by Tim Sandlin
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?”
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 looke
d 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.”
15
“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. Y
ou 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?”
16
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.