Calloustown

by George Singleton

  “He’s right outside. You want me go get him?” She took the can of beer from me, and I thought about how I would have to tell Ransom Dunn that between the time he took off, I drove down to the Calloustown and Country Pick-Pay-Go.

  I stared at the pressure cooker’s top and imagined what it would be like to shove my face straight down into the meat. I wondered if it would be enough to kill me. I’d heard somewhere along the way that burning to death was the worst of all, and that drowning was the best. People always had these kinds of lists. Cancer worse than a massive heart attack, hanging worse than drug overdose, those kinds of things. My relatives had found a variety of ways to kill themselves, but none out of boredom, which was the means of dying I feared worse. Muddy Waters sang songs about wanting to be a catfish, or about being a diving duck. Those were animals that didn’t consider the heaviness of existence, evidently.

  With no warning I found myself enveloped in that miserable, relentless feeling that I needed to be elsewhere, as in living with my ancestors. I’d not felt this particular feeling since that last official day of working as an optician, a day that included six glaucoma and two diabetes patients one after another all blaming me for their conditions.

  I looked at the two-pronged fork and thought about a story I read back in college—for the record, future opticians shouldn’t be forced to take literature courses—wherein a Japanese soldier disembowels himself. I imagined that, on the list of death pains, disembowelment would be right below self-immolation. I thought of the long-term forms of suicide—smoking and drinking, working out in the sun for years on end without sunscreen, tearing down asbestos-riddled attics, driving without a seatbelt. I thought of Hansen’s disease and realized that I got off track in terms of self-inflicted downturns. Somewhere along the line I got stuck wondering if it would be worse jumping off a building head first onto the concrete below, or picking up a live electrical roadside line following a tornado or hurricane. I wondered if two black mamba strikes simultaneously would be worse than jumping out in front of a Greyhound bus driven by an impatient man with blues songs running through his head and a questionable wife at home.

  When the Dunns and my wife walked into the kitchen, one after the other, I thought two things: “How long have I been out of focus?” and, “Is this one of those interventions everyone’s talking about lately?” My wife laughed and enwrapped Boo Dunn’s shoulder. I’m talking Harriet slung her head back in a way that showed off her back molar dental work. Ransom Dunn carried in two bottles of Merlot that appeared to be bought either online or from a real wine store sixty miles away. My wife said, “We’ve not had anyone over for dinner for a long time. Well, ever, now that I think about it.”

  Boo Dunn said, “Why don’t y’all let me make some pizza dough, and we can put some of that other venison on it for a topping. I know it sounds weird, but there’s nothing much better than deer pizza. Let me use one of your specialized rolling pins, there, Duncan.”

  “I’m not much of a wine man, myself,” Ransom said. He stood close to me and stared down at the pressure cooker. “I saw where you had some bourbon back there in your spot,” he said, pointing his thumb. His wife and Harriet seemed to be running off to look at a shower curtain, or throw rug, or curio cabinet, or stylish Venetian blinds, or baker’s rack, or collection of swizzle sticks, stuff like that.

  My nineteen-year-old ex-stray pound dog Sophocles dragged himself into the kitchen and looked up at me. He directed his nose toward the pressure cooker. I said to Ransom, “I’ve had this dog ten years. He won’t die.”

  “Yeah,” said Ransom. “I guess he don’t want to.”

  I walked Ransom into the den. We turned on the television. What else could we do? Sophocles followed us, pulling his back legs the way he did. In the kitchen, something bad happened and the pressure cooker blew. Maybe I didn’t crank the top on tight enough. I said, “Damn.”

  Boo and Harriet came out of the guest bedroom saying “What was that?”

  I said, “We might have to call out for some food.” I said, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

  No one responded. The Dunns looked at me, though, as did Harriet. Did I see in their faces some kind of accusatory glance? Did they think I rigged the pressure cooker to blow? I looked down at Sophocles and thought about how I could’ve just as easily named him Homer or Ray Charles. Even my dog seemed to look at me as if I’d done something wrong and on purpose.

  “The deer’s on the ceiling,” Boo Dunn said.

  We all looked up that way. Harriet walked into the kitchen and opened the wine. She didn’t say anything about how I was a loser with bad luck. She didn’t look up at what dripped back down on our floor. Me, I looked at my wristwatch and thought about how many days I had to break my family’s record. Barely—if anyone listened closely—we could hear Sonny Boy Williamson singing about bringing eyesight to the blind, I swear. Ransom said something about how he didn’t think what plastered itself to the ceiling would eventually start a fire. Then he asked me if I had two harmonicas anywhere around.

  Spastic

  The Calloustown station remains open twenty-four hours a day, though no Greyhound or Trailways bus has pulled up for passengers to disembark in fifteen years. The building—plastered-over cement blocks that nearly look stucco, thus exotic among the mobile homes, wooden bungalows, shingle-sided shotgun shacks, and fieldstone salt boxes—holds, still, a linoleum-floored waiting room with chairs shoved in three rows along the walls. There are two restrooms, both with working sinks and toilets, and a glass-fronted booth where someone sold tickets, offered advice, and tagged luggage. A television’s mounted in the southwest corner of the waiting room, six inches from touching the ceiling. There’s a half-filled gumball machine, the proceeds of which aid small children with birth defects. No one has ever thought to crack open the globe and steal its pennies. An empty cigarette machine with a rust-splattered mirror and rusted silver knobs stands in the corner—$1.75 a pack for Lark, Camel, Lucky Strikes, Pall Mall, Viceroy, Kent, Winston, Marlboro. There’s the smell of Juicy Fruit in the air, of plastic, of instant coffee.

  The personnel’s vanished, the bus line having chosen a different route between Columbia and Savannah, but the electricity’s still on. Because there’s no community center, YMCA, Lions Club, rec center, Moose Club, Jaycees, Ki-wanis International, Rotary Club, or Shriners Club in Calloustown, the more community-minded men—the ones who’ve lived to retirement age, or given up altogether—meet daily at the depot. They have come to realize that their town needs a famous resident in order to attract tourists, which will revive the economy. They have realized that it’s better to have a diverse population instead of nearly everyone named either Munson or Harrell. These free thinkers have concluded that annual festivals—such as their own Sherman Knew Nothing celebration to point out all that the general missed by swerving away between Savannah and Columbia during his march—don’t bring in the recognition or revenue. How can, like the old days, a Calloustown child grasp enough knowledge and culture to understand the importance and benefits of fleeing?

  Munny Munson says daily, “If our kids fear the outside world, or never comprehend its offerings—good and bad—then those kids will remain here. You think the gene pool’s not wet enough to emit a mirage now, just wait another two generations. We got to do something.”

  On a particularly bleak day, there in the waiting room, one of the other Munsons, or one of a number of men named Harrell, might say, “Low IQs means less personal hygiene. Less hygiene means more contagious diseases. And then everyone dies and people elsewhere might never appreciate William Tecumseh Sherman’s apparent myopia.” Or one of the men might go off saying, “Lower IQs means less ambition. Less ambition means not taking care of the yard. High grass means field rats. Field rats attract snakes. Bite from a viper on an ambitionless slow-witted person with influenza would be fatal.”

  For eight hours a day these men nod, clear their throats, blurt out versions of slippery-slope possibilities, al
l the time while watching The Price Is Right, soap operas, reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island, and Hogan’s Heroes. They veer from local, state, or national news—“I’m depressed enough, change the channel, I think that one station’s doing an Addams Family marathon”—and no one ever questions how they could get cable television in a closed-down bus station where no one admits to paying the electric or water bills.

  They don’t brag about sexual conquests, or reminisce about first times, for each of them has a wife whose brother and cousins stand nearby.

  Mack Sloan wipes his soles on the worn rubber Trailways mat out front, turns the knob, and walks into the waiting room. At first he thinks that the men congregated inside laugh at him—as if they judge a man by the overalls he wears and anyone who decides to go out in public wearing fluorescent warm-up pants and a matching windbreaker stands worthless. Then Mack Sloan realizes that the laughter emanates from the television program’s laugh track, the volume cranked full. The men watch The Honeymooners.

  Mack Sloan nods. Munny Munson stands up and turns the volume knob. He says, “Are you the man from the Guinness Book of Records we been waiting on?”

  Mack shakes his head. He says, “I’m turned around a little. Any of you men know where I can find the local high school?”

  Flint Harrell stands up and leans backward awkwardly so that this stranger—the first non-Calloustowner to enter the bus station in fifteen years—can admire Flint’s gold-plated belt buckle embossed with SOUTHERN REGION DISTRICT 4 LEVEL 6 SENIOR DIVISION THIRD PLACE HORSESHOES. Flint says, “If you looking catch a ride there from here, you’re late by 1996. Last bus come through ended up taking people down to those Atlanta Olympics.”

  Mack Sloan does not feel threatened. He almost laughs. This is perfect—he loves being the first scout in a backwards area, coming out of nowhere like some kind of savior to extract an unknown high school athlete from humble beginnings, promise questionable future monetary outcomes. “No, I got a car out front. Just looking for the high school.”

  Munny Munson says, “We been waiting on the World Record fellow. Me and Lloyd one time played dominoes for sixty-seven straight hours straight. That’s got to be some kind of record.”

  And then, as if in a rural AA meeting when the floor opens up for personal testimonial one-upmanship, each man offers his declaration:

  “I can lace a pair of logging boots in fourteen seconds.”

  “I ate four whole barbecued armadillos in twelve minutes.”

  “I’ve stared at thirty-two solar eclipses and ain’t gone blind yet.”

  “I trained an ostrich to clean gutters.”

  Mack Sloan says, “Okay. This sounds like quite a town. Listen, I know it’s pretty small here and everyone’s probably related to one another. Do any of you know about Brunson Pettigru, the track star? I’m supposed to go clock this fellow and see if he can really do what they say.” Sloan pulls a stop watch from the pocket of his windbreaker, as if to prove his being an authority.

  The waiting room regulars quit talking. What did this man mean by “related to one another”? Had word seeped out about the gene pool?

  Munny Munson says, “Track star? No. Never heard of him.”

  “We don’t even have a team anymore, not that I know of,” says Flint Harrell.

  “Let me see that fancy timepiece,” Lloyd says. “I could use one these when I dismantle and reassemble my 1970 Allis Chalmers D270. I believe I got the record unofficially, you know.” Then he went into how the world record take-apart-and-put-back-together-a-tractor man might pull in visitors to Calloustown, and then they’d buy hot dogs, and then everyone would gain financially, and then there would be no more threat of pestilence within the failing, bleak, doomed community.

  Mack Sloan, indeed, had not heard of Brunson Pettigru via Track and Field News, The Florida Relays, Runner’s World, or Parade magazine. No, a man named Coach Strainer—who taught PE over the Internet through the South Carolina Virtual School—boasted of his unknown students on his Facebook page wall: 57% of his students could figure out their BMI. One kid had taken online physical education so seriously that he’d dropped five pounds over the semester, and another could explain all the rules of two different darts games, plus badminton. And then there was Brunson Pettigru of Calloustown, a homeschooled white kid, a six-foot two-inch, 155-pound country boy who had—once he fully understood the cardiovascular system’s nuances—dropped his quarter-mile time from fifty-five seconds to forty-six, his half mile from 2:08 to 1:50.

  Sloan understands that, even at a regular high school with traditional teams, coaches exaggerate. He’d scouted, in the past, a boy who heaved a shot put eighty feet, only to find out the boy’s father worked in a machine shop and had shaved weight from the iron sphere. So Mack contacted the S.C. Department of Education, which sent him to the Department of Charter Schools, which sent him to the Department of Online Schools, which eventually offered to have Coach Strainer—“one of our finest educators”—contact Mack in Oregon.

  “I didn’t believe the kid, either,” Strainer had said from his office in Myrtle Beach, which doubled as his dining room. “But I seen it with my own two eye! I got me a friend retired down here from the CIA and he seen it, too, and says they’s no way the tape’s been sped-up doctored.”

  One of the waiting room men points out the door and says, “School’s down there a piece. You won’t miss it. They mascot’s a ostrich, so they’s a big bird right out front of the place. I mean, a sculpture one.”

  Another man says, “I know who you mean. He ain’t no runner, though. He’s a spastic.”

  “We don’t want to be famous-known for spastics,” says Munny Munson.

  Brunson Pettigru’s mother homeschooled her only son, for she viewed the public school system in general disdainfully, and the Calloustown school district in particular. Mrs. Pettigru did not fear that her child might receive secular teaching in regards to science, literature, and religion. To the contrary, she believed a public school filled with children of one denomination only—a school with a population made up almost exclusively of Harrells and Munsons—might corrupt her son into believing in virgin births, no dinosaurs, ribcage wives, and talking bushes. Unlike ninety-nine percent of homeschooling parents in South Carolina, she didn’t choose to direct her son’s studies so that they would include daily recitations or sing-alongs of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer, the Star-Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, and the Second Amendment of the Constitution. No, Betty Pettigru feared that touched-by-God born-again teachers might chance reprimands and recrimination for “doing what God believes to be right.”

  “If you want to see yearbook photos of people who did what they thought God wanted them to do, go check out any state’s Department of Corrections file of mugshots,” she told her son often, as she had told her husband, Finis, before he gave up and died of a heart attack in the middle of trying to break the world record for smoking cigarettes in a twenty-four-hour period.

  Mack Sloan drives up to Calloustown High and sees Brunson wearing vintage gray drawstring sweatpants down at the cinder track that surrounds what might have been a football field. There isn’t but one goalpost, for the Calloustown Ostriches won a game due to forfeit three years earlier—the team from Forty-Five had been forced to suspend all of its players at the last minute when its appeal was denied by the South Carolina High School Athletic League, in regards to having a number of thirty-year-old players who didn’t go to college—and the fans in attendance stormed the vacant field and with the use of Harmon Harrell’s tractor knocked over the goalpost and carried it into town. From that point on, when a visiting team scored a touchdown, or wanted to attempt a field goal, the teams had to turn around if indeed they had no goalpost in which to direct a kick.

  “You’re Brunson?” Mack says when he gets down to the field. “You’re Brunson’s mom?” he asks the woman who stands there, holding what appears to be wide rubber bands meant for strapping furni
ture to a flatbed’s frame. “I’m Mack Sloan.”

  Mrs. Pettigru says, “I wouldn’t be allowing this to happen if there was homecolleging.”

  Mack says, “What are those things?” and points at the rubber bands.

  He hasn’t looked closely at his prospect yet. Brunson wears eyeglasses that appear to be fake, the lenses are so thick. He has them tied to his head with what looks like a bra strap. And in a voice that Mack would later describe as something between a tracheotomist’s and a kettle spewing steam, Brunson says, “Because of the cardiovascular limits of the heart vis-à-vis oxygen intake, I tie my forelimbs with these industrial bands before I run so that my most vital organ vis-à-vis the running process does not need to validate anything between my glenohumeral joint and my phalanges.”

  Mack looks at Brunson. He thinks, what if aliens come down to the planet and discover this guy? Wouldn’t they wonder if they’d never left home? He says, “All right. You seem to be the kind of guy who might have pre-med in his future.”

  Mrs. Pettigru, wearing a cotton-print dress, says, “My Brunson has always been interested in animals. Does your college have a veterinary program?”

  “I like cheetahs,” Brunson says. “They’re the fastest. If this school had been called the Calloustown Cheetahs, I might have had to fight my mother about allowing me to matriculate. What’s your college’s mascot?”

  “It’s a duck. They’re not much on land, but they can fly. Some of them can fly.” Mack looks down at Brunson’s shoes. The boy wears a pair of regular, flat and slick-bottomed Keds-brand canvas boatshoes. One of the Pettigrus took a bottle of Wite-Out and marked a Nike swoosh on the sides. Mack says, “Duck.”