by Tim Sandlin
“Yes, Mom, I’m okay. How’s Dad?”
“He’s okay.”
“And Petey?”
“He’s okay too.”
The man at the cash register said “Next.” He waited a moment, then he reached across the counter and grabbed Annabel’s package. She didn’t want to let go at first, but he gradually eased the box of bags away from her. Annabel’s empty hand fluttered around her neck area. “I clean your room every day.”
Maurey said, “I know.”
***
We ran into Annabel one other time on the mountain road. Lydia had dropped us off at a spot right below the TM fence line where we could play with Maurey’s horse awhile, then cut across to the warm spring without being seen. Maurey said the spring calmed the baby and made her body bearable. I liked it because seeing Maurey’s wet belly was neat. She was just a little girl, still playing kick the can and four square, not even old enough for zits, and yet here was this shiny bowling ball stomach with a pooched-out navel—impossible to deny when she was naked.
I wanted to say “We’re having a child together” over and over until we believed it, but when I started Maurey dunked her head underwater so she couldn’t hear.
“Not listening doesn’t make it go away,” I said.
“Talking about it twenty-four hours a day won’t make it more real.”
Afterward, we hung out by the road waiting for Lydia, who was late, as always. Maurey goo-gooed over Frostbite while I walked the top pole of the buck-and-rail fence. Weird how it was no sweat walking a fence pole when the log over the rushing creek caused anxiety. Whenever a car came along we hid in the dry irrigation ditch, but somehow the Chevelle snuck up on us.
What happened was we heard a truck and hid, only it was Hank going to town. He had a cowboy shirt and a new straw hat. The driver’s door was tied shut with wire, which meant, unless he’d fixed the other side, Hank had crawled in through the window.
After he drove by, I stood up and stared after him, wishing I hadn’t hid—Dougie was passable, but barely, and I missed Hank—and while I was wishing, Annabel came down the hill and caught us in the open.
Maurey said, “Oops.”
Annabel eased to a stop and rolled down her window. Petey leaned over from the backseat to stare at Maurey. He screamed right in Annabel’s ear, “She’s fat.”
Annabel ignored him. “You need a ride?” She looked thinner than she had in the hardware store. Her eye sockets kind of rose up off her face, and her body was being swallowed whole by the parka.
“No, thanks,” Maurey said.
“Why is Maurey so fat?”
Annabel glanced down at Maurey’s body. “She’s been eating french fries.”
“Maurey, you look like a balloon.”
Annabel rolled up the window and drove on down the hill.
***
Maurey Pierce smiled mysteriously to herself as she fondled Sam Callahan’s thing. “I told Dothan pregnant women can’t do it after the seventh month. He couldn’t make me orgasm anyway, so I had to get rid of him.”
Sam Callahan fondly stroked her lush hair. “More tongue there on the bottom.”
Maurey Pierce raised her head and gazed at him with glistening eyes. “Sam, some of your fantasies are bullshit.”
Lydia met Buddy once at the liquor store in Jackson. She and Dougie were buying tequila.
“What was Dad buying?” Maurey asked later in our kitchen.
“Looked like a pint of Jack Daniel’s and a six-pack of Coke. I hope he isn’t planning to mix them.”
Maurey sat at the table drawing a picture of Frostbite. “Did you say anything to him?”
“I told him only a cad would walk away from his daughter in her time of need.”
“You called my father a cad?”
“He didn’t deny it.”
“What’d he say?”
“He wanted to know what doctor you’re going to, are you eating right, usual parent stuff.”
Maurey bent over the picture and didn’t raise her head when she asked, “Does he miss me?”
“Buddy wants to apologize and bring you back home but he can’t figure what to apologize for since you’re the one who got pregnant.”
Maurey looked up at Lydia. “He said that?”
“No. I could tell by his eyes.”
***
The one nice thing about being ostracized by a whole town is people don’t crowd you. They give you lots of room at the Pioneer Days Rodeo, and I, for one, appreciated it. The weather was king-hell hot—a full 125 degrees hotter than it had been New Year’s Eve, right before Maurey’s first orgasm. How can people survive in such a spread?
Last winter I would have given everything Caspar owned to feel warmth again, but now all I wanted was shade.
“North Carolina was never this hot,” I said to Lydia.
“Sure, it was. We simply didn’t attend the rodeo in Greensboro. Civilized humans stayed inside under the air conditioner.”
Dougie perked up some at the word civilized. His Ban-Lon shirt had the biggest pit stains I’d ever seen and his face was sunburning by the moment.
“You oughta get a hat,” I told him. I had on a used straw Stetson Delores had given me that morning. She showed me how to slope the brim into a V so water and snow wouldn’t collect and dump when you look down at your hands.
“It’ll never snow again,” I said.
“That’s the spirit.”
The Callahan gang sat in a row—Dougie, Lydia, Delores, me, Maurey, and Dothan—at the top of the bleachers with five or six feet of breathing space on all sides. And five or six feet was a lot. Everyone in the county plus a smattering of into-the-local-scene tourists were packed in those bleachers, sweating all over each other. Buddy, Annabel, and Petey sat right off the rail by the bucking chutes with Stebbins and his odd brood three rows behind them. Buddy was big and hairy as ever. If he knew Maurey was nearby he didn’t let on any. Annabel had traded in the blue parka for a turtleneck sweater. I couldn’t believe it.
Between the two families, a tour group of senior citizens from Omaha, Nebraska, fanned themselves with their Wyoming Activities guides. I counted—thirty-five blue hairs and one bald man.
Maurey saw them too and pointed out the irony to Dothan. “Senior citizen tours are always women. You think men don’t live that long or they refuse to ride buses?”
Irony wasted, Dothan grunted and popped open a warm Coors. I wasn’t just happy as a lark about his presence in the Callahan gang in the first place. Dot had heard rumors that he was the real father of Maurey’s baby; letting him hang out with us would only fuel that kind of disgusting innuendo. I could just see me paying for the baby—or Lydia through Caspar paying for the baby—and me changing diapers, teaching it to read, playing tooth fairy to it, while county lore held that Dothan’s sperm produced it.
They’d be calling me the house-virgin. If forced to choose, I’d rather get the kid than the credit, but I deserved both. After all, Dothan got the girl.
Maurey kept bumping her shoulder into him and touching his knee. To make her jealous, I let Delores touch my knee while I leaned over and whispered in her ear, and I laughed way loud when she said I had such pretty hair and ran her fingernails behind my ear.
Delores was into her black look, complete with a black cowhide flask she wore on a thong over her shoulder like a purse. When she leaned toward me I could see her black panties under her short black skirt.
“Mex-cans were right,” she said. “Nothing like tequila to take the heat off.”
“Let me try some.”
The grand entry parade was colorful—lots of flags, and Shriners in tiny cars, and decked-out cowgirls in flashy Western wear. The difference between these healthy girls and the Southern types, besides wide shoulders and competency, was that the cowgirls spent more
time grooming their horses’ tails than their own hair. You could tell. The girls were pretty, for the most part, but the horses were king-hell amazing. Coats glittered, heads tossed and snorted, front feet pranced for the fun of prancing. That was a proud bunch of animals.
Maurey punched me on the shoulder. “If it wasn’t for you, Frostbite and I would be out there.” Her voice was friendlylike, so I took it more as a comment than criticism. It was easy to picture Maurey on a showoff horse. She had the perfect posture for cow-girling.
Mom can’t stand it when people take something seriously that she thinks is silly. The thought that a cowboy is admired and considered hot stuff because he can rope a calf or stay on a horse makes Lydia gag.
“That man is strutting.” She pointed to a skinny bowlegged kid named Neb Larks who’d just been dumped in the dirt by a bareback Appaloosa. “I can’t abide strutting. He thinks all eyes are on his crotch and he’s proved his manhood.”
“All eyes are on his crotch,” Delores pointed out.
My eyes were on his jeans flapping off his butt. The kid had no ass at all, just loose jeans with a round Copenhagen-can imprint worn into the right back pocket.
Lydia was on a roll. “The timed riding of a bucking horse is nothing more than competitive sex. Proof that the man can subjugate anything wild and beautiful and free if he can just get it between his legs.”
“Isn’t the man generally between the woman’s legs?” I asked.
Delores’s hand squeezed my thigh. “What gets me is they want a belt buckle for lasting eight seconds.”
Dougie sniffed. On top of his sunburn, he had bad hay fever. “A real man doesn’t have to prove his manhood in public.”
“How would you know?” Lydia asked.
She kept up a running commentary on gene pools—“That boy’s parents were siblings. Look at his chin, how can they let him out of the house with a chin that cries incest”—and sexual preferences—“Homosexuals, they’re all latent homosexuals”— clear through bareback, saddle broncs, and calf roping.
She found the ropers especially disgusting. “They’re child molesters. At least the horses outweigh their subjugators. This is baby rape.”
“What’s a subjugator?” Dothan asked.
I gave him Lydia’s Lord-why-do-I-suffer-fools look but he didn’t care. He asked Maurey. “How often does she shut up?”
Maurey laughed like this was the pithiest comment she’d heard in days. I decided to ask Delores if I could see her naked later.
***
When it came time for bulldogging, the P.A. man said the first entry was Hank Elkrunner with Ft. Worth Jones as his hazer. There was a gap of time I used to look out at the cemetery, then the yearling, Hank, and Ft. Worth exploded into the arena. I saw the calf’s eyes first, all wet, black and white, bugged in terror, then I saw Hank’s hair. It’d always been longer than a white guy’s, but now it flowed back in the wind like a black mane.
Hank came off his horse fast and violent, lifted the yearling, shoved in a leg, and slapped it to the ground—Bam. Happened so quick, by the time I realized it was over, Hank was swatting dust off his chaps as he walked back to his horse and Ft. Worth was grinning at some girls in Rexburgh, Idaho, letter jackets.
I looked over at Lydia whose face had gone pale blank and said, “Twice I asked Ft. Worth how he spells his first name and both times he said, ‘F-T period, like the town,’ only you don’t spell the town F-T period at all. It’s F-O-R-T, Fort.”
Lydia ignored me, as usual, so I went on. “You think I should tell him he’s been misspelling his name all his life?”
Dougie gingerly touched his shrimp-red neck. “So what perversion do bulldoggers prefer? You’ve rated everyone else by their choice of competition.”
Lydia blinked a couple times and kind of shook herself awake. “They need a hazer, someone to position the woman before they throw her on her back.”
“Looked like a stud to me,” Delores said.
Lydia finally shut up.
During barrel racing Delores put her hand on my leg. “I need a Coke.”
Dougie squinted down the line. “Coca-Cola and tequila don’t mix properly. You’ll awaken with a hangover.”
“I’d think I was sick if I didn’t awaken with a hangover. Sam, honey, go get us two Cokes with lots of ice.”
“Can I wait till after the girls finish? This is neat.”
She dug her fingernails into my thigh. “I want a Coke with lots of ice, now.”
***
At least behind the bleachers was shady. The concession stand consisted of a card table and a cigar box, three coolers of bottled pop floating in water, and a garbage pail full of ice. Chuckette Morris and Rodney Cannelioski sat on stumps behind the card table, going rapturous on each other’s eyes.
I said, “Two Cokes, lots of ice.”
Chuckette stood up. “My boyfriend and I are in love.”
“Congratulations.” I meant it.
“Rodney gave me his jacket. He’s a gentleman.”
“Chuck, it was thirty below zero when you wanted my jacket. Anybody can be a gentleman in July.”
“Don’t call her Chuck,” Rodney said. “I’m the only one allowed to call my girlfriend Chuck.”
I couldn’t see how any girl could like Rodney over me, even if I didn’t want her to like me. “Can I have my Cokes?”
“Only if you apologize,” Chuckette said.
“For calling you Chuck?”
“For everything awful you ever did to me.”
I wasn’t sorry for anything awful I ever did except not nipping that going-steady stuff in the bud, but she was holding Delores’s Cokes hostage. “I’m sorry I got Maurey pregnant while I was going steady with you.”
Chuckette filled two wax-coated cups with ice. “You better not ever French kiss with my sister.”
“I’ll never French kiss with Sugar.”
“That’ll be forty cents.”
Back up in the stands, Delores held her fingers across the top of her cup and poured the Coke under the bleachers—got some kids who were crawling around down there looking up at beaver shots right on their faces.
I said, “I thought you were desperate for a Coke.”
“I was desperate for ice.” She leaned over with her face up against my ear and whispered in a voice that smelled of tequila, “Here’s how real Mexican women cool down on a hot day.”
Delores dug two fingers into her cup and pulled out an ice cube. Her hand disappeared under the black shiny skirt, moved up and around some, then came back empty. “Ta-da.” She opened her palm to show me the empty hand.
I drank about half my Coke in one pull. “Do all women pop ice up their tunnels?”
Delores giggled and touched my hair. “Of course.”
***
Something happened during the bull rides, the upshot of which was to affect my own personal life, although the way things were headed, the upshot was probably only a matter of time. The announcer said Neb Larks had drawn a Brahma named Tetanus, and while Maurey explained tetanus to Dothan, and Lydia said, “The mind boggles at the thought of this boy’s sexual preference,” they pulled open the chute and cut Tetanus loose.
I plain don’t care for sports where it helps to be short and skinny—horse racing, high school wrestling—but at least in those sports there’s a reason for staying underweight. My theory is bull riders ride bulls because being small has given them a personality disorder.
Tetanus came out spinning clockwise along the fence, each flying hoof as big as Neb Lark’s head. The bull planted his front feet and rag-dolled Neb into the air, where he twisted, bent forward, and came down face first on a rising horn. It was like exploding a blood-gorged water balloon. Splat. Red foam sprayed everywhere.
Tetanus’s front end soared again and for one remarkable instant
Neb lay lengthwise along the bull’s back, his runny crimson face aimed at the sun, then Tetanus popped and Neb flew over the fence into Annabel Pierce’s lap.
People who love rodeo love this stuff. Petey screamed, Buddy grabbed Neb by the shoulders and pushed a bandana into his face. The clowns came over the fence, half the senior citizens fell back and the other half pressed forward. Only Tetanus and Annabel stayed sedate. The bull wandered across the arena, calm as an Irish moo-cow; Annabel smiled slightly and stared vaguely into space. Her head seemed disengaged from her body where Neb lay gushing blood.
Maurey’s hand gripped my arm. “Mom’s not going to like this.”
“She looks okay.”
An ancient, white International Travelall ambulance eased through a gate as Tetanus eased out. The clowns and Buddy propped Neb up to probe under the blood, looking for the hole in his face. The one eye I could see didn’t register pain, more like wonderment. They held under his armpits and feet and lifted him back across the fence. Buddy got in the ambulance first and gently pulled while the clowns guided Neb in.
“This is exciting.” Lydia’s face was flushed and alert. Blood brings that out in her.
“I might ought to see about Mom,” Maurey said.
“I’ll come with you.”
Maurey was too pregnant to see her feet, so she needed help with the bleacher steps. By the time we felt our way to ground level, the ambulance had pulled a U-ey and was blaring across the arena, siren wailing. The siren seemed unnecessary.
All eyes were on the ambulance and no one but Maurey and me saw Annabel dig into her purse and come out with a hand full of Kleenex. She dropped to her knees, spit on the Kleenex, and started scrubbing blood.
She chirped, sing-song-like. “Have to clean this floor before Buddy gets home. A man’s work goes from rising to setting sun, but a woman’s work is never done. Never had a flow this heavy before. Buddy will be angry, he doesn’t want children…”
Maurey knelt, which was a trick, and held one of Annabel’s wrists. “Mama, it’s okay, leave the floors for later.”
“Can’t let Buddy see tracks on the linoleum.”
“She’s nuts.” Howard Stebbins stood a row up from me. “She’s nuts, ought to be locked up.”