Petey didn’t move. He had these remarkably dark eyebrows, long eyelashes, and a natural pout of a mouth. Would have made a cute girl. Maurey left the couch and advanced on Petey and the television.
“This sucks.” He slapped the screen with the flat of his left hand. I mean, the kid was eight, nine years old, way too far along to think you can punch sense into a TV show.
Maurey grabbed his other hand on the channel knob and Petey let out a scream. She pulled him hard, but he latched on like a snapping turtle, screaming his damn brains out. He tried to hit her with his free hand, but Maurey blocked him with her forearms. Just as Mrs. Pierce charged into the room, Maurey doubled up her fist and decked her brother in the face.
“Maurey.” Mrs. Pierce was aghast.
Petey held both hands over his eyes and went right on screaming. I come from two generations of only-child families. This was miles out of my context.
Maurey looked from me to her mom. “I didn’t hit him that hard.”
Petey made loud snuffling noises. “She won’t let me watch Rocky.”
Mrs. Pierce gathered the kid into her arms and glared across the top of his head at Maurey. “You know he watches Rocky every afternoon, what’s the matter with you?”
“It’s not on today. The Texans killed President Kennedy.”
Petey howled. “It is so on, she won’t let me see it.”
“Look, brat.” Maurey stepped to the TV and slowly turned the selector knob all the way around the dial.
See, the deal back then was that if a family had a really tall outside antenna they could pick up two Idaho stations, CBS and NBC. No one in northwest Wyoming saw ABC until the cable came in twenty years later. A person without an outside antenna, say Lydia, could only watch a snowy CBS. Not a bad place to raise kids.
Anyhow, Maurey went clear around the dial twice while Petey snuffled into Mrs. Pierce’s breasts and she cooed in his ear.
“She’s hiding the station,” Petey whimpered.
“Why isn’t Rocky on?” Mrs. Pierce said.
Maurey was at a peak of exasperation. “The president of the country is dead. Some things are more important than Rocky the Flying Squirrel.”
Petey took this as the lie it obviously was, and his mother blinked dubiously. “Come on to the kitchen, baby Pete, I made some Toll House cookies and I’ll pour us some fresh milk.”
“I hate Toll House cookies.”
There’s a certain type of mother who calls chocolate chip cookies Toll House, and I’ve never liked that type. They’re the same women who call gravy sauce.
Mrs. Pierce turned to me. “Would you care to stay for dinner, Sam? We’re having tuna croquettes.” I checked Maurey to see if she caught the bizarre irony, but I guess she’d missed lunch at school. She was glaring at Petey with that same look she used to give me before today.
“No, thank you, ma’am. My mother will be expecting me soon. She’ll have supper on by now.”
“You could call her and tell her you’re eating here.”
“We don’t have a telephone, ma’am.” There’s a Southern defense mechanism where whenever someone makes you uncomfortable, you fall back on antebellum politeness. I saw poverty pity in Maurey’s mother’s eyes, so I figured I better explain the phone deal. “It’s not that we’re poor, we just don’t know anyone to call.”
“Why, you’ve been in town two months. Hasn’t your mother met anyone yet?”
“Lydia’s not all that outgoing.”
Mrs. Pierce gently moved Petey off her lap. He moved back on. “Well, we’ll just have to have you and your mother over for dinner soon.”
I tried to picture Lydia in this house full of trinkets and dust-free knickknacks. Mrs. Pierce was the sort of woman Lydia always said “Fuck me silly” in front of.
I shook my head. “My mom doesn’t get out much. She’s having trouble adjusting to the dry air.”
“I’ll just have to drop in on her with my welcome wagon basket. My baskets are very popular this time of year.”
“I’d think awhile before I did that, ma’am.”
All the rules must have been off that day because when I tramped home through the snow, Lydia wasn’t there. Surprised the heck out of me. I took advantage of the situation to dump overflowing ashtrays and clean out the Dr Pepper stash beneath the couch. At least Lydia was consistent—two and a half packs of cigarettes, variety of brands, six pops, Dr Pepper, and a pint of gin, Gilbey’s, a day. A boy needs consistency in his life.
The Olds 88 sat in the rut that passed for our driveway, which meant Lydia walked away into the storm or somebody came and got her. Either one would be unique unto itself, but presidential assassinations are unique unto themselves and other little uniques tend to spin off their wake. Look at my afternoon with Maurey.
I drank from my own Dr Pepper and sat on the couch reading
The house was too quiet. I kept glancing up at Les, expecting him to have moved a tiny bit. The refrigerator hummed some, the water heater knocked, but other than that, it was like no one had been around lately. I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet but didn’t jiggle the handle like you had to to make it quit running. Lydia’d told me the sound of running water soothes neurotics and we’d all be calmer if we slept next to a creek. She said TV white noise does the same thing, which is why she always slept on the couch with the television turned all the way up on a dead channel.
A truck pulled up and I checked out the window, but it was only old Soapley coming in from making sure nobody got too much water or plowing roads or whatever he did late every afternoon. Soapley’s cowdog Otis still rode standing on the top of the cab, even in winter, and I was afraid he’d fall off someday and die right in front of me.
Lydia’s bedroom-turned-closet smelled different from the rest of the house. I don’t know what it was—Lysol and woman odors or maybe a mouse died under the empty bureau or something—but it made me want to get in and get out without wasting any time.
The panty box sat right next to the bureau. Why didn’t she open a drawer and dump stuff in? I generally took care of the laundry—we had an ancient Whirlpool set off the kitchen—but I left her clothes in a pile for her to fold and put away. Our relationship wasn’t that sick. But why shovel them into a cardboard box instead of a drawer next to it? Maybe unpacking would be like admitting we live here. Heck, I don’t know. A person could waste weeks tracking down the motivation behind any move Lydia made.
She owned about sixty pairs of panties too. Digging through the box was like swimming. Swimming in panties is how I’d found the photographs in the first place, but I wasn’t about to expose that much to Maurey. Rules off or not, the walls had only been down one afternoon.
I took the photos to my room for a mirror comparison between the guys and me.
Two of the guys stood shoulder to shoulder with their hands on their hips. The other three were posed in fake running and passing shots. Their helmets were weird, like somebody had lacquered ear muffs across the top. Only one had a face mask and it was a single bar.
Numbers
The center had a square head and missing teeth, and the end wearing the same dark uniform was a thin character with glasses under the one-bar face mask. I didn’t wear glasses so that let him out.
Eleven wore a different uniform, lighter with a squirrelly black stripe around the belly. He had a flattop
