Maurey looked awfully chipper, considering yesterday. Her hair was brushed shiny and her eyes glittered blue with interest at the baby stuck to her breast. The surf of love I’d expected last night rolled over me, only more for Maurey than the baby. The baby was still a little abstract.
She held out a Bic pen. “Want to sign my cast?”
Her left leg encased to the thigh hung by the same pulley-and-hook deal the vet used on Otis. Her toes were gray.
“Does it hurt?”
“Itches like king-hell, but doesn’t hurt.”
“You never said king-hell before.”
Maurey smiled, which was neat. “You’re rubbing off on me.”
“Holy moley.” I signed up her leg from Buddy—
“Is the baby eating breakfast?”
Maurey parted the hospital gown to give me a better view of the baby’s mouth clamped to her nipple. She looked asleep. “Her name is Shannon.”
“That’s pretty, I never heard it before.”
Shannon’s cheeks sucked in and out and the eye I could see opened, then closed slowly, like a tortoise.
“Can I touch her?”
Maurey looked worried for a second. “Okay, but be gentle. Babies aren’t footballs.”
“They don’t travel as far when you kick ’em.”
Maurey didn’t like my joke a bit. For a moment I thought I’d blown the chance to touch my baby. We hemmed around and I apologized and Maurey asked me when was the last time I’d had a bath, which she knew full well was the warm springs.
“That water was probably full of cooties.”
“You didn’t mind it yesterday.”
“Yesterday I was different.”
Finally, I sat on the end of the bed and touched Shannon on the back of her leg, above the plastic I.D. anklet thing. She was soft as a bubble gum bubble and, I imagined, just as delicate. I had created this. The whole deal was so neat I started hyperventilating and had to stand up.
“I hope she grows up to have my looks and Dad’s brains,” Maurey said.
“How about me?”
“She’ll have your hair.”
Sometimes I feel sorry for Petey. He was the only one who lived with Annabel from the abortion to the nuthouse. That period had to have an effect on the kid.
While we waited for Buddy and Hank to haul Maurey out of the woods Petey told me his mother was dead.
“My mama’s dead.”
“No, she’s not.” I poured their coffee dregs together into the same cup and took a drink.
“And Maurey’s going to be dead too. I’ll get her room.”
It was cowboy coffee and the grounds hadn’t settled all that well. “What makes you think your mother is dead?”
“Cause Daddy said she went away to the hospital. Jason’s dad said his mom went away to the hospital and she was dead. Grown-ups say went away when they mean dead.”
When Me Maw died Lydia found me under the round bed and pulled me out. She sat me in a chair and looked me right in the face and said, “Me Maw is dead. We won’t see her anymore.” None of that gone-to-a-better-place jive.
“You want to go outside and pet the horses?” I asked.
“Ever’ time somebody dies or gets a bortion or fat or anything, I have to go out and pet the horses. I hate horses. I’m tired of petting horses.”
Hank drove me to Jackson Drug where we bought a box of nickel cigars. He said this was part of the process, I had to give a cigar to everyone I met all day. I didn’t know if the deal was Indian or Wyoming or maybe people all over America bought cigars when they had babies. The druggist said, “Congratulations.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Hank and I each lit a cigar for the ride to GroVont. I was really tired from the excitement of Maurey breaking her leg and having a baby, and I hadn’t slept much on the sticky chair, so right off the cigar made me sick. Not so much barf sick, though nausea was a factor, as exhaustion-in-every-internal-organ sick.
Everything was over—I was a father,
Nothing was left but a long, long trip clear across the country—with the worst driver I’d ever seen.
Hank puffed and sucked and caused a cloud he could have sent signals with. As I got sicker, he started humming the song from “Bonanza.”
“What are you happy about?” I asked. “You’re losing a girlfriend.”
Hank took the cigar from between his lips. “Your mother has the heart of a mountain lion. The will of a buffalo.”
“Lydia?”
“She shall never be daunted by a man.”
“Until the first check doesn’t show up.”
Hank bent forward to look up through the cracked windshield at two hawks wheeling in the west. His foot came off the accelerator and we coasted down the highway while he admired, or studied, or whatever he did. They were kind of pretty.
“I got a winter job,” Hank said. “Winter jobs are rarer than girlfriends in these mountains.”
I didn’t ask what the winter job was—I didn’t care—but he told me anyway. “Buddy hired me to feed stock a couple weeks a month while he’s in town with the kids.”
I felt blue-green. “Mind stopping the truck for a second?”
As throwing up goes, this one was fairly normal—wet heaves, dry heaves, fear of death. Hank handed me a bandana and kept talking.
“We worked it out yesterday before you came screaming in the back door. I hadn’t mentioned you two being in the neighborhood, must have been a surprise for Buddy.”
“I wasn’t screaming.”
Hank blew smoke at me. “Try to miss the truck, Sam.”
I climbed back in and leaned against the door using the taped-up window as a pillow. “Life’s not all the Hardy Boys built it up to be, Hank.”
“Beats the alternative.” Hank shifted gears and moved back onto the asphalt. I’d never felt so awful.
“All I want is to go home and sleep till Halloween.”
“We have to drop by the White Deck first. You haven’t had your breakfast.”
“Food makes me puke.”
“Breakfast is important for a boy.”
“I want to go home.”
“After we eat.”
Caspar’s Continental was parked in the line of five or six pickups outside the White Deck.
“I can’t go in there, he’ll kidnap me.”
“Your grandfather will not kidnap you.”
“He’ll take me straight from breakfast to Culver. I won’t be allowed to tell Les good-bye. And Alice, I’m not leaving Wyoming without Alice.”
Hank dropped his butt into the near-empty Orange Crush bottle where it sent out a low hiss. “I will not let him take you without saying good-bye to Les and Alice.”
“I’m sick, Hank. Let’s go home.”
