Pine nodded and smiled, rubbed his stomach in circles like a 1950s kid overacting in a TV commercial for whole milk. Then he ran off to partake in the bobbing for grenades contest. I made a mental note to tell him not to mention this part of the day to Alberta or Bonita, seeing as it would mean the end of our pre-foster days. They weren’t real grenades, but miniature finials. Still, social workers and wives frown upon toy guns, too.
A handful of women wailed, reenacting how one mourns the death of a Marine, when Clarence Reddick’s body got transferred to a pine coffin, then placed up on a stage where, later, a John Philip Sousa tribute band would play two hours’ worth of marches and people would try to do-si-do.
I don’t know why I said, “That’s a kind offer,” and asked for retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry’s phone number. I had no intention of calling him. My theory went thus: Let’s say I became fluent in Morse code. By that time, Pine would be back living with relatives or bona fide foster parents. Even if Bonita and I took in another emergency child, what would be the chances that the child communicated only in dits and dahs? What would be the chances that I’d have a field trip of military personal at CPR who would find it amusing to speak in Morse code? Hell, I would be better off filling my head up learning Hindi, or Gullah.
I walked over to where Pine stood, his head dripping, a wooden pineapple in his jaws. I said, “Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah,” just jabbering, not knowing that I had looked at him and said, “Zero.”
We got home and I told Bonita everything that I learned. She said, “Is that true? Six hundred thirty-eight Cubans were captured in the real invasion? Where did they go?”
I said, “That’s not what I want you to focus on. We met an old guy from the Navy. He communicated with Pine just fine, because that noise he’s been making has actually been Morse code. There’s an imaginary friend involved named Joe. Maybe it’s G.I. Joe. And if it is, that would be even more worrisome. I think you need to call up Alberta and tell her this isn’t working out.”
Bonita shook her hair out. She laughed. “Are you serious? I had an imaginary friend in West Virginia named Charlie. As in Charles Manson. Who was brought up in foster homes in West Virginia, insert joke here, when his mom was off in prison and whatnot.”
Pine had walked straight back to his room. I looked over my shoulder to make sure he didn’t stand in the doorway. To Bonita I whispered, “I think Pine’s parents damaged him in ways we’re not capable of handling. I’m serious.”
“Pine! Come on in here, Pine! I got to get to the bottom of something!” Bonita yelled out. He came running. She spoke in a voice I’d not heard before, with really hard long “I” sounds, and Ts that came out Ds. She said, “Why’s your head wet? Back where you come from you walk around with a wet head all the time? You know who walks around with a wet head all the time? Fish. You just a fish, Pine? That what you consider yourself to be? A fish ain’t come out of the water yet to join the rest of us humans on dry land?”
I looked at Pine and noticed how he teared up. I said, “Goddamn, Bonita. Ease up. It’s my fault about letting him bob for apples.”
“You can speak in English, and you’re about to do it pronto, Pine. I don’t care about your mom and dad sitting around in their trailer letting you say dit dot dit dot all the time with your head and shoulders wet. This is a whole new ballgame here, where you got to interact with us in a polite and honest procedure.”
I’d never seen my wife get so wound up. In a way it made me wish we had had children of our own, but in another way I saw it as a blessing that she didn’t go all mountain girl on our kid—yelling, speaking in a way not that much different than Morse code, not blinking, and looking like she could pull out her own teeth and use them in a mosaic portrait of her father in mid-hack, bent over a bucket of balls on the edge of a cliff.
I walked around my wife, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out two cans of ginger ale. I handed one to Pine. We pulled our tabs open within a half second of each other, to make a dit-dit sound. And then fucking Pine said, in a voice that came out as gravelly as the oldest cigarette-smoking, bourbon-swilling, black blues singer of all time, “I’ll dry off in time. It wasn’t apples. I bobbed hand grenades.”
I said, “Hey, you talked,” and Bonita said, “What?”
I said, “Okay, Pine, good job. Don’t wear yourself out in one day. Go on back to your room and take a nap. Later on we can go across the road and hit some pitching wedges at doves flying up.”
“They bob for hand grenades at the Invasion of Grenada reenactment? No goddamn wonder we got problems with the youth of today,” Bonita said. “What else did y’all do, play ring toss on severed heads? Enter a hollering contest see who can yell ‘Kill!’ the loudest?”
“Dah-di-dah di-dit di-dah-di-dit di-dah-di-dit,” Pine said, which Bonita and I knew spelled out K-I-L-L.
She said, “No. You are not going to be having any secret language with a secret invisible friend from this point on.” She pointed at the telephone on the wall and said, “You want me to call up the Department of Social Services and have them come pick you back up and take you to a family might try to exorcise you? That what you want, Pine?”
“Okay, let’s just settle down. It’s only been a couple weeks. Things will smooth out,” I said. I drank my ginger ale and burped accidentally, which made Bonita glare at me.
Pine shook his head. He said in that ancient voice—just a grating rasp off of being that of an old-school tracheotomy victim—“I’d like to go visit that drugstore my parents tried to hold up. I got me some money. I’d like to go to that drugstore, maybe buy me a Timex watch.”
Bonita held a self-satisfied smile I’d not seen since she found some kind of study that ranked West Virginia ahead of my home state in regards to education and quality of living. I felt pretty sure she wrote it herself, sent it to a friend somewhere, and had that person post it on the Internet. I said, “Well, then let’s go to that drugstore.”
I loaded Pine into the car and off we went. We drove past the remnants of the Invasion of Grenada reenactment to see straggling “Cubans,” “Grenadians,” and “Americans” laugh and clink beer cans, gauze wrapped around their heads. We drove by Old Man Reddick’s nursery, and the defunct bus station where men still met mornings in order to think up ways to resurrect Calloustown. Out on Old Charleston Road we passed children selling used golf balls—under normal circumstances I would’ve stopped to make sure they weren’t stolen from me—and then another group of children selling sweet potatoes.
Pine made his noises off and on, I assumed spelling things out in Morse code. I didn’t have it in me to tell him to stop, that he should speak English. Little steps, I thought, kind of like spreading democracy whether Third World nations wanted it or not. I said, “Is there a reason you have to go to this particular Rite-Aid?” I didn’t say, “I understand how you might want to apologize for your parents, that it’s a healing process,” that sort of thing. I didn’t even think about it until later that night, when Alberta came to pick Pine up and take him out of our home.
Pine shook his head. We got there. The saleswoman took a small key and opened the rotating Timex display case. Pine chose a regular, old man’s silver wind-up wrist-watch with a stretchy flexible band that caught arm hairs too much, in my opinion. He shoved it all the way up his arm past his elbow, stuck his ear to it, and said, “Tick tick tick tick tick.”
The woman said, “I bet we can find you a watch with a band that’ll fit better.”
Pine shook his head. “I’m going to use it to make a bomb anyway,” he rasped away. The woman stepped back a bit. “Y’all took my parents away from me after they came in here to get what they needed. I’m going to make a bomb.”
Maybe there’s a reason Bonita and I never had children of our own. I didn’t know what to say or do. My father would’ve beaten me with a nine iron right there next to the perfume counter, but I knew that kind of behavior no longer found acceptance. Should I have laughed and sa
id the boy was kidding? Should I have told the woman she should feel honored that he didn’t say that entire monologue in Morse code? I guess, in retrospect, I should’ve waited thirty minutes in line for the pharmacist and asked him or her to explain to Pine how scared everyone gets when a robbery takes place, and how a nation cannot be considered civilized until its citizens stop attacking each other with little provocation. Evidently the wrong thing to say was, “You got that right, son. I don’t blame you.”
Sonny Boy Williamson for Dinner
Normally I don’t answer the side door if a man’s knocking outside while holding a shotgun in his crooked arm. I don’t even have guns in the house. It’s not like I tell everyone around here—that could only lead to break-ins, and talk that I was truly queer, capricious, unpatriotic, and/or nonresistant—but I don’t keep guns, rope, safety razors, gas stoves, tall kitchen plastic garbage bags, garden hoses, or pills around. There’s a chance that my DNA makeup isn’t the same as my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents on both sides, and some stray cousins, sure, but I don’t want to take the chance. Because I might have what microbiologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, and palm readers haven’t yet discovered—the suicide gene. I won’t marry, I won’t have children, I’ll barely have a pet unless it’s a shelter dog over the age of nine. I’ll drive on occasion, but always attempt to take routes without bridges or thick roadside trees seeing as I might become manically depressed and veer. I’ve been thinking about moving to one of those southwest deserts—no rivers to cross, and most cacti are probably no match for my pickup—but the boredom there might, of course, send me outside to juggle vipers in a careless fashion.
It’s not like I’ve always been aware of my family’s sudden choices to exit a world made up of unemployment, broken hearts, IRS audits, early onset arthritis, hypertension, lackluster restaurant choices, terminal skin conditions, and alcoholism. I grew up with parents who understood their ancestors—thus why they would let me read everything except Hemingway, or why they blacked out Greco-Roman history tomes when Nero showed up, or told me I needed to swerve from any Rothko paintings should I ever take a field trip to a museum of modern art.
They brought me up as best they could, shielded me from how my uncle Carl asphyxiated himself, how my aunt June cut her wrists with a Bowie knife, how one of my grandfathers stepped in front of an Amtrak and the other went skydiving without a parachute. Then my mother and father—right after I graduated college—spent a Sunday night drinking bourbon while eating a special barbiturate pie. I took some jobs, I did some family research, and then I retreated for the most part. No matter, if I make it to forty-nine years old I’ll hold the record for longest-living Gosnell on this particular sad branch.
I expected my “common-law wife” Harriet to be knocking on the door, locked out, and that’s why I thought nothing of opening up without considering what dangers could be out there. Harriet doesn’t have the possible gene. She’s originally from North Dakota and has a great-aunt who’s something like 114 years old. Sometimes I say things to Harriet like, “What does a woman who’s 114 years old do?” and the answer’s always, “She looks forward to making peanut brittle for the volunteer fire department’s annual fundraiser.” Makes fucking peanut brittle once a year! Sorry, but I side with my dead family members when it comes to this. I side with Socrates—who drank some goddamn hemlock—when it comes to how the unexamined life is not worth living. Harriet says, “Well, maybe she’s examining whether or not she can make the perfect peanut brittle each year, just like you think you can design the perfect kitchen utensil.”
I said to the shotgun guy, “Hey. Hey, hey, hey,” and looked behind me for some kind of weapon while closing the door.
This was from my ex-garage, which I used for a workshop. People who know of my possible genetic flaw say to me, “Duncan, why would you leave a job finally making such good money as an optometrist in order to move to the middle of nowhere and run hand tools that might backfire on you?” They say, “What’s to say you won’t get depressed one day and run the circular saw across your jugular?”
To them I say, “What’s to say I wouldn’t get depressed from women arguing with me about how they don’t need bifocals, then one day self-dilating my eyes and run out into midday traffic?”
“I ain’t here to hurt no one,” the man said from the other side of my door. “I’m kind of your neighbor. Here. I’ve put my gun up leaned against your truck.”
I cracked the door back open, armed with my DeWalt Variable Speed belt sander in one hand and a Black & Decker cordless twelve-volt lithium drill in the other. For some reason I thought it necessary to blurt out, “I know all about the goddamn Second Amendment.”
The man didn’t stick out his hand. He said, “Gosnell, right? Me and my wife’s been meaning to come by here and welcome you to Calloustown. I’m Ransom Dunn, from up the road.”
I said, “Good to meet you, Ransom. Duncan,” and set down my tools to shake his hand. I didn’t say, “We’ve lived here for four years.” I thought, Ransom Dunn? What a cool name.
“I just wanted to tell you that I hit a deer down at the end of your driveway. It ain’t dead, and I want to put it out of its misery. Way we do it around here, you get half and I get half, seeing as it’s on your property.”
I stepped outside and looked at his shotgun. It didn’t look all that stable leaned against my bumper—what were the chances of it falling over and discharging? I said, “Damn. Your truck okay?”
I don’t want to ever say anything about anyone else’s vehicle, but Ransom’s truck looked as if he’d hit a good fifty deer. He said, “It’s running.”
I looked down the gravel driveway. The deer—a doe—kept lifting her head in an attempt to get up. I said, “Listen, you go ahead and take her all. I appreciate the offer, but my wife and I are about venisoned out, if you know what I mean.”
See how I did that? I made it sound like A) I hunted on a regular basis and had a freezer full of deer meat; and B) we weren’t vegetarians for the most part, though Harriet was a vegetarian who wouldn’t let me cook what with the chances I’d put Drano in the soup.
Ransom Dunn said, “That’s mighty neighborly of you, my man,” and “Y’all come on over some Saturday night we’ll chew some venison jerky, drink beer. Your wife oughta meet my wife, Boo. Women ’round here need women. Does your wife like to paint by numbers like mine?”
Ransom and Boo Dunn. Boo Dunn sounded like that good sausage from down in Louisiana. I thought, if Harriet and I were named Ransom and Boo Dunn, we’d probably go out on the road and never question the apparent meaningless of life. I said, “Okay,” and picked up my tools.
Back in my workshop I cranked up some Sonny Boy Williamson singing “Keep It to Yourself” and turned on my electric fan. I didn’t want to think about that deer with a barrel to her temple. I wanted to drown it out, much like I used to drown out people screaming about how they didn’t have glaucoma, or hypertension, or diabetes, or torn retinas. I had one man spit right in my own eyes one time when I told him that he had a cataract. They say dentists have a high suicide rate, but I would bet any dentist who says, “You have a cavity” doesn’t equal the effect of his or her saying, “You’re about to go blind” when it comes to the depression that follows for both health professional and patient.
Let me say that even Sonny Boy Williamson’s good loud harmonica won’t drown out a shotgun blast from a hundred yards away.
I put a cheap, handleless rolling pin in my vise, drilled out what needed to be drilled out, and shoved car cigarette lighters into both ends. Sometimes I make sure they match—two Buick Electra lighters, two Comets, two Dodge Dusters, two Fairlanes. But I understand that, in the real world, modern marriages suffer through mixed allegiances, that there are Chevy-only women married to Ford-only men, and that they won’t purchase one of my one-of-a-kind rolling pins unless they’re both represented. It’s just like Yankees/Red Sox families, or Auburn/Alabama families, or Harvard/Yale famil
ies. It’s like Wonderbread/ Sunbeam families, or Duke’s/Hellman’s mayonnaise families.
People pay $66 dollars apiece for my one-of-a-kind rolling pins, even in the recession. My average rolling pin—it’s twenty inches long and might best be called a “dowel” before I shove the lighters in both ends—costs me about nine bucks. I get the lighters for a dollar apiece, down at a number of auto salvage places in and around the Calloustown area, plus up in Columbia when I get Harriet to drive me past EyeCU Optical, where I worked for twenty years.
I sell my work in boutique kitchen appliance shops, through a website, on eBay, and on Amazon.com. I understand the notion of supply and demand, and go full force. One day there will be no more cigarette car lighters, seeing as the automotive industry now designs vehicles without even ashtrays. One day there will be no more flour, and carbohydrate-addicted people will commit suicide.
I heard a blast, and then I heard another. Did Ransom miss the first time? Was he some kind of sadist? Did the doe’s eye stare back at him in a way that made Ransom Dunn take a second shot to eradicate the sad doe-eyed glance from his future dreams?
I worked on a second rolling pin: a specialty order made from a wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat so that when the breadmaker rolled dough there’d be an indention that spelled out “Willie Mays” in script. Who has that kind of money to ruin a vintage ash bat? I looked on the Internet and saw where such bats went for $65 apiece in and of themselves. The signature was at the sweet spot, which meant I had to cut it down, then sand down the thicker end. I don’t want to question anyone’s motives or needs, but I wondered about this particular person’s ego in regards to rolling out biscuits with “Willie Mays” on the top crust.
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