bent over Otis in the truck.

“I did,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“It was my fault,” Hank said.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You two girls can argue over who did it later. Let’s get him inside.”

Dr. Brogan went to the house and brought back a stiff stretcherlike thing. Hank and Soapley carried Otis into the animal clinic next to the house. That left me to walk in with the vet.

“You do this often,” he said.

“Today’s the first time I ever fired a gun.”

Brogan grunted. I know he hated my guts. I usually don’t mind people hating me, it’s their choice, but this guy had just cause so it felt really bad.

They lay Otis on the table and raised his right hind leg with a line-and-pulley deal attached to the ceiling. Brogan gave him an injection in the front leg to reduce the pain, then he studied the place where I shot him.

“What a mess. You did this with a twenty-two?”

“Yes, sir.” Hank and Soapley were at the end of the table, holding Otis’s head and shoulders. His eyes were closed now so at least I didn’t have to face that look anymore.

The doctor cleaned and probed and messed around a long time. He clamped off the exposed artery to stop the bleeding. It looked like a thin worm. The muscles were pink and way down in there the shoulder bone glistened white.

Brogan turned to Soapley. “He’s lost the leg.”

Soapley swallowed but didn’t say anything.

Brogan went on. “See here, the bullet took out all the blood vessels and shattered the bone. I can’t believe a twenty-two could cause this much damage.”

It all looked like gore to me. I’d never seen any real gore before, unless you count the dead kittens, which count I guess. I felt sick and wanted to go out to the truck and lie down. Christmas was wrecked.

“Do it,” Soapley said.

Brogan pulled out an electric razor and started shaving Otis’s leg above and below the wound. “Dogs don’t get near as traumatized losing limbs as people do. They only know what is, so there’s no dwelling on what might have been. He’ll be up chasing meter readers in three days.”

Hank spoke. “Can the boy wait outside while we do it?”

Brogan’s eyes were lightning harsh. “He’s going to shoot things, he needs to see the consequences.”

I watched his fingers working over the exposed flesh. I said, “You’re right.”

The big upshot of the deal was I never want to shoot a gun again. People can call me wimp or city whuss or whatever, but as I watched all the cutting and sawing and sewing, I knew that I caused this and I didn’t want to cause anything like it from now on.

Brogan went two inches or so up from the wound and slit the skin all the way around. He cut through the fatty layer, then the muscles and laid them back in flaps. It looked like cutting a chicken thigh off the breast. When he cut through the joint, the knife made a scraping sound.

“You going to pass out on me?” he said without looking up.

I glanced down at Hank and Soapley. Their faces were blank, although Soapley was sweating some. “No, sir.”

Otis’s front paws did a digging motion, so Brogan stopped to give him another injection. Then he clamped off three blood vessels and tied them with black thread. After he made the final cut, he handed me the leg.

“Souvenir.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Hank said.

Brogan started sewing the muscle flaps shut. “Yes, I do.”

“It was as much my fault as the boy’s.”

“You two can share it.”

Dr. Brogan wanted to keep Otis overnight. Hank and I waited outside while Soapley did a short good-bye thing, then we sat in the truck and rode back to the dump. I had the leg on my lap. It was mostly black with a large white spot near the top and a smaller one down lower. The toenails were black.

At Hank’s truck, I wanted to tell Mr. Soapley I was sorry, but I started crying and he only stared out at the mounds of garbage. He wouldn’t look at me or say anything. Hank went over and got my rifle and unloaded it. He made me hold it on the ride into town. I went in the house with the rifle in my right hand and Otis’s leg in my left.

The day after Christmas I took to my bed with no intention of getting up again. I didn’t think, I will never get up again, I just didn’t think at all. I knew this was it. I would lie there until I rotted from the inside and mold grew across my face and armpits.

You think you’re doing fine, zooming along through the day-to-day, more or less above the deal. I’m making out okay in school, learning all this new sexual territory with a pretty girl, going where you’re supposed to want to go, Lydia’s in a practically human phase, Hank’s a nice enough guy, then I go and blow the leg off a dog and
whomp
, nothing means squat anymore.

I wanted to go backward, to before fucking and before I shot anything, back to North Carolina where I was young. Nothing mattered then either but I didn’t know it. Christmas Day in Greensboro I would have been playing basketball in Jesse Otake’s driveway. He always made me play point guard because he was an inch taller. I would have ridden my three-speed over to Bobby McHenry’s garage to watch his older brother with the cigarette pack twisted into the T-shirt sleeve break down the clutch on his ’59 Chevy.

I sure wouldn’t have spent Christmas at the dump with an Indian. I never saw a dump in Greensboro. You put the trash on the curb Friday morning and it disappeared. Nobody cared where it went. Dogs didn’t ride on top of truck cabs. Indians stayed out of sight.

I wanted to see the ground. How could we live in a place with no ground? And no railroad tracks, and no curb markets or McDonald’s or car washes or hotel elevators. Hell, no hotels. I woke up every morning and looked at the ceiling and saw two dead animals with giant bug-eyes and horns. That couldn’t be a healthy first sight every day for a person.

My thing got stiff and I lay on my side with one eye open and stared at Otis’s leg on my desk next to my typewriter.

The nurse checked on the IVs and crept soundlessly from the room. The boy’s grandfather waited anxiously in the hall.

“Well?”

“He says he’s fed up. He will no longer accept pain.”

“It’s all my fault.”

“That’s what he thinks.”

“I should have taken him more seriously. I shouldn’t have banished him away from his friends and coaches.”

“He says he’ll never move again until somebody loves him.”

“Poor boy.”

Early afternoon the need to pee overcame the need to be in a coma, so I padded barefoot across the house and came back by way of the kitchen where Lydia sat in her white nightgown, working a crossword puzzle.

She had a blue spot on the edge of her mouth where she’d been sucking on an ink pen. She held the pen in her hand like a cigarette with her long, thin fingers pointed at the ceiling.

“Ten-letter word for lampoon.”

I opened the refrigerator and looked in at a stick of butter, a jar of dill pickles, a bottle of French salad dressing, and five Dr Peppers.
“Satirize.”

She counted out letters on boxes. “Too short.”

“Lydia, would you explain to me about women.”

She glanced up at me, then back at the puzzle. “Cold enough in here without the fridge open.”

I took the pickles over to the table and sat across from her. I could see the puzzle upside down. Lots of answers had been written in and scribbled out so it was hard to figure what was what.

Lydia filled in a couple of letters. “I thought I already told you about girls.”

“I don’t mean dicks and tunnels and babies. I want to know why they do what they do.”

“Come on, Sam. Nobody knows why anybody does anything. Give me one of those.”

“Maurey and I perform sex and I feel something odd for her but she keeps telling me we’re just friends and nothing mushy is going on.”

Lydia took one of my pickles. “So?”

“Isn’t sex the definition of mushy?”

“Four-letter word for dessert.
Cake
?
Tart
?
Pies
?” She tried a letter then blacked it out. “You’re lucky she’s your friend. In all probability, you’ll have a lot more lovers than friends in your life. And you’re too young for any deep emotional entanglement.” She bit the tip off the pickle. “This way you get the fun of love without the heartbreak.”

“But what if I like her and get my heart broke anyway?”

She looked back up at me for a second. “Then you’re a sucker.”

“Maurey’s looking forward to going on dates.”

“Aren’t you?”

“She thinks she can go to the movies with some guy and flirt and neck, then come back here and get in bed with me and tell me about it.”

“Wish I had a deal like that.”

“I think it’s bizarre, even for us.”

“Caricature.”

“What?”

“Ten-letter word for lampoon—
caricature
.” She stuck her pen tip in her mouth.

“Is Hank a lover or a friend?”

“Don’t be impertinent.” She switched pen for pickle.

“Impertinent? Lydia, we passed that six years ago when I started fetching your Gilbey’s. You can’t be a buddy when it’s convenient and a mother when it’s not.”

“You’ve been reading too many books.”

I sat there scarfing pickles and watching her concentrate on something other than me. Even upside down, I knew several of the answers, but I wasn’t about to help her.

“Hank is a suitor,” Lydia said.

“That’s awfully Southern of him.”

“He’s kind of a Southern boy. You know he feels terrible about yesterday.”

“When are we going back to the South, Mom?”

Lydia crunched on her pickle and ignored me.

***

New Year’s Day I went over to the Pierces’ to watch the Cotton Bowl on their TV. Buddy was home, leaned back in the recliner, sipping on a beer with a plate of Annabel’s snickerdoodles on a tray next to his hand. Maurey and I sat on the couch but she didn’t watch the game. She pulled a cushion up against the arm and sat sideways, reading a book in the old lounging position of bare feet up against my leg.

I felt a little strange, what with her touching me in front of her dad—I’ve never done well with other people’s dads—only he didn’t seem to care. It was hard to tell since his face was mostly hair, beard, and two black eyes like periods at the end of a sentence nobody could read. I wondered if that was an outdoorsman deal they developed to stalk game or if Buddy was the only one with marble eyes. When Hank’s face shut down, it was like a stone slid over his face and he was untouchable, but Buddy’s emotionless look was softer, more like Pushmi and Pullyu over my bed at home.

He talked some about a mule deer that scored a 186 on the Boone and Crockette and a shed roof that caved under the snow, a weasel that had crawled into a generator to get warm and fried itself—not much conversation for the three hours I watched the game. Maurey hung on his every word.

It was Navy against Texas for the national championship. Navy had a king-hell hot-stuff quarterback named Roger Staubach. He zipped passes all over the field, kind of the football equivalent of classical guitar. Magic fingers. Even I could spot style.

Unfortunately, Navy’s defensive line was outweighed about thirty-five pounds a head, and by the middle of the fourth quarter Texas pretty much had a wrap.

Petey spread a ton of Christmas toys around the floor so whenever Annabel brought in another round of food and drink she had to lift her feet and titter. She said, “Go play in your room, Petey,” in a tone of voice that wouldn’t move a rabbit off a road.

One of Petey’s games looked like fun. It was a table soccer deal with knobs you turned to kick the ball at the goalie. I wanted to get on the floor and play it with him, only Maurey would take that as a sign of immaturity.

The book she was reading was
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov. She’d given it to me for Christmas.

“It’s about a girl our age coming to terms with her emerging sensuality,” she told me before she borrowed it back. She told Annabel it was by the same author who wrote Peter Pan.

My Christmas present to Maurey was a Pro-Line Frisbee. I found an ad for it in the back of the
Sporting News
and sent off to a place in Ohio. Could well have been the first Frisbee in northwest Wyoming, which isn’t saying much.

“We had a boy from North Carolina in my company on Iwo Jima,” Buddy said, apropos to diddley. “Had a thick accent the guys made fun of. Lost his leg to a mine. Why don’t you have a thick accent?”

“My grandfather was from New York. I guess you talk more like your family than your neighbors.”

He eyed me over a snickerdoodle. “Kid’s name was Martin Symons. Said his grandmother could heal by faith, she smoothed over scabs with Coca-Cola. Is that something people talk about down there?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“I thought Symons’s accent was fake until he stepped on a mine he’d set out only ten minutes earlier. He was screaming, ‘M’laig, m’laig.’”

“Daddy got a Bronze Star,” Maurey said.

“What for?”

Buddy popped the cookie in his mouth and chewed as he talked. “Killing folks. Army put a lot of stock in that talent.”

“Oh.”

“Lot of things they send you to prison for are considered heroic in the right circumstances.”

“Like murder?”

“I’d never let a son of mine join the army.”

Petey rolled on his back and did a “
Pow, pow
” bit with his thumb and index finger. I decided Buddy Pierce wasn’t such a jerk after all.

Maurey kicked me with her foot. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“But the game’s not over.”

She swung her legs off the couch and bent down on a sock search. “I’m hungry.”

Wrong thing to say about the time Annabel brought in our third tray of homemade junk food. “I made coconut kisses.”

Petey yippied and made a run for the whatever.

Maurey said, “I want a malt. Get up, Sam.”

“Navy might pull it out.” Texas was up 28-6.

“Sam, this book makes me think of other things.” She sent me a heavy-duty meaningful move-it stare and I caught on.

“Yeah, a malt’s just what I need.”

***

The sky was the same color as the ground and low clouds hid the Tetons so it made GroVont seem like a town in an envelope. I was getting tired of off-white, maybe because winter in Grotina only lasts two and a half or three months and my body knew time should be up.

“Don’t you ever miss dirt?” I asked Maurey as we walked up Alpine.

“Is Lydia home?” Whenever I say something a woman doesn’t understand or want to hear, she doesn’t hear it. It’s not like she ignores me, more like migratory deafness.

“She’s down with a killer hangover. Her and Delores went into Jackson last night and she didn’t come home till dawn. She’d lost her shoes somewhere and about had frostbite.”

“So she’s at your house.”

“Dead asleep when I left. Hank called a couple times. I think she didn’t feel like a wholesome New Year’s Eve so they had a spiff.”

“Maybe she’ll sleep through it.”

I knew what “it” was so I shut up. Ft. Worth drove by in his new Ford pickup truck and waved at us. Then Soapley came by. Otis rode inside now, with his two good front feet up on the dash. I’d taken meat scraps to him several times lately and played with him some in the snow. Whenever Otis saw me he would wag his short tail and jump around, which made me feel bad because he didn’t know what I’d done. Soapley said it was okay. Otis didn’t remember he’d ever had more than three legs.

“Dogs only know how they feel right now,” Soapley had said. “They don’t know nothing about before or after.”

Soapley gave us the Wyoming road wave of four fingers with the thumb under the steering wheel.

“Is the leg still on your desk?” Maurey asked.

“I went to Kimball’s for Lydia’s cigarettes Friday and it was gone when I came home. I guess either her or Hank got rid of it.”

“It looked kind of gross next to the typewriter.”

I shrugged. I hadn’t seen all that much difference between a leg on a desk and a moose head on the wall. “It was starting to smell some.”

Dot drove by on her way to the White Deck. She pulled over and rolled down her window to ask if we wanted a ride. Dot had put on five more pounds since I met her. It was strange that I’d been in GroVont long enough to notice changes. I didn’t really like the idea.

“We’d rather walk, it’s a nice day,” Maurey said, which was a lie. It wasn’t a nice day, it was drab, and I’d rather have ridden.

“Chuckette Morris is having a party next Saturday night,” Maurey said after Dot moved on down the road. “You’re coming to it.”

Maurey had on this dark blue parka thing that made her hair look nice, as if her face was in a frame. It had giant caves for pockets and looked warm. Her parents had given it to her for Christmas.

I asked, “Why?”

Maurey glanced at me and smiled. “Chuckette thinks you have a cute nose. Weird, huh?”

“Chuckette told you this?”

“She asked me if you and I liked each other.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told her that was silly. Don’t look at me that way. She meant ‘like,’ as in the right way, as in boys and girls.”

“You like me but in the wrong way?”

“I like you as a friend.”

I thought that was the point. “As a friend is the right way to like somebody.”

Maurey put both hands in her parka pockets. “There’s two ways I can like, Sam—as a friend or as a boyfriend.”

“And the two ways never overlap?”

She laughed. “Of course not. I couldn’t talk like this to a boy I liked.”

What could I say? I was strung out on the girl I was sleeping with but we weren’t allowed to connect except on a deeper friendship level. I’d of had to be a grown-up not to be confused.

Maurey went on as if she didn’t know she was addling me. “She’s inviting four or five couples. Her mom is making fondue, that’s where you dip food into melted stuff.”

“I know what fondue is. Who will you be there with?”

She didn’t say anything for a few steps so I knew the answer wouldn’t be neat.

“Dothan Talbot.”

I stopped and she went on a ways, then turned back. “Don’t go all freaky on me, it’s just a date.”

“But he’s our mortal enemy.”