He said, “School not out again?”
I said, “Yessir,” and walked past the cans of pork brains in milk gravy, Spam, Vienna sausages, Hormel Deviled Ham, and various other potted meats. I passed the penny gums and the pork rinds. I walked around a display of watch-bands and another for Putnam Dyes. “I’m just taking a break before my first period.”
“Running a special on day-old bread, Mendal. You can get you carbohydrates out of bread, day-old or not.”
I was pretty sure that my father had asked Rufus Price to take care of me, but I didn’t know for absolute sure. I said, “I’m getting something for Dad. I thought I might as well get it now than have to wait until after school. You might have a big rush between now and then.”
He creaked his wheelchair forward. Out beside the shotgun-shack building, Rufus Price’s goats bleated and shuffled and banged their horns against the wooden slat exterior. He said, “Your daddy might want some gum, too. He might want some gum or Life Savers. He ain’t starting up a pulpwood business these days, is he? I won’t sell to pulp-wooders. You know why.”
As I pulled out the eight-pack, I wondered if my friend Compton would show up like normally, but remembered how his art teacher had asked her students to come in early for an entire week so that they could go out on the football field and make a chalk collage of the history of Forty-Five Mills. The president of the place had promised to donate a picture book to the library about the history of textiles that he’d written and published himself.
I bought my beer, gum, and breath mints. Rufus shook his head at me. His beard swayed like a strange grandfather clock’s pendulum. I said, “Ask my dad. This beer ain’t for me.”
Mr. Price wore his usual overalls, the legs folded up neatly to his stumps. He said, “You need a girlfriend who keeps you inside the hallways of school, son.” He spat on his own floor. “You need a hobby. Don’t end up like me. Don’t end up like everyone around here. You smart, boy. Nothing’s enough for some people. But nothing’s a whole lot less than two minus one.”
Mr. Price liked to show off that he was a graduate of Forty-Five High, too.
I’D BEEN KNOWN to dig holes in my father’s backyard when I knew he’d be gone for more than an hour. And I acted thusly if, and only if, I’d awakened in the middle of the previous night to hear him grunting and cursing, burying something that he either foresaw would be valuable in the coming years—old metal gasoline-station signs seemed to be his forte—or that he thought was an eyesore. He seemed to have something against whatever Baptist preacher it was in Forty-Five who, plagiarizing roadside Burma-Shave ads, stuck BIRD ON A WIRE/BIRD ON A PERCH/FLY TOWARD HEAVEN/FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH up and down Deadfall Road, Powerhouse Road, Highway 25, and Calhoun Drive. I made a three A.M. note to myself as to where the sound emanated from so I could later find the pine straw covering the freshly dug clay and find out what it was that he deemed worthy of concealment.
Driving back to school from Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon, I knew I’d get out a spade later in the afternoon, seeing as my dad would be somewhere over near the Savannah River all day trying to figure out what useless piece of land would later be bought up by the state for ten times its worth so a roadside park could be built, or a boat landing that dropped down to a fishless dammed lake. Maybe I would walk back to the acreage owned by the Few family trust and see if phony toxic barrels were actually standing upright beneath the surface.
“Presente,” I said to Senora Schulze when she called the roll.
Libby Belcher said, “I smell beer. I smell beer coming from Mendal’s direction. Senora Schulze, I smell beer.”
Senora Schulze said, “Cerveza, Libby. You smell cerveza.”
Well, ha ha ha ha ha, I thought. Libby had no way of knowing that I kept the other four beers in my backseat, that I kept the door unlocked so Senora Schulze could go out there during her lunch break and down them. Libby Belcher’s head turned toward me in midspasm. I shot her a peace sign, then curled my index finger away. Senora Schulze turned on the overhead projector to reveal a slew of irregular verbs that we needed to know. I leaned over to the left and whispered to Libby, “Why aren’t you in Miss Ballard’s class with the rest of the cheerleaders and football players? Why do you think you need to know a foreign language? Are you planning on having a Mexican baby or something?”
Oh, I could be as mean as my father back then. And I’ll give Libby Belcher this: she grew up to get a doctorate in education, then become a superintendent of schools. But she didn’t have the right answers on this particular day. She said, “I’m taking Spanish because I’m taking home ec. I need to know how to make tacos in an authentic manner.” Then she said, “I know you been drinking. And I saw your baby picture from yearbook staff. When’re you going to understand that you can’t trick everybody, Mendal Dawes? You can’t. You been trying since first grade. We all know better. We all know.”
Senora Schulze said, “Oh, never mind,” and cut off the projector. “I doubt y’all will ever need to know these verbs. It’s been my experience that you only need to know a bunch of nouns to get your idea across to foreigners.”
When the bell sounded I walked to the gym, found Coach Ware, and said I’d be willing to run track in May if he gave me a note saying I needed to go home for the rest of the day. Forty-Five High couldn’t afford to have its track team ride a bus to meets, but they splurged once a year and allowed us to take part in the regional meet. If anyone qualified for the Upstate, then his parents had to take him all the way up to Greenville—fifty-five miles away—in order to compete. I should mention that although no psychologist had invented attention deficit disorder in 1976, Coach Ware suffered from the malady. I went to him once a week and gave him my word about joining the track team, though he never took me up on it later.
Let me be the first to say that I felt bad whenever I drove home from school at midday. First off, Senora Schulze wouldn’t get her cerveza—maybe the only word she really knew in Spanish. My biology teacher in second period wouldn’t have anyone there to help him say “mitochondria,” a word for which he never figured out the right syllable to stress. The third-period history teacher who never blinked, and always found a way to relate everything that ever happened in America to the invention of the cotton gin—in a way she was before her time, in relation to focus and specialization—would miss me. She should’ve become a college professor, and then maybe a full-out dean. When she experienced slight petit mal seizures, I was the one who always said something like, “Could you explain the connection between the Great Chicago Fire and the cotton gin?” Forget trigonometry—that teacher said “maff” when he wasn’t undergoing coughing and/or sneezing attacks when someone asked for him to explain, again, how the notions of sine or cosine would be important to us later on in life.
And so on. But I got out of there. At this point I’d already gotten into a few colleges—the ag school that guidance counselor Mrs. McKnight made me apply to; all of South Carolina’s state schools, including all-black S.C. State, just in case Shirley Ebo and I finally fell in love with each other; a liberal arts Baptist school my father said he’d let me go to if I didn’t mind his daily visits with a firebrand to burn the place down; and an experimental place up in North Carolina founded by Unitarians, where I ended up going. It allowed students to double major in anthropology and basket weaving. Anthropology and pottery wheel. Anthropology and furniture making. Anthropology and metal casting. I knew to go into anthropology and geography, so I would know not to make a wrong turn and end up back in Forty-Five.
I should mention that Mrs. McKnight got some kind of yearly districtwide award for Miss Guidance, though she never understood the pun.
Anyway, I left Forty-Five High School and went back to Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon. Rufus sat outside handing his goats the stale and expired products. When I got out of the Jeep he said, “School not out again?” He might’ve been kin to Coach Ware, for all I knew.
I said, “Hey, Mr. Price. I’ll leave the m
oney on your counter if you trust me.”
He held out a piece of Little Debbie Snack Cake to three-horned Tripod, my favorite goat. “I don’t trust anybody, son. The last man I trusted said the pulpwood truck wouldn’t roll forward while I worked on its radiator.” He dropped some oatmeal cake on his lap by accident, and Tripod gathered up the crumbs. Mr. Price leaned his head backwards.
I nodded. I said, “Yessir, I remember.” I thought about doing anthropology and condemnation, mostly because my father had me read Schopenhauer when I finished those other books he ordered from publishing houses that never sent anything to our local library. But no one needed a minor in condemnation, I decided. Everyone in Forty-Five could brag about having a major in condemnation, whether they knew it or not.
BILLY GILLILAND HAD a photograph of himself sitting on a nice front porch while a Chihuahua licked his face. He wore what might’ve been knickers. Libby Belcher’s picture had a fake background of Niagara Falls amid the Rocky Mountains. Timmy Stoddart stood in the middle of Ballantine Oldsmobile’s car lot holding a car key in his hand, wearing a boat captain’s hat. Helen Valentine wore a tutu. Glenn Flack looked angelically toward a wasps’ nest. Bobby Coleman’s red-topped head shone and shone as he looked straight at the camera from beside a land tortoise housed at the Forty-Five Petting Zoo. Bobby Williams—the king of calling a woman’s nether parts “cock” later on—had a picture of himself with his diaper on backwards, his hands covering his nipples. Peter Human, Frank Funderburk, Mack McDowell, Vivian Hulsey, Eugenia Wimmer, and Patty Addy all had childhood photographs taken up in Ghost Town in the Sky, standing beside a wooden cutout figure of one of those Indian chiefs, or General Robert E. Lee, or Paul Bunyan, or the Marx Brothers, or Eisenhower.
My friend Shirley Ebo’s picture was taken in front of Forty-Five Indoor Movie House, a place that still had a balcony where blacks had to sit. As a matter of fact, she was standing in front of the sign out on the sidewalk. At the left of the photograph you could see WHIT with an arrow before it. To the right of Shirley Ebo there was an arrow pointing upwards. Her little figure blocked the printing, though—all but OREDS.
I shuffled through all of the pictures like an idiot. Miss Ballard had either left altogether or was standing off in the smoking area. Me, I’d already been home, rifled through every drawer and safe in the house in case Dad had hid something new, found nothing special, drunk my beer, put on running clothes, covered six miles in thirty-six minutes without even sprinting toward the end, put some clothes in the washing machine, then come back to Forty-Five High School like I meant to attend one of the after-school clubs or meetings. Like I meant to care about Spanish Club, or Glee! Club! Like I went to the Ecology Club meeting, whose members went out once a semester with convicts from the county detention center and always complained that they got bullied out of their cigarettes.
I am not proud of any of this, of course. I’m a buffoon, understand. I took those yearbook pictures home, spread them out on my father’s kitchen table, and said things like, “Look, peckerhead, these are the kinds of pictures that get taken of children when they are children,” et cetera. I accused my father of an abuse that wouldn’t make the media for another decade.
“Listen,” my father said. He rolled his neck in all kinds of directions. “I see your pictures here.” He stared down at the kitchen table. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to prove that everyone else had happy childhood photographs. No, I wanted no one to have them, I realized, even back then. Unfortunately, I wanted no one to have memories of happy days. “You have pictures of you not standing in front of a ditch, or poison ivy patch. You just don’t have those pictures in your possession, fool,” my father told me.
The telephone rang. As my father walked toward it, I believed that it was either my guidance counselor or my mother. My father said, “Yes … yeah … I understand. … We’ll see that it doesn’t happen again, I promise.”
He hung up the phone and leaned on his cane. He didn’t turn my way. I said, “That was Mrs. McKnight saying how I cut classes today, right?”
My father turned his head but not one bit of his torso. He said, “I believe you have something else to tell me, Mendal. Why are you acting up so much these days? I know I ain’t done the best job raising you, but please, please understand that I’ve tried my best. Goddamn, son.”
Hell, I thought he was going to cry. I went ahead and told him all about buying two eight-packs of tiny beers, of skipping classes, and how I used hot water when I washed clothes, even though he’d told me he read something somewhere about how cold water cleaned just as well and didn’t run up the electric bill. I even went back a couple years and admitted that a stranger hadn’t really driven by and shot our cement-block house with BBs, that in truth I’d found a three-wood and a sack of golf balls in a ditch over by the all-black Cokesbury Hills Country Club’s nine-hole course and tried to tee off over our house on a dare from Compton.
My father turned his body almost imperceptibly and faced me. He said, “That was Mr. Lane. He called up to say how we used some inferior hooks on a trotline we laid out on Lake Between. They’re all bent straight down, and unless there’s some hundred-pound catfish on that lake, we probably cut corners too much.”
I said, “There might be that big a catfish in Lake Between.” Already I could feel his cane hitting my hamstrings, triceps, or side. It occurred to me that my father spoke cryptically on the telephone at all times, perhaps readying himself for a day such as this.
He lifted his arm, shifted his weight, and laughed. He said, “A firecracker’s still a firecracker, lit or not.”
I kept my eyes closed, waiting for him to strike me. I had no clue what he meant concerning pyrotechnics, and tried not to wonder about what a firecracker was after it exploded, outside of smoke and smell and nonflash.
I DIDN’T TAKE my classmates’ baby photographs back to school the next day. My father had gotten up in the middle of the night and either buried or hid them somewhere. At the breakfast table—we ate grits every morning, with sausage balls to the side on special days—I asked, “Hey, I should take those pictures back. Where’d you put those pictures of everybody for their Before?”
My father tapped his cane on the linoleum. “That photograph of you was the only real picture. Where the heck do you see waterfalls around here?” He swung one arm. “I don’t see any mountaingoddamntops. Give me a break. I knew I should’ve sent you to a private school. I’d’ve sent you to a private school if there was one around here that wasn’t only a white-flight place. If there was one around here at all.”
I pretended that there wasn’t too much butter in the grits. I tried not to think about how my English teacher said how all southern novels had grits in them, or a grandmother who didn’t want to go to Florida, and how grits and grandmothers were symbolic of Good. I said, “I like public school, Dad. I like meeting people of different ilks in life.” Well, maybe I just thought all of that later, like in college, when my new classmates all hailed from prep schools up and down the eastern seaboard.
My father got up from the table and opened the freezer door. He pulled out the manila envelope and tossed it like a Frisbee. “I was just playing with you. Go ahead and look through them if you want, make sure I didn’t lose any of them.”
I poured them out. I don’t want to accuse my Forty-Five classmates of crawling from a gene pool so shallow that it wouldn’t take a Dr. Scholl’s insert to keep one’s soles dry, but I have to tell you that they all, as babies, had held the same broad, high foreheads and eyes that floated a little too close to their noses. Except for Shirley Ebo, it looked as though the same child had posed in front of Santa, or the fake nature backgrounds, and so on.
My father had me recheck the pictures for a reason. I didn’t find the one in which I stood in front of the fake toxic barrel, but there was a nice black-and-white of me with my mother. I’d not seen a picture of her since he’d either burned, buried, or otherwise destroyed every single document that
proved she’d had a part in the short-lived marriage. I said, “This is Mom.”
“I took that picture. Hell, it might be the only time I got the camera away from her. She was always a little shy about getting her photo taken. You’d think a woman like that, who ran off to Nashville, would want her picture taken a thousand times daily. Publicity photos and whatnot for her singing career. But not your mother.”
I held it and pored over every square millimeter. My mother and I were standing in front of my father’s old Buick. She wore a dress that seemed to have too many buttons. The neckline came halfway up her chin, like an old Puritan outfit. Shiny mother-of-pearl buttons clasped every inch down the front, all the way to the hem. Even in the black-and-white, I could see the bluish gray swirls of them. I imagined the dress in disuse, filleted out like a saltwater fish, those buttons off to one side like vertebrae.
She wasn’t smiling. I wore some kind of ensemble made up of short pants and a jacket. I said, “I’d rather have my toxic-dump picture for the yearbook, Dad. This is too weird. They make enough fun of me over there.”
He said, “But if you ever lose this picture, then you’ll have it for keeps in the annual. I’d go with this one. Do it for me.” He didn’t tear up, or choke-voice. “Besides, I wasn’t thinking right earlier. What if someone got real smart and saw that picture of you twenty, thirty years down the road, put two and two together, you know, and when the land developers started unearthing those barrels they thought you had a part in it all? You might go to prison for inciting a panic, or contributing to the delinquency of a businessman.”
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