“I want you to go into the hallway and move the gun cabinet off to the right,” my father called to say one Saturday afternoon.
I had answered with, “Hey, Shirley, sweetie, what you want to do this fine day?” like an idiot, because my father had left a note saying he’d be gone until past supper, and Shirley Ebo had sent me a note during class the day before saying she wanted to either have me sit still for a couple hours so she could paint me for her art class, or go see a crazy, white, traveling tent-revival evangelist who could make people fall down at will.
My father said, “Well I might have the wrong number, son.”
I about hung up. I should’ve hung up, and when he called back I could’ve said, “I’ve been here all day. I didn’t just pick up the phone,” et cetera. I said, “Hey, Dad. I thought you were going to be Shirley. I was playing.”
“Listen. This is important.” I heard cars or trucks driving by. “A while back I got a call saying my twenty acres over here in Slabtown is some kind of fire hazard. I want you to go to the safe and find what that old boy’s name was wrote me that letter.”
I still tried to think of excuses as to why I had called Shirley “sweetie.” I said, “I’ll have to put the phone down.”
My father said, “Shirley Ebo your official girlfriend finally? I don’t know what the people of Forty-Five will say about your white ass having a black girlfriend. But I ain’t surprised in you, boy. Plums are good, but bruised plums make for better pudding.”
I set the phone down. I could hear my father laughing, then heard him say, “Hey, hey, hey! You got to listen to me on how to get here.”
I picked up the phone. “She’s not my girlfriend. We’re taking that sociology course together. We got teamed up together and are supposed to act like husband and wife.” This had actually happened. “We’re supposed to act in ways that’ll keep one of us from leaving the other, out of the blue.” I knew that my father would change the subject when the notion of monogamy cropped up, or his mismanaged attempt toward it some decade earlier.
“You got to go beneath the house and get a crowbar, then crack open this place that looks like it got plain sealed up for good in the wall.”
I didn’t say that I knew already. I didn’t say how I’d learned to patch drywall all by myself because of cracking—then resealing—his hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden safe. I listened like the good son. I went “Yessir” when he was done.
My father said, “It might take you thirty minutes.” He went through where all of his odd keys hung. “The paper I want will say something about a fire hazard, and Slabtown. It should be near the top of the pile. The first four to ten envelopes is what I’m saying. I’ll call back.”
“Where are you now?”
My father said to someone walking by, “Hey, is it true that this is still a dry county?” To me, he said, “I’m here. Don’t worry about where the hell I am. You worry about finding that fellow’s number before I stick another dime plus more in this telephone.”
I said, “Okay then,” and hung up.
It didn’t take the beneath-the-house-crowbar to open up the drywall seams, let me say right now. I had a flathead screwdriver I’d been using since about the age of twelve, plus the sharp edge of a putty knife. I pulled the gun cabinet aside and slit the drywall tape, pulled the door open, and so on. I got to the safe, opened it, and noticed a mesh bag of handmade marbles that moved when I pulled the door my way. I started opening envelopes, and more envelopes. I went four-to-ten-envelopes down.
When I found what my daddy wanted, I set it aside. What other documents did he hide? I wondered. Oh, I found all kinds of IOUs from Compton Lane’s father, and Glenn Flack’s, and Libby Belcher’s, and even Forty-Five’s ex-mayor Dash Mozingo. They ranged from two hundred to two thousand dollars, and were dated from before my birth in 1958 right on up until 1975. I found something like two dozen four-leaf clovers, all laminated singly. My father had saved cocktail napkins from far-off places like Charlotte, Charleston, Atlanta, and a joint called the Wicked Witch in Greenville, up sixty miles north on Highway 25. He had an Esso map of the eastern United States with a thick pen mark showing the closest routes between Forty-Five and Nashville, and Memphis, and New Orleans. I found what I thought were my old dog’s toenails in an envelope, what I thought were my baby teeth in an amber druggist’s vial, and a rubber change purse with what I understood to be two gold fillings that had once resided in the mouth of a man my father punched out, seeing as Dad had written, “I guess this makes us even” on the outside.
There may have been other little gimcracks and trinkets, I don’t remember. I dove my hand down six inches and pulled out one thin sheet of paper. It happened to be my birth certificate. I looked and saw my mother’s name, that I was twenty-two inches long, that I weighed an amazing nine pounds and fourteen ounces. The doctor’s name was Wilson.
My father, the document read, was unknown.
When the telephone rang and I picked it up in the den, my father said, “Did you find that letter?”
I said, “Oh I got it, man. I got it.”
He said, “Have you been drinking?”
I heard more cars driving by on his end of the line. “No sir.”
“Hey, is there any way you can bring that over here? I might need the pickup in case I have to haul something away. Do you know where I am in Slabtown? I’m at the intersection, you know. We’ve been here before. In front of the Slabtown Diner on the corner of 86 and 135. It might take you an hour.”
I said, “What? I don’t know, Dad. Shirley’s supposed to come over here because the time’s right for us to make a baby. What? What?” Then I laughed and laughed, and thought about my father’s brown eyes, a face that wasn’t close to mine, his nonchin. My mother had been gone so long that I didn’t even remember what she looked like. I said, “I can drive your pickup.”
Again my father asked somebody near his pay phone if it was a dry county, like he didn’t already know every inch of South Carolina’s Blue Laws, from Myrtle Beach to Caesar’s Head. I’d seen him ask this question a thousand times before, and realized that he was only waiting for some stranger to tell him where a bootlegger lived.
I left the secret door to the secret cabinet to the secret safe in the false floor wide open, though I folded my birth certificate in half and shoved it into my back pocket. I took Highway 25 north toward Slabtown, driving with my right wrist draped across the steering wheel in the manner of my father—I even thought about how he drove thusly, how it must’ve been genetic. I didn’t stop at Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon for an eight-pack of Miller ponies or a mason jar of homemade peach bounce, should my father never learn Slabtown’s local laws. I drove the speed limit, veered from potholes, and tried to find a radio station that didn’t play country music.
“We have a prayer request for a nearsighted husband who keeps missing things by about two inches,” this radio preacher said on one of the AM stations. “We have a prayer request for a sister who has too much love. We have a request for a son who takes to the drink.” The background music wasn’t any different from that played during a viewing. “We have a request for a boy who don’t treat his parents right.”
The letter from one volunteer fire chief, William G. Franklin, set opened on the bench seat. My birth certificate about burned a hole in my pocket. I sat up, pulled it from my backside, and reread, “Father Unknown.” How could I bring this question up to my father? Would I? Did it matter whatsoever that I might not know my own people?
“We have a request to pray for a man who has cancer of the eye. We have a request for a man who has cancer of the foot.” The background organ seemed stuck. “A good daughter has asked that we pray for her father’s missing fingers after a chain-saw accident. We have a prayer request from a wife who can no longer tell taste. She asks the Lord to let her know the difference between salt and pepper.”
I turned the radio off. My father’s pickup truck hummed and hummed up the road. I found myself singi
ng Merle Haggard songs, though I didn’t like or understand him at the time, though I wasn’t quite sure about the true lyrics.
I PULLED INTO the Slabtown Diner’s gravel parking lot and, as a joke, gunned the truck toward my father. He leaned hard against our old Ford Galaxie’s hood, and didn’t move even when it looked like I meant business. I screeched to a halt, got out, and went for my father’s neck, half-joking. My father didn’t move. Had he known that I would find my birth certificate? Was this his way of letting me understand how maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought?
“It ain’t a dry county, or a dry township,” he said. “In case you were wondering. Hey, did you bring that letter?”
I pointed my thumb toward the pickup. My father reached behind himself and grabbed a pint of Jim Beam. “You want you a swig? You old enough still.”
I shook my head no. “Come on,” I said.
He tensed his lips, then said, “I’ll leave the car here. Hand me the keys. I think I remember where this land I bought might be.”
“Hadn’t you better call this William G. Franklin man? There’s not going to be a pay phone out in the middle of no-where, likely.”
My father pointed at me and raised his eyebrows. He smiled. “I knew there was a reason why I wanted to have you as a son. You’re pretty smart. One time this old boy said you smelled, and I said, ‘Like shit he does.’”
“That joke’s getting old, Dad.”
My father took the keys from my right hand. He got in the pickup, I got in the passenger side, and he said, “You want an old joke, call up your mother.”
Here’s the law in South Carolina: If someone’s squatting on your land, and if said person has planted a crop, nothing can be done about it if the crop stands half-past harvesting. If someone takes over land you own and sets out corn, and the corn gets to three feet high, then the true owner of the land can’t do anything about it. If he does go back and, say, burns down the crop, then he can be sued by the squatter. It goes all the way back to Civil War times. It goes back to Job, or at least when some Mormons traipsed through the region on their way to Utah, my father said.
This all came into play when my father and I met William G. Franklin at some mostly useless flat acreage somewhere between the Chattahoochee and Savannah rivers, a place that—in my later life—my father would sell for something like a million-times profit to California land developers who planned and built a townhouse and golf course retirement community that also had its own airstrip. Dad shook Mr. Franklin’s hand, pointed to the middle of his plot, and said, “That ain’t my snail-back trailer,” which stood amid pole beans, tomatoes, and watermelons. Marigolds appeared to be planted randomly.
Mr. Franklin stood tall. He wore both plaid pants and shirt, plus red suspenders. His hair stood straight up in what would later on be a good punk style. Although he didn’t chew tobacco at the time, he owned two good juice gutters that framed his pointed chin. Mr. Franklin stared at me as if I had something to do with the situation. “I’ve seen this once before,” he said. He leaned one hand on his own truck, a Chevy.
I said, “Well. My name’s Mendal. I’m his son.” My father looked out at the trailer. There seemed to be no sign of life there. Whoever owned the place didn’t have a car parked in the middle of the field, and there were no tire tracks going that way. The three of us stood on the berm looking west, the sun in our eyes.
Mr. Franklin scratched his crotch. “Them fields seem more’n half-past ready.”
“How and why is this a fire hazard?” my father asked. “There’s something wrong going on here, but I don’t see the fire hazard. Fire hazard’s when you got a big old tank of kerosene next to an open fire.”
I kind of wanted to pull the pint of bourbon from my father’s back pocket. I kind of wanted to drive back to the Slabtown Diner, get on the pay phone, and ask Shirley Ebo to meet me at the tent revival. “Let’s go down there and knock on the door, y’all,” I said. It didn’t seem like brain surgery.
Mr. Franklin pulled a pistol out of his boot. He said, “I think it’s the only thing we can do.” He looked at me, but spoke to my father. “If some shooting goes on, can we count on the boy to keep quiet?”
Dad looked at the snail-back. “Can you keep quiet? You got it in you to be quiet should something bad happen?”
I said, “Me? I wouldn’t wonder about me. Do you?” I thought about taking my birth certificate out of my pocket, and would have done so hadn’t Mr. William G. Franklin stood there all staring down at me. I said, “I’ll be quiet. In case we have to kill a man and stuff him in a freezer or something, bury him out in the front yard.”
“We won’t have none of that,” Mr. Franklin said. “But I might have to call Larry for some help. He’s another volunteer fireman. He’s a good one. And to be honest, sometimes he’s a little more rational than I am. Larry. Larry.”
We walked down through tomato plants that had recently sprung green fruit no larger than jawbreakers. There were an inordinate number of spiderwebs connecting these plants. We passed the tomatoes, then the newly tendriled watermelons, then the pole beans. Mr. Franklin held his pistol in his right hand, knocked with his left a good hard five times. All of us heard a woman singsong out, “Hold on one second,” and then the trailer’s small aluminum door swung open.
“Oh, hey! It’s about time,” this wondrous woman said. She wore a sundress with spaghetti straps. Her black hair flowed in curls that seemed to spell out “beauty/beauty/beauty” in cursive. I had never seen such a vision, and I knew that my father and Mr. Franklin hadn’t either, seeing as my dad’s knees actually buckled, and William G. Franklin dropped his pistol right there in the dirt. “I take it y’all are from the extension service.”
My father smiled and shook his head sideways. “Do you want some bourbon?” He spoke so slowly that it sounded like a 45-rpm record set on 33.
The woman stepped down the twelve inches from her trailer. “I’m afraid there won’t be room for all of us inside. My name’s Eva Laws. Come on this way and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.” For a second I thought she introduced herself as “Evil Laws,” for what it’s worth.
She jumped down from her trailer and didn’t turn around. Mr. Franklin reached down and picked up his pistol. Eva yelled over her shoulder, “In all my years working experimental crops, I’ve seen nothing like this.” She swished her rear end in a perfectly natural manner.
Some years later I would think that the only fire hazard present on my dad’s property might have been him, the volunteer fireman, or me spontaneously combusting from Evil Laws.
About a hundred yards into the walk with Eva I noticed how writing spiders took up most of the space between the tomatoes. I’d learned early on that if you found your name in a writing spider’s web, death was on its way down from above. The chances of a spider spinning out “Mendal” were pretty slim, but I swore I saw “Lee”—my father’s name—more than once.
Eva stopped finally, and William G. Franklin said, “I think you have us confused with some other people. I’m the fire chief in Slabtown. This here’s the man who owns the land. I sent him a letter a while back saying he had a fire hazard.”
I said, “I’m his son!” like that, all excited, idiotic. My voice actually cracked in the middle of yelling out. I didn’t think about my fake sociological marriage to Shirley Ebo, or how I couldn’t tell whether my biological father was a madman or saint.
Eva turned and said, “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I thought y’all were from the extension service. I think I’ve come across an as-yet-to-be-discovered insect, and I wanted to bring someone down here. It looks like a praying mantis and a wolf spider got together somehow.”
“Like I was saying, we come out here for the hazard,” the fire chief said.
I couldn’t stop staring at this Eva woman. I daydreamed about moving into the trailer with her, about fixing her breakfast each morning, about going out at daybreak to pick fruits and vegetables. She said, “My area of expertise i
s organic gardening. I don’t use pesticides.”
I said, “That’s good. I’ve been reading up on that lately.” My father grabbed my shoulder and pulled me behind him, out of the woman’s view.
“WHAT HAPPENED WAS this,” Mr. William G. Franklin said. “I happened by one afternoon, and the sun beat down on your silver trailer, and a big glare shot off that way.” He pointed with a wave of his hand toward the pole beans. “I figured that it might be like holding a magnifying glass down toward dry grass, you know. That they was a chance the hot glare reflection could catch a leaf on fire, and then the whole place would go up.”
We stood in front of Eva’s abode. My father said, “That ain’t gone happen, Franklin. What are the chances of that happening?”
I couldn’t help but stare at the woman. She said, “If I’d’ve known about that, I would’ve pitched a tent out here. And the whole reason why I’m here is because my professor told me that this land was owned by the university. I’m sorry. I’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
I said, “No, no, no,” as if I were in control. My father looked at me, but the fire chief didn’t.
“You put a tarp on top your trailer, I think we’ll be fine,” the fire chief said.
“Yeah,” my father said. “I got a couple extras back home. I’ll bring them over tomorrow. What, again, are you doing here, though?”
Eva went into some long-winded discouse about how she planted her crops and marigolds in purposeful patterns. She said something about how tomatoes attract aphids, that aphids attract praying mantises, and that any spider with a mantis in its web is a contented spider. Eva said that if we viewed the field from above, we would see that she had tomatoes encircled by pole beans, encircled by watermelons. We would see other areas where marigolds stood in the center, followed by watermelons, then pole beans, then tomatoes. Oh, she went through every possible configuration, and I thought about this woman later on in college when I was forced to take a mathematics course involving statistics and probability. She finished up with, “You fellows want any coffee, or some iced tea? I feel badly that you came all the way out here.”
Why Dogs Chase Cars Page 18