Crosby left his banner on the floor. He got behind the bar and tested the taps. “You know his real story, don’t you? Man. I hired him on because I felt so sorry for him.”
I went through war hero, almost-astronaut, winner of a strip poker game with Jayne Mansfield. Crosby said, “I don’t know about all that. I haven’t heard any of those stories. No. What happened was, back about ten or fifteen years ago he was falsely accused of murder-for-hire. I’m talking about the business end of murder-for-hire.”
Crosby pulled a draft PBR and handed it to me. I said, “The business end of murder-for-hire would be the guy who got killed, wouldn’t it? What do you mean?”
Crosby looked back toward the restrooms and leaned my way. He whispered, “He’d been accused of getting hired out to kill someone. As it ended up, somebody couldn’t stand Mike so much that he went to the cops and said, ‘I hired a guy to murder my wife, and he agreed to do it.’ By the time everything got to the court stage, the man confessed. Mike was totally blindsided, of course. He’d not been asked to kill anyone, for one. The man who made up the entire lie ended up going to prison. I think he’s out now, though. That’s one expensive practical joke, if you ask me.”
I didn’t need to hear any of this. What if some parents got together and hired somebody to murder me just because I wasn’t officially certified to show off insects to their children? What if an exterminator didn’t like me going around espousing the symbiotic relationship between cockroaches and crumb-spilling husbands? What if Justine decided that she didn’t want to move out of our rented house, that it would be easier to kill me off than to pack her own boxes? This medical ethics thing I had been so obsessed with at one time, to the point of memorizing various oaths—what if people around here thought it best to kill people who believed in euthanasia? I said, “Fuck, Crosby. Fuck. It might be best if I move to another state. I can’t see anything but trouble ahead for me around here.”
“I told Mike to do the same thing way back when, but he wouldn’t listen. Here he is, you know. Here he is.” Crosby laughed. “In case you don’t own a mirror, go back there and look at Mike in the face and maybe you can see yourself in twenty or thirty years. Or tomorrow.”
A police officer opened the door to Crosby’s bar and yelled, “Everything okay in here, Crosby?”
“Good as it’ll ever be,” Crosby said. “Was there really a holdup, or were y’all just playing cops and robbers?”
The police officer stared at me, I swear. He talked to Crosby, but he kept looking at me. He said, “They surrendered peacefully. As it ended up they lifted a manhole cover and got in to wait it out.”
I don’t know why I thought it necessary to say, “Maybe News Four needs a submarine instead of a helicopter,” but I did. The policeman stared at me a good five seconds, didn’t respond, and closed the door.
Mike the Liar came out of the restroom carrying a plumber’s helper in one hand and a crescent wrench in the other. He said, “All is well. All is well. Both toilets are now flushing fine, and neither’s running water. This reminds me of the time I got hired out to fix every goddamn clogged toilet at Madison Square Garden in 1971 when Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali. Frank Sinatra ended up helping me for a little while.”
I looked at Crosby as if to say, “See?” but Crosby nodded. He said, “Fifteen rounds and a unanimous decision. Those were the days.”
Mike sat back at the bar, two stools away. He smiled to himself. Crosby gave him a draft. I thought, That cop’s waiting for me outside. I thought, If I leave this bar, I’ll end up riding to jail for some reason.
Crosby said, “I’m glad they found out the truth about you, Warner. Listen, is it true what they say about a female praying mantis?”
I said, “Yes. Bites the head off her mate.”
Mike drank his beer in two gulps and set the glass down. He said it wasn’t true about Jayne Mansfield being decapitated. Crosby said something about how he needed a good St. Patrick’s Day in order to keep his bar afloat financially. Mike said that Jayne Mansfield’s breasts looked like cocoons, waiting to erupt with the most beautiful butterflies ever.
LEACH FIELDS
This story isn’t about me, though it took place during my wilder days, in a small town where I spent time in the county jail. This particular anecdote—which got me to thinking about how everyone’s out to fuck with everyone else, how there’s no defense against a well-obsessed man, how no sane person should even try to settle down in a marriage and expect it to work—this particular story, which I believe fully, came out of the crooked mouth of a fellow petty criminal named Sarly Fink. If you ask me, Sarly Fink’s parents tabbed him with two options only in life: petty criminal or septic system cleaner, what with the name. Oddly enough, he turned out to be both, plus a real talker.
I had agreed to not pay bail and do my thirty days, because I knew no one in town yet and had zero money. I’d been charged with littering, burning without a permit, destruction of private property, stealing, public drunk, resisting arrest, and assault on an officer of the law, in that order. Actually the public drunkenness charge came last, but it wasn’t much true. I couldn’t walk a straight line during the roadside test because I’d hurt my ankle. I sprained it while running from the deputy, who—unless I’d not stuck my foot in the underground yellow jackets nest—would’ve never caught me. His name was Gaylord French. Name like that? Cop or florist or college professor.
There at the jail booking area I said to Gaylord French, “I used to be a decathlete. I used to compete in the decathlon back in college. That means ten events.”
The policeman who sat behind his desk cataloging my empty wallet and keys said, “You get yourself three more charges added to these seven and you’ll be a decathlaprisoner.” He didn’t laugh. He acted as if he’d been waiting his whole life to say something like that.
I said to Gaylord French, “No, man, I was just saying—you’re in pretty good shape, running me down the way you did. I wasn’t the best decathlete, but still. I know the hundred-yard dash, and the mile, and hurdles, and the high jump. Pretty much you and I performed all those events down there in the woods.” Understand that I fully know that I sucked up to the deputy.
Gaylord French said to the other officer, “Who’s got a cigarette? I need to put some spit-tobacco on these bee stings. Goddamn this place for going No Smoking everywhere.”
I didn’t have a cigarette at that time in my life because I still considered myself a decathlete. Later on I would understand Gay-lord French’s impatience concerning do-gooders deciding what was right for prisoners in regards to their health. Prisoners, hell—I would be willing to bet that every goddamn do-gooder was pro-choice in regards to a woman’s body and euthanasia, but they wouldn’t allow for people to kill themselves slowly and voluntarily, all the while paying taxes on cigarettes so that Medicare and education could continue, with tobacco products.
The “assault on an officer” charge, by the way, should’ve been leveled on the yellow jackets, not me. In backwards South Carolina, where this took place, if an officer of the law falls asleep behind the wheel and crashes his cruiser, a diner waitress can get charged for not serving the officer enough coffee. True law, passed unanimously by the legislature, from what I’ve heard.
But this story’s not about me.
The booking cop made me sign something, he took away my shoelaces, a magistrate appeared soon thereafter, and I received an orange jumpsuit. I might’ve received only thirty days because the magistrate said, “Barry Pendarvis. Are you related to Perry Pendarvis, of Pendarvis Cadillac?”
I about said, “Yes!” like that. I about said, “My daddy could get all y’all Cadillacs if you let me loose and we forget this ever happened.” But my old track coach’s voice came into my head right about then—damn him!—saying, “Become the javelin, and soar beyond up-till-now unfathomed illusion.”
I said to the magistrate, “No, sir. I’m not related to anyone here.”
Gaylord F
rench stood there and said, “I need to get some Benabryl.” Benabryl! Like part Benadryl and part Brylcreem. I got lost in thought thinking about an old-fashioned hair styling gel that repelled stinging insect pain.
I said, “I’m here because I got one of those post-graduate Clean Up South Carolina fellowships.” The magistrate and Gaylord French looked at me as if I’d spoken in a foreign tongue. I should point out that—maybe this is everywhere, I don’t know—no law experience, or even college education, is required to become a magistrate in South Carolina. They’re appointed by the governor, who doesn’t have to have a college education either, but should possess working knowledge of how to drive a tractor, run a spinning frame, quote the Bible in a believable fashion, and see no need whatsoever for libraries. I said, “I graduated from college, and I’m taking a year off to pay up my student loans. There’s this program. It’s like the Peace Corps. Except not about peace. Or the United States.”
“So you was burning up campaign signs, and that’s considered trash in your opinion,” the magistrate said. I would mention his name, but I never learned it, and the fake-copper nameplate on the desk read “Big Man.”
Gaylord French said, “Thinks our people is trash, running for office, represent us all over, good citizens.” You should’ve seen his face. He had those yellow jacket stings ringing his eye sockets in a way that looked like Maori warrior tattoos.
Here I did like, “Well, I haven’t officially started my job yet, and I figured that if litter stood on the side of the road, then it should be picked up. I mean, the signs I gathered up were from a primary that took place a year ago.”
Call me a yellow dog democrat, but I thought that the two million republicans running in the primaries for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of education, first district congressional seat, senate, county council, et cetera, should’ve contacted their wrongheaded volunteer supporters to pick up those roadside campaign placards at major and minor intersections, and correctly disposed of the things, or at least stacked them up and saved them for the next election. I had moved into the rent-free Clean Up South Carolina apartment that they gave me, went scouting around, as twenty-two-year-old ex-decathletes might do, for good beer joints. I found one, I drank some drafts, and I thought about how I couldn’t believe a guy at the University of Oregon almost amassed 10,000 points in the decathlon whereas I could never break 7,000.
I don’t want to make any generalizations, but I would be willing to bet that behind most bashed-in mailboxes, shot-up stop signs, and toilet-papered trees stood either a future- or ex-decathlete.
I would also contend that drunken ex-decathletes don’t remember the unimportant inviolable proceedings of an admonitory magistrate who enters a faux courtroom in a jail’s side room bent on gavel-banging, driven to hold a better office in a more convenient and prestigious district.
Whereas I thought I got thirty days because the magistrate saw in my face an otherwise honest man, I learned later that the harshest sentence a magistrate can offer is thirty days, or a fine not exceeding $500. Maybe Big Man bought a lemon from Perry Pendarvis and took it out on me.
Sarly Fink was my cell mate. He’s still there, probably, or down in Columbia at the big prison. One can get on the computer these days, type in “SCDC”—which stands for South Carolina Department of Corrections—find the site, and enter a name. I’ve done it, sure, but Sarly Fink doesn’t appear. Has he died? Has he been transferred to Angola or San Quentin? Maybe he’s been truly rehabilitated, like some kind of success story that’s never been reported.
Sarly Fink had a lawyer and everything, according to him, but a jury found him guilty of passing bad checks, or DUI, or forgery, or selling beer to minors, or fishing without a license, or tampering, or not paying taxes, or driving without a license, or killing an endangered species that attacked him, or spooking neighborhood children mercilessly.
This is his story. Sarly Fink told a lot of them, and I believed one.
Again, it was the county jail. We wore orange jumpsuits. Some of us worked the kitchen, some the recycling center, and others on a chain gang without the chains. Sarly Fink and I picked up roadside garbage, just like I would’ve done, of course, had I honored my Clean Up South Carolina post-graduate fellowship. Here’s something I learned: It seems like redneck litterers prefer Busch Light, Hardee’s hamburgers, and Slim Jim Giant Jerk beef jerky strips. We stabbed our nail-sticks into more of those objects in a day’s time than, say, cans of Sapporo, Big Mac boxes, or Mallo Cup wrappers.
“I’m paying for something else I done,” Sarly Fink whispered to me on the first day out. “I fucked up, and God’s holding a grudge.”
I know there are a bunch of those nightly cable TV shows about convicts stuck together holding hands and whatnot in eight-by-ten cells, but Sarly and I weren’t in this type of situation. Maybe jailhouse homosexuality becomes an issue after thirty days, I’m glad to say.
I picked up a used diaper and shoved it in the canvas bag and said to Sarly Fink, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. God’s against all of us.”
“Listen to what I have to say,” he said. “I want you to ponder my story.”
There were some other encaged fellows with us. Most of them bragged about the women who awaited them on the outside. Sometimes I imagined pole vaulting over the razor wire, running off, and meeting up with incarcerated men’s supposed girlfriends. Sometimes at night—I didn’t sleep much—I imagined shoving a shot put into the mouth of Sarly Fink.
People kept honking the horn as they drove by. I probably lost a few years of my life from what these thirty days did to my nerves. I said, “Go on, my man.”
You wouldn’t believe how many ticks live in roadside high grass. I’d say that three ticks show up about every ten steps. I kept pulling them off of me—and thinking how I needed to tell Clean Up South Carolina how it wasn’t fair to offer a post-graduate fellowship without Lyme disease protection—and seeing them on Sarly Fink. I told him, but he kept walking, high-stepping, looking for trash.
“I sucked other people’s crap,” Sarly said finally. “That’s what I done for a living. It’s what I do now, and what I will do in the future. I got the equipment.”
I said, “Look at how bleached out that dead deer’s skull is,” and pointed.
He stabbed it. Sarly said, “Hear this, Barry. I ain’t proud of it all.”
“I’m not proud of my quarter-mile time,” I said. What could I say?
“I’ve been thinking about telling a psychiatrist all about it so we can write my story.”
We continued walking through sweet grass taller than the average third-grader. I tried to concentrate there on the side of the road, but looking back I probably thought only about how I would soon no longer be a decathlete officially. I felt pretty sure that some kind of federation stripped people of what they called themselves if said people didn’t compete over a certain period of time. Like an accountant can’t call himself one anymore if he forgets to punch in some numbers over, say, two hours.
I found a 16-ounce beer, half full, and drank from it. That’s how I was back then.
“I kept track of people,” Sarly Fink said. “I drove around and looked. I watched. People always looked down on me for what I done for a living, and I reciprocated duly.”
I didn’t say anything about how “reciprocated” might be a big word. Reciprocated? I said, “Is that a copperhead down by your foot?”
Sarly said, “Man and woman. Husband and wife. Rainfall for a month. Septic tank needs cleaning out ’cause they ain’t played by the septic tank rules for years. Do you know septic tank rules, Barry? There are rules. No grease dumped down the drain, for one. There are eighteen others. Anyway, they call me up like it’s my fault. So I show up with a box of rubbers in my truck and have them opened and unstrung, you know. People who yell at septic tank cleaners ain’t going to come out there and look at their own shit, you know.”
Of course I pretended to know what the hell Sarly Fink meant. Was he
speaking in some kind of stream-of-consciousness? Was he imagining things? I said, “I’ll be damned.”
“Let’s say a married couple needed their tank cleaned. I’d show up, and dig a foot or two down to the coffin lid, you know, that covers the tank’s opening—right there when the pipe leads from the house. If I felt they didn’t respect me and mine, I’d drop ten or twelve opened rubbers down there to float atop the water, maybe stick two hanging right there from the pipe like they’d not finished their journey. Then I’d call the man and woman out and say, ‘Y’all shouldn’t throw all these here condoms down the commode.’ You see what I’m talking about? That’s what God’s mad for.”
I said, for no reason whatsoever, “My least favorite event’s the long jump. I think it has to do with a fear of fouling there at the board.”
“So then a woman would say, ‘My husband don’t wear no rubbers,’ and a husband would say the same. He thinks some old boy’s showing up when he’s away, you know, screwing his wife. And she thinks that a woman’s showing up when she’s off somewhere. Do you see what I’m saying? Can you picture the scenario in your mind’s eye?”
Telling Sarly’s story later, I see one of his eyes twitching, maybe sweat draining down the sides of his face. I didn’t say, “That’s kind of cruel,” though I thought it.
“I bet I done this little trick a couple hundred times. See, then they would divorce because they don’t trust each other. That’s what happens. They divorce, the house comes up for sale cheap, and I buy it. Or at least I had plans to buy those houses and resell them later, but I never had the money.”
I turned around to look for the guard, who wasn’t paying attention. I said, “Wait. You threw rubbers in the septic, and then asked a husband and wife to come look at the things?”
“College boy. I told them they shouldn’t dispose of rubbers down the commode, among the seventeen other things. Feminine hygiene products. Paper towels. Grease. Rocks.”
Between Wrecks Page 17
