Why Dogs Chase Cars

by George Singleton

  I could actually feel my knees knocking together. I thought for sure my cling peaches, corn bread, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and sloppy joe sandwich would find their way out of my body one way or the other. I said, “My father told me to say all that. He just got a thing in the mail from some environmentalists saying we should care about the trees. I guess I had it on my mind.”

  Mr. Pearman’s hair was perfectly greased back in swirly Vitalis waves. I couldn’t help but picture tiny men surfing down his forehead and temples. “You got hit in the head yesterday by a man with the IQ of a desk clerk’s bell. I know your daddy told you not to question Marvin Childress, ever. And now today. Don’t you learn? I thought you was smart. I got boys at the orphanage who don’t stick their hands in a rat trap twice. I got plants at my nursery that don’t let aphids bother them none.”

  My brain worked way ahead of itself trying to think of excuses. I didn’t say, “How in the world would you know about Marvin Childress popping my head with a rock unless my father planned some grand scheme that involved your hanging out next to my emergency room bed?” I said, “Was Eli McClintock a real baseball player? I thought you did a wonderful job. It was right up there with the time back when I was in seventh grade and you came in as Booker T. Washington’s great-grandson. That was cool. You must’ve had to do a lot of research on that guy.”

  Sonny Pearman pointed his bat at my chin. He said, “There ain’t but a few of us left in Forty-Five who have any hope for the future of our community, Mendal. You need to know this. Me and some other men and your father know that it could all go away unless there’s some smart leadership. And smart leadership don’t happen with a man who makes fun of the retarded or the Christian.”

  It probably didn’t start with a boy who would turn around and urinate right onto the front-yard boxwoods, either, but that’s what I did at this particular moment instead of peeing my pants. I said, “I couldn’t hold on anymore. Excuse me.”

  “You our little Dalai Lama, Mendal Dawes. You go on and pee where you want. Nothing’s enough for you, bubba. Nothing’s enough.”

  I said, “The Dalai Lama is picked, I know. But who’s the old Dalai Lama of Forty-Five? Are you the current Dalai Lama, Mr. Pearman?”

  Sonny Pearman tapped his boot heels with the bat. He threw back his head and laughed. “You know I ain’t that wise. And if you’re the next one, you should know already.”

  I said, “I’m getting out of Forty-Five, though. I’m going off in a few years to a real college.”

  Sonny Pearman put on his Shakespearean-actor voice. He was being either Lear or Richard III. He said, “And then please come back.” Or maybe Desdemona. “A man must experience life in order to offer life experience.”

  He tapped the bat against his boots some more, then took a stance as if a knuckleballer stood sixty feet, six inches away. Mr. Pearman swung at the imaginary ball. He looked at a point forty-five degrees on the horizon, as if he’d hit one out of the park, out of town, out of South Carolina. I zipped up my pants and followed his gaze. I saw exactly nothing—not even a cloud. Across the woods I heard Shirley Ebo’s father’s donkeys call out. Mr. Pearman didn’t look over in that direction, past the cement truck, but I knew that he, too, could tell that their two-syllable cries sounded like “Men-dal, Men-dal. Men-dal, Mendal.” If we’d’ve had a travel agent in town, I would’ve booked a plane to Mississippi, or any of those other states where I could get lynched quickly and without notice—just so I could flat-out die without much fanfare. I looked back to that imaginary spot in the sky and thought about how my mother should’ve been around to witness this spectacle.

  I thought, Joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. That’s it. I didn’t nod, or shake my head, or shrug. I didn’t shake his hand. Mr. Pearman said, “You don’t even have to think about it. There’s nothing to think about. It’s predestined. Like a dog that has no choice but to chase cars, you know. They’re pretty much predestined to get run over.”

  He left, swinging his bat. He walked up Deadfall Road, not in the direction of the orphanage. I looked back up at the sky but saw nothing different to note later on. Dogs bayed off in the distance, mournful, not urgent.

  I walked down the road to Marvin Childress’s church. I sat on the stoop there, hoping that some power would come down and offer me solutions. Evidently Marvin Childress had spilled much of his honey on the porch. An inordinate number of flies thrived there, two feet from God’s front door.

  MUFFLERS

  If my father had had a friend in the parole and probation office or working with the district attorney, I might have been fitted for a monitoring device around my ankle. But whatever spy gadgetry might have existed in 1974 South Carolina, it would not make it to the town of Forty-Five until decades later.

  When I got my driver’s license legally, at the age of fifteen, there were still party lines for all of our residents, and I’m pretty sure that some neighbors wired up tin butter-bean cans with string between their houses. Gone with the fucking Wind didn’t make it to our sad drive-in movie theater until the late sixties, and it wasn’t until then, when word of that movie and the South’s loss spread, that a large portion of our black population felt free to move on. Men still trapped animals by digging deep holes and covering them with thin reeds and pine straw, and most mornings, thirty minutes before school began, the cries of woods-living children yelling “Help” could be heard. The CB radio, a fad that had trickled down from truck drivers to regular citizens in other towns, seemed too extravagant for the residents of Forty-Five. My biology teacher owned and operated a ham radio set, but communicated only with another biology teacher in France.

  Hell, I remember when Lanky Jenkins walked into class one day all excited from learning that some French guy had figured out how to make milk last longer.

  Oh, sure, I exaggerate somewhat. But I would bet that if a pollster came down to Forty-Five and asked about man landing on the moon, half of the population wouldn’t know about it, and the other half would pronounce “Mojave” as two syllables.

  So, because of the lack of technology and my father’s basic parental understanding that teenagers needed constant supervision, the first car I bought with money I’d saved from a variety of tragic and misguided part-time jobs lost its muffler before I had put five miles on the odometer. This was a giant, baby blue, slanted-upward Ford Galaxie that—with its muffler—could be heard all the way over in tiny, reckless downtown Forty-Five, and probably all the way out to Gruel. “We’re taking off the muffler so I’ll always know where you are,” my father said. “In case I need some help and have to come get you.” He got beneath the Galaxie’s carriage with a couple channel locks and ten minutes later said, “Start this thing up, Mendal.”

  I stood in the gravel driveway leading up to our cement-block house. I only wanted to go pick up my friend Compton, drive out to the Sunken Gardens Lounge, and buy an eight-pack of Miller ponies from one of the tray-twirling black kids who took orders in the parking lot. I said, “Dad, I don’t want no muffler. How am I going to hear anything? It’ll be embarrassing when I go out on a date or something.”

  My father emerged from beneath the car. He stood up and held the muffler with one hand. “A date?” He laughed and laughed and laughed. “I don’t want to bust your sacred cow none, boy, but you ain’t going out on dates with these girls around here. Unless I save up some money and have your tongue removed. They’ve heard you talk. Forty-Five girls don’t like smart boys.” He tossed the muffler into the yard. It clanged against a metal staircase he’d picked up somewhere and left in the sparse grass going nowhere. “Why you think your momma left me?”

  I didn’t say the usual, but I thought it: because she felt the need to improve her station in life; because she feared catfish at the yearly Catfish Feastival; because—even without the use of CB radios—she heard the voice of God calling her west, to Nashville. I said, “What if I tell you exactly where I’ll be and come back exactly when I say. Then if I
mess up, we’ll take off the muffler. The very first time I’m a second late.”

  He spit on the trunk and wiped off an imaginary smudge with his shirtsleeve. “I know that trick,” he said. “It don’t take much time to change every clock in a house. Like mother, like son.”

  IF THERE’D BEEN any kind of seismic recorder in Forty-Five, it would’ve registered six point something on the Richter scale every morning when I warmed up the Galaxie, each afternoon when I drove home from school, and almost every night when I drove around aimlessly. My father added WINDOW REPAIR and SOUNDPROOFER to the sign he kept in our front yard on Deadfall Road, beneath HOUSE PAINTER, ELECTRICIAN, FLOOR REFINISHER, AUTO BODY REPAIR, ROOFER, LANDSCAPER, PREDICTER, and so on. He should’ve had SCAM ARTIST on top of them all, I figured out way too late in life.

  I drove my Galaxie around town, out to Lake Between, over through the mill villages, and slowly past Libby Belcher’s house. My father caught up with me in all these places, too, especially if I made it nearly twenty miles away. He said things like, “I need you to help me clean out the gutters,” or “Come look at this stray dog that showed up on our front porch,” or “Goddamnit, Mendal, I’m trying to sleep. How do you expect me to get up in the morning when your car’s making so much noise?” If the party line wasn’t being used, he’d call Mr. Ebo, or Mr. Lane, or Mr. Flack—knowing that I was approaching their houses—and ask them to go outside, flag me down, and send me homeward.

  One time Comp and I were careening down Bucklevel Road drinking, when I saw my father in the rearview. Buck-level Road split through no real property; it cut across Gray-wood County with a protected national forest on both sides. Comp scrambled over the bench seat to hide our cooler. I pulled over. My father said, “Compton’s on the telephone back home. He says he really needs to talk to you.” My friend knew to stay crouched on the ample, spacious floorboard in back. My father said, “What’re you doing all the way out here. Hotdamn, gas doesn’t grow in trees.”

  I didn’t say how, actually, carbon dioxide was a gas that plants emitted once they decomposed, et cetera. I said, “I was looking for you, of all things.”

  In the backseat—and a family of four can live in the back of a Ford Galaxie—Compton was curled up under a wool blanket I kept. I didn’t know if the missing muffler was what caused my heater to quit running, but it had. Or hadn’t. My father said, “Bullshit, boy. You can’t bullshit an old bullshitter. I’ve been home all night.”

  I opened the car door, confident that no inside light worked. I stood up the best I could, bloated as I was. “Comp and I heard there was a KKK meeting out here tonight.” I opened the back door. “Come on out of there, Comp. It’s not a grand wizard or anything. It’s Dad.” Comp sat up. He kept our cooler covered, suavely. I said, “We were going to park nearby in the woods and rev the engine. You know how it sounds like a machine gun?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Compton said. “That’s what we were going to do. If we came across the KKK meeting.”

  Both of our fathers had gone to great pains to disrupt KKK meetings in the past. They had invested in Roman candles more than once and dug supposed deer traps all over the place on land they didn’t own when they caught wind of where a meeting would take place. Mr. Lane once spent an entire year trying to corner the white sheet and hood market, or so he said.

  “Good boys,” my father said. “I thought y’all might be out smoking dope. Good. Good.” He put his hands in his grease-stained pockets and nodded that homemade burr haircut like it was a stand of summer goldenrod.

  I said, “You kind of blew our cover, Dad. We haven’t found the meeting yet. If they’re nearby, I bet they hear us now.”

  Compton walked past my father and stretched out on the berm. He said, “Man, look at the stars. Man, what if the sky only has holes in it, and we’re all wrong? What if stars are really holes—kind of like hotel-door peepholes—looking into other galaxies, and then those galaxies have holes to look into other galaxies? Man. Cool.”

  I got back into the car and stepped on the accelerator. It sounded like six thousand soldiers were marching atop hollow logs simultaneously. My friend stood up as if a hypnotist had directed him toward the near-paisley front-seat fabric on which we normally sat. My father said, “Y’all go on back home. I’ll drive around, see where these dumb son-sabitches burn crosses, peckerheads.”

  My rumble home reverberated against loblolly pines and hillsides and homes of people who probably wondered how their precious suppers had given them such horrific gas, for all I knew. Comp stuck his foot out of the passenger window and said, “Can you imagine ever living in a more stupid town? Nothing against your daddy.” He said, “Mine’s the same since my own mom left.”

  At our twenty-fifth reunion Compton brought all of this up, and I said, “What? What?” like that. “What galaxy are you talking about, buddy?”

  I’M NOT ONE to believe in hidden-early-childhood-trauma syndrome, but I knew for a fact that my mufflerless Galaxie did erase a good summer out of my life. When all of Forty-Five’s parents understood that I was nothing more than a trick junebug on a string, they, too, removed their teenaged sons’ and daughters’ mufflers. I’m talking the Midas guy in town went out of business. But the doctor who fit people for earplugs ended up buying a vacation house in Myrtle Beach.

  I remember that much.

  Anyway, a Friday night in Forty-Five sounded like the first lap of the Southern 500 nonstop coupled with endless freight trains, sporadic sonic booms, and haphazard thunderstorms. This was a time between real Cold War fears and terrorist attacks. The people of Forty-Five saw a need for corralling their kids, and without an official vote, they enacted mandatory law.

  It wasn’t good. For a while, word was that the teenaged women of Forty-Five had been touched by God and convulsed into speaking tongues, until someone realized it had happened only during the rhythmic bounce inside nonmufflered cars. No girls had resorted to sitting on half-filled washing machines or dryers back home when their parents were gone, is what I’m saying.

  “I wish I could get a patent on this idea,” my father said almost every night between getting off work unbuilding old heart-pine barns and my leaving for parts unknown. “I’ve started something that might take the nation by storm. Man. Nixon could’ve used me for figuring out how to beat them Vietnamites.”

  I always said, “What? I can’t hear you. What?” I really meant it, seeing as I’d just come in from school.

  “There’s got to be a way to make money off my idea,” my dad would say. “If you come up with a notion, let me in on it. I’ll split the money with you.”

  It took me some time, but I finally answered him with, “Gas. Sleeping pills. Carbon-monoxide-level device. Invest in Texaco, seeing as every parent drives around trying to figure out which car is his kid’s car. Invest in sleeping pills, seeing as no one can sleep right, what with all the noise. And somebody’s going to die, what with the fumes coming through the floorboard.”

  My father leaned the metal staircase against the side of our house for no reason I could tell. He said, “Lanky Jenkins says that there’s a woman in France who’s done some amazing things with radioactivity. Maybe we can get her to come over and help us.”

  I stared at my father. “Madame Curie?” I said.

  In the distance, my peers revved and idled with everything they had. I owned some imagination back then and convinced myself that these other cars—Pintos and Mavericks and El Caminos—called to my own Galaxie, that unbeknownst to whatever human being was tapping his respective accelerator, his car called out to mine, “Come on out and join us, Galaxie.” I lived in a bland, bland, dull town. What else could I fantasize about?

  My father said, “Sometimes I don’t believe everything Lanky Jenkins says, but I don’t let on. Don’t you tell him that I know.”

  I said, “What? I can’t hear you. What?”

  ALTHOUGH HE SWORE that he’d foreseen the whole thing, my father thought one of the other boys
would end up shot, not me. There wasn’t but one other Galaxie in all of Graywood County, and that was owned by Boland Bobo and driven by his eldest son, Bo. Bo Bobo quit going to Forty-Five Junior High in the eighth grade when he turned fifteen years old, and he matriculated two years later to the vocational school on Old Bus Road, where welding, advanced woodworking, and engine repair got taught by men who couldn’t take the pressures of small-business ownership. Bo Bobo’s Galaxie looked nothing like mine: he had detailed his for free every Monday through Friday, at tax-payers’ expense. Bo Bobo’s blue Galaxie experienced no rust and shone like a glacial lake. His chrome, when the sun hit it right, could’ve been used for laser surgery. Unfortunately, perfect and imperfect Galaxies pretty much looked the same at night in a town that had no need for streetlights.

  I drove around one Saturday night not smoking dope nor drinking. I rode alone, my Galaxie louder than a California motorcycle rally. Compton had gone camping with his father up in North Carolina. Any girl who might’ve been interested in dating me was sitting at home in the den with her parents, watching The Lawrence Welk Show and playing charades, eating homemade Rice Krispie Treats, and clapping her hands when the accordion guy started up.

  I didn’t know that Bo Bobo’s daddy had put his son on restriction for stealing an acetylene torch from the vocational school. There was no way that I could’ve known that Bo Bobo should’ve been home at ten o’clock, that his Galaxie had thrown a rod way over on the McCormick Highway, that he was sitting on his hood waiting for help to drive by, seeing as this was a time before cell phones.

  Me, I putt-putted around Forty-Five’s perimeter, giving the left-hand-index-finger wave to other mufflerless members of the Forty-Five High Speed Fire Ant community. I tried not to think about how none of us had anywhere to go later.

  And then, in my rearview mirror, I saw what ended up being Mr. Bobo’s sad Fairlane approaching me, right before I hit the boundary of Leroy Cannon’s Baptist Orphanage where, I had heard, runaway girls could get picked up for drives all the way over to the Georgia border. I didn’t hear a rumble louder than mine and figured it was only a poor traveling salesman having to take back roads between Columbia and Atlanta. When Bo Bobo’s daddy shot out my left rear tire, too, I only thought I’d had a flat. When I pulled over, got out of my own Galaxie, and Mr. Bobo shot me in the right knee, all I could think was how I needed to drive around with a tin can, a long string, and a responsible friend waiting on the other end.