Jeff the owner will say, "How you want your hot dogs?"
"Mustard, ketchup, onions, and relish. That's all. No chili."
Jeff will look over at two men playing eight ball, then say to Amanda, "You don't want no buns?"
She won't take his comment as some kind of antifeminist slight. She won't think that he said "buns" in some kind of double-entendre kind of way. Amanda will lean over the bar, pull back the draft beer dispenser, and hang her head upside down. She won't think of what statues might be erected in her name. She won't think of her previous life, of the cell phone she quit answering, of any scholarly tracts she once considered meaningful.
Assurance
MY FATHER DEFLATED the tires of his Plymouth down to about ten PSI, he said, so that the car would grip the road better. There was no road, as far as I could tell, only four inches of snow—BLIZZARD IN CAROLINA! the weekly paper would read in its next issue—and my father said we needed to drive some twenty miles away to buy an air compressor for when he felt it safe to reinflate the Goodyears. I was too young to say something like, "Why don't you get chains instead?" or "Why don't you keep a set of spiked snow tires in the shed out back?" or "Where is it, exactly, that we might have to visit that's so far away we'll have to drive?" My mom said something, though. She followed us right to the end of the driveway, screaming, using the two-foot indented tracks for better footing that the Plymouth's more-than-half-flat tires left. My father stepped on the accelerator and we roared out on Old Old Greenville Road at a blazing five miles an hour. Unfortunately, I was old enough to say, "Why don't we walk? We'll get there faster." My father took off his high school, Masonic, wedding, and Insurer of the Year rings—all of which he kept on his right hand for some reason—and punched my left arm, the arm I wouldn't use when I pelted the back of his head with snowballs later in the day.
"Hey, you want to stop by and pick up Watt or Louis or Andy? We can all squeeze in. The air compressor will fit in the trunk when we get it. We can keep the chain saw set up here between you and me."
I didn't slink down in the car seat like I normally did when Dad made me ride around town with him, blowing his horn at current and future life insurance policyholders. I said, "I doubt they'd be awake this early, seeing as we don't have school. Even if we did have school, I doubt they'd be awake at six thirty in the morning."
This was late January, and when the electricity went off the night before, my father held up a finger and said, "I guess y'all aren't going to argue with me about trading out that stop sign I found for three transistor radios with Mr. Dawes, are you?" He didn't say much when only one of the radios had a battery that wasn't fully dead. He found an AM station out of Graywood that reported statewide school closings. The announcer said that absolutely no one should go out driving, and that a number of trees had fallen on secondary roads.
"I know of a great ice cream store up where we're going. I'll get y'all ice cream, son."
I didn't say, "It's snowing. People drink shots of whiskey, like I know you'll do later, when it's snowing." I said, "Shouldn't you turn on your headlights? It's dark."
My father drove in the middle of the road. He took his hands from the steering wheel and asked that I pound against my door should we lean too much to the left, that he'd do the same should we lean toward the ditch on my side. "Don't need no headlights. The moon's leading us on. Look at that snow glowing! It's like the Yellow Brick Road. Except white. If I turned on the lights there's no telling how many deer we might hit." He pulled his coat sleeve down below his palm and wiped a circle on the windshield, then asked me to do the same.
I said, "Double negative. 'Don't need no headlights' means that you actually need headlights."
My father quit defogging the windshield. He punched me and said, "Maybe you should hold my rings in your hands so it'll make you remember what might be coming your way. Here." He handed them to me. "Don't never say I never gave you nothing."
I put the Masonic, Insurer of the Year, and high school rings on my left thumb and the wedding band on my right, not thinking about how—when I would later pelt the back of his head—the wedding ring would fly off obliquely, somewhere, in virginal snow unperturbed by traffic.
"I can't believe that I was looking at the want ads not last week and saw this air compressor for sale. At the time I only thought how nice it would be to blow up your bike tires, your basketball and football, and maybe the spare in your momma's car."
I banged my door and the car righted itself, somehow. "It's not that far down to Gruel Gas. Mr. Bratcher doesn't charge for air or water."
The windshield wipers stopped. My father turned on his headlights. "Mark my words, boy. They'll start charging for air and water before long. Back when your grandfather—well, maybe your great-grandfather—was a boy, they didn't even charge for gas. Now look at it. You know how come they didn't charge money for gasoline when your great-grandfather was a boy, Bane?"
I'd heard this one before. My father'd either forgotten or tested me as to whether I listened to his stories. "Because there were no cars back then. Horses didn't need gas."
He nodded. At the top of a hill he stopped the car, got out, retrieved a bottle of bourbon from the trunk, and poured some of it out on the windshield and the wiper motors. They came back to life. "Damn it to hell, I hate having to do that," he said as we continued up Old Old Greenville Road. "Say, did you hear that disc jockey list off anything about the liquor stores being closed today?"
I was too young—and sore—to say that I did.
Earlier in the week, before the official blizzard, it had been my turn to give morning prayer over Gruel Normal's intercom system. This was supposed to be a sixth grader's perk—and since there weren't but fifteen of us in total, we pretty much got to do it once a month, taking into account holidays, teacher workdays, and so on. We were supposed to give a standard recitation made up by the principal that started off something like, "Our Father, who art in Heaven, please bless all of Gruel, and may we have a safe journey into the day's events." It went on and on. Then the Pledge of Allegiance came next, followed by an instructional verse from Psalms. Most of my classmates practiced what they would preach, but me, I normally opened the Bible, closed my eyes, and read wherever my finger landed. To say that I already didn't cotton to the fire and brimstone of the Good Book would be an understatement. My father wouldn't allow us to attend church. Any Gruel church had such small congregations that it would take at least a hundred dollars' worth of tithings each month to pay for the preacher and keep up summer league softball uniforms. To attend a church with a respectable membership would mean driving way past where he and I went to get an air compressor. Being in the insurance business, he knew that chances for a wreck multiplied with each foray down a two-lane stretch of asphalt.
"If anyone in the house feels the need for religious counseling, you can come to me," he said more than once. "I'm in insurance. God's in assurance. They're practically the same word."
This is not to say that my father saw himself as God's right-hand man, or that he scoffed anyone's personal beliefs. He'd taken a variety of seminars over the years all the way down in Jacksonville, Florida, and felt like, somewhere along the line, he probably got the same kind of education as a middle-of-the-road seminarian.
My mother, though, found it necessary to put out the fire when asked to meet with Mr. Haddon, the principal, after my little slip of the tongue during morning prayer. First off—in order to prove my innocence—I'd like to point out how none of us at Gruel Normal even thought to call the guy Mr. Hard-on. We didn't know.
"Bane was a touch-me-not baby at birth, Mr. Haddon," my mother started off. We sat in his office. I still wasn't sure what went on. "Any time another human being came to pick him up or stroke his cheek he'd start to crying. He wouldn't stop until he got put back in the crib. I couldn't even b-r-e-a-s-t feed him until he was about four years old."
I said, "I can spell, Mom."
She held up her hand. "That didn
't come out right—I didn't breast-feed him when he was four years old. But that would have been about the time I could have, if it would have been morally acceptable and doctor-approved. It's not and wasn't, and I didn't. By then he ate regular food, like every other child, and he let me stroke his head every once in a while. But what I'm saying, as a touch-me-not baby, he might not have gotten some of the social graces that the rest of us have."
Mr. Haddon wore a lot of Brylcreem in his hair, making the top of his head look similar to a roller coaster. He said, "What? I don't think anyone tried to touch Bane when he gave his prayer. Did anyone come up and poke you in the ribs, boy?"
I said, "No, sir."
I'd given the requisite part of the morning prayer about God looking after us through the day, but then unlike my classmates I plain popped open the Bible and stuck my finger down to what I knew, somehow, would be a pertinent passage. Each verse is pertinent, in its way, if stretched enough. I hit Psalm 77, verse 10, which reads, "And I said, This is my infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High."
First off, the print in a regular Bible is small enough, but this was out of one of those tiny pocket-sized green ones given out by one of those do-gooder organizations at the beginning of each school year. And secondly, maybe I suffered from a variety of dyslexia. I know this: I said, "I will remember the right hand of the Most High on my rear." I'm sure I could've gotten away with it—perhaps even commended—at a parochial school.
My mother said, "Who's to say that God didn't come down and touch his little bottom while he was still in the womb? Maybe that's why Bane was such a touch-me-not. Maybe he didn't like anyone else's hand, after feeling God's. Say, while we're on the subject, do you believe that Jesus is everywhere?"
Mr. Haddon stared at my mother for a good five-beat. Looking back on it all I bet he either thought about obtaining state funding or asking me to leave his office in order to screw her on the desk. He said, "I certainly do."
"Do you believe that God resides with the downtrodden, the sick, the poor, and even the evil sinners of the past?"
Get this: Mr. Haddon said, "Indubitably."
"I guess he's in hell, then. Jesus is in hell. Jesus lives in hell. All these people think He's up there in heaven, Bane, but according to Mr. Haddon, Jesus lives in hell. Come on." She grabbed my arm—which I didn't like, of course—and drug me out of Gruel Normal. If there had been another country school within, say, a hundred miles, I'm sure I would have registered there presently.
In the car on the way home my mother said, "Please tell me you didn't turn that Bible verse around on purpose. Making fun of the Bible will get you a one-way ticket to Hades, Bane, that's one of the laws of the universe."
I was old enough to say, "Maybe I want to go live with Jesus."
My mother began taking off her rings and setting them atop the dashboard.
My father didn't fully understand supply and demand. For some reason he thought he could wrangle a snowy day air compressor deal. I guess he thought umbrella salesmen sold their wares for less on big city street corners during thunderstorms, too. But as soon as the guy selling an air compressor noticed my father's tires, he jacked up the price. This was in downtown Ware Shoals, a cotton mill town with a couple traffic lights, a place that—ten years later—would fold completely into a ghost town. My father complained, but forked over the money. I helped him get it in the backseat of the Plymouth. We drove off after my father told the man, "I would normally try to sell you some life insurance, but with the way you conduct business I can understand how you won't live very much longer and thus it would be unwise for me and my company. I try not to sell cancer insurance to a man who's coughing up lung, you know."
The man said, "Is that a threat you making me?" His eyes were sunken in, his chin jutted, but he looked as though he'd been sitting out in the sun for a good couple decades. He wore a plaid shirt and striped pants.
My father kept his window rolled down and said, "Don't slip on the ice and bust your head, boy. Don't go off to work and get your fingers stuck in a machine, unless that's the kind of thing you do to make money off the mill."
We drove to the first stoplight and pulled up next to a woman driving a Fairlane. The snow wasn't as bad in Ware Shoals, and people drove to and from the mill. I didn't notice the woman staring at us until my father said, "Watch this." He stepped on the accelerator and lurched four feet toward the intersection. The woman turned her head and drove straight across, running the red light. A driver crossing the intersection through his own green light hit his brakes, fishtailed, and barely missed the Fairlane. He honked his horn, and gave the woman a finger. My father said, "Now we wouldn't have been able to see none of this had we not gone out, could we have?"
The light turned green and we proceeded. About a half mile down the road my father spied the Fairlane parked at the Piggly Wiggly. He said, "Let's you and me go in there and get us some them three-for-a-dollar barbecue sandwiches. We'll get six."
I might've been a touch-me-not baby who grew up to feign dyslexia when reading Bible passages, but I knew enough to know that my father would go inside the grocery store, seek out the staring woman, and try to sell her insurance of one sort or another. I said, "I'll just sit here."
He pulled in right up front and parked next to her. I waited until I saw him veer toward the back of the store. Then I got out, started making snowballs, and lined them up on the hood of our car. For some reason I remembered Ricky Timmerman giving his selected verse earlier in the year. It went, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest." We all made cooing noises at him when he returned to class. Ricky also was the first person to tell me that bane wasn't a good word. He told me how one time his own father said, "Ricky, you are the bane of my existence," which got him all confused. For a while he thought that we were brothers, or at least half brothers.
I had a good hardpacked twenty-four snowballs lined up when my father emerged from the Piggly Wiggly, toting his sack of barbecue. He turned around, I assumed, to say something to the Fairlane woman. Did he apologize for revving his engine and pretending to drive forward? Did he remind her of his hours of operation should she want to come in and get some health/life/fire/auto?
The first snowball hit the back of his head in a way that I couldn't have drawn up on paper. I couldn't have gotten a potato gun and aimed a better shot. This is probably when his wedding band flew off my thumb. Snowballs two through ten hit his head, back, butt, and right ear. He dropped the sack. I missed a few times, nailing the ice machine, a stray buggy, a picture of the Piggly Wiggly mascot Scotch-taped to the window.
But my father laughed—he laughed and ducked and grabbed our barbecue before running at me all wide-armed, smiling, acting like some kind of B-movie monster confronting his tormentors. For a split second I thought he might try to hug me. I ran.
"You don't want these things getting cold, Bane," my father yelled. He circled behind the car and opened the driver's-side door. I watched him stamp his feet first. "Come on, son. I ain't going to show you no affection in public or nothing, I promise."
I stopped in the middle of the street, not knowing if it was a trick. He got in the car and turned the ignition. The woman in the Fairlane came out with two paper bags. She set them on top of her car and gave my father a wave. Was she flirting? I wondered. What had my father said to her?—maybe in the cereal aisle, or over near the picnic supplies, or in the dog food section.
When he pulled around and reached over and opened the passenger door, I got in. He said, "Boy, that woman's boobs are so big I'd never sell her insurance. She's going to fall over one day unbalanced and kill herself like a turtle fallen over on its back." He said, "Hey, let's take some really back roads on the way home and see if there are any fallen trees. I'll let you use the chain saw! Mom will be happy if we come home with some free firewood."
I got in. He said something about my arm being major league. I took a bite out of a thirty-
three-cent barbecue sandwich and watched the white, white landscape slide by slowly. The snow stopped, but a full gray cloud hung not ten feet above any irrational traveler.
So we filled up half of the trunk and all of the backseat with scrub pine sawed in three-foot lengths. My father was obsessed with bringing firewood home. I know this, because a couple of the trees weren't blocking back roads—my father pulled into the overgrown dirt driveways of more than a few abandoned houses, and cut down trees that might've been bent from the snow but weren't blocking the road whatsoever. The snow halted, but the temperature still hovered at thirty degrees, so we didn't pull the air compressor out immediately. No, we gathered my last complete and uneaten barbecue sandwich, and a half of my father's, put them back in the sack, and offered them to my mother as some kind of hunter-gatherer prize.
"I figured we wouldn't have electricity left yet, so we brought you some supper," my father said. "And on top of that, Bane and me got some logs so we can cook in the fireplace. I'll do it all! I learned to cook over an open fire a long time ago, in the Boy Scouts. You go get out some pots and pans, and I'll make us some good eggs and grits for breakfast. Hey, seeing as the refrigerator's out, let's you and me pull out everything and pack it in the snow, Bane. Outside's colder than inside, you know."
My mother held her head tilted upward and didn't blink. She stared at my father. "You been drinking? Tell me you didn't take our only son out in this weather so you could drink the whole time."
I shook my head no. "We had to use the bourbon to unstick the windshield wipers," I said.
My mother looked at the wood. "Pine causes too much sap and soot to gather in the chimney. You don't want to burn pine in a fireplace, Buck. I read it somewhere in one of my magazines." My mother crossed her arms in a way that would've made any TV sitcom actress look like an amateur.
Drowning in Gruel Page 8
