Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (19 page)

The world’s most strikingly beautiful baby cooed contentedly and reached for his father’s thick moustache.

Maurey came up beside her men and put an arm across Sam’s shoulders. “He’s the perfect baby. I’m so glad you convinced me to have him.”

Sam stretched his arm around Maurey’s waist and let his hand rest on her round belly, eight months full with the next of their children. “There’s nothing like a family.”

I started into the White Deck but this scattered-looking, gangly man in glasses charged out of the Dupree Art Gallery and said, “You’ve been to the Twenty-one Club.”

He had on dark slacks instead of blue jeans which, in GroVont, made him stick out like a foreigner. I said, “I’ll be fourteen this summer.”

“I mean Fifty-seventh Street, the Guggenheim, the Algonquin Hotel, Baghdad on the Hudson. New York City.”

“I saw a game at Yankee Stadium once.”

“At the very least you are aware of life east of Cheyenne. Come look at my paintings.” He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his long nose and stared down at me eagerly. Any grown-up who wanted to talk to a kid had to be desperate, which made me leery of the deal.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m Dougie Dupree. Perhaps your mother has spoken of me.” He held his hand out for a shake.

“You know my mother?”

The stunned-by-Lydia look came in his eyes. “Come see my works.”

I shrugged and followed his back into the gallery. A card table in the middle of the room was covered by some kind of board game deal involving black-and-white marbles. Paintings of the mid-size type filled the walls. Almost all Teton pictures in this highly visible light, three or four had cheap margarine-colored sun rays pouring down the canyons. One showed a cowboy trying to lasso a skinny little pinto with its ribs showing. The cowboy and horse both looked fairly pitiful.

“I did that one,” Dougie said. The price was $1,300.

“Do you get many customers?”

He pushed up his glasses. “In the summer they move like popcorn. There’s no one at all this time of year, but my uncle owns the place. He doesn’t understand on-season, off-season, so he makes me stay open.”

“Oh.”

“He lives in Florida.”

“That explains it.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit in this room all winter wearing slacks instead of jeans and wishing I was in New York. “How do you know Lydia?”

His eyes got all sly. “We’ve dated casually.”

This surprised me. No one likes a mom who keeps secrets, besides, Lydia never does anything casually. I decided Dougie was lying in his teeth.

He sat at the table and looked sadly down at the board game. “You know the difference between me and your mother?”

I wondered why he played with marbles.

“We both feel superior to the provincial hicks of this area, but she enjoys feeling superior and I don’t. Lydia probably wouldn’t like Manhattan, she couldn’t feel superior there.”

“She could too.”

“I crave intellectual equals, challenging minds. I hate being a snob in this jerkwater outpost of aboriginal quaintness.”

“Lydia likes being a snob.”

He stared at the marbles a long time, as if he’d forgotten I was there. I suppose he was thinking of some flashy club in New York City where the men wore slacks and the women respected brains. I couldn’t decide whether to slip out the door or stay put.

Suddenly, Dougie smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to know go, would you?”

I thought he said “no go,” which didn’t make any more sense than what he did say.

He nodded at the marbles. “Go is an ancient Oriental game which tests the human mind to its very limit—thousands of years older than chess and much more complex.”

I didn’t even know chess. “No, I don’t.”

“That was to be expected. I’ll teach you.”

“I have to eat lunch.”

Dougie pushed his glasses up again. “I’ll be here when you’re ready to learn.”

“Thanks for showing me the paintings. I like the one you did best.”

Dougie beamed. “Give my regards to your mother.”

“Your regards.”

***

The phone rang and Maurey answered. “Callahan residence.”

“Good day, madam. I was wondering if you would be interested in a complete set of Golden Book Encyclopedias of the World, twenty volumes in only twelve easy installments?”

“You’ll have to wait until my husband comes home from the office and ask him. Sam handles all the details of our life.”

“You look sad,” Dot said. “You’re too young to look sad. I’ll bet a strawberry shake would fix you right up.”

Why do adults think kids don’t have a problem in the world that can’t be solved by sugar? “I’d rather have a cheeseburger,” I said.

Dot settled her body into the booth across from me. “You eat a cheeseburger in here almost every day. Doesn’t your mother feed you?”

“I feed her.”

Dot had two uniforms. They were both mostly white, only one had lime-green trim and the other had pink. I preferred the pink, which is what she had on then. It went better with her smile. She also had two little matching hat deals she wore on the supper shift.

She didn’t show any sign of getting up to turn my cheeseburger order in to Max. “You’re too young to be hangdog, Sammy. Start now and think where you’ll be when you get his age.” She thumb-pointed to Oly who was nodded out in his old booth next to the jukebox. I looked at him and wondered where I would be when I got his age. I could think of loads of places worse than that booth. By the time you were that old, you couldn’t have problems anyway, except it would be tough having people look at you and not care you were there.

Oly’d grown a goiter in his neck since Bill died, which made him more unpleasant than ever to look at, but, other than the goiter, his life seemed the same as ever.

“Something happened that I guess I don’t mind, only someone else does and it’s going to unhappen without any say from me. Did that ever happen to you?”

Dot looked at me awhile. It was nice of her not to treat me my age. “You ought to have a say in what happens,” she said.

“I don’t mind it not happening so much as nobody asking me what I’d do if it happened to me.”

“That is a problem.” We sat a few minutes staring into space. I stared at Dot’s hands, which were pretty much normal except for the color. They were way pink, pinker than the trim on her uniform, more like the pink of a person’s gums.

“Any chance of you telling me what it is we’re talking about?” she asked.

I scratched my nose. “I guess Maurey is pregnant. I guess. She thinks maybe she is. Pregnant.”

One of Dot’s hands flew up around mouth level, but otherwise she took it fairly well. She didn’t say anything so I kept going.

“She and Lydia are over in Dubois at the doctor finding out, but it looks kind of like she is.”

Dot’s hand went from her mouth back to the table. “Those questions weren’t just kid curiosity. I thought you two were playing I’ll-show-you-mine, you-show-me-yours.”

“We took the game another step or two.”

“I guess.”

“Now she wants an abortion.”

I looked up at Dot’s face and her ever-present smile was gone. She said, “Isn’t it funny how people who don’t want it get it and people who do don’t.”

“Do you and Jimmy want your little boy?”

“Let me turn in your ticket.”

Dot went to the kitchen and I sat looking at myself in the napkin box. The shiny sides had a design that made my face all twisted and weird, so it was possible to pretend I was a fetus. I opened my mouth in an O which looked fishy, but then I breathed out and the jaw in the napkin box went milky.

Dot brought us both cups of coffee. I filled mine with sugar and milk; she drank hers black.

“So your mother is helping her?” Dot asked. I nodded and blew across my coffee. “How about Maurey’s parents?”

“We’d just as soon not get them involved.”

A smile almost flickered onto Dot’s dimples. “Buddy’ll roast your butt on a branding fire.”

I tried not to visualize the image. “What’s an abortion feel like?”

Dot drank some coffee. “I wouldn’t know, someone told me it’s like having your guts and soul sucked away.” More visualization. I think Dot was embarrassed about using the word soul in conversation. She flushed and looked back at the kitchen as if she hoped my burger would come up.

“Abortions are illegal,” I said.

“There’s a place in Rock Springs, a regular clinic during the week, but on Saturdays and Sundays they do those things to women. I hear it’s disgusting, they wheel the women through three at a time and you can hear the doctor or whoever does it scraping the woman next to you.”

“Scraping?”

“I heard more than one woman on the number-three table freaks out and runs away half-gassed.”

I put more sugar in my coffee. What did she mean, “scraping”? And “gassed”? Did they stick a tool up there and pry loose a dead baby?

“How do you know this stuff?” I asked.

“People think waitresses are deaf. Boy, could I write a book if I had the time.”

“I’m going to write a book someday.”

Once again, Dot didn’t treat me my age. “How about I tell you the true stories and you write the book. We’ll split the money.”

A bell
dinged
and Dot pulled herself out of the booth to go fetch my cheeseburger. After she left, I thought her stories were okay for her, but when I became a writer I was going to make mine up. True stuff isn’t fun enough.

***

I didn’t see Maurey the rest of the day, but Lydia told me the doctor had done a test and we’d know for certain Tuesday.

“What’s an abortion feel like?” I asked.

She gave me her look. “Feels like cutting your fingernails real short.”

I thought about that. “Someone told Dot it’s like having your guts and soul sucked out.”

“You discussed this with Dot?”

I told her about the clinic in Rock Springs and how the third-table woman can hear scraping on the first-table woman when she’s half-gassed.

Lydia went stern. “Sam, as far as Maurey goes, it’s getting her fingernails trimmed. You got that?”

“Why?”

“This won’t be a lark for her. I’ll brook no talk of guts and souls.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am me one more time and I’ll cut off your allowance.”

“What allowance?”

Tuesday afternoon we played Clue. Hank was Professor Plum, I was Colonel Mustard, and Maurey was Miss Scarlet. Lydia sat on the milk crate and smoked cigarettes.

She made fun of us. “The butler did it with a shotgun.”

Hank held his cards with both hands and concentrated. Maurey was understandably distracted and I watched her. She had on a light blue sweater with little loops on the shoulders. Every time the refrigerator kicked on, she’d give a little jump.

Hank didn’t like Clue. “This game takes logical thought and logical thought goes against everything the Blackfeet believe.”

Lydia snorted through the smoke. “Whenever Hank feels inadequate he claims his Indian heritage.”

“Who mentioned inadequate?”

“You. You can’t figure out who killed where with what, so you blame your bloodline.”

Hank had been around Lydia enough to know real criticism from exercising her tongue, which is what this was. Explaining people’s flaws to them was a habit of hers; somebody had to do it.

Hank made a decision. “Mrs. White with a rope in the conservatory.” He looked over at Maurey who showed him a card. “Damn.”

It wasn’t the rope or the conservatory because I had both those cards, so Maurey must have Mrs. White. Whoever killed the guy did it with the lead pipe, I knew that much, and I guessed the billiard room, but I was a ways from the murderer.

“What’s a conservatory?” Maurey asked.

Hank and I looked at each other and shrugged.

“Opposite of a lavoratory,” Lydia said.

I looked at the picture of the conservatory on the Clue board. “I think it’s a library.”

Maurey put her finger on the board. “Here’s the library.”

“It’s a place where people conserve things,” Lydia said.

Maurey rolled and came up four. As she moved Miss Scarlet into the library, the phone rang. We froze in this-is-it poses, Maurey staring at the board and me staring at her amazingly blue eyes.

From the living room, I heard Lydia say “Yes” twice and “Thank you” once, which gave the answer because she wouldn’t have said thank you if the news was good. Lydia came to the door and leaned on the frame and blew smoke at us.

“Positive.”

Hank exhaled, but Maurey and I just sat there. She blinked a couple of times and her eyes glistened. I picked up my Professor Plum piece and turned it over between my fingers.

“Say something,” I said.

Maurey blinked twice more, real fast. “Miss Scarlet, lead pipe, library.” She was right.

***

The next day at lunchtime, Teddy and Dothan got in a king-hell fight over whether some droppings in the school yard were moose or elk. It happened so fast,
zoom
, the yard went from boring to violent.

I heard them arguing, but my main attention, if you could call it attention, was on Chuckette’s complaint that her sister Sugar was being allowed to do something at the age of eleven that Chuckette hadn’t been allowed to do—talk to boys on the phone, I think. Or use hair spray, I don’t know. Chuckette was always upset about something Sugar was allowed to do—when Dothan suddenly tackled Teddy and they rolled across the snow.

Dothan came up on top with his knees on Teddy’s shoulders. Teddy spit chew juice on Dothan’s shirt and neck. By then a bunch of kids circled around, so I had to watch through their legs, but I saw Dothan making Teddy eat whatever kind of droppings were involved.

Maurey stood on the cafeteria steps, watching the fight.

Chuckette caught me watching Maurey. “Maurey Pierce is lucky to have a boyfriend like Dothan.”

I almost asked why, but figured it didn’t matter anyway. If Maurey liked in the right way a kid who made another kid eat animal shit, she would never really like me.

Chuckette went right on. “I bet I’m the only girl in school who would go steady with you. Everyone says you aren’t good enough for me and I’m settling beneath my dignity.”

I looked at Chuckette’s flat face and my scarf around her neck, and felt depressed. “That’s right, Chuckette, I’m not good enough for you.”

“Don’t pout. I hate it when you pout.”

***

Lydia drove over to Dot’s duplex to get the scoop on the Rock Springs deal, then she made several hush-tone phone calls. Maurey was over every evening, only Lydia was her best friend now instead of me. They would sit at the kitchen table and talk quietly while I watched our one station on TV. Whenever I went in there, they’d shut up and stare at me until I left. At least she didn’t run to Dothan Talbot.

I asked Lydia what they talked about and she said, “Girl stuff.”

“Why can’t I listen?”

“Give her a week, honey bunny. She still needs your friendship. Just wait until we clean up the mess made by your dick.”

***

A front came through Friday night, dumping a few inches of fresh snow, so the drive to Rock Springs the next day was even more tense than the usual drive to an abortionist. We loaded up as soon as Annabel left for her weekly bridge-club deal, all three of us in the front seat with Maurey in the middle, and almost immediately she took my hand in hers, which made me feel good. It wasn’t like sexy hand holding—there’d be no jack jobs on this ride—but more like friendship, like she needed to touch someone who liked her. Lydia had never driven on ice before and it took her clear through the Hoback Canyon to realize the brake pedal caused more trouble than it was worth. We slid right through a stop sign, but no one was coming so we didn’t crash.

In Pinedale, Lydia said, “Need a pee?”

I said no and Maurey stared out the window at the road ahead.

The route was the same as the last two hundred miles of our trip out from Carolina in September. Where before I’d seen miles of Wyoming nothingness, now I picked up on details—a line of willows sticking from the snow marked where an irrigation ditch would be if spring ever happened, cottonwoods way off meant ranch houses, the bruise-colored mountains to the east followed the Continental Divide.

The problem was that I didn’t feel right about this abortion deal. I was torn between reality and wouldn’t-it-be-nice. The reality, and I king-hell well knew it, was that seventh-graders are too young to have babies. Maurey was chock-full of potential of doing something in life, and raising a child would make the next few years predictable. She might become Annabel.

Also, Maurey didn’t love me so us being a couple, as in family, was out. And unmarried pregnant girls in small mid-American villages come in for vicious abuse; they’d probably kick us out of junior high.

Buddy would roast my butt on a branding fire.

On the wouldn’t-it-be-nice side was the baby. I’d always wanted to be needed, and, whenever I looked around at people in grocery stores, it always seemed like being part of a family would be neat. If I couldn’t have a father I could be one. It would be a hoot to teach a kid how to lay a bunt down the third-base line.

With a baby, I’d have a connection to Maurey. Even if she didn’t love me in the right way, if we had a child together the right way might happen, or at the least, we’d stay in touch. I didn’t know true love from Dothan’s moose turds, but I was fond of her hair and eyes and little fingers; I didn’t want to lose her, whatever part of her I had.

The bottom reality of the whole deal was that whether I felt right about the abortion or not, nobody asked my opinion.

An antelope—Pushmi and Pullyu’s cousin—ran along next to the Oldsmobile for a few hundred yards, then crossed the road in front of us. His white bottom made a whoosh blur going over the fence.

“We were moving fifty miles per and he beat us,” Lydia said.

“That’s fast,” I said.

Maurey didn’t say anything.

The clinic was a blond-brick box across the street from a Dairy Queen. Same architecture as a Southern Church of Christ, even had one of those Signs on Wheels out front, but where a Church of Christ sign would read
Make your bed in Heaven today for tomorrow there will be no sheets
, or some pithy little saying that sounded great but made no sense to anyone, the clinic sign read
Red Desert Medical Arts Complex
and listed four doctors and an optometrist.

Maurey let go of my hand long enough for us to get out of the car, then she took it back. “Hank says this is a nasty town,” Lydia said. “No place for an Indian.”

The wind was blowing so hard we had to lean together across the parking lot, and when I opened the clinic door it whipped back and whopped against the rubber doorstop.

Lydia checked her reflection in the glass and corrected some stray hair. “No place for a white woman either.”

Maurey’s face looked calm, kind of. She wasn’t panicking or anything. Her tongue pressed against her lower lip making a little bulge in the hard-set line of her mouth. She had on jeans, and the hand that wasn’t holding mine was in her front pocket. Her eyes gave no information.

We stood over by a water fountain while Lydia went to the front desk and talked to a woman with violent orange hair and turquoise jewelry. They studied a sheet of paper and Lydia handed the woman a wad of cash. During the week the clinic was a regular obstetric place for women who wanted babies, so they had this bulletin board covered with snapshots of newborns with each baby’s name and weight written on the white border in blue ink.

Maurey and I stood in front of the bulletin board, looking at the babies. At first, they all seemed the same—wrinkled and rose-colored with squished-up eyes—but then I started seeing differences. Amanda Jen Wayne, 6 lbs. 7 oz., had a widow’s peak. Cody LaMar Jenkins, 9 lbs. 2 oz., had a furrow in his chin you could run a straw through.

Maurey’s hand tightened on mine, but she didn’t say anything. Lydia came back from the desk and tried to get us to sit on this cow udder-colored couch, but Maurey wouldn’t move from in front of the baby bulletin board.

She said, “I’m fine,” which were about the first words she’d said all day.

A door opened behind the desk and a girl not much older than us came through. She smiled. “Come with me and we’ll get you ready.”

Maurey gripped my hand harder and looked at me, then at Lydia. She said, “This is the shits.”

Lydia said, “You’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

I gave her hand a squeeze and let go. The girl pointed to a door off to the right. “The waiting room is through there. She’ll be done in a couple of hours.” Then she led Maurey away.

***

Three Negro men in white shoes took Me Maw away. I was in the bedroom with the round bed, under the bed, waiting for her to be dead. Bed springs are pretty cool if you lie on your back and look up at them. They grow fuzz. I heard the hearse pull up on the driveway and the men joking, teasing each other about someone named Sylvinie.

When the doorbell chimed I crawled out from under the bed to look out the second-floor window at the dark blue hearse with little flags on the corners. The back doors were open. Across the street, the Otake kids dashed around in their bathing suits, playing on a Slip ‘N’ Slide. The whoops and yells that carried across our yard didn’t quite fit the action. Jesse sprayed his sister with the hose, but her scream lagged behind her open mouth.

Two Negroes carried Me Maw out under a plastic sheet on a stretcher thing, with the other Negro and Caspar coming behind. When they were finished sliding Me Maw into the hearse, Caspar tipped each one a dollar. I could see the pink in the bald spot on his head, and his hand which was also pink stretching out with the dollars. The Negroes looked down at their white shoes.

After they drove away, Caspar turned and saw me in the window. I ducked down and slid under the bed.

***

Lydia and I went back out through the wind to the car where she picked up a
Saturday Evening Post
, then we crossed to the Dairy Queen to wait. I had a taco pie, which was this thing like a sloppy joe on a bed of Fritos in a paper boat, and a soft vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate wax. I imagined all the people who had sat in this very Dairy Queen, eating ice cream and waiting for loved ones to finish abortions so they could go home and get out of the wind.

Three high school girls bent over their soda pops watched us and giggled,
Titter, titter
, like doofy birds. All Rock Springs must know what happened over there on Saturdays. They knew I was the sperm father of a baby who would soon join the city sewer system. I wanted them to stop talking about me. It made me nervous, made my butt itch like king-hell, then my whole back and neck. The woman at the counter knew I’d been in the clinic too. They all knew.

Lydia glanced up from her magazine. “Stop fidgeting.”

“I itch.”

“Well, go to the restroom and scratch then.”

The bathroom was past the boothful of girls who knew, and, much as I needed to pee, I couldn’t walk by them. They’d say something—“
Abortion boy
” or “
Where would you be if your mom…
” Something like that. They might even reach out and pinch me.

“I’m going back over and wait in the waiting room.”

Lydia looked across her magazine and raised one eyebrow. “Just don’t fidget around me.”

At the clinic, I found a bathroom without having to ask the red-haired lady at the desk. She would know I was the cause of everything too. After I peed, I stood at the sink running water and studying myself in the mirror. I don’t think I’d ever really concentrated on that before. I mean, I knew what I looked like—a short kid with ears that stuck out, a long forehead and a spooky nose. I could have passed for nine—but I tended to forget. I tended to think of myself as sort of neutral-appearing, as if I could slide through life without being noticed, a face on a baseball card.

Back in the reception room, I didn’t even look at the desk lady. She was probably pointing a finger at me.

Six or seven people waited in the waiting room, and not a one was happy. An older couple who could have been someone’s grandparents sat holding hands. An angry man in a business suit glared at me. A familiar shape with a crewcut stood, facing the door on the other side of the room. He turned and our eyes met and it was Howard Stebbins.