the White Deck—like we belonged for a change. Nobody was pushy or wanted anything. None of the customers avoided looking at us or quit talking when we started. Lydia and I were part of the scene.
Lydia still cleaned the silverware when we sat down and still called locals peckerheads. She used the word
Just that morning I’d heard Lydia ask Soapley what he had under his Polaris and she seemed to understand the answer. Which I didn’t.
Dot brought over Lydia’s hamburger, Maurey’s shake, and Hank and my blue plates—Swedish meatballs, noodles, and green beans. Hank asked for ketchup.
“Got a letter from Jimmy today,” Dot said. “He’ll be home end of the summer.”
Lydia was doing the looking at her teeth in the butter knife number. In it, she stretches her lips out flat so her teeth look like fangs. “The kids tell me Jimmy likes it four times a day.”
Dot reddened and pinched me on the shoulder. I pointed to Maurey. “Her. She’s the rat, I never said a word.”
“What’s Jimmy doing in Vietnam?” Hank said. Hank was the first nontelevision news person I ever heard use the word
Dot propped one hand on her hip. “He says he’s teaching one bunch of monkeys how to kill another bunch. Sounds kind of stupid to me. You want more iced tea?”
Lydia scowled while Dot jacked up Hank’s glass. Southern iced tea came presugared and Lydia took it as a personal affront that nobody in the West could get it right.
After Dot left, I used Hank’s ketchup and caught crap from both the females. “Hank put it on his stuff,” I said.
“Hank’s an Indian,” Maurey said.
“Hank’s a clod,” Lydia said.
Hank just smiled. I flashed on a futuristic ganging-up process where I could be in big trouble.
Maurey sucked vanilla shake through a paper straw. “Hank can shoot a rifle under a horse’s brisket going full blast, just like in the movies.”
“So can you,” Hank said.
“Yeah, but you hit what you’re aiming at.”
“Got kicked in the head last time I tried that trick.”
Lydia turned to stare at Hank’s head. “It shows.”
For some reason, I was looking a couple booths down, right at Bill’s rock of an Adam’s apple. Oly said something I didn’t hear, then Bill stood up and fell into the jukebox. He stuck for a moment, then slid down.
Everybody shut up at once. Oly put down his coffee cup and said, “Bill’s dead.”
Me Maw died when I was five. Sometimes I speculate that Caspar wouldn’t have been such a king-hell hard- butt if his wife hadn’t got cancer and spent seven years being sad and then died. I don’t know. Maybe he was always severe. Maybe that’s why she got the cancer in the first place.
I don’t remember all that much about Me Maw before she died. She wasn’t up much. I remember her smell, a cross between rubbing alcohol and paper matches right after you blow them out. They made me go in the library- turned-sickroom to say good-bye. Her eyes were way in there and waxed paper-looking. When I kissed her on the cheek, she was wet. I was scared I’d get the cancer from touching her.
At her funeral, Caspar, Lydia, and I sat together in front. Neither one of those two showed a lick of emotion. That carved look on their faces was the one I recognize now as the look a kid gets when a coach yells at him for something he thinks he didn’t do, like, “You’re not going to get to me, you asshole.”
I sat with my hands in my lap and watched Me Maw’s face in the box, sure she was going to blink or sit up or something that would freak me out. I wondered if she was wearing shoes. Caspar told me to stop moving my legs.
After the cemetery, we went out for ice cream, same as when Maurey and I lost our virginity. Maybe there’s a pattern.
That evening Maurey and I lay on my bed and tried to figure out the death thing. We unbuttoned each other’s shirts, and I had mine off, but the impetus to keep going petered out about the time I touched her right breast.
“I wonder what it feels like to be dead?” I asked.
Maurey rolled over to face the ceiling and covered her left breast with her hand. The eye on my side blinked three times. It was kind of funny, her lying on her back with one breast hidden by her hand and the other one hidden by mine. I never could get over how small Maurey’s hands were. “Cold, I guess.”
I tried to imagine Maurey’s tit cold and dead, but I’d only learned what it felt like warm and alive four days ago, so dead was beyond me. With my hand cupped over her chest, you couldn’t even tell Maurey had a breast.
Maurey said, “People sure die easily in books. It’s not that casual in real life.”
“The easiest place to die is in the movies.”
Maurey bit her lower lip and turned to look at me. “I think about being dead all the time. I’ve read every book in the library I can find about girls dying and I can’t figure it out.”
I moved my hand off her breast and touched her cheek. “It’s not like sex, Maurey. The people who write books don’t know any more about being dead than we do.”
Bill hadn’t looked comfortable dead. He fell with one leg doubled under his body and his head at an off-angle. His belt was cinched up on his belly so he looked cramped. His eyes were closed, which surprised me. I thought people died with their eyes open.
Nobody in the White Deck went hysterical or anything. The Park Service guys flipped him over and tried what passed for artificial respiration back then—a push on the back, pull on the elbows useless maneuver. Lydia went and sat next to Oly, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at the lump on the floor that used to be his friend. Once, he said it again. “Bill’s dead.”
Dot called Jackson for an ambulance while Hank felt Bill’s neck for a pulse, but anyone could see he was king-hell dead.
Max the owner came out of the kitchen to watch. I’d never seen him in person before. He had hardly any hair and a purple tattoo of a bird and he wore a sleeveless T-shirt. He didn’t talk.
Maurey leaned over me to look, then she sat back and held my hand. It took so long for the ambulance that we tried to play hangman awhile, but neither one of us could concentrate on the letters.
He’d died between the jukebox and their private booth, which meant anyone going to the bathroom had to step over the body, which I wasn’t about to do. That’s what I remember most about my first look at immediate death—having to pee like crazy and not being able to.
GroVont has a Mormon church that from the outside looks like a Pizza Hut. And, over by the Tetons, the Episcopal chapel in Moose is more in the way of a tourist trap than a real church. It’s not open in the winter. Baptists and Catholics go to Jackson to be buried.
Bill’s funeral took place in the VFW. I went because Maurey asked me to, and she went because the Pierces and Bill and Oly were connected in some way to do with World War I. Her grandfather served with them in Belgium and, later, when he died in an avalanche, Bill and Oly did the like-a-father gig for Maurey’s dad.
Everyone in the valley is either literally related or spiritually attached. One reason Maurey chose me for the sex practice was because, with me, she knew for certain there would be no hint of incest.
“Besides, I like your hair,” she said.
“I thought it was my Eastern casual demeanor.”
“Fat chance.”
I wish someone would do the like-a-father gig for me.
Lydia wouldn’t come with us. “I don’t do death,” she said. “Les is the only formerly animate object I
