“Yeah, but someone told Mom at her AAUW bridge club yesterday that this time it would be big. You want to come over, Lydia? Mom would be glad to have company.”
“Every time I speak to Annabel she works the conversation around to laundry detergent. I’d rather talk to my moose.”
“Mom,” I said.
“Look.” Hank pointed as we crossed the Snake River. It was an army-green color and gave off the impression of cold. “No rivers like that down South.”
“Nonsense,” Lydia said. “The South is full of rivers. And concert halls and department stores and porches. Every house has a proper porch. Here they have mud rooms.”
Discussion deteriorated into the stock West-versus-South and rural-versus-urban canned lecture that Lydia used to fill time. I think she hated silence and Hank was comfortable with it and she couldn’t stand seeing him comfortable when she wasn’t. Much as I liked Maurey on my lap, her butt bones were digging into my thighs. I shifted my weight, trying to find a comfortable divot.
She reached behind herself with her right hand and grabbed my penis hard. I yelped.
“What are you whining about now?” Lydia asked.
“Caught the window knob in my rib.”
“Well, keep it to yourself.”
We started up a steep hill with pine trees on either side. “This is the pass,” Hank said. “From the top we can see the four corners of the world.”
Lydia lit a cigarette. “What difference does it make?”
Maurey went into this pulsating squeeze action. It felt good, kind of bizarre, but I couldn’t block out of my mind the picture of her kissing that grease bag.
Hank said, “I want to be idealistic. I want to believe in things.”
“Like what?” I asked, though my voice came out wrong. I could feel Maurey’s smile clear through the back of her head.
“Like beauty and the nobility of man. Look over there.” We passed a big live moose, Les’s cousin maybe. He was up a little gully, belly-deep in snow, chewing on a bush. Maurey squeezed the hell out of me.
Hank went on giving what, for him, was practically a speech.
“You can believe in whatever you want to believe in up here. Look at the snow on that whitebark pine. People in cities can’t believe in the nobility of man because they see no evidence of it.”
“I love it when he talks like Chief Joseph,” Lydia said.
Maurey said in a deep voice, “I will fight no more forever.”
I kept up my end of the conversation under the direst circumstances possible. “Easy to believe in people when there’s none around.”
Hank hit the steering wheel with one hand. ‘‘That’s what I mean.”
Maurey gave a mighty squeeze and I blew in my pants. Coughed like death to cover the sound and clawed at the window handle, which was a waste; you can’t roll down a window that isn’t there.
“Sam, control yourself,” Lydia said.
“I got hot all of a sudden.”
She turned to look at me. “It’s freezing in here.”
Maurey put her hand back in her lap. “Mrs. Callahan, I came to see you on purpose.”
“As opposed to accidentally?”
We were moving up the mountain. I went into a fear fantasy where the truck broke down and all that come froze around my pecker and it broke off.
Maurey’s voice cut through the story. “How can you tell if you’re pregnant?”
There’s a conversation stopper for you. We rode a quarter mile up the mountain in silence.
Lydia lit a cigarette. “The game was supposed to stop on your first period.”
“I’ve never had a period. Can you get pregnant if you’ve never had a period?”
Hank rolled the window down a couple of inches. I asked, “What’s a period?”
Nobody pays any attention to me in a crisis.
Lydia blew smoke across Hank at the cracked window, then turned back to Maurey. “What exactly makes you think you might be pregnant?”
“My body is way off, has to be pregnancy or cancer. I get sick sometimes and food smells like poop and my tits hurt.”
“Get sick mostly in the mornings?”
“Right. And after lunch at school. And my dreams have been really weird lately.”
I glanced over at Hank, wondering what he must think of the turn in our Sunday drive. Hank stared out the cracked windshield at the typically majestic terrain. He had on his implacable look that I was starting to take as something of a pain in the ass. I mean, how convenient if in every slightly off-the-norm social situation you could fall back on the Blackfoot stereotype.
“Do you know what cancer feels like?” Maurey asked.
Lydia suddenly scratched her right ear, a very un-Lydia-like thing to do. “I hardly even know what being pregnant feels like. I was only with child once and I was your age, almost. The subject hasn’t come up since.”
I felt Maurey’s stomach through her car coat. Could I have done something to put a little person in there? Lydia’s sex lesson hadn’t included anything about the pregnancy process—other than it might happen so we had to stop when Maurey became a woman. I didn’t know exactly what Maurey and I could have done to cause or not cause a baby.
It was an odd feeling though. A baby, a live piece of me in Maurey.
Hank pulled into a parking area and turned the truck around. “This is the place.”
I leaned to look over Maurey’s right shoulder. The whole valley stretched off beneath us like a waxed linoleum floor. Lines of brown marked the creeks with a wider band at the Snake River. Chimney smoke drifted over the towns of Jackson and Wilson. GroVont was around a corner, too far north to see. The whole thing gave the illusion of being above life.
“God, I hate being practical,” Lydia said.
Maurey’s hair brushed my face when she nodded. “I know what you mean.”
“No use getting agitated until we know for sure. Who’s your doctor?”
“Dr. Petrov in Jackson, but I can’t go to him. He and daddy played football together in high school.”
“Everyone in this state played football together in high school. How about Erickson over in Dubois? He’s a Valium candy store. Does your daddy know him?”
I couldn’t see Maurey’s face, but she shook her head no.
“Then if you are pregnant we can talk abort or not to abort.”
“I’m just a kid, I can’t have a baby.”
“That’s what I thought.”
We sat a minute, staring at the shimmery view and considering the implications. Buddy would castrate me. I’d heard him talk horse castration before and he enjoyed it. Gave me every disgusting detail. Took an “I’ve got my balls and you don’t” attitude. Annabel would be disappointed. Everyone else would get a kick out of the deal because it would give them something to talk about. Wasn’t that much to talk about in winter.
Abortion—I knew what that meant, more or less. Meant keep or get rid of and it was king-hell, kick-in-your- door illegal stuff.
Maurey started yanking at the door handle. “How the hell do you escape this monster, I’ve gotta slide.”
Hank popped open his door. “Only works from the outside.”
As Hank ran around the back of the truck, Maurey threw her shoulder into the door which didn’t budge. “Give me a box, I’m a kid. Kids have fun, dammit, why won’t this door do something.”
Lydia looked at me. “You following this?”
