Between Wrecks (14 page)

I don't want to say that my ex-coworker's a prophet but, sure enough, we were on television for about a half-day of CNN reports, every hour. Mike couldn't take it. He got all paranoid. Seeing as no one can figure out the owner of the tongue, or the renter of the car, Mike figures he's got a hit planned on him in the same way that Salman Rushdie—I have that first edition, too, but the signature's a fake; I did it myself—underwent from all those old-timey extremists. Mike went back directly to selling mobile homes, saying he hoped that only terrorists
and
FBI agents bought from him, and that they all got involved with a tornado.

I believe it's either the FBI or Homeland Security that owns the tongue now. I imagine they'll hand it over to some other government agency in order to do some DNA testing. Word is, if steroids are detected, Congress might get involved.

I don't care. I have other things to think about—namely, the lecture tour some kind of publicist guy set up for me to tell my story. The company's letting me take a sabbatical—just like if I taught at a regular college. So far I haven't been contacted by my ex-wife's new husband's place. I hope it happens, though. I'd like for her to see how she should've hung around the marriage a little longer. I'm flying to some places, driving to others in one of the competition's rental cars. Everywhere I'm going, I bet, I'll either get frisked, or questioned about excessive mud and dings.

BETWEEN WRECKS

The kid's mother stole my pallet of river rocks stacked out by the driveway, she said, to complete the thousand arrowheads on order from Cheap Chief Charlie's roadside attraction down near Myrtle Beach, among other places. The woman introduced herself as Sally Renfrew and claimed that the chalcedony vein below Andrew Jackson Prep—her son Stan's school—finally “ored out.” Sally Renfrew said that she had run a fake arrowhead business for fifteen years; that she now understood Malthaus's notion of supply and demand; that it wasn't easy being a single mother anywhere on the planet but seemed particularly difficult off Scenic Highway 11, some twenty miles from at least an Auto Zone, Staples, public library, grocery store chain, GNC, or hardware store that specialized in durable chisels; that she couldn't return what flat rocks she'd already slowly stolen (and I never noticed, seeing as I'd allowed the family river rock business to fail while I hopelessly worked on my low-residency master's degree in Southern culture studies) over the past month; that she was worried miserably that her boy wasn't going to follow through with college once he graduated from high school in the next year. She rattled on. I thought that maybe she feared I would tie her up, throw her into a secret back room, and torture her for the unspeakable crimes she performed upon a man, namely me, whose pregnant wife took off on him in order to raise their child far from South Carolina. Then I felt so guilty about standing there on my own land on the banks of the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River, blocking Sally Renfrew's exit strategy, that somewhere during her manic monologue I agreed not only to help her load rocks, but also to be a “big brother” of sorts. She chattered on and on about how Stan recently met his biological father, how the father died in a motorcycle accident, and how the kid had it in his mind that he could skip college and become a stand-up comedian. I looked down at the river. I wondered if my father or grandfather ever had poachers of this sort, and tried to think of how they might handle the situation.

I said, “Shut up. Get all the rocks you want. I tell you what—make your arrowheads, and give me ten percent of your gross profit. I know all about the arrowhead market,” which wasn't a lie seeing as my mother had manufactured fake arrowheads long ago. I looked at Sally Renfrew—if she had a seventeen-year-old son she must've had the kid at age sixteen, I thought, for she appeared to be my age—and stuck my hand out.

“We live about two miles away. I promise that I haven't stolen from you before this past month. I didn't steal back when your dad pulled river rocks out and sold them to landscapers, or even those couple years when your father kind of slacked off after your mother's death, or when you gave up altogether in order to go back to studying full time. Or when Abby took off for Minnesota.”

I kept eye contact. “You certainly seem to know enough about what goes on around here.” I wondered if she
knew
that I was trying to complete a low-residency master's degree program in Southern culture studies from Ole Miss-Taylor, and that I waited daily for some kind of omen to send me in the right direction in regards to a new and daring thesis.

Sally Renfrew shrugged. She placed a nice flat piece of slate that might've been part of my house's roof some sixty years earlier. She said, “I'll tell Stan to come over here tomorrow. He's not much into sports. But he eats. Maybe y'all could go hang out and eat breakfast. Tell him how important it was for you to study all those things you studied before you came back here with Abby and gave up. How many bachelor's degrees do you have anyway? And as for the Southern culture studies thing—good God, man, there's a term paper a minute going on around you.”

I said, “Hey, wait,” but then forgot what I was going to ask her. It had to do with scams, the South, and people, maybe.

When she left I think she might've called out the open truck window, “Five percent.”

Stan Renfrew said that he now pronounced his name “Stain,” and that it was his biological father's idea. He said it would get him more attention on the comedy circuit. We sat inside Laurinda's, the closest diner from my house, in a square brick building that over the years had housed an auto body repairman, florist, office supplier, biker leather goods, bait shop, lawn mower repairman, and a number of other people running their money-laundering, drug-selling, slave-trading fronts. There was no valid or business-rational reason for a florist to set up shop in an area where houses stood about three per square mile on a two-lane road that only connected ridges, hilltops, and valleys. I hadn't yet figured out what Laurinda did illegally, and my visits to her good diner went from twice a month to about daily after Abby took off to birth and raise our child in the upper Midwest without my help.

Because I didn't want this Stan kid snooping around my property, I drove over to Sally Renfrew's place and found him waiting for me at the end of their quarter-mile driveway. He leaned against the mailbox, tall and skinny, but not with the ubiquitous ennui-ridden look on his face that most seventeen-year-old kids perfected from watching bad situation comedies. Stan got in my truck, said, “I hope you're Stet Looper,” and stuck out his hand to shake.

I said, “Your mother must be the top saleswoman in all the world. I realize that you probably don't want to hang out with an old guy.”

He nodded, apologized. Stan said, “I just spent ten days with my father. He died on me. But he was seventy-seven years old. So I'm kind of used to old people.”

I U-turned and headed toward the diner, trying to do math in my head. “Your father was
seventy-seven?
Good God, man, how old is your mom?”

“It's a long story that involves a famous visiting professor named Stanley Dabbs and a starry-eyed college senior who wanted to be an art critic. I'm what came out of all that.”

I grinded my gears and didn't look at the road. I knew Stanley Dabbs's name. I thought about how I might have had a book or two the man had written, from back when I was either a philosophy or history or anthropology major. Dabbs was the last of the great social critics and commentators. “Stanley Dabbs is your father?”

“Was,” Stan said. “Are we going to Laurinda's place? I used to go there when it was a driving range. There used to be a tree farm with migrant workers back behind the place, and everyone yelled out ‘Quatro!' after hitting tee shots.”

I didn't remember it being a driving range, but that sounded about right. I said, “Do you play golf?” I tried to think of all the correct and relevant golf terminology I'd amassed over the years. I said, “What's your handicap?”

I drove past my own long driveway. A vee of geese flew overhead. Stan said, “That was all just a joke. Quatro! I made that up. Hey—if the Special Olympics had a golf tournament, would it be all right to ask competitors what their handicap was?”

I stepped off the accelerator and looked at Stan. He didn't smile. This is a different kind of boy, I thought. “So your mother wants you to go to college, huh? She told me that you wanted to forego college and be a comedian.” I pulled over into Laurinda's, which seemed to have more cars in the lot than usual. “I have a feeling your momma isn't going to like my advice.”

Before Laurinda—she worked as cook and waitress, somehow—got to our booth, I looked outside and saw a man who, I thought at first, suffered from an inner ear problem. I'm that way mostly, I swear. I ignore people's vices. I told Stan, “That guy either has an inner-ear problem or a gimpy leg.” The man weaved around the newspaper rack outside, then looked east up Highway 11. He took four mini-steps to turn around and look uphill in the other direction.

Stan said, “I've been thinking about going to the vocational school to study construction. Then I'm going to build a wooden house entirely out of yardsticks for the exterior. I figure it'll make it easier to prove the square footage when it's time to sell.” He didn't laugh.

The man came inside, doffed his stained cap that advertised Celeste Figs, then sat down at the counter. “Chicken truck turned over three mile thataway, and a three-car wreck the other,” he said loudly to no one in particular. Laurinda flipped a round mold of hash browns over on the stove.

She said, “Coffee?”

“Well, two cars and a van of illegal aliens, you know.”

I said to Stan, “Order whatever you want. Except the sausage or bacon. I don't want you clogging your arteries. Or the chicken, seeing as I guess we can drive down the road and get chicken for free.”

Laurinda came around the counter and said, “Stuck, too?” I didn't nod or shake my head. I must've stared blanker than cornfed trout. “Are y'all stuck between the two wrecks, too?” she said.

Stan Renfrew said, “No, ma'am,” like a regular gentleman. He said, “We're out looking for our trained cadaver dogs that got out of their pens. Is there a cemetery nearby, by any chance?”

Laurinda said, “Oh my God.” She set her coffee pot down on our table. “You mean those dogs go round pointing out dead beneath the rubble?” When she held her mouth open I noticed that she chewed two separate pieces of gum.

“I've heard both of those jokes, Stain,” I said. “The one about cadaver dogs. The one about yardsticks. Just order. There's no snare drum inside here for rim shots.”

Laurinda stared at me. She closed her mouth and, with a look of impatience, shook her head. “Okay. You boys ready to order?”

The man with the inner-ear problem folded his cell phone in half, swiveled our way and said, I thought, “Ford ate.” Maybe he talked about himself in third person, I thought. Maybe he left a buddy named Ford at home, seeing as Ford had already eaten breakfast.

Laurinda turned over our coffee mugs without asking what we wanted to drink. She poured both cups to their rims without asking if we wanted milk. To the man at the counter she said, “Hours?”

“Yeah.”

I said, “What's he saying?”

“Drunk say ford ate hours before the roads get cleared.”

Four to eight
, I thought. “He's drunk all ready?” I kind of whispered. And I felt like a hypocrite, seeing as I'd been known to partake of bourbon shortly after sunrise. Laurinda nodded and looked out the window. Stan Renfrew asked if she served muffins, and I waited for some kind of off-color joke that he never delivered, even after she said, “Haven't yet. Mostly serve hungry people, honey.”

“I've been to your house before,” Stan said. Laurinda brought him two pieces of toasted white bread cut into circles, scrambled eggs, and a hot dog. “Before and after you moved back there.”

“Did you know my father?” I asked. Abby and I moved back to my childhood home after I'd finished my fifth bachelor's degree, and after Abby—who had a lisp—realized that she wasted her time trying to get an on-air reporter job at a TV station. My father had promised to let me “study myself out,” as long as I promised to return home to operate our family business.

Laurinda brought me a plate with six over-well fried eggs stacked atop each other. I had ordered pancakes. Stan said to me, “I never met your father, no.”

I said to Laurinda, “This isn't mine.”

She checked her order pad, then looked at the booth parallel to ours. A family of four bowed their heads in prayer. Laurinda swapped eggs for pancakes, quietly, right beneath the praying woman's nose. Six fried eggs! I thought. Who eats a half-dozen fried eggs at one time?

Laurinda placed her finger on her lips and asked us to keep the secret. Stan said, “That is so cool.” He leaned over and whispered, “Second Comers,” which were members of a religious cult that chose northern South Carolina to bombard with believers, thus taking control of the area after running for various councils. As far as I'd heard, only one family ever emigrated, and here they were stuck between scenic-highway wrecks. Stan got up, grabbed both of their syrups, and placed them next to my plate. He reached over again and took the man's fork, then smiled at me. I wondered what a proper, responsible Big Brother or mentor would do in this situation. I probably should've said, “That's not appropriate behavior,” or quoted something about having and having not. Instead, I nodded and smiled, and took a glass of water from their table. Stan said, “I know all about these people.”

I said, “Go ahead and finish the joke.”

Stan said, “No joke. But to answer your question: Nope. Never met your father. But I helped your wife move out, sort of.”