Why Dogs Chase Cars

by George Singleton

  So on Sundays my father sent me out to do meaningless chores that may or may not have needed doing. I pulled his car or pickup truck down to the end of the driveway and changed the oil; I cut grass; I crawled around looking for dandelions, and sprayed the boundaries of our land with a homemade insecticide made up of Dad-pee and cheap beer—which meant it was basically just Dad-pee. I burned leaves in a fifty-five-gallon drum; I followed mole holes to nowhere. Every Sunday I went out to do something and stayed out there until somebody came to tell me how the Lord made Sundays for rest.

  It was almost always Marvin Childress who bestowed this knowledge upon me.

  Marvin Childress was one of a number of town fools, but he was known as the official one. None of us ever used that term around him, of course. How could we? Marvin made everyone in Forty-Five feel better about themselves. He wasn’t a drunk, and his IQ might’ve been quite high in regard to psychological standards. He was forty-five years old, always, according to him. Marvin tended to walk into social settings and blurt out stuff like, “I must go now—I have an important lecture to give at the University of Moscow,” or “When I was at the Sorbonne, I ate many, many snails. I don’t do that anymore, though. I’m forty-five!” He stood five feet tall, had graduated from Anders College when it was still a religious institution, and came from a prominent Forty-Five family that had somehow thrived outside of the cotton mill community. Marvin bought one vitamin daily down at Durst Drugs from a pharmacist named Byrd who could cluck his tongue and make it sound like a cello. Marvin Childress kept a paperback world atlas in his back pocket, pulled it out often, and when out shopping said things like, “Potenza, Modenda, Lacenza, Grosseto—I’ve been there. Oh, I’ve been there. Don’t you think that I haven’t been there. I’m forty-five! Ciao!” and then he’d take off swishy as an Olympic walker. Sometimes it was “Segovia, Palencia, Villa Real—I’ve been there. Oh, I’ve been there. Don’t you think that I haven’t been there. I’m forty-five! Adios!” and so on. A couple times Marvin cited Canadian cities and said, “Au revoir” and “Ta-ta” before exiting.

  It’s necessary to understand that as much as my father distrusted everyone, and downright hated most people, he taught me not to make fun of Marvin Childress. He told me just to agree with whatever Mr. Childress said, especially if it had anything to do with religion or science, no matter what I thought was incorrect. “It don’t matter none winning arguments with a fool,” my father said more than once. “What matters is not getting swell-chested or big-headed after walking away from a man like Mr. Childress. Who wants to have WON ARGUMENT AGAINST IDIOT on his tombstone? Not me. It don’t matter. You remember to be nice to that old boy, Mendal. That’s more important than being correct.”

  All of this does have to do with my father getting that letter from the environmentalists saying how he should be more careful with cutting down trees, by the way. Hold on.

  Forty-five-year-old Marvin Childress—for all of his supposed IQ and awareness—went to church every Sunday at the Forty-Five Three Holy Trinity Ten Commandment Church, which was the only other cement structure on Dead-fall Road. Anytime one of my teachers asked what church we attended and someone mentioned Forty-Five Three/Ten, I thought of pro-football quarterbacks calling a play. From the first grade on, my father told me to say that I went to the Sixty-Nine Church of Sacred Lips, and for me to come home and say which teachers laughed and nodded and caught on. I did. They didn’t.

  Anyway, Marvin’s church of choice—for me—was a regular mathematics problem, and he rode his old one-speed Schwinn bicycle right past our cement-block house on Dead-fall Road one-seventh of every week. The Sunday after I told my father about Shirley and me, I was standing out there painting the cement truck a variety of swirling colors because Dad had read an interesting article on hallucinogens, thought he might throw a big southern Woodstock one day, and wanted to turn the drum around to make people say “Far out, man.” Marvin Childress came up as per custom, except he was carrying a beehive. He carried the entire white box atop his bicycle seat as he rolled it toward Forty-Five Three Holy Trinity Ten Commandment, the queen bee inside, workers zipping all around his uncovered face. I said, “Hey, Mr. Childress.”

  He stepped down his kickstand, but held on to the hive. “You ain’t supposed to be working on Sunday, monsieur,” he said.

  I said, “Yessir,” because my father made me. If it’d been the mayor, or anyone who worked high up in the cotton mill, my response was supposed to be, “Is there anything in the Bible about taking a vow of silence? Why don’t you just goddamn shut up.” And then I was supposed to run away toward the front door.

  Marvin Childress had eyes that would’ve made a shark’s seem penetrable. He had the eyes of a molester, but the mind of sweetgrass. “I got my bees in this box,” he said. “I’m taking them to the church. The good people there can put their jars down and get them the best honey this side of Tupelo, Mississippi. I’ve been there! I attended the University of Mississippi. You want some of God’s sweet Truth nectar, you come on up to the church.” Those bees flew into his eyes. They lit in his tear ducts, but Marvin Childress didn’t swat once.

  I had made a wide swath of swirled red going down my father’s cement truck and had used half the blue paint. It was going to be a patriotic, hallucinogenic, twirling thing that I would later paint two big tits on and call the “Red, White, and Boobs” when I drove it around town. I said to Marvin Childress, “Yessir.”

  He didn’t move. The church sermon will start in ten minutes, I thought. He needed to get along to pour his slow honey for not-allergic-to-bee-stings parishioners. “God wants us to preserve and take care of His inventions, son. That’s what He wants. He wants us to take care of what animals grew up in the Garden of Eden, and of what trees He blessed with petals.”

  I looked at Mr. Childress’s wooden beehive and said, “Somebody chopped down a tree for you to make that hive.” I pointed at the Bible in his hand. “Bible’s made of paper. Paper made of wood. Wood from a tree. Tree from God. You’re a sinner.”

  What was I—fourteen, fifteen—old enough to know that I’d always have more questions than answers, that maybe I should’ve taken a vow of silence myself. I lived. People had lived before. Something bigger than us had made the universe. My father would beat me with a stick if he heard that I’d questioned a simple man.

  “God made everything, but He wouldn’t be upset with a Bible,” Marvin Childress said. “Oh, He’d be upset with about everything else we’ve done with His creation. I studied up on these things when I was over at the University of Tokyo, teaching classes on economics and agriculture.” He handed me a sushi-bar menu tucked inside his Bible, right about in the Mark section. Who ate sushi in Forty-Five, South Carolina?

  I said, “This menu is made of paper. It’s from a tree. God made the tree, right?”

  “Jesus was a fisherman,” Marvin Childress said. “You can look it up. It’s in the third chapter, second verse, of Warren.”

  My father came outside about this time and yelled. He pointed at the cement truck. My father waved his cane in the air as if swatting at Marvin Childress’s stray bees. I said, “I’m working, I’m working.”

  Thirty seconds later Mr. Childress picked up a rock the size of a baseball and hit me in the back of the head. Right before I went down I heard him say something about how any prophet with a chisel could etch out the eleventh commandment on a good-sized stone.

  MY FATHER DIDN’T press charges against Mr. Childress, and didn’t even tell the police that he wanted one of those don’t-come-within-five-hundred-yards injunctions. “It’s your own damn fault, Mendal,” my father said at the emergency room. “I told you, never taunt an idiot. I have a good mind to take this hospital bill out of your allowance.”

  The back of my head didn’t require stitches, but I’d been knocked unconscious for a few minutes, and my father worried. It wasn’t the first time I woke up on the ground yelling out, “What day is it, what day is it?” Not th
at I was a clumsy child and teenager, but my head had a propensity for finding hard objects, from cement floors to hickory trees. On this occasion, I had looked up at the red and half-blue cement truck and thought I’d been run over somehow.

  Dr. Wiggins came in and said, “Hey, Mendal, how you feeling?” He grabbed my knee. Dr. Wiggins had been my pediatrician since birth and had treated my father for gout, migraines, boils, snakebite, and food poisoning. Forty-Five wasn’t the kind of town for specialists.

  I said, “Fine. I got hit in the head with a rock by crazy Marvin Childress.”

  “Fine? Then what the hell did I bring you all the way over here for, son?” my father yelled. Someone on the other side of the curtain kept screaming about how he’d gone blind. “You didn’t feel so fine all blubbering in the front yard.” My father pulled a tongue depresser out of its dispenser, broke it lengthwise, and started cleaning his fingernails.

  The doctor shined a light in my pupils and asked me to follow his finger. He felt my skull and said, “I don’t have any experience with phrenology, really. Have you always had these knots on your head?” Dr. Wiggins had said the same thing every other time I got knocked out.

  I didn’t have time to answer. My father said, “That’s from his mother’s side of the family. They’re a bunch of knot-heads from way back.” It’s what he always said, too.

  Dr. Wiggins didn’t laugh. My father didn’t say, “That was a little joke.”

  “I’m of the belief that you’ll be okay. You need to stay away from whoever threw the rock at you, though, or at least keep him in front of you at all times,” the doctor said. “Anything else?”

  My father nodded up and down. And I never have figured out what secret sign language he and Dr. Wiggins knew, but before I could say anything, the doctor pulled out a special foot-long cotton swab. He reached for a rubber mallet normally used for testing reflexes. “The boy says he had sex with a girl in the back end of my cement truck. While we’re here, you want to go ahead and test him for the VDs?”

  Years later I would figure out that my father had paid Marvin Childress to hit me in the head, so then I’d have to go to the doctor, so then I’d learn my lesson about unprotected sex. I figured out that my father bought the cement truck so I’d have a dark place to take girls, and he took the truck in payment on purpose, and so on. The chain of events was monumental, well planned, and far-reaching. On the butcher-paper-covered examination table, though, I didn’t understand all of this, how this cause-and-effect went all the way back to God, really. When the doctor told me to drop my pants, I could only blurt out, “I didn’t really have sex with Shirley Ebo, Dad. I promise. I was only talking big. It was a joke. I made it all up.”

  The blindman on the other side of the curtain laughed and laughed. He said, “I didn’t really splash battery acid in my eyes, either.”

  The doctor dropped the mallet on the floor and put his middle and index fingers to my jugular. He said, “I believe he’s lying to us now, Lee. His pulse is too rapid for honesty.”

  “Uh-huh,” my father said. “Maybe I should get both Shirley Ebo and her daddy in here to clear this up.”

  “Whoa. You should feel his heart beating now, boy. Everybody stand back—I think Mendal’s fixing to explode.”

  I said, “No I’m not,” but just sat there.

  “Where’s ye erection now, boy?” the blindman on the other side of the partition yelled out. “That’d get your blood slowed down in the neck area.”

  I paid attention to the voice, finally. It could’ve been my high-school principal. It could’ve been the man who gave my father the cement truck. Hell, it might’ve been my mother.

  A TOWN WITHOUT whores must invent its celebrities. Ours was a man named Sonny Pearman who visited the schools on a bimonthly basis. Mr. Pearman had a passion for mimickry and deceit, and worked, for whatever reason, as a special guest speaker of sorts. I had known Mr. Pearman in real life—he worked as a housefather at the local orphanage, ran a plant nursery, and walked around Forty-Five swinging an empty watch chain. He tipped his hat to passersby, and spoke in foreign accents. He wore fake facial hair of one kind or another, always.

  On the day after my syphilis/gonorrhea exam I went to Coach Tappy Pinson’s first period P.E. and found a slightly familiar-looking man sitting at the locker room’s desk. Coach Pinson said, “Boys, we have a real treat today. This here’s a real, live ex–major league baseball player who’s come to talk to y’all today. I want all of you to listen close. This is Mr. Eli McClintock, the old center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. He has some things he wants to talk to y’all about.” As soon as he said that I figured out it was really Sonny Pearman, wearing a perfect handlebar moustache.

  Coach Tappy Pinson wasn’t but a step up from being a waterboy for the junior varsity football team, but he took himself seriously and seemed to know a little bit about foot and ankle injuries when one of us tripped while running up the bleachers every morning. This Eli McClintock was also the famed world-bounding travel writer who came into my English class the previous nine weeks. The year before, he was a famous good-hearted medical doctor who worked in Uganda and talked to my biology class about the dangers of an unhygienic lifestyle. When I was in the seventh grade Mr. Pearman showed up to my Civics class as a purported descendent of Stonewall Jackson.

  “Howdy, fellows,” the fake center fielder said. “How many of y’all like the game of baseball? How many of y’all like football, baseball, basketball, and a good fight song?” We raised our hands because our parents had told us to be polite. Mr. Eli McClintock’s moustache danced like electrons around Sonny Pearman’s face. He smiled sideways and had that faraway look in his eyes that let me in on the fact that he’d given this speech before, beneath a giant evangelical tent erected beside a country store on par with Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon down on Highway 25. Sonny Pearman used the lilting melodic voice of a hypnotist or animal-control specialist.

  He also owned the voice of the blinded man next to me at the emergency room.

  I should mention that Sonny Pearman—no matter what historical or made-up expert he chose to be—ended every session, no matter what the topic, by getting students to join him in prayer and to recognize that there was no peace without Jesus Christ in their lives. He meant well. I didn’t care. Later on, after I finally escaped my hometown, Sonny Pearman pretended to be Hal Holbrook pretending to be Mark Twain at the Forty-Five Little Theatre. It got rave reviews in the Forty-Five Platter.

  Anyway, we sat there in our short gym pants, our tube socks, and our T-shirts that all read 45. Fake Eli McClintock said, “I want to tell you about the time I hit for the cycle two games in a row. Y’all know what a cycle is, don’t you?”

  My friend Compton Lane said, “It’s the best time not to get a girl pregnant.”

  Glenn Flack yelled out, “My daddy used to have a motorcycle back when he fought in the Korean War.”

  Sonny Pearman didn’t veer off. “It’s a single, double, triple, and home run in one game. It don’t have to be in that order, but you have to get all of them.”

  Coach Pinson said, “The odds are against it happening. One time I got two singles in a row playing church league softball, but that was it.”

  I wanted to go outside and run around the cinder track until I got rubber legs and fell down face first. I wanted to walk over to the home ec class and stick my hand beneath the sewing machine needle. Compton Lane hit my bare leg and whispered, “Ask Coach Pinson if they were single men or single women.”

  Sonny Pearman droned on and on about his fake major league career, and then finally said, “And we have no other recourse but to be proud that God invented a pastime such as baseball.”

  Don’t ask me why I raised my hand when Eli McClintock asked if we had any questions prior to our obligatory prayer, or why I wanted to prolong our special get-right-with-God-and-you-can-do-anything pep talk. I said, “Mr. Pearman, are you of the belief that all of God’s creatures are splendid and s
pecial?” like I’d heard him say when he was pretending to be a hundred other people.

  He said, “Son, I’m Eli McClintock, the world-famous center fielder from the St. Louis Cardinals.”

  I said, “Uh-huh.” And then, for no reason outside of hardheaded meanness, I said, “To play baseball, God made trees, then trees get cut down and made into bats. God made horses, then horses get slaughtered so their hides can make balls. Gloves made from cows. Rosin bag made from rosin.” I kept going. I went into bleachers, and popcorn boxes, and hot dog wrappers.

  Compton said, “Foul ball, foul ball, foul ball,” with each of my examples.

  Coach Pinson said, “Hey, that’ll be enough, Mendal. That’s enough.”

  Before Sonny Pearman led us in prayer as Eli McClintock, he said, “That’s right. God gives up horses, cows, and trees so we can enjoy our nation’s pastime. Isn’t God wonderful?”

  To me Coach Pinson said, “You think about that when you’re burning in Hell.” Then he gave me two demerits for talking back.

  I MADE IT through the remainder of the school day without dropping my lunch tray, and without Melissa Beasley or Libby Belcher raising their hands to tell a teacher that I didn’t go to church on Sundays, that my father didn’t have a real job, or that my mother traveled with a pack of gypsies. I got home, though, to find Sonny Pearman waiting on the front porch. My father was off looking for cheap land to buy up at one-tenth its true value once some land developer decided to make a golf course subdivision there.

  I said, “Hey, Mr. Pearman.”

  “Hey you own goddamn self, boy,” he said. He didn’t wear his St. Louis Cardinals uniform anymore, even though he held a thirty-four-ounce wooden Louisville Slugger. “You go and try to make a fool of me one more time in public and I’ll beat your face in. You do it in private, and I’ll see to it that you dead.”