Calloustown

by George Singleton

  So I had driven around on weekend supply-and-demand forays with Mass Massey and Lincoln, and when I came home on Sundays my mother looked up from her baskets to ask, “What did y’all do this weekend? Did you go fishing?”

  “Who names their kid Lincoln in the South?” my father would bellow. “I’m not saying anything racist, but you’d think that more black people would name their kids Lincoln. If I were black, you’d be named either Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, or Brown Versus the Board of Education.”

  And then I’d ask, “How come you named me Reed?” knowing all along—because my grandfather got drunk and told me—that I’d had a brother named Ed who died long before my birth, and that in actuality my name was Re Ed.

  “Never mind that. It’s a good name. In those baby books, it means, ‘cleared land,’” my mother would say.

  “And it means something that grows near the water. So you got it either way, either cleared land or something growing on the land,” my father said.

  We went through this incessant charade for, I guess, about half the Sundays of every year for three or four years. And then one rainy day I returned from school to find my pure and patient mother crying. My father was to have driven her somewhere with her baskets earlier—she’d improved to the point of people asking if she had nimble-fingered Cherokee blood in her background, had three craft galleries carrying her work in towns where people had money to buy baskets that didn’t hold green plastic grass and screw-top eggs filled with cheap chocolate—and she carried them on her lap. She didn’t want them in the back of the truck, seeing as it rained. My father hit a pothole, she lurched forward, the baskets got crushed, and she broke two ribs.

  She didn’t blame him because, for once, it wasn’t his fault. The particular pothole—and I remembered shoveling it out while Mass and Lincoln Massey picked extra hard, out near the center of the blacktop—must’ve been eighteen inches deep. The hole disappeared once rainwater filled it up, at least to an unsuspecting and non-prescient driver.

  My mother’s ruined baskets ended up reparable, as did her ribs. But my father took it as a sign: that he’d been punished by God because of his own shortcomings, failures, and mean-spirited acts that he wouldn’t divulge completely. I remember only his getting home, having me help him try to bang out the damaged left front rim of his truck, and saying, “There are some incidents for which I need to atone.” I remember all of this because it came out so grammatically correct and biblical. “I’ll probably need your help.”

  My father fixed his wheel as best he could. He checked in on my mother, fetched aspirin and ice packs, asked if she wanted any gum, and handed me a ball-peen hammer. Out back, below the homemade fire tower that at this point stood eight or ten feet high, my father kept a stack of broken bricks. He retrieved a washtub and two old stumps for us to sit on like ancient narcissistic whittlers. He stood up and stared at an outbuilding, told me to go fill up a wheelbarrow with some sawdust he had piled up in case I ever decided to become a pole vaulter or high jumper, and came back with a bag of cement. I said, “There’s no way we can glue these pieces of brick back together.”

  “No,” he said. “No, we’re doing the opposite.” And then my father told me to break the bricks up further and transfer any pieces smaller than dimes into the washtub. We worked hard together, and played a guessing game with our plink-plink-plinking. “Three Blind Mice” was easy to make out, but not so songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” My father mixed the brick crumbles, sawdust, and cement together, and three hours later we loaded the heavy, impossible mixture into the back of his truck and took off with a hoe, two broken shovel handles, and a dozen plastic jugs of water.

  I said, “Why don’t we just call the South Carolina Department of Transportation? Why don’t we go over to Lincoln’s daddy’s house and tell him about the potholes? He works a job telling people to fill the things in.”

  My father didn’t say anything about Mass Massey being communist, Catholic, atheist, or werewolf. He said, “Mr. Massey has enough things to do besides having someone outside of his work tell him he doesn’t have enough things to do.” And then, mostly beneath his breath, he said, “I need to do this in case there’s really a Heaven.”

  Was he feeling guilty about naming me Re Ed, and dooming me to live up to my unknown dead brother’s prospective reputation? Had he wronged my mother more than what was perceptible? Was my father feeling guilt for never living up to my grandfather’s expectations? I never learned the truth. We found the first overt and culpable hole, filled it up, poured water on top, and mixed it together into a foul ashen sludge. Drivers slowed and veered.

  “How long will it take for this to dry? Maybe we should borrow some of those orange cones and put them around this thing so people don’t drive into it,” I said. “I know where to get some. Mr. Massey keeps a bunch of cones in the back of his work truck.”

  My father stretched his back and groaned. He said, “I didn’t think about that. Huh. Damn, I didn’t think about that, Reed. Good thinking. It’ll stay gummy too long for us to hang around waiting.”

  I stood there alone while my father drove to my best friend’s underground house. He tied a red oil rag to one of the broken shovel handles and said, “Stand in front of the hole and wave this around. If it looks like someone’s not going to slow down or move over, jump.”

  It all worked out well. People saw me and they slowed. A few drivers asked if I was okay, I explained the situation, and they thanked me. One guy said there should be a Boy Scout badge for such community-spirited causes. My father returned, we put up two cones, and we drove onward to the next potential disaster.

  “Did your father explain it all to Mr. Massey?” June asked me in the traffic jam. An ambulance, driving on the sidewalk, passed us with its lights on but no siren blaring.

  “I have no clue. I asked him, he said I asked too many questions, and that was it. He said it might be best if I never brought this up to Lincoln’s daddy, so I have a feeling he plain stole the cones,” I said.

  “You come from a fucked-up place,” June said. I looked forward. The driver in front of me put on his left-hand blinker and crept slowly ahead. June said, “First off, you could’ve potentially killed people with the potholes, and then your father could’ve gotten you killed—or kidnapped—leaving you there in the middle of the road.”

  I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t mention how Calloustown wasn’t the kind of place, back then, where hit-and-runs or kidnapping occurred.

  When we got to the site of the wreck, June rolled her window down. She said, “Is everyone all right?” to a highway patrolman who brandished an unlit flashlight.

  He said, “Mexicans. Three dead, one unconscious. One of them might be all right, unless the emergency room doctor does the right thing. Maybe they’ll send him back before he wakes up.” I had never known a highway patrolman to offer the results of a car wreck to passersby and wondered if he’d committed some kind of misdemeanor.

  My wife laughed.

  I looked at her and said, “That’s not funny. What has happened to you?”

  June said, “Give it a break, Reed. I’m only interacting with another human being.”

  I thought, mass murderers might say the same thing on a witness stand. Rapists might do the same, and child molesters.

  She said, “At least I didn’t break my mother’s ribs.”

  When we got to the lecture, people filed out of the auditorium. June and I took a different route back home, and we didn’t speak, that I remember. In the kitchen, later, June looked at a calendar she kept on the side of the refrigerator. She mentioned that we had a cooking demonstration the following night at six o’clock over at the farmer’s market, that the chef and author would be using kale in every recipe, and that nutritionists worldwide now touted kale as one of the new organic wonder foods, filled with vitamin A and calcium. June told me that vitamin A was all about eyesight and asked me if I cared to see well for a
long time, or if I’d rather live in the dark like all my old friends in their underground lairs.

  I might’ve shrugged. I squinted to look at the calendar, but thought more about which vitamins best kept livers thriving. I thought about Lincoln, which made me think of emancipation. I wondered if there was a vitamin for foresight. We have all kinds of lectures and demonstrations to attend to straighten our lives, I almost said. And then I thought about those sadly doomed people born with holes in their hearts, on edge, I imagined, from impending merciless misfortunes.

  Static, Dead Air, Interference, Memory

  My wife’s some kind of medical fluke, has a nerve running from her tear ducts to her pudenda. She can be out in the kitchen chopping an onion and the next thing everyone in the neighborhood’s wondering what’s got Mella ululating like a mournful Syrian. Back when we dated, and even for a few years after we married, I’d make sure one of those Feed Our Children telethons was on TV and begin to undress as Mella walked through the room, caught a glimpse of a peckish smudged-faced toddler, then cried until she neared climax as I found inconspicuous ways to pull off her panties. I don’t want to say that I’m lazy, but after twenty-six years I feigned the cable being out some nights when I knew that nothing aired save Old Yeller, My Dog Skip, Born Free, or any of those other sad movies. Maybe I’d tired of the bombardment of reminders that I couldn’t give Mella the satisfaction that, say, actor Tom Hanks could give her when in movies he spoke to a volleyball, or his wife Jenny died and left him with that bastard child, or he opened up a big soulless bookstore and forced that woman out of business, or that gigantic prisoner’s pet mouse got smushed, or he decided he didn’t want to be big anymore after talking to that mechanical fortune teller, or he came back to Normandy and talked at a grave marker.

  I’ll give Mella this: She learned to mask her public orgasmic outbursts into sounding like something else. In a movie theatre she could make the noise of a rusty film reel spinning, for example. At a New Year’s Eve party, when that big ball’s going down and everyone’s crying, Mella sounds like champagne corks exploding. She’s an Amazonian bird in that way. She’s like nothing else in all others, though.

  She got disability early on, of course, even though a qualified doctor finally signed her off as having some kind of rare chronic pain syndrome because he knew he’d be laughed out of the medical community if he wrote down somewhere on an official document, “She can’t work seeing as every workplace is sad and sadness makes her orgasmic,” blah blah blah. Between marriage and age thirty Mella worked as a high school English teacher who never gave less than an A, seeing as she couldn’t take the kids flipping out saying their parents would kill them or that they wouldn’t be able to get into college. I met Mella in college—we went to a place that had a perennial 0–11 football team, and let me tell you I got lucky every Saturday night after the autumn games. Hell, I thought every woman was like Mella and wondered how come the boys on my hall had such trouble getting laid—“Take them to a football game,” I said. “Then when you get back to your room, bring up something about how the quarterback got a concussion, which meant he’d probably be suffering from dementia later on in life. Go ahead and start taking off your clothes at this point while putting a Tom Waits album on the turntable.”

  Anyway, Mella “retired” from the workplace and diddled around, so to speak, until eBay showed up. I had a regular job doing regular things that brought us a regular paycheck. I’m an actuary. An actuary! I’m supposed to be able to predict how long people will live, and whether my company can make money off of them. It’s more complicated than that, certainly, but not by much. Let me say this: I have professional friends in the business that I see daily. If I had to predict, and that’s what I do, how many times they have a meaningful, productive, non-reproductive, sexual experience with a woman, I’d say the odds were something like, oh, infinity-to-one.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker that was good, Tank.”

  She rarely called me “Tank,” but that’s how good it was there, pulled off on a dirt road outside Calloustown, South Carolina, on a Saturday morning, driving around aimlessly in search of small boxable items she could sell on eBay—advertising ashtrays, for instance, or first-edition books, or silver salt spoons. My father understood that people named Henry got called Hank. He wanted to name me “Tank,” my mother said no, and he somehow convinced her that he had an old uncle named Tenry: “I want to name our first son after my old Great Uncle Tenry,” he supposedly said.

  “Tenry!” my mother said there on a bed after her water broke. “That’s different! With a name like that, he won’t be something everyday.”

  Like an actuary.

  My father called me Tank, my mother called me Tenry, I went to college, and I met a beautiful woman who should’ve been a Sioux named Mella-Who-Cries-and-Seizures-Loudly.

  We had pulled off on the dirt road some seventy miles from where we lived and thirty miles from our destination because I’d made the mistake of putting the radio station on NPR on a Saturday morning before Car Talk, and there was this goddamn piece about an ex–opera singer who had at one time sung that sad “O Mio Babbino Caro” song in some kind of production in Tampa, which is sad enough without the story of this ex-opera star having fallen upon such hard times that she had to eat cat food because she didn’t have money, and her leg had some kind of nerve damage that made her foot flop around, and a daughter of hers died from a Lortab overdose, and her faithful husband died in a boating accident that involved two manatees, and then the bank finally foreclosed on her house because she’d missed a mortgage payment by several minutes.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker,” Mella said, and I got back in the driver’s seat in order to take us onward. She put her seat back up. “I’m sorry. I needed that. I couldn’t handle it alone. Thank you. Thank you, Tank.”

  I said, “Uh-huh.” I’d been preoccupied, up until that point, with the odds of a man living to the age of seventy-six after he’d been in cancer remission since the age of forty-five. What with all the new drugs and experiments and treatments, it wasn’t easy.

  We drove back down the highway. I turned the radio off. I said, “You got anything special you’re looking for?”

  My wife said, “Something’s wrong with the car.”

  I thought we’d been hitting potholes, that maybe my eyes failed to discern changes in the macadam. I said, “Calloustown seems like the kind of place where you’ll find some old syrup containers, or singletrees, or metal Pepsi signs, or turkey calls, or battery-operated clapping monkeys, or Underwood typewriters, or arrowheads, or Edgefield pottery, or Vietnam-era Zippos, or confederate money, or dinosaur bones, or…” The car hopped onward, sure enough. And then that temperature needle flew up, showing that we overheated. I knew if I drove much longer my engine wouldn’t live another day. I said, “I need to pull over.”

  Mella started crying.

  I’m not sure what kind of so-called qualified town wants to have a funeral home as the first business after the “Welcome To” sign, but I eased into the parking lot of the Glymph Funeral Home and put it in park. I said to Mella, “This is not sad. This is one of those things. Do not make a scene, please. We’re all right.”

  I got out and opened the hood, as if I knew what I was doing. Well, I did know that every damn belt shouldn’t be snapped and dangling from its water pump, alternator, power steering, and A/C compressor pulleys. I looked down into the mysterious cavern of my car’s innards, saw what seemed to have sprang, and yelled out to Mella, “Look what we did at our age! We’re fifty! We killed us some rubber gaskets and whatnot, is what I’m saying. Goddamn. You and I were humping so hard we broke everything.”

  The front end steamed and pinged and tick-tick-tick-tick-ticked to the point where I could do nothing but close down the hood for fear of getting shot in the head by a rod. Mella nodded inside the car, then patted the driver’s seat. She said, “I’ve seen this happen on TV. It’ll be all right. I s
aw this happen one time in a movie that involved these two guys having to drive through the desert.”

  I remembered the time she’d watched that movie—a lizard died, and Mella started crying, and the next thing you know I had her backed up against the bookcase. I remember it well, because Mella was the reader in the family, what with her English teacher background, and while I had her there I got to looking over the titles and thought, I really ought to read Of Human Bondage, and Wuthering Heights, and Ethan Frome. That’s what I thought back then. But here I said, “We need to call Triple A.”

  She said, “If I call them, and they come out here to help us, the next thing you know our rates will go up.”

  There were no clouds in the sky. I reached down at my slightly wet balls and jerked my khakis left and right a few times. I said, “Don’t do this again, honey. Please don’t do this.”

  One time we had a hailstorm that damaged our roof and cars mercilessly, but Mella wouldn’t call the insurance agent seeing as it would jack our bill.

  She cried. She got out her cell phone, though, and flipped it open. “I don’t know Triple A’s number,” she said. “Here.”

  What did I know? I punched up my buddy Aaron the actuary, seeing as I knew his number, but I learned that we were in a place with no bars. We were stuck in a “fuck you for trying to contact the outside world” kind of place.

  “Man, we need to find a payphone or something.” I thought, when’s the last time I saw a payphone? I thought, Mella ought to buy up payphones and sell them on eBay. I said, “Please don’t cry. I’ll go inside.”

  “I’m not going to wait out here in the parking lot of the dead. The parking lot of people who wait to go see the dead. The parking lot.”

  I doubt I have to go into much detail or speculation about what might happen to an orgasmic-by-sadness woman walk ing into an institution of embalmment. I’d learned to live by the “we probably won’t see these people again” dictum long before. I said, “Let’s go see if they got a landline.”