My father reached in his back pocket and pulled out his half-gone pint. He said, “I don’t reckon.”
William G. Franklin said, “No ma’am. I guess we’re done here if you promise to cover your shiny edges with them tarps.” He backed up, then turned toward the road. “I need to get back to my real job. This is done business. If anyone needs some cabinet work, come see me. That’s what I try to do when I ain’t out looking for glares.”
I would later know that my father wanted me out of there, that he wanted to talk to this Eva Laws scientist all alone. But at the time I could only say, “I’ve always had a fascination with scientists. With science. I might go study up on some science when I go to college. I’m thinking about being a vegetarian.”
My father could say nothing. He looked at Eva, and then she said, “I came from a whole series of scientists, in their own ways. My mother dropped out of college to marry my father back in Chicago. My father’s father was a carpenter, and my father ended up working for General Motors. But my mother always concocted home cold remedies and household cleaning products. My mother’s brother ended up working in the nuclear power industry, and my father’s sister and her husband raised milk cows up in Wisconsin. I have a cousin who invented a better milking machine. They send me cheese hoops every Christmas, and I send them canned vegetables.”
Here’s what my father got out: “So you’re not from around here, are you?” And it was at this point that I understood how my mother, more than likely, got knocked up by some stranger, that I got born, and then my father married Mom out of pity, duty, or some kind of unresolved guilt.
Eva pulled her head back and laughed. “I’ve been down south now for six years. I guess if I live to be a hundred I still won’t be from around here.”
I wanted to belt out, “Me either!” and take my birth certificate out, maybe explain how my biological father might’ve been a northern salesman, or a midwestern soldier. I said, “What’s your last name again?”
“It’s Laws. I’m legal.” She laughed.
Again I thought, Evil Laws. My father said, “Well, we better be going. I’ll drop by tomorrow with the tarps. Maybe I can work out some kind of lease agreement with your people at the university for next year, you know. I hope you find out what you want to learn, whatever it is you want to learn.”
Eva Laws said, “I do, too. I’m small-time, but in the long run I’m thinking what experiments I’m doing might help us all be healthier.”
My father took the back of my neck and led us to the truck.
At the Slabtown Diner I opened the passenger-side door and got out before my father had stopped completely. He put the truck in neutral and got out. “I’ll meet you at home,” he said. “Maybe tonight we can go down to Forty-Five Barbecue and get us some ribs.”
I said, “Okay,” though I really wanted Shirley Ebo to come over so I could show her my birth certificate.
“All right. I’ll be right behind you.”
I took off before checking if my father had accidentally left his lights on, or his door open, if his battery had worn down. But I didn’t burn rubber out of the gravel parking lot. There was a straightaway down Highway 135, enough for me to look in the rearview mirror and see my father turn the other way, back toward Eva Laws’s snail-back trailer.
I swerved into a pebbled asphalt entrance and turned around. I thought about going back to my father’s land, but pulled into the diner’s lot and went inside. This joint had about a dozen booths, maybe four six-top tables, and a counter overlooking the parking lot. I looked eighteen, I knew, even though I wasn’t but seventeen and a half. I said, “I’ll have a PBR, please,” to a woman who might’ve been twenty or forty.
“You look like the kind of man who wants to run a tab.”
I looked around the room. “How in the world did this place get called Slabtown? Is there a cement factory nearby?” Oh, I was as worldly as they come. I was weary, too. I had my birth certificate in my back pocket. It would’ve been a good time to bring either Nietzsche or Schopenhauer up in conversation, I thought. “My father owns some land down the road that way,” I said pointing. “Some crazy woman’s squatting on his land.”
The waitress slid my beer bottle six inches my way. “I don’t know how it got named,” she said. “It’s Slabtown. I guess whoever got here first thought it looked like a big old slab. It ain’t that flat, though. Maybe from above it looked like a slab of bacon.”
I drank from my beer and looked out the window. “I just met that woman, and she said I needed to look at the land from above.”
“That might be the only way to look at things,” the waitress said. “I’ve been stuck here all my life and only seen things ground level.”
My father didn’t drive by within the hour. The waitress’s name was Betty. She came around and sat beside me between my first and second beer. Betty asked if I drove an eighteen-wheeler. I started to lie, but could tell that she wanted a ride out of Slabtown. I shook my head no. She asked if I’d like a sandwich, on the house.
“Sooner or later this area will be worth some money,” I said. “Don’t ask how I know, but I know. Sooner or later these land developers will come through here and make it a regular paradise. You’ll be sitting pretty. If there’s any way for you to buy up some land, do so now. I can’t give you the details.”
Betty put her arm through mine and leaned in. She said, “I don’t live far from here. What’s your name again? I’m glad I found you before any of the other girls did.”
I don’t want to sound like I was cool, that I wasn’t scared. I said, “I need to wait to find out what my father might or might not do.”
Betty said, “Oh, now I know that woman you’re talking about. She’s raising praying mantises. You know what a female praying mantis does to its mate, don’t you?” Betty held her drawn-on eyebrows high, as if she’d explained one of the wonders of the world. She took her arm out of mine, said, “That’ll be two dollars on your beers,” and got up. She went back around the counter. Betty shook her fanny not unlike Eva Laws. “I take it you ain’t man enough to want anything else.”
I pulled out three one-dollar bills and set them on the counter. I pulled my birth certificate out and set it down beside the money, all melodramatic, I realized much later. Betty didn’t say, “Thanks.” She went over to another man wearing all plaid. I unfolded the certificate, took some sugar packets off the counter, and arranged them so only “Father Unknown” showed.
My daddy drove by at eighty miles an hour soon thereafter. Or at least the Galaxie went by. I assumed that he was bending down for a cigarette on the floorboard, or his bottle. I didn’t see his head or shoulders anywhere near the steering column. I watched his Galaxie fly by and wondered what that scientist woman Eva Laws had said to him that would make him drive by so quickly. Did she remind him that he had a boy back home to tend? Did she rebuff him in such a way that caused a guilt he had not felt since marrying my mother? Or was she in that front bench seat, too, splayed out, dreaming of what symbiotic affairs might occur outside of aphids, mantises, and spiders?
I knew that I’d get home after my father. I would lie and say how I had stopped by Shirley Ebo’s house, that we had homework. I would say that her own father had cleared the dining room table so we could spread our papers around, so that we could have space in order to find ways to tell our teacher how much our fake marriage worked. I would tell my father how Shirley and I made up some things involving gardening, and how important it was for us to know what seeds we planted came up healthy and unaffected by outside influences or troubles beyond our control.
EVEN CURS HATE FRUITCAKE
Whenever I retreat to wonderment at how my life turned to one of hoardment and obsession, I stop at the memory of a muggy June night. I found myself inside a smoke- and curse-filled beer joint on Highway 301 near the Fruitcake Capital of the World. I bent over to pick up a fallen blue cube of Silver Cup cue-stick chalk, reached over to set it on one of two pool tab
les, then became startled by an overall-wearing mountain man—his gray beard as windblown as John Brown’s—who yelled at me, pointed toward my hand, and asked if I got Stonewall Jackson or John the Baptist. That particular night, not two weeks after I’d graduated from high school, I ran through every reason to make my answer one man of history or the other.
“Don’t rub it up, goddamn. Look at it. Whichen is it?” the man said. He leaned on a house cue stick so warped it could’ve been used as a bow. I saw a knife blade spack glare from his other hand.
I said, “I don’t know.” I looked down to see a perfectly carved visage on one side of the chalk. “Yeah, it’s one or the other. But I’m not so sure I’d know Stonewall Jackson or John the Baptist if they both walked in the door.”
This old man jerked his head once and held out the hand with his knife in it. I handed over the chalk. Two men from a fruitcake company—they wore work shirts with various candied ingredients sewn above their pockets—started a game of eight ball. The one who broke barely made the rack move, as if he was challenging Newton’s action and reaction theory.
“It’s one or the other, I believe, but I can’t remember. And I carved the son-bitch,” the man said. “Goddamn it to hell, I’mo have to get my book out again and see who this looks like. I got a book I keep at home. It’s got famous people’s pictures in it. Everything I carve ends up looking like somebody, somewhere.” He handed the miniature near-bust back. “You figure it out and let me know.”
Then he walked out. When he got to the door, without turning around, he yelled out, “If Stonewall Jackson and John the Baptist came in this bar alive and you couldn’t tell the difference, I feel sorry for you, boy. One would be a-rolling and one would be a-strolling.”
I had my back to the two pool players. One of them said, “I bet Brother Macon’s on his way to the schoolhouse. They already told him he couldn’t steal they chalk no more.”
I went over to the four-stool bar and ordered a beer from a woman who wore the expression of a Rose of Sharon bud about to blossom. “You a buyer?” she asked me.
I said, “No, ma’am. My last name’s Dawes.”
“Huh,” she said. “That’s not what I ast you, but that’s aw-ight.”
MY NEW BOSS, Marcel Parsell, suggested that I start in Claxton, move my way north to Tallulah Falls, Georgia, then drive east to Chimney Rock, North Carolina, south to Denmark, South Carolina, then back west. He said I could then go inward, always traveling clockwise in a smaller and smaller circle. This was my first real, not-gotten-by-my-father job. I was working for a disgruntled ex-editor of Fodor’s travel guides who wanted to put out a book about places in the United States to avoid completely. From what I had gathered, from this year onward he would hire fifty or sixty new high-school graduates every June to write sarcastic thousand-words-or-less articles about towns that offered no real cultural, artistic, or dining experiences. It was supposed to look like we’d gotten a scholarship, I guess. “A book like this will make everyone in bigger cities feel better about themselves and their lives. Plus, this idea has trade paperback best-seller written all over it, from here on out.”
I had answered an ad that read, “Like to travel for money?” Imagine that. How come my high-school counselor never veered me toward a class in economics or ethics or logic, or ever took one herself?
I said to the bartendress, “I’m here because I’m writing a book on little-known places you might want to visit.” I didn’t want to end up being lynched for making fun of whatever slight populace inhabited places like Claxton, Georgia. And, since I hadn’t taken that ethics course at Forty-Five High, I felt no remorse about lying outright.
Marcel Parsell—who had studied both geography and culinary arts—told my new colleagues and me that, just as it was okay to exaggerate how wonderful a city might appear, it was all right to exaggerate its limitations. “A local roadside diner that brags on its pork-flavored ice cream isn’t a bad thing for our purposes,” he said. I took notes.
“That man gave you piece chalk ain’t like our regular people around here,” the barmaid said. “Don’t judge Claxton or its peoples from crazy Brother Macon. He says God told him to carve what he could into people God blessed before. He chose chalk ’cause it’s made down in Macon. He seen a reason and connection.”
I said, “I won’t judge y’all by one man’s vision.”
“Hey!” she yelled. “This boy here’s writing a book about us!”
At first I thought I’d’ve been better off only skimming the outskirts of all my tiny prearranged towns, that I should’ve been objective while detailing odd Catfish or Bucktooth festivals. Marcel Parsell handed all of us a ten-point dos-and-don’ts bulletin that included not falling in love with a local and not believing mayors.
I got paid fifty dollars for every article that made it into a book that ended up being called Wish You Weren’t Here. I got paid five bucks for the towns Marcel Parsell decided against. This was 1976. I had no clue about money and saw myself getting about three grand over a two-month period, then moving on to work for the South American, European, and Australian versions of the same book, working college summers. It didn’t occur to me that if fifty travel writers each got fifty thousand-word essays published, the book might be a little on the thick side. I didn’t realize that staying in twelve-dollar-a-night motels went way beyond extravagant, that maybe I should’ve considered KOA campgrounds or the backseat of my old Jeep at roadside rest areas.
I never got the chance. What I learned immediately in Claxton—the Fruitcake Capital of the World—was that there were citizens who would pay decent money to have their place sound utopian, and just as many people who would offer favors to keep strangers away.
“Oh, I’ll tell you all you fucking want to know about a place people elsewhere think we make fruitcakes for door-stops,” one of the pool players said.
“No, no,” said his opponent. “This is a good place to raise children. Come talk to me about here.”
Not that this has anything to do with my story, but over the years I’ve learned that any human who brags about his or her town being a good place to raise kids only says so because that particular town has no art museum that kids might beg their parents to visit. There’s no theater without the word LITTLE on the sign. The horrendous school system doesn’t offer after-school field trips and activities outside of dollar-admission sporting events. Nothing dangerous exists that might cause parents to think and act in these places. I was brought up in the town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, by God—the Raise Children Here Capital of the World.
Maybe my future background in anthropology jaded me, though.
I stood in the Rack Me roadhouse bar and fingered my carved cube of chalk. I didn’t mention how I wasn’t really writing a book solely on the Fruitcake Capital but tried to emit an air that, at any moment, I might change my mind and load up the Jeep, find some people to talk to in the Pecan Roll Capital of the World.
The barmaid opened a drawer beneath the cash register and handed me a dozen carved blue pieces of Brother Macon’s chalk. The best one looked like Mount Rushmore on all sides and the bottom. The worst might’ve been one of those famous pirates, or a Cyclops, or James Joyce.
LOOKIT: THE AD WENT, “Do you want to make money and travel?” Then there was a non-1-800 number to call for a preliminary interview. For all I know, everyone who called made it through the first hurdle. I was asked to send a biographical essay, a descriptive essay about my hometown, an argumentative essay concerning my views on cats versus dogs, and a comparison/contrast essay about any two fast-food chains. I almost told the truth about myself, Forty-Five, and dogs because I got kind of tired of the whole process. My final essay went, “I only know diners and home-cooked meals built over a fire out back. I’m from a town called Forty-Five, named after a piece of vinyl that revolves second-fastest.” The stuff about my place of training wasn’t all true, of course, but I feel certain now that it got me the job.
I di
dn’t tell Marcel Parsell any of the other theories, of course, dealing with community theaters and art museums or the lack thereof. He called me, went over the payment situation, and said I could start immediately. He sent his ten dos and don’ts—my favorite, rule number nine, went, “Never let them see you spit out food”—and I drove to Claxton with a suitcase, some Mead composition notebooks, a cheap handheld tape recorder, and a camera.
I returned from Rack Me to my motel outside Claxton, a little L-shaped place called the Fall Inn. It advertised free TV, radio, and telephone. The dozen doors to the place were each painted a different pastel shade, which I learned later was symbolic of the different colored candies in a five-pound fruitcake.
I wasn’t in the room five minutes on my first night when the phone rang. I expected my dad, or my imaginary girlfriend checking up on me, or Marcel Parsell wanting to offer congratulations on my first day at Wish You Weren’t Here. I cleared my throat and said, “Mendal Dawes,” all professional, like I had seen Frank Sinatra do in a 1950s movie that showed up at the Forty-Five Drive-In Theatre in 1972 or thereabouts.
It was the desk clerk. She said, “I’m calling to see if there’s anything you need, hon.”
When I checked in, she’d not spoken at all, just taken my cash money and handed me a crude flyer explaining checkout time and how I shouldn’t leave lights or the TV on unnecessarily. The woman looked to be my age, and held her face in a way that told me she didn’t hold fruitcake-working people in the highest regard. I said, “I’m fine.”
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