I stood up straight and looked across the top of the Olds to the pee tree. It was disgusting. Nobody tried to cup with their hands or anything. And they knew too. The high school boys were nudging each other and giggling and sneaking leers our way.
I said, “I call that sick.”
Lydia smiled as she gazed back into the crooked mirror. “I call that hospitality.”
The next day, Saturday, it started snowing. I wasn’t total hick enough to run into the street hollering, “Jeeze Louise, what’s this white stuff?” I’d seen snow in Carolina, just not a whole lot. It was still a cold novelty. We both kept it casual—“Look outside, honey bunny, Jack Frost came last night”—but, underneath, Lydia and I were pretty excited.
She stared out the window the same old way, right foot on the sill, Dr Pepper in one hand, cigarette in the other, but something had changed. She wasn’t staring into the void or herself or wherever Lydia went when she did her lost-in-space number. She was looking out the window.
“What’re those bushes over there?” She pointed with her cigarette across the street behind old Soapley’s trailer.
“That’s sagebrush.”
“Kind of pretty with the snow on it.”
We’d been living in a sagebrush ocean for two months. Something, either the snow or the penis parade, had opened the connection between Lydia’s eyes and her brain.
“You ever notice those mountains the other side of town?”
“It’s the Tetons, Lydia. We live smack in the middle of Grand Teton Park.”
“I knew that.” Her lips had a near smile, as if she remembered something. Which made me nervous. I wanted Mom to wake up, sure; it’s no fun coming home to an emotional slug, but Lydia awake could be a powerful force. The difference between a passive and an aggressive Lydia was like the difference between mononucleosis and a hurricane.
I ripped off Lydia’s new book, Catch-22, and rode my bike down to the White Deck. The snow was only an inch or so deep, but I still hit a slush spot and crashed the bike. Right out in front of Dupree’s Art Gallery, I slid sideways under a parked GMC. Afforded Dougie Dupree no end of entertainment. I got an earful of cold mud and the right half of my clothes wet. Bent my handlebars.
Added to all that indignity, Dot wasn’t even working. Some prissy little bopper hardly older than me bounced over and took my order for peach cobbler and coffee. Only other customers in the joint were two slack-cheeked retirees, named Bill and Oly, arguing over a fish they didn’t catch in 1943.
“It was a brown, didn’t you see the jump it made.”
“Brookie. Biggest damn brookie anyone around here ever saw. Fought like hell when she hit my gray ghost, but she didn’t jump. Brookies don’t jump.”
“Weren’t a ghost. Was renegade you rubbed worm all over.” I’d hoped Dot would see me reading this fabulously sophisticated novel full of sex and rebellion and think I was interesting. Instead, I dumped four spoons of sugar and a load of cream in the coffee and sat there with Catch-22 propped open by the napkin box, staring out the window.
Not that the book wasn’t a kick. It was the first time I realized death and despair can be funny, depending on how you look at it. All comedy, from I Love Lucy to The Taming of the Shrew, would be sad if it were true. This idea would eventually grow into my philosophical outlook on life.
But snow was more important than outlooks that day. Since then, an incredible amount of my time has been spent looking at snow, playing in snow, fighting with snow. Like true love, it has caused me hordes of pleasure, pain, and anxiety. From the White Deck window, it appeared soft and harmless. Lydia might seem soft and harmless, seen through a window. Goes to show you.
Two yards either way and Sam Callahan would have missed the dying trapper. As it was, Sam heard the low moan, “Diphtheria,” just before he stumbled over a frozen lump in the blizzard.
“Diphtheria,” it said again.
Sam brushed snow crystals off the old man’s face and held the frozen body in his arms without doing anything that might be misconstrued as latent homosexuality. “What’s that, old-timer?”
The man coughed for several minutes, then spoke. “There’s diphtheria in Yellowknife.”
“I’m not afraid of sickness.”
The dying man’s eyes were frozen open so he couldn’t blink. “The serum. I have the serum in my pack. Those settlers won’t die if they get the serum.”
Sam made his decision. “I will take the serum to Yellowknife.”
“But the blizzard. No one could make it through this blizzard.”
“I’ll make it, or I’ll die trying.”
The old man’s lower lip quivered. “I did,” he whispered, then he was dead.
Maurey Pierce banged through the door followed by LaNell and LaDell Smith, the twins all giggles and flouncing curly hair. Maurey stopped when she saw me and did a narrowing-of-the-eyes number. I narrowed mine right back. Overt hostility hadn’t erupted in the first two and a half months of our relationship. I’d call it extreme wariness, at least on my part. Maurey seemed to regard me as a very large, but non-threatening bug.
She dropped into the next booth with her back to me. LaNell and LaDell made a minor scene on who had to sit on the inside. LaNell and LaDell are the kind of twins whose clothes will match their entire lives. From the back, they’re kind of cute in a narrow-shoulders, big-hips fashion, but they both squint up their eyes like they just put in new contact lenses and haven’t gotten used to them yet.
I’m afraid God only passed out one brain between them.
At first, they made a major point of ignoring me. They all ordered hamburgers with Pepsi and went into this drawn-out debate on Liz Taylor’s treatment of Eddie Fisher. Maurey defended Liz. “Maybe she and Richard are in love,” which outraged the twins no end.
They cited Debbie Reynolds and Eddie’s mother and Burton’s wife Sybil or Sydney or something. I didn’t give a hoot and I don’t think Maurey did either. Nothing that happened to anyone more than fifty miles away could possibly affect GroVont, Wyoming, so it seemed stupid to worry about Liz and Eddie.
Then the bopper waitress, whose name was Laurie, brought me a coffee heater. “Anything else?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
I should never have spoken. Or maybe they’d exhausted Liz talk and they’d have turned on me anyway. LaNell’s voice was comparable to cutting a cardboard box with a butter knife. “Hey, Sam, don’t you know you’re too young to drink coffee.”
I gave her the mystery smile I’d been working on just in case I ever found myself in a Western poker parlor.
LaDell came in next. “Your mother should tell you not to button the top button on that kind of shirt. You look like a squirrel.” The pair stared at me with their upper lips warped so I could see watermelon-colored gums over their incisors.
I defended my button. “It’s cold outside.”
“It’s cold outside,” LaDell mimicked. “Wait’ll January.”
I wished I could see Maurey’s face. Her back hadn’t moved so at least she wasn’t laughing at me like the retard twins. Maybe she felt an empathetic connection.
LaDell continued. “Hey, Maurey, he’s reading a book on a Saturday. Trying to show off and study in public.”
“It’s not a school book. It’s literature.”
“Litter tour. Litter tour.” What makes people between the ages of eleven and fifteen such mean jerks? I’d rather be ninety-five than thirteen again.