The whole time I spoke with Mrs. Ebo, watching her hand flake pig, then knead sauce into it, Shirley sat on the love seat, drumming and tapping her fingers on a one-by-six piece of pine maybe eighteen inches long. Every half minute she said, “Ding.”
I looked behind me and said, “What’re you doing, Shirley Ebo?”
She raised her white palms. “Momma taught me how to type. I’m practicing.”
“When she gets good enough I’mo let her sneak in the mill and work on mine. Best a black girl can do in South Carolina these days’s work as a secretary,” Mrs. Ebo said. In that high, whining, barely audible voice her daughter always used on me when things seemed wrongheaded, Mrs. Ebo said, “Harder to trace a threatening letter or ransom note typed up on a Royal.”
Shirley stopped. “Do Mendal and his daddy have to stay? I don’t want them staying here. It’s a holiday.”
“Shirley,” Mrs. Ebo said. “You apologize, girl. Mr. Dawes is bringing over all the fireworks. You want fireworks, don’t you? It’s Independence Day.”
I stared off at a space on the brown kitchen wall. I couldn’t look at Shirley or her mother, and wished that Mr. Ebo would show up. At the time, I didn’t know that he was with my father, looking for the cheapest beer in a two-county area. And I don’t know what made me all of a sudden realize that it was one southern man, Lyndon B. Johnson, who understood—and later on only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton understood, above all else—how things weren’t right. Sitting there as poor Shirley pecked on a plank of wood, I wondered how and why she and hers ever celebrated independence. I said, “You ain’t got to apologize, Shirley.”
She said, “I don’t care ’bout shooting off bottle rockets or screamers.”
I looked at her mouth to see if she meant streamers. She was eating nothing, but meant what she said.
Shirley continued her fake typing. Mrs. Ebo said, “I can tell that y’all’s reading’s helping. Shirley been reading to me better at night.”
“Momma can’t read,” Shirley said without looking up. “She know the ABCs, but she can’t read yet.”
I was young, understand. I said, “How can you work as a secretary if you can’t read?”
Mrs. Ebo held her hands up out of the meat. “The man writes up what to type, and I find the letters. I ain’t blind.” She washed her hands, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a head of cabbage.
Shirley Ebo said, “I want me some more that skrawberry pie.”
I WON’T SAY that I officially fell in love with Shirley Ebo on the Fourth of July. My father and Mr. Ebo returned in Dad’s weird DeSoto he’d bought for nothing and planned to fix up, as always, and indeed they brought bottle rockets, strings of Black Cats, a couple boxes of sparklers, and cherry bombs. They had M80s, whistling chasers—which most white people called something else, but none of us did on this day—smoke bombs, and assorted cones that sprayed various fizzing colors.
And my father brought case after case of beer. Shirley and I didn’t know that a large-scale party had been planned without our knowledge or approval. About every black family living on Deadfall Road showed up by four o’clock, and then a slew of Ebo uncles, aunts, and cousins. My father’s best friend, Mr. Lane, and my best friend, Compton Lane, showed up, and that was it for white folks, outside of a squirrelly albino second cousin of Shirley’s named White Clay, a boy I’d met some time before while driving around with my dad meeting afflicted people.
My father walked up to Shirley and me at the back of the Ebo property as we tried to hide from everybody. “Y’all aren’t stashing beer away back here for a little celebration of your own, are y’all?”
Shirley shook her head sideways. I said, “No, sir. We’re going through some verb conjugations. Show Dad, Shirley.”
She smiled. “I come, you come, he/she/it comes; we come, you come, they come.”
My father said, “Well all right, then. That’s pretty good, Shirley Ebo.”
Neither Shirley nor I got up from the ground because, sure enough, we had snuck four cans of beer and a church key and stashed them within the root system of an untamed wisteria behind us. I had already shared one of them with Shirley, and, although I thought myself unaffected, I said, “So, Dad, you’re always bragging about how handy you are with tools and whatnot. When’re you going to invent some kind of mouthpiece for Shirley so she can say her words right?”
My father looked up at a bottle rocket stuck and hissing in an oak tree behind him. It popped and showered sparks down on top of White Clay, who yelled how the doctor said he wasn’t allowed to get burned. “What you say, son?”
I made Shirley say some words, then I told her to stick a hot dog in her mouth and say them again. She conjugated “strap,” “strip,” and “stray.” Shirley swallowed and, for some reason, decided it necessary to say, “My momma’s got a cousin in Charlotte who works at a skrip-tease club.”
I said, “I told you, Dad.”
Mr. Ebo walked up and said, “I hope y’all ain’t out here planning no wedding. I ain’t got the money for no church service right now. Shirley, you and Mendal have my blessing to elope.” He was all haw-haw-haw-ain’t-our-childrens-innocent-at-this-age about it. He let his gold tooth shine.
My father took Shirley’s chin and edged her head back. He stared in. “I can grind out a nice small piece of pine. Later on tonight let me pull out my tape measure and micrometer. I can get something in there that’ll help you out. This’ll be a challenge. I’m betting we can fix you up nicely.”
Shirley started to talk, stopped, bit into her hot dog, and said, “Mendal, you got to give me a string of pearls before I say ‘I do.’”
Compton Lane walked into the backyard. He watched us all and said, “Hey, Mr. Ebo. Mr. Dawes. Lookit what I got.” He held up a six-pack. “Put these with the ones y’all hid, Mendal. Has Shirley loosened up any for you yet?”
My father said, “I can mold a piece of pine. You ain’t allergic to pine, are you Shirley?”
Somebody lit a cherry bomb. Mrs. Ebo yelled out how she had more barbecue and cole slaw ready. Shirley hiccupped. I knew that I’d lost my goodwill volunteer job tutoring at that moment.
THE TOWN OF Forty-Five somehow held on to the Forty-Five Indoor Movie House running over the years. I didn’t realize until I moved away years later that most of the films we saw had already been seen by the rest of America six to ten years earlier. For all that most of my hometown knew, I’m willing to bet, World War II had occurred between about 1951 and 1955 or thereabouts, what with those newsreels.
The Forty-Five Indoor was the tallest building in town, for it had a balcony. Black people were forced to sit up there. They had their own line going in, too, through a side door. Not to sound weird or liberal, but as a child I wanted to watch a movie from upstairs more than anything else. It seemed to me that Son of Flubber would be bouncier, Cleopatra sexier, when viewed from above.
Outside of masquerading in blackface, there was no chance that I could go up there, though. Once or twice Compton and I stood in the black line, but we never made it to the ticket booth, seeing as we got the feeling that we weren’t wanted by our queue-mates up top.
Right before the school year started, Comp and I rode our bicycles into town—still on the lookout for monkeys and anacondas—to see Cool Hand Luke. We sat in the middle of the lower level, kind of confused about the parking meters at the beginning of the movie, as neither of us had ever seen one. Paul Newman walked around that town wrenching and clipping the heads off. I whispered to Comp, “I don’t think it’s his job,” like Luke was an employee of the city or something. Ten years later I would sign up for a film studies course taught by a Marxist-feminist-Freudian professor. She believed that Cool Hand Luke’s actions replicated circumcision, and that he was crying out for a return to the womb—a place where no one could instill capitalistic values in him.
Compton and I watched that movie slightly disappointed. Both his father and mine had eaten fifty hard-boiled eggs at one sittin
g, easy. We had all kinds of kinfolk and family friends who had escaped from prison at one time or another. Eating cockroaches wasn’t that big of a deal—I’d eaten a salt-covered slug once, on a dare from Comp, and he’d bitten the head off a female praying mantis right after reading about what they do to their mates.
During one of those chain-gang scenes, I felt something wet hit the top of my head. I put my hand up there and felt water, then looked at the ceiling for a leak. Within a minute—Cool Hand Luke had just run off with that other guy with the fake southern accent—my head got spattered again. I turned and looked at Glenn Flack behind me, but his plastic black-rimmed glasses only reflected the screen.
I looked up at the balcony and saw Shirley Ebo.
She was sitting in the front row, her popcorn box and Coke resting on the long banister that kept Forty-Five’s black population from spilling onto the rest of us. Shirley had her feet up—maybe she was undergoing growing pains—so that her face was framed between shoe soles.
She spit again.
Shirley Ebo took the wooden hockey puck that my father had carved out of her mouth and threw it down hard. This mouthpiece glanced off Glenn Flack’s head and landed three or four rows ahead of me. On the screen, dogs bayed crazy, looking for their prey.
“You ain’t as nice as you think, Mendal. You ain’t as cool as you think, either.”
I mean, she yelled this out. Every white person on the lower level of the Forty-Five Indoor Movie House turned and looked upwards. Compton Lane said, “Your girlfriend’s calling you.”
Glenn Flack from behind me said, “You’re in trouble, Mendal Dawes.” He held his head, and kept looking at his palm to see if blood showed yet.
Shirley Ebo went into her high-whining voice and said things about how white people thought they knew everything, how white people didn’t know what really went on in the world, how white people were the poison of the earth. She yelled, “Mendal sits down there now, but he wants to be up here with me.” She said, “What’s it matter what a woman sounds like talking, as long as you know what she means?”
Cool Hand Luke got shot in church. His best friend yelled out and tried to attack the sniper.
Everyone filed out of the separate sides once the movie was over. Those of us who were kids, we would study history, government, and biology for real, soon. We would try to understand the outside world better, or as best we could without much warning as to what was ahead of us in terms of cause and effect. My hometown’s adults would leave, walking in straight lines, humming whatever easy songs evolved in their heads.
ASPHALT’S BETTER THAN CINDER
Even though he starred in this stupid educational documentary about parasites on his scalp, Bennie Frewer probably didn’t really have head lice. I’ll tell you what—and I know it’s flat-out mean—but whenever one of the prettier girls in our class looked like she doubted Bennie’s affliction, either Compton Lane or I would mention seeing Bennie’s nit comb poking from his back pocket or the barber flapping his CLOSED sign upon viewing Bennie Frewer and his father trudging up Montague Street to get themselves dual flattops.
Those were competitive days, when we all knew inherently how difficult it might be to escape Forty-Five, and that a pretty girlfriend or wife for the rest of our days in a town best known for its “Widest Main Street in the World!” and “Second Largest Population of Albino Squirrels!” might be the best we could ever do while working at Forty-Five Cotton Mill in a midlevel management position.
Later on in life I would read some French philosopher’s notion that every society needed a madman so that we could all feel better about ourselves. The same went for small South Carolina communities: we needed our freaks, goof-balls, pinheads, schizophrenics, dwarves, losers, adulterers, freckled children, Peeping Toms, exhibitionists, near-gays, and has-beens in order to feel like we all lived upstanding, fulfilled, committed lives. In the sixth through twelfth grades Bennie Frewer participated as our one-boy caste of untouchables. Without him, I supposed even back then, it would’ve been me. My chin’s size and shape were unlike anything this side of half a loaf of white bread.
“Your friend Bennie’s coming over later to spend the night in the backyard with you,” my father said one Friday in September. I’d planned on riding my bike over to Forty-Five High School to watch the Forty-Five High Speed Fire Ant team get smeared by the Ninety Six Wildcats. Compton and I liked to walk around the cinder track nonstop—as did about another fifty sixth- and seventh-grade boys. We stuck our right hands in our front pockets with our middle fingers out when we walked past the visitors’ bleachers, lap after lap, during the entire game. On the home side we slowed down to watch the cheerleaders and pretended like we knew things about sex that we wouldn’t understand until our junior years in college. “Mr. Frewer’s a friend, and his boy needs one.”
I made a face. “Bennie Frewer’s got head lice, Dad. I can’t have him over here. Comp and I are going to the football game.”
“Well, Comp and you and Bennie can go to the game. But afterwards, Bennie and you will camp out in the backyard. Comp can, too, if he wants. If you think that you’re going to get head lice from Bennie—and you won’t, by the way—consider it as living dangerously.”
My father wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I figured he must’ve owed Mr. Frewer some money or—this was later on, too—that he had had an affair with Bennie’s mother. I will admit that I kind of whined out, “Dad,” in the way that Bennie Frewer had on finding out that he had head lice in his ETV-supported television documentary.
“I have the pup tent all ready,” my father said. “I have a place for y’all to build a bonfire and roast marshmallows and weenies.”
This is the weird part: I actually said, “I think Bennie doesn’t eat meat. He’s turned himself into a vegetarian, so I’m willing to bet that he doesn’t want anything to do with wieners.”
“Look, son. There are times in life when you have to do some things for other people. That’s just the end of that.” When my father said, “That’s just the end of that,” it meant that the monologue might go on for half a day. “I’ve been trying to teach you that there are other people from other stations in life. Evidently you’re not getting it. Get it, boy. What I’m trying to teach you is that there are some people out here in the world that ain’t got it as good as you. There’re some people, you know?” My father went into the kitchen and picked up a yardstick from Snead’s Builder Supply, which he’d used to hit me on the hamstrings before. He slicked his black, black hair back, then wiped the Brylcreem off on his blue work pants. “Goddamn, sometimes you sear my sack.”
Dad held that yardstick like a saber. This is no lie: I wondered if a metric stick would hurt more or less, if the extra few inches caused more of a whiplash pain, or less. I said, “Yessir. Okay. I’ll do it.”
My father said, “I can dig a hole out back, fill it with ice, and stick beer out there.”
I said, “Yessir.”
My father began twirling his yardstick in a way that didn’t make me comfortable. It’s not like I thought he’d hit me anymore—no, I worried that he had some kind of majorette tendencies. “You’re now, what—twelve, thirteen years old?”
“Yeah. You’re in the right vicinity.”
“I know I gave you a beer back in the third grade. And I’ve kept track of what beer I kept in the fridge, by the way, so I know you know.”
I didn’t know. I thought my father couldn’t even count, since he always told complete strangers that exactly zero wives—my mother—had left him in his whole life.
I tried to think of what I could talk to Bennie Frewer about in a pup tent. My father spent more time out there at night either pining about his wife, my mother, leaving, or digging these deep oblong holes he tended to dig in order to bury whatever he needed to conceal, things I pretended not to know about.
I said, “That tent smells like an old sock. It smells like bad cheese, like dirty wet towels, like a river-swimming dog, lik
e a basement bag of flood-ridden Bibles, like a Persian rug left outside during monsoon season.” We’d been studying similes in our weird sixth-grade class. I kind of got into it. I said, “That pup tent smells kind of like an ashtray filled with junebugs.”
My father stuck his yardstick through one of his belt loops. He looked at the ceiling. “And I’ll throw in a half-pint of peach bounce,” he said.
WHEN WE GOT past the visitors’ side—at the fourth curve of the track toward Forty-Five’s cheerleaders—Bennie Frewer took one look at beautiful Ferrell Waldrep and said, “I would flip her over to the B-side and see what that song sounded like.”
Comp wasn’t with us. When he found out that Bennie Frewer would be tagging along he called up and said, “Y’all go on without me. What’s your father trying to do to you, man? You’re going to end up just like Bennie if people see you with him.”
To Bennie I said, “What’re you talking about?” I held a stack of wax Coke cups that, when stomped correctly, sounded like shotgun blasts. Bennie held another twenty or thereabouts.
Bennie smiled and nodded his head up and down as fast as a skittering metal toy frog. “You know. I’d do her from behind.”
Let me say here that my father had offered me zero sex talks—another reason I figured he couldn’t count—and, although I could come up with something like sixty similes in a minute, I knew nothing about human relationships beyond scratching a dog’s side until she thumped a leg crazy. Oh, my father had tried once a few years earlier, but he happened to be drunk, and I pretty much guessed that he’d made things up, about seeds and eggs and placenta. I said to Bennie, “Yeah. I’d do that to her, too.”
We walked past the cheerleaders real cool and didn’t look up at the parents, high-school students, and ex–Forty-Five football players who made up the crowd in the stands. I tried to either walk six steps ahead of Bennie or lag behind and search the cinder track for arrowheads. We made it past Ferrell, Bunny Barnett, and Julie Sizemore—Forty-Five could only afford three cheerleaders, and if there was ever a vote for Most Spectacular Pyramid Formation in the History of High School Cheerleading, my future school would come in dead last. The cheerleaders were finishing up that ubiquitous, “Unh, ungowah—you know we got the power” cheer as Bennie brushed up against Julie Sizemore. He said, “You got you a nice B-side, too.”
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