Between Wrecks (18 page)

“I might've picked a bigger state to visit had you done gone to Poke High like every other goddamn linthead's child wrongly hoping to be all valedictory in his or her wants,” Cush said right about the time we crossed the St. John's River via ferry boat—my first time—and then pulled into a VFW lounge he'd researched. “I might've picked us Texas. But your momma was all worried about the violence in the schools.”

This VFW took up the bottom floor of an ex-department store that appeared to be three stories high. It will matter.

Anyway, I didn't contradict him. He'd only been back from Vietnam for five years after choosing to stay there after the pull-out to hike Southeast Asia alone and mesmerize villagers with his spoon-playing repertoire. Uncle Cush's softest visage compared to that of a trailer hitch, his normal eye contact that of two balls of barbed wire. On more than one occasion over the years we'd walked into convenience stores only to have the assistant managers raise their arms up in the air. One time when he was looking at new trucks over at Forty-Five Motors the lot manager went inside and called two deputies. People often took him for the actor Jack Palance's crazed brother, if Jack Palance's brother ever slicked back his black hair with shellac and let a Fu Manchu grow down below his clavicles.

I didn't say, “Mom wasn't so concerned with the violence in elementary and middle school as all the other parents were, seeing as I beat the shit out of all those kids every day. The violence came from me.” I didn't say, “I enjoyed being homeschooled without a Bible portion of the curriculum, seeing as I could be President of the Solitaire Club and captain the tetherball team.”

We got out of the step van, there in a paved lot on St. Augustine Road, and my uncle—because he was a visionary and mind reader—said, “And you loved it when your daddy took you down in the basement to teach you how to beat off for sex ed while your momma stood upstairs with no girls to counsel or inculcate.” Uncle Cush looked at himself in the side mirror. “Now. We get in here, you say you my son so's not to cause suspicion, understand? If you say you're nothing but a nephew, everyone's going to be asking questions about where your daddy is, or how come your daddy let me take you on a joyride. Right now we're just going to water the testosterone, as they say.”

I said, “I shouldn't mention the parachutes,” and nodded.

“No. You shouldn't mention parachutes. Don't mention that goddamn Jean-Paul Sartre you been reading, either. Don't mention how you ain't never had no pussy I ain't set up for you. How you love long-distance running over football or baseball? Don't bring that up. Your ideas that we shouldn't've invaded Grenada? I'll kill you if I even think I hear you starting up a word that starts with
Gr
. Don't bring up how in twenty years there will be nothing but life one pubic hair away from being American anarchy because of Second Amendment arguments, or how corporations will flourish on the backs of workers stuck with part-time minimum wage jobs without insurance benefits, or how I'm the only man living who has figured out a way to stop it.”

Sometimes my uncle veered into crazy talk, and I assumed that there in the hot northern Florida sun he'd succumbed to such nonsensical diatribes. I said, “Last semester I studied up on the filmography of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Lillian Gish. I know how to be mute.”

“Watch and learn,” my uncle said. Then—and understand that we'd been in the loaded step van for six and a half hours, taking back roads—he said, “By the way, we'll be gone for at least ten days.”

He pointed out into the Gulf of Mexico, I assumed, but then waved his arm that could've meant somewhere south of the Equator.

There on the western edge of the Gulf, my uncle said, “Hey there, comrades, anyone here from ASA Radio Research?” which I later learned was some kind of battalion or platoon of soldiers who scored high on military intelligence tests. “Anybody here spend time in Bing Bang Ding Dong?” At least that's what it sounded like to me.

Everyone nodded. They didn't nod as in, Yes I Was in Your Platoon, but more like You Are in the Right Place. A jukebox in the corner played a song that skipped right in the middle of a yodel. “Name's Cush Waddell,” my uncle said loudly. “This here's my boy, Start. Just graduated first in his class up in South Carolina, so I'm taking him out on a little celebratory vacation, show him how his old man's about to save the lives of veterans down in Florida.”

The bartender wore a decorated garrison cap that somehow balanced on the right side of his head. “We could use some saving, long's it ain't the born-again kind, you know what I mean.”

I said, “I'd like a Budweiser, please.”

“Nah, nothing like that,” Uncle Cush bellowed out. He couldn't've have been louder with a megaphone. “One thing I was reading near a year ago was how all our brothers who made it out of 'Nam came back home to unemployment, demons, post-traumatic stress, suicidal tendencies, and freak accidents that lead to death and maiment.”

I didn't say, “‘Maiment' is not a word.” I looked at the bartender. He wore a military name tape over his pocket that read
WARREN
. I didn't say anything to my uncle about how that could be a sign—that this bartender might warn others about the hoax that Cush had in the works, the hoax I'd not been privy to at this point. I said, “Or whatever you have on special, bottle or can, Admiral Warren.”

“I read that same article,” a man at the bar said, nodding. “Got all these old boys like us dodged bullets and landmines, come back here and get shot in the head minding our own business in line at the Snack 'n Gas. Them's the kind of maiment I can't figure out.”

I wanted to go kick the jukebox. Why didn't anyone bring up the skip? The more I listened to it, the more it sounded like a troop of howler monkeys I'd seen when Cush took me to a zoo for another one of his celebratory side trips.

Cush pointed over at the man and said, “There you go. What I have in mind here for y'all, and you boys look like you might could use the money, are mini parachutes to be worn at all times. I read another article—I bet you read it, too—about all the sinkholes in Florida. You think the government's going to stop everything, come down here and build a stronger manmade foundation for Florida? They ain't. It's every man-woman-child for hisself. Sinkhole drops out from under your feet twelve or twenty stories deep, you gone need one these parachutes to slow down the descent. Just like the little emergency chute everyone knowed about in Airborne. I tell you what—it's a lot better landing fifteen miles an hour into the limestone and dolomite pits of Florida than at forty miles an hour, don't that make sense?”

Warren reached down and slid two cans of Dixie toward my uncle. “So what you're saying is, you get people to go around wearing these things all the time. Kind of like protection, should the ground give way.”

My uncle took both cans of beer in his left hand, reached in his right-hand pants pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He said, “We come down with a truckload of them. What I was hoping to do was, I was hoping to sell the things wholesale, let my brothers from 'Nam go 'round making a profit for theyselves. A normal parachute for jumping out of planes might go for over two thousand dollars. Of course I ain't offering all the extra doodads, so these emergency chutes shouldn't retail for more than two hundred. I'm willing to sell what we got for a hundred dollars each to anyone wants to go out and sell them for whatever. We already sold a whole shipment to some veterans up in Tennessee. They got them some sinkholes south of Knoxville you wouldn't believe. One them things goes 250 feet deep and spans three-plus miles. Look it up.”

My uncle had been sneaking out textbooks I'd bought used from college bookstores, for I had come across a story about Big Sink in White County, Tennessee, and another about Grassy Cove—one of which was indeed 250 feet deep and the other three-plus miles across, but not the same place altogether. I said, “Hey, tell the story about your brother who had to move away because he might've killed a man,” so that Uncle Cush would hand over the beer in order to quiet me down.

“Let's take a look at one,” Warren said to my uncle. To me he said, “I wasn't an admiral. Hell, I spent most of my time in the brig, to be honest, when I wasn't on a sub. Call me Shorty.”

I said, “Aye-aye.”

I figured out later that the parachute material from Poke Mills was free, and the nylon backpacks my uncle ordered in bulk only came out to $1.22 each. I never learned, over the ensuing years, how Cush became a champion seamstress—sometimes he told me that a woman named Cu taught him how to taxidermy water buffaloes in Vietnam, sometimes he told me that he worked in a sweatshop while hiding from the FBI on non-nefarious charges—and wondered when he had the time to construct miniature pseudo parachutes for sinkhole possibilities. For some reason I doubted that he hadn't slept since 1971, though he always held his hand up and dared me to go find a lie detector test.

Warren and my uncle left for the truck. No one talked to me. The man on the stool got up, rounded the bar, extracted two more cans of Dixie, and slid one my way. He said, “I still owe you for tying that tourniquet on my leg, back in the jungle. Man, that was an emergency, wasn't it, until the helicopters showed up.”

“We have a little left over in our emergency fund for occasions like this,” Warren said when he came back wearing a neon orange child-sized backpack, a ripcord slung over his right shoulder. He yelled out, “Hey, boys, I know some y'all wish to die, but how many y'all want to die in a sinkhole? How many want you and yours to disappear into the hollowed-out caverns of Duval County?”

No one raised a hand. Uncle Cush shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I could tell that he wanted out of there before one of the ex-Air Force guys asked a number of pertinent questions, as ex-Air Force retirees are wont to do, especially the ones who couldn't qualify for astronaut training. Cush said, “How many of y'all want to have a tombstone that reads ‘Dropped Into the Earth and Was Never Found'?”

Again, no one raised a hand. The yodeler still skipped in such a way that made me envision a sack of cats dealing with a professional wrestler adept at the infamous “pile driver” maneuver. I finished that second beer and blurted out, “I want my tombstone to say ‘Born 1969,' and then just an en-dash after it, meaning that I never died.”

A man wearing blue jeans that someone had ironed flat-wise stood up and said, “I got mine picked out. It'll say, ‘First There Was Seoul, Now This Hole.' I'm a Korean War vet, see.”

It was on. Another man stood up and saluted the television mounted on the wall, which had the sound turned low and showed
The Price Is Right
. He said, “Mine gone be First a Pain, Then an Itch. Here Lies One Mean Son-of-a-Bitch.”

“Someone Send Down Some Water! That's mine,” a man yelled out, not turning to look at us. Then he pointed toward the screen and said, “I got me a Kawasaki jet ski just like that one. Goddamn it, if I was on the show like I was supposed to be, I'd say $6,999 and be up there on the stage with Bob Barker.”

My uncle held up his arms and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He looked at Warren and said, “Help me out here.”

Warren said, “This man has some chutes for sale that we all need. Now, I believe it's my job to advise everyone in attendance to line up and buy one these anti-sinkhole devices. And I advise that we go out in the field just like we did on foreign soil and teach the savages what they need to do in order to survive. Get on up here and buy you a chute, Tonto. Skidmark. Finger Man. Gutter.” He went on and on. When each veteran's nickname got called up, he stood at attention and marched to the bar counter. Me, I got all caught up wondering what I would have to do in life to acquire “Finger Man” for a moniker.

Uncle Cush said, “Don't be afraid to buy as many as possible. You can sell them twice they worth, easy.”

I reached over and got my third Dixie beer. At the time—at age eighteen—I only knew Pabst, Budweiser, and Miller. Later on in my life I would understand Dixie to be a beer drunk mostly because of its provenance, but at the time, to me, it was as exotic as Camembert or hashish. I said, “When this gets done you better tell me what you meant about Dad and Mom moving,” and my uncle glared at me. He concentrated hard, I could tell, until he gathered up the “cold blue polished steel” glower. I said, “I mean Uncle and Aunt.”

I stared at the beer can for a moment before looking up to find every man inside the VFW lounge sporting a miniature lifesaving sinkhole parachute. Each man had his right hand clenched around the ripcord. Uncle Cush said, “You know what might get us all into Heaven, is if y'all get on the phone and call loved ones to come on down here to pick one or two up. You know what I mean? Any y'all go to church, you might want to call up the pastor. I'm sure he wouldn't want any his congregation falling down so close to Hades should the earth give way.”

I excused myself to the men's room where, at the urinal, I aimed at a plastic roulette wheel of sorts and watched the arrow spin until it ended up Big Shot.

Big Shots would've known better. In retrospect, Uncle Cush and I agreed that we should've sold six or eight faux parachutes and then driven off to the next VFW. We should've parked at a busy intersection and hung a banner like those people who sell name-brand tennis shoes or mattresses on the roadside. But Warren got on the phone and called his people, who called their people, and so on. Within the hour the VFW parking lot filled with the hopeful, the hopeless, the discombobulated. It was the preachers who bought multiple chutes—and I overheard one say to the other, “All's it gone take is saying God tode me to tell everyone they needed one these things at two hundred a pop. Next thing you know, I got me a new Cadillac to drive around in, show people how good God is to those who live a Christlike life.”