Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy (24 page)

Dougie spoke through a lemon wedge. “There is one more example of an event that would not occur in New York City.”

“They’d slit your throat for a cigarette, but they wouldn’t punch you out. Why did someone hit you, Sammy?” Lydia’s face held the danger smile, the one that sets off little smoke alarms in my head. Even bent over with my ear up against God’s own tit, I knew trouble was courting the Callahan household.

I decided to lie. “A fella said my mom was a tramp so I hit him and he hit me back.”

“How noble.” Delores clamped me even tighter to her breast. She smelled of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder and I wanted to turn my mouth more into her, only I was afraid I’d bleed down her pink ruffly blouse.

“Sam’s a regular prince,” Lydia said. She knew I was lying. Lydia can always tell, somehow, and I can always tell when she’s lying, but in spite of this mutual curse we both go on lying to each other on a daily basis.

“You must admit Marlon Brando is the dominant tragedian of our time,” Dougie said, I guess resuming something I’d interrupted. Dougie blew my theory that tall men are never full of crap.

“Brando’s eyeballs are upside down,” Lydia said. “He’s like one of those drawings you turn over and they go from happy to sad.”

Delores sighed, which made her breast heave into my face. “I’d let Marlon Brando turn me over. Dougie, did you ever do it from the back? Ray won’t do it that way, says it’s perverse.”

I muffle-mumbled. “I can’t breathe.”

“I bet Sammy likes doing it from the backside. He wouldn’t call it perverse.”

Lydia looked at me and threw down a shot. “Delores, you relate all subjects to your organs.”

“I can’t breathe.”

When Delores let up, the oxygen rush made me dizzy. “I better clean up.”

“Don’t dribble on the floor.”

Dougie was cutting lemons for another round. “The New York–trained actors are so superior to those who matriculate in Hollywood, there is no comparison whatsoever.”

I went to the bathroom to wash off blood, then back to my room to change clothes and look up
matriculate
. As I passed through the living room, Delores was sitting up close to Dougie with her legs crossed so her pink skirt didn’t cover much of anything. She touched his elbow when she talked. “
Life
magazine says Picasso caught gonorrhea from an orgy with colored women.”

Back in my room, I left the door cracked and sat at my desk listening to the grown-ups kill off their fifth of tequila. Dougie was explaining why Andy Warhol was a cheater when Lydia said, “I want to dance.”

“Dance?”

“In Greensboro I used to enjoy dancing.”

I’d been working on a short story about an artist who suspends small dead animals in Jell-O molds. It was inspired by this stuff Max made at the White Deck where he’d start the Jell-O setting up, then dump in canned fruit cocktail and all the grapes and whatever fruit is in fruit cocktail would sink part way to the bottom and stop. Max left his Jell-O in the fridge for a week, so if you ordered it Friday the skin was like rubber. I liked that.

Two of the most famous art critics in Paris scratched their chins as they circled Sam Callahan’s gelatinized sculpture.

“It’s genius,” the one murmured.

“I have never looked at a rat with such clarity,” said the other. “Observe the terror in her eyes. The struggle of the ears juxtaposed against the strawberry Jell-O.”

“I wonder how he makes it so lifelike,” murmured the first critic.

Sam put on his Blackfoot smile. Little did the critics know the rat had been alive when dropped into the Jell-O mold.

Lydia’s head appeared at the door. Her eyes had the bemused yet reckless glitter of a skydiver about to take his two-hundredth leap. I’d never seen Lydia blasted on tequila before, and I’m not sure she ever had been. Tequila was fairly new to serious drinkers back then; they hadn’t realized yet that it’s not the same drug as bourbon or gin.

“You stop bleeding?”

“Yeah, I’m doing my homework,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked why I was sitting at my desk writing on a legal pad.

“We’re leaving for Jackson to dance at the Cowboy Bar. Dougie has a new car.”

“You’re going to ride in a Volkswagen?”

“I’ll make Delores sit in back, otherwise she’ll make obscene advances at Dougie all the way and they’ll sneak off and leave me alone in the Cowboy. I’m not willing to break in new dance talent tonight.”

Her forehead was soft but her eyes buzzed and her mouth kind of twitched. She’d looked like this the week she did whatever she did that got us shipped to Wyoming.

“What do I tell Hank when he calls?”

“Tell him Crazy Horse got what he deserved.”

***

The phone woke me from a dream where my teeth rotted from the roots and fell into a cube of mixed-fruit Jell-O and stuck there all cluttered and disorganized. I knocked the alarm clock to the floor, then bent down to discover the time was just after midnight. Drunk Dougie must have driven the bug into a frost heave and killed my mother, left her twisted on the pavement with blood trickling from both ears. If I picked up the phone my new life as an orphan without Lydia would begin.

The phone stopped ringing for about thirty seconds before it started again. Those were a rough thirty seconds. The mental picture of Lydia dead made me sick, struck down with a flu attack. Maybe she wasn’t dead but only brainless in a coma. Shoulda-saids and deals with God blitzed through my head, so when the phone rang the second time I went for it.

The voice said, “He that digresseth from the matter to fall upon the person ought to be suppressed by the speaker. No reviling or nipping words must be used.”

“Caspar, you scared the doo out of me. I thought Lydia fell in a frost heave.”

“Your next assignment is to memorize
Robert’s Rules of Order
, Grandson. Life must be order. Business cannot continue without consistency.”

“Lydia and I are full of order. What was that about progresseth from the matter and nipping words?”

“The matter is carbon paper.”

“Caspar, it’s after two o’clock your time. Did you call to read to me about nipping words?”

“I called to speak to your mother.”

“Your daughter?”

“I demand an explanation about the Indian.”

Lemon peels, juice, and salt lay strewed around the table. A tequila bottle was on its side under the TV. They’d left the front door open so the gas heater was blasting away for nothing. Order was not the Callahan word of the day. “She seems to have moved the Indian along for the moment, but she might listen if you make her dump him permanently. Lydia misses your ultimatums.”

“Put her on the phone.”

“Well, she isn’t home right now. She had a meeting.”

“I control the cash flow.”

“And I respect that.”

There was a short sound of old-man breathing. “Tell me what you think about night and day, Grandson.”

“Carbon paper.”

“Good lad.” Caspar hung up.

***

I wandered into the kitchen for a Dr Pepper, then into the bathroom to shake the toilet handle. Lydia would let the water run forever if I wasn’t around. I stood at the open door, staring at Soapley’s junky yard and trailer and the Tetons beyond. There was enough moon to make out mountains over there, but without delineation or substance. Compared to North Carolina, everything I saw was alien. I wondered if North Carolina would be alien when I went back. That would make all places alien and I wouldn’t know where I was anywhere.

The flash of a dead Lydia on the pavement had me screwed up. Maurey contemplated death often, which I’d always put down as a waste of time. To me, death was where they put old people. I’d really be alone if Lydia got drunk and killed—more alone than usual. Then someday I’d die and be alone in a box forever.

Whole thing screwed me up so much I drank a second Dr Pepper and ate a Valium. The Valiums were getting to be a regular thing.

***

Here’s how this deal works: one Valium and one Dr Pepper and I sleep peacefully through the night; one Valium and two Dr Peppers and the need to pee cuts through the fog so I wake up in a couple of hours; two Valiums and two Dr Peppers, I sleep through the night but come to scrambling for the commode. I haven’t tested the progression past two and two.

Somewhere in there I woke up with the itch. I blinked at the moon through the window, then stepped out of bed onto my alarm clock, said “Shit,” and made my way to the bedroom door. Light from the kitchen gave the living room an indirect glow. As I stumbled along considerably more asleep than awake, a sound sunk in—like someone running and a puppy whimpering. It came to me that Dougie Dupree and Lydia were fucking on the couch.

His long, bony body lay on top, stripped except for one brown sock. His mouth was up under Lydia’s jaw and the hand on my side was a fist next to her armpit. Lydia had her head thrown back, eyes open, with wet hair stuck to her cheek. She made a sound like she needed air.

I peed without flushing, then went back and stood under Les, kind of absorbing the scene of watching Mom screw. The sound got to me—three rhythms—the couch going sideways and up and down, Dougie making the puppy noise, and Lydia. Dougie’s back had hair across the shoulders and up his thighs right into his butt, with moles and erupted red blemishes making a constellation pattern—Pisces maybe, or Pleiades.

Lydia’s skin showed much paler than Dougie’s. I couldn’t see her tits, only the sides of her legs next to his and her feet. Her toes pointed in at each other.

I was sure I was supposed to feel something here—disgust or jealous or sick, something—but I didn’t; all I felt was odd, like you do when you eat too many aspirins, or it rains while you’re at a matinee and you come outside to stuff you didn’t expect. The three sounds weren’t synchronized, no rhythmic relationship. Their bodies were just stuck together.

Dougie made a deeper, less puppylike grunt, rose on his elbows with his eyes squinched together, then collapsed on Mom like a dead man. Her eyes stared right at me and blinked twice before she closed them.

Back in my room I sat in front of the typewriter, looking out the window at a cloud shaped like home plate sliding past the moon. Lydia hadn’t gotten off. Is a kid supposed to root for his mom to reach orgasm or is this a no-never-mind? Dougie’s sweat was rubbed into her and his squirt dripped through her body. I wondered where they put Delores.

A single headlight turned off Center onto Alpine and eased up the street toward our cabin. When the light shone on Dougie’s Volkswagen, Hank’s truck slowed down and the form behind the wheel leaned forward. He switched his beam to low, then back, then he drove on toward the Jackson highway.

“Hank came by last night,” I said.

Lydia didn’t deign to hear me. She was slumped back against the booth with each hand clutching a glass of tomato juice.

“And Caspar called about midnight, several hours before Hank came by,” I added so Lydia would know when Hank came by and what he saw. Her eyes quivered a moment, but the effort to open them was just too much.

“What’d Caspar want?” Maurey asked. She was eating french fries because Dot refused to bring her a chocolate shake.

“You live on coffee and chocolate shakes,” Dot had said. “That’s no food for a growing baby.”

“You’re jealous because of your diet, you can’t have shakes so you don’t want anyone to have them.”

“How about a chef’s salad?”

They compromised on french fries. Dot was on a diet because Jimmy was coming home this summer and she weighed twenty-five pounds more than she did when he left.

“Jimmy can’t stand fat women,” she said. “He won’t want me anymore. He’ll want high school girls that can eat anything and never gain a pound.” I wished she’d hurry up and lose the weight, or else give up. Dot on a diet wasn’t near as cheerful as Dot fat.

Maurey took a whole fry in one bite and repeated, “What’d Grandpa Caspar want?”

“He demanded an explanation about the Indian.”

Lydia moaned real quiet like and got her right eye open. “What did you tell him?”

“I said, ‘What Indian?’”

“He meant Hank,” Maurey said.

“I know he meant Hank.”

“Then why did you say, ‘What Indian?’”

Lydia’s left eye made it open but the right one fell back shut. “Maurey, you want some advice?”

“From you?”

“Don’t wreck your life trying to make your daddy notice you exist.”

“My daddy knows I exist.”

I’d wondered about this deal. “Is that why we took Hank in, because you thought an Indian would get Caspar’s attention?”

Both Lydia’s eyes went closed, but her left hand raised its glass and she took a sip of tomato juice. Behind her, in the next booth, a man reading a newspaper cracked a finger joint. Lydia’s face paled even more, her hand shook so hard she spilled juice.

Maurey touched the window with her index finger. “It’s raining.”

I set down my chicken drumstick to stare at the rain. In Greensboro, it rained all the time, so much that mold grew on walls and fungus between your toes. But GroVont had had nothing but snow or clear and cold for six months. I’d known I missed the ground, but until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I missed rain.

“I think it’s turning to snow,” Maurey said.

“It can’t be.”

“Or hail.”

The man behind Lydia cracked another knuckle. This time both eyes opened and she reached for the napkin dispenser. She stood over the man, holding the dispenser over her head as a weapon. “Do that one more time and you’re dead.”

“Do what?”

“Do not play stupid with me, I’m a desperate woman.”

They went into a stare-off that lasted an embarrassingly long time, until Dot noticed and brought the man a coffee refill. He turned a page in the paper and went back to reading. Lydia slumped into the booth. “God, I hate this place.”

Dot said, “I’m hungry.”

Maurey said, “What’s Hank doing?”

Hank pulled his truck into a parking space at Zion’s Own Hardware, then he came back fast across the street straight for the White Deck. For an instant it appeared the Dodge would crash through the wall. I jumped up as Maurey slid across the booth.

Dot put both hands up to protect herself. “What’s that he’s carrying?”

Lydia said, “Les.”

“Les?”

“The moose. The moose is Les.”

Hank fell from the truck onto the curb. He pulled himself up by the rearview mirror, then moved toward us, keeping both hands on the truck body.

“He’s drunker’n a skunk,” Dot said.

Maurey stood next to me. “Hank doesn’t drink, maybe he’s sick.”

Hank lowered the tailgate and sat on it, breathing hard, staring through the window at Lydia. Lydia stared back, both hands tight on the napkin dispenser. A trickle of blood dripped down Hank’s chin from a cut on his lower lip, all his shirt buttons except the bottom one were unbuttoned.

Hank stood and turned around to drag Les to the back of the truck. Then he lifted the moose above his head and ran toward us. Dot screamed, Lydia fell sideways from the booth, and Les came through the window.

Glass flew all over shit, Maurey said, “Jesus,” I took off for the door. I caught Hank as he was climbing back in the truck.

“Hey, asshole.”

His head turned to me without much recognition. I saw a Jim Beam bottle and a pistol on the dashboard.

“Maurey’s pregnant.”

He blinked.

“You could have hurt her, buttface.”

Hank blinked twice more. “Don’t call me buttface.”

“How about drunk fucking Indian.”

Hank nodded in agreement. “And your mother’s a whore.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to get drunk and hurt Maurey.”

His head kept nodding up and down. When it came up, a drop of blood fell off his chin. “I’m sorry.” He pulled himself into the truck and shut the door, then he rolled down the window. “But your mother is still a whore.”

I’d come off the initial adrenaline deal of a stuffed moose coming through the window. All I saw now was a pitiful man screwing himself up because he’d put his hopes on Lydia. I said, “Go on home.”

Hank drove away nodding.

***

He’d trashed the cabin. Thrown furniture into walls, broken what few dishes we owned, torn up books and scattered the pages. He got into Lydia’s panty drawer and knifed the crotch out of all sixty pairs. I found Alice mewing in my closet. Lydia turned the elk-gut chair upright and sat in it with her eyes closed. I set my typewriter back on the desk, then went into the living room and looked down on her. She looked old and skinny. Even her fingernails were a mess.

“Well, Lydia, you messed it up good this time.”

She didn’t even open her eyes. “Fuck you, Sam.”

“Fuck you too, Mom.”