by Tim Sandlin
Maurey’s eyes blazed as she turned on him. “It’s your fault.”
“No more than you.”
“What’s she talking about?” Howard’s wife asked.
Annabel spotted the blood on her turtleneck. “God, he’s back.” She was up, tearing the sweater off over her head. Maurey jumped toward her; I saw hands battling each other, then Annabel was on her back tearing her jeans off. She kept yelling, “My baby, my baby, you can have my baby.”
Dothan stood on my other side, amazed. “Her pussy’s shaved.”
Every rib showed; her hips were shovels pushing out skin. Maurey fumbled with Annabel’s clothes, trying to force them back on. Petey cried. Everyone else kind of stood there in a semicircle, staring at this emaciated skeleton woman. Now that her clothes were off, all except her bra, Annabel seemed to want her skin off too. She scratched at her thighs, then dug into her crotch. Her panicked face turned from person to person in the crowd, searching for someone, finding Coach Stebbins. “You tore my baby, you killed my baby.”
All Stebbins’s nightmares came true at once.
His wife whined. “What’s she mean, Howie?”
Annabel howled, “Abortion.”
As Maurey moved forward into the pool of blood to get hold of her mom, Annabel went into a crouch. “Where’s Buddy. I have to find Buddy.”
“He went to the hospital,” Maurey said.
Annabel put her hand on the top fence rail, vaulted across into the arena, and took off.
Maurey said, “Holy shit.”
She’d have looked better totally naked. As it was, in nothing but her bra, she looked pitiful. Private hell had gone public.
Twenty yards into the arena, Hank roped her—caught both feet in the loop and jerked. Then he was by her body, covering it with a horse blanket. Since Maurey couldn’t jump the fence, we circled to a gate and crossed in front of the chutes. The crowd around Annabel parted, giving us a straight view of her curled-up body. She lay sniffling, mumbling, with her knees tucked up to her chest and her hands holding the rope behind her legs. Hank held her head up and brushed dirt from her nostrils.
“You didn’t have to rope her,” Maurey said.
He looked up at us. “You’d rather the whole county chase her like a calf scramble?”
“I guess not.”
“I figure the sooner this is over the better.”
Annabel put her face up against Hank’s shirt and sobbed.
***
As the junior high cheerleader drew the clean sheet up to cover her developing bosom, sweat steamed off her forehead. “Sam Callahan, you get me so hot I can scarcely stand it.”
Sam Callahan left the bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen where he opened the freezer. Back in the bedroom, he set an ice bucket on his night stand. “Here, honey,” he said. “I’ll show you what the older women do when I make them hot.”
Hank and Maurey wrapped Annabel in blankets and got her into Hank’s truck. Annabel seemed to have passed through something and come out on the other side dead. She breathed, but that was all. She didn’t move or speak or have any expression on her face. Hank had to arrange her feet around the gear shift, then fold her arms over the blankets.
After I helped Maurey into the passenger side—the door Hank had fixed—they followed Buddy’s tracks off to the hospital in Jackson, and Lydia, Dougie, and I retreated to the White Deck where half the trucks in the county had gathered. I don’t know where Delores and Dothan got off to, I only hoped they hadn’t gone off together.
Lydia sent Dougie around to bum the last three empty chairs in the place, but we had to share a table with two Mormon missionaries in white shirts and skinny ties. Lydia hates all forms of purposeful innocence. She looked around the crowded cafe and said, “Who do you have to fuck to get a cup of coffee in this joint?”
One missionary blushed, but he took it. The other one looked down and opened a Book of Mormon. Lydia would have to try harder than “fuck” to shake these two.
A bunch of college boys from Montana sat on most of the stools, and I could see tension between them and the two booths that held Ft. Worth and his gang of rednecks. Ft. Worth had talked the Rexburgh girls into sitting with him, and, from the drift, I figured the Idaho girls came to the rodeo with the Montana boys and the Montana boys felt infringed. They didn’t say anything out-front ugly, but they acted surly—kept demanding service in loud voices as if they were being put upon.
I decided to help Lydia with the missionaries. “If a girl shaves the curly hair from between her legs, does it always grow back?”
Lydia checked her teeth in the butter knife. “Leg hair comes back faster the more you shave it, but I don’t know about crotch, I never shaved mine. Dougie, you ever shave your pubics?”
“No, I never shaved my pubics.” Dougie had sissy hands. How could a person go to a rodeo and sweat tremendous pit stains yet still come out with manicured hands? The missionaries had rougher hands than Dougie.
“Maurey’s grew back,” I said, “but Annabel was smooth today.”
Dougie blew his runny nose on a napkin. “And what does Annabel’s smooth crotch signify?”
The Montana boys were getting more obnoxious about the lack of service. I hoped for a fight. “When they shaved Ft. Worth’s arm, the hair grew back even though the skin had moved to his finger.”
Lydia breathed on the knife and wiped it on the tail of her shirt. “Maybe Annabel’s been shaving herself ever since the abortion.” She smiled at the missionaries. “Do Mormons shave their groins after abortions?”
The one with the book stood up. “They’ll never serve us here, LaMar. Let’s go someplace where we can avoid religious persecution.”
“I just asked about shaving clitori.”
I noticed something. “It’s not religious persecution, nobody’s been waited on.” Not a table in the room even had menus. Ft. Worth stepped behind the counter and helped himself to the coffeepot, much to the indignation of the Montana boys, so his table had coffee, but I hadn’t seen anyone who worked at the White Deck since we came in.
I pushed back my chair. “Think I’ll go look for the waitress.”
Dougie sniffed. “She’s probably committing unnatural acts with the cook.”
“You just went off my list,” I said. Even if he was Lydia’s boyfriend, I didn’t have to listen to anyone bad-mouth Dot. I’d been considering it for a month, but now I knew the time had come to move Dougie Dupree down the road.
I worked out various ways to handle his expulsion from the family unit as I crossed in front of the cereal pyramid and pushed through the swinging doors, which meant I wasn’t all that alert, but right away I felt something weird in the kitchen. Dot sat on a ten-gallon bucket of burger pickles with her head down so I couldn’t see her face. Max sat in front of her on a same-size bucket of mayonnaise and a man in a uniform stood by the grill, staring down at a burned steak.
The man said, “I hate my job.”
“The restaurant is full of people,” I said.
Max ran his hand over his nearly bald scalp. He looked more lost than ever. “We’re closed. The people should go home.”
My stomach got a real sick feeling. “What’s the matter? Dot, what is it?”
When Dot lifted her face, she had a tear track off her right eye. She looked at me and tried to smile but couldn’t. “They took my Jimmy.”
I sat on the floor. First Annabel and now this, nothing made sense. “Took? Who took Jimmy?”
The man at the grill seemed to be speaking to the steak. “He was killed in action, that’s all I know. The officer accompanying the body sometimes has more details. I just notify the kin. In ROTC they never said anything about notification.”
“Killed?”
Max reached over and touched Dot on her knuckle. She still stared at me. “What do I do now, Sa
mmy?”
I hadn’t even known Jimmy. I was thirteen, about to be a father. I didn’t know what she should do now.
Behind me, Lydia burst through the swinging door. “Who do you have to fuck to get a cup of coffee in this joint?”
26
This guy Jimmy went to high school with played the saddest version of “Taps” anyone ever played on the harmonica. You can do that with a harmonica if you really feel bad. King-hell despair dripped off each mournful note till, except for Lydia and Dot’s son, there wasn’t a dry eye in the cemetery.
“You ever see the movie Shane?” Maurey asked. We stood back a ways by the cottonwood tree—same place we’d stood at Bill’s funeral. Everything was the same except that was winter and Maurey wasn’t eight-months-and-some pregnant when they covered Bill.
Clouds blew around over by the Tetons, but I was hot and itchy from my clip-on tie and suit coat. “Sure. Alan Ladd. The kid hollering ‘Shane, come back. Mother wants you.’”
“That guy played ‘Dixie’ at a funeral in the movie. They filmed it here in this cemetery.”
“Neat.” Although it wasn’t all that neat. Whenever I see something really emotional, I like to think it’s spontaneous and never happened before. This harmonica player had practice at ripping heart strings.
“Who’re the old people?” Lydia asked. Lydia had actually come to the thing for Jimmy. She put on this dark, shiny dress and sunglasses and dragged Dougie away from the gallery. I think she was motivated by loyalty to Dot, which showed how much Lydia had changed since we came to Wyoming. She never had time for Southern women.
Maurey wore this top that looked like an open umbrella and a short skirt. From the knees down she looked thirteen and not a bit pregnant. “That’s Dot’s parents. They used to live here but the Park Service took their house. He sells siding in Moscow, Idaho, now. The shrunk-up old lady is Jimmy’s grandma who raised him.” The mom kept pulling Dot’s son Jacob off the dirt pile, but every time she got him down he scooted right back up. Cute kid, as kids go. Had a lovable chubbiness and dark, dark eyebrows. Reminded me of John-John at Kennedy’s TV funeral.
I unbuttoned my top shirt button behind the clip-on tie. “I wonder why Dot’s not raising him.”
Maurey shrugged. Lydia said, “Cause she’s smarter than me.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said, though I wasn’t sure. Normal people go all appreciative of live loved ones at these deals, but I think death just scared Lydia into getting tougher.
After the preacher said whatever prayer you say about dead people, a man in a uniform took the flag off the casket and handed one end to the harmonica player. The army casket was silver and smooth, like a miniature Airstream trailer. Soapley’s trailer before he painted it. It was nothing like the two caskets I’d seen before in my life.
The uniformed guy and the harmonica player did this folding ritual, then the uniformed guy handed the flag to Dot, who stared at it as if she didn’t know what it was.
Dot’s face had lost like five pounds in the four days since the rodeo. More than pounds, her light beam had gone under, she’d lost that inner-cheer thing that made her bright and beautiful. Her posture was shot to hell. She reached for Jacob, as if to prove he was there, but he pulled away and scrambled up the grave dirt.
The black clouds piled high behind the Tetons all the way to Yellowstone and big forks flashed every minute or so. After a flash, I counted to twelve before thunder rolled over the cemetery. Dougie blew his hay-fevery nose. “If they don’t finish this we’ll be struck by lightning and everyone will die at a funeral.”
Lydia kind of sighed behind her sunglasses. “Shut up, Doug.”
I’d been to one winter funeral and one summer funeral, and if death is inevitable like Maurey keeps telling me, I’d rather die in summer. Nobody should be left underground when the dirt is frozen.
Dot’s fingers touched the smooth coffin. Her lips moved awhile, then she took Jacob by the hand and walked around saying thank you to the clusters of people who had come to tell Jimmy good-bye.
That part even moved Lydia. “Jesus,” she said. “Only Dot would remember to be courteous at her own husband’s funeral.”
Maurey said, “I wish I could have the baby this minute.”
Dot hugged Hank, then Coach Stebbins who was there without his wife. They’d both been pallbearers, along with four other guys from the only GroVont basketball team who ever made the state finals. Jimmy was the first guy from the team to turn up dead.
Maurey stood with her hands on her extended belly. “Dot’s son will never know his daddy. That’s kind of sad.”
“I never knew my daddy and I’m okay.”
Maurey and Lydia both said the same thing at the same time: “Says who?” Even at a grief gathering, my women stayed consistent.
Somebody gave Jacob a Tootsie Pop that he tried to unwrap as Dot led him over to our little group. He pulled free from her to use both hands on the job, which I could tell made Dot insecure. She wanted to touch him at all times.
Dot stood in front of us, looking torn. She was the kind of person who thought she owed the world cheerfulness, as if by not smiling and laughing she was letting down her part of the load. But she couldn’t smile now, and I know that embarrassed her.
“Well.” Her shoulders went up and down. “How’s Annabel doing?”
Maurey shifted her stomach weight from one leg to the other. “Dad’s taking her to a hospital in Salt Lake today. She still won’t talk or wear clothes.”
“When Annabel comes out of the hospital, you forgive her. Hear me, Maurey?”
What could Maurey say? Dot’s husband was dead, so she couldn’t very well disagree. Bereaved people are supposed to have special insight into what really matters and what doesn’t. Besides, Dot was probably right.
No one spoke for an awkward time, then Dot touched Maurey’s belly. “And take care of that baby. No milkshakes and coffee for breakfast.”
Maurey went into Dot’s arms. “Won’t you be here to take care of me?”
Dot looked over Maurey’s shoulders right into my eyes. I put my hands in my pockets, then took them out. My turn was coming and I didn’t know if she’d expect a hug or what. “I’m going to Moscow for a while,” Dot said. “All that’s left of Jimmy is Jacob and I want to watch him grow up.”
She left Maurey to come to me and the hug was natural as water. Her back felt soft under my hands. “The White Deck won’t last without you,” I said.
“I won’t last without Jacob.” At the sound of his name, Jacob looked up and grinned a sticky smile.
After Dot hugged Lydia, she stood back with her hands on Mom’s shoulders. “If you find a good man, don’t ever let him go. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
Dot’s head nodded up and down a few times before she continued. “Pride won’t keep you warm after you lose him forever.”
Lydia repeated, “Yes.”
Jacob dropped his Tootsie Pop in the dirt and burst into tears. Dot did another moment of intense eye-lock with Lydia, then she turned and bent over her son. “It’s okay, don’t cry, we’ll wash it off and make it good as new.”
Jacob stomped his right foot. “No.”
“Look,” Dot said. She put the Tootsie Pop in her mouth and drew it out clean. “See. All new. If you don’t want to eat it, I will.”
“Mine.” Crisis over, Dot led Jacob back to where her parents waited. As she passed the casket, she gave it one last pat, then she picked up Jacob and got in a car.
Dougie blew his nose again, sounded like our water heater when you crank the bathtub hot spigot. “What was all that about?”
Lydia bit her lower lip as she stared off at the lightning behind the Tetons. When she goes into one of those thought trances, I can almost see the process in her eyebrows. They scrunch down behind the sunglasses while
she faces whatever it is she’s suddenly come upon, then, when she makes her decision, they spread wide and calm.
Dougie talked to Maurey and me through his handkerchief. “What was that ‘Know what I mean’ stuff?”
“Got me,” I said.
Lydia’s head kind of snapped. She turned to Dougie and took off her sunglasses, her eyebrows at ease. “It means, Dougie, that you’re a nice fella, but you’re not a good man.”
Dougie drew up as tall as possible. “I don’t get it.”
“It means we had our jollies, the fun is over. It means thanks a lot, it was real.” She shook his hand.
“Are we separating?”
“That’s one way to put it. People die, Dougie, and I’d hate like hell for you to be my last man. See you around.”
Lydia walked over to the basketball team that was still sulking around the grave. Coach Stebbins fiddled with the pulley deal holding the cylinder over the hole while Hank and the others loosened straps. Lydia walked up to Hank, put her hands on both sides of his face, and kissed him. He jerked back and turned around. Lydia followed him around the circle, almost stumbled into the hole. He had to catch her by the arm.
“Hey, this is good,” Maurey said. “Think she’ll get him?”
“She’ll get him.”
“Why does she want him?” Dougie asked.
Lydia gestured with her arms, Hank’s face went Indian. The other pallbearers, who only moments before had been droopy and depressed, started to smile behind their hands. Even Coach Stebbins didn’t look all that miserable. They needed a tension break, and one thing Lydia can provide is comic relief.
“He wrecked her house,” Dougie said.
“That’s the Blackfoot way of saying I love you,” Maurey said.
“I’ve been dismissed.”
“Don’t take it personally,” I said. “Happens to me all the time.”
Hank tried to walk away. He went clear around the casket and hole, then he headed for his truck with Lydia talking away at him the whole time.
Maurey put her arm around my shoulders, which made me feel real good. She popped the silly tie off my shirt. “Can you give us a ride into town, Dougie? I’m not up to walking home after another funeral.”