Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (7 page)

“Ft. Worth and his friend Hank Elkrunner drove me over to Dubois this afternoon. Hank’s part Indian, Blackfoot or Black-feet, something about feet. He knows all this neat stuff about the forest. We found a badger track.”

“You went into the forest? There’s snow, and cold.”

“They had snowshoes. It was a hoot, Sam. I tried something new.”

“What did you try new?”

“Don’t look at me like that, honey bunny. I told you— snowshoeing. It was wholesome.” She kicked off her shoes and padded barefoot into the kitchen, then came back with a glass of water, which was really weird. The only time Lydia ever touched water was to wash down pills.

This time she drained the whole glass. “I thought I would never do anything new again the rest of my life, but now I did. How about that?”

“How about that.”

She came over and gave me a little motherly hug. “Don’t be such a grump, Sam. We’re in this place. Hell hole or not, we might as well admit it and see what there is to see.” I’d been giving her that rap for a month now, but you’d think Lydia was the first person in history to realize it’s more satisfying to live where you are than where you aren’t.

“Did you hear about President Kennedy?” I asked.

She broke the hug and went over to pat Les on the side of the head. “Isn’t it a shame.” Lydia stared off into space and I thought she was dwelling on the pitifulness of a national tragedy. Wrong again. “Did you know coyotes and badgers sometimes run together so they can eat whatever the other one kills?”

“Ft. Worth told you all this nature stuff?”

“Hank. He’s interesting. His great-grandfather was one of only four Cheyennes killed at Little Big Horn. That’s in Montana. Custer bought it there.”

“I know about Custer.”

“Hank says he had it coming.”

“This guy sounds like a mountain of folklore.”

“You know that bucking bronco and cowboy on everyone’s license plate?”

“The ones you think are so stupid?”

“They have names, Steamboat and Stub Farlow. Steamboat is the horse.”

This was too much strangeness all in one day. “Do any of these little items relate to us?”

She snuffed out the cigarette before it was half smoked.

“Sammy, information can be interesting even if it doesn’t affect me personally.”

“That’s not how I was raised.”

I headed for the kitchen to boil mac and cheese water, but something bothered me about the setup. “Did those guys come over here and say ‘Let’s go for a ride’?”

Lydia smiled at me. “I met them at the White Deck. Ft. Worth has a hairy fingertip.”

“You went to the White Deck alone?”

“You don’t expect me to stay in this living room forever, do you?”

“I thought you expected to.”

“Honey bunny, there’s a difference between time out and death. Ask Les, he’s the one told me to get my head off the wall.”

I looked up at Les, wondering if Lydia meant that symbolically or literally. A lot of weird things can happen on a pint of Gilbey’s.

She flipped on the TV. A fuzzy image came on of two people showing the mechanics of a rifle. Lydia went on. “That Dotty’s had a fascinating life. She has a little son she hasn’t seen in two years and a husband in Asia, or somewhere, in the army.”

“You talk to Dot?”

“We have a lot in common.”

You think you’re on top of the deal, then suddenly you find yourself actually over to the side with the view blocked.

I was more disoriented than ever.

Maurey and I discovered a mutual love of reading books. It was like being in Bolivia or someplace foreign and running into the only other person in a thousand miles who speaks English—instant old-home week.

We raved at each other. “Have you read
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
?”

“God, it was great. Have you read
Stranger in a Strange Land
?”

Sunday, Maurey and I discussed the sex stuff in
Diary of Anne Frank
while Petey played fort with the couch cushions. Neither one of us knew exactly what sleeping together meant, we were only sure it meant more than being asleep at the same time in the same place.

“It’s a metaphor,” Maurey said.

“A metaphor for what?”

They were showing the procession as John Kennedy’s body was moved from the White House to the Capitol. It was real sad and dignified. White horses pulled the casket up the street followed by a black horse with empty boots stuck backward through the stirrups.

“Jeeze, what a horse,” Maurey said. “Wouldn’t you love to ride him?”

“Who wouldn’t?” The horse looked like a man-killer to me.

Petey dragged a bunch of dolls and a beat-to-death bear into his fort and pretended they were customers at a drive-up liquor store. Being from North Carolina, I had no idea what that meant until Maurey explained.

“You sure have led a sheltered life,” she said.

“I went to New York City once. I didn’t see any drive-up liquor stores there.”

The literary sex stuff confused us both. Growing up around Lydia, I’d learned the patter early—the hooker laid the John with a Bo Peep fantasy on a half and half—but I didn’t know what went where when the hooker did all this.

Maurey couldn’t even follow it that far. “Bo Peep is about doing it?”

I faked sophistication. “Of course.”

Maurey had read
]ane Eyre
and D. H. Lawrence’s
The Virgin and the Gypsy
. The virgin gets wet and cold in a flood and the gypsy saves her by doing something peculiar.

I told her about the whores in
Catch-22
.

She told me a Hemingway story where an African guide has a double cot and somebody’s wife sneaks out for a couple of hours, then the next day she blows her husband’s head off.

I told her about
The Catcher in the Rye
, which I read because a teacher told me not to.

We finally found common ground with
Tortilla Flat
, in which Danny drags every woman in the Flat into a gully, drinks three gallons of wine, and dies.

“But what happened in the gully?” Maurey asked.

I shrugged. “Seems like a lot of book people die afterward.”

Maurey pointed to the TV. “Here’s the killer.”

“Who are all those other people?”

Boom.
Oswald bought the big one. Right there, live, in front of me and everyone else, one person murdered another one.

“Holy cow,” Maurey said.

Annabel brought in a huge bowl of popcorn and stood in the middle of the family room, staring blankly at the Dallas police wrestling Jack Ruby to the concrete floor. She turned to us. “Who’s ready for a snack?”

Petey twisted the bear’s head until it tore off its body.

***

That night I had my first wet dream. It was king-hell peculiar. Lydia and I were in this department store to buy me some new Wranglers. She held a pair of 26-28s up to my waist and said, “Looks right if they don’t shrink much. Maybe you better try them on.”

I went into the changing booth and Annabel Pierce was sitting on this three-legged stool, naked with Kleenex boxes on both feet. She said, “You didn’t eat the popcorn.”

I couldn’t take off my jeans to try on the new ones with her watching, so I just waited there, holding the pants in front of me, embarrassed because Annabel was old and naked.

She stood up and said, “Here’s what the gypsy did to the virgin,” and she pressed herself against me and kissed me on the lips, a real closed-mouth kiss, felt like kissing the seam on a football.

Lydia banged on the door. “Come on, I want to see the waistline.” Then suddenly I was naked from the navel down, except my socks, and something felt really weird and I woke up with this mess on my stomach.

I wiped myself off with a day-old sweat sock and changed pajamas. In the bathroom, I examined my eyes for signs of jaundice. Me Maw died of jaundice caused by cancer and Caspar said it was hereditary. I checked a mole on my right inner thigh, which I’d been told would change color and fall off if I had polio.

No yellow, no rotting moles. I went in, turned off the TV, and woke up Lydia, which I’d never done before.

She still slept on the couch in an askew post-Gilbey’s position, but at least she’d graduated to a white flannel nightgown. No more waking up fully dressed. Out the window, dawn turned the snow from gray to a light pink. That meant she’d had several hours to process the gin and Valium and might be somewhere near coherent.

I stuck the gooey sock up close to her face. “What’s this?”

Lydia blinked twice, stretched her spine, then made a chewing motion. It was my first experience at watching a woman go from asleep to awake.

“Sammy?”

“Lydia, something weird is going on and I demand an explanation.”

Her eyes focused. “You blew your nose on a sock.”

“No way in the world did this stuff blow out my nose.”

Lydia blinked a couple more times. She touched the goo with her index finger and touched the finger to her tongue. Her eyes woke up. “You jerked off. It’s come.”

I’d heard come-brains and come in your pants, and knew it was connected to the penis, but I’d vaguely figured it meant peeing on yourself. Jerk-off was a term used in sports to denote a lazy screwup. “I didn’t jerk off, Mom. I woke up with this stuff all over me.”

Lydia’s eyes left the sock and went to my face. “You had a wet dream, honey bunny. It’s okay. Boys have them all the time.”

“A wet dream?”

“Were you dreaming right before you woke up?”

I nodded.

“Maybe there was a girl in the dream?”

“She was naked.”

Lydia smiled. “Did you recognize her?”

Something told me to skip that one. “She kissed me and I felt funny.”

Lydia sat up and hugged me. I held the sock out away from her back. “Poor Sammy. It’s a natural stage in life. You just moved a step closer to being grown-up.”

I couldn’t see how gushing pus on my belly made me a grown-up. “Will you get me a Dr Pepper,” Lydia asked. “My mouth is all dried out.”

Staring into the refrigerator, I thought about the trauma I’d been through. This was just the kind of information that doesn’t sneak up on boys with fathers. Back in the living room, Lydia was examining her face in the turned-off television screen.

“Mom, a major fluid is leaking from my body and no one ever mentioned it. Why wasn’t I told?”

She drank about half the D.P. in one pull. “Don’t boys talk in locker rooms?”

“Dothan Talbot threw a rubber at Kim Schmidt once. I know how it fits over the end.”

“Well, that stuff is what the rubber catches. It’s not just for show.”

Outside, the pink snow was turning a different tinted gray and I could make out the Tetons off across the valley floor. “What exactly is this stuff?”

“Do something with it. Mothers and sons aren’t supposed to talk about this with a sock full of come between them on the coffee table.”

I carried the gooey sock into my room and set it on the keyboard of my typewriter. Then I went back and re-asked the question. “Talk, Lydia. I bet every kid my age in the world knows about come and they’re laughing at me, saying I’m a squirrel.”

Lydia made some eye contact with Les. Then she sipped on her bottle. “Come is like sperm in a runny mayonnaise base. It’s where babies come from. That’s why they call it come.”

“You give this stuff to a girl and she makes a baby?”

Lydia thought. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

“Doesn’t it get the girl all messy? I don’t know of any girl would want runny mayonnaise smeared on her.”

Lydia looked at me sadly. I guess ignorance is always sad when it has to be set straight. “The come goes in the girl, honey bunny. You really don’t know, do you? It doesn’t get on the girl—until she stands up, then it runs down the inside of her legs and feels icky.”

I sat down and tried to picture an anatomy I’d never seen. “You stick your dick up where the girl pees? How can millions of people do something they don’t let kids know about?”

“It doesn’t go up where they pee, there’s another tunnel. And sex is practically all anyone talks about.”

“I never heard anyone talk about sticking their dick up a tunnel.”

Lydia lit her first cigarette of the day and blew smoke at the dawn. “People use vague adult terms the kids can’t follow. Make love. Do it. Fuck.”

This was as major as discovering color or water or something crucial to life that everyone else knows about but I hadn’t dreamed possible. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. “Lydia, this gooey dick and tunnel and sex stuff sounds kind of grotesque.”

She blew more smoke. “It’s fun once you get the hang of it.”

She was sixteen, a cheerleader at a large Southern high school, with long legs, blonde hair, and real breasts. She came to Sam Callahan in the early evening, as the sun dipped behind the Tetons. “I hear you can teach me something.”

“Who told you that?”

“Ramona. She says you revolutionized her life.”

“Ramona was a quick learner. Are you prepared to trust me?”

“Yes, Sam, teach me the mysteries of adulthood.”

“It’s not all pleasant. Icky stuff might run down your leg.”

“Teach me, Sam Callahan. Teach me everything.”

***

First thing I wanted to do Monday was tell Maurey what happened during the skipped parts of novels. I made Lydia’s coffee, ate a donut, and carefully wrapped my gooey sock in Saran Wrap just in case Maurey didn’t believe me. I thought about taking it over to the Pierces’ as proof—look, come—but it made a lump in my jeans that made me look squirrelly.

Besides, some things I did know instinctively. How to have sex wasn’t one of them. Knowing enough not to talk dicks and tunnels in front of Annabel was. Not all mothers are equal.

That day, Monday, Annabel finally took an interest in the national tragedy. She sat in the overstuffed recliner, cross-stitching a Christmas scene all morning. “Look at Jackie. I heard she hasn’t cried once all weekend.”

On the television, people filed through the Capitol rotunda on each side of the president’s body, four abreast. They’d been standing in line all night so they could do this, but what surprised me was the ones who didn’t look at the casket. They looked straight ahead or into the network cameras filming them. Why had they waited in line ten hours to do something they weren’t doing?

Maurey noticed it too. “It’s sad,” she whispered. “I don’t see the point.”

To take a shot at honesty here, by then I was somewhat bored with the assassination aftermath. The television had been droning for four days without a single commercial. No matter how much it affected the rest of our lives, Maurey and I were just too young for sustained somberness. I wanted to go outside and build anatomically correct snowboys and girls so we could figure out this sex thing.

Maurey was more interested in Friday’s fight. I wanted to smash Dothan Talbot and his sister in their inbred noses, but Maurey was into forgiveness. “Dothan didn’t know what he meant. It’s his Southern jerk-racist parents. I bet all he hears at home is, ‘I wish Kennedy would kill himself and save us the trouble.’ People talk like that and kids buy it.”

Forgiveness isn’t my deal. “The clown rubbed my face in snow. I want him to die.”

“See. You don’t mean that literally.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Besides, Dothan sees people die all the time on television. He doesn’t know real death from make-believe.”

I glanced at Annabel, checking her attention level on the conversation. Her face was blank newsprint. I tried to remember if her breasts had tits on them last night. The only tits I’d ever seen were in
Playboy
magazine where they looked like bull’s eyes on water balloons. Annabel’s breasts were way smaller than water balloons, at least as far as I could see, so maybe the bull’s eyes would be way smaller too, like little pimples. Imagining Mrs. Pierce’s breasts made me nervous, so I turned back to Maurey. Maurey didn’t have breasts.

“What are you defending this guy for? He’s king-hell stupid and he’s stronger than us. I don’t like people stronger than me.” Too late, I realized I’d said hell in front of Maurey’s mother.

Annabel spoke from over her cross-stitch. “The littlest Talbot is a slow, you know.”

“A slow what?”

Maurey was leaning back against the end of the couch with her feet between us. Whenever I shifted, one of her bare toes touched my leg. The index toe on her left foot was as long as the big toe.

She said, “You know what a slow is. Every grade is divided into two classes, quick and slow. We’re in the quick class.”

“You and I are quick, everyone else seems sort of medium.”

Maurey smiled, my discovery that the girl was a sucker for a compliment. “Everyone is put in slow or quick by the second grade and that’s where they stay.”

“No one ever crosses over?”

“Wanda Martinez went from quick to slow,” Annabel said.

Maurey kicked my leg. “That’s because her daddy rolled their Jeep off the pass and turned Wanda into a retard.”

The television was showing old footage of John and Jackie Kennedy at a dignitary ball. She wore a strapless exotic white thing and leaned toward him, fascinated by what he was saying. John Kennedy looked like a fairy-tale prince. They both had a happy, immortal presence, as if they lived in a special bubble. Then the picture went to a speech John had given in West Berlin. The Germans loved him as much as we did.

“It must be very hard on the Talbots to have a slow in the family,” Annabel said. “I don’t know what your father would have done if you or Petey had turned out slow.”

Maurey straightened her right leg so her ankle was draped over my thigh. “Mr. Talbot doesn’t care that Pud’s a slow. Probably makes him feel like real folks.”