Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  No matter what, I surfaced, faced seaward. I came up out of the water—probably not that far from the shore, but at the time it seemed as though I’d swum a good quarter-mile—and looked out, I imagine, in the direction of Bermuda. There were ships out there, though I saw none. There were dolphins or porpoises—I still don’t know the difference—writing cursive loops atop the swells.

  And then I turned around.

  Maybe, because of the distance, I couldn’t tell how close people sat next to my mother and Frankie Hassett. Maybe he had a secret to tell her, and that’s why he leaned in toward her ear. My mother seemed to giggle, from my vantage point in the ocean, or maybe she had eaten one of the ham sandwiches and gotten some white bread stuck to the roof of her mouth. I could see his right index finger pulling away the fabric of her two-piece top, in order to see what body part he thought made the best bait down in Florida.

  Maybe the slap I saw my mother plant across Frankie’s face wasn’t really as hard as it looked while I bobbed offshore.

  “What you do, see, is you kill a goddamn bastard, and you stuff his or her body in a duffle bag. Then you go over to one of those motels that aren’t but one story high, you know. You go ahead and park in the parking lot in a way that none of the maids can see your license plate. Then when they leave one of the doors open—they leave the doors open all the time, going from one room to the next—you take the body in, and lay it out in the bed, and pull the covers over it. Then you drive away real fast, you know. That maid will go back in and say, ‘I forgot to make the bed!’ And then she’ll find the body. And then the motel manager will call the cops, and they’ll spend a ton of time trying to see who was in the room the night before, and then that guy will end up getting charged.”

  Frankie said all of this from the back seat. My mother drove. I’ll give her this: She drove faster than he did, and she didn’t shake her hands back and forth on the steering wheel as if she shook Jiffy Pop.

  My mother looked into the rearview mirror and said, “Does your mother let you curse like that around the house all the time?”

  I opened up the glove compartment. My father always threw his spare change in there. No one paid attention, so I took out two quarters and a dime. Frankie said, “Oh, give me a break. Don’t act like you’ve never heard anything like that. Rosalind. Ros.” He reached up to touch her hair. She leaned forward. I turned in my seat and slapped his hand away. He said, “Brother, I believe I’d think twice before I did anything like that.”

  I said, “It’s a proven fact that only stupid people curse, ’cause they can’t think up any other words!” In between I kind of hyperventilated. I said it all as quickly as possible, and it kind of came out in a high voice that I wouldn’t be proud of. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Breland, used to say this kind of thing all the time to a poor kid named Ricky Cogburn who probably suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. Later on in life I would realize that some prude made that little dictum up, because I have met, over the years, cursing geniuses. I said, “And fish aren’t attracted to nipples, either, for your information.”

  My mother stepped on the accelerator. When we got to Marvin’s Texaco, she told Frankie and me to stay in the car. My father came and stood outside the service bay. He nodded more than a few times, shook his head sideways, shrugged his shoulders. He handed over a newly opened bottle of Coca-Cola to my mother, and she drank from it, then handed it back. In the car, Frankie said, “Your parents are square, man. This whole place sucks. This entire situation sucks.”

  I learned not to hold my thumb inside my fist when punching someone in the nose. He yelled out “Fucker!” but held his bleeding nose and started crying. And he was gone that night. My mother and I watched Daktari together and ate popcorn. My mother snapped off half a pain pill and gave it to me for my broken thumb. When my father returned, he said he had dropped by the union hall after taking Frankie to the bus station, and that he’d be boarding a tanker in the morning. My mother pointed at the television and said, “Look, a trained chimpanzee.”

  Maybe she pointed to my father. We never saw him again.

  TONGUE

  I can’t speak for all car rental agencies, but where I work there’s more to it than having your flight canceled, getting pissed off, deciding to drive from Charlotte to Atlanta or Baltimore or Cincinnati or Nashville or Memphis, then coming down by Baggage Claim to talk to either good-looking Norleen or Frankie, showing a valid driver’s license and getting the keys to an Economy or Compact car that you later complain about being too small, or not having any acceleration, even though that’s what you ordered as opposed to a van or Buick. I can only make assumptions and predictions. I’ve been here six years plus—which, as far as I’m concerned, is the exact amount of time it takes at almost all jobs before the Assumption and Prediction phase can kick in. I’ve got a five-year service pin I’ve worn for fourteen months and two days. I have five-year pins from a few other places, too, none of which are car rental agencies. But they were places where I got to see how people acted. They were places where I noticed how we, as humans, don’t have much in the areas of truth, patience, cleanliness, or forgiveness. Before inspecting rental cars before they went out and came back, I’d worked in insurance, and then in retail, and then in hardware. Five years, five years, five years. Before that I went to college. Growing up, my father made me sell encyclopedias door-to-door like he had done back when people actually bought encyclopedias. I can only make an assumption—I have no proof—but I guess that my overall view and distrust of people started during the encyclopedia days. You wouldn’t believe how many people stopped buying right after volume D, just because they didn’t like the way Jefferson Davis got portrayed. They said they didn’t want to get all the way to volume L just to find some lies about how great a man Abraham Lincoln was according to the biased encyclopedia writers and researchers. A B C D, A B C D, A B C D—I’d like to know how many households in South Carolina have only those World Books up on their shelves above the television.

  And tolerance. We, as humans, don’t have much in the area of truth, patience, cleanliness, forgiveness, or tolerance. There are more. I’ll add on some others, I’d be willing to bet, long before I come close to my ten-year pin.

  Another prediction: There will be no ten-year pin.

  But this isn’t about longevity. It’s not about how the company makes me wear a work shirt that doesn’t have my real name across the pocket, even though that’s kind of interesting and a lesson in paranoia—since 9/11 the company’s been forced by the Homeland Security people to worry about renting out cars to possible terrorists and suicide car bomb drivers. Norleen and Frankie—at least in our Charlotte office—have a lot of responsibility in this regard. They’re the ones making the first decisions. I mean, Butch, Mike, Lou, and I have the authority to raise our hands and say something like, “This guy’s luggage is ticking and maybe we should send him back over to Hertz or Budget or Avis,” but Norleen and Frankie went through three training sessions that included being able to identify eye color, judge height and weight, and so on. Some guy with government connections came down and showed off a bunch of fake IDs and taught our customer service reps how to spot them. Back when I grew up, people used fake IDs to get liquor, or maybe to rent a car if they were running away and had a lot of money. It’s different now. I don’t need to tell anyone that it’s different now. That’s a given. It’s going to last this way until everyone in the world gets along.

  The company says that men with one-syllable names come across as handy with their fists and can possibly scare off possible car-renting terrorists who always have six or eight syllables. You get a guy with some kind of family name for a first name and by the time he introduces himself a car-renting terrorist can pull out a dirk, saber, machete, or switchblade and disembowel the guy like they do in Middle Eastern countries, past and present. That’s what the company handed down to us, in those words.

  They let us pick our own tough-names. I’m Chuck. I like
it because it’s not only a name, but a verb. I got used to it early, and even introduce myself as Chuck after work, when I go off to one of the bars, or to the bookstore to see if there are any terrorist women poring over How to Rig a Rental Car Bomb books, which I’ve never actually seen on the shelves but wouldn’t be surprised to find, what with the First Amendment and a stretched view of the Second Amendment.

  People always want to know what I find inside rental cars after they’ve been returned. People say to me both at the bars and book store, “Chuck, you ought to write a book about what you’ve come across.”

  Mike and I have an ongoing game we play to find the best things. That’s why I’m talking here, I guess. At the end of our shift we gather up everything, and we don’t tell each other our finds until the very end. It builds some suspense and makes the day go by faster. Most of the time we have to meet up in the parking lot of either Fatz Cafe or Applebee’s or TGI Friday’s or Mulligan’s or Ruby Tuesday’s or Monterrey’s before we can pull things out of our respective boxes, one at a time, saving the best find for last.

  You can imagine the usual—CDs, hair brushes, spare change, a million cell phone chargers, house keys, dirty magazines, business cards, cell phones jammed into the passenger seats—which meant a man picked up a hooker and she sat down and then he got all paranoid that she stole his phone so he never called up the number again—packs of cigarettes even though we tell people they’re not supposed to smoke in the rental cars and so on. I’d say that Mike and I have about tied, over the years, on weird things. One time I found an eight-ball of cocaine. One time Mike found a quarter pound of weed left in a scooped-out Gideon’s Bible. One time I found a signed copy of a novel by that guy William Faulkner, but Mike didn’t believe me and said I’d only found a book and forged the signature. So the next day he found a non-scooped-out Gideon’s Bible and wrote on the first page, “Hope you like my caracters—God.” I told him that God would probably know how to spell.

  Anyway, we go over what we’ve found, and we try to be objective, and whoever has the best thing doesn’t have to buy the first beer. Well, when I find the best thing I always order a beer, but Mike’s one of those guys who sits up at the bar and orders something fancy and expensive, like a salty dog in the summer months, and a single malt scotch when it’s below forty degrees outside. He’s one of those guys. You know those guys.

  I should mention that, in the beginning, when it came to rings and watches and other good jewelry, we actually turned them in to Lost and Found. We thought people would come back to the rental agency looking for things like that. The rest—I would be willing to bet that years ago there was a Lost and Found for everything, but evolution took care of people like Mike and me—the rest, we knew it would just sit in a box in a room far away from the actual place where you sign up to rent a car. It’s one of those things. For the last few years, though, we didn’t turn anything in. I don’t know how it works in other car rental agencies, but for ours it went like this:

  People came to where they turned their rental cars in and said, “I lost my cell phone.”

  I would say, “Our Lost and Found is not here. It’s way out on Independence Boulevard.”

  If the person went ahead and drove out there, the person working the office would say, “No cell phones have been returned in the last six months,” or whenever. She’d say, “You know, maybe you left it at your last hotel where you stayed.”

  Then the person would say, “No, I called the hotel.”

  Then our person would say, barely audible, “You know, those cleaning ladies don’t usually report what they find.”

  Look back through all of the history of travel, and I’m betting that the blame ends up with the cleaning lady.

  So somehow Mike and I learned about this little ploy, and we quit turning things in too. What’s more, I’ll go ahead and admit that Mike and I both do a little something in order to get people to leave things accidentally. We talk. We’re supposed to walk around the car and give it an eight-point inspection: dings, scrapes, excessive bird droppings, cigarette butts put out on the dashboard, cigarette burns from a driver trying to throw out his butt and it flying into the back seat area, excessive mud on the floor mats, odometer reading, and gas gauge. There’s always going to be some kind of ding, and that’s what the drivers worry over. Me, I start talking like crazy, asking questions about politics, weather, baseball, gas prices, the gestation period of rats, lactose-intolerant people, drought, the next solar eclipse, poisons that most people don’t know about, merit badges I never earned, my ex-wife DeLaura’s new Professor of Leadership husband at a community college, the stench of a dog that rolled on roadkill—anything—and the next thing you know the guy’s getting his suitcase out of the trunk and trying to run off, leaving something in the glove compartment, console, side-door pockets, or above the visor. One time I almost won Best Find of the Day with Mike when I came to the bar with a Swiss Army knife, but he’d found a machete. Another time I got a snubnose .38, and he had a shotgun.

  We’ve never found blueprints of federal buildings, train stations, airports, bus stations, college campuses, or any other place the company has told us to keep a lookout for. Mike and I have never found any notebooks filled with Arabic scrawl, though I got all excited one time after finding what ended up being a takeout menu written entirely in Chinese. On that particular day, Mike found a remote-control helicopter with two sticks of dynamite attached to its runners. At the bar he ordered a kamikaze right away.

  We’ve found money and canes and a couple scooped-out Korans, but there was nothing inside them. I guess in that religion you’re not supposed to drink, so they finished off the booze. I can only speculate, which is a close cousin to Assume and Predict.

  Sometimes I vacuum, but more often than not I only use a whisk brush. Sometimes I get down on the asphalt and check out the undercarriage, but most of the time I look in the driver’s eyes and make an educated guess.

  So it came to this. Right here is what it’s all about. I’m going to repeat it word for word.

  Mike and I had a big haul because it was the Sunday after Christmas. That’s when people needed to return their Hyundai Sonatas, Kia Rondos, Dodge Calibers, and whatnot. Sometimes Mike and I sit around in the bars making up names for future car models. When the Rondo came out we had to look up what it even meant. It’s a poem. Sonata’s a long-winded song. The Dodge Caliber might not be the best car on the rental lot, but at least it’s not named for a song or poem. Who gets hired out to come up with these names? How much money does the Vice President of Car Names get? In my notebook of future models, I have written these options for the Asian car market: Villanelle, Haiku, Quatrain, Rhyme, Couplet, Sestina, Spondee, Terza Rima, Tanaga, Aubade, and Iamb. I had to look them all up, understand. It’s not like I ever knew anything about poetry, outside of what would make a good name for a car model of the future. It’s not like I have a five-year pin from some kind of English or Music department. I have written down Chant, Madrigal, Sea Shanty, and Yodel. “Blues” won’t work, obviously. “Punk” won’t work either. I’m pretty sure there’s already a car called the “Anthem.” Personally, I think that the Hyundai Yodel has a ring to it, but I’m betting with myself that my first winner will be the Daewoo Dirge.

  Listen, I’ve written down all these names, sealed them in an envelope, and sent them to myself in case one day I can sue Toyota or Honda or any of the new Japanese or Korean or Chinese auto manufacturers-to-come for copyright infringement. Then maybe I could be considered a real “leader” in this sector, which is more to say than my ex-wife DeLaura’s new husband the Leadership professor.

  Anyway, we had a big haul. I had two filled liquor-bottle boxes, and Mike had a Rubbermaid garbage can. There were a slew of hardback books, and I’d be betting that they were Christmas gifts that the respective receivers took and thought, I ain’t going to make my suitcase heavier with this thing packed inside. Then they said to the givers, “I’m going to keep this o
ut so I have something to read on the plane.” Here’s what I’ve learned about people who give visiting relatives books: They want the receivers to change their ways. These books are almost always nonfiction, and they’re either written by left-wing politicians or right-wing radio commentators. Let’s say I go visit my ex-wife’s father. He’d load me down with books by or about Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Bush’s daughters, and that dude on TV who says we not only need a fence around America but also some kind of burp-top lid. My ex-father-in-law would say something like, “Here. Read this right here I got for you about the flat-tax rate, then tell me again how come you think everyone deserves to have medical attention when they need or want it.” He’s one of those guys. You know those guys.

  So I had a bunch of books, and so did Mike. We could’ve opened up a used book store with just far-right and far-left walls of shelves. We took out the books to see which ones were signed—none during this particular holiday season—and set them back aside. I save up all my books and donate them to the literacy society once a year. Mike drops his off at the library’s book drop just to confuse librarians in the morning when they look all over for a bar code or that little pocket in the back like in the old days.

  We placed our books in our respective cars—we both drive ex-rental cars seeing as we get a deal after 37,000 miles—and then Mike borrowed one of my empty boxes so he wouldn’t have to lug a Rubbermaid into Mulligan’s. We walked in and Mike said to the hostess, “We need a booth.”

  We never needed booths. I didn’t even like booths. Two grown men in a booth looks funny, if you ask me. If they’re not having an affair, it looks like they’re planning something illegal, or know some things to talk about that they shouldn’t know.

  Which brings me to here. Mike and I showed off our Finds of the Day, working up to the big one. My best find was a bamboo fly rod. I could already see myself selling this thing on eBay. Mike had a beautiful red-and-white silk scarf that he tied up on his head like a do-rag, and then a turkey call on his next-to-last find, so it looked like I’d win and he’d buy my first beer. I even said, “I might order me one of those special Christmas beers they got—those bock beers.”