Maurey was more interested in Friday’s fight. I wanted to smash Dothan Talbot and his sister in their inbred noses, but Maurey was into forgiveness. “Dothan didn’t know what he meant. It’s his Southern jerk-racist parents. I bet all he hears at home is, ‘I wish Kennedy would kill himself and save us the trouble.’ People talk like that and kids buy it.”
Forgiveness isn’t my deal. “The clown rubbed my face in snow. I want him to die.”
“See. You don’t mean that literally.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Besides, Dothan sees people die all the time on television. He doesn’t know real death from make-believe.”
I glanced at Annabel, checking her attention level on the conversation. Her face was blank newsprint. I tried to remember if her breasts had tits on them last night. The only tits I’d ever seen were in Playboy magazine where they looked like bull’s eyes on water balloons. Annabel’s breasts were way smaller than water balloons, at least as far as I could see, so maybe the bull’s eyes would be way smaller too, like little pimples. Imagining Mrs. Pierce’s breasts made me nervous, so I turned back to Maurey. Maurey didn’t have breasts.
“What are you defending this guy for? He’s king-hell stupid and he’s stronger than us. I don’t like people stronger than me.” Too late, I realized I’d said hell in front of Maurey’s mother.
Annabel spoke from over her cross-stitch. “The littlest Talbot is a slow, you know.”
“A slow what?”
Maurey was leaning back against the end of the couch with her feet between us. Whenever I shifted, one of her bare toes touched my leg. The index toe on her left foot was as long as the big toe.
She said, “You know what a slow is. Every grade is divided into two classes, quick and slow. We’re in the quick class.”
“You and I are quick, everyone else seems sort of medium.”
Maurey smiled, my discovery that the girl was a sucker for a compliment. “Everyone is put in slow or quick by the second grade and that’s where they stay.”
“No one ever crosses over?”
“Wanda Martinez went from quick to slow,” Annabel said.
Maurey kicked my leg. “That’s because her daddy rolled their Jeep off the pass and turned Wanda into a retard.”
The television was showing old footage of John and Jackie Kennedy at a dignitary ball. She wore a strapless exotic white thing and leaned toward him, fascinated by what he was saying. John Kennedy looked like a fairy-tale prince. They both had a happy, immortal presence, as if they lived in a special bubble. Then the picture went to a speech John had given in West Berlin. The Germans loved him as much as we did.
“It must be very hard on the Talbots to have a slow in the family,” Annabel said. “I don’t know what your father would have done if you or Petey had turned out slow.”
Maurey straightened her right leg so her ankle was draped over my thigh. “Mr. Talbot doesn’t care that Pud’s a slow. Probably makes him feel like real folks.”
I had some trouble following that. “Pud?”
Maurey laughed. “They call him Pud. His real name is Montgomery and he’s the stupidest kid in the valley. I saw him in front of Talbot Taxidermy the other day with frozen drool down his shirt.”
Dothan, Florence, and Montgomery. I made a connection. “They’re all named for towns in Alabama.”
Neither Annabel nor Maurey knew that and for a while we were all three silent as they digested the information and I watched Kennedy give his Cuban crisis speech. Actually, Annabel probably digested the information and Maurey moped because I’d known something she didn’t know.
I decided it was time to move around. “You want a Coke? We can catch what’s happening at the Deck.”
Annabel said, “We have pop here.”
Maurey stood up. “That’s not the point, Mom.”
The light was nice as Maurey and I walked the two blocks down Glenwood to Alpine and over to the White Deck. It has to do with altitude or lack of pollution or something—whatever it is, light in Wyoming can be transparent, energetic. It reflects completely, never losing a bit of brightness, especially after new snow. The light in North Carolina is heavy and absorbent, like a paper towel. You can’t see something three blocks away as clearly as something in your hand. In Jackson Hole, distance is irrelevant.
The Tetons stood, bing, shining against a sky so blue it appeared artificial. Every snow crystal on the ground was separate from every other snow crystal. It’s easy to believe in beauty when it batters you over the head.
As we walked along, I gave Maurey the rundown on last night’s revelations, leaving out the part where her mother triggers the mess. She nodded and asked questions at pertinent points. “How much goo?”
“Say what?”
“How much goo came out? Two tablespoons? A cup? A quart? Surely it wasn’t more than a quart.”
“It wasn’t more than a quart.”
“More than a pint?”
I tried to remember. “It was all spread out, but I’d say less than a third cup.”
“Did you taste it?”
“God, no. But Lydia did.”
“That may be illegal.”
This shocked me, the thought that a biological process might be affected by laws. “It was on a sock. I never heard of anyone getting arrested for tasting come off the end of a sock.”
“You never heard of come till this morning.”
“I’d heard of come, I just didn’t know what it was.”
“Knowing a word, but not knowing what it means, is the same as not knowing it.” Maurey’s face was flushed pink from the cold. There were rose spots above each cheekbone.
She looked down at my zipper. “When your thing is hard, does it point straight out or down?”
“Up.”
“Up. Are you sure? Horses’ things point down.”
“Up. At least mine does. I don’t know about anyone else.”
We stopped across from the triangle and tried to picture the internal workings of the deal. Maurey’s eyes squinched as she thought. She had the advantage over me in that she knew what male things were shaped like and I didn’t know squat about females except there was a tunnel involved.
Maurey nodded. “That’s about how I had it figured. The horses confused me. I wonder where kissing comes in.”
In books people often kissed before things were either skipped or talked about so metaphorically no one knew what was going on. It seemed to be a one, two, three ritual—kiss, skip the weird stuff, fall in love. I thought about kissing Maurey, right there on the street, in hopes that one thing led to another and couldn’t be stopped once begun, but she didn’t seem interested in the romantic end of the deal. Maurey was into the mechanics.
“Maybe you could show me your thing,” Maurey said.
“It’s not hard right now.”
“How can you make it hard?”
“I don’t know. It just happens sometimes. It’s not in my control.”
We stood on the curb trying to imagine the unimaginable. This seemed like a big deal—like driving a car—only adults could do and kids couldn’t. It would involve touching a girl in places you weren’t even allowed to look at. How could you touch something you couldn’t see?
“Do you think it feels good?” I asked.
Maurey shrugged as we walked on to the White Deck. “People in books usually think so. There must be more to it than making babies.”
7
Dot tousled my hair—a nasty habit if ever there was one—and smiled at Maurey. “I thought you two was mortal enemies.”
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked. Older women were always touching my hair. They think it’s big fun to embarrass kids.