That’s what I thought, by God.
“I tode you ten o’fucking clock it’s ten-fitty I been hearing you riding circles thowing it in my face, boy,” Mr. Bobo said. He had turned his headlights off but pulled in behind me on a wide spot parallel to the orphans’ chapel building. I might not’ve been the smartest boy in the world but I knew enough to limp my way to the front of my Galaxie.
I didn’t recognize Mr. Bobo’s voice. I said, “Ow, ow, I’ve been shot.” If anything, he sounded like any one of my teachers at Forty-Five High. I said, “This is Mendal Dawes. I think you got the wrong man.”
Mr. Bobo stopped walking toward me in his John Wayne swagger. He said, “Shit. Got-dang.”
I said, “Uh-huh.” I covered my face with one hand and held my knee with the other. At the time, I didn’t know that it wasn’t anything but a couple shotgun pellets that had penetrated my blue jeans.
He hobbled back to his car and turned on the headlights. One of the housemothers came running over from Leroy Cannon’s Baptist Orphanage’s dorms. She evaluated the situation and started reciting one of those Psalms, the one about God being a rock, buckler, and horn. At the time, I foresaw amputation. I thought about rock, paper, scissors, dynamite—as I always did when I couldn’t figure out what to do.
My Galaxie quivered on the side of the road, reverberated, waited for me to take it home, shivered and shook like a big, wet, long-haired stray dog.
MAYBE MY FATHER’S back acres were so filled with used heart-pine lumber and odd architectural elements that I never noticed the mufflers. After all the fathers had taken their sons’ and daughters’ mufflers off in order to keep tabs on them, my father went around collecting—as was his lot in life—that which had been discarded. He awoke early and drove around town, seeing who had thrown a muffler down at the end of a driveway for Mikey Adams’s Trash Service to pick up in his dump truck with LET’S TALK TRASH hand-printed on the doors. My father gathered mufflers and made a note as to whose was whose. Then he waited for someone to get shot accidentally, though—as he told me at least twice a day until I left Forty-Five within a couple years for what I thought was for good—he didn’t think I would be a part of the near disaster.
Boland Bobo took me to Self Memorial Hospital, driving his Fairlane so fast it outran its own headlight beams. The housemother came with us. She didn’t even go back to the dorm to tell her orphans she’d be gone, and I knew that some of my friends and acquaintances would wonder which God had come down to offer them so many runaway teenaged girls wanting to hit Augusta before the bars closed there. “‘They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations,’” she said from the back-seat. “‘He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.’”
Mr. Bobo took a curve too fast and said, “Would you please shut the hell up, please? I mean it. I thought you wanted to come along to rip sheets and apply pressure on this boy’s leg.”
I said, “I think I’m not bleeding anymore. You can slow down.” Of course we came up on Bo Bobo pulled off on the side of the road.
Mr. Bobo slowed, and asked me to roll down my window. “Boy, what’s wrong with you out here?”
Bo Bobo stood up from his hood. “I’m thinking I thowed a rod,” he said. “The engine blowed.”
“Get in,” Mr. Bobo said. “We got to get to the ’mergency room.” Bo Bobo slid in beside the housemother.
I said, “It only stings a little now. This isn’t life-threatening or anything.”
Bo Bobo in the backseat said, “My Galaxie looks better than your Galaxie, Cuz. I seen your Galaxie. It’s a ’sixty-five? You oughter be ashamed of your Galaxie.”
Mr. Bobo turned on Highway 25, a few miles from the hospital, where later a resident straight from med school would take special tweezers and pull shot from my knee. The housemother—we all learned later that her name was Martha Bang, though everyone at the orphanage called her Sister Bang, like she was some kind of incestuous porn star—mumbled about Job, Job, and Job. I said, “Well, I’d rather have a Galaxie with a flat tire over one with a blowed motor.”
We pulled into the emergency-room entrance. When an orderly of sorts opened my door, the housemother jumped out from her perch and said, “I’m Sister Bang from Leroy Cannon’s Baptist Orphanage, and I would like to bring the spirit of Jesus into the operating room.”
I said, “I promise I’m fine. I don’t even need a wheelchair,” and walked toward the wide sliding-glass door. “Some one probably needs to call my father, seeing as he won’t hear my car going anywhere.”
Sister Bang took me by the arm. Mr. Bobo stood up out of his car and bellowed out how it was only an accident, how he hoped I wouldn’t press charges, how he only meant to shoot his own son. I said I understood completely, and for some reason I did.
THE MAN TOOK out my buckshot. He gave me prescriptions for infection and pain. Bo Bobo said he’d give me a dollar for every painkiller I didn’t want. Sister Bang called her orphanage from the emergency room’s pay phone and explained the situation to Sonny Pearman, who watched orphans in a different dorm. Mr. Bobo called my father and said he owed us a left rear tire.
When my dad showed up at the emergency room he didn’t ask about my condition right away. And for some reason he wore a paper hat, like a corporal, like a Waffle House cook, like a waiter at the Rendezvous in Memphis, like an old-timey ice-cream vendor. My father bolted into the E.R. and from behind my curtain I heard him say, “Okay. All right. This proves it’s time to get the mufflers back on. Okay. All right.” He went on and on before pulling back the scrim that kept me shielded from a poor kid undergoing epileptic seizures. “You okay, Mendal?”
My pants leg was pulled up above the knee, sliced up the inseam like in a real-life documentary. “Mr. Bobo shot me because he thought I was Bo driving loose.”
My father shook his head. “I’ve been working on a barbecue sauce that I think’ll take hold. It’s vinegar-, ketchup-, and mustard-based, all in one.” He didn’t need to add anything about how he needed to invent something in order to get us out of town forever.
I said, “Well that should just about suit everyone,” as I remember.
“The mufflers must go back on,” my father yelled back toward Mr. Bobo. To me he said, “I guess I got to give you a percentage of the proceeds, you know. I mean, I’ll take out for gas and time, but I guess you deserve some of the profit. Hell, you can use the money for college.”
Maybe my first Percodan kicked in and that’s why I said, “You’re fucking crazy, Dad.” Maybe whatever local anesthetic the doctor-to-be shot in my leg caused me to say, “Mom left us because men’s plans aren’t ever enough. I read that in ‘Dear Abby.’ The tap-dancing black guy’s more talented than the white accordionist. I’m pretty sure we have black blood running through our veins. Look at my wide nose! I might ask the doctor if I’m prone to sickle-cell anemia. Where’s the camera, I can’t find the camera, how do you expect me to act when I don’t know where I’m supposed to focus?” and so on.
My father lit a Camel and stuck it in my mouth. Later on I realized that he realized—since he’d started me drinking at something like the age of nine—nothing mattered. I understood that my father followed the notions of Schopenhauer, how all of us were either in pain or boredom, with nothing in between there in Forty-Five. Sometimes I thought it even affected the strays near our house—that they chased cars only due to pain or boredom. I coughed and coughed and forgot about my leg.
Boland Bobo came in to my semi-semi-private room. “He ain’t coughing ’cause we let him get cold, Lee. Don’t go saying I caused him to get the pneumonia.”
My father broke the man’s jaw with one great right-cross punch.
And then everything was even, in a numerical town. No one pressed charges. The local newspaper ran nothing about the entire incident. Every second-car-owning father decided to remuffler his kid’s automobile, and my father—since there was no Midas man lef
t in town—obliged everybody for something like twenty-five bucks each, parts and labor. If I’d not gotten a pity-scholarship for college, my daddy’s muffler ruse would’ve taken care of me for four years.
But what mattered is Sister Bang. From what I understand, she prayed and prayed. I came out fine, which must’ve made her feel better about herself. Bo Bobo went off to live a life of burglary, larceny, and arson. He got interviewed in prison one time years later and said he invented the rattail, and he expected some compensation.
My Galaxie stood on the side of Highway 10 for two days before my dad and I attended to it with a jack that worked. I looked over at the orphanage and saw little parentless children skipping around outside their dorms. Sister Bang’s redbrick house stood silent.
My father said, “I’ll follow you. Bobo’s gun might’ve hit more than tire.”
I drove twenty miles an hour home. I looked in the mirror at my father. He seemed to drive with his face uncomfortably close to the windshield.
Not that I had any kind of ESP, but it was at this point that I knew Sister Bang would leave her post, that she’d end up on the televised traveling-evangelist circuits, and that I would end up being the anecdote she told as to why she left an orphanage for a life on the byways of America. She would remember my name and everything. She would remember Bo Bobo, and say his name as if she stuttered. Whenever I saw her on Channel 16, she was telling her story, then singing a song. Sister Bang would hold her palm in the air and praise Jesus. And although I had no faith whatsoever, I would watch, and smile, and wonder what else my father might’ve collected off the side of the road.
My knee, later on, looked like the beginning of a crude tattoo, like two eyeballs punctured in. When people asked about it, though—when I wore shorts—I told them it was my birthmark, nothing else. Or I said I’d stood too close to a bed of vipers as a child—that there was nothing but beds of vipers all over my hometown—and I’d gotten struck repeatedly.
TIRED OF OLD TRICKS
During my father’s convalescence, I counted splinters. I’d never kept a real diary or journal like our one new English teacher at Forty-Five High said I should do over the summer—like she did—so I could lug it in to a psychotherapist years later and trace backwards my mental, spiritual, and moral demise. Here was my marbled Mead composition book: “Monday, 6 splinters in right hand; Tuesday, 3 in index finger, 1 in left palm; Wednesday—working with cedar—about 150 in both hands; Thursday, drank six-pack of Schlitz, took powdered aspirin for the first time, cussed Dad; Friday, 1 splinter in forehead, which felt good to extract; Saturday, 5 in hand; Sunday, didn’t go to church for the 844th straight time.”
My father had rolled his pickup truck out on roughly paved Dixie Drive, halfway between Graywood and Hodges. He told the cops he’d swerved from a deer. He told me it was a pack of dogs en route to the tree farm across from our house. It didn’t matter the truth—he’d been flat-out drunk and driving with Herbert Coleman, a man who sometimes helped Dad with heavy loads and otherwise played guitar at the Sunken Gardens Lounge when he wasn’t on first or second shift over at Forty-Five Cotton. I imagined that they sang songs about women they didn’t have, or women that they’d had but couldn’t take anymore. Sometimes Herbert Coleman showed up at our house unannounced to ask my father personal questions about my momma’s leaving, for he knew he would find a good hook or chorus there somewhere along the line. Herbert had sworn off marriage. He liked to say, “I’m of the firm belief that marriage is the number one cause of unhappy separations in America.” He thought he was some kind of Einstein or Svengali or Dr. Joyce Brothers.
If Mr. Coleman had ever had the money to buy a bus ticket to Hollywood, and if he’d found his way to that famous drugstore where stars got discovered, he could’ve been the next Marlon Brando/Clark Gable/Humphrey Bogart. He stood six-one, had curly black hair and blue eyes, owned a physique that any Olympic swimmer would’ve wanted. But he didn’t have bus fare. He worked as a doffer, or a spinner, or a picker, or whatever it was that men did inside Forty-Five Cotton for working-poor wages.
Anyway, that night Herbert Coleman got thrown from the pickup and bounced his head across the berm until he landed upside-down against a fence post that kept Frank Godfrey’s prizewinning Angus caged.
My dad had remained in the truck’s cab and only bounced around like so many beans inside a burbling crockpot. He broke those floating ribs, a knee, and half the bones in his right hand and wrist. He also suffered a circular burn on his forehead, which meant that he’d pushed in the cigarette lighter about ten seconds before losing control, that it had popped out unexpectedly, and so on. I figured that much out, all by myself.
Herbert Coleman would never sing again, really, though he didn’t get killed. He went from coma to half-wit in a matter of weeks.
All of this occurred the summer my father bought land once owned by men who’d needed sharecroppers some sixty to eighty years earlier. We went in and disboarded the out-buildings, the houses, and the barns. Later, we sold the land outright to land developers and the state. If my father wasn’t in a wheelchair, then he stood on crutches. When crutches didn’t support his upright body, then he leaned on a nearby tree or unfolded his body onto a stump and waved his arm for what I should do next. I pried and pried at two-by-twelves, then stacked them up to the side for later transport to our own yard.
At night we went to the hospital and sat in Herbert Coleman’s room. My father smoked cigarettes there next to the crank-up bed as Mr. Coleman—who liked to introduce himself to strangers at Herbert “Tarleton” Coleman—only barely breathed. He wore an IV “like the tapeworm I used to keep for a pet when I was a poor kid,” my father said nightly.
I would’ve written all of this in my notebook, had I been thinking of anything outside of splinters. I sat in the hospital room not looking at handsome Herbert Coleman half-dead. I pulled splinters out of my flesh and notched the numbers in a binder filled with lined sheets. I didn’t care about the new English teacher at Forty-Five High School, though I knew I’d be taking a course with her in the fall. Her name was Ms. Shaw. Her daddy sold insurance and was best friends with our state senator. My father said she couldn’t have gotten a job picking lint from a navel without those connections. Like always, I figured that she was just another woman who’d rebuffed my father’s advances, until he told me that she once held the title of Miss Graywood County, and that when she didn’t make the top ten in the Miss South Carolina pageant her father tried to prove collusion between judges and the mayor of Myrtle Beach. Her talent involved juggling on roller skates.
On this particular night I wrote down “Tuesday, 4 splinters in right hand. 3 in left hand. Crown of thorns.” It was at this point that I knew how I would show Ms. Shaw my supposed journal. I would hand it in on August 20 or thereabouts, and nod, and say I couldn’t wait to read some Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, those Brontës, and/or any of those other writers’ books any sane high-school student views as very boring, melodramatic writing.
WHEN IT LOOKED like Herbert Coleman would survive his head trauma and at least get to the point of singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace” in a language that resembled English, my father let me take off from hospital duty. He continued to go up there to Self Memorial Hospital in order to poke lit cigarettes into Herbert’s face, filter-end first. He’d either wheel or gimp himself up there and stay long after visiting hours should’ve ended. Most nights I stayed at home and wrote in my little notebook however many splinters I’d eased out with a needle or knife. On one late-June Friday, though, my friend Compton and I got invited, miraculously, to a pre-debutante-ball party, held at the Forty-Five Country Club, which was really nothing more than one tennis court, a nine-hole golf course, a swimming pool without a real diving board, and a one-room clubhouse lined with mirrors. The Forty-Five debs wouldn’t be presented until a week before Christmas, but their parents, sponsors, and escorts held bimonthly parties leading up to the big event.
; Let me make sure that you understand the entire debutante process: in places like Birmingham, Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond, eighteen-year-old female college freshmen who attended colleges like Hollins, Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Agnes Scott, and Randolph-Macon came back home to be presented to society in a way similar to that of royalty. These were the young daughters of tycoons and barons, people who vacationed in the Hamptons, Cape Cod, and the Riviera. In Forty-Five—and every tiny crossroads in South Carolina, at least—a girl with all of her teeth and the mental capacity to potentially complete a two-year technical college with a degree in secretary science could pretty much undergo the debutante process, complete with gowns, elbow-length gloves, and cheap tiaras.
Compton called me up on a Wednesday night and said, “Hey, man, did you get an invitation to Libby Belcher’s coming-out thing? Goddamn.”
I said, “I thought it was a joke. They must be worried no one will show up.”
Comp said, “Oh, we’re going, amigo. You better find a way to get your daddy a babysitter for Mr. Coleman.”
I didn’t tell him how Herbert Coleman had rounded the bend, so to speak. I said, “Do we have to get dressed up?” I didn’t own a suit, seeing as my father wouldn’t allow me to attend church services, and no one I knew had died yet.
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