Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (25 page)

The weekend before school let out, the fire siren went off about four in the morning. I lay in bed, staring at the dark corner of the room where three lines from the walls and ceiling came together. The siren wailed up and down a minute or so, then came silence except for a pickup truck speeding up Center toward the volunteer fire building. One pumper truck siren kicked in and headed north out of town, soon followed by a second.

Whenever the volunteer alarm sounded, especially at night, I got goosebumps wondering whose place was on fire—Maurey’s, Hank’s, the junior high. A fire siren late at night is about the saddest sound in the world. I pictured the volunteers groaning “Oh, damn,” as they crawled from the blankets to pull on their pants. Their sleepy-eyed wives mumbled “Be careful, honey,” not knowing if it was a false alarm or their neighbor’s children burning up.

That night I closed my eyes to play which-would-you-rather. Which would you rather have happen, 150,000 Chinese die in an earthquake or Lydia die in a car wreck? Maurey have a baby or Maurey marry me? Caspar let us stay in Wyoming or Caspar let us come home? I ended with me dying of cancer or being buried in an avalanche. Cancer would be slow and painful and pitiful, but an avalanche would be heavy and dark; I wouldn’t be able to breathe or move my arms. I pretended I couldn’t breathe or move my arms and two tons pushed down on my head until I got the king-hell creeps and spent the rest of the night reading this teenage sports fiction book.

***

The next day Maurey and I rode our bikes up to the TM Ranch. We’re talking sixty degrees, sunny, no ice on the road or snow on the valley floor. We’re talking spring.

I wallowed in it. Living without something most of the time means you get a kick when it’s there. By late May, the North Carolina spring is old hat. Nobody cares. But Maurey and I were the weather equivalent of let out of prison. She laughed and tied her hair back in a rubber band. I swerved through every mud puddle on the gravel road so I soon had a wet brown stripe up my back.

“What was the siren about last night?” I asked as we coasted side by side down a hill.

Maurey stood on her pedals. “Probably a grease fire. People dribble grease onto a woodstove and it burns.”

“At four in the morning?”

“Maybe it was creosote.”

“I bet it was worse than that.”

She looked over at me. “What do you want me to say, Sam? The alarm was a trailer fire and eight children were found suffocated dead behind a locked door? Not everything has to be dramatic.”

“Some things do.”

I cut left to scare a squirrel. He stood on his back legs to chew me out.

Maurey giggled. “You and Chuckette were the cutest couple at the sock hop Saturday night. She’s been blooming since that thing came out of her mouth.”

“I don’t want Chuckette to bloom.”

“Face it, Sam. Chuckette’s in love.”

***

We found Buddy in a pasture below the ranch house, working way off next to a big rock and a small herd of horses. Maurey’s face lit up. “There’s my Frostbite.” She stood on the second rail of the buck-and-rail fence and let out an unbelievable whistle—didn’t put her fingers in her mouth or anything. Just blasted like the lunch siren at the carbon paper plant.

All the horses’ ears jerked up, but only one came trotting toward us. Maurey jumped over the fence. “He’s so beautiful. I get goosebumps every time I see him.”

For the record, skewbald means tan-and-white splotches; kind of like Little Joe’s horse on
Bonanza
, only with no black. And Frostbite was a lot bigger than Little Joe’s horse. He had nostril flares almost the size of Les’s hooker twats.

When he was about twenty feet from us, Maurey held up her hand and said, “Stop.”

Frostbite stopped, then he turned and faced Buddy and the other horses.

“Let’s see what he forgot over the winter,” Maurey said. She took off toward the horse.

I said, “Should you run in your condition?”

At full speed Maurey jumped, planted both hands on Frostbite’s butt, and flew onto his back—we’re talking the classic Cisco Kid maneuver here—and in the same motion, Frostbite leaped into action.

I’d been to the Ringling Bros. Circus, I’d seen every Gene Autrey movie made in my lifetime, but I’d never seen anything as natural as Maurey on her horse. With one hand on his mane and the other on his back, she kicked her legs over and bounced both feet off the ground, first on the right side, then on the left. At the end of the pasture they made a tight turn and came roaring back with Maurey holding herself up by her arms between her legs and her feet straight out to the sides. Her hair flowed like Frostbite’s tail. Buddy stopped working to watch.

Maurey rotated, so she was facing the back, then she lifted her body and stood right on her hands.

The girl was almost six months pregnant. I should have been scared to crap for the baby, but I wasn’t because of the look on Maurey’s face. It was neater than before, during, or after her orgasm. Sex or death or teen pregnancy—none of that stuff meant squat to Maurey right then. I’m really glad I got to see her face as she rode Frostbite. I learned something important.

Maurey finished by standing on his bare back and galloping right up to me. Frostbite dug in all four legs as Maurey flew backward into a flip. She bounced once and landed with both feet together and her arms out wide.

I clapped and cheered. Maurey smiled. Her face was red and excited and her breath came in short gasps so I could see her breasts, sort of.

I hopped off the fence. “You never told me you could do that.”

“Yes, I did. Come on, Frostbite, let’s go see Dad.”

I walked fast to keep up as we crossed the pasture. “I mean, you told me, but you didn’t tell me how good at it you are.”

“I’m the best around.”

As we approached, Buddy put both hands on his hips. ‘‘You’re gonna break your neck yet,” he said, but I could tell he was proud. He had on a white T-shirt, jeans, and big black rubber boots with pointed toes. You couldn’t see his mouth for all the beard.

The big rock next to Buddy wasn’t a rock at all. It was a brown horse, lying on her side, hyperventilating. Her belly sucked way in so you could see every rib, then it bloated out. Buddy didn’t seem too disturbed by this so I figured it was a normal horse deal.

Maurey knelt by the horse’s head and scratched her under the chin. “Has Estelle been down long?”

“I was eating lunch and saw her out the window.”

A really odd thing happened. Estelle’s belly rippled and two points shot out of her crotch area, then zipped back in.

Buddy knelt on one knee to peer at her womb. “Damndest thing happened with Lauren Bacall. Her foal came out perfect, except she had no eyeballs.”

The two points shot out again, only farther this time, and when they zipped back they didn’t zip all the way.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Maurey rubbed her hands across the horse’s shoulder. “The front feet. Neat, huh?”

“Neat.”

Estelle’s stomach rippled again and most of two legs and a nose popped out, covered by this white-red puss stuff. It was fairly gross, yet all electric at the same time. Even Buddy’s eyes had a glitter and this must have been everyday stuff to him. My heart was going nuts.

“What happened to Lauren Bacall’s foal?” Maurey asked.

“Had to shoot her. Damndest thing, she had empty eye sockets where the eyeballs should be. Would have been a beautiful horse too.” Buddy reached out and held the two front feet, but he didn’t pull or anything. He seemed satisfied to watch.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the deal. It was amazing, this live thing crawling out of another live thing. I kept thinking about the baby in Maurey, was he in puss, would his feet come out first, would he have eyeballs. Estelle didn’t look in much pain. The whites around her pupils bugged some, and cords in her neck tightened. Once she moved her front legs like she wanted to stand up, but Maurey soothed her back down.

Then her crotch made a slurp sound and the foal slid right out—
plop
—all alive. I wanted to applaud. As Buddy pulled the pussy stuff away from its eyes, the colt had the most astounded look on its face, as if birth was one king-hell of an unexpected event.

Buddy smiled at Maurey. “You want to name it?”

Maurey had a hand on her own stomach. I guess she was thinking of the baby too. Her eyes were glisteny. “How about Dad?”

Buddy looked from her to me and back, then down at the foal. “If you call it for oats, I might come.”

“Dad’s my choice. What sex is it?”

Buddy did a cowboy-type inspection. “Female. Whoever heard of a female named Dad?”

“I did,” Maurey said.

Estelle’s front feet kicked and she made it upright. The gunk hung from her crotch like she was losing guts. One back leg came up two or three times until she managed to step on the gunk, then she walked forward pulling the stuff out; same technique as when you come out of the John with toilet paper stuck on your shoe and you try to scrape it off before anyone sees.

Maurey scratched her horse on the ridge of his nose. “So how’d Frostbite winter so far?”

Buddy glanced at Frostbite, then his eyes followed Estelle as she nuzzled the colt. “He’s a mean bastard, worse than his daddy ever was. Kicked Simon yesterday, like to broke his neck. Petey get over his cold?”

“Petey never had a cold. He was faking to skip school.”

Buddy stood with his big hands on his hips. I thought he was about to say something, but he didn’t. He looked over at the shiny Tetons for a few seconds, then down at the foal named Dad.

“Who’s Simon?” I asked.

“Dog.” Buddy’s hand went to his beard. “You kids want to come up to the house, have some lemonade?”

“I think we’ll walk up Miner Creek a ways. Sam’s never seen a beaver dam.”

***

The pasture was all horse turds so you had to look where you stepped. As we walked toward the creek, Hank drove by on the gravel highway. One arm came out of the driver’s window in a wave. I waved back, glad to see him and wishing he’d pull over and talk, but he didn’t.

“What’s Hank doing?” I asked.

“He found irrigation work up at the Bar Double R. They’re laying pipe in from the river. He ever start coming around again?”

I shook my head no. “Took a week to put the cabin together and get Les back on the wall. Lydia won’t allow his name said in her presence.”

Maurey knelt to pick a yellow flower. “Hank didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I know and so does Lydia, but admitting she screwed up is beyond her scope.”

“Lot of things are beyond Lydia’s scope.”

“We’ll never mess up stuff like our parents did.”

***

The beavers had built three dams, each one upstream bigger than the last. They were solid, too. I’d have bet dynamite wouldn’t put a hole in any of the dams, except maybe the littlest, bottom one. Maurey said dynamite would cut a hole, but the beavers would only chew down more aspen trees and fix it overnight, so there was no use blowing holes in dams.

“Only way to get rid of a beaver is to kill it,” she said.

“Why would you want to get rid of a beaver?”

“They kill trees.”

We sat on a log next to the biggest pond, watching the beaver lodge and waiting for one to pop up.

“Beavers mate for life,” Maurey said. “If you trap the female, the male will die from sadness.”

“People aren’t like that,” I said.

“People will find someone else to screw. That’s why there’s more of us than them.”

She told me the names of all the flowers around the pond and up the hill behind us—larkspur, balsamroot, cinquefoil, bear-berry. Maurey knew what to call everything she saw. I really envied her for that. I hardly ever knew the name of anything I was looking at, and that wasn’t just because I came from North Carolina and didn’t know Wyoming. I hadn’t known what anything was in Greensboro either. We must have had ten or twelve kinds of trees in our backyard at the manor house, and the only one I knew was post oak and Caspar had a Negro cut it down. It would be such an advantage to know what things are.

“Let’s go.” Maurey stood up and held out her hand. I tried to hug her, but she didn’t buy it. She turned sideways, which left me hugging a shoulder and feeling like a squirrel. The butt on my jeans was wet too, from sitting on the log. Hers wasn’t wet and she’d sat right next to me.

“Do you think the baby knows it exists?” she asked.

“How should I know.”

“I don’t remember anything before I was three, so maybe I didn’t know I existed then.”

“I knew I existed the first time Lydia blamed me because she couldn’t get a date.”

***

“I want to show you a nice place,” Maurey said.

“Like a secret spot?”

She nodded and started upstream.

“Have you shown this spot to Dothan?”

She stopped and looked back at me in blue-eyed exasperation. “You never know when to shut up, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“There’s a time to give me crap and a time to keep your mouth shut and this is a time to keep your mouth shut.”

She headed up the trail. I wondered how I was supposed to know which was which. Girls—Chuckette, Maurey, and Lydia anyway—always knew what I was supposed to be doing, and they expected me to know also. Didn’t seem fair.

We came to this log across a ravine kind of thing. The log was big around as my waist, with loose bark on the sides and a few drops of water from spray off the rocks below. Maurey hopped on the log and walked across like it was a sidewalk.

She turned back to me. “This nice place is over here.”

The creek went fast, white, and noisy through the ravine. It was only eight or nine feet below the log; I probably wouldn’t break my neck on the rocks below, but cracked ribs or a concussion seemed way possible.

“How about if I slide down the bank and wade across?”

“The water will freeze your feet off.” She put her hands on her hips—same position as Buddy standing over Estelle. “Come on, Sam. Don’t be a chicken.”

Chicken, squirrel, every time I turned around she was calling me another animal. Peer pressure is a weird thing. It’ll make even a normal kid like me risk his damn neck over something stupid.