Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  “The thing is, you see, with Bobby Suddeth—you have to let him start feeling comfortable. He’s a lot smarter than he comes off, you know. I’m just biding my time.”

  As it ended up, there were forty acres of junk cars and trucks. In the distance I heard doors creaking open, slamming shut. Gulls circled overhead and mockingbirds flew by us at head level. I said, “He’s a character.” I knew from experience that it wouldn’t take prying to get back to Doc’s housebreaking story.

  “What happened was, I took photos of my valuables should there ever be a break-in or fire. I had double prints, you know. I got a set of prints in a fireproof lockbox, stashed in the trunk of an old Renault back thataway.” Doc didn’t turn his head but gestured to the left. “Then I got the pictures hidden in a file cabinet in my house. I had the photos done, and I told people, I guess, all about it. I told Bobby Suddeth—or I told someone in my office, and Bobby was standing there like always.”

  I veered over to a Saab, reached in, and pulled out a nice lighter. I put it in my pocket. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have dreams,” I said.

  Doc slicked back his already slicked-back hair. He said, “I made Bobby believe that I believed that the photo shop boy developed my pictures, saw what I had, then came over and robbed my house. It was all made up. I said, ‘The guy had my phone number and address from having to fill out that little envelope where I dropped in the film!’ So Bobby, he says, ‘That’s exactly what happened. You need to tail the guy.’ And I said, ‘I ain’t got time to tail the guy, Freebird. But I know someone who does—you.’ Next thing you know, Bobby’s on his moped hanging out in the parking lot, waiting for the guy to get off work. Or that’s what he says he’s doing. Of course he doesn’t have to, seeing as he’s the one who broke in my house, and so on.”

  I thought about how good poker players slow play a hand. Doc had that game plan down. I pushed aside some cobwebs on the passenger window of an MG Midget, reached in, and extracted the car lighter. “It’s hot out here. It’s got to be ten degrees hotter out here than in town. Is it all this metal?”

  Doc looked up at the sky. He said, “No cover available.”

  I tried to think of anything else to talk about. Doc didn’t look like the kind of man who’d follow baseball stats. He didn’t look like the kind of man with whom I’d want to bring up politics. I said, “No cover.”

  He began laughing. “Listen, I’ve learned that to run a good scrap metal operation, you need to know how to act. I mean, you need to have some acting skills. I could’ve told you all about how car cigarette lighters is the new fashion, you know. I could’ve made up a story about three, four men and women coming down here weekly for car cigarette lighters. But I knew your daddy. Soon’s you come in, I said to myself ‘That’s old Looper’s boy.’ You look just like him. One time your daddy sold me some river rock for next to nothing. I used it for a fence”—Doc pointed to nowhere—“I thought I needed. I didn’t. It’s over there covered in kudzu, near where Bobby Suddeth’s hidden three watches, my wife’s engagement ring and wedding band that she should’ve been wearing in the first place, my silver dollar collection, two shotguns, most of my home tools, my collection of silver certificates, and a little urn with the ashes of my favorite dog, which Bobby Suddeth probably thinks is a genie.”

  We turned, finally, to walk toward the Oldsmobiles. Along the way I reached in and pulled out anything metallic. I refrained from pulling out newer, plastic-handled lighters. I said, “I know what this is all about. I’m with you on this one, Doc.”

  “You a smart man. I knew I could count on your understanding.”

  “In a weird way you’re not really that pissed off at Bobby Suddeth. He shined a light on something.” Let me say right here that I wasn’t all that smart, and that I only tiptoed around hoping to set foot on solid purchase. I kind of wanted out of there. From this point on, I told myself, I wouldn’t follow through on any dreams as being omen-worthy.

  “Bobby Suddeth showed me my wife was having an affair, that’s right. She wasn’t home. She wasn’t wearing her wedding band. I looked into the situation. She was out. Me, I work my ass off all day, grimied up, and there she is saying she’s spent the afternoon at Wal-Mart or the Dollar General, when she’s really going over to this tree farmer’s nursery place, swishing her tail around amongst the Leyland cypresses. I don’t see that fellow buying her a new refrigerator freezer. I don’t see him putting in new flooring. But she’s over there. She’s over there right now as we speak, I’m betting. It’s why she always says she doesn’t want a cell phone. I mean, she says she doesn’t want one because she’ll always lose it. What woman doesn’t want a free cell phone? I’ll tell you—the kind of woman who won’t pick up ’cause she’s in the middle of laying down.”

  At the Oldsmobiles Doc sang “Little baby born in the ghetto.” He sang, “We’re caught in a trap.” He sang, “I turned twenty-one in prison.” I kind of wondered if his “phonographic memory” was just one more notion of “acting.” Those songs didn’t come out at the same time, I thought. Wouldn’t cars get parked one after another, day after day, kind of like soldiers at a national cemetery?

  Doc said, “This is where I think we’ll find what you’re looking for, more or less. Tell me again about this dream. Why would you dream about car lighters? What a weird dream! Me, I always dream about getting sucked up into the sky by giant magnets. Always. Every night.”

  I said, “No way. You’re acting. I’m on to you.”

  Doc nodded. Doc lifted his chin. He said, “Yup. And let me tell you another thing: I don’t think the Oldsmobile car cigarette lighter is any better than the Cadillac or Buick or Dodge. It’s certainly no better than the couple Hudsons I got lodged back here somewhere.” He walked over to the car next to the one where I stood. He lifted the trunk and pulled out a Mason jar. “I just wanted a drink, more than anything else. What with what’s going on in my life, I just wanted a drink.”

  Doc unscrewed the lid of what I knew was a particular favorite style of moonshine called Peach Bounce, what with the bloated piece of bruised fruit sagged to the bottom. He drank from it, then offered it my way. I said, “I got me a thermos of bourbon back in the truck, but what the hell.”

  “You goddamn right, what the hell. What the hell! We might get seen, you know, what with no cover available out here in the fucking middle of dead Detroit, but I don’t give a woodpecker’s vibrating ass.” Doc handed over the jar. He reached in the trunk and got another. He said, “My wife’s name’s Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A. That song came on one time when I backed a Duster in. I can’t look at a Duster these days without singing that song.”

  I said, “Abby’s mine.” I said, “She might be cheating on me with a guy who likes hockey. She’s been up in Minnesota for some time. What could I do?”

  “Abby,” he said. “Women. I don’t want to make any suppositions about your wife, but saying her name sounds like a type of blood. A blood type.”

  I drank from the Mason jar and tried not to think of Southern culture studies, or what teleological connection Doc made with my wife’s name.

  “Teleological” is not a word I learned in my low-residency master’s degree program at Ole Miss-Taylor. I got it either from the crosswords, or my short stint as a philosophy major way back before in undergraduate school. Three sips into the moonshine and I understood how I should’ve been a philosophy major. How many philosophers found themselves stuck at the back corner of a junk yard, drinking blind-worthy white lightning with a man destined to kill a tree farmer and a man without a kickstand?

  Bobby Suddeth held his hands cupped together when Doc and I stumbled back to the office. Bobby opened them up quickly and said, “Uh-oh. I had that horn sound for you, but I guess the battery’s dead.” Then he haw-haw-hawed a bunch. “Let me see the lighters you picked out.”

  I unloaded my pockets, Doc unloaded his, and then I emptied a plastic Spinx station bag I’d found stuck on a briar along the way. I had a good hundred l
ighters, with which I knew that I’d never do anything. No, I would go home eventually, sleep one off, wake up, then start doing research on the importance of car junk yards in the South. I’d try to make a connection between junk yards and Antietam, or Bull Run, or Andersonville Prison. Then I’d send it off to Dr. Crowther and he’d say it wasn’t a very good idea. By that time I’d have another dream, or begin obsessing more so on Abby and the child I thought she had but never really did, et cetera.

  Doc said, “I got an idea. I got a great idea. Since most of my valuables got stolen, and since I got some insurance money for them, why don’t I give you all these lighters here. You make me a special chair or bench—yeah, make a bench so I can get rid of this telephone pole stool—and then I’ll let you go out and get another sack of lighters for free. How’s that sound?”

  Bobby Suddeth said, “You should make a chair that only has one lighter sticking straight up from the middle. It could be called the Happy Chair for Women, you know.”

  “Or the Happy Chair for Bobby Suddeth’s Ass,” Doc said. He exhaled loudly.

  Bobby Suddeth said, “Y’all been drinking without me? I smell it on both y’all. Where’d y’all get the liquor? I didn’t hear y’all leave.”

  I started laughing. I said, “We got it over by the collection of kickstands Doc has piled up.” I felt like I had the right. I felt like I belonged in the club. “Hey, I got a thermos of bourbon out in my truck. Let me go get it. Damn it to hell, I know better than to start. If I start drinking, I can’t stop until I’m asleep.”

  “Yeah. I’ll drink some bourbon,” Bobby Suddeth said.

  I looked at Doc. He took up his limp again and scooted two stand-up ashtrays against the wall. He said, “I guess. Normally I’d say ‘no,’ but this seems like a different kind of day.” He took his leg and scooted the loveseat back against another wall. Was he expecting us to need room for a bigger dance floor? I thought. Was he later going to sweep his office?

  When I got to my truck I could hear Bobby Suddeth saying, “You crazy, man. Doc, Doc. You crazy, you old crip.” It was what they might call, in the Southern culture studies world, a “plaintive cry.” He yelped it out quickly.

  By the time I picked up the thermos—this was one of those nice ones, with the plastic cup that screwed to the top—I expected to hear two pistol reports. Instead I only heard some pings. Ping, ping, ping. Ping-ping-ping-ping. Because I’d not lived long enough with car cigarette lighters in my possession, I didn’t connect the sound with that of lighters being thrown hard and ricocheting off of Bobby Suddeth’s forehead, the cash register, windows.

  My first thought, of course, was to get in my truck and drive off fast. I’d done it before. I had sprayed gravel out of the Modestine Duncans’ trailer park with all their weird Book of Revelation quotes printed on their mobile homes, and out of the barren fat lighter farm, and out of the He’s Out Casting bar when I got the pet monkey, all in the name of a low-residency master’s degree. I’d been spraying gravel directly or metaphorically since birth, I realized, and it didn’t seem to matter. It was like I took off out of one trouble spot only to arrive at another. I could never find a place to flat-out hide.

  But I didn’t drive away. I sauntered back inside Doc’s Salvage to find Bobby Suddeth smiling—was there a trick being played on me?—and Doc picking up my car cigarette lighters from the floor. He said, “I’m just frustrated, you know. You imagine how frustrating all this can be.”

  Bobby Suddeth said, “Hey,” to me, as if we’d never met before. I could tell that he almost said, “You looking for a carburetor?”

  I said, “Here’s some bourbon.” I said, “What’s going on in here?”

  “So after about a year what you can do is get me to go sell off that silver and that paper money. And you already got the insurance money. I don’t want to brag none, but I would think that this is a good idea, and for it you’d give me a cut, you know,” Bobby said. “If I leave here tomorrow,” he sang out, “and you go turn in the silver, somehow you’re going to get caught for insurance fraud.” He said, “Hand me that thermos.”

  “I’m serious when I say I want that bench,” Doc said. He reached behind the counter and pulled out two coffee mugs. Bobby Suddeth poured Doc some, then poured himself to the rim, then handed me back the Thermos. “Jesus S. Christ.”

  We drank. Bobby said something about how those cigarette lighters hurt. He said it reminded him of playing dodgeball with rocks and hardboiled eggs back when he was a kid. I couldn’t wait any longer and said, “What’s that mean, Doc? Tell me what ‘Jesus S. Christ’ means. I’ve never heard it that way before.”

  He wouldn’t make eye contact. He limped over to the counter, picked up the phone, and said, “I’m calling Gloria.” I could hear it ring a good ten times. No answering machine picked up. “She must be at Wal-Mart again. That woman won’t be happy until she buys one of everything sold at the Wal-Mart.”

  I sat down on the loveseat. I wanted to go nowhere. For a second I thought about asking Doc if I could rent out some space here, maybe set up a studio, maybe in one of the junked buses. Then I thought about Abby up in Minnesota, and imagined her strolling around the baby section of Wal-Mart, picking up bibs and whatnot. Why hadn’t she called me? Why had she asked that I not contact her, ever?

  Doc said, “Shade. It stands for ‘Shade.’”

  I nodded. I thought about Jesus on the cross, probably hoping that there was some shade to comfort him a little. The three of us sat in silence for an uncomfortable amount of time. Doc said how he couldn’t be selfish anymore, and pulled a brand-new bottle of bourbon from beneath his counter. We passed it around. He said, “I’m not going to kill you, Bobby, though I ought to. I know you’re living back there.” He pointed with his thumb.

  I said, “I need to get home,” but didn’t move.

  I didn’t move, for I knew that our story together wasn’t finished. I closed my eyes and inhaled the odd smell of cilantro and candle. Later on, I knew, we would get in my truck and drive to that nursery. Doc would ramble around pretending to buy a couple saplings to plant around his salvage yard, but really he’d be taking mental notes. Bobby Suddeth would look for things to steal while no one watched him. I’d end up maudlin, remember too many songs that played back when my wife and I underwent rites of passage, then make some more promises to myself I would never keep, and from which I’d never be able to escape.

  TRADITIONAL DEVELOPMENT

  Mal Mardis spun two spent rolls of color film on the bar, didn’t look up at Gus, and realized that cutting basic cable alone wouldn’t solve the problem. He’d also have to find a way for his wife to quit subscribing to the magazines. This morning’s mission was no different than when Brenda renovated their bathroom, den, or what used to be a two-car garage. Mal was supposed to drop off the film at any of the one-hour developers twenty miles from their house, use that time to buy at least two dozen frames, go back to the developer—Eckerd, Jack Rabbit, Wal-Mart, One-Hour Photo—select the nicest shots, and ask that the person behind the counter now blow them up into 8 x 10s. Then Mal, according to his wife, could use that hour to visit Gus, have two non-brown liquor drinks, return to get the enlargements, and come home. Soon thereafter, Brenda would nail up on available wall space twenty-four photographs of the old kitchen, all of which looked down on the new tiled countertops, the laminated flooring, the new cabinets that replaced a gigantic island that once took up so much space they had to move the table outside to rot. Mal didn’t get it. Keeping pictures of old rooms on the wall pretty much, to him at least, kept the new room looking old.

  “You don’t see women getting face lifts then plastering pictures of their old selves all around the vanity,” Mal said to Gus. He sat at the counter. At the far end sat a man known as Windshield, who claimed that he still had tiny fragments of glass imbedded in his face from when he took a hard exit out of a Ford truck. Gus’s bar had a sign out front that only read “Gus,” for back when he bought the place he
couldn’t remember if it should be “Gus’s Place” or “Gus’ Place.” Neither looked correct. No one who ever came into Gus Place knew the grammatical rule or cared. One time some fraternity boys came by and painted an H on the end of his name. Another time somebody from the Latin Club came and changed it to read “Caesar Augustus,” which Gus kept for a good month until Mal told him that it might be an omen that he was going to get stabbed by an everyday regular drinking customer.

  Mal tried to think of another analogy about the new kitchen, something about a hip replacement.

  “Missed you at Frankie Perkins’s funeral Sunday,” Windshield called over to Mal.

  Mal spun a roll of film then set it upright next to the other. He said, “I didn’t know Frankie Perkins.”

  “Well he was asking about you,” Windshield said in a voice that started off a baritone and ended up so high he could’ve done a Memorex commercial for breaking wine glasses.

  Gus leaned over to Mal and said, “Don’t mind him. He said the same to me. For some reason he thinks this dead guy used to frequent the bar. Anyway, Brenda called and said you weren’t allowed bourbon. She said you can have two vodkas.” He laughed. He poured a jigger and a half of bourbon, placed it in front of Mal, then reached down and got him a can of Pabst. “I’m just kidding. She ain’t called this time. Yet.”

  “Those fuckers on TV. How many shows are on about renovating or redecorating or do-it-yourself-ing? There’s got to be twenty of those shows on nonstop between channels 70 and 80. Who are these people? I’m surprised there are any contractors left out there doing real work.”

  Gus stood up straight and half-turned. “I been thinking about changing around the bar. I’m getting tired of y’all getting to stare down at the water. Some kind of flood or freak tidal wave shows up, I ought to be the first to know about it, not my customers.”

  Mal stood up from his stool and craned his neck to look at the Saluda River. He said, “Beavers still working hard down there. Maybe Brenda can come on by and help them out with the interior of their den. I guess she’d have to use some kind of underwater camera for the before-and-after shots.”