Why Dogs Chase Cars (27 page)

“I'm Frankie,” said the other woman. “Like in the song.”

“Hey, Frankie,” I said. “I remember you.”

“Open the fruitcake like Cammie said.” Cammie walked toward the sink and shimmied up on it. “It's from the Small Business Owners Association. I'm part of them.”

I had no option but to believe in a God who looked down upon and cared about me. I pulled open the first box to find a fifty-dollar bill sitting atop the fruitcake. Subsequent boxes held twenties, tens, more fifties, and a roll of silver dollars. “What're you people doing?” I asked. This was a half-town of people willing to bribe me to leave them alone and another half-town bribing me to exaggerate their wonderful environs.

“You the money man,” Frankie said. “The Christmas
dessert and money man.” She walked past me and stretched out on the bed. “I wish they was a good movie on tonight. Anyway, the association only asks that you let the world know how great Claxton is. Then people will indeed come visit. And it'll be nothing but an economic boom for the community as a whole.”

All told, I got forty-eight free fruitcakes and another thousand-plus dollars. “Well y'all might win Friendliest Town in the South,” I said. I foresaw a fine life of driving from one small forgotten place to the next garnering illicit payoffs, each town's populace evenly divided between hopeful do-gooders and ne'er-do-well outlaws. I said, “Do y'all want any of this money from the shopkeepers? I mean, did y'all come here to trade off some work, or what?”

Cammie said, “I got to get back to the front desk.”

Frankie got up off the bed, looked at herself in the mirror, and fingered her hair upwards. She squeegeed her teeth and popped gum I'd not noticed before. “I hope you're not talking about what I think you're talking about, as cool as you are or not. Anyway. If the mayor or anybody comes by and asks tomorrow, don't forget to tell them we brought over the gifts.”

That night I didn't call Marcel Parsell to tell him I'd be mailing Claxton in presently before moving on to Egypt, or Canoochee, or Kibbee, or Emmalane. I didn't call my father to say how I'd succeeded in finding a satisfying job, regardless of what I might go on to study. I thought about calling
Shirley Ebo, my imaginary black girlfriend who worked the summer as a counselor at a camp for children with missing extremities. Shirley taught knitting, somehow.

I didn't telephone my lost and wayward mother in St. Louis, Nashville, New Orleans, or Las Vegas. Compton Lane—my best friend since birth—didn't get a call.

I had three thousand dollars in my room, in a town of a thousand people, during an economic recession.

I took my leftover marijuana and pressed it in the Bible, like an autumn leaf. Don't think I left money in there stupidly so the chambermaid could change her station in life. Then I called Rack Me. When Cecil answered I announced myself and asked if anyone was playing pool, then told her I'd come bring tip money in the morning if she would direct the receiver toward the pool table. I said something about how I'd unexpectedly needed to hear the crack of one sphere hitting the other, that I needed to prove to myself that at least one law of physics was working somewhere. She covered the mouthpiece, but I heard her laugh right before she hung up altogether.

I packed and made a point to fold my sparse collection of clean clothes neatly. It seemed important to place my money everywhere possible—in my shoes, in the glove compartment, between two opened fruitcakes shoved together. It would take another twenty years for me to understand
what little value all of these bribes had, and how fortunate I was to—even if it was only a joke at the time—stick a carved cue chalk of either Henry Ford or William Tecumseh Sherman on my dashboard as I left for another hopeless group of citizens two hours away. My remaining collection of Brother Macon miniatures vibrated atop the passenger seat in an awkward and mysterious historical orgy, the participants of which would one day attract both friends and strangers to my door. Everyone in my later life would remark how great it was that I could line up these chalk busts and offer little lectures at tiny libraries to kids wishing for a place worthy of their rearing.

My deceased father's ex-stray cur Scarface dug another perfect six-by-six-by-three-foot-deep hole in the backyard I'd inherited along with him. I figured he'd been taught such a trick, so I moved—board by board—the pallets of heart-pine lumber that covered areas where Scarface needed to dig. I'm talking I cleared the land and reset all that salvaged lumber in the front of the house, for I knew that the dog had been helping my father by doing my old job since I left Forty-Five for college.

I stacked thousands of feet properly, then got out the shovel and pickax and metal detector and, starting at the back edge of my new acreage, uncovered caches of old, stolen, tin service-station signs: Gulf, Sinclair, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, all wrapped in newspaper and bed sheets. They were laid out horizontally, and in better than fair condition.

It proved to me that indeed my own father hadn't died unexpectedly without preparing some kind of last will and testament, that he had gone to his own odd lengths to take care of his only son. I went back inside the cement-block house of my youth to tell my confused, skeptical wife, Lyla, my theory—now confirmed—of how my father had spent most of his life.

Lyla followed me outside. Scarface sat erect next to his latest hole, as if expecting a bone. I said, “Good boy. You can retire. Go chase a car if you want.”

After that I dug up ten thousand advertising yardsticks wrapped in a conglomeration of plastic and wax to prevent termites, and understood that my father had requested them at every hardware, appliance, and home-furnishing store, every car dealership, hospital, and sporting goods outlet in a three-state area, that he had foreseen the demise of a metric-converted America, that he'd journeyed to building supply conventions and extravaganzas in Charlotte, Atlanta, Columbia, and Asheville.

After Lyla clinked into a giant hole full of ashtrays, International House of Pancake syrup containers, and old automobile hubcaps and car lighters, she said, “It's like a yard sale for the dead in Hell, Mendal.”

I couldn't respond. I myself had come across a stash of fishing lures, railroad spikes, and old oilcans. When I unearthed mounds of both clear and green telephone-pole insulators, I tried not to undergo flashbacks of my father waking me up early weekend mornings to walk the roadsides of Forty-Five armed with burlap bags in search of such treasures.

I lined those insulators up all the way to the back door twice, to make a sidewalk for Lyla and me to follow. In another hole I found a group of metal church signs, Lion's Club signs, Rotary Club signs, Shriners signs, and town-limit
signs. My wife found six lockers filled with stolen first-edition books. I uncovered the bones of my boyhood dogs, Peewot and Gypsy, strays that had shown up, received attention, and never chased cars to their deaths. Or at least the bones looked big enough to be dog bones and too small to be the mother who supposedly ran away in the early 1960s.

All in all, Lyla and I dug up an old john boat, two airplane propellers, a section of the Forty-Five High School football stands, twenty-two old oak school desks with ink-well holders, enough car bumpers to refield a demolition derby, enough restaurant salt shakers to kill all the slugs in the Southeast, enough free-pour sugar containers to sweeten Republicans into understanding the plight of unemployed workers in need of health insurance. I thought it might be good either to rent out a Quonset hut somewhere or start cataloging these things for sale on an Internet auction site. There was a filled hole of unopened Billy Beer cans and rotary telephones. Another hole held nothing but rubber Quikoin change purses made in Akron, silver church-key can openers, and wall calendars—all advertising giveaways—everything wrapped in plastic garbage bags. Lyla accidentally scooped out what must've been a refuse heap from a hundred years earlier, when an antebellum house had perhaps stood nearby in the middle of something like two thousand acres of cotton, corn, beans, and tobacco. She found old, old cobalt blue bottles and what appeared to be the remnants of a still. After I dredged up one last set of
buried yardsticks, I wheelbarrowed off the last of the excess of red clay to the front yard's property lines. By then—and it took more than a week—I had built a wall not dissimilar to those that surrounded Old Testament cities.

After I found enough black-and-yellow tin
NO TRESPASSING
signs, red-and-white
KEEP OUT
, and regular posted signs, I understood my father's belief that the entire globe should be traversed easily by all persons, regardless of land ownership. He never locked his door, in keeping. After my wife and I had disemboweled the backyard of my upbringing, we stood three-to-six feet below original ground level and looked at everything my father had amassed, the great junk and precious, rare items. I thought Lyla, an archaeologist by both trade and nature, an antique-hunting freak by avocation, would've been overjoyed with our newfound Americana. After she said, “You'd think he could've buried a few mayonnaise jars filled with silver quarters; you'd think we'd've come across some liberty dimes jammed into Ball or mason jars,” I figured our marriage was back in trouble.

“There's a million dollars' worth of stuff here,” I said.

Here's what Lyla said to that: “A million dollars that'll take two million to move, store, advertise, and sell. Add in your time and the years you'll have to spend with a chiropractor, and you'll wish he'd only buried coins in the ground like every other paranoid schizophrenic does if they haven't been committed.” Lyla leaned on her adze. She wore one bandanna around her neck like a cattle rustler and another
over her scalp hoodlum-style. If it had been pollen season, she would've worn a third one across her face like a post–Civil War Texas bank robber.

We'd been married long enough for me to see a side of her personality that might've suggested cold-blooded accusations and a thin heart.

Lyla said, “I'm sorry I said that about your daddy,” looking at the dug-up Frisch's Big Boy statue as she spoke. Scar-face limped off to the side of the house and lifted his leg on one of the Golden Arches.

W
HILE
I
WAS
growing up there weren't but ten houses along the entire three-mile length of Deadfall Road. A hundred years before, I would imagine, there'd been only one. By the time my father died near the end of the century, nearly every landowner's inheritors had sold off acreage to developers who built nearly identical ranch house subdivisions, or nearly identical two-story brick pseudo-Tudor homes, or rented out nearly identical mobile homes with phony stone underpinning. The original ten houses from my childhood stood surrounded by a horseshoe of “homes,” the inhabitants of which all worked at foreign-owned industries between ten and sixty miles away: Fuji, Michelin, BMW. Their children sat in front of televisions all day long and showed no curiosity about the graves, bullets, and arrowheads that lay beneath their canned homesteads. The homeowners invested in garage door openers, commuted to and
from work alone, and never saw their neighbors on either side. Occasionally Lyla and I drove through the anemic development behind my father's house and watched men ride their lawn tractors as if competing in a synchronized swimming competition, with a yard always in between them. The residents of, say, 101, 105, and 109 Chaucer Court would be up and out to cut their front yards by ten
A.M.
on Saturday mornings while the men of 103, 107, and 111 did their backyards. Index fingers poking through venetian blinds meant these people feared conversation, that waving at one another two doors over satisfied their intentions to be neighborly. Did similar dances occur out of my view, all along the perfect arterial U of Shakespeare Lane and its veins and capillaries: Marlowe Street, Walter Raleigh Court, Dickens Circle? The whole dopey neighborhood together was called Sherwood Forest, which made me wonder what kind of grades land developers in America had made in their English 102 classes. The subdivision that ran behind Compton Lane's father's house had streets named—get this—Marlin, Sailfish, Dolphin, and Barracuda, but it was called Freshwater Acres.

Some days I hated life altogether.

A week after my wife and I had, we figured, excavated the entire back acreage of my dead father's soil, Lyla walked into the kitchen and headed straight for the blender. She pulled it forward, turned to the refrigerator for ice, then reached below the sink for a bottle of tequila. “I'm making
margaritas,” she said. “When we have had about two each I'll talk again.”

I'd been on the Internet and telephone all day dickering with
woodplanks.com
,
heartpine.com
,
pineplank.com
,
heartwood.com
, and
woodheart.com
. I e-mailed them all, requesting prices for what I knew I owned out in the front yard. Then I called them back, said my aim was to see what a middleman like I should receive for his product, and so on. Because I knew that I had enough ancient lumber to make me wealthy no matter—and my father had sold off at least this much twenty years earlier, but that's a whole other story—I didn't make anyone stew for days like a regular bastard businessman might. I sold the unfinished and rough ex–barn wood to a man named Terrell Smoot for two bucks a foot on seven-to-ten-inch widths in full knowledge that his people got upwards of twenty dollars per square foot. We made a gentlemen's agreement, and he promised to drive up from his home base in Goose Creek the following morning, a couple of semis behind him.