by Tim Sandlin
“It’s my way of keeping in touch with the little people, sir.”
***
The cabin was so quiet it was noisy. The toilet ran, the refrigerator kicked on and off like a lawn mower, I opened the back door twice before figuring out the water heater knocked. By 9:30 I knew who was hiding in the swamp and what kind of wine went down in an Italian pool hall.
“Mom?”
Lydia ignored me.
“Lydia?”
“Yes, dear.”
“How can you go so long without peeing?”
“It’s a sign of the upper class.”
“You haven’t moved except to play with the TV in four hours that I know of. Why don’t you go to the bathroom like other people?”
Lydia lit another cigarette, a Lucky Strike this time. “Honey bunny, you read like a guy chasing whiskey with beer.”
Both books lay propped open, face up on my chest. “I like reading two books at once.”
She blew smoke at the moose. “You’re dead,” she said.
The moose stayed cool.
Lydia made her version of a sigh, which is more like the sound you get when you stick a knife in a full can of pop. “I’ve made a decision about this banishment deal, Sam.”
“Should I be told?”
“The way I conducted life back home didn’t work.”
“I’ll say.”
“I’m calling time out. No more connections for a while. I’m declaring myself a temporary emotional catatonic.”
I thought about this. “How’s a catatonic supposed to raise a son?”
Lydia looked down at her long fingers. “We’ll negotiate an arrangement.”
At 10:00 the news came on and we sat watching stories about people in east Idaho. Potatoes were important. Rangers in Grand Teton Park—which GroVont is smack in the middle of—were being plagued by elk poachers. Vice President Johnson was in Vietnam complaining about the food. During the sports, I didn’t recognize the names of any of the teams.
“It’s ten-thirty.”
Lydia smiled. “You mind?”
I went into the kitchen and brought back a pint of Gilbey’s gin and a two-ounce shot glass.
“You be all right?”
“Sure, I’m fine. I think I’ll sleep out here tonight and start unpacking in the morning.”
“I’m going to bed now.” I bent over and kissed her forehead. It was cool and slick. Her hand touched the back of my head.
“Your hair needs cutting.”
“Any barber around here’s going to make me look like one of them.”
“I’ll do it myself. It’ll be like we’re pioneers.”
***
I did the shower and toothbrush thing, ate a children’s multiple vitamin, snuck one of Lydia’s yellow Valiums, and put on my pajamas. I wore pajamas to bed back then. Before I flipped off my light and lay down to wait for the pill to kick in, I stood behind my open door, looking at Lydia through the crack.
She was at the window with the shot glass in her left hand and her right foot propped up on the sill. She stared out a long time. I could see the blank tightness on the side of her face, the twin knots on her neck, and a tiny throb on her temple visible clear across the room. She lifted her right hand and drew something in the fogginess her breath made on the window. I always wonder what she drew.
***
I had a dream that I was a fox and a bunch of uniformed people on horses chased me through a Southern hardwood forest.
Sam’s lungs cried out with the pain of charging headlong down the steep hillside. He tripped over a rotting log and sprawled onto his face. Rolling over quickly, he made it to his knees and crawled through the thick, thorny underbrush and into a weed-choked stream.
He turned west, splashing through the frigid water, using his paws and legs to pull himself upstream. Sam heard the dogs running up and down the bank, baying to each other and their wicked masters. Horses thrashed through the trees. He’d fooled them for the moment. Now to find a safe hole. He waded around a corner and came face to face with the blue-eyed Hitler girl astride a giant, sneering bay. She laughed and raised the rifle to her shoulder.
3
It’s a weird school too. There’s maybe forty, fifty kids to the grade, so seventh, eighth, and ninth are each divided into two classes, slow and quick. It’s a social thing that lasts for life. I got all huffy the first morning because I thought the cowpoke of a principal had slotted me into the slow class, but then I saw the others at lunch hour. I’ve been to South Carolina; I know cousin crossbreeding when I see it.
So right off the bat before I’m even awake, there’s this teacher character with hair he must cut with hedge clippers. I made up a short story in which the guy was drummed out of the Marines for doing something disgusting to a recruit three months ago and his reentry into society hasn’t gone well. The people in charge tucked him away in this God-forgotten valley where nothing he could do would matter.
“He machine-gunned his entire English class, sir.”
“None of those kids would have ever left Wyoming anyway.”
I like to make up short stories; it’s what I do.
The man had the face of a haunted Marine—all hollowed-out surfaces around the eyes, below the cheekbones, the temples. His chin had a cleft you could hang a bra over.
I’d hardly settled into the farthest back desk I could find when he marched over and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Howard Stebbins. I’ll bet you like football.”
“No, sir. I’m from North Carolina.”
Howard laughed like I was a real kidder and slapped me on the elbow. I can’t stand having male people touch me, especially coaches. I never met one yet didn’t like to watch boys take showers.
Along with coaching the junior high team of the season, Stebbins taught seventh-grade English and high school driver’s ed. Lots of coaches teach driver’s ed. I don’t know how he got the English job. Maybe somebody old died.
Howard sat on the corner of his teacher’s desk, looking casual while he talked Huckleberry Finn. “Mark Twain combined high adventure, slapstick comedy, and moral outrage into one monumental work, probably the American novel of the nineteenth century.”
I hope nobody tells Moby Dick. I’d never been as jazzed by Huck and the boys as the young reader is supposed to be anyway. For one thing, the ending sucks eggs. We’re walking down a road a thousand miles from home and buddy Tom Sawyer pops up. “Hey, Huck.” “Hey, Tom.”
Get real, Mark.
Mr. Stebbins asked all these leading questions about Negro and white motivations and is the river thematic, and it didn’t take but about six minutes to figure out that the Nazi girl and I were the only ones who had actually read the book.
This teased-up and sprayed-down hairdo up front had read as far as chapter four—“The Hair-Ball Oracle”—and got hung up. “He says the hair-ball big as a baseball came out of the fourth stomach of an ox. I never heard of a hair-ball in a cow.”
“Well, Charlotte, superstition plays a big part in the book.”
“Daddy’s seen a gallstone big as a fist, but even a idiot could tell a hair-ball from a gallstone.”
Teddy the chewer with the weird belt spoke up. “Maybe it was a coyote. I’ve seen coyote hair-balls would gag an ox.” He was still chewing—right there in class. Had a Maxwell House can to spit into.
“An ox isn’t the same as a cow,” the Nazi girl said. “It’s bigger.”
Charlotte couldn’t be stopped. “Oxes eat grass so their turds are runny, same as a heifer.”
The kid who played third base yesterday held up his hand. His name was Kim Schmidt and that morning before school he’d shown me his one and only God-given talent. He could make a sound exactly, exactly mind you—when Kim showed me the trick he must have said “exactly” six times—exactly the sound a
dog makes when it throws up.
“The German shepherd,” Kim had said, before his mouth went oval and his throat clicked three times, then he made the sound. I believed him.
“The cowdog,” he said. I couldn’t tell the difference; guess you’d have to know your barfing dogs.
Anyhow, Stebbins called on Kim who explained that a hair-ball would be in the first stomach of an ox, not the fourth, and that Jim the Nigger, or Mark Twain, had counted backward.
“Ain’t no hair-balls in no cows,” Charlotte insisted.
Stebbins took a shot at directing the discussion back to theme and character development. “Let’s leave hair-balls for the moment—”
“We haven’t decided about them yet,” Charlotte said.
“—and go on to Twain’s brilliant use of Negro dialect.” I’m not even sure Stebbins had read the book. That “brilliant use of Negro dialect” smacked of the Classic Comics introduction.
“Maurey,” Stebbins asked the Nazi girl. That was her name— Maurey. As in the record-setting base stealer for the Dodgers. “Maurey, what did you think of the way the character spoke?”
Maurey sniffed like the question was beneath her dignity. She was wearing a blue fuzzy thing and her hair came down more on one side than the other, the Jackie Kennedy look. “Nobody really talks that way.”
“Why do you think Twain wrote the dialogue in dialect if no one talks like that?”
“He wanted Huck to seem stupid and Jim even stupider. It was a way to put them down for being hicks.”
The class seemed to buy the rap. Who was I to publicly disagree with a Nazi?
Stebbins wasn’t sure. “So, Maurey, how do you know no one talks the way Twain wrote?”
“I’ve heard Southern accents on TV and they’re nothing like ‘I’se gwine ta hyar a gos, Massa Huck.’ What dope would talk that way?”
I knew better, but I jumped right in without raising my hand. “Huck is from Missouri which isn’t the South, and the book is set before the Civil War. Maybe people back then didn’t talk like they’re on TV.”
She reddened and turned in her seat to stare at me. I’ve seen disdain—nobody can touch Lydia at true disdain—but I’d never seen such intense disdain aimed right at me. “How do you know how people spoke before the Civil War? You’re not a day over eighty.”
Some of the kids sniggered and right off I was in the modern equivalent of school bully beating up the new kid at recess just to prove who’s toughest.
“I’m not even eighty,” I said back in as close to her tone as I could pull off. “I just figure Mark Twain knew more about how Negroes around him every day talked than you do.”
Stebbins opened his book, then shut it again. He cleared his throat. “We know Mark Twain was one of the great proponents of equal rights for all. We appreciate that here in the Equality State.”
I said, “Yeah, but he couldn’t stand a Jew.”
Stebbins looked surprised. “Are you sure?”
“Twain blamed every problem he ever had on Jews.”
A girl up front I hadn’t noticed before spoke up in a semi-Southern accent. “Are you Jewish?”
“No, I’m not Jewish.”
“How do you know Mark Twain hated Jews then?”
“I can read.”
A general murmur circulated the room. Natives were turning ugly. I might go through this and still get beat up at recess.
Maurey’s face had these two white spots on her forehead and her hair bounced when she talked. “How can you say that when you hate Negroes.”
“I don’t hate Negroes.”
Stebbins finally made it to his feet. “But you’re from the South.”
“So.”
“Everyone in the South hates Negroes.” That’s from the teacher. Can you believe it? For a moment I was struck dumb.
“You can’t deny it,” Maurey said.
I looked from face to face. They all looked the same. I had an inkling of what a black person sees in a white world. “Have you ever spoken to a Negro?” I asked her.
Maurey didn’t answer.
“How can you say anything about Negro speech if you’ve never spoken to one?” Mr. Stebbins started to say something, but I cut him right off. “Have you ever seen a Negro, Miss Smarty Pants?”
The smarty-pants deal took things too far, but this was junior high war. If I didn’t shut her down now, I’d spend the next six years in the coat closet.
“Of course I’ve seen Negroes,” she said.
“Where besides TV?”
Teddy spit in his can. “I seen ’em in Denver when we went down Christmas.”
“Did you speak to any?”
Teddy grinned and let juice run down his chin.
The girl up front came to the class rescue. “My daddy knows plenty niggers back home and we hate ’em all.”
“Does every Caucasian in the South hate Negroes?” Maurey asked her.
“I don’t know ’bout Caucasians, but ever’body in Birmingham does. Daddy moved here ’cause niggers got his job.”
Stebbins knew better than to try to control Maurey or me— we were smarter than him—so he tried to pull off some dignity on the little Dixie racist. “We do not call them niggers out West, Florence. They prefer to be known as Negroes.”
“Huck Finn calls the guy Nigger Jim.”
“That’s because Huck is an ignorant hick,” Maurey said. “Hicks talk that way.”
“They’ll always be niggers to me.”
“See.”
Stebbins shut his book with a pop. “Polite people say Negroes.”
I corrected the Marine washout one more time. “Actually, in North Carolina, the younger ones are calling themselves Afro-Americans.”
The whole class busted up at this. Don’t ask me why. What some people think of as funny has always been a mystery to me. Even Stebbins chuckled. “That’s a bit far out, don’t you think.”
I just shrugged. I snuck a look at Maurey and got the scowl to end all scowls. I crossed my eyes at her. She turned around to face the front.
About then the bell rang. Stebbins shuffled up his papers and books. He stared out at the class—not at me, mind you, just vaguely in the air above the third row—and said, “Sam Callahan, I’d like to see you here after sixth period.”
Great. First day of school and I’m being held over to clap erasers.
***
Next came Miss Flanagan and geography, then Mrs. Hinchman and citizenship. She showed us on the chalkboard how to write a check. I’d been writing checks since the third grade.
At lunch hour I skipped the post-cafeteria baseball game. Figured I’d blown that one yesterday; they’d have stuck me in right field again anyway. Hardly anyone under sixteen can hit to the opposite field, and since there aren’t many left-hand batters, right field in junior high is like let’s-get-rid-of-this-guy-so-we-can-talk-about-him.
Instead, I sat on the cafeteria steps and watched Maurey play volleyball. She was pretty good. She was the only girl out there who could serve and didn’t squeal like a stepped-on cat every time the ball came near. The blue thing I’d seen from the back in Stebbins’s class was a pullover-sweater deal. She had on an off-white skirt that came about mid-knee and rose up when she jumped at the net.
Somewhere in there, she realized I was watching. She glanced over a couple of times, then after a bad serve, she turned and stared right back until I looked off at the Tetons.
Sam felt the rock above for a seam, the tiniest crack with which he could pull himself another foot up the sheer face of the mountain. The calf of his left leg began to quiver. Hundreds of feet below, the waterfall crashed down granite walls, roaring like an angry lion hungry for flesh.
Sam had to move. Suddenly, the fingertips of his left hand felt an edge. No wider than a dime, this must be the n
ext line of safety. Groaning, straining, sweating like August in Charleston, Sam pulled himself up higher, ever higher, until finally he stood on the dime-wide ledge.
Okay, next step. A crack slit the rock vertically. If he could work his way into the crack, his feet braced on one side and back on the other, Sam stood a chance of wriggling his way another stage up the impossible north face of the Matterhorn.
His stomach felt the rock give before his ears heard the tearing sound. The thin ledge began to separate from the mountain. It snapped like water dribbled into french-fry grease. With a cry, Sam leapt for the vertical crack. His hands beat against the side of the mountain, his fingernails seemingly digging into the solid stone. Sam froze there for a moment, like in a Roadrunner cartoon when the ledge gives way under the coyote and he hangs suspended in midair just long enough to look at the camera and swallow once.
Then Sam fell to his death. His grandfather would be sorry now.
After lunch came history taught by Miss Barnett who I knew was senile as those old black guys who sit on their porches in Greensboro with Ping-Pong-ball colored eyes and catheters. I supposed they kept her on because she’d been with the school since Wyoming was run by Indians, and no one had the heart to make her stay home.
I didn’t concentrate much. Mostly because I didn’t have to—everyone in class seemed to be taking naps—but also I was somewhat concerned about this after-school discussion with Howard Stebbins. What if he was weird?
Maybe he was just pissed because I knew more about Mark Twain than he did. Or it could be that thing about Twain blaming his problems on the Jews. Maybe Stebbins was Jewish. We had Jews in North Carolina but you couldn’t tell them from anyone else except when they made a big deal out of a holiday or something. Nobody—unless you count a few Klansmen that I don’t count—cared anyway. Lydia’d been to New York City to see her mama’s mama, and she said there you could tell the difference and it mattered for some reason.
When I was nine or so, I heard Caspar say the government had Jewed him out of something or another. I asked Lydia what that meant and she said they’d circumcised him. I believed her, it wasn’t 10:30 yet.