Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (18 page)

I listened while Lydia made her way across the house and into her bedroom. Then I got up and poured water into the trash can.

“If you are pregnant, we could get married and live in an apartment. I’ll find a job.”

“Oh, Sam, don’t be a squirrel.”

***

Being a squirrel was the worst thing that could happen to a boy. Kids would do anything, no matter how bizarre or dangerous, to avoid squirrelhood; all except for the really squirrelly ones like Rodney Cannelioski who didn’t know Shinola. I kind of felt sorry for him. He put more salt on his food than anyone I ever saw. We would sit at the cafeteria table and watch him shake salt over his square slab of pizza for five minutes. You could see it caking up on the awful stuff that passed for cheese.

No matter what a chump you think you are, you never have to look far to find someone else in worse shape—only they don’t seem to know it. Lydia says it’s not nice to make empty, worthless people see themselves in a true light. “They just get angry and nothing changes anyway.”

The conversation with Maurey where I suggested marriage took place next to our Oldsmobile on Saturday right before she and Lydia drove over to Dubois to see the doctor. Maurey had been nervous all week and I knew she was scared—pregnancy is a big deal whether you keep the kid or not—but she would never admit it. She seemed somehow mad at me, as if I’d imposed on her.

The closest we came to talking about the baby was Wednesday after geography when I asked her if she felt like coming by for practice that night.

“We practiced enough, Sam. We’re through with practice.”

“Does that mean we’re ready for the real thing?”

“I’m ready to go back to sixth grade. You can go anywhere you want.”

Chuckette walked up and did the dirty-look-at-me thing for talking to another girl and Maurey went off to the ladies’ room where I knew she got sick between second and third period every morning.

***

Lydia put a box of Sterno and her toothbrush in the backseat for their drive to Dubois. She was always afraid the car would break down fifteen miles from any people and she’d freeze to death behind the wheel and be discovered dead with bad breath. She hid boxes of matches all over town in case the power failed in a blizzard. And I know for a fact she stashed a spare toothbrush in the silver toilet-paper tube in the women’s John at the White Deck.

“Want anything from Dubois?” she asked before they took off.

“Spider-Man comic books.”

“Sammy, you are so infantile.”

Maurey sat on the passenger side, staring out the window, not looking at me. It occurred to me we hadn’t made eye contact, much less love, in a week.

After they left I felt kind of flat, like you do when you’ve been waiting for something interesting to happen, then it does, and afterward it’s the same old same old. Being a father is supposed to change things, but it was still winter and I still had to go to a junior high full of idiot students and wimpy teachers; Lydia had a boyfriend now, but she still killed a pint of Gilbey’s every night at 10:30. Other moms fixed their kids grilled cheese sandwiches. Not once in my whole life did Lydia ever fix me a grilled cheese sandwich.

I had one girlfriend I pitied and another friend who was mad at me for squirting in her. Thirteen years old and my sex life was probably over. Baseball season was months away.

I went inside and lay on the couch with my head over the edge and a cushion on my chest. From upside down, Les looked a little like Caspar. I got to wondering what Lydia did to get us sent to Wyoming, which led to wondering about my father, which led to nowhere, so I got up and drank a Dr Pepper and walked uptown.

Ever since the Beatles last Sunday, hair had turned into a major social issue. The longer your hair, the more coaches and principals viewed you as a rebellious snot-nosed troublemaker. I mean, it had only been one week. How could a person grow enough hair to make a statement in one week?

My hair was probably longer than anyone else’s in the seventh grade—the curl showed anyway. That had more to do with Lydia being too emotionally tired to trim it than any wild-in-the-streets quirk in me. But Stebbins took offense, and even our principal, Mr. Hondell, stopped me in the hall to ask if I had a buck and a quarter.

“Yes, sir.”

“Get your hair cut then. We’re not running a dog kennel here.”

Stebbins did his bit of king-hell nastiness in front of the whole class. He was big on public humiliation.

He stood at the blackboard, showing us how to diagram a sentence with a subjunctive clause in it. I find the diagramming of sentences morally reprehensible. Who cares? Was Jules Verne any better or worse a writer because he could diagram a sentence? Seventh grade is such a waste of time.

Stebbins had all these lines going horizontal, vertical, and off at a 45-degree angle—even worked in an interjection, Wow!—when he all of a sudden turned around and said, “Sam, stand up.”

I was staring at the back of Maurey’s head, bored to death with subjunctive clauses and thinking I was kind of happy I’d probably made her pregnant, so I didn’t hear Stebbins.

“Sam Callahan, are you defying me?”

“What’s that?”

“I will have no back talk here. The one thing I demand in this class is respect. Now, stand up.”

I stood up but basically forgot everything I ever knew about the teacher-student relationship. I asked, “How can a person demand respect?”

He was so amazed he didn’t speak. Across from me, Teddy spit in his coffee can and I could see Chuckette digging at her retainer. “Respect is an earned and given deal,” I went on. “It can’t be demanded. Respect is like love. Force it and lose it.”

“You think all that hair makes you smart, don’t you?”

“No.” For the record, my hair touched neither my ears nor my collar. Already, I resented the Beatles.

“What makes you think you’re so smart then, Mr. Callahan?”

There’s no answer to a question like that so I fell back on silence. Maurey turned in her desk to look at me, but I couldn’t see any expression on her face. She had more to worry about than Coach Stebbins suddenly going weird on me and me going weird back at him.

“I will not allow any know-it-all smart guys in my class. You will get a haircut, do you understand, Mr. Callahan?”

“Sure.”

I asked Lydia that night to trim it back some but she said she didn’t have the energy just then.

The next day in sixth-period PE—which I say should have been basketball practice—Stebbins pulled me, Dothan Talbot, and a kid named Elliot out of the dressing room and gave us licks for having long hair.

“You’ll get a lick a day until I can see white skin above your ears,” Stebbins said.

I think we should of had a warning day before the actual licks began. I feel strongly about licks from coaches. They’re demeaning, and they sting like all hell. I have no fat back there and I don’t adapt well to pain.

Elliot went first, shaking like an aspen leaf. I’ll never figure out that kid. He had terrible acne and all he cared about was playing the piano. He was like one of those idiot guys who can’t tie their own shoe but can tell you what day of the week January 15, 1631, came on.

Dothan was second and he just smiled as if, boy do I love this stuff. I’d heard his dad was big on licks, so I guess the defiant shiteater grin was his defense mechanism. I didn’t have a defense mechanism.

Stebbins’s paddle was a one-by-four with a carved handle and
World’s Greatest Dad
woodburned in the flat area. He always swung low, below the butt bones and high on your legs, so sometimes he’d leave a red welt that said Dad backward on your leg.

PE licks are as much a tradition in American values as anything, but I hated every minute of it and if they ever make me president I’m going to make the whole ritual illegal.

***

Walking uptown Saturday, I dawdled a good deal to work out the ethical implications of the haircut. Stebbins was forcing me to do something by means of fear; therefore I shouldn’t do it because his means sucked. But I had been intending to get a haircut anyway, and not doing something because a jerk tries to force you to is letting the jerk control your life just as much as doing it would be. I could end up like Lydia who dyed her hair platinum a few years ago after Caspar told her he’d kick her out of the house if she did. Lydia couldn’t stand platinum blonde hair and wouldn’t leave her bedroom until it grew out.

At Kimball’s Food Market I helped Mrs. Barnett carry two bags of groceries to her Buick. She called me young man.

“Thank you, young man,” she said, and she pulled this rubber change pouch out of her purse and gave me a nickel. The pouch was shaped like a run-over football with a slit down the center, and if you squeezed the ends the slit opened. Mrs. Barnett came from a generation that thought shiny money was worth more than dull money, so the first nickel laid in my palm wasn’t good enough.

She said, “Just a moment, dear,” and took it back, and poked around in the rubber pouch until she found a good one. I tried to imagine what Mrs. Barnett had been like when she was a teenager, before her cheeks got floppy. Had she worried about the compromise between wholesomeness and popularity? In her whole life, had the thought of birth control ever crossed her mind?

Zion’s Own Hardware store had a window display for National Center Pivot Month. All the pipes, sprayers, nozzles, and general irrigation deals made me feel like spring had to come someday. I mean, somebody expected to see the ground again. The dogwoods would flower in Greensboro in a month, but Maurey had told me Wyoming trees don’t ever flower. They molt.

The Ditch Creek Barbershop was a one-chair deal with three cracked-plastic kitchen chairs for people waiting their turn. There was this gumball machine with a sign saying the Jackson Lion’s Club took the gumball money and gave it to people who needed cornea transplants. The back wall by the sink was covered by photos of young guys in army uniforms standing next to each other, and all these medals, ribbons, certificates, notices from the American Legion, and a map of the South Pacific with needles stuck in it.

Pud Talbot sat in the chair, getting himself burred, so I almost left but the barber said, “Be just a minute, son.” I figured I better wait in spite of Pud’s ugly yap. The barber had called me son. He was telling a story about Okinawa, something about piles of dead Japanese bodies across the road from piles of dead Americans and his job was to keep the flies off the American piles.

“I waved a fan over twenty-two GIs for seventeen hours,” the barber said. “Not a single fly laid eggs on my buddies.”

I picked up a two-year-old
Time
magazine with John Glenn on the cover. There was a story about how Elizabeth Taylor had eaten a can of bad beans on the
Cleopatra
set and gotten food poisoning. I wondered what Lydia would say if I told her Elizabeth Taylor ate canned beans.

As soon as the barber—who said his name was March—got me in the chair, he did something that nobody who cuts hair ought to do. He pointed to this brown, mushroomy thing nailed to the wall with all the photos and said proudly, “That’s my ear.”

“Oh.”

“Cut it off a Jap at Corregidor. He wasn’t even dead yet, just lay there with his bottom half blown off by a sub-Thompson. His eyes didn’t flinch or nothing when I took the ear.”

“Oh.”

“Those Japs were tough. Had to give them that, they were tough. Why haven’t I seen you before?”

I gave him the general rundown.

“You’re son of the woman in Doc Warden’s place, huh?”

He’d started clipping away with the scissors, which made me nervous, so I didn’t answer for fear of distracting him.

“I hear your mama’s a real pistol.”

I had no idea what that meant, so again I didn’t answer, but March had his speech worked out and anything I said wouldn’t have mattered.

Since then, I’ve discovered there are some people who think one little spot in their life was real and everything else is just meaningless time killing. I’ve met sports heroes like that, and a couple of women obsessed with late pregnancy and childbirth.

March was that way about World War II. He was in the Twenty-fourth Division in Sydney, Australia, then in New Guinea where he saw Japanese who had been cannibalizing their dead. He spent thirty-one days in a hole with another guy.

“That was on Davao. These officers came along and told us they needed the hole and we had to get out but I said, ‘Forget it, sir.’ Front lines weren’t like Fort Bragg. Officers don’t mean nothing up there.”

“Leave the back kind of long.”

He switched to the electric buzzing razor which at least couldn’t draw blood. “Let me give you some advice, son. You’re not too old to hear advice, are you?”

“Right now I need all the advice I can get.”

“Find yourself a war. Not a police thing like we’re piddling with over in Asia, a real war where you can test your mettle and find true men who are true friends.”

“I don’t know many men.”

“There’s nothing like lying in the mud next to a guy all night, knowing you’ll probably die in the morning, to cement a friendship.” He waved the razor in the direction of his picture wall. “Those are my closest relatives. No one who hasn’t been in a war knows the meaning of trust.”

“Are you leaving some on the back?”

March spun the chair around and stared me in the eye. “You hear me, son.”

“Find a war and make friends.”

“That’s right. Test yourself, son. Life means something when you know it can end with one bullet. Be a man, son.”

“Find a war,” I said.

“You’ll never live till you kill someone who’s out to kill you.”

“That’s true.”

Sam Callahan rode his bicycle up Alpine and turned in at the yellow frame house with the neat yard. As he bounded up the porch steps, he reached down to pick up a toy firetruck blocking the door.

“Honey, I’m home.”

Maurey Callahan smiled sweetly from behind her ironing board. “How was your day at the office, dear?”

“A rat race, honey, a real rat race.”

“Why don’t you relax while I fix us some supper.”

“Got to check on my little pal first.” Sam went into the nursery and lifted Sam Jr. from his playpen. “How’s my son today? Did you learn important new skills?”