1971—Abner and Willoughby Rex play in the cool black dirt under Abner’s daddy’s house in Carbon Hill, Alabama.
Willoughby Rex’s voice is somewhat whiny. “Come on, I give you Frank Howard for Mickey Mantle.”
“Grow up,” Abner says.
“How about Willie Mays and my uncle M.L.’s gallstone?”
“I like my Mickey Mantle.”
Willoughby Rex furrows his brow and makes a last offer. “Okay, my Sam Callahan card for your Mickey Mantle and your Roger Maris.”
“Throw in Sam Callahan’s last novel and you got a deal.”
In Jackson Hole, one sort of athletically inclined boy goes rabid for mountain climbing—“The cafeteria wall is a five-point-five with a forty-foot exposure”—and the other sort of athletically inclined boy defines himself by rodeo—bullriding if he’s short and self-destructive. That doesn’t leave much pickings for Little League. The baseball players are mostly kids who would rather waste the summer drinking Kool-Aid and hassling little girls, only their fathers make them do something, and baseball is less stress than climbing mountains or riding bulls.
Skipper O’Brien’s dad volunteered to coach the team. He was on workman’s disability from falling off the dam and messing up his inner ear, so he didn’t have a regular job or anything interesting to do. The first day of practice Mr. O’Brien sent the whole team to the outfield for fungo-catching. He took off his windbreaker, picked up a bat, threw a ball in the air and whiffed. Missed by a foot.
Right then I told Kim Schmidt we were in for a long summer.
Mr. O’Brien was also the kind of coach who prides himself on not giving his own son special attention, which meant that every day we had to stand there and listen to him yell at Skipper.
“You’re a sick excuse for a ballplayer. You can’t run, you can’t catch, you can’t hit. You throw like a girl.”
Typical junior high-coach child psychology. Made me glad I didn’t have a father.
We opened against Jackson East and lost 17-3. Kim and I scored all three runs. Jackson West shut us out 21-zip.
Most nights I listened to the Dodger game on the radio, then crawled into bed next to Maurey and told her the frustrations of my day, just like we were a real couple. “Rodney Cannelioski is disabled, I swear the kid puts his jock strap on backwards. You know what he did at the plate this afternoon?”
“Sam, I don’t give a rat’s ass what happened at baseball practice today.” She would slap her growing belly. “I’m uncomfortable. I miss my horse. For the first summer since I can remember I’m not riding every day. Little League baseball means nothing to me. Do you understand, Sam. Nothing.”
“How can baseball mean nothing?”
Sometimes this launched another round of foul-mouthed tirade—Maurey’s language went downhill after that day she said fuck in class—or other times she’d lie there silently seething. The seething was hard to deal with.
“You’re just jealous cause you’re too fat to barrel race.”
That one got me Alice across the neck.
Every now and then Maurey was king-hell happy. One afternoon I came in from practice to find her, Dot, and Lydia in total hysterics over baby clothes. Maurey was holding a mint green sunsuit over her head and dancing while Dot slid clear off the couch and onto the floor from laughing so hard, and Lydia smoked two cigarettes at once. I didn’t see anything funny about dancing with baby clothes and said so and that set them off all over again. When she tried to get up, Dot hit her head on the coffee table.
Another time I caught Maurey and Lydia comparing my toddler pictures to the five football players. A photographer had set up his camera in J. C. Penney’s and Lydia dressed me in this stupid sailor suit with a flat-topped hat with two ribbons off the back. In every picture, I looked embarrassed about to death.
“He’s definitely a Negro,” Maurey said.
“I think he looks more like Billy-Butch. See that weak chin.”
That was the night Maurey kicked me out of bed for sleeping. Three in the morning, she bit my thumb.
“My God, you bit me.”
“Wake up.”
“Why did you bite me?”
“I can’t sleep and if I can’t sleep I’ll be damned if you will.”
“Look, tooth marks on my thumb.”
“This is your fault. ‘I won’t squirt,’ you said. ‘No mush,’ you said.” Maurey did the line attributed to me in a falsetto. “All you wanted was in my pants. You’d have said anything to screw me.”
“That’s true.”
“And now I’ll never sleep again.” I swear, she started to cry.
“I could get you a Valium.”
“Valium’s bad for the baby. I can’t take Valium.”
“Lydia ate lots of Valium when she was pregnant with me.”
“Yeah, and look at you.” She sniffled a few minutes and wiped her nose on my pajama collar. “You have to sleep on the floor tonight, Sam. I need the whole bed.”
“How about if I take the couch in the living room?”
She clutched my shoulder. “I don’t want you that far away. I may need you and I want you next to me—on the floor.”
“You may need me?”
She pushed me gently off the bed. “God, I wish Dad was here.”
I didn’t see Buddy all summer, and, so far as I know, neither did Maurey. I guess he stayed up on the TM, delousing and moving water, whatever it is you do for horse maintenance. Whether because of shame or hard work, I don’t know, but he didn’t come into GroVont. I can’t picture Buddy avoiding anything because of shame.
One day in late June we bumped into Annabel in the checkout line at Zion’s Own Hardware. I’d found plans in Boy’s Life for a self-loading goat feeder that I knew could be adapted into a cradle. Maurey made a list of all the boards, nails, and brackets we’d need and gave it to the man at the lumber counter.
He stared down his eagle nose at her and ignored everything I said, the usual treatment, but he found our stuff.
Annabel stood in line second from the cash register and we were fifth. Third and fourth—March and his fat wife—shuffled and scratched their faces before she realized they’d forgotten wood-stove polish and they disappeared back into the hardware aisles.
“Hi,” Annabel said. Her face and stringy neck looked like she’d lost more weight than Maurey had gained. I couldn’t see the rest of her. Even though it was about seventy-five degrees outside, Annabel had herself wrapped in this puffy blue parka.
“Hi, Mom,” Maurey said.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Pierce,” I said. I don’t think she saw me.
“Did you brush your teeth today?” Annabel asked.
Maurey nodded.
“And flossed?”
“Yes, I definitely flossed today.”
The customer in front of her paid and walked away, but Annabel didn’t move. She looked down at her hands which held a box of Hoover vacuum cleaner bags—size F. “Well, I guess you’re doing okay then.”
“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.”
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, Sammy?”
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?”