I held Maurey around her waist. We were going out into the cold and I had a crotch full of goo and a possibly pregnant just-friends friend. Other than that, I was lost as ever.
Maurey got me in a cardboard box behind her with her arms up on my knees—almost the same position of Hank and Lydia in the bathtub.
“This smacks of suicidal,” I said.
“Stay loose if we dump.”
By leaning forward I could see way the heck down the mountain. It was like looking down a great, white throat. Hank had every intention of pushing us over the edge and letting us hurtle down the iced-up angle and into the woods. That’s why the box was waxed—so we could go fast and not waterlog out halfway down the mountain.
Lydia lit a cigarette. “Looks like spontaneous fun.”
Hank looked up at her. “We’re next.”
“Over my dead body we are.”
Maurey’s face was a nifty flush-red with white points on the tip-top of her ears. The air wasn’t near as cold up high as it had been in the valley. Hank said it was an inversion. “Same thing that causes smog.”
“Pollution causes smog,” I said.
Maurey’s eyes had a nothing-to-lose glint that worried me. “Whatever happens, don’t bail out,” she said. “You’ll break your neck.”
“I know we have a problem, but death isn’t the answer.”
Her head came back with all that beautiful hair in my face and she laughed and I was charmed to no end. It was the laugh of a child, the laugh of king-hell innocence, not pregnancy and orgasms and jacking-off boys in trucks; not even necking with greasers at the picture show. Maurey’s laugh belonged to a person who had done none of those things.
I’d of said something about it if Hank hadn’t shoved the waxed box and we took off like a cut-loose elevator.
I’m big on control. I like knowing where I am and where I should be next and how to get there and how to escape any situation. Falling is not your control motif. Maurey was hollering into the wind, same note as when she came in my room. My stomach did the up-the-throat thing.
I guess it was no faster than a sled, but the sleds I’d been on were semi-controllable and didn’t fly a half-mile down the ramp. The snow had these hollowed-out dips so there was an up sensation in the midst of the down. Tears froze. Then there was a cliff and we were rolling. I grabbed Maurey as we went through the box. Snow crystals stung while we rolled and rolled and I braced myself for the tree that never hit.
We finally slid to a stop with Maurey in laughter hysterics. I did a four-point and threw up. She shoved snow over the mess as fast as I put it out.
I can’t stand it when someone has a wonderful time doing the same thing that I hate doing. “Holy cow, that was a gas,” she laughed. “You okay?”
I tried to breathe.
“You’d better move fairly quick,” Maurey said.
“Why’s that?”
“Hank and Lydia are fixing to face plant on that same drop off and they’ll land on you.”
I looked back up the hill. Forty yards or so up was a five-foot ledge, not a cliff at all. “No way in hell Hank’s going to get Lydia in a box,” I said.
Famous last words. I heard the scream just before they came flying over the top. It was one of those stop- action memories that freeze in your head and stay there for life, even if you turn senile and can’t remember your own phone number. They floated in the air above the box. Lydia had her arms up, reaching for the sun. Her mouth was an O and I could see the tip of her tongue. One of Hank’s black boots hovered over her legs and his left hand showed on her shoulder. He seemed to be leaning back, as if the box was still behind him.
They hit and separated. Hank slid on his chest with his face pushing a great mound of snow before him. Lydia rolled end over end, then fell into a baseball hook slide. Neither one slowed down all that much as they went past Maurey and me. The really weird part was that Lydia went by laughing.
I’d never heard my mother laugh before.
Lydia mostly liked to comment on things. She didn’t really care to do anything and laughing requires some kind of doing. I didn’t know if I liked this turn of events or not.
When the slide finally petered out, she was lying on her back with both arms out in a crucifixion look. Hank slowly stood up and brushed off his face, but Lydia didn’t move a muscle. I flashed on paralysis and death. The three of us all made it to her at the same time. I knelt next to her head and touched her limp shoulder. “Can you move?”
Lydia smiled. “Isn’t the air pretty.”
“Where does it hurt?”
She sat up with her hands around her knees. “I was just admiring the sky. Do you mind?”
“You never admired the sky before. I thought you were crippled.”
“Why can’t a person admire the sky without their kid calling for an ambulance?”
I looked at Maurey who seemed to know what Lydia was talking about. They made eye contact. What I thought was the word:
Lydia struggled to her feet. “That had a high entertainment value. Let’s do it again.”
I wish I could claim that I caught the historical significance of watching
My brain was stuck on the first joke I ever memorized. Lord only knows how old I was, but I must have been young because I thought you could tell a joke five thousand times and it would still be funny. It’s a wonder Lydia and Casper didn’t slap me upside the head.
I would stand real straight and recite, “Mary had a little lamb,” then I’d hesitate a millisecond before screaming, “
Buddy was home, sitting in his Stratolounger, taking apart the trigger doogie on a thirty-ought-six. He spread all the little pieces on a cloth on a TV tray. Petey played Candy Land and he cheated. I saw him. Maurey lay on her stomach on the floor with a pillow under her chest and her chin propped on both hands.
She raised one foot, then lowered it and raised the other one. I watched her instead of Topo Gigio, the Italian mechanical mouse. I pretended I was the baby in her. It would be dark and hot and wet. Really wet. I imagined the baby as a wet mouse. It would be a girl. We could name her Vanessa or Chadron; or maybe Nancy since we’d both read over thirty Nancy Drew books.
Maurey would marry me if we had a daughter. Buddy would make her.
Buddy dropped a tiny screwdriver and said “Shit,” just as Annabel came in the room with a tray of cocoa mugs. Maurey’s mother must have been a cocoa junkie and I think it affected Maurey’s outlook.
“Don’t talk like a cowboy in front of the children,” she said.
“I am a cowboy.”
Petey jumped to his feet, singing, “Shit-shit-shit, shit-shit-shit,” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” He danced around the room in his pajamas, driving everyone right up the wall. If Maurey’s and my kid acted like that I would put him in Culver Military Academy.
Buddy raised his arm in a mock backhand and Petey ran screaming to hide behind Annabel’s legs. “Don’t let Daddy beat me. Don’t let Daddy beat me.”
“Now look what you’ve done,” Annabel said.
I was always intrigued by the flow of the Pierce family. I think the only way you can act cruddy to a family member is when you deep down inside care for them. Lydia and Caspar were formal and polite because they didn’t like each other. Anything approaching honesty at the manor house would have caused bloodshed.
“Shut up,” Maurey ordered.
Ed Sullivan is like the American role model. The guy couldn’t do anything—couldn’t act, sing, draw, throw a
