Skipped Parts

“I’m going to bed now.” I bent over and kissed her forehead. It was cool and slick. Her hand touched the back of my head.

“Your hair needs cutting.”

“Any barber around here’s going to make me look like one of them.”

“I’ll do it myself. It’ll be like we’re pioneers.”

***

I did the shower and toothbrush thing, ate a children’s multiple vitamin, snuck one of Lydia’s yellow Valiums, and put on my pajamas. I wore pajamas to bed back then. Before I flipped off my light and lay down to wait for the pill to kick in, I stood behind my open door, looking at Lydia through the crack.

She was at the window with the shot glass in her left hand and her right foot propped up on the sill. She stared out a long time. I could see the blank tightness on the side of her face, the twin knots on her neck, and a tiny throb on her temple visible clear across the room. She lifted her right hand and drew something in the fogginess her breath made on the window. I always wonder what she drew.

***

I had a dream that I was a fox and a bunch of uniformed people on horses chased me through a Southern hardwood forest.

Sam’s lungs cried out with the pain of charging headlong down the steep hillside. He tripped over a rotting log and sprawled onto his face. Rolling over quickly, he made it to his knees and crawled through the thick, thorny underbrush and into a weed-choked stream.

He turned west, splashing through the frigid water, using his paws and legs to pull himself upstream. Sam heard the dogs running up and down the bank, baying to each other and their wicked masters. Horses thrashed through the trees. He’d fooled them for the moment. Now to find a safe hole. He waded around a corner and came face to face with the blue-eyed Hitler girl astride a giant, sneering bay. She laughed and raised the rifle to her shoulder.

3

It’s a weird school too. There’s maybe forty, fifty kids to the grade, so seventh, eighth, and ninth are each divided into two classes, slow and quick. It’s a social thing that lasts for life. I got all huffy the first morning because I thought the cowpoke of a principal had slotted me into the slow class, but then I saw the others at lunch hour. I’ve been to South Carolina; I know cousin crossbreeding when I see it.

So right off the bat before I’m even awake, there’s this teacher character with hair he must cut with hedge clippers. I made up a short story in which the guy was drummed out of the Marines for doing something disgusting to a recruit three months ago and his reentry into society hasn’t gone well. The people in charge tucked him away in this God-forgotten valley where nothing he could do would matter.

“He machine-gunned his entire English class, sir.”

“None of those kids would have ever left Wyoming anyway.”

I like to make up short stories; it’s what I do.

The man had the face of a haunted Marine—all hollowed-out surfaces around the eyes, below the cheekbones, the temples. His chin had a cleft you could hang a bra over.

I’d hardly settled into the farthest back desk I could find when he marched over and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Howard Stebbins. I’ll bet you like football.”

“No, sir. I’m from North Carolina.”

Howard laughed like I was a real kidder and slapped me on the elbow. I can’t stand having male people touch me, especially coaches. I never met one yet didn’t like to watch boys take showers.

Along with coaching the junior high team of the season, Stebbins taught seventh-grade English and high school driver’s ed. Lots of coaches teach driver’s ed. I don’t know how he got the English job. Maybe somebody old died.

Howard sat on the corner of his teacher’s desk, looking casual while he talked Huckleberry Finn. “Mark Twain combined high adventure, slapstick comedy, and moral outrage into one monumental work, probably the American novel of the nineteenth century.”

I hope nobody tells Moby Dick. I’d never been as jazzed by Huck and the boys as the young reader is supposed to be anyway. For one thing, the ending sucks eggs. We’re walking down a road a thousand miles from home and buddy Tom Sawyer pops up. “Hey, Huck.” “Hey, Tom.”

Get real, Mark.

Mr. Stebbins asked all these leading questions about Negro and white motivations and is the river thematic, and it didn’t take but about six minutes to figure out that the Nazi girl and I were the only ones who had actually read the book.

This teased-up and sprayed-down hairdo up front had read as far as chapter four—“The Hair-Ball Oracle”— and got hung up. “He says the hair-ball big as a baseball came out of the fourth stomach of an ox. I never heard of a hair-ball in a cow.”

“Well, Charlotte, superstition plays a big part in the book.”

“Daddy’s seen a gallstone big as a fist, but even a idiot could tell a hair-ball from a gallstone.”

Teddy the chewer with the weird belt spoke up. “Maybe it was a coyote. I’ve seen coyote hair-balls would gag an ox.” He was still chewing—right there in class. Had a Maxwell House can to spit into.

“An ox isn’t the same as a cow,” the Nazi girl said. “It’s bigger.”

Charlotte couldn’t be stopped. “Oxes eat grass so their turds are runny, same as a heifer.”

The kid who played third base yesterday held up his hand. His name was Kim Schmidt and that morning before school he’d shown me his one and only God-given talent. He could make a sound exactly, exactly mind you —when Kim showed me the trick he must have said “exactly” six times—exactly the sound a dog makes when it throws up.

“The German shepherd,” Kim had said, before his mouth went oval and his throat clicked three times, then he made the sound. I believed him.

“The cowdog,” he said. I couldn’t tell the difference; guess you’d have to know your barfing dogs.

Anyhow, Stebbins called on Kim who explained that a hair-ball would be in the first stomach of an ox, not the fourth, and that Jim the Nigger, or Mark Twain, had counted backward.

“Ain’t no hair-balls in no cows,” Charlotte insisted.

Stebbins took a shot at directing the discussion back to theme and character development. “Let’s leave hair- balls for the moment—”

“We haven’t decided about them yet,” Charlotte said.

“—and go on to Twain’s brilliant use of Negro dialect.” I’m not even sure Stebbins had read the book. That “brilliant use of Negro dialect” smacked of the Classic Comics introduction.

“Maurey,” Stebbins asked the Nazi girl. That was her name— Maurey. As in the record-setting base stealer for the Dodgers. “Maurey, what did you think of the way the character spoke?”

Maurey sniffed like the question was beneath her dignity. She was wearing a blue fuzzy thing and her hair came down more on one side than the other, the Jackie Kennedy look. “Nobody really talks that way.”

“Why do you think Twain wrote the dialogue in dialect if no one talks like that?”

“He wanted Huck to seem stupid and Jim even stupider. It was a way to put them down for being hicks.”

The class seemed to buy the rap. Who was I to publicly disagree with a Nazi?

Stebbins wasn’t sure. “So, Maurey, how do you know no one talks the way Twain wrote?”

“I’ve heard Southern accents on TV and they’re nothing like ‘I’se gwine ta hyar a gos, Massa Huck.’ What dope would talk that way?”

I knew better, but I jumped right in without raising my hand. “Huck is from Missouri which isn’t the South, and the book is set before the Civil War. Maybe people back then didn’t talk like they’re on TV.”

She reddened and turned in her seat to stare at me. I’ve seen disdain—nobody can touch Lydia at true disdain—but I’d never seen such intense disdain aimed right at me. “How do you know how people spoke before the