by Tim Sandlin
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 sa
id, “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.
I said, “Coach.”
He said, “Callahan.”
Time froze up, my mouth went aluminum foil. The implications raced—I was dead meat. Caught. Finished in Wyoming. How had he known? It hit that he hadn’t known. His eyes weren’t self-righteously hateful. He was pleading. He was the one with the dead meat.
A low scream came from the back of the clinic, then behind Stebbins, Maurey broke through the door in a white hospital gown. Her animal eyes searched the waiting room and found me.
“Let’s go.”
At her voice, Stebbins turned and Maurey made a gurgle-gasp sound. She ran; he reached out as if to stop her, then she was past him and moving. Everyone could see her full back and butt below the hospital gown strings.
I looked back at Stebbins, and behind him, in the door, stood Maurey’s mother in a white gown of her own. Her face was terrified, ugly; her mouth a gash. She called, “Maurey.”
I said, “Annabel,” and her eyes shifted to me. Then I got out.
17
The first twenty miles north of Rock Springs no one talked. Maurey rode bent over with her face between her knees. At one point she reached up to crank the heater and fan as high as they would go. I looked at her bare back, at the bumpy ridge of the spinal column with the two dips along each side and her thin shoulderblades. There were two strings, one tied around her neck and another that was supposed to tie around her ribs but had come loose.
Lydia glanced at me and narrowed her eyes.
“Her mom was there,” I said, “getting an abortion too. And Coach Stebbins was with her.”
Lydia let this sink in as the high Wyoming plains swept by. A mail truck passed us going south, and some ravens swooped around a roadkill deer.
Lydia wrinkled her nose. “Annabel Pierce had sex?”
Maurey’s head sunk and I heard her say “Daddy,” then she was crying. Her back trembled, contracted with sobs. She cried really loud. I’d never heard honest grief before.
Lydia pulled off the side and held Maurey’s head, pulling hair out of her face. I put my hand on her shoulder blade, for a second, then took it back. I didn’t know if I was part of the problem or the comfort.
The loudness didn’t last long, then came gasps like her breath had been knocked out. She sat up and leaned her head back on the seat, staring open-eyed at the car roof.
“A man was shaving me,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
Lydia said, “Shut up.”
“He was touching me, down there, and chewing gum and it felt dirty. I wanted to get rid of my skin. I looked to the right at the Negro girl who had already been shaved. Her eyes were closed like she was asleep and I thought, wow, I see my first Negro and get my first abortion on the same day.”
Lydia held a Kleenex up to Maurey’s nose and said, “Blow.” After Maurey blew, Lydia cracked her window and threw out the Kleenex.
Maurey sniffed twice. “I turned my head to the left and she was looking at me. I said, ‘Mama, what are you doing here?’ then I realized the man was fixing to shave her too. She said, ‘Oh, honey.’
“I jerked and the man snapped at me. I was afraid to jump up for fear he’d cut me there, I had to lie still but I couldn’t. My own mother . . .” Lydia leaned over and started the car, but didn’t put it in gear.
“The nurse gave the Negro girl a shot, and I knew when she gave me one I’d never be able to move. And Mama kept staring at me. That’s when I screamed.”
Lydia shifted into drive and we eased back onto the highway. The wind blew snow across the road about wheel level so we couldn’t see the pavement but everything a foot off the ground was clear. It ma
de for an unreal effect.
I didn’t understand. “This is impossible. How could Annabel be getting an abortion at the same time and place as Maurey?”
Maurey blinked when I said “abortion.”
Lydia punched the lighter and waited a few seconds, then lit a cigarette, a Kool. “Once you get past the odds of them both being pregnant at the same time, it’s not so hard to figure. This is the only clinic doing them for three hundred miles, that I know of, and it only runs on weekends and we had to come today because of Annabel’s bridge club.”
Maurey still looked at the ceiling. “I bet there never was a bridge club. I bet every Saturday she goes off with Howard Stebbins and fucks all day.” Tears flowed again, only this time with no sound. “And while Daddy’s up taking care of the horses and being alone all winter, she’s naked with Howard on top of her sticking his greasy thing in my mother.”
Maurey’s voice rose when she said “my mother.”
“His filthy thing that just came out of his filthy little wife who gave him those three brats. Annabel Pierce, the perfect home-maker and thing-sucker.”
I had trouble with the picture. Annabel would never allow herself to be seen in an unironed blouse. How could she get naked with a coach? And I suddenly realized what part of this whole thing affected me. Was the abortion off or postponed or what? We’d left Lydia’s money—Caspar’s really—and Maurey’s clothes and shoes back in Rock Springs. They owed us an abortion. Were we talking rain check or blow off?
We drove another thirty miles with each of us lost in our thoughts. My fairly boggled thoughts jumped from Buddy to the baby to how this would change homeroom. The sucker would never blackmail me into coming out for football again. No more licks. Maurey took my hand again in one of hers. I was real happy about that. All I ever wanted was to be needed.
Maurey closed her eyes. Lydia chain-smoked Kools. We passed a cluster of three houses, one mobile home, and a post office with a sign out front that said Eden. One of the houses was surrounded by huge cottonwoods. It had recently been painted yellow and looked strange and kept up in the middle of the white on gray on white winter desert.