CALLOUSTOWN
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
CALLOUSTOWN. Copyright © 2015, text by George Singleton. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Designed by Steven Seighman
Some of these stories appeared originally in Agni, Arts and Letters, The Baffler, Best of the Net, Boulevard, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Five Points, Glassworks, Kugelmaas, New World Writing, The Normal School, Oxford American, and River Styx. The author is grateful to the editors.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Singleton, George, 1958-
[Short stories. Selections]
Calloustown / George Singleton.—First edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-938103-16-2 (softcover)
1. City and town life—Fiction. 2. Southern States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.I5747A6 2015 813’.54—dc23
2015015294
First U.S. Edition: November 2015
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Ron Rash, and in memory of William Gay
CONTENTS
When It’s Q&A Time
Static, Dead Air, Interference, Memory
Ray Charles Shoots Wife Quenching Earth
Muddling
Invasion of Grenada
Sonny Boy Williamson for Dinner
Spastic
These Deep Barbs Irremovable
Pitching Pennies
Fresh Meat on Wheels
Gripe Water
Is There Anything Wrong with Happier Times?
Unraveling
After School
What Could’ve Been?
When It’s Q & A Time
Although they lived in a giant hole, the Masseys didn’t hail from a tribe of cave-dwelling Vicksburg ancestors. They weren’t West Virginia coalminers relocated to Calloustown, South Carolina, who longed for happier times. None of the Masseys suffered from syndromes or diseases or allergies or phobias. They merely lived underground, as blithe and relentless as anyone else in Calloustown. My father didn’t like or trust them, probably because my father built brick walls and walkways, plus the occasional foundation, and the Masseys needed no barriers or welcoming entrances. I never went to art camp, so I can’t draw a picture of my best friend Lincoln Massey’s abode, but it’s like this: you walk about a half mile south from my parents’ house, take a right into the woods, and when you see a door on the ground with a knob sticking out, you’re at the Masseys’ place. The door might be covered in leaves and pine straw, just like the flat shingled roof, if it’s between October and March. To knock on the door, you plain stomp a foot. The whole reason I know Morse code and rudimentary tap dancing emanates from going over to Lincoln’s place most days, bored with a simple bang-bang-bang.
Before I was born—and before Lincoln was born, too—from what I gathered later on in life, Mass Massey had a normal, wooden, one-story cottage with a six-hundred-square-foot bomb shelter built below the garage. The house burned down. My father always said two things about this occasion: “That’s what they get for not having a brick house,” and “Too bad I didn’t have my homemade fire tower built at the time or I could’ve gotten a good view of the flames.”
Five or six years after I was born and discovered the doorknob in the ground, seeing as I could wander the woods and fields with little or no supervision, I heard the true story: Lincoln’s father and mother moved into the undisturbed bomb shelter, he got ahold of a jackhammer, and through industrious hard labor and obsession he had a two-story, then a three-story house, lined with cement blocks, those blocks painted or covered in fabric. There were a lot of lamps, of course. There was a toilet and shower up on the first floor, but I didn’t go to plumbing or engineering camp, either, so I don’t know how those things worked. And I guess I exaggerate somewhat about the knob poking out: If the Masseys were home, there was a car and S.C. Dept. of Transportation truck parked right before the roof.
Mass Massey couldn’t have stood more than five-two or weighed over 130 pounds of pure muscle. He appeared to be coiled at all times and didn’t blink his close-set, agate marble-like eyes. With his shaved head he looked more unforgiving spider monkey than husband and father, and after I tap danced on his door I stood back always, thinking he might pop through the annulled threshold like a jack-in-the-box at the end of its song.
His wife Evelyn, though, was either nearsighted or pious. She stood four inches taller than Mass Massey, wore tight sweaters, and played the role of my pillow when I was thirteen years old and needed a better cushion than my mattress had to offer groin level.
“Be careful of the moles and snakes at night, Reed,” my father said to me whenever I went over there to spend the night. “Don’t think about earthquakes, cave-ins, or worms.” To my mother he said things like, “Mass Massey doesn’t sound much like a commie name, but they got to be communists, what with their wanting to dig a house all the way to China.”
Secretly, my father loved having Mass and Evelyn Massey living nearby, because it made him seem normal. A man who strove to build the tallest fire tower in the state—for no other reason than to prove that he never should have been denied a job with both the forestry commission and the fire department straight out of high school—seemed normal compared to a family of underground misfits.
I always said, “Their house is nice,” seeing as it didn’t have knife-sharpening grinding wheels set up in the den or a disassembled window unit air conditioner on the kitchen table. “You should go over there and see it. Mr. Massey’s got a gigantic collection of arrowheads and spearheads and hatchet heads.”
“That’s good. Maybe he can use those things for ammunition when he digs one foot too deep and opens up a door to Satan’s minions,” I heard my dad say more than once.
My mother said, “Shut up, Dwayne. You’re going to give Reed nightmares.”
“I tell you what gives a kid nightmares—sleeping in an underground house where yellow jackets might come out of the walls at any moment. Or dead people buried nearby, when their graves slide through fissures. Dead people have abnormally gummy teeth. As does Mass Massey. All gums.”
“Go over there and have fun, Reed,” my mother would say. “Be polite. Don’t go telling the Masseys all these things your daddy says. As a matter of fact, try to keep Mr. Massey from talking. He might have a stutter, thus his name.”
I don’t know exactly what the psychological phenomenon might be called, but there has to be a label for how a child—or at least a boy—will almost always tell a neighbor something that he, the boy, was counseled to keep quiet. And then there’s the opposite: what a boy should tell his parents about the neighbors he forever keeps locked inside until, say, twenty-five years later when he’s on a psychiatrist’s couch or, in my case, stuck in stalled traffic with my then-wife June until a coroner showed up to put sheets over the bodies of a dead driver and his passengers up ahead on W. Ponce de Leon Drive. A close, lifelong neighbor can touch a boy’s pecker and take him on weekly convenience store holdups, say, “Don’t tell your mom and dad,” and the kid will turn into a compliant mute until everyone involved trades logic for dementia. That same boy can watch his father throw a dinner plate against the wall out of desperate angry boredom, divinely hear, “It’s a sign of weakness to lose on
e’s patience and temper, I promise not to act thusly again, don’t tell anyone,” and that boy will practically rent a billboard to announce his father’s weakness.
I sat behind the steering wheel, taking my then-wife June to a lecture over at one of those satellite campuses because she and I were about to give up on our marriage—though we never talked openly about it—and somehow we chose confronting new ideas instead of getting drunk daily as a way to repair our increasingly miserable cohabitation. This particular lecture was open to the public, offered by a female scholar from Mississippi who gained the trust of some Native American potters in New Mexico, where she learned how to build coil pots and fire them in dung. We didn’t know that the wreck ahead involved a dead threesome of migrant workers, two of whom got thrown from the cab of their truck, two of whom got ejected from the bed, one of which was only scraped up miserably and knocked unconscious. I looked at the lane next to mine and noticed a foot-deep pothole and said, “Indirectly, when I was six to twelve years old or thereabouts, I ruined a number of rims, hubcaps, and axles.”
“When it’s Q-and-A time, I’m going to ask that woman if the Hopi Indians were the first to make shallow oval casserole dishes with lids. I think I read somewhere that they were the first to make them, and that Corningware stole the idea.”
People ahead of us began honking. I didn’t mention how it had always been my experience that the people who asked questions at the end of the evening cared more about letting everyone in the audience know how stupid they were instead of needing a valid answer.
June said, “Wait. What did you say?”
My mother had won an Honorable Mention in the Upstate Fair’s craft competition for an egg basket she wove out of kudzu and honeysuckle back in 1972, and for the remainder of her time in Calloustown she concentrated on discovering new homemade dyes and patterns that rivaled “man in the coffin” or “peace pipe” or “snake on the loose.” She wasn’t paying attention to anything I did. My father drove around most days in between jobs, making a list of people who chose wooden fences and gravel paths over brick so he could make a point of shunning those people in public later. I can’t remember for certain, but I think I might’ve spent the night in the Massey hole for entire weekends without my parents even knowing I was missing.
And maybe those creatures did come out of Lincoln Massey’s house at night. I wouldn’t know, for we never stayed there. As soon as it got dark outside, Mass Massey loaded up his son and me in the truck, and we took off all over Gray-wood County, and sometimes right on over to the edge of the Savannah River, probably fifty miles away. Like I said, Mass Massey worked for the South Carolina Department of Transportation. He foremanned a road crew. And I guess with gas prices going up, inflation on the tilt, and the Office of the President being somewhat tenuous most days, Lincoln’s father feared getting laid off. This was the late seventies, both before and after the Iranian hostage crisis.
We got in his truck after supper—and I was glad to get out of their underground house, for the Masseys seemed to eat a lot of fish and the odor of cooked fish forever hovers interminably below the earth like stymied clouds. Maybe they were Catholics. There wasn’t a Catholic church within fifty miles of Calloustown, or a synagogue for a hundred. I never asked anyone’s religion, seeing as I feared a conversation that would include the question of my denomination. My father told me to tell people our preferred denomination was hundreds, then punch their noses if they didn’t laugh.
So we ate fish, waited for nightfall, then emerged from the bunker. Mr. Massey checked the bed of his truck and said out loud, “Shovel, pick, pick.” He touched his temple, looked at us with those beady eyes, and said, “Map.” And then we drove off, found quiet country roads with little traffic until teenage drinkers and dope smokers came out, wary and trustful that highway patrolmen stuck to more traveled stretches of blacktop, got out of the truck, and invented potholes where otherwise good asphalt existed.
“My daddy has to do this in order to keep his job,” Lincoln said each night, like I didn’t remember. “He says when the world runs out of potholes, he’ll run out of paychecks.”
Lincoln and I remained friends throughout our time in Calloustown, then he went off to college and, from what I heard last, worked as a lobbyist in D.C. Fortunately for him, he looked a lot like his mother, though I tried not to think about that when my pillow groaned beneath me on those confusing and hormone-ridden nights.
“Don’t tell anyone about this, Reed. You know that, don’t you? One day you’ll want people to keep your secrets, and they ain’t going to do it if you tell on me. That’s how it works. I’m not sure how or why, but that’s the way things go.”
I never planned on telling anyone about the potholes, especially my parents. I didn’t want Mass Massey finding out, then springing toward me one day from his trapdoor.
June rolled down her window. This was in April. The night before we’d gone to a lecture at the Georgia Center for the Book given by a man who published a memoir on his childhood, living with a manically depressed mother and a skeptical father. Personally, I had sat there mostly unmindful. I had caught myself trying to think of anyone I knew in Calloustown who wasn’t depressed or skeptical, and how perhaps a memoir of an exhilarated and gung-ho family upbringing might offer an obsequious and prurient reading experience.
June said, “See? This is what I’m talking about. How long have we been together? I can’t believe you’ve never told me this story. You’re not making this up, are you?” And then she stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Goddamn it to hell, move! Drive! Somebody pull onto the side of the road!” To me she said, “This isn’t one of those stories you heard from one of the barefoot people, is it?”
June never understood how or why I would work for the nonprofit Shod America, or find both joy and meaning in talking shoe companies into donating their products to poor Appalachian people. My wife, I feel certain now, envisioned herself going from food writer to editor of the Lifestyles section of the paper, then trudging forward from there. June, at this point, liked nothing more than to accept assignments from the paper to cover meaningless black-tie fetes of the unworthy, and then write, in my opinion, insipid narratives of how the chocolate fountain was the hit of the night. She wrote about or how the Pyramid of Cheops ice sculpture coupled with the monoliths of pâté formed to recreate Stonehenge seemed destined to live together at every social function.
When we sat at lectures and demonstrations that were supposed to strengthen our unrevivable union, I thought about how she no longer criticized our state’s politicians or the president. She no longer blurted out things about home-school parents, and in the afterlife I’m going to ask someone in charge if my ex-wife voted libertarian.
“It’s a real story from my life, June,” I said. We didn’t move. A black man walked by on the sidewalk, and June rolled up her window and clicked her door lock. I said, “What the hell’s happened to you?”
“Fuck you, Reed. I would’ve locked the door if a white guy came our way.”
I didn’t say “Bullshit,” but I thought it. In the afterlife I’d hunt June down and say, “Liar.”
How come I had never told my wife of the Masseys? Because when we got along, I didn’t want her to make some kind of unqualified leap in logic, which was how this entire conversation would end. Perhaps in some kind of passive-aggressive way it’s how I wanted our relationship to finally end. Maybe I’d gotten tired of June saying things to me like, “You’ve never had any ambition! What’s the next big career move for a man who doles out new shoes to poor people? Belts? Are you going to move up the ladder and start handing out neckties?”
When we met I had plans for graduate school in anthropology. I’d been accepted into two of the best programs there were, but June had that meaningless degree in journalism and had taken a job in Atlanta because their last food writer died—get this—when her gall bladder exploded. June had said to me, “I am not moving to Michigan or Chicago. How m
any columns can I write about bratwurst?” Before Shod America, I worked in the Textiles and Social History collection for the Atlanta History Center, receiving and cataloguing more than ten thousand pieces. June had said to me—though she was drunk at the time—“What’s your next step, plastics and social history? Something and anti-social history? You don’t have any sense of drive or accomplishment.”
I don’t know when the transformation took place within her. In the beginning we got along. I don’t want to make any presumptions, but she might’ve thought that my family name—Reddick—meant that I was related to the Reddicks, the ones who made their money in oil, then in newspapers. June drank a bunch for the first few years of our marriage, as did I, so maybe she kept forgetting when I told her I was from the Calloustown Reddicks. Maybe she thought I lied, that I paraded an anonymity-prone nature. I don’t know. From those early years I can only recall June looking like she emerged from a shower with Modigliani, and that she pitched a Sunday column called Bar Naked to her editor, which would include the mastery of mixology coupled with True Weird Tales from real-life publicans. The editor said it might work in Portland, Seattle, or Laramie, but not in the South. June quit drinking. I drank more, haunted daily by quilts and samplers on my job at the museum, then by wingtips and cheap canvas boating shoes when I got to Shod America.
I turned on the radio and tried to scramble past evangelists, country singers, and rappers—who all, oddly, seemed to comment on the same topics—trying to find the Road and Weather Conditions station. June looked at her watch. She said, “There’s no way we’ll make it to the lecture. Damn it. I wanted to learn more about kilns. I’d like to learn how to cook something in a horno, then write about it in my column.”
“Kilns get hot,” I said. “They get hot enough to turn dirt into a brick.” I couldn’t pass up the perfect segue, or what in my wet-brained mind I understood to be perfect and serendipitous cause and effect. I said, “You never met my father, but he knew how to turn clay into bricks, and bricks back into ground, kind of.”
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