Why Dogs Chase Cars

by George Singleton

  Then off to the side stood a jug, and even from where I stood I recognized on it the buttons that had once clasped my mother’s dress front. Shirley said, “They it is,” and pointed.

  “Can I walk across here?” I asked. I looked straight up at the darkening sky, through the hole formed by missing trees. “I don’t like walking on people’s burial spots, man.” Shirley led me around the outer edge of the graves toward the jug.

  More than buttons covered this earthen, gallon-sized vessel, too: paper clips, a metal fingernail file, pieces of thread, hair, two barrettes, a couple of false eyelashes, a shoehorn, what appeared to be tiny glints of diamond, the cap to an aspirin bottle, and a compass had been glued on it. Shirley Ebo said, “My daddy said it just showed up one day. He said I could look at it all I wanted, but not to disturb it. He calls it a memory jug some days, and a whatnot jar others. My daddy says a long time ago sometimes these worked the same as headstones for the dead.”

  I didn’t touch the jar. On my hands and knees I looked into the mouth, hoping not to find ashes—or another photograph of me, standing at attention beside my mother’s sharp hips. I said, “My mother’s not buried here, Shirley. Take it back. I know for a fact that my mother’s not buried here. She used to call me up. My mother used to call me up from Nashville, and New Orleans. She called from St. Louis one time, and another time from Las Vegas.” I turned my head and squinted one eye, but the day’s sunlight in these woods had disappeared already.

  Shirley stood up. “I took a flashlight one time and looked in there, but there ain’t nothing. Don’t worry. It’s empty.” She pulled her cotton dress halfway up her thigh and scratched at a bite.

  I remained crouched. “My father wouldn’t lie to me about this. He couldn’t. He’d end up getting drunk and telling me the truth.”

  Shirley said, “Now’s the time if when you sing ‘Amazing Grace’ or ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ you can hear the dead sing along. I don’t know the words but my daddy do.”

  By the time I quit staring at the jar—by the time the mother-of-pearl buttons quit reflecting what light remained in the sky—Shirley Ebo had vanished from the circle.

  In later years I would say that I walked out of there calm as a wealthy man’s cat. I would say that Shirley must’ve played a trick on me and that I followed the same path out that we took in, that I saw Shirley and her father sitting on their stoop drinking iced tea and that I hollered over to them, “Thanks, Shirley! Good night!” But that wasn’t the case. Once that goddamn “Battle Hymn of the Republic” tune came into my head and I felt an urge to vocalize, I took off running blindly through a land I’d never explored. And within about fifteen seconds I reached Deadfall Road, maybe a quarter mile up from my house. Shirley and I had cut a giant fishhook-shaped path through those woods, and the slave graveyard, in actuality, rested a cheap BB gun’s arced shot away from where we’d begun.

  Marching home, slowly, I caught myself whispering “Glory, glory hallelujah.” I didn’t hear any choir providing backup, though.

  MY FATHER WASN’T HOME, and because I noticed a new pack of matches from Gruel’s All-U-Can-Eat BBQ on the kitchen table, I knew that he’d been there, then home, during my little excursion with Shirley. So I got in the Jeep and drove straight to the Sunken Gardens Lounge. My father and Mr. Lane sat straight up at the bar, across from bartender Red Edwards. From outside the plate-glass window I watched my father in midstory, holding his hands a couple feet in front of his face, palms upward, jerking them back and forth. It looked as though he was shoving an imaginary watermelon to his mouth.

  I walked in and said to Mr. Red Edwards, “A draft beer and a shot of bourbon, please,” like I knew what I was doing. Like I wasn’t the kind of high school–skipping teenager who tried to sell his teachers unpacked tea leaves for pot. Like my misspelled name rightly derived from the eastern Semitic word Mendel, meaning, “A man who gains knowledge by experience and study.”

  My father swiveled somewhat and yelled out, “Mendal! My son, Mendal! Hotdamn, boy, grab yourself a seat over here.” He patted the red-vinyl stool on the other side of him.

  Mr. Red Edwards said, “You want that straight up or on the rocks? House bourbon okay, or are you celebrating something, boy?”

  I knew what “on the rocks” meant, but didn’t cotton to drinking anything Red Edwards bottled on the premises. I said, “I want it straight up, and I want something that’s not house bourbon.”

  Mr. Lane said, “Where’s Comp? How come my son ain’t with you?”

  I said, “I was with him earlier, but he didn’t have to go find out where his mother ended up being dead,” trying to be all cryptic and telling. “So he went on home to have a peaceful night.”

  Mr. Red Edwards slid my beer over to the other side of my father’s space. He handed me the shot of bourbon across the bar. My father said, “Mr. Lane and I just came back from Charlotte. Boy-oh-boy, we had us some business dealings up there.” He lifted his bottle, as did Comp’s daddy.

  I didn’t have the patience to wait for a perfect time to bring up what I thought I knew: that my father had murdered his wife, buried her in a slave graveyard, and used some kind of clay jug for a pathetic marker; that he told me over and over how his wife ran off to Nashville to become another Patsy Cline who wanted to croon in a way that would make men and women alike break down; that he hired some mysterious woman to call me up periodically on the telephone—or send sporadic birthday, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas cards—to say how much she missed me.

  I said, “You haven’t been to Charlotte. You’ve been to Gruel’s All-U-Can-Eat BBQ.” I said, “I know how you killed Mom and buried her over by Mr. Ebo’s farm.”

  To our left, at the end of the bar, Dunny Dunlap urged the pinball machine from his wheelchair. His father stood behind him, feet pressed hard against the wheels so his son wouldn’t roll backwards. The boy would graduate with my class, even though he only got to go to school because his rich Forty-Five National Bank–owning father had paid off the school superintendent somewhere down the line. Dunny’s IQ couldn’t have been much more than those of any of the feral dogs I’d ever encountered, but all of us knew that he’d end up running that bank once his father died off. Dunny performed with the high-school marching band, in his own way. The back of his wheelchair had been designed to hold a snare drum, and Nelson Townes paradiddled away in the rear, while shoving Dunny through the routines—the band members just had to stand together, start an off-key song, then walk to their spots to make a big 45 in the middle of the football field. Because our football team always lost, and because no girl from Forty-Five High would ever date either of us, Comp Lane and I usually sat in the short wooden stands on the visitors’ side, hoping to make time with girls from Greenville, Aiken, McCormick, Ninety Six, Batesburg, Laurens, or Clinton. During the halftime show, from our vantage point, our band looked like it was spelling out S4, which seemed appropriate.

  My father said, “Boy, I hope you think you’re only dreaming. Pain doesn’t hurt as much in dreams.”

  Mr. Lane got up and walked to the men’s room. I said, “Shirley Ebo took me to the graveyard, and I saw that jug you put down for Mom’s tombstone, and I saw all the buttons on it from that picture.”

  My father’s eyes looked exactly like those of the copperheads I’d seen before in the woods. He had his head turned funny, and I could tell that he had sobered immediately. He said, “You stupid son of a bitch.”

  I said, “I saw what I saw,” threw back my bourbon shot, and proceeded to cough it right back out. My father hit my back until I quit. “I saw what I saw, and then I figured out what I figured out.”

  Dunny Dunlap yelled out, “Neeee! Neeee! Neeee!” His father looked at the machine’s back glass and tapped his son’s head over and over.

  My father looked at Mr. Red Edwards and nodded once. I drank half of my beer, cleared my throat, and coughed for five more minutes. “Is Shirley Ebo your girlfriend, Mendal?”

&nb
sp; 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.

  UNEMPLOYMENT

  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.”