He watches his mother weave almost indiscernibly, then reach Old Calloustown Road and turn left, toward what remains of the town. She drives in the direction of Worm’s and the community center. She drives past Tiers of Joy bakery. Harold remains a safe distance behind her, crawling along at twenty miles an hour. He watches as his brother comes from the other direction and notices how Ruth doesn’t seem to notice. Kenny waves at their mother, then blows his horn and swerves toward his brother, a big open-mouthed laugh on his face.
The ember falls off of Harold’s cigarette right onto his lap. He brushes his pants quickly, flicking the ember, somehow, straight into a crease between the sock on his right foot and his loafer. In an attempt to toe the shoe off completely with his left foot, he steps on the accelerator and, not watching the road, rams into his mother’s car. Harold’s two front teeth, capped, break off on the steering wheel. The airbag doesn’t deploy as it does on Ruth’s car—Harold’s father had bragged about the 1988 Lincoln Continental being one of the first vehicles out of Detroit to have driver’s-side bags.
“Son of a bitch,” Harold yells out, throwing his shoe across the road into a ditch. He holds his hand to his mouth, spits two teeth out, and then reaches down to take off his sock. By the time he reaches his mother she’s already out of the car, her eyes shut tight from whatever chemicals or gases had released.
Ruth says, “What the hell are you doing, boy?”
He doesn’t say anything about the cigarette. He doesn’t want his mother to know that while she wasted money on cartoon characters he spent money on what would eventually kill him. He says, “I must’ve blinked. You stopped for no reason, and I must’ve blinked.”
She says, “I didn’t want to hit those rats crossing the road. Did you see those rats? There was a line of them, just like deer but smaller. That’s bad juju to run over the helpless.”
They walk together to view the damage. Harold’s car’s radiator spills antifreeze on the pavement. The Lincoln appears barely damaged, though several of the small dings have now transformed into one large dent. “Is there a dentist left in this town? Damn, damn, damn. I can’t deal with customers if I look like this.”
“Why are you following me?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to kill me or something? Is that what this is all about? You out of money or something, son? Come down here finally to scare me to death, run me off the road, get you and Kenny what’s left of the estate?” She holds the back of her neck. She opens one eye slightly.
“It’s that song from Dad’s funeral,” Harold says. “That’s how come I knew that song on the radio.”
“Call yourself a wrecker, son,” she says. “I got things to do.” She walks back to her open car door, still holding onto the back of her neck. There are children waiting for her to tell stories, and single mothers who need to learn how to knit. At six o’clock she’s supposed to teach a class on making wind chimes out of bamboo. Plus, she’s promised to help Berta Parks speak in proper Southern dialect, should someone ever need to take over Storytelling Hour. Then there’s the puppet show. Ruth bends down slowly and lifts her eldest son’s compromised sock off the ground. She says, “This will work out just fine for a puppet, I’m betting.”
Unraveling
Long after I moved away, knowing nothing but bad things could occur to me—bad job followed by no job, bad marriage followed by no marriage, painful lesions followed by death—my father continued to struggle with mysterious demons and/or the Opposite of Newton’s Third Law. It need not be pointed out that my father, born Sinclair but known as “Sin” forever, owned a printing company until the remaining denizens of Calloustown discovered Kinko’s, that my mother left him for a man down in Sumter who retired from the Air Force and opened up an oyster bar, and that boils/ hives/shingles arrived simultaneously on Dad’s torso, just like I’d warned him. Sometime after I’d moved away, my father swore, he would pick up the phone to call someone only to find that person already on the other line, and then when he hung up the telephone would ring. He’d fill up premium unleaded into his tank, get a mile down the road, and run out of gas. My father put worms on his hooks and caught nothing, then, in desperation, threw in a naked bronze Eagle Claw and immediately pulled out a palm-sized bream. He’d spray his live trap with apple juice and place carrots in the tray in order to catch rabbits so he could breed the things and sell them to locals, only to have a cloud of Mexican free-tailed bats roost in the chimney. One time he had a sneezing attack, took over-the-counter medicine, went to a certified allergist, and after a thousand pinpricks the doctors concluded that my father was allergic to Benadryl. This went on and on. I had moved off to college then stayed for fifteen years. My dad closed down Sin’s Printing, my mother left, the lesions erupted, and I visited less frequently until I picked up the phone one day to call my father and he was already on the other end.
“I told you this kind of shit happens all the time to me. And listen—because I know you’re going to bring it up—if I moved away, then it would be like letting my nerves win,” he told me. “Where would I move? To Sumter, where I’d be stuck eating oysters and letting Soretta live the high life from her goddamn husband’s profit? Fuck that. I know she’s your mother and you probably love her still, but I can’t make myself hope that she does well. As a matter of fact—and I hope there’s nothing to bad karma, you know, wherein you wish bad things on a person and then bad things happen to you because of it—I kind of want her to die a miserable death. Well, no, I want her to think she’s going to die a miserable death, but really live to a hundred always on the edge of thinking it. Does that make any sense, son?”
I said, “Hello?”
“Listen. I wouldn’t be so pissed off if there was a goddamn reliable doctor in this town. Do you remember Dr. Stoudemire who used to be here? He was a great man. You know what he did when the town died? He decided to move and start up doctoring in New Ellenton, which is close to being a ghost town on the edge of the Savannah River Nuclear plant. Ellenton’s under water, in case you didn’t pay attention to South Carolina History in seventh grade.”
I hadn’t. I mean, I remembered something about slavery, and a nuclear bomb that accidentally fell through the bomb door hatch of a B-47 above Mars Bluff on March 11, 1958, and—although the uranium and plutonium core wasn’t attached—it created a mushroom cloud and hole deeper than most freshwater lakes in the area. I remembered that Senator Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat and opposed desegregation, though he fathered a biracial daughter. I remembered that a man named Senator Brooks beat up Senator Charles Sumner with a cane back before the Civil War. There was some kind of mention of a slew of astronomical events predating the end of the Pleistocene epoch hitting right around Calloustown, things called “Carolina Bays” because of the holes in the ground that, oddly, looked similar to that bomb hitting Mars Bluff. The teacher made a big point bi-daily to say something about how a man named Ruple went off to embalming college, got a job in one of the more prone-to-die-early cities, and left her in Calloustown alone.
I said, “Okay. I think we’ve gone over all of this before. Why did you almost call me but didn’t because I picked up the receiver to call you and you were already there?”
“There’s more,” my father said. “There’s so much more. A lot more.”
I looked over at my wife. She had taken up knitting and spent more time—from what I could tell—untangling knots than actually manufacturing a scarf or mitten or bootie for one of her friends who planned on having a baby in the next twenty-seven months. I said, “Do you want me to drive down there?” I should mention that as soon as my mother left, back when I was in college, my father insisted that I call him only “Sin.” I said, “Do you want me to drive down there, Sin?”
He said, “It’s gotten to the point where I go to sleep at six fifteen in the morning, and wake up at eight thirty at night. It’s all backwards. It’s not like I’m scared of dying, like that man in that famous story. It’s not like I want to st
ay awake all night afraid I’m going to get murdered.” He said, “I caught myself last week toweling off before I got in the shower. And then I got in the shower with my clothes on, goddamn it.”
I looked at Patricia. She said, “Are you all right?” She unknotted more yarn. It looked like a stalagmite of reddish noodles at her feet.
I shook my head. To my father I said, “Tell me what I can bring down there that you can’t get in Calloustown. I’ll stop by the store and get it, and then see you in a couple hours.”
Patricia said, “Here we go again,” set down her needles, and walked to the bedroom.
I called out to her, “Hey, don’t get mad.”
My father said, “Pussy.”
If you gave Sin laxatives, he’d become constipated. A diet of hoop cheese sends him sitting on the toilet non-stop. His eyesight has gotten better with age. His skin de-freckles when he sits out in the sun too long.
I drove down to Calloustown and got there at two o’clock in the afternoon, walked in the unlocked door, and found him sitting in his old half-stuffed chair with copies of the National Enquirer, Star, and Sun unfolded across his lap. He said, “How’d you get in?”
I said, “I thought you said you slept all day long. You aren’t asleep.” I looked at the end table to see if he had a bottle of bourbon set out, but he didn’t. He drank either water or vodka.
My father got up from the chair. He let the tabloids fall to his feet. “Thanks for coming down here, Duster. You still go by Duster, or have you shortened it rightly to ‘Dust’ by now? Like Sin. Sin and Dust, father and son. We could go into business together doing something. Like a fucking oyster house. Too bad my daddy—that would be your grand-daddy—didn’t name me Dirt.” He shook my hand, which seemed to me a little mannered and inappropriate. We’d not seen each other since National Boss Day—the only holiday he ever celebrated when I grew up, seeing as he was my boss, his own boss, the boss of everything other-mental. My father understood that he was the boss of his, say, triceps, but not of his psyche. So it had been two months. Patricia and I spent Thanksgiving with her parents, and they feigned amazement at the two trivets she’d haphazardly crocheted out of Nu-Grape bottle caps so that the sweet potato and squash casseroles wouldn’t scald the dining-room table.
I said, “The door was unlocked.”
Sin—at this point he wasn’t but sixty-three years old—looked at the door. He said, “It used to be that the door locked when I turned that little knob up and down. Now up and down means unlocked. I don’t like this one bit. I can’t keep up. Where’s Patricia? I miss seeing your wife.”
I walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, just out of nosiness. Nothing seemed unusual, except that he had an inordinate amount of fast food–acquired condiments stacked neatly on the top three shelves, categorized. There was no McDonald’s, Burger King, Long John Silver’s, Arby’s, Sonic, Hardee’s, Krystal, Jack in the Box, or Taco Bell within fifty miles of my childhood home. He had some from a place called Swensons, which I knew from my travels only existed in and around the Akron, Ohio, area, some six hundred miles from Calloustown. I got a can of ginger ale out and said, “What’s with all the mayonnaise and mustard? What’s with the horsey sauce, taco sauce, three pepper sauce, and ketchup?”
I walked back in. Sin said, “You still married to Patricia?” He said, “Listen, you should read some of the articles in these newspapers I’ve been reading. There’s a shoe-hoarding man in South Dakota who owns a white slave, and it’s legal! The slave even says he likes it! His name’s Thompson, and he says he’s working to be in the Guinness Book of Records for most shoes shined in a lifetime. There’s a picture of them in here,” he said, picking up one of the papers, “and the South Dakota guy has Thompson wearing a choke collar, on a leash. America!”
I didn’t say, “Those stories are made up, Dad.” I didn’t say, “Don’t believe everything you read, Sin.” I said, “I bet the slave owner’s got something on Thompson,” because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Kind of like your mother had something on me. Is that what you’re saying?”
I shook my head. I grabbed the channel changer and turned on the TV, even though I knew intuitively that it wouldn’t work. Sure enough, the radio came on. I said, “I’m allergic to shellfish.”
“Back to the question,” Sin said. “I have figured out a way to garnish my sandwiches without having to pay for it. It saves me a fortune. See, I’ll drive to one of those places, go inside—that’s where everyone makes a mistake, going to the drive-through—and buy the cheapest thing on the menu to go. Then I walk over and absolutely overload my bag with packets of condiments. I’ve been meaning to get me a few empty jars and spend one of my nights squeezing what I have into them so it won’t take up so much space.”
I said, “The price of gas, Sin.” I said, “Why am I here again?”
My father shook his head. He reached up and pulled at a patch of gray hair that grew mischievously to the left of his crown. He walked over to the window and looked out at my car. He said, “I thought you were going to bring me some pussy. Hey, you want to go throw some tin cans at a BB pistol out in the front yard?”
I sat down on the couch. I looked up at the photographs my father had put on the wall since my last visit—all of them pictures of various birds one might find browsing a Yankee feeder: goldfinches, sparrows, cardinals, bluebirds, Carolina wrens. I said, “You mean take the gun out and shoot at cans, like when I was a kid?” There were also photographs of crows, hawks, blue jays, and woodpeckers, a lone osprey—birds that didn’t visit traditional feeders.
“You’re not a kid anymore, Duster,” my father said.
“Why’re these birds on the wall? Are you into birding nowadays?” I got off the couch and corrected a frame. I said, “Who took these photos? They look professional.”
My father looked at the frames on the wall as if he’d never noticed them being there. He raised his eyebrows up three times, then squinted. He said, “I was hoping you’d bring someone with you. I always kind of liked Patricia’s mother. She’s classy, you know what I mean? I mean, Patricia’s mother’s classy.”
My wife’s parents had been married for forty-plus years and from what I could tell thrived unapologetically up in Wise, Virginia. They keep a sign in their front yard that goes VIRGINIA is FOR LOVERS, like it was some kind of non-argumentative statement on par with Rain Falls Downward. I said, “I think Patricia’s mom’s out of your league, for one. And she’s unobtainable for two. Three, Patricia’s dad has never liked you, and he would kill you. He was a sniper in the old days, you know. He was a sniper in the Army, or whatever. He shot actual people. He didn’t throw things at his own gun.”
My father walked out the door without saying anything. He got in the passenger side of my car and sat there. Of course most people I would tell this story later would think, “That man is going through the first stages of dementia!” They would say, “He’s the kind of man you read about for two days under the ‘Editor’s Picks’ section of the MSN homepage!” I was used to it, though. I went out to the car, opened the driver’s side, and said, “You want to go to Worm’s Bar?”
“After,” he said. “I didn’t call you to drive all the way down here to take me to the bar. Hell, I can walk down there if I want to. Or hitch a ride. I can drive my own truck if I feel like the fucking cop is taking a nap. I can get on the riding lawn mower.”
“After what?” I said. I went ahead and got in the car and cranked it. I didn’t feel sad or indifferent or happy or excited. I’d been going through this routine for a while with Sin. I said, “Where we going?”
My father said, “I need to go see a doctor. I mean, yeah, after Worm’s, I need to see a doctor. I’m afraid with the way things are going, I might live forever. I don’t want to not die, Dust. Who wants to live forever?”
_______
The hot-water tap turned cold, and vice versa. When he tried to quit smoking and put on a nicotine p
atch, it made him crave cigarettes more. One time he told me that his vices began at age seventeen with heroin, which led him to cocaine, which led him to marijuana, which led him to bourbon, which led him to the occasional domestic beer. My father swore he bought my mother a parrot that never learned to talk, and rescued one of those non-barking Basenji dogs that ended up howling all the time, then running off. His mousetraps worked better without peanut butter on the little tray.
I don’t like to think of myself as a bad son, but I drove my father straight to one of those emergency care clinics out off Highway 78 instead of the bar. I had called up Patricia from the driveway, for my father said he needed to go back inside and apply layers of black bloodroot salve on his torso and limbs before hitting daylight for too long, what with the lesions and hives and shingles that arrived like bad cousins, one after the other. To my wife I said, “I don’t know why I’m here.”
She said, “Yes. That’s one of the great existential questions. Sometimes when I’m unraveling, it’s the only thought that goes through my mind.”
I told her how my father seemed listless and depressed, that he looked like he could no longer take the world, that he’d given up on fighting. “He wants to go to a bar, so I told him we could go there for a while. But in reality, I want to take him to see a dermatologist. Can you get on the Internet and Google something like ‘Dermatologist/Calloustown, South Carolina/unexplained neurological disorders/ex-wife married an oyster shucker,’ and find out if there’s any kind of medical center within a fifty-mile range?”
Patricia didn’t answer immediately. Then she said, “I think it’s you who wants to go to Worm’s Place, but that’s another story.” I heard her clicking away on the keyboard, and imagined her there in our den, a cell phone cradled to her delicate neck, enough merino wool yarn surrounding her to fashion a car cover.
My wife clucked her tongue, which sounded exactly like knitting needles clacking together when she was on a roll of knit-pearl-knit-pearl maneuvers for more than a couple minutes. I said, “No, I only want to drink all day long when I’m in my hometown, Patricia,” hoping that she’d think, “Because of me, is that what you’re saying, because of me?”
Calloustown Page 20
