Down and Out in Bugtussle

by Stephanie McAfee

  We part ways at Mr. Tad’s door and I head down to Mrs. Davis’s room. When I walk in, the students get quiet, which is seriously not normal. In the silence, I start to feel apprehensive about my decision to come back here and do this. Some of the kids recognize me, a few speak, and there is a lot of whispering going on. Just as the tardy bell rings, five students hustle into the room. Four rush to sit down and one stops to glare at me.

  “Who are you and where is Mrs. Davis?” she demands.

  “I’m Ms. Jones and Mrs. Davis is out today,” I say with a smile.

  “Where is she?” the girl asks. She props her hand up on her hip and scowls at me.

  “I’m sorry, what’s your name?” I ask.

  “Brittany Franks,” she announces with no small amount of pageantry. “Who are you again?”

  “I’m Ms. Jones.” I make a show of looking through the sub folder. “Well, Ms. Franks, I’m sorry, but Mrs. Davis didn’t leave you a personal message explaining her whereabouts.” I give her my best I’m-so-not-impressed-with-your-attitude glare. “So why don’t you take a seat?”

  Her fellow classmates snigger as Brittany Franks rolls her eyes and goes to the back of the room. Another student yells that Brittany isn’t sitting in her assigned seat, so I go through the folder until I find the seating chart. When I pull that out and hold it up for them to see, I don’t have to say a word. They automatically rearrange themselves. Except Brittany Franks, whom I have to threaten with detention before she moves to her assigned seat.

  Second period is Mrs. Davis’s planning time, so, thank the good Lord in heaven, I’m off for forty-five minutes. I piddle around online for a little while, trying to distract myself from how tight these pants are, then text my pal Lilly Lane and ask her when she has lunch. Like me, Lilly graduated from Bugtussle High School back in 19-and-let’s-not-say-when. Then we moved to Starkville and enrolled in Mississippi State University, and that’s where we met Chloe. After Lilly graduated from college, she took off to pursue the magic of her dreams and spent a few very profitable years on the modeling circuit. When she got tired of the hustle and bustle, she moved back to Bugtussle and immediately landed a job teaching French, which isn’t the most difficult thing to do because foreign language teachers tend to be in short supply in northeast Mississippi.

  Lilly Lane hails from a wonderful and beautiful family, all of whom make living life look splendid and easy. Her handsome and distinguished father is a big shot at a furniture company in Tupelo, her lovely and petite mother runs the only investment firm in town, and her sexy older brother is halfway through a highly decorated army career. They’re just a perfect freakin’ success story whose only dysfunction is how normal they are. I’ve often wondered how her parents got everything so right and how they have such a seemingly trouble-free existence. They must make a lot of good decisions. Like hundreds and hundreds of consecutively good decisions.

  Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if my parents were still around. If it would be different or if I would be different. I wonder what it would’ve been like had we stayed in my mother’s hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, rather than moving to my father’s hometown of Bugtussle, Mississippi. Certainly my mom would’ve been much happier during that last year of her life. She didn’t like Bugtussle. She didn’t fit in. And she didn’t want to, either. Perhaps they would still be around, because if we’d just stayed in Nashville, they wouldn’t have been on the road coming back from there like they were the day the accident happened. I stare at the digital clock on Mrs. Davis’s desk, fully aware that mulling over the “what-ifs” and “maybes” is a colossal waste of time, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

  I remember standing in that funeral home where so many strange people kept hugging me and saying things like, “Everything happens for a reason” and “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.” I didn’t believe that crap then and, to this very day, I think those comments were creepy and sadistic. I mean, I don’t think God orchestrated a series of unfortunate events because the angels up in heaven desired the company of Jake and Isabella Jones. Likewise, I don’t believe the Lord grabbed the steering wheel and jerked a truck into the front of my parents’ car. The poor guy driving the truck was just trying not to run over a little old lady standing on the side of the road whose car had broken down. The whole thing was just bad luck and wretched timing. I fail to see any strokes of divinity or rationale in what happened, but whatever. People believe what suits them best and cling to whatever makes them feel the most comfortable while failing to consider that everyone doesn’t experience life on planet Earth the same way they do. At least when it happened, I already had a year in down here, so when I had to pack up my room and move in with Gramma Jones, it wasn’t that far of a ride. And at least I already had a few friends in place. One of those friends was Lilly Lane, who dutifully stood beside me while all of those people imparted what they mistook for words of comfort.

  I pick up my phone and see that Lilly has texted back “3L,” which I interpret to mean third lunch, which sucks because I have first. My phone buzzes again with abbreviated instructions to call her after school because she can’t wait to hear all about my first day on the job as a permanent substitute teacher. Then she sends me one final message, which says, “Avoid Freddie D.” I would like for her to elaborate on that, but the bell rings to end second period and I have to go stand in the hallway next to Mrs. Davis’s door.

  Much to my relief, I don’t have any trouble with third period because more than half the class have been students of mine at some point in the past. Since most of them liked me and my class, I take that opportunity to put in a good word for my new friend, Stacey Dewberry. I’m not sure anyone takes it to heart, but at least I can tell Chloe I tried.

  Fourth period is a long and drawn-out affair because as soon as I take attendance, I have to escort my class of twenty-six freshmen to the cafeteria. I join Stacey Dewberry at a teacher table off to the side and, after a quick recap of her day thus far, she proceeds to tell me about her alphabetized collection of vintage cassette tapes, which are, as we speak, in a special crush-proof carrying case tucked safely into the trunk of her 1989 Iroc-Z28. I’m very intrigued by this tidbit of information and start quizzing her about her favorite types of music. I’m not surprised when she rolls off the token big hair bands of the 1980s—Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, and Mötley Crüe—but I am somewhat surprised when she tells me how many concerts she’s been to and then proceeds to rank the shows according to venue, band visibility, and sound quality. She surprises me again when she tells me that she worked in the ticket office of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for three years.

  “Is that in Ohio?” I ask her.

  “Cleveland,” she says. “Right on the shore of Lake Erie. Beautiful place.”

  “So did you meet any famous people while you were there?”

  “No, but I did have my picture taken with every single figure in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.”

  What? I think, struggling to make the connection. “In New York?”

  “Yes. I lived there for a couple months after I left Cleveland. Just got a wild hair up the crapper one day.” She looks like she’s thinking hard about something. “Don’t remember what year that was, but I do remember that I got my income tax check in the mail and then just decided to pick up and move to the Big Apple.” She looks at me. “I didn’t know a soul, but I met a lot of really interesting people. Living in the city was exciting, but not always in a good way, if you know what I mean.” I don’t know what she means, but I try to imagine. She’s focusing on her corn chips now. “Anyway, it wasn’t for me. Lots to do, but I couldn’t take the crowds. Plus I was paying three arms and a leg to rent a place smaller than a porta potty.” She looks at me again. “And, as you can see, I only have two arms, which means I couldn’t afford it, so I ended up leaving after a few weeks.”

  “So, where all have you lived?” I ask, and can’t help but wonder wheth
er she’s making this stuff up.

  “Where all have I not lived?” she says with a chortle. “My parents were hippies, so I lived all up and down the West Coast when I was little.” Okay, so now I’m really starting to think she’s spinning a yarn, but I do my best to maintain a look of genuine interest as she continues. “Then when I was seven, my mom OD’d and my dad sent me to live with my grandparents in Alabama.” She shakes her head and looks out the window while I sit there and hope that maybe she did make that part up. “I hadn’t been to school, so I had to start a year behind. Never heard from my dad again. Don’t know if he’s dead or alive. Went to college on a Pell grant and did a pretty good job up until my senior year and that god-awful student-teaching experience.” The thought crosses my mind that everything happens for a reason. I start wondering if maybe I had lost my parents so I could be more empathetic to this poor old girl with purple eyeliner and hot-rolled hair who didn’t have her mom for as long as I did and doesn’t even know what happened to her dad. Bullshit! Maybe we were destined to be friends. More bullshit! She’s still talking. “Then I took the money I had left over from the grant and what little I’d saved working part-time at Papaw’s feed store, and I took off.”

  I watch as Stacey Dewberry digs the last few corn chips out of a Ziploc bag. There’s so much I want to say to her, so much I want to ask, but the bell rings to end first lunch and we have to get up and get going.

  “Wait a minute,” I say as we walk toward the gigantic garbage cans next to the cafeteria dish window. “How in the world did you end up in Bugtussle, Mississippi?”

  “Well, I was on a pilgrimage of sorts,” she says, tossing her lunch trash. “I’d moved back home to Centreville again—that’s south and a little bit east of Tuscaloosa—and was staying with my grandmother, just trying to figure out what my next move should be. Then one day I saw something on TV about an Elvis festival in Tupelo and I knew that was where I was going next. I went and pawned an engagement ring I’d been hanging on to for a couple of months and off I went. Had to sleep in my car, but I didn’t care.” She glances at me as we make our way through the crowd of students. “I have a very nice body pillow that I keep in the car and my backseats lie down, so it’s nice and flat back there. Anyway, after the festival, I was really feeling the Elvis vibe, so I decided to go on to Memphis and see Graceland while I was at it. I’d stopped to get some gas at the Pack-a-Poke and had just walked into the beer cooler when I met what I thought was my soul mate and anyway, to make a long story short, I ended up moving here.” She looks at me. “I wasn’t buying beer. I don’t drink beer. I just went in there to stand for a minute ’cause it was hotter than Hades outside and the AC had gone bonkers in my car and I had to have some cool air.” She shakes her head. “T-tops can do only so much in a triple-digit heat wave.”

  “So you have a boyfriend?” I ask.

  “Oh, no, that didn’t even last a month,” she says. “Turned out he was the kind of guy who expected a lot out of his girlfriend. Like he wanted them to have a job or two, cook all the time, stock the fridge with beer, and keep his trailer clean. All while he sat on the couch all day every day watching Cops with a can in his hand.”

  “So he didn’t have a job?”

  “He was drawing disability, but I’ll tell you right now that he’s a heck of lot more lazy than he is crazy. But he did a fine job of making me crazy, which is why I had to ditch that fool.” We pause to let a group of students come out of A Hall. I see a handsome fellow, tall and lean, lagging behind the group. I imagine it must be the notorious Freddie Dublin. I tune Stacey out as I watch him walk by. His dark hair looks like it was styled by a professional and he’s wearing a striped button-up neatly rolled above the elbows with dark gray pants. He catches me looking, raises one eyebrow, and turns his head. Slightly embarrassed, I turn my attention back to Stacey, who is still yapping away.

  “So by then I already had this job and thought I’d better keep it because, as I mentioned this morning, I’d like to finish my degree and maybe get a job as a real teacher, and I think this would be good experience and look good on my resume.” She glances at me. “It’s been hard, but I’ve stuck it out and learned a lot.”

  “That’s good,” I tell her. “Being a sub is definitely one of the best ways to get a teaching job.” Or to get one back, I hope. She keeps rambling as we walk under the giant A and into our hallway.

  “Yeah, so I found a little house to rent and took out a quick cash loan on my car so I’d have the money to pay all the deposits and first two months’ rent. About a week after I moved in, Joe Red somehow found out where I was staying and came over. He wanted to kiss and make up and then asked me if I’d buy us front-row tickets to a monster truck show that was coming to town. Can you believe that?” I tell her I can’t. She continues. “I told him I didn’t think I would and that was our last fight. Haven’t seen him since.” She sighs and her shoulders slump a little, pads and all. “I should’ve known better than to get involved with a guy buying a case of Old Milwaukee at ten a.m. on a Monday.” She shakes her head. “But I ignored that rip-roaring red flag and now here I am and that’s how I got to Bugtussle.”

  “Well, that is quite a story,” I say, stopping at Mrs. Davis’s door. I realize that we’ve walked right past Mr. Tad’s classroom.

  “Yeah, you can tell me your story next time,” she says, and I can see that sharing hers has taken some of the wind out of her sails. Or maybe she’s just exhausted from all that nonstop talking.

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear mine. It’d be dull and boring compared to yours,” I say in an exaggerated tone that makes her smile. “Have a good rest of the day.”

  “You do the same,” she says with a little wave. She turns to walk back to her assigned classroom and I reluctantly step into mine. I stand behind the podium and watch the students file in, thinking that I’d rather have my face hot-glued to the dry erase board than be in this classroom with these pants on for the next three and a half hours.

  Fourth period creeps by at a snail’s pace, fifth turns out to be another class of rowdy freshmen, and sixth is a class of somewhat-less-rambunctious sophomores. Seventh is freshmen again, and they are buck wild and crazy from start to finish. I wonder why Stacey didn’t mention this group to me, because they are, by far, the rowdiest and most noncompliant of the day. When the bell finally rings at 3:05, I’m seriously questioning my decision to be a permanent substitute teacher. Sitting in my car waiting for the buses to leave, I text Lilly and tell her I’ll have to call her tomorrow. Today I have to go home, get these damned pants off, take a long nap and then drink lots of cold beer.

  When the buses finally pull out, I bark a tire out of there and don’t care who sees me. I drive home like a bat out of hell and turn into my driveway on two wheels. I hop out of the car and unbutton my pants on the way to the door. When I get inside, I go straight to the laundry room and dig a pair of cutoff sweatpants out of the dryer. I take off my bra, which had also started to squeeze me in all the wrong places, and put on a tank top and a sweatshirt. I go to the kitchen, get two beers out of the fridge, and retire to the living room where I plop down on the sofa. After turning on the television, I realize I can’t stand the racket, so I hit the mute button and close my eyes for a second. I prop my feet up on the couch and drink my beer in silence. Buster Loo creeps out from behind the love seat and joins me on the couch. He nudges my hand with his snout. I put the beer on the end table, pick him up, and give him a good hug.

  “Oh, I love him,” I say, and he gets excited. “Oh, I love him so much. He’s a good dog.” Buster Loo gives me a quick lick on the cheek, then leaps off my lap and starts running in circles around the living room while I tell him what a good boy he is. That makes me laugh, which makes me feel better. Buster Loo is good at that. After three beers and a few rounds of indoor speedy-dog fetch, I feel like I might be able to get up and go back to work tomorrow.

  I walk into the kitchen and think about what I want for di
nner. What I need more than anything is some of Gramma Jones’s creamy chicken noodle soup. I dig through the pantry until I find her cookbook, which is a small binder filled with recipes written on note cards. I flip to the soup section, and the recipe I’m looking for is the second card on the page. I reach under the cabinet and get the pot she always used. I wonder what she would think of my using canned chicken instead of boiling a fresh breast like she always did. She’d probably think my soup wasn’t quite as good as hers. And she would be right.

  Sometimes I think I should box up all of these old pots and pans and dishes and go buy myself some new ones, but then I remember how happy it makes me to be in this kitchen with all her stuff: plates I’ve eaten on since I was a child; a cast-iron skillet that belonged to her grandmother; the old wooden spoon she always used to stir the sugar into the tea. It all gives me a sense of security that I don’t think belongs in a box in the attic. Not to mention that when I donated her old living room furniture to Goodwill several years ago, it took me almost two weeks to get over it. I line the ingredients up on the counter and smile, thinking I’ll just hang on to my old-fashioned kitchen goods. I flip the pot over and look at the bottom. Revere Ware Clinton, Illinois. A stamp like that might be hard to find these days.

  4

  Tuesday is a repeat of Monday, too-tight pants, smart-ass Brittany and all, and the only thing keeping my spirits from going into a nosedive is that the weather has warmed ever so slightly.

  I drive home with the windows down and find my faithful companion, Buster Loo, snoozing in the backyard. When I open the gate, he spins onto his paws in one swift motion and then runs across the yard to greet me. I scoop him up and take him inside where he wiggles out of my arms and runs to the front door.

  “Buster Loo wanna go for a walk?” I ask him, and he starts jumping up at his leash. “Just a minute, little buddy.” I run back to the bedroom and put on some fleece pants and a long-sleeve Bugtussle Rockets T-shirt. When I get back to the foyer, Buster Loo is still bouncing like a basketball. I grab his leash and we head out the door to the park.