Out on Highway 25 Lyla pointed to a service-station-turned-junk-shop with old gasoline memorabilia. The sign read I GOT GAS. She said, “Pull in here and let’s check prices on the kinds of things you think you’ll find more of below your daddy’s soil.”
I turned. “I’ll send this Dr. Boyce guy fifty dollars. Fifty dollars an hour is more money than what anyone deserves.” I unbuttoned my pants, pulled down the zipper, and extracted the world. “I gave better advice to dying men at Forty-Five Longterm Care when I wasn’t but ten years old, working part-time after school for something like a buck-fifty an hour.”
Lyla said, “I have a confession to make. I only wanted you to prove to me that you’d be willing to see an avant-garde therapist. Just by agreeing to go lets me know we’re okay.” She leaned over and kissed the side of my mouth. “You mean weirdo.”
I said to Lyla, “I’d’ve gone to an acupuncturist with you, honey. I’d’ve gone to a rebirthologist who found a way to incorporate aromatherapy into her sessions.”
A round white man with silver sideburns shaved into cowboy-boot silhouettes came out of the stucco filling station. He held his arms out to showcase his wares. I rolled down my window. “Evathang’s thutty puhcent off!” he yelled out. “Take the price tag and mult-ply by point seven. That’s thutty puhcent off.”
Lyla stepped out of the car. She said, “Hey,” and pointed at the Esso sign. “You get $175 for this?” she asked the man.
I got out and said, “Where’d you get your gasoline memorabilia? Have you been saving these things all along?” The man looked like a department-store Santa Claus who’d gotten bored with shaving and left the sharp-edged mutton-chops. He looked like the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island, like every other football coach/driver’s ed teacher at South Carolina low-country schools, like that actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke.
“Oh, I get it,” he said. He didn’t make eye contact.
I looked at him harder and saw the same squint as my father’s. This man had also seen the future and stolen these signs over the years faster than a man on second base peeping at the opposing team’s catcher. Lyla said, “What’s the best you can do on that sign?”
The parking area was plain flat brown dirt. My wife stood with her hands on her hips, palms backwards, elbows out, like a domesticated turkey. She stood as erect as a soldier’s dream. And although I had thought I loved Lyla most when we stole out of Dr. Boyce’s office, it felt like Adrenalin got shot into my heart there at I GOT GAS.
Strother-Martin-with-sideburns said, “That’s it. That’s the best price I can do. One thing in America these days—people always pay good money to get a sign.”
WE TOOK BACK roads to Forty-Five, as if there were any four-lanes between my old hometown and anywhere else. Lyla kept her feet propped up on the dashboard. “The problem is, nobody in Forty-Five would buy old advertising signs. We need to move to a place with more upwardly mobile people our age. But then the cost of living outside South Carolina will end up being too much, you know. Maybe we should just get a backhoe and see what else we can find.”
“I’m not sure I want to know everything that my daddy put to rest on his land. Maybe he only told me that his only wife and my mother disengaged herself from our home when I was a child. Maybe my father was one of those men who accidentally shoved a woman’s head onto a sharp counter-top, then had no choice but to bury the body and claim abandonment before friends, neighbors, relatives, and co-workers could formulate other scenarios.”
Lyla flipped her visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. “By the way, what’s a rebirthologist?” she asked.
I said, “Listen. I don’t know how to say this. You never knew my father very well. I mean, he acted pretty normal around you most of the time. But he wasn’t normal. When he brought me up the best he could, he was flat-out nuts from the get-go. I’m just saying, I don’t know if I want to know all that’s buried back behind the house.”
She flipped up the visor and squinted. “You started it, Mendal. You’re the one who rented the metal detector and got everything in motion, not me. What’re you talking about?”
“My mother didn’t have a plate in her head. She had no fillings in her teeth. I’ll dig, but no backhoe. Promise me no backhoe.”
Lyla put her feet on the floorboard. She shifted in her seat. “We don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want. It’s your house.”
“Our house. You know that.”
“Look, I’m happy. Sure, I wouldn’t mind living in a town that could offer more than The Sound of Music, The Music Man, and Oklahoma! at its Little Theatre.” We crossed into Graywood County. Lyla said something about my watching for stray dogs crossing the road unexpectedly. “Or that didn’t have the audacity to call its old-timey drugstore and rifle collection The Museum. But that’s all right. I’m fully optimistic that Forty-Five’s just a tiny, tiny stepping-stone on our path to a better life.”
I honked the horn and grinned and nodded like a trick horse. I didn’t tell Lyla how—after I’d gone off to college—my father had gone through a suicidal phase, how he stacked newspapers and kerosene-soaked rags in every room and replaced the windows with magnifying glass.
I said, “I read somewhere about rebirthology. People go through this thing when their lives are so messed up that the only cause they can see has to do with their emergence into this world. Like maybe a man’s head came out cocked, or an arm got stuck sideways too long. I read about it. I’m betting that if one of us could disguise our voice, we could call up Dr. Boyce and he’d be able to explain it better.”
Lyla put her left hand on the gearshift, which always made me nervous. She said, “People. What’re they thinking? You get cards from the dealer and you either play or fold. There is no redealing in the five card draw of life.”
I put my right hand on top of hers, on top of the gearshift, not wanting us—even by accident—to hit neutral or reverse. Lyla pointed and said, “Watch out for that pack of chows ahead. What’s with people coming over the county line to drop off their wild and unwanted strays?”
I didn’t tell her my theory.
IN MID-DECEMBER it was still seventy degrees outside in Forty-Five. After Lyla and I resumed our lives I found myself trying to list out everything I should do in order to feel better as a citizen and husband, not necessarily in that order. I thought, I could take in the stray dogs that roam my county while waiting for the Earth’s rotation to slow down so they can find their original owners—the people who opened a passenger-side door and shoved them out into a mysterious, sad, unfortunate, sterile place.
Lyla stood next to me outside. She’d fixed a pitcher of margaritas and we stood on our barren, barren soil. I don’t want to sound New Age or anything, but I could hear what my father still had buried beneath; I heard his stolen signs and borrowed gimcracks sigh with what weight had encumbered them over the years. Across the way, Pete and Frank Godfrey’s livestock bellowed away, as if they, too, understood what obstacles would no longer hinder the horizon. The cattle looked at Lyla and me as if they couldn’t figure out if they should move or stay for the spectacle.
I looked at the nighttime sky. Six planes flew overhead, blinking lights. “We’re small, small people. Not you and me, Lyla. I mean, you and I are small people, too. But good goddamn. I don’t feel so great about myself here.”
I’m not sure where my wife’s gaze drifted, or what she really thought. Me, I tried to remember what my father had sold off already, what my grandfather had sold from his daddy. I wondered what my odd Irish ancestors held or foresaw as valuable outside of friendship and drink, truth and tradition. Lyla hummed a song I didn’t know. No meteors showered across the sky, as would happen in a sentimental Hollywood production.
By midnight I would be asleep cross-legged on the ground where I got trained. And I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of Lyla and me living elsewhere without conscience, of my father explaining how he’d saved and buried yardsticks once all the talk
of a metric system had emerged.
Lyla nudged me awake. She took me to what was once my parents’ bedroom, told me she loved me, and held her hand on my forehead. “You were talking in your sleep outside,” she said. “‘Shirley Ebo, Shirley Ebo.’ Why don’t you call up her daddy and see if she’s living nearby still?”
“Shirley Ebo’s not in Forty-Five,” I said. “Before we were even in college she said she’d stay, and I said I’d be leaving forever. It’s how things work out, always. Backwards.”
Lyla rolled over in bed and told me that she’d once seen a documentary on educational television about the elongated grieving process between men and the women with whom they’d lost their virginities. It could be worse, she told me. But if indeed it got worse, we could always seek help again, to feel better, Lyla said. I’m not sure if I—always the pessimist—said something about Houdini again, or if I just thought about him before closing my eyes.
A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2004 by George Singleton. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, where some of these stories first appeared under different titles and in different forms: Book, the Georgia Review, Shenandoah, New England Review, Atlanta magazine, Cincinnati Review, the Yalobusha Review, the Greensboro Review, and the Disclaimer. “Even Curs Hate Fruitcake” appeared as “Raise Children Here” in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2004.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.
E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-911-5
Also by George Singleton
THESE PEOPLE ARE US, Stories
THE HALF-MAMMALS OF DIXIE, Stories
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