Between Wrecks (20 page)

I closed my eyes and felt my uncle ease up the accelerator, then tap his brakes. In my mind I imagined his losing control when he pulled off to the gravel berm, maybe accidentally wrecking into the guardrail, scaring the boys we would ask to join us. I looked way into the future and thought about how we would measure our lives between such wrecks, and that there would never be a time when we could feel safe or content about the next one looming.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE WOMAN OPENED HER BAG AND SIGHED

Rodney Sheets couldn't stop thinking about deforestation. He'd seen three separate documentaries on three different networks, and thus concluded that there must be a connection between innumerable acres burning on two continents and the reason why the temperature outside hovered at 100 for three weeks straight. He thought, Those narrators and scientists and actors are right—I can change my daily habits and help save the planet. He'd finished his fourth gin and tonic.

No one else populated Gus Bingham's bar on the Saluda River. Gus said he had to go check out a smell in the crawl space. He set two bottles in front of Rodney, along with a cut-up lemon, a pen, and cocktail napkin. He said, “Hatch off your tally. Anyone else comes in, bang the bar stool for me. I got to get some lime, and not for your drink.”

Rodney nodded. He marked four lines at the top of the napkin, then a fifth. He unfolded it and wrote, “Plant trees in yard. Buy recycled products. Promote constipation—save TP.” Then he stalled.

The door opened and a woman limped in. She carried a filled canvas satchel. Her matted hair reached past her shoulders, and not in the I'm-a-white-hipster way that Rodney saw on a whole other documentary about the unfulfilled lives of ex-Deadheads. The woman plopped down indelicately two stools away and placed her heavy bag between Rodney and herself.

She emitted an odor of week-old perspiration and moldy Roman Meal bread. Rodney said, “Hey. Gus'll be right back.” He didn't get off his stool and bang it on the floor. Gus wouldn't be happy to emerge from a fouled crawl space only to have a homeless drifter woman plead for alms.

The woman said, “Buy me a drink.” She looked at the bottle.

Rodney said, “What you got in the bag?”

“I have money. Damn, man. Whatever happened to men buying women drinks in bars? In New York and L.A., there're still men buying.”

She reached in her back pocket and pulled out twenty one-dollar bills. Rodney said, “You turn in some aluminum at the recycling place down the road? Good. I was just sitting here making a list of ways I could recycle paper products.”

The woman reached below the counter and grabbed a plastic cup. She said, “You could write on your hand, instead of cocktail napkins.” She sneered at Rodney. She shook her lice-likely head. “Write that on down, Bozo. For your information, I have better, higher-calling things to do than collect cans off the roadside.” She leaned in Rodney's direction and took the bottle from him. She didn't slide it back.

Beneath them, Gus bellowed out, “Oh, hell,” and wretched audibly in great, measured wails. “This one's bad.”

Rodney said, “That seems like an appropriate segue. So. If you don't clean up the environment… You're not from around these parts, are you?”

The woman opened her bag and sighed. She pulled out a number of advance reader's copies. She stacked them up and balanced her cup atop the uncorrected proofs. “I'm a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews,” she said. “I don't expect you to know the journal. I don't expect you to understand anything about anonymous criticism.” She downed a shot of straight gin and poured another.

Like Gus below, Rodney didn't cotton to sighing, eye-rolling, melodramatic people in the bar. He said, “You need to take a bath. How's a little of that for not being anonymous? If you're as smart and haughty as you're trying to come off, you should know about the secret life of bacteria. What'd you do, get a merit badge in Alternative Lifestyles, then quit the Girl Scouts?”

Then he wrote on his cocktail napkin, “Eradicate anonymous critics.” Who are you to be so presumptuous? he started to say, but didn't. He thought to ask her if she'd ever read Salinger, Yates, Carver, O'Connor, or Hannah, like he did daily. But his thoughts strayed.

Gus came in through the back door, clapping lime dust from his hands, smiling.

JAYNE MANSFIELD

Some kind of manhunt kept me locked inside Crosby's while SWAT teams scoured the area looking for two supposed bank robbery suspects. Looking up at the bar's normally irresponsible TV set, I sat there watching the action taking place outside, almost making out exactly where I sat from News Four's rarely used helicopter's shots, and when the reporter paused to catch her breath back in the studio, in between her mispronouncing words and stumbling over teleprompter sentences, I heard the rotors overhead. Crosby had left me and the one other patron alone so he could carry a St. Patrick's Day banner up on the tar-and-gravel roof in hopes of gaining free advertising for the green draft beer he planned to sell cheap in two weeks.

“Y'all look for me, Warner,” Crosby had said. “They say the camera puts some weight on you. If y'all see me, notice if I look normal.” Crosby stood six feet tall and weighed 130. He had owned and operated his bar for a decade, since he was forced to retire early as a supervisor at Central Yarn. Crosby might've been married to the only woman who ever said to her husband that he should buy a bar, drink nightly, and try to put on some pounds.

I nodded. How could I even expect to be either alive or free from jail on St. Patrick's Day?

“This is like living in Los Angeles,” the other man said. “I used to live in Los Angeles. I bet I couldn't count the days I heard a helicopter over my house. Or turned on the news and seen a car chase on a street I'd traveled earlier in the day.” Then he said, “I'm Mike.”

I lifted what had been a straight triple bourbon. I said, “Good to meet you, Mike. I'm Warner.” Mike lied, I knew, for no one said “Los Angeles” who'd ever really spent time there. My first real girlfriend in college went west for a month to get on a game show, and she called it “L.A.,” as if she'd been a mayoral candidate. And my current girlfriend Justine had lived there for her first eighteen years and called it “L.A.” Justine had also lived in San Francisco and Nashville before we met up, places she referred to as “Frisco” and “Nash Vegas.” Since my trouble began a month earlier, she'd been talking of moving to “Chi-town,” or “The City,” or “Big D.”

I sat in Crosby's thinking about these women who abbreviated their homes and destinations. It wasn't the first time.

“Happy February thirtieth,” Mike said. He stood up, his feet on the bottom rungs of his bar stool, leaned over the countertop, and poured a draft. “You probably don't think there's ever thirty days in February, am I right? Twenty-nine every four years—that's called a ‘leap year'—but mostly twenty-eight. Am I right?”

I looked at the television screen. The local manhunt had cut to a commercial for Advance America payday loans. I said, “Yeah. I don't know. Are you going to tell me about one of those pre-Julian calendars?” I thought, Jesus fucking Christ, man, talk about sports, weather, or pussy like everyone else inside a dark wood-paneled bar.

Mike shook his head. He kept eye contact, descended from his stool, and reached for his wallet. He said, “I'm the only man in America born on February thirtieth. It's my birthday! Look at this.”

Mike pulled what proved to be a worn birth certificate from his wallet, unfolded it, and held it by two corners. I first read “Unknown” beneath the father's name, then scanned upward to, sure enough, “02-30-45.” I said, “I'll be damned. You didn't get that made up at one of those places down in Myrtle Beach, did you—those places that make fake newspapers with fake headlines?”

“You didn't believe me, did you? I celebrate my birthday on March second, you know, or sometimes March first. You didn't believe me, did you?”

“It's like a bar trick,” I said. I looked at the TV and said, “Is that Crosby?” The helicopter cameraman had zoomed in and focused on a parking meter.

“It ain't no trick,” Mike said. “Shit, man, you wouldn't believe what kind of trouble this birthday has caused me.”

“I'm sorry. Happy birthday. I should've wished you a happy birthday right away. Get a pint and put it on my tab,” I said, pointing to the draft beer dispenser. “It's already March? Fuck. I think I forgot somebody's birthday”—which wasn't true. I knew the date. At this moment my lawyer supposedly was meeting with another lawyer, and by the end of the day I would know what decisions I'd have to make—as in, move out of town, get ready for jail, or kill myself.

“I'd been in the air force already, you know, bombing the hell out of Indochina on a secret mission, and then when I come up to apply for being an astronaut they look at my birth certificate and say, ‘This ain't right, Bubba. They might be thirty days in February in Russia or China or Cuba, but not in the United States.' I got reneged from NASA only because some nurse got all confused back in 1945 because her brother or husband was returning from Iwo Jima or Dunkirk. Ain't that the something, how things work out?”

I'm not sure why I thought it appropriate and necessary to say, “I was born in 1983. I guess the war in Grenada hadn't gotten to the point where nurses got confused back home from people dying.” This wasn't true, but I couldn't think of any kind of known war going on in 1981.

“I've died twice, unofficially,” Mike said. He held his mouth open in a way that astronomers who discover new planets, or microbiologists who discover new viruses, might. He reached over for another beer. “Twice officially, and I don't know how many times unofficially. A bunch, unofficially. Like twelve. Or fifty.”

I didn't listen closely as Mike listed off times when an EMT, nurse, doctor, or unlucky passerby was present to witness what could have been regarded as unnoticed death. No, I looked back behind the bar and watched a common American cockroach—
Periplaneta americana
—skitter its way between stacks of beer mugs. I thought, How in the world can they accuse me of not being qualified to teach children the ins and outs of the insect world? How can they accuse me of endangering the lives of others just because I don't have a PhD?

I got up and served myself at least another three fingers.

“Shit, man, I was
born
dead,” Mike said.

I became fascinated with the insect world at an early age, collected specimens, went to college, and in my junior year veered away from the agriculture and life sciences department with an emphasis on entomology in order to study philosophy. My father—a tobacco farmer, among other things—didn't actually say, “You're disinherited,” but when he had to sell off the land later he made a point of telling me, “It's your fault,” and “You'll remember this day when I die and you see my will.”

I went to graduate school to concentrate in medical ethics, of all things, but halfway through my second year a professor said to me, “Hey, you're a farm boy. My daughter, Beauvoir, has a class project to finish up that involves bugs. She's scared to death of the things. Is there any way you could help her? I'm not exactly enthralled by the insect world,
a priori
, or
a posteriori
, either. I mean, could you come talk to her, and maybe hold some crickets and worms so she can see that they're not deadly?”

Who the fuck talks like that? I thought right off. And I thought, Why would I want to spend my time with people who throw in stupid Latin terms rightly or wrongly every day, much like lawyers did?

Not only did I come over and handle the crickets and worms—plus explain the benefits of their droppings in regards to fertilizer—but I volunteered to escort the girl to her sixth-grade class, pretended to be an expert, and taught her classmates all about why they should never kill honeybees, wasps, spiders, wooly bears, ants, beetles, and so on. Beauvoir's teacher—who had lived in L.A. for the first eighteen years of her life and became my second real girlfriend—thought so much of my expertise that she said, “I am going to make a few calls. We can get you some grant money. We've had people come in here with injured birds of prey and snakes to teach or scare the children, but nobody's ever been so funny and qualified and comforting.”

Maybe I didn't have enough courses in
regular
ethics, for I didn't say anything like, “I'm not really an entomologist,” or “Because I'm more interested in medical ethics it might be more beneficial for me to teach your sixth graders about how God gave us the gift of life, and if it's a true gift then we, as humans, should be able to return the gift whenever we feel necessary, i.e., commit suicide.” No, I said, “I would be honored. You want to go get a drink after you're done today?”

And then I got hired on to visit other middle schools regularly, and elementary schools, and the occasional vocational school where students arrived in short buses, so I dropped out of my graduate program. I got asked to talk to scout troops, retirement centers, the Optimist Club, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Upstate, and so on. Understand that after helping out Beauvoir—who names a kid that? Did she have a brother named Jean-Paul and cousins named Nietzsche?—and getting Justine's backing, I had to go out and collect worthwhile venomous and parasitic insect specimens, which, here in the South, took upwards of two hours. And then four inconsequential years later a goddamn kid named Jacob, afflicted with OCD, and ADD, and ADHD—born to a mother who drank tequila and smoked crack during her pregnancy—supposedly stuck his hand in an ex-pickle jar filled with black widow spiders, got bitten, went home and told his white-trash mother, and she made some phone calls to the police, the school district, an attorney, and so on.