I stood there like a fool for a few seconds. The woman who complained about her baseboard started flipping through pages, saying, “Look at them. Every one of them.” Then she went on to explain to a woman who must not’ve been a regular, “I keep a scrapbook of every time my husband messes up. This scrapbook’s the bad home repair one—he tries to fix something, then it costs us double to get a professional in to do the job. I got another book filled with bad checks got sent back, and newspaper clippings for when he got arrested and published in the police blotter. I even got ahold of some his mugshots.”
It was like standing next to a whipping post. I said, “Okay, I’m sorry to take up any of your time.” The place should’ve been called Straphappy, I thought.
As I opened the door, though, I heard a different voice, a woman who’d only concentrated on her own book of humiliation up until this point. She said, “Do you mean like if you know somebody got lynched, but it all got hush-hushed even though everyone around knew the truth?”
Everyone went quiet. You could’ve heard an opened ink pad evaporate.
I pulled up one of those half-stepladder/half-stool things. I said, “Say that all again, slower.”
Her name was Gayle Ann Gunter. Her daddy owned a car lot, and her grandfather owned it before him, and the great-grandfather started the entire operation back when selling horseshoes and tack still made up half of his business. She worked on a scrapbook that involved one-by-two-inch school pictures that grade schoolers hand over to one another, and she had them under headings like “Uglier than Me,” “Poorer than Me,” “Dumber than Me,” as God is my witness. She said, “We’re having our twentieth high school reunion in a few months and I want to make sure I have the names right. It’s important in this world to greet old acquaintances properly.”
I said, “I’m no genius, but it should be ‘Dumber than I.’ It’s a long, convoluted grammar lesson I learned back in college the first time.”
The other women laughed. They said, “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” in unison, and in a weird, seemingly practiced, cadence. Knox said, “One of the things that keeps me in business is people messing up their scrapbooks and having to start over. I had one woman who misspelled her new daughter-in-law throughout, the first time. She got it right when her son got a divorce, though.”
“This was up in Travelers Rest,” Gayle Ann said. She kept her scrapbook atop her lap and spoke as if addressing the airconditioning vent. “I couldn’t have been more than eight, nine years old. These two black brothers went missing, but no one made a federal case out of it, you know. This was about 1970. They hadn’t integrated the schools just yet, I don’t believe. I don’t even know if it made the paper, and I haven’t ever seen the episode on one of those shows about long-since missing people. Willie and Archie Lagroon. No one thought about it much because, first off, a lot of teenage boys ran away back then. Maybe ’cause of Vietnam, I guess. And then again, they wasn’t white.”
I took notes in a professional-looking memo pad. I didn’t even look up, and I didn’t offer another grammar lesson involving subjects and verbs. For some reason one of the women in the circle said, “My name’s Shaw Haynesworth. Gayle Ann, I thought you were born in 1970. My name’s Shaw Haynesworth, if you need to have footnotes and a bibliogeography!”
I wrote that down, too. Gayle Ann Gunter didn’t respond. She said, “I haven’t thought about this in years. It’s sad. About four years after those boys went missing, a hunter found a bunch of bones right there about twenty feet off of Old Dacusville Road. My daddy told me all about it. They found all these rib bones kind of strewn around, and more than likely it was those two boys. This was all before DNA, of course. The coroner—or someone working for the state—finally said that they were beef and pork ribs people had thrown out their car windows. They said that people went to the Dacusville Smokehouse and couldn’t make it all the way back home before tearing into a rack of ribs, and that they threw them out the window, and somehow all those ribs landed in one big pile over the years.” She made a motorboat noise with her mouth. “I’m no expert when it comes to probability or beyond a reasonable doubt, but looking back on it now, I smell lynching. Is that the kind of story you’re looking for?”
Abby walked in sweating, hair pulled back, wearing an outfit that made her look like she just finished the Tour de France. She said, “Hey, Stet, I might be another hour. Phyllis wants me to fill in for her. Are you okay?”
The women scrapbookers looked up at my wife as if she zoomed in from cable television. I said, “We have a winner!” for some reason.
“You can come over and sit in the lobby if you finish up early.”
To the women she said, “We’re having a special next door if y’all want to join an aerobics class. Twenty dollars a month.” I turned to see the women all look down at their scrapbooks.
Knox said, “I believe I can say for sure that we burn up enough calories running around all day for our kids. Speaking of which, I brought some doughnuts in!”
I looked at Abby. I nodded. She kind of made a what’re-you-up-to? face and backed out. I said, “Okay. Yes, Gayle Ann, that’s exactly the kind of story I’m looking for—about something that happened, but people saw it differently. How sure are you that those bones were the skeletal remains of the two boys?”
A woman working on a giant scrapbook of her two Pomeranians said, “They do have good barbecue at Dacusville Smokehouse. I know I’ve not been able to make it home without breaking into the Styrofoam boxes. Hey, do any of y’all know why it’s not good to give a dog pork bones? Is that an old wives’ tale, or what? I keep forgetting to ask my vet.”
And then they were off talking about everything else. I felt it necessary to purchase something from Knox, so I picked out a rubber stamp that read, “Unbelievable!”
I’m not ashamed to admit that, while walking between Scraphappy! and Feline Fitness, I envisioned not only a big A on my first Southern studies low-residency graduate-level class at Ole Miss-Taylor, but a consultant’s fee when this rib-bone story got picked up by one of those TV programs specializing in wrongdoing mysteries, cold cases, and voices from the dead.
SINCE I WOULDN’T meet Dr. Theron Crowther until the entire graduate class got together for ten days in December, I didn’t know if he was a liar or prankster. I’d dealt with both types before, of course, in the river rock business. Pranksters came back and said that my stones crumbled up during winter’s first freeze, and liars sent checks for half tons, saying I used cheating scales. After talking to the women of Scraphappy!, I sent Dr. Crowther an email detailing the revisionist history I’d gathered. He wrote back to me, “You fool! Have you ever encountered a little something called ‘rural legend?’ Let me say right now that you will not make it in the mean world of Southern culture studies if you fall for every made-up tale that rumbles down the trace. Now go out there and show me how regular people view things differently than how they probably really happened.”
First off, I thought that I’d done that. I was never the kind of student who whined and complained when a professor didn’t cotton to my way of thinking. Back when I was forced to undergo a required course called Broadcast Station Management I wrote a comparison-contrast paper about the management styles of WKRP in Cincinnati and WJM in Minneapolis. The professor said that it wasn’t a good idea to write about fictitious radio- and television-based situation comedies. Personally, I figured the management philosophies must’ve been spectacular, seeing as both programs consistently won Nielsen battles, then went on into syndication. The professor—who ended up, from what I understand, having to resign his position after getting caught filming himself having sex with a freshman boy on the made-up set for an elective course in Local Morning Shows, using a fake potted plant and microphone as props—said I needed to forget about television programs when dealing with television programs, which made no sense to me at the time. I never understood what he meant until, after graduation, running my family’s business ineffectively and
on a reading jag, I sat down by the river and read The Art of War by Sun Tzu and Being and Nothingness by Sartre.
I said to Abby, “My mentor at Ole Miss-Taylor says that’s a made-up story about black kids and rib bones. He says it’s like those vacation photos down in Jamaica with the toothbrush, or the big dog that chases a ball out the window of a high-rise in New York.”
Abby came out from beneath our front porch, the half bottle of bourbon in her grasp. She said, “Of course he says that. Now he’s going to come down here and interview about a thousand people so he can publish the book himself. That’s what those guys do, Stet. Hey, I got an idea—why don’t you write about how you fell off a turnip truck. How you got some kind of medical problem that makes you wet behind the ears always.”
I stared down at the river and tried to imagine how rocks still languished there below the roiling surface. “I guess I can run over to that barbecue shack and ask them what they know about it.”
“I guess you can invest in carbon paper and slide rulers in case this computer technology phase proves to be a fad.”
ALL GOOD BARBECUE stands only open on the weekend, Thursday through Saturday at most.
I got out a regional telephone directory, found the address, got directions off the Internet, then drove around uselessly for a few hours, circling, until I happened to see a white plume of smoke different than most of the black ones caused by people burning tires in front of their trailers. I walked in—this time with one of the handheld tape recorders the bank was giving away for opening a CD, I guess so people can record their last words before committing suicide, something like, “One half of one fucking percent interest?”—and dealt with all the locals turning around, staring, wondering aloud who my kin might be. I said, loudly, “Hey—how y’all doing this fine evening?” like I owned the place. Everyone turned back to their piled paper plates of minced pork and coleslaw.
At the counter a short man with pointy sideburns and a curled-up felt cowboy hat said, “We out of sweet potato casserole.” A fly buzzed around his cash register.
“I’ll take two,” I looked up at the menu board behind him, “Hog-o-Mighty sandwiches.”
“Here or to go?”
“And a sweet tea. You don’t serve beer by any chance, do you?”
“No sir. Family-orientated,” he said. He wore an apron that read “Cook.”
I said, “I understand. I’m Stet Looper, up from around north of here.”
An eavesdropper behind me said, “I tode you.”
“By north of here I mean just near the state line. I’ll eat them here. Anyway, my wife introduced me to a woman who told me a wild story about two young boys being missing some thirty-odd years back, and a pile of bones the state investigators said came from here. Do you know this story?” I mentioned Abby because any single male strangers are, in the sloppy dialect of the locals, “quiz.”
“My name’s Cook,” the cook said. “Raymus Cook. Y’all hear that? Fellow wants to know if I heard about them missing boys back then. Can you believe that?” To me he said, “You the second person today to ask. Some fellow from down Mississippi called earlier asking if it was some kind of made-up story.”
I thought, Goddamn parasite Theron Crowther. “I’ll be doggone,” I said. “What’d you tell him?”
“That’ll be five and a quarter, counting tax.” Raymus Cook handed over two sandwiches on a paper plate and took my money. “I told him my daddy’d be the one to talk to, but Daddy’s been dead eight years. I told him what I believed—that somebody paid somebody, and that those boys’ families will never rest in peace.”
People from two tables got up from the seats, shot Raymus Cook mean looks, and left the premises. One of them said, “We been through this enough. I’mo take my bidness to Ola’s now on.” Raymus Cook held his head back somewhat and called out, “This ain’t the world it used to be. You just can’t go decide to secede every other minute things don’t turn out like you want them.” At this precise moment I knew that, later in life, I would regale friends and colleagues alike about how I “stumbled upon” something. Raymus Cook turned his head halfway to the open kitchen and said, “Ain’t that right, Ms. Hattie?”
A black woman stuck her face my way and said, “Datboutright, huh-huh,” just like that, fast, as if she waited to say her lines all night long.
“You can’t cook barbecue correct without the touch of a black woman’s hands,” Raymus said to me in not much more than a whisper. “All these chains got white people smoking out back. Won’t work, I’ll be the first to admit.”
I thought, Fuck, this is going to turn out to be just another one of those stories that’ve bloated the South for a hundred fifty years. I didn’t want that to happen. I said, “I’m starting a master’s degree on Southern culture, and I need to write a paper on something that happened a while back that maybe ain’t right. You got any stories you could help me out with?”
I sat down at the first table and unwrapped a sandwich. I got up and poured my own tea. Raymus Cook smiled. He picked up a flyswatter and nailed his prey. “Southern culture?” He laughed. “I don’t know that much about Southern culture, even though I got raised right here.” To a family off in the corner he yelled, “Y’all want any sweet potato casserole?” Back to me he said, “That’s one big piece of flypaper hanging, Southern culture. It might be best to accidentally graze a wing to it every once in a while, but mostly buzz around.”
I said, of course, “Man, that’s a nice analogy.” I tried to think up one to match him, something about river rocks. I couldn’t.
“Wait a minute,” Raymus Cook said. “I might be thinking about Southern literature. Like Faulkner. Is that what you’re talking about?”
I thought, This guy’s going to help me get through my thesis one day. “Hey, can I get a large rack of ribs to go? I’ll get a large rack and a small rack.” I looked up at the menu board. I said, “Can I get a ‘Willie’ and an ‘Archie?’”
It took me a minute to remember those two poor black kids’ names. I thought, This isn’t funny, and took off out of there as soon as Raymus Cook turned around to tell Miss Hattie what he needed. I remembered that I forgot to turn on the tape recorder.
On my drive back home I wondered if there were any low-residency writing programs where I could learn how to finish a detective novel.
I TOLD MY sort-of wife the entire event and handed her half a Hog-o-Mighty sandwich. She didn’t gape her mouth or shake her head. “You want to get into Southern studies, you better prepare yourself for such. There are going to be worse stories.”
“Wershtoreesh.” I said, “I don’t want to collect war stories.”
“You know what I said. And I don’t know why you don’t ask me. Here’s a true story about a true story gone false: This woman in my advanced cardio class—this involves spinning, Pilates, steps, and treadmill inside a sauna—once weighed two hundred twenty pounds. She’s five two. Now she weighs a hundred, maybe one-o-five at the most. She’s twenty-eight years old and just started college at one of the tech schools. She wants to be a dental hygienist.”
We sat on the porch, looking down at the river. Our bottle was empty. On the railing I had The South: What Happened, How, When, and Why opened to a chapter on a sect of people in eastern Tennessee called “Slopeheads,” which might’ve been politically incorrect. I said, “She should be a dietician. They got culinary courses there now. She should become an elementary school chef, you know, to teach kids how to quit eating pizza and pimento cheese burgers.”
“Listen. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know how and why and when she lost all that weight?”
I said, “She saw one of those Before-and-After programs on afternoon TV. She sat there with a bowl of potato chips on her belly watching Oprah, and God spoke to her.” I said, “Anorexia and bulimia, which come before and after arson in some books.”
“Her daddy died.” Abby got up and closed my textbook for no apparent reason. “Figure it out, Stet
. Her daddy died. She said she got so depressed that she quit eating. But in reality, she had made herself obese so he’d quit creeping into her bedroom ages of twelve and twenty-two. Her mother had left the household long before, and there she was. So she fattened up, and slept on her stomach. When her father died she didn’t tell anyone what had been going on. But when all the neighbors met after the funeral to eat, she didn’t touch one dish. Not even the macaroni and cheese.”
I said, “I don’t want to know about these kinds of things.” I got up and walked down toward the river. Abby followed behind me. “Those my-daddy-loved-me stories are the ones I’m trying to stay away from. It’s what people expect out of this area.”
When we got to the backhoe she climbed up and reached beneath the seat. She pulled out an unopened bottle of rum I had either forgotten or didn’t know about. “There were pirates in the South. You could write about pirates and their influences on the South. How pirates stole things that weren’t theirs.”
I picked up a nice skipper and flung it out toward an unnatural sandbar. Then I walked up to my knees into the water, reached down, and pulled two more out. An hour later, I had enough rocks piled up to cover a grave.
EVEN CURS HATE FRUITCAKE
WHENEVER I RETREAT TO WONDERMENT AT HOW MY life turned to one of hoardment and obsession, I stop at the memory of a muggy June night. I found myself inside a smoke-and curse-filled beer joint on Highway 301 near the Fruitcake Capital of the World. I bent over to pick up a fallen blue cube of Silver Cup cue-stick chalk, reached over to set it on one of two pool tables, then became startled by an overall-wearing mountain man—his gray beard as windblown as John Brown’s—who yelled at me, pointed toward my hand, and asked if I got Stonewall Jackson or John the Baptist. That particular night, not two weeks after I’d graduated from high school, I ran through every reason to make my answer one man of history or the other.
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