Skipped Parts

opinion.

An antelope—Pushmi and Pullyu’s cousin—ran along next to the Oldsmobile for a few hundred yards, then crossed the road in front of us. His white bottom made a whoosh blur going over the fence.

“We were moving fifty miles per and he beat us,” Lydia said.

“That’s fast,” I said.

Maurey didn’t say anything.

The clinic was a blond-brick box across the street from a Dairy Queen. Same architecture as a Southern Church of Christ, even had one of those Signs on Wheels out front, but where a Church of Christ sign would read Make your bed in Heaven today for tomorrow there will be no sheets, or some pithy little saying that sounded great but made no sense to anyone, the clinic sign read Red Desert Medical Arts Complex and listed four doctors and an optometrist.

Maurey let go of my hand long enough for us to get out of the car, then she took it back. “Hank says this is a nasty town,” Lydia said. “No place for an Indian.”

The wind was blowing so hard we had to lean together across the parking lot, and when I opened the clinic door it whipped back and whopped against the rubber doorstop.

Lydia checked her reflection in the glass and corrected some stray hair. “No place for a white woman either.”

Maurey’s face looked calm, kind of. She wasn’t panicking or anything. Her tongue pressed against her lower lip making a little bulge in the hard-set line of her mouth. She had on jeans, and the hand that wasn’t holding mine was in her front pocket. Her eyes gave no information.

We stood over by a water fountain while Lydia went to the front desk and talked to a woman with violent orange hair and turquoise jewelry. They studied a sheet of paper and Lydia handed the woman a wad of cash. During the week the clinic was a regular obstetric place for women who wanted babies, so they had this bulletin board covered with snapshots of newborns with each baby’s name and weight written on the white border in blue ink.

Maurey and I stood in front of the bulletin board, looking at the babies. At first, they all seemed the same— wrinkled and rose-colored with squished-up eyes—but then I started seeing differences. Amanda Jen Wayne, 6 lbs. 7 oz., had a widow’s peak. Cody LaMar Jenkins, 9 lbs. 2 oz., had a furrow in his chin you could run a straw through.

Maurey’s hand tightened on mine, but she didn’t say anything. Lydia came back from the desk and tried to get us to sit on this cow udder-colored couch, but Maurey wouldn’t move from in front of the baby bulletin board.

She said, “I’m fine,” which were about the first words she’d said all day.

A door opened behind the desk and a girl not much older than us came through. She smiled. “Come with me and we’ll get you ready.”

Maurey gripped my hand harder and looked at me, then at Lydia. She said, “This is the shits.”

Lydia said, “You’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

I gave her hand a squeeze and let go. The girl pointed to a door off to the right. “The waiting room is through there. She’ll be done in a couple of hours.” Then she led Maurey away.

***

Three Negro men in white shoes took Me Maw away. I was in the bedroom with the round bed, under the bed, waiting for her to be dead. Bed springs are pretty cool if you lie on your back and look up at them. They grow fuzz. I heard the hearse pull up on the driveway and the men joking, teasing each other about someone named Sylvinie.

When the doorbell chimed I crawled out from under the bed to look out the second-floor window at the dark blue hearse with little flags on the corners. The back doors were open. Across the street, the Otake kids dashed around in their bathing suits, playing on a Slip ‘N’ Slide. The whoops and yells that carried across our yard didn’t quite fit the action. Jesse sprayed his sister with the hose, but her scream lagged behind her open mouth.

Two Negroes carried Me Maw out under a plastic sheet on a stretcher thing, with the other Negro and Caspar coming behind. When they were finished sliding Me Maw into the hearse, Caspar tipped each one a dollar. I could see the pink in the bald spot on his head, and his hand which was also pink stretching out with the dollars. The Negroes looked down at their white shoes.

After they drove away, Caspar turned and saw me in the window. I ducked down and slid under the bed.

***

Lydia and I went back out through the wind to the car where she picked up a Saturday Evening Post, then we crossed to the Dairy Queen to wait. I had a taco pie, which was this thing like a sloppy joe on a bed of Fritos in a paper boat, and a soft vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate wax. I imagined all the people who had sat in this very Dairy Queen, eating ice cream and waiting for loved ones to finish abortions so they could go home and get out of the wind.

Three high school girls bent over their soda pops watched us and giggled, Titter, titter, like doofy birds. All Rock Springs must know what happened over there on Saturdays. They knew I was the sperm father of a baby who would soon join the city sewer system. I wanted them to stop talking about me. It made me nervous, made my butt itch like king-hell, then my whole back and neck. The woman at the counter knew I’d been in the clinic too. They all knew.

Lydia glanced up from her magazine. “Stop fidgeting.”

“I itch.”

“Well, go to the restroom and scratch then.”

The bathroom was past the boothful of girls who knew, and, much as I needed to pee, I couldn’t walk by them. They’d say something—“Abortion boy” or “Where would you be if your mom…” Something like that. They might even reach out and pinch me.

“I’m going back over and wait in the waiting room.”

Lydia looked across her magazine and raised one eyebrow. “Just don’t fidget around me.”

At the clinic, I found a bathroom without having to ask the red-haired lady at the desk. She would know I was the cause of everything too. After I peed, I stood at the sink running water and studying myself in the mirror. I don’t think I’d ever really concentrated on that before. I mean, I knew what I looked like—a short kid with ears that stuck out, a long forehead and a spooky nose. I could have passed for nine—but I tended to forget. I tended to think of myself as sort of neutral-appearing, as if I could slide through life without being noticed, a face on a baseball card.

Back in the reception room, I didn’t even look at the desk lady. She was probably pointing a finger at me.

Six or seven people waited in the waiting room, and not a one was happy. An older couple who could have been someone’s grandparents sat holding hands. An angry man in a business suit glared at me. A familiar shape with a crewcut stood, facing the door on the other side of the room. He turned and our eyes met and it was Howard Stebbins.

I said, “Coach.”

He said, “Callahan.”

Time froze up, my mouth went aluminum foil. The implications raced—I was dead meat. Caught. Finished in Wyoming. How had he known? It hit that he hadn’t known. His eyes weren’t self-righteously hateful. He was pleading. He was the one with the dead meat.

A low scream came from the back of the clinic, then behind Stebbins, Maurey broke through the door in a white hospital gown. Her animal eyes searched the waiting room and found me.

“Let’s go.”

At her voice, Stebbins turned and Maurey made a gurgle-gasp sound. She ran; he reached out as if to stop her, then she was past him and moving. Everyone could see her full back and butt below the hospital gown strings.

I looked back at Stebbins, and behind him, in the door, stood Maurey’s mother in a white gown of her own. Her face was terrified, ugly; her mouth a gash. She called, “Maurey.”

I said, “Annabel,” and her eyes shifted to me. Then I got out.