Why Dogs Chase Cars

by George Singleton

  “This’ll work out better than you think, Mendal. I know what’s going to happen afterwards.”

  I stood on spongy ground surrounded by sad, felled cobras. In the distance I thought I could hear my father hoot out the open passenger window. Both Compton and I wore black watch caps at his father’s insistence.

  When our fathers returned with the man who would teach us how to dissect a regular local toad using box cutters and chopsticks, they piled out of the Brougham better than European secret agents. Lanky Jenkins pulled three signs from the trunk, then held the wooden spikes as my father hammered them into the ground. Mr. Lane took a can of spray paint and went to work on poor Coach Adair’s front-porch windows. Comp and I threw our garden tools in the open trunk before getting in the backseat with the cooler between us. I said, “They seem to have thought this out over a long period of time.”

  Comp lifted the Styrofoam lid. “You don’t even know, man. My father’s been talking about this night since you and me got stuck in Adair’s stupid class.”

  “Goddamn,” I said. I didn’t mention how maybe Comp’s daddy was insane, too. Later on I would watch daytime talk shows concerning obsessed human beings and understand that Mr. Lane could’ve been elected president of any obsessive organization, that he would’ve been self-nominated over and over and over until everyone else wore out.

  The men executed their part of the job and returned to their front-seat positions. Comp’s father motioned not to close the doors, and we drove out of Coach Adair’s driveway without headlights for a good mile down the road.

  “Pass up a few cans, boys,” Lanky Jenkins finally said, half-turning his face. “Y’all know not to mention any of this back at school.”

  Comp said, “We kind of figured that out.”

  I said, “Thank you, Mr. Lane. Thanks.”

  My own father said, “You boys don’t even tell your mothers what we done, should they ever get back into your lives. They ain’t getting back in touch with y’all, are they? Mendal, you’re not holding out on me, right?”

  I said, “What were those signs? I couldn’t read them in the dark.”

  Mr. Lane hit the horn and bucked his head forward twice. “‘Forty-Five Sucks, Forty-Five Sucks,’” and “‘Ninety Six Rules.’”

  Ninety Six’s elementary, junior, and high schools regularly beat Forty-Five in any sport. This’ll tell you about our area of South Carolina: an Indian maiden crossed forty-five creeks to tell pioneers how the British were advancing on their settlement back in 1776. That same maiden crossed ninety-six creeks to warn settlers in what later became Ninety Six, only fourteen miles away. One time Lanky Jenkins took his science class on a three-day walking field trip, and they forded eight streams between the two towns.

  Or: an Indian maiden ran forty-five miles, et cetera, then ninety-six miles—as if Indian maidens kept odometers on their ankles. Whatever, no one seemed to question why the British ever encamped forty-five or ninety-six or, hell, two hundred miles from our pathetic crust of red-clay piedmont. Did they need indigo?

  I said, “Coach Adair will think all this was done by Ninety Six pranksters.”

  “Cause-and-effect, Mendal.” Mr. Lane leaned forward to look past Lanky Jenkins and said to my father, “Good job, Heart Pine. Good parenting.”

  We drove twenty miles an hour, not going toward anyone’s house. My father, whose name was Lee, told Mr. Lane not to call him Heart Pine. I said, again, “Thank you, Mr. Lane. Thanks for the money,” though we’d not received it yet.

  I COULDN’T LOOK Coach Adair in the face Thursday third period. And Coach Adair didn’t seem intent on teaching us the intricacies of throwing medicine balls to one another like he’d promised a day earlier. Even when we passed him in the morning before homeroom and said, “Hey there, Coach Adair,” he stared forward, the only sound coming out of him the squeak of his rubber-soled coach’s shoes on linoleum. In the middle of our class three hours later he plain wandered off.

  In fourth-period English class I reached over to Comp and said, “I’m glad we’re over with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. What were we supposed to read last night?”

  Mrs. Herndon came in wearing a pink pantsuit. She said, “I know this will make y’all sad, but we’re going to have an unscheduled assembly this period. We have to go to the cafeteria.”

  Our stupid and slight principal, Mr. Knox, stood in front of the mashed-potato lady and held his hands up for us to sit down. “I know some of y’all have friends or cousins over in Ninety Six. And I know how important our game is with them tonight. But some them fans come over here last night and cut down all Coach Adair’s cobras.” There was a clear, loud chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” and a couple of “those bastards,” just like in a bad teen movie shown mostly at the Forty-Five Drive-In. Coach Adair’s cobras had attracted people from all over—at Christmas he put lights on them. I didn’t look over at Comp; I looked for Coach Adair, but he wasn’t in attendance.

  The assistant principal, Mr. White—who made Knox look like a genius—said, “If any of y’all’ses know names, you need to give them up. This is a federal offense.”

  A federal offense! I thought for about two seconds before I realized that maybe he didn’t know the law. All of my Forty-Five Junior High classmates shook their heads sideways, like they would’ve if we’d had a tennis team for Coach Adair to supervise.

  Libby Belcher stood on a lunchroom table, lifted her arms, performed a split, and yelled, “What do we need, what do we need?”

  “Forty-Five Cobra poison!” my moron classmates yelled, outside of Comp and me and some of the special kids who got pushed in from their portables out back of the L-shaped building.

  “Kill those Ninety-Sixers—uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh!”

  Later on I wondered if dyslexic students from Ninety Six got real popular with members of the opposite sex. But I didn’t think any of this inside the cafeteria. I felt my face redden, afraid I’d get caught.

  I sat at the table where I always ate lima beans, canned peaches, mashed potatoes, and meat loaf. I sat and made a point of keeping eye contact with the principal, a man who would later duct tape a garden hose to his muffler and off himself just because the football team went 0-10 three years in a row, which caused Forty-Five High to go 0-10 three years in a row subsequently, seeing as the same players were playing, which caused people to write editorials in the Forty-Five Platter asking what had happened to our school system. I didn’t look peripherally and ignored Libby Belcher’s pleas concerning the upcoming game.

  I thought of my father, and Comp’s father. I tried not to think about how I would eventually learn biology from a man who leaned toward promoting anarchy.

  I remembered a time when Coach Adair took all of us in his P.E. class outside, how he had found a spectacular ant-hill, and how—for fifty minutes—we watched ants work back and forth, some carrying food into the mound, others leaving on missions of some sort. Coach Adair had said, “Teamwork. I want y’all to understand teamwork.”

  Maybe we listened closer than he ever thought we would.

  MY FATHER AND his friends got their way. As it ended up, while we listened to Knox and White blather on, slaughtering the English language and offering up illogical, useless, too obvious “epiphanies,” Coach Adair was loading up on gasoline cans and Ohio Blue Tip matches. That afternoon he burned down the entire Ninety Six field, the wooden bleachers, two school buses, and their gym. He got caught within an hour. The local paper ran a long article about the disaster, then a short item three pages later about the culprit. Word was he just yelled, “They only jealous, they only jealous,” on his way to jail. He didn’t return to school, but we received mimeographed statements before the year was out saying how Coach Adair was sorry for his actions, and how none of us should follow in his footsteps, and how we should all pray for him. Coach Adair wrote an open letter to the Forty-Five Platter about how we should look toward South Carolinian Joel Poinsett, inventor of the poinsettia, as a leader.

/>   And then he somehow got shipped away somewhere in the manner that only guilty, half-insane schoolteachers do. He didn’t go to prison. But he was never far from a padded cell, from what we understood.

  When I ran a mile in 4:44 one year later—an age-group state record—I thought of Coach Adair. While I ran, though, I could only zip those “blank is to blank, as blank is to blank” propositions through my head, so I would end up with a better SAT score, as if “blank is to blank” mattered whatsoever. I ran and ran my four laps, and hunched my shoulders waiting for a second wind, and blew my nose using thumb to nostrils like my father taught me.

  I never took up golf. I didn’t play basketball in a way that would get me placed on a foul line. Coach Adair finally moved to the small town of Gig, South Carolina, once released from the mental institution in Columbia. He got a job teaching, too—at Gig Junior High, where their mascot was, of course, a frog. The Gig Frogs. I tried to imagine wild rosebushes transformed into leaping, water-thriving amphibians.

  Compton and I never again brought up Coach Adair’s name. We couldn’t. Our fathers had us focused on a man teaching history named Mr. Case who thought God made America biggest of all the continents on purpose, a man who believed dates didn’t matter except for Jesus’ birthday and Easter. He didn’t have plants out in his front yard, though. He had no obvious hobbies worthy of destruction. Some mornings I woke up to find my father and Mr. Lane together at the kitchen table, drinking coffee before dawn. I understood that they were scheming ways to persuade Mr. Case from teaching, and that somehow Comp and I would be their assistants, earning money to fund our own way out of town.

  NO FEAR OF GOD OR HELL

  I learned early on that psychiatrists and dentists don’t care about their patients being cured. Why would a therapist want a client to stop having neuroses, nightmares, or delusions? Why would a dentist promote a brushing technique that would eradicate cavities forever?

  My father took the time to let me in on a number of the mysteries of capitalism: how lawn care men had no choice but to spread fertilizers and weed spores sporadically; how no doctor cared about a cure for the common cold, red or German measles, migraine headaches, acne, or arthritis; how fishmongers, butchers, and farmers didn’t want the government to develop a long-lasting preservative. Way before anything made it to the newspapers, my father predicted that tobacco corporations had included addictive ingredients on par with heroin and vagina—his words and theory—to cigarettes.

  I came to understand how entomologists had developed a chemical that kept termites away from wooden building materials, but that the lumber industry paid them off to keep it a secret. Oil companies didn’t give us their best. Although the United States Patent Office might have another inventor’s name down on the list, in reality it was a lawyer who thought up the foam-rubber neck brace and the term “whiplash.” Stockbrokers never gave up their best tips, seeing as their clients would get rich, retire, and stop investing. Insurance agents hadn’t been mentioned in Dante’s circles of Hell only because they didn’t exist back then. There were razor blades out there in the laboratories of America that never needed sharpening, batteries that never died, light bulbs that didn’t fizzle, clothes that didn’t wear or fade, asphalt that didn’t succumb to potholes, and reusable ice cubes. There were oak trees that never lost their leaves, but the rake manufacturers didn’t want that secret out. Veterinarians just plain made up canine and feline diseases in order to shoot up domestic pets with spurious vaccines and antidotes.

  I heard it all. My father should’ve invested some money in a muckraking, yellow-journalism rag to sell at annual meetings for the disenfranchised, skeptical, and out of touch. Oddly, my father believed that man had landed on the moon instead of somewhere in the Mojave Desert. Unfortunately, he also believed that we’d already put a series of daredevil secret soldiers on Mars and on all of Jupiter’s moons, and that there was a hole in the ocean that went all the way through, guarded by bivalve mollusks on both sides at the two-and-a-half-mile depth mark. When I asked him what was in between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans he said, “You don’t want to know. Well, I can tell you what it’s not—there ain’t no Hell in between. And there ain’t no scuba divers brave enough to swim through.”

  So it didn’t come as a surprise when I came home from school one day to be met at the door with, “I got a letter today from some peckerhead environmentalist telling me how trees are valuable, and how we shouldn’t be cutting them down. Do you believe that? Do you get it? Have you any concept about what’s going on here, Mendal?”

  I got the concept that the mail must’ve been delivered really early that day, because my father had built up enough blood pressure to run a steam engine. Like any other day in my upbringing, I’d spent the prior thirty minutes thinking up excuses in case I got accused of anything I might’ve done. Every time I accidentally left the water hose on out back from filling the dog bowls or drenching tomato and pepper plants, I only had to say, “I bet it’s those damn meter readers. They drive around all day turning on people’s spigots when they see nobody’s home.” It always worked, I promise. I had a harder time convincing my dad that the Duke Power people actually broke into our home and turned on all the lights, plus two eyes on the electric stove.

  “Shirley Ebo wanted to see the inside of the cement truck’s drum, then she panicked, and I had to go in after her,” I blurted out. It’s the excuse I’d been working on since Algebra I class at eight thirty that morning. My father had bought a man’s land, and then—for reasons unknown to anyone on Deadfall Road—took over the guy’s 1955 cement truck. He parked it right in our front yard and left it there. I don’t remember why I thought it necessary to get Shirley Ebo and me inside the giant drum, for us to discover each other’s nakedness there, unless it was so that later on in our respective lives no mattress would seem as exciting as the cold metal and rough, cement-boogered walls. We unlatched each other’s snaps and buttons; we sweated profusely. When Shirley finally grabbed at my hopeful erection she said, “Mighty small gearshift for such a big truck.” She, too, had practiced lines long before she got to use them, I figured out later.

  Me, I had only hoped that my father wouldn’t come home drunk and decide it would be a good time to take the truck out on a joyride, or—worse—flip the switch.

  My father said, “What’re you talking, boy? Black Shirley Ebo’s caught in the cement truck?” He looked out the window. On his face I read how he was thinking up excuses to give Mr. Ebo, how he would honestly make a plea that we were white folks who didn’t cotton to such acts of mock violence and/or imprisonment.

  I said, “Well, there’s no White Shirley Ebo that I know of, first off. And, no, she got out of there all right. We didn’t do anything wrong or mess up your truck. What do you think—she and I are going to lose our virginity with each other in the back end of a cement mixer when we could come inside and use a bed?”

  This was a hot, hot, end-of-the-school-year afternoon. My father was wearing a blue cotton jumpsuit. The sweat stains between his armpits and neckline met in a way that looked like three waves on a cartoon ocean. He shook his head quickly, as a man with petit mal seizures might, and closed his eyes. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said, which allowed me to breathe again.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, either.”

  “Paper’s made of trees. Are they not teaching you anything at Forty-Five High? Goddamn. This is called logic. You got people out there yelling about saving trees, and they’re sending letters to tell you about it. No one knows nothing no more.”

  I didn’t correct his speech because I thought it might be a ploy to hit me on the hamstrings. I said, “Shirley Ebo got some scrapes on her knees and butt and elbows, but nothing else. And I got some on my knees and elbows, trying to get her out.”

  My father didn’t listen. He picked up the telephone and started calling people to see if they had gotten the same kind of mail. I thought about ho
w things would be different if my mother hadn’t run away from home. No wife would allow her husband to obsess over junk mail. Then again, no good mother would allow for a cement truck parked in the front yard, a giant, empty, inviting hole making up most of its being.

  I’D BEEN TAUGHT that life was relatively meaningless, too. I had been taught that no matter how good or bad a man happened to be, when he died—in time and eventually —he would be forgotten for what good he did or forgiven for what bad he did. My father said the same for women, I should mention. No matter what good a woman did—say Madame Curie—she would be forgotten with time. Animals fell into the same categories as men and women. No matter how many laughs Mr. Ed had brought on, or how many tears Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and Old Yeller, they would die off after a meaningless life, and the rest of us would trudge on for no apparent reason.

  Oh, man, listen: our home teemed with optimism.

  If we had lived in an entirely conservative Jewish neighborhood, my father would have sent me out every Saturday morning to work hard publicly. But we didn’t, and he and I lived in a predominantly Baptist setting, a verifiable Christian area, and although I pretended to be proud of our refutation of those tall tales in the Bible, it embarrassed me to go out Sunday mornings to cut the grass between ten and twelve thirty, or to clean out the gutters, or dig out built-up silt from the drainage ditch and throw it onto the nearby macadam.

  “This can wait until next Saturday,” I always said.

  “There’s no time like the present for doing something that won’t matter anyways for people living a life that doesn’t matter in the first place,” he always said. It didn’t take an advanced degree in existentialism to understand my father’s paradox. By the time I conjured up enough vocabulary to verbalize my skepticism, though, he had already begun using a cane. It took one strike on my hamstrings to remind me that, as a species on Earth, we were supposed to shy from pain as much as possible. I didn’t know anything about hedonism, really—back then, at least—but I soon learned that any supposed comfort was still better than outright pain.