Between Wrecks (16 page)

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.

Patricia said, “I'm so sorry that I ever doubted you.”

I said, “Do we have any Pepsi, or did you hide that from me, too?” I got up and looked in the back of the refrigerator to find a sixteen-ounce bottle of ginger ale. It wasn't my favorite chaser, but it wasn't the worst.

My wife got up, went into the garage, and came back with an eight-pack of tiny Pepsis. She said, “I had a feeling that this was going to happen. I looked ahead! I got these yesterday at the store. I knew it was going to happen!”

Grapefruit juice is the worst chaser, if it matters, when it comes to bourbon. The tie for second place goes to Squirt, buttermilk, Fanta orange soda, soy milk, cranberry juice, and Mr. Pibb.

I turned the page. I turned the page again and again: photographs of my wife and me sitting in the car, entering the automatic carwash down the road, of us walking in a park, of us dropping mail into a drop box. I went to the very back page—maybe Patricia had affected me—to see if there was some kind of plot. The last photograph showed my wife and me sitting inside a vegetarian café that I despised but frequented with her when she craved hummus. On a side note, if you ask me, Patricia and her cohorts should get a group of people to eat hummus, then stand around with matches in poor neighborhoods to keep itinerant and haphazard flames going.

There I was cutting the front yard with Patricia watching me, and there I was opening the door to a convenience store for an old man, and there I with her picking up litter down the road from where we lived. More photographs with Patricia: inside a theatre at one of those goddamn movies wherein three or four women talk about the past, destroy men, and drink shots of beer; inside a yoga paraphernalia outlet; in a music store, standing between the goddamn Show Tunes and Folk Music sections; in the parking lot of the Humane Society before we went inside and ended up with a mixed breed we named Mule who looked like a bird dog with the face of one of those actresses who always show up in movies that Patricia made me attend with her.

There were others. Some of them had a windshield wiper, or steering wheel, in the foreground. The only photographs of me alone—or at least not with Patricia—showed me at Skeeter's bar in town, sitting on the first bar stool by the door, reading one of those goddamn classic books I'd promised to finish. There were a dozen of those pictures, and in each one I wore my favorite going-to-a-bar shirt with two pockets.

I finished off the jelly jar and poured some more. I said, “Okay. I guess that this is going to either be about satellite imagery, or about my not really going to a book club on Tuesdays and Thursdays when you do those night classes.”