Like I said, Bennie Frewer never really spoke much to me again. I think that somewhere in that period my father broke Mr. Frewer’s jaw for cursing at him. Shirley Ebo, though, spoke with me daily for the rest of my life, if only through her eyes, her swishing down school hallways, her wagging finger and smile, the shake of her wild head.
IN NEED OF BETTER HOBBIES
Coach Adair prided himself on transforming boxwoods into topiary figures without the use of hedge clippers. According to him, our seventh-grade coach, he could stare down and persuade a wisteria into becoming one of the Seven Dwarves, or a redbud into a groundhog at full roadside attention. Of course he couldn’t, but we never challenged our insane coach’s ability to control his own plants, bushes, trees, or lawn. Adair shied from regular topiary figures: stallions, Disney characters, grazing sheep, historical figures. Instead, the coach trained his personal botanical treasures into giant cobras—our junior high’s unlikely mascot. Right there in class, Coach Adair swore on the Bible that he had only to stare down a plant in order to make it permanently flange out a hood, then sway east and west. When we look back on things, maybe it didn’t take that much mental telepathy to bend a rose of Sharon or Leyland cypress into an erect, hooded viper.
We did our sit-ups, squat-thrusts, push-ups, pull-ups, and hurdler’s stretches there on the hardwood gymnasium floor third period, and we ran those stupid things called suicides that ruined our tennis shoes. On occasion, Coach Adair took us outside to play dodgeball, using unripe peaches that he gathered from a tree in his backyard, which, he said, would one day grow into the biggest cobra north of Panama.
We said, “Hey there, Coach Adair,” when we passed him in the halls.
He said, “A-dare,” like that. He wore short gray coach’s pants every day, and a Clemson University T-shirt. Black-rubber-soled shoes and white tube socks. Adair was the offensive line coach for football each fall, assistant basketball coach in winter, and golf coach each spring. Our golf team consisted of a half-dozen white boys whose daddies worked in Forty-Five Cotton Mill management. When he didn’t coach P.E. he taught a course in South Carolina history for students who hadn’t quite passed it in first, third, or fifth grades. From what I understood, Coach Adair skipped over people like John C. Calhoun and General Francis Marion, the entire Fort Sumter Civil War episode, and Dixiecrats, in order to focus on various questionable horticulture experiments going on at state-supported agriculture colleges—namely Clemson—ranging from edible kudzu to seedless fruits. From what I heard, he spent most of his time explaining how South Carolina’s chief crops—tobacco, cotton, and soybeans—could probably be coaxed into lifelike topiaries, which could only aid in the tourist industry.
One time in the middle of P.E. class he even piped out, “Y’all boys get in good shape maybe you can get jobs on golf courses down Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, Charleston. Tourism’s the quintessexual job future for me and you.”
I couldn’t make these things up.
Coach Adair’s best—we learned later that it was his only—friend at Forty-Five Junior High was the shop teacher, a man named Mr. Finger, who made everyone build caskets to be used down at the county farm for prisoners buried in a potter’s field out back. I didn’t take shop, but I heard boys in the smoking area laugh about how Mr. Finger would start every day off by saying, “Fingers is important, boys. They the second best friend a girl can have, you’ll learn later in life. So don’t cut y’all’ses off.”
And I should mention that, although the school budget got cut something like 50 percent every year after the nearby bomb factory laid off workers as Vietnam slowed down, the Forty-Five Junior High football team always had enough booster club money to buy new uniforms, pads, helmets, grass seed, and chalk. This went unnoticed by every Forty-Five resident, probably, outside of a good, serious science teacher named Lanky Jenkins, who tried to run his class without Bunsen burners, petri dishes, test tubes, beakers, dissection frogs, tongs, goggles, and scalpels.
Mr. Lane, my friend Compton’s father, drank with Lanky Jenkins on Wednesday nights, when the rest of Forty-Five attended Baptist church services. According to my father, Mr. Lane was a communist and the only other person in town who seemed to understand the need for unions. Mr. Lane got tabbed an instigator only because he sold some land in a white neighborhood to a black funeral home director richer than 99 percent of the town. Over time, the story turned into how Comp’s daddy actually had given the two acres away just to upset longtime residents still worried over particular stations in life.
Maybe he had. I only know that Comp and I got paid good money to sneak onto Coach Adair’s property one Wednesday night—when no one would be around what-soever, seeing as they sang the doxology and those other hymns in their weird churches—armed with scythes, limb cutters, machetes, and sling blades to cut Coach Adair’s cobras down.
WE DIDN’T KNOW that Mr. Lane believed that pathetic Forty-Five would one day shrink to become a town of even simpler-minded misfits unless a slew of teachers either got fired or quit and a whole new batch replaced them. Whenever I was over at Compton’s house—usually drinking bad cans of cheap beer right in front of Mr. Lane, seeing as he handed them over like most Forty-Five fathers handed over shotgun shells to their sons—I bet I heard his daddy say “zeitgeist” at least once per visit. I thought maybe he had sneezed or had heard one of us do so. When I was a sophomore in college, one of my professors used the term and I pretty much jerked straight up in my seat. The professor had said, “Spirit of the time!” like that, staring at the ceiling, his little pencil-thin moustache winging out like a tiny, tiny turkey vulture in midglide.
I remember that it was a mandatory course in art history, and we had talked about Marcel Duchamp.
“My father needs to talk to you,” Comp said to me, walking from P.E. to fourth period English on a Thursday in mid-October.
I said, “What did I do?” What I had done was sneak a six-pack of PBR from Mr. Lane’s garage on my way out the night before. It wasn’t like Compton didn’t do the same from mine, always.
We carried our books carelessly. “He wants us both to be there, man. I told him how you didn’t have anything to do on Friday, seeing as you never have anything to do. He wants to talk to you and me both. Seven o’clock.”
Added together, Comp and I already stood twelve feet tall and didn’t weigh much more than two-forty. But we didn’t have acne. Mr. Lane said to me once, “You’ll find drunks with scarred-up faces, Mendal, but they only started drinking afterwards. To forget about their acne. Oh, it’s a fine and mysterious line.”
I couldn’t think of an excuse not to meet Mr. Lane. I said, “Okay.” We passed the president of the glee club, but she looked the other way.
Comp tapped his book against his hip. “Did you read this Mark Twain stuff? God-o-mighty. Getting somebody else to paint a fence doesn’t seem like that big a scam to me. That old boy would’ve never made it around here. I’ve about had it. My cousin Dale’s thinking about going up to Alaska to work on some kind of oil pipeline. Let’s you and me go. There’s nothing but money, oil, and women in Alaska, according to Dale. Money, oil, and women mix.”
It’s what he said. We were thirteen years old. I remember it vividly. We walked down the B Wing’s checkered linoleum hallway toward our English class. We passed the star golfer on Coach Adair’s team, who was struggling to remember his locker combination. Not that I’m one of those guys who can only remember what happened in school—whenever I returned to Forty-Five, more often than not some pinhead son-of-a-banker who became another banker would say something like, “You ’member that time when I dropped a pencil on the floor in maff class and looked up Vivian’s dress?”—but this day stood out because it would change our lives.
I said, “I’m not going to Alaska. What’s in Alaska? I’ll get out of town somehow. But there’s Florida, Kentucky, and Ohio. There’s Delaware.”
Comp shrugged. “Well, I promised Dad you’d come over. He thinks you’re
the only friend I have who can keep his mouth shut and his testicles swinging. That’s what he said, word for word, I swear to God.”
We passed Libby Belcher, one of the cheerleaders. I said, “Hey, Libby,” but she didn’t hear me. To Comp I said, “I’m your only friend, idiot. And your father’s crazier than mine. But I’ll be there. I’ll show up on time.” As we walked into the classroom I kept saying, “I’ll be there, I’ll be there,” like some kind of retard. I wouldn’t think about this moment again until studying The Waste Land and that “Hurry up please, it’s time” part.
Comp sat down in his desk. He said, “Our sea of excuses doesn’t seem to have enough waves anymore.” I told him to shut up.
“Y’ALL MAY GROW up to be the types of men who won’t even cut the grass, seeing as you think it hurts a living thing,” Mr. Lane told us. He wore brown pants and a blue work shirt. His hair bristled as thick as a boot scraper. “I’ve talked to your daddy, Mendal, and he’s a hundred percent behind what I’m going to have y’all do for good reason. As a matter of fact he told me personally just yesterday that if he had fifty extra bucks he’d hire you and Compton here his self.”
I sat in what had always been Mr. Lane’s chair. Comp sat on the den floor cross-legged. The television wasn’t on. Mr. Lane stood above us half-hunched, as if he didn’t know whether to call a huddle or work up some gas. I said, “Yessir.”
“Now, Mendal, I’ve taught my boy here all there is to know about cause-and-effect. And I’m fully aware that most parents don’t have time to even come close to such high-minded thinking. Your father’s my friend, and I’m sure he’s done a good job. But I’m sure that every other man in Forty-Five’s pretty much said wipe your butt, tie your shoes, drive a car, and wear a rubber. I’m not making any comments on how to barbecue, understand. Everybody’s got a favorite, time-tested recipe, right?”
I already felt drunk and he’d not opened his special refrigerator yet. “I guess so,” I said, though I didn’t follow his monologue.
“Show off some cause-and-effect, son,” Mr. Lane said to Comp.
My buddy didn’t pause. He stood up. “Men quit cutting grass. Grass grows high. Venomous snakes have a place to hide. Dogs run out and get bitten by snakes. Dogs die in high grass and rot. Buzzards come down and eat like all get-out. Men have to shoot buzzards. Buzzards are protected by the law, so men go to jail. There are no fathers left in America. The grass keeps growing, letting off useful gasses. We live in a cleaner, less-polluted environment.”
“You got that right,” Mr. Lane said. He slapped Compton twice hard on his pate. “See, Mendal, that’s good cause-and-effect. It’s what your daddy and I were talking.”
Comp sat back down. I said, “I need to go home.”
“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Mr. Lane said. “We’re going to make it so every Forty-Five student has a chance to get a perfect score on those college tests y’all have to take in a few years. Then you’ll go off to a top-notch school. Then you’ll come back to South Carolina and live more productive lives. Get it?”
Comp said—and later I would give him two dollars for saying it—“We might understand it better if you’d share some of your latest investment, Dad.”
Mr. Lane’s eyebrows, oddly enough, looked soft, and kind of moved like a stand of sea oats. “If I give you a beer each, I might go to jail. If y’all mess up and tell on me. On us.” Then, like his son, he went from unkempt lawns to clean air. Mr. Lane walked into the kitchen. He said, “So none of us should ever feel bad or guilty. Y’all’s Coach Adair might get unemployed, but he’ll be all that much healthier in the long run.”
It would’ve been a good time to kick back the La-Z-Boy and swing my legs upward in celebration. I didn’t. Later on I would tell this rite-of-passage story to my wife, friends, and colleagues. I would exaggerate and say how I shimmied my hands in the air like a vaudevillian dance troupe member. To Mr. Lane I said, “Coach Adair says we won’t get an A unless we shoot forty-five free throws in a row, sink a putt from forty-five feet, or run the mile in less than four forty-five. We can’t get him any madder than he already is.”
Mr. Lane handed me a can of Olympia he’d gotten shipped in from Washington state. “I have some frosted glasses in the freezer. You want a frosted glass, Mendal?”
“No sir,” I said. My father was exactly like Mr. Lane, except for the frosted glasses thing.
“If Adair goes nuts do you think his replacement’s going to want the same thing?” Mr. Lane asked me. “No.” He held his eyebrows arched upward and his mouth in an O. One time I saw a documentary on Russian male ballet dancers, and they displayed similar facial expressions.
Comp stood up. He took from his beer, then lifted the can toward me in salute. “To our missing moms.”
Mr. Lane jerked his head. “Do you think Adair’s ways are going to help you get into college later on, Mendal? Do you think you’ll ever have to sink forty-five free throws to pass a final exam in philosophy, or anthropology? You’ll be taking those kinds of courses, believe me. I can tell. I know. And my son.”
One time Comp and I played a game of H-O-R-S-E that lasted two days. Neither one of us could make a shot. I said, “Maybe I’d have to sink free throws in math.” I said, “I don’t know.” Mr. Lane bobbed his head up and down like a windup toy. He said for me to trust him.
Comp said, “If Mendal had a date tonight, then he’d have a hard-on. If he had a hard-on, then he’d mess his pants. If he messed his pants then he’d go to a dry cleaner, learn how much dry cleaners make for a living, then aim his sights on being a plain dry cleaner for the rest of his life.”
“Good work, son,” Mr. Lane said. “Now let me go get tools out of the shed to make sure you little weenies will know how to use them next Wednesday night. Zeitgeist!”
I said, “Bless you, sir.”
MAYBE I SHOULD mention again that my own father hung out with Mr. Lane and Lanky Jenkins, the science teacher, Wednesday nights while everyone else in Forty-Five underwent midweek prayer meetings. I don’t think my father was a full-fledged red-card-carrying communist at this point, but he knew enough to hate my mother’s father once Mom took off without warning; my father realized he had to quit working for his father-in-law and start up any kind of business that would contradict his in-law family’s means of sustenance.
Maybe I should mention how most Wednesday nights these three men drove aimlessly around the small town of Forty-Five, through the “Widest Main Street in America” with its six or eight shops on both sides of what was really only a major railroad confluence. These men commented on how it would be easy to break into houses and steal what pathetic belongings these people held within their walls. “If anyone knew art outside of laminated plastic Norman Rockwell place mats, we could release ourselves to places between Miami and Minneapolis,” my father once said to me as he burned hamburger patties, right before a Little League game where I’d get bruised up trying to catch Yancey Allison’s knuckleball. “We could go to Memphis and eat real chopped barbecue nightly. We wouldn’t have to drive all the way over to Gruel BBQ.”
These men drove three abreast in Mr. Lane’s Cadillac, with a cooler in back. If there had been reliable local cops in Forty-Five they wouldn’t have pulled Comp’s father over, seeing as he either owned their rental houses or sold them trailer land cheap. My dad and his friends cruised, from what I understood, doing what a teenager would think of as unplanned scouring.
Comp and I acted similarly soon thereafter, and I would be surprised that we never got caught, maybe weaving up Deadfall Road, our pockets filled with loose Lipton’s tea, pretending to have marijuana that we sold to the two smartest female Forty-Five classmates, who later went to the College of William and Mary and Wake Forest. Not to mention what we nearly sold to our high-school Spanish teacher. But this particular Wednesday night was five years before smart women entered our doomed weekends.
“Dad says they’ll be right around the corner if we get in trouble.
If for some reason the churches let out early,” Comp said.
We stood in the middle of Coach Adair’s front yard, like idiots, holding farm and garden implements of destruction. This was eerie—cobras loomed above us from all angles. I was the first one to whisper, “There’s no way we’re not going to get caught doing this.”
Comp watched his father’s taillights fade down Edgefield Street. He said, “I’d rather get caught by the police than by Hey-There, A-Dare. He’d kill us. He’d beat us with a pitching wedge.”
And then we went to work. I took a machete and knocked down a stray Japanese plum tree as if it were goldenrod. I walked five feet over to a nice, full, bowed and persuaded persimmon tree and hacked it six inches from its root ball. Comp laughed and laughed, then whacked every cobra cypress, cobra red tip, and cobra spruce. Me, I looked up at the sky and noticed how no God’s face appeared in the stars, no matter how hard I tried to connect the dots.
We hewed Coach Adair’s yard. We harvested faster than Comp’s father thought we could’ve. If there was a Guinness World Records category for turning topiary into wasteland, then Comp and Mendal would’ve ranked first and only, is what I’m saying.
We never spoke to each other. We looked back at the deciduous destruction we’d leveled, and I still don’t know how Comp felt, but I knew deep down what we did was wrong, no matter what the long-term effects his father had rationalized. “Fifty dollars each won’t be too bad,” my best friend said. “You need to say ‘thank you’ to Dad when he comes back, you know.”
I said, “I will,” even though I didn’t feel good about what we’d done. Most fathers received vicarious pleasure from their sons shooting par or better. Why was it that our dads wanted only for us to prove ourselves as swindle-worthy as they?
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