Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  “Maybe you can get a job running one of those Meet Singles agencies if you don’t go to college or end up making it as a stand-up comedian, Stan.” I pronounced his name “Stain,” like he wanted.

  “That’s ‘Pimp Daddy Stan’ to you, my man.” Pimp Daddy Stain didn’t sound very hygienic.

  I unstoppered the sink. I said, “I’m still married. I’m not looking for a girlfriend, I’m sorry to say.”

  Stan smiled at me. He loaded a caddy of clean silverware. “I’m thinking about joining a Hermits Anonymous group, but I have a feeling that no one will ever show up to the meetings.” He looked at me. “Would it sound better as ‘Hermits Anonymous,’ or ‘Misanthropes Anonymous’?”

  I said, “I used to be a member of Cannibals Anonymous. Great buffet.”

  This might be selfish on my part, but I enjoyed spending time with Stan Renfrew not for the right reasons: To be honest I didn’t give a crap about his self-esteem, or the so-called weighty decision before him involving whether to forgo college to make people pay money in order to laugh. As far as I could tell—and I wasn’t but some sixteen years older than Stan—no children made less than a B in high school or college anymore, and then they graduated and found high-paying jobs without ever having to know the discomfort of blisters. I had read an article somewhere about a group of college graduates who didn’t get high-paying jobs and successfully sued their alma mater. Pissants.

  We caught Laurinda up with clean dishes, pots, and silverware, then took to reloading spring-action napkin holders, checked on the salt and pepper shakers, gathered up wet dishrags and tossed them in a take-home hamper. Stan and I walked around with coffee pots, topping off people’s mugs. I didn’t have time to think about my low-residency master’s degree projects that I would probably never finish, about the prospective theses that I didn’t want to undertake. And I didn’t have time to think about my confused, determined, wayward, pregnant, and estranged wife.

  “Y’all sit down and have some pie,” Laurinda said. “I wonder if I’ll have everyone here for dinner, too, what with the road blocked.”

  “Ford ate hour,” the drunk man said, though his eyes looked much clearer.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to the Second Comers, who had finished their praying somewhere along the line and eaten their meals—I assumed—without complaint. I said, “I’m still full,” to Laurinda.

  Stan said nothing, but turned to look at the patriarch of this particular religious cult family. The father stood up and held both hands up high. To me Stan said, “Here it comes. Here’s the reason why they have to pray so long.” I waited for him to finish up a joke of some sort. He didn’t.

  “While y’all are all trapped here I guess it’s as good a time as ever to make you an offer.”

  “They’re grave robbers,” Stan whispered to me. We leaned against two stools adjacent to the drunk man. “I’ve followed them around before. They’re grave robbers.”

  The man must’ve only stood five-five at the most, which I couldn’t tell when he kept his head bowed. His blue jeans showed patches of red clay at the knees. I leaned forward to see both of his children staring down at their empty plates, appearing embarrassed. The wife looked up at her husband in that beautiful, hopeful, dreamy way that only women can pull off. Abby once looked at me that way when I added transmission fluid to her car, I remembered.

  “As y’all may or may not know, the price of gold has skyrocketed what with our being in a war and amid high fuel costs and on the brink of upcoming inflation. Not to mention the end of the world as we know it, praise Jesus.”

  I started to laugh. Stan said to me, “Hallelujah.”

  “Anyways, gold’s now upwards of six hunnert dollar a ounce, and I’m talking the good kind of gold the dentist puts in your teeth. Anyways,” he reached into his pocket, “I got here with me a nice collection of gold teeth I’d be willing to sell right at half the price of what they got it going for up in New York and down in Hong Kong.”

  I looked at Stan and craned forward to look at what the man held in the palm of his hands. Stan turned to me and said, “I told you so. That’s why they pray for so long—in case grave robbing’s frowned upon by God. And of course it won’t be, seeing as God told them to chisel gold out of dead people’s heads.”

  “Sister Rebecca?” the man said. She stood up—her pants held mud stains, too—opened her purse, and pulled out a set of scales best known to small-time drug dealers.

  I said, “Damn. What’s the world coming to?”

  The drunkard blurted out, “Why’d anyone want to buy gold if it’s the end of the world like y’all’re saying? I thought you couldn’t take it with you, end of the world and whatnot.” He stood up, and for a second I thought he was going to attack the family of grave robbers. He said loudly, “Does anybody have a got-damn bottle of booze stashed in your car outside?” and banged his right fist against his thigh.

  The grave robber, of course, said, “We have some communal wine out in the van we’d be willing to sell.”

  Stan smiled. He said, “Man, I’m going to get a whole mother lode of jokes out of this place. Get it?”

  I kind of wanted some booze, too, at this point. I wasn’t proud to say that since Abby had taken her “necessary sabbatical,” I had gone from stealing a shot or two of bourbon a week—maybe a can of beer if I was interviewing prospective Southern culture studies subjects worthy of a thesis—to a good near-fifth a day. I had gone from telling myself I wouldn’t drink until dusk, and then that went backwards to happy hour, and then that went backwards to as soon as the sun was one degree past its zenith. I had made a point not to’ve slugged down a sixteen-ounce plastic cup of bourbon and Pepsi before going to pick up Stan. I rummaged around the cupboards until I found a pint of boysenberry-flavored vodka—Abby’s—and glug-glugged a couple shots into my coffee. I learned that if I ever lived in the Land of Only Boy-senberry-flavored Vodka, I would be a sober man.

  “You ever had a drink, Stain?” The grave-robbing Christian and the drunk had left for the parking lot. “Maybe you and I could get in on some of that wine action. I think it’s my duty as a big brother to make sure you know how to handle your inebriants, or whatever. Your beers, wines, and liquors.” Let me say now that I felt like an idiot saying all this. I understood that Stan was smart enough to figure out my ulterior motive.

  Stan said, “I spent ten days with my biological father. Then he died.”

  I took that answer as meaning that he’d been drunk, and he’d done some drinking afterwards in order to ease his guilt, pain, wonder, misery, flashbacks, Oedipus complex, no sense of worth, anxiety toward college, and/or panic attacks about jokes that don’t get laughs. I said, “Let’s you and me go meet Mr. Gold and see what kind of deals he has, seeing as we’re stuck here.”

  We aren’t stuck, I thought as I was shaking the Second Comer’s hand. Stain and I can drive right back home between the two wrecks. The drunk man said, “Ford ate hours. I can’t wait that long. This is my idea of Hell.”

  The Second Comer man said, “I could tell by the look on your face that you didn’t believe my gold to be gold. I promise on a stack of Bibles that I ain’t done no alchemy tricks.”

  Stan said, quietly, “Double negative.” I wanted him to be my younger brother. I wanted him to be my son. He looked at me and said, “I know what you could go investigate.” Understand that he shouldn’t have known about my life whatsoever without doing some detective work. “There’s a man who buys fake arrowheads from my mother. He walks from North Carolina to Oklahoma throwing them down on the ground. Part of what he’s doing’s political, and part of it’s plain crazy. He says that he’s filling the Earth back up for what we’ve extracted. He says that he’s also making sure we never forget the Trail of Tears. He calls himself Johnny Arrowhead.”

  I said to the Christian, “I believe you got gold. I’m more interested in the wine.”

  He handed me an unlabeled bottle and said, “Muscadine. It’s good.
It’s what Jesus drank. Five dollars.”

  Stan took the bottle, took the cork out with his teeth, and tipped the bottle up like a professional. I said, “Hey.” I said, “Hey, hand that to me.” I gave the Second Comer a ten-dollar bill, and he handed me over another bottle from the trunk of his car. I looked inside and saw two shovels, eight muddy boots, a crowbar, a pair of pliers, and a map with highlighted yellow circles. The drunk went back inside with one bottle.

  Stan’s mother, of all people, drove into the parking lot of Lau-rinda’s diner. Stan said, “My mom. Damn.”

  He handed me his bottle. She got out of her car wearing heavy leather gloves. She looked at her son, then at me. She smiled. “I just heard on the news about some big wrecks. Thank God y’all are here. Oh my word the whole drive over here I thought it would be y’all.” She wore some tight blue jeans, that’s all I have to say. I don’t know if it was on purpose or anything, but she had these scuff marks on her thighs that pointed straight up like arrowhead points, toward her zipper.

  The Second Comer man knew enough to close his trunk. His wife and children came out of Laurinda’s diner and got in the car. He took off, and I assumed that he either squatted on nearby land, or he would sit in a traffic jam, waiting. Stan stuck out his hand to shake his mother’s. He said, “Ford ate hour, Mom. Ford ate hour.”

  She said, “Are you drunk?” She looked at me. She said, “Are you not the man of whom I thought?”

  Stan said, “Now that’s some good English.”

  I looked toward Laurinda’s front windows. Inside there were people feasting on good bad food. I said to Sally Renfrew, “I’m just trying to do the best I can. I’m just trying. I didn’t sign up for this particular mission, you know.”

  Sally said, “Go on inside, Stanley.”

  I said, “Stay, buddy.”

  She kind of sidled around, as best I could figure. I think I’d seen my wife Abby sidle, maybe near the beginning of our marriage. Sally Renfrew ebbed and flowed left and right, shifting her weight. She said, “Go inside and see if they have any toothpicks. I need some toothpicks.”

  Stan said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  I said, “Don’t you do it, Stain. It’s a trick.”

  What the hell? I laughed, and looked off in the distance in the same direction as to where the Second Comer drove off with his family. Stan said, “Ford ate hour, ford ate hour, ford ate hour,” and walked back into the diner. To his mother I said, “Well. Here we are. How long have we been neighbors?”

  She said, “I’ve lived off Highway 11 for sixteen years. I moved here right about the time you went off to college the first time. I’m older than you are, Stet. Not by much, but I’m older than you are.”

  I offered her my bottle of wine. “It ain’t bad, really. It’s good. It’s not bad. It’s different. It’s bottled by a Christian of sorts. It’s not bad. It’s good.”

  Sally took the bottle and turned it up in the same manner as her son. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Overhead, some ducks flew by. Way above, a jet flew north, or toward the Midwest. Or West. It didn’t fly south. Sally said, “Well. Here we are.”

  I didn’t say, “Yes.” I didn’t say, “I get along well with your son, and maybe we can all move in together.” I didn’t say, “Hoo-whee ain’t it weird all these cars piled up and we’re stuck at a diner?”

  I said, “You don’t look older than I am.”

  Sally nodded. She looked at me in the same way that women always looked at me—as if I’d said something about the correct way to boil Brussels sprouts wrong—and said, “Right.” From inside Laurinda’s Diner I heard someone say, “It doesn’t matter,” and wondered if that person talked about his eggs not being sunny-side up. Did he say it didn’t matter about hash browns, or grits, or toast? Sally said, “Yeah, people tell me I look too young to be Stan’s mother. But I am. I think they’re being nice. Like you’re being nice. Well, you have to be nice for letting him drink wine.”

  I was officially married. I didn’t need complications or temptation. I noticed how I too began shifting my weight involuntarily. I held my right elbow with my left hand, and swung my right forearm back and forth. Sally Renfrew said that she wanted me to write about her. She wanted me to write my low-residency master’s thesis in Southern culture studies on the way she invented a prosperous fake arrowhead empire, and how she had finished an unpublished scholarly treatise on the philosophy of craft.

  Stan came out of the diner smiling and holding something up to the sky. The Second Comer grave-robbing Christian had dropped one of his gold teeth on the linoleum. Stan said, “Would this be bad luck or good luck?”

  I said, “I think it’s good.”

  Stan’s mother said, “Bad.”

  Stan got behind the wheel of his mother’s car, and I opened the door to my truck. I told Sally I would go get my tape recorder and notepad, then come over to see how she manufactured fake arrowheads. It seemed like a good idea at the time—I couldn’t imagine anyone else writing such a thesis. Stan put his mother’s car in reverse by accident and backed into my truck. He said it was a joke. Sally told me to bring my own protective eyewear.

  VULTURE

  A couple months later, with everything going right in our marriage, my wife pulled out a photo album I’d never seen. She blushed, and for some reason I thought she was going to show me some near-professional nude photographs she’d posed for and taken herself. I think one night when I couldn’t sleep I might’ve punched the channel changer until it hit those movies shown in the 500s, and witnessed a woman who, for her husband’s birthday, wanted to give him some 8 x 10 glossies of her wearing, I don’t know, the half-peels of a kiwi fruit hanging off her nipples. I knew that Patricia had the top shelf of a hall closet stacked with photo albums, new and used. The ones from back when she was in high school and college tended to have butterflies or kittens on the covers. The one from our wedding looked like the yearbook cover of an all-women’s Catholic college—all in white, with raised gothic lettering that spelled out Marriage. Patricia had inherited her parents’ photo albums, and they had inherited theirs—ones that were filled with what appeared to be daguerreotypes, you know, with stiff subjects staring mean-eyed at the camera, as if they faced a firing squad. Patricia pulled all those photo albums down about twice a month and turned the pages backwards. She looked at magazines backwards, too, if it matters. If it says anything about her as a person. Maybe in a previous life she lived in China, or Arabia, or wherever it is people read right to left, and back to front. You’d think that that’s how they’d read south of the Equator, like in Australia.

  Anyway, Patricia pulled down the new photo album, which ended up being two inches thick and had a picture—I’m not making this up—of an electric chair taped to the front of it. I’m not sure where she found the picture, but it had been torn out of a book with thickish, beige paper. It looked like it might have come out of one of those old Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias. I didn’t have my micrometer nearby, but I would estimate that the paper ranged in the 10/1000ths of an inch range—the same as a lottery scratch card, the same as that black paper used in the old photo albums that held blank glares of Patricia’s ancestors straddling slaughtered hogs or favorite mules.

  Patricia said, “I don’t want you to get mad at me, but I need to show you something. And I want you to know that what I’m about to show you should let you know how much more I love you.” We sat at the kitchen table. I knew something was up, because Patricia reached in the back of the pantry and extracted a bottle of Old Crow she’d hidden from me some time back. I was pretty sure that Patricia did this on a regular basis—not as often as she daydreamed over photographs of her sorority sisters and her having a pillow fight, or holding shots of beer aloft before chugging them, but more often than most men have their whiskey hidden.

  That’s right, I said shots of beer. I’d met some of her sorority sisters. They had all gone on to become either corporate attorneys or do-gooders just this
side of being nuns. Notice how my wife’s named Patricia, and not Tricia, Trish, or Patty? Her sorority sisters went by Cynthia, Christina, Suzanne, Melinda, and Dorothy, never Cindy, Kit, Tina, Christy, Sue, Suzy, Mel, Linda, or Dot. Patricia was a do-gooder who worked for a non-profit called Light the Way, which had something to do with trying to get solar-powered lamps shoved down into the yards of poorer neighborhoods across America so that, at night, people would feel safer. Light the Way had all kinds of questionable statistics that concerned darkness and burglary, darkness and domestic violence, darkness and sexual assaults, darkness and illiteracy. A splinter group of Light the Way, whose members held an interest in more environmental concerns, promoted the need for more fireflies in both urban and rural areas.

  Me, I called her organization “Light the Wayward,” usually behind her back. I said to her, during tough economic times when no corporations donated money, that she and her cohorts needed to contact arsonists.

  I unscrewed the top of the bourbon. I said, “What’s this all about?” and tapped the electric chair.

  Patricia continued to blush. Her eyes zigzagged. She said, “You’ll see.”

  I opened the album and saw a slightly out of focus picture of Patricia and me in the Publix, with me pushing the shopping cart, from behind. I wore my favorite pair of Bermuda shorts that I only wore on summer Saturdays either grocery shopping, or out in the back yard reading the Faulkner stories and novels I kept saying I’d finish before I turned forty. I wore rubber Nike flip-flops. Patricia held, of all things, a giant can of V8.

  I said, “Who took this picture?”

  I poured some bourbon—maybe three fingers—into an old Welch’s grape jelly jar that I liked to drink straight bourbon in because my father did so, and his father did so. Mine had a picture of an Asian elephant on it from the Welch’s “Endangered Species” collection, which I liked to drink from so I wouldn’t forget. We didn’t have photo albums in my childhood household, but by God we had some jelly jars. I looked on the recto side of the album and saw a photograph of Patricia and me sitting in my Jeep at a red light.