Maurey straightened her right leg so her ankle was draped over my thigh. “Mr. Talbot doesn’t care that Pud’s a slow. Probably makes him feel like real folks.”
I had some trouble following that. “Pud?”
Maurey laughed. “They call him Pud. His real name is Montgomery and he’s the stupidest kid in the valley. I saw him in front of Talbot Taxidermy the other day with frozen drool down his shirt.”
Dothan, Florence, and Montgomery. I made a connection. “They’re all named for towns in Alabama.”
Neither Annabel nor Maurey knew that and for a while we were all three silent as they digested the information and I watched Kennedy give his Cuban crisis speech. Actually, Annabel probably digested the information and Maurey moped because I’d known something she didn’t know.
I decided it was time to move around. “You want a Coke? We can catch what’s happening at the Deck.”
Annabel said, “We have pop here.”
Maurey stood up. “That’s not the point, Mom.”
The light was nice as Maurey and I walked the two blocks down Glenwood to Alpine and over to the White Deck. It has to do with altitude or lack of pollution or something—whatever it is, light in Wyoming can be transparent, energetic. It reflects completely, never losing a bit of brightness, especially after new snow. The light in North Carolina is heavy and absorbent, like a paper towel. You can’t see something three blocks away as clearly as something in your hand. In Jackson Hole, distance is irrelevant.
The Tetons stood,
As we walked along, I gave Maurey the rundown on last night’s revelations, leaving out the part where her mother triggers the mess. She nodded and asked questions at pertinent points. “How much goo?”
“Say what?”
“How much goo came out? Two tablespoons? A cup? A quart? Surely it wasn’t more than a quart.”
“It wasn’t more than a quart.”
“More than a pint?”
I tried to remember. “It was all spread out, but I’d say less than a third cup.”
“Did you taste it?”
“God, no. But Lydia did.”
“That may be illegal.”
This shocked me, the thought that a biological process might be affected by laws. “It was on a sock. I never heard of anyone getting arrested for tasting come off the end of a sock.”
“You never heard of come till this morning.”
“I’d heard of come, I just didn’t know what it was.”
“Knowing a word, but not knowing what it means, is the same as not knowing it.” Maurey’s face was flushed pink from the cold. There were rose spots above each cheekbone.
She looked down at my zipper. “When your thing is hard, does it point straight out or down?”
“Up.”
“Up. Are you sure? Horses’ things point down.”
“Up. At least mine does. I don’t know about anyone else.”
We stopped across from the triangle and tried to picture the internal workings of the deal. Maurey’s eyes squinched as she thought. She had the advantage over me in that she knew what male things were shaped like and I didn’t know squat about females except there was a tunnel involved.
Maurey nodded. “That’s about how I had it figured. The horses confused me. I wonder where kissing comes in.”
In books people often kissed before things were either skipped or talked about so metaphorically no one knew what was going on. It seemed to be a one, two, three ritual—kiss, skip the weird stuff, fall in love. I thought about kissing Maurey, right there on the street, in hopes that one thing led to another and couldn’t be stopped once begun, but she didn’t seem interested in the romantic end of the deal. Maurey was into the mechanics.
“Maybe you could show me your thing,” Maurey said.
“It’s not hard right now.”
“How can you make it hard?”
“I don’t know. It just happens sometimes. It’s not in my control.”
We stood on the curb trying to imagine the unimaginable. This seemed like a big deal—like driving a car—only adults could do and kids couldn’t. It would involve touching a girl in places you weren’t even allowed to look at. How could you touch something you couldn’t see?
“Do you think it feels good?” I asked.
Maurey shrugged as we walked on to the White Deck. “People in books usually think so. There must be more to it than making babies.”
Dot tousled my hair—a nasty habit if ever there was one—and smiled at Maurey. “I thought you two was mortal enemies.”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked. Older women were always touching my hair. They think it’s big fun to embarrass kids.
“Same place I hear ever’thing else.” Dot pointed at the floor. “GroVont ever gets a newspaper I could be the only reporter.”
Maurey turned sideways in the booth and leaned against the wall. “We’re experimenting with friendship. We could go back the other way any second.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.
Dot laughed like she always does. “Hate is a good way to start being friends. Better than the other way around like those two old farts.” She pointed at Bill and Oly who were back in their regular corner booth. They stared into their coffee cups as if they’d done a freeze-frame in that position.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
Dot more or less sorted. “They were meat and gravy for thirty years. Had a logging business, you never saw Bill without Oly or Oly without Bill.”
“You still don’t,” Maurey said.
“We used to think maybe they’s queer, but who ever heard of a queer logger.”
“Must get lonesome in the woods,” I said.
Dot grinned real big. “That’s why God made sheep,” and she went off into a veritable gale of mirth. Maurey and I cut eyes at each other, knowing this had something to do with dicks and tunnels, but not sure how sheep fit in.
“I have to watch them every minute now. Bill’s punched out Oly three times this month. Almost broke his nose the other day. Oly don’t know what to make of it. He’s gotten skittish. The whole cafe is tense.”
I studied the two old men nodding over their coffee cups. They didn’t appear skittish, they appeared dead. Their hands wrapped around their cups, as if that was the last possible source of warmth. At one point, Bill swallowed and Oly blinked.
I ordered a cheeseburger and coffee. Maurey had a vanilla shake. When Dot brought the food, Maurey went right to the point.
“Dot, do you and your husband have sex?”
Dot’s head kind of snapped back an inch. She snuck a quick look around for eavesdroppers, but there were no other customers besides the old men practicing for death. Dot smoothed her apron with her right hand. “Jimmy’s been in the army two years, over in Asia the last six months, so there’s been a dry spell here just lately.”
I smiled sympathetically. Maurey went right on. “But you used to have sex, right, before Jimmy went away?”
