Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  “Most people I ever meet need to have a tombstone that reads ‘Well That Wasn’t Worth the Time,’” Cush said. “Mock it down: Everyone who buys a sinkhole-saving parachute here—or where we’ll be going later—should probably die from a fatal unexpected fall into the depths of Duval County. Or, fuck, any county, any state.”

  More people drove into the parking lot, people who must’ve gotten a celebratory and exhortatory warning, men wearing grease-smudged khakis and women in worn cotton-print dresses. Mothers showed up yelling, “Will it work for my bay-bay?” and men asked, “It ain’t gone blow up like a airbag, is it? I don’t want to be down there with the ancient coral alive but burned up like a bad wick.”

  This particular scheme wasn’t failing like the free groceries hoax. I would’ve pondered about it more, but well-meaning and hopeful derelicts stretched their hands my way as if I owned Fountain of Youth water best known down forty miles south of where we stood. I felt surrounded by zombies. I had witnessed late-night evangelical channels with similar desperate dawdlers hopping up to the stage in hopes of having that missing leg reappear.

  I yelled out, “Step right up! Step right up! Step right up!” like any obnoxiously buzzed eighteen-year-old might do after realizing that he’d never see these people again. I didn’t notice two things: First off, somebody had worried about their drug-addicted children who showed up after huffing fluorescent pink paint from paper bags. These kids—six of them, about my age—leaned down to idling car headlights, then stood erect to show off their glowing alimentary canal entrances. In the dusk, as they wandered around, it looked as if frosted strawberry doughnuts hung in the air, or like the little blips that live inside one’s eyelids had taken steroids and threatened to run away. If they stood in a line according to height it looked like O O O O O O standing between our truck and the entrance to the bar. I got mesmerized for thirty seconds or so, and listened to these boys wearing my uncle’s parachutes end every sentence with “dude.” I didn’t notice, too, that said pink-encircled-mouth huffers found a way to ascend to the roof of the VFW lounge soon thereafter—again, three stories high—and yell down to us those words that never offer good news, viz., “Hey! Dude! Hey! Are y’all watching us? Get out of the way!”

  “Get out of the way,” Uncle Cush said to someone as he got in the step van and turned the ignition. To me he said, “Close those goddamn back doors and jump in fast.”

  I said, of course, “I think I’m going to regurgitate.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out what ended up being $900. What were all these people doing with a hundred dollars to spare? I thought. Or at least I thought it later. I thought about it twenty years later, too, when people made the news for falling into sinkholes every other day. From the way we were parked in front of the VFW, I was on the side closest to the door. People slammed their palms against the step van’s panels like zombies looking for living meat. Like groupies hoping that the lead guitarist would emerge from the venue’s back door with his pecker hanging out. Like Southerners wanting milk and bread at the grocery store when the temperature dipped below forty.

  Uncle Cush turned the ignition and palmed the horn. In retrospect, I think he kept the horn going so as not to hear the sound of six deranged teenagers hitting the ground from thirty or forty feet up.

  I grabbed Cush’s arm and made the horn stop. And then I heard “Geronimo” and watched as one fluorescent pink circle fell from the sky, first quickly, and then slowed down. The five other circles followed with the same result. Cush backed up the step van and aimed his headlights toward where the boys had landed, all of them standing upright, their miniature parachutes unfurled on the ground like spent condoms thrown out of a moving vehicle.

  Uncle Cush said, “I’ll be goddamned,” and looked at me. He said, “The bridle pulled the D-bag out, the bridle pulled the D-bag out!” though at the time I thought he referred to the assortment of huffers as douchebags. He’d not gone into details about the technical terminology of a parachute, hand-crafted or not.

  I said, “They’re alive,” but not with much enthusiasm, for I still felt as though all those cans of Dixie beer might leave my body in an undesirable way.

  Cush put the step van back in park. “Get out and let’s get back to work,” he said to me. To Warren he yelled out, “If that ain’t a commercial for how to survive a sinkhole attack, I don’t know what is,” and Warren said, “Shit, man, let me go back inside and open the safe. I’mo buy me another dozen them things for resale.”

  This was a time before cell phones. No one got on the World Wide Web and advertised how a Fu Manchu-ed Vietnam War veteran and his “son” brought lifesaving technology to the largest city area-wise in the United States of America. The paint huffers descended, landed safely, and somebody made another call from a pay phone in the parking lot of the VFW. Then the callee called some people, and they called some people, and so on—just like Malthus pointed out in An Essay on the Principle of Population, which I read in the fourth grade at the urging of my parents after I wouldn’t finish the Catfish Surprise that my mother baked for supper, and which I think shouldn’t have been called an “essay” seeing as it plodded on somewhere into the 42,000 word range.

  “Sober up, son,” Uncle Cush said to me. “I don’t mind a man drinking, but you need to know how to act sober on the spot, with no warning, when it comes to high finance. We get back home? I got some films of Wall Street tycoons testifying before Congress. They know how to do it better than anyone.”

  We didn’t sell out of the parachutes there in the VFW parking lot, but the huffers’ questionable feats of daring helped us, I would bet, sell another sixty or eighty units over the next few hours. The crowd dwindled. The original nicknamed veterans had gone home to undergo their personal nightmares. Warren locked up the front door to his bar and told us he didn’t mind if we stayed in the parking lot overnight to sleep, just like people did at Wal-Marts in their recreational vehicles. My uncle thanked the man, waited for his taillights to disappear, then got in the step van and said to me, “I pride myself on not making mistakes with the Singer machine, but I can’t promise nobody’s going to go jump off a bridge tonight and have a failed chute. No need to sit here like a radioman tattooed with bull’s eyes, knowing snipers are everywhere, aiming for us.”

  Cush drove and I unfolded a road map provided by a Texaco station down in south Georgia. I said, “Daytona Beach looks like the next best place for a VFW, if you want to get out of Duval County entirely.” I directed him toward Highway 1.

  “Daytona Beach,” my uncle said. “That’s the kind of place where people would want to live a long time, not fall victim to the earth’s frail decisions. That’s a type of place to grasp and decipher the truth.”

  We didn’t get two miles down the road when, up ahead, the headlights showed the round flourescent mouths of those daredevil huffers, turning around to hitchhike. I knew already what would happen. My uncle didn’t say, “Hey, do you think I should pick these boys up and take them down to Daytona?” He didn’t say, “What these boys need is a good role model, like me, so that they get off the paint fumes and quit acting like shell-shocked soldiers in a way that won’t allow them to become comfortably superstitious octegenarians.” I read his mind though. He felt as though he could offer some of his hourly advice and turn them around, at least after they proved his mini-parachutes’ worth when leaping from a Holiday Inn’s tar-and-gravel roof, to the shock and amazement of local onlookers who—whether they admitted it or not—had long feared being swallowed up inside the bowels of a relentless state not known for moderation on any level.

  I closed my eyes and felt my uncle ease up the accelerator, then tap his brakes. In my mind I imagined his losing control when he pulled off to the gravel berm, maybe accidentally wrecking into the guardrail, scaring the boys we would ask to join us. I looked way into the future and thought about how we would measure our lives between such wrecks, and that there would never be a time when we could feel safe or cont
ent about the next one looming.

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE WOMAN OPENED HER BAG AND SIGHED

  Rodney Sheets couldn’t stop thinking about deforestation. He’d seen three separate documentaries on three different networks, and thus concluded that there must be a connection between innumerable acres burning on two continents and the reason why the temperature outside hovered at 100 for three weeks straight. He thought, Those narrators and scientists and actors are right—I can change my daily habits and help save the planet. He’d finished his fourth gin and tonic.

  No one else populated Gus Bingham’s bar on the Saluda River. Gus said he had to go check out a smell in the crawl space. He set two bottles in front of Rodney, along with a cut-up lemon, a pen, and cocktail napkin. He said, “Hatch off your tally. Anyone else comes in, bang the bar stool for me. I got to get some lime, and not for your drink.”

  Rodney nodded. He marked four lines at the top of the napkin, then a fifth. He unfolded it and wrote, “Plant trees in yard. Buy recycled products. Promote constipation—save TP.” Then he stalled.

  The door opened and a woman limped in. She carried a filled canvas satchel. Her matted hair reached past her shoulders, and not in the I’m-a-white-hipster way that Rodney saw on a whole other documentary about the unfulfilled lives of ex-Deadheads. The woman plopped down indelicately two stools away and placed her heavy bag between Rodney and herself.

  She emitted an odor of week-old perspiration and moldy Roman Meal bread. Rodney said, “Hey. Gus’ll be right back.” He didn’t get off his stool and bang it on the floor. Gus wouldn’t be happy to emerge from a fouled crawl space only to have a homeless drifter woman plead for alms.

  The woman said, “Buy me a drink.” She looked at the bottle.

  Rodney said, “What you got in the bag?”

  “I have money. Damn, man. Whatever happened to men buying women drinks in bars? In New York and L.A., there’re still men buying.”

  She reached in her back pocket and pulled out twenty one-dollar bills. Rodney said, “You turn in some aluminum at the recycling place down the road? Good. I was just sitting here making a list of ways I could recycle paper products.”

  The woman reached below the counter and grabbed a plastic cup. She said, “You could write on your hand, instead of cocktail napkins.” She sneered at Rodney. She shook her lice-likely head. “Write that on down, Bozo. For your information, I have better, higher-calling things to do than collect cans off the roadside.” She leaned in Rodney’s direction and took the bottle from him. She didn’t slide it back.

  Beneath them, Gus bellowed out, “Oh, hell,” and wretched audibly in great, measured wails. “This one’s bad.”

  Rodney said, “That seems like an appropriate segue. So. If you don’t clean up the environment… You’re not from around these parts, are you?”

  The woman opened her bag and sighed. She pulled out a number of advance reader’s copies. She stacked them up and balanced her cup atop the uncorrected proofs. “I’m a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews,” she said. “I don’t expect you to know the journal. I don’t expect you to understand anything about anonymous criticism.” She downed a shot of straight gin and poured another.

  Like Gus below, Rodney didn’t cotton to sighing, eye-rolling, melodramatic people in the bar. He said, “You need to take a bath. How’s a little of that for not being anonymous? If you’re as smart and haughty as you’re trying to come off, you should know about the secret life of bacteria. What’d you do, get a merit badge in Alternative Lifestyles, then quit the Girl Scouts?”

  Then he wrote on his cocktail napkin, “Eradicate anonymous critics.” Who are you to be so presumptuous? he started to say, but didn’t. He thought to ask her if she’d ever read Salinger, Yates, Carver, O’Connor, or Hannah, like he did daily. But his thoughts strayed.

  Gus came in through the back door, clapping lime dust from his hands, smiling.

  JAYNE MANSFIELD

  Some kind of manhunt kept me locked inside Crosby’s while SWAT teams scoured the area looking for two supposed bank robbery suspects. Looking up at the bar’s normally irresponsible TV set, I sat there watching the action taking place outside, almost making out exactly where I sat from News Four’s rarely used helicopter’s shots, and when the reporter paused to catch her breath back in the studio, in between her mispronouncing words and stumbling over teleprompter sentences, I heard the rotors overhead. Crosby had left me and the one other patron alone so he could carry a St. Patrick’s Day banner up on the tar-and-gravel roof in hopes of gaining free advertising for the green draft beer he planned to sell cheap in two weeks.

  “Y’all look for me, Warner,” Crosby had said. “They say the camera puts some weight on you. If y’all see me, notice if I look normal.” Crosby stood six feet tall and weighed 130. He had owned and operated his bar for a decade, since he was forced to retire early as a supervisor at Central Yarn. Crosby might’ve been married to the only woman who ever said to her husband that he should buy a bar, drink nightly, and try to put on some pounds.

  I nodded. How could I even expect to be either alive or free from jail on St. Patrick’s Day?

  “This is like living in Los Angeles,” the other man said. “I used to live in Los Angeles. I bet I couldn’t count the days I heard a helicopter over my house. Or turned on the news and seen a car chase on a street I’d traveled earlier in the day.” Then he said, “I’m Mike.”

  I lifted what had been a straight triple bourbon. I said, “Good to meet you, Mike. I’m Warner.” Mike lied, I knew, for no one said “Los Angeles” who’d ever really spent time there. My first real girlfriend in college went west for a month to get on a game show, and she called it “L.A.,” as if she’d been a mayoral candidate. And my current girlfriend Justine had lived there for her first eighteen years and called it “L.A.” Justine had also lived in San Francisco and Nashville before we met up, places she referred to as “Frisco” and “Nash Vegas.” Since my trouble began a month earlier, she’d been talking of moving to “Chi-town,” or “The City,” or “Big D.”

  I sat in Crosby’s thinking about these women who abbreviated their homes and destinations. It wasn’t the first time.

  “Happy February thirtieth,” Mike said. He stood up, his feet on the bottom rungs of his bar stool, leaned over the countertop, and poured a draft. “You probably don’t think there’s ever thirty days in February, am I right? Twenty-nine every four years—that’s called a ‘leap year’—but mostly twenty-eight. Am I right?”

  I looked at the television screen. The local manhunt had cut to a commercial for Advance America payday loans. I said, “Yeah. I don’t know. Are you going to tell me about one of those pre-Julian calendars?” I thought, Jesus fucking Christ, man, talk about sports, weather, or pussy like everyone else inside a dark wood-paneled bar.

  Mike shook his head. He kept eye contact, descended from his stool, and reached for his wallet. He said, “I’m the only man in America born on February thirtieth. It’s my birthday! Look at this.”

  Mike pulled what proved to be a worn birth certificate from his wallet, unfolded it, and held it by two corners. I first read “Unknown” beneath the father’s name, then scanned upward to, sure enough, “02-30-45.” I said, “I’ll be damned. You didn’t get that made up at one of those places down in Myrtle Beach, did you—those places that make fake newspapers with fake headlines?”

  “You didn’t believe me, did you? I celebrate my birthday on March second, you know, or sometimes March first. You didn’t believe me, did you?”

  “It’s like a bar trick,” I said. I looked at the TV and said, “Is that Crosby?” The helicopter cameraman had zoomed in and focused on a parking meter.

  “It ain’t no trick,” Mike said. “Shit, man, you wouldn’t believe what kind of trouble this birthday has caused me.”

  “I’m sorry. Happy birthday. I should’ve wished you a happy birthday right away. Get a pint and put it on my tab,” I said, pointing to the draft beer dispenser. “It�
��s already March? Fuck. I think I forgot somebody’s birthday”—which wasn’t true. I knew the date. At this moment my lawyer supposedly was meeting with another lawyer, and by the end of the day I would know what decisions I’d have to make—as in, move out of town, get ready for jail, or kill myself.

  “I’d been in the air force already, you know, bombing the hell out of Indochina on a secret mission, and then when I come up to apply for being an astronaut they look at my birth certificate and say, ‘This ain’t right, Bubba. They might be thirty days in February in Russia or China or Cuba, but not in the United States.’ I got reneged from NASA only because some nurse got all confused back in 1945 because her brother or husband was returning from Iwo Jima or Dunkirk. Ain’t that the something, how things work out?”

  I’m not sure why I thought it appropriate and necessary to say, “I was born in 1983. I guess the war in Grenada hadn’t gotten to the point where nurses got confused back home from people dying.” This wasn’t true, but I couldn’t think of any kind of known war going on in 1981.

  “I’ve died twice, unofficially,” Mike said. He held his mouth open in a way that astronomers who discover new planets, or microbiologists who discover new viruses, might. He reached over for another beer. “Twice officially, and I don’t know how many times unofficially. A bunch, unofficially. Like twelve. Or fifty.”

  I didn’t listen closely as Mike listed off times when an EMT, nurse, doctor, or unlucky passerby was present to witness what could have been regarded as unnoticed death. No, I looked back behind the bar and watched a common American cockroach—Periplaneta americana—skitter its way between stacks of beer mugs. I thought, How in the world can they accuse me of not being qualified to teach children the ins and outs of the insect world? How can they accuse me of endangering the lives of others just because I don’t have a PhD?