Why Dogs Chase Cars (7 page)

I said, “No sir. No.”

“Is Shirley your friend, like her papa's my friend?”

I didn't get where he was going. “I guess.”

“That's right.”

Comp's father returned and said, “There's a good one
written in the bathroom now. Someone wrote, ‘I'd rather have a beer than a lobotomy.' No, that's not right. It went something like that. It's funny. Some them college boys must've come in here recently.”

My father grabbed my forearm so I couldn't leave. He said to Mr. Lane, “I'm glad you're back. You remember when you took that pottery class up in Greenville, and you gave me that big old jug you made with the handle on it?”

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Lane said. “Why are y'all making fun of me?” He spoke quietly and measured his words out. His eyes sliced over to Red Edwards.

My father looked back at me. “When about was that?”

Mr. Lane shook his head like he couldn't believe that someone would call him on trying to better himself, that his attempt at bettering himself or finding a new trade would end up in humiliation. The jukebox came on, playing “Sixty-Minute Man.” Dunny Dunlap's father walked off to greet a woman he'd been waiting for, evidently—a woman I knew to be a teller at his bank.

Compton Lane's father said, “I know exactly. It was nineteen sixty-six.”

My father turned to me and said, “Your mother left before then. There you go. Goddamn this reminds me of how your mother was. You burn my testes sometimes. I was having a perfectly good day, and then you come in and step on my high.”

I nodded when Mr. Red Edwards asked if I'd like another
beer, and shook my head when he asked if I wanted another bourbon. Someone in the back room yelled out, “You're up, Lee!” and my father and Mr. Lane got up to play pool. My father said, “Maybe I just wanted to put to rest her memory. Did it have those ugly goddamn fake eyelashes on it? Or the stones from the engagement ring I gave her that she left on our kitchen table? Did it have that nail file she spent more time looking down at than my feet that hurt from working sixteen hours a day so she could buy what she wanted? What about the compass—was that on the jug? She left that compass on our door when she left, and a note that she'd be anywhere from northwest to southeast, which only left out California, and for me to not come looking. Did you find the hair I swept out of the bathroom so I wouldn't have to look at it anymore?”

Another song came on the jukebox, Johnny Cash singing about walking a line. My father went on and on. He mentioned some things that I didn't find on the jug: a pack of Picayune cigarettes he found in the fireplace flue, a tube of ruby red lipstick he'd never seen adorn my mother's face, and an Elvis Presley 45-rpm record of a song my father never heard played in our house. I said, “Yessir. I found some of those things. I apologize, Dad. I'm sorry.”

“You damn right.” My father got up to find a cue stick that wasn't warped.

I didn't stare at myself in the mirror behind Mr. Red Edwards. I looked at the packs of salted peanuts, the jarred
pickled eggs and sausage. Would I ever come to a point where I believed my own father? Could I ever get to the point of telling him that it was possible that he and Mr. Lane had practiced this routine beforehand, over the years? What would it take for me to convince myself that my dad didn't have a vengeful side, and how could I ever look a woman in the face and say how I came from a long line of functional, understanding people?

Mr. Lane yelled, “I want to say right now that we don't have chalk or sticks around here that's worth a crap. If we lose, I call foul. The chalk's dry, and the sticks're warped. It's like Forty-Five sex. We all need to go out yonder and see what's going on in the rest of the country, I swear. It can't be like this everywhere, can it?”

I watched Dunny Dunlap peripherally, grunting in front of the pinball machine. His father walked off to a booth with the teller. I got up, stuck a quarter in the slot, and pushed the drummer's helper forward. I stuck my right foot forward hard, looked down to my pants leg, and noticed all of the beggar-lice still stuck there from my adventure in the woods. It looked like any wild dog's scruff. “I saw you chasing your father down the road once, Dunny. You had this wheelchair rolling. I'm thinking you probably shouldn't do that.”

My father broke in the back room. I watched him until I realized that he was keeping his face turned from me all the time, even if it meant inventing awkward and difficult bank
shots that rarely fell in.

My second-grade teacher didn't think ahead when she agreed to let us sing that “Name Game” song the last hour of Valentine's Day class. Because—as Miss Dupre even admitted—her homemade heart-shaped cookies turned out warped into looking more like bananas, it seemed almost necessary to sing. My friend Compton Lane had suggested everything, seeing as we no longer took music classes weekly; the chorus teacher had quit during Christmas break, saying she couldn't distinguish an on-key student in all of Forty-Five Elementary.

I didn't quite understand the implications of Compton's request, didn't realize what lyrics would occur in a class that, oddly, included two Chucks, a boy named Lucky, another named Tucker, and an unfortunate girl—unless later on in life she had gathered work in a Nevada brothel—whose parents tabbed her Bucky.

“Okay,” Miss Dupre said. “We'll sing the song starting with Compton. Then, Comp, you point to whoever's next.” She went on to say how we would hand out our cheap Valentine's cards to each other afterwards and eat her mis-baked cookies that, once she realized hadn't come out heart-shaped, were iced yellow with
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY
painted in red.

As years went on, I remembered those cookies as reading only
HAPPY V.D.
, but maybe my memory turns that way because twenty-three-year-old Miss Dupre had gotten fired soon after handing them out.

The class stood in a circle, surrounded by four cork-boards that stressed personal hygiene, poisonous plants, things to do on rainy days, and how to crouch during both natural and unnatural disasters. Compton pointed at me when his name was done, only because we were best friends who both had crazy runaway mothers. We went, “Mendal, Mendal bo bendal—banana fanna fo fendal,” et cetera, and the whole while Comp jerked his head for me to call on Tucker. I pointed toward Tucker next, not knowing—this was second grade in a town where people gossiped when someone said “darn” or “heckfire” after falling from a roof—that our song would have a term I'd heard only once, when my father stepped on a nail.

Miss Dupre didn't even know the bad word, at least from the expression on her face. Later on I figured that she'd been trained thusly, in her education classes, in some course like “Psychology of Pranksters” or whatever.

Tucker pointed at one of the Chucks. Chuck pointed at the other, and then that Chuck chose Bucky, in succession. From down the second-grade hallway I'm sure it sounded like a shipload of merchant marines were holding a sing-along.

I know this because our principal, a stern, unamused
man named Mr. Uldrick, happened to be taking a group of state legislators on a tour of Forty-Five Elementary at the time, hopeful that we'd get more funding to at least reroof the place so there wouldn't be doves nesting in every class-room's ceiling and attracting hunters during season, which subsequently made it difficult to comprehend Miss Dupre over the shotgun blasts.

Uldrick motioned for us to stop, then took our teacher outside the door. I made out, “See me in my office after school,” and then Miss Dupre said, “My cookies came out funny. I didn't take any home-ec classes in a South Carolina state-supported college.”

Compton held his shoulders almost to his ears and his eyebrows toward the doves' nests. Glenn Flack said, “I heard my daddy say those bad words one time to my mom. He was talking about the Korean War.”

Miss Dupre walked back in slower than she normally moved. Her red-and-white-polka-dot skirt didn't swish. “I think we're going to have to stop now, class. I think y'all did a wonderful job. But Mr. Uldrick says it's very important that we have no fun until three o'clock. It's officially quiet time. Y'all can pass out your cards to one another and come get two each of my cookies. But we can't make noise. I'm sorry.”

I didn't know at the time that presently we would have a new teacher who'd start each day singing a hymn, that Miss Dupre would quit and never teach again. But I swear I studied her face and noticed the same thing I would later see on
my own wife's face and on the faces of both men and women in a textile town gone bust during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

We tiptoed across our linoleum floor and handed out those “Be Mine,” “I'm All Yours,” and “You're Special” nonfolding cards. Shirley Ebo, the only black girl stuck in an otherwise nonintegrated school, gave me a card that must've been a reject or a second. Instead of “Let's Be Friends” it read only, “Let's Fend.” She hadn't signed it.

I said, “Thanks, Shirley Ebo.”

She said, “Does your name stand for something else, Mendal? I mean, is it short for something?”

I said, “I don't know. Men-doll. I doubt it.”

Comp came over and said, “My mother says my name means ‘free,' but she didn't want to name me that.” Comp was my best friend from birth onward. In college, he would tell women that his name was short for Complimentary, Compulsive, Compatible, and Complex.

Shirley said, “My last name means something in Africa. I'm a warrior.”

I said, “Uh-huh,” and took more cards from my classmates. Miss Dupre sat at her desk, opened the drawer, and stared down. I had completely forgotten to sign a card for her and had no other choice but to approach the desk and hand Miss Dupre what Shirley Ebo had given to me earlier. “‘Let's Fend,'” my teacher said aloud. “That's funny, Mendal. Let's fend. I agree with that.”

And then she stood up, walked around her desk, took my face in her young hands, and kissed me on the forehead. When she hugged me, the side of my face wedged directly into her cleavage. My classmates let out an “ooh” in a way none of us could perform in music class. I blushed, almost cried, and then the bell rang.

On my way out of school that day I passed Mr. Uldrick's office. My teacher sat across from him, her face turned away. I stood there and watched the principal wave his arms. Then he leaned back in his chair and spread his feet on the desk. Miss Dupre stood up, pointed at him, then looked at me standing by the door.

Years later I would say that she blew a kiss, mouthed “Thank you,” and waved to me in a manner that meant for me to get away and keep going.

Every country boy on our Little League team could hit that knuckleball during practice. We had no choice. Coach D. R. Pope and both of his assistants had worked in the cotton mill, and all three of them had undergone tragic digit loss due to spinning frames, looms, and/or pneumatic presses of one sort or the other. D. R. pitched batting practice most of the time with his right hand, which had only a thumb and a little finger. So the baseball always lolled toward the plate without as much as one rotation between his grasp and the Louisville Slugger. Our own pitcher during games—a farm boy named Yancey Allison—must've thought that the knuckleball was some kind of Forty-Five, South Carolina, miracle, for he'd perfected it, too. Yancey let his nails grow out an inch beyond his fingertips, he dug them into the ball's seams, and even with the arm movement of a catapult, the ball crossed the plate at maybe twenty miles an hour. Our foes regularly hit Yancey's pitches a good hundred feet past the outfield fences. Meanwhile, all the rest of us stood stock-still when the opponents' pitchers threw fastballs, sliders, changeups, and curves in our direction. I wasn't the only player to take a mighty swing
afte
r the ball reached the catcher's mitt and he threw back to his pitcher. One time I actually got two
strikes called on me by the umpire because I stood there and watched for strike one, then fouled off a ball as the catcher threw back and I finally swung.

Let me make it clear that the grounds on which we played needed regular tending before each game, for hunters would steal onto the field at night, regardless of legal hunting season, and deposit salt blocks and mounds of sweet corn to attract deer. If anyone decided to sleep in the bleachers overnight, like my friend Compton Lane and I did once, he'd be awoken an hour before dawn by camouflaged men sporting anything from .410 shotguns to thirty-aught-sixes. D.R. and his assistant coaches sent us out like boys with metal detectors to scour the rye grass between the infield and the cheap outfield signs advertising
45 OFFICE SUPPLY
,
45 EXTERMINATION
,
45 FLORISTS
,
45 LUMBER
,
45 GRAVEL AND AS PHALT
,
45 MEN'S WEAR
,
45 DEBS AND BRIDES
,
45 JEANS
, the
FORTY-FIVE PLATTER
newspaper,
45 TRASH PICK-UP
,
45 RECORDS
,
45 MODERN BARBERS
(who sponsored our Little League team, the Flattops),
SUNKEN GARDENS LOUNGE
(which
used
to sponsor our team before Mr. Red Edwards decided he couldn't afford a losing team's destruction of his reputation), and
RUFUS PRICE'S GOAT WAGON
store. We took wheelbarrows out with us while the opposing team got to stretch, run wind sprints, take infield practice, and get ready to raise their collective batting averages.

“Just do the best you can, Mendal,” my father always said as we pulled into the parking lot of the Forty-Five rec
center. “I'll talk to D. R. and see if we can't get you playing first base, or left field.” More than once he'd said something about how Bennie Frewer didn't really have head lice, and that it was okay for us to touch the baseball after Bennie threw it in from right field on those odd occasions when somebody from the other team didn't hit the ball over the fence and Bennie would gather it up and throw it to first or second base.