I said, “Shut up. Get all the rocks you want. I tell you what—make your arrowheads, and give me ten percent of your gross profit. I know all about the arrowhead market,” which wasn’t a lie seeing as my mother had manufactured fake arrowheads long ago. I looked at Sally Renfrew—if she had a seventeen-year-old son she must’ve had the kid at age sixteen, I thought, for she appeared to be my age—and stuck my hand out.
“We live about two miles away. I promise that I haven’t stolen from you before this past month. I didn’t steal back when your dad pulled river rocks out and sold them to landscapers, or even those couple years when your father kind of slacked off after your mother’s death, or when you gave up altogether in order to go back to studying full time. Or when Abby took off for Minnesota.”
I kept eye contact. “You certainly seem to know enough about what goes on around here.” I wondered if she knew that I was trying to complete a low-residency master’s degree program in Southern culture studies from Ole Miss-Taylor, and that I waited daily for some kind of omen to send me in the right direction in regards to a new and daring thesis.
Sally Renfrew shrugged. She placed a nice flat piece of slate that might’ve been part of my house’s roof some sixty years earlier. She said, “I’ll tell Stan to come over here tomorrow. He’s not much into sports. But he eats. Maybe y’all could go hang out and eat breakfast. Tell him how important it was for you to study all those things you studied before you came back here with Abby and gave up. How many bachelor’s degrees do you have anyway? And as for the Southern culture studies thing—good God, man, there’s a term paper a minute going on around you.”
I said, “Hey, wait,” but then forgot what I was going to ask her. It had to do with scams, the South, and people, maybe.
When she left I think she might’ve called out the open truck window, “Five percent.”
Stan Renfrew said that he now pronounced his name “Stain,” and that it was his biological father’s idea. He said it would get him more attention on the comedy circuit. We sat inside Laurinda’s, the closest diner from my house, in a square brick building that over the years had housed an auto body repairman, florist, office supplier, biker leather goods, bait shop, lawn mower repairman, and a number of other people running their money-laundering, drug-selling, slave-trading fronts. There was no valid or business-rational reason for a florist to set up shop in an area where houses stood about three per square mile on a two-lane road that only connected ridges, hilltops, and valleys. I hadn’t yet figured out what Laurinda did illegally, and my visits to her good diner went from twice a month to about daily after Abby took off to birth and raise our child in the upper Midwest without my help.
Because I didn’t want this Stan kid snooping around my property, I drove over to Sally Renfrew’s place and found him waiting for me at the end of their quarter-mile driveway. He leaned against the mailbox, tall and skinny, but not with the ubiquitous ennui-ridden look on his face that most seventeen-year-old kids perfected from watching bad situation comedies. Stan got in my truck, said, “I hope you’re Stet Looper,” and stuck out his hand to shake.
I said, “Your mother must be the top saleswoman in all the world. I realize that you probably don’t want to hang out with an old guy.”
He nodded, apologized. Stan said, “I just spent ten days with my father. He died on me. But he was seventy-seven years old. So I’m kind of used to old people.”
I U-turned and headed toward the diner, trying to do math in my head. “Your father was seventy-seven? Good God, man, how old is your mom?”
“It’s a long story that involves a famous visiting professor named Stanley Dabbs and a starry-eyed college senior who wanted to be an art critic. I’m what came out of all that.”
I grinded my gears and didn’t look at the road. I knew Stanley Dabbs’s name. I thought about how I might have had a book or two the man had written, from back when I was either a philosophy or history or anthropology major. Dabbs was the last of the great social critics and commentators. “Stanley Dabbs is your father?”
“Was,” Stan said. “Are we going to Laurinda’s place? I used to go there when it was a driving range. There used to be a tree farm with migrant workers back behind the place, and everyone yelled out ‘Quatro!’ after hitting tee shots.”
I didn’t remember it being a driving range, but that sounded about right. I said, “Do you play golf?” I tried to think of all the correct and relevant golf terminology I’d amassed over the years. I said, “What’s your handicap?”
I drove past my own long driveway. A vee of geese flew overhead. Stan said, “That was all just a joke. Quatro! I made that up. Hey—if the Special Olympics had a golf tournament, would it be all right to ask competitors what their handicap was?”
I stepped off the accelerator and looked at Stan. He didn’t smile. This is a different kind of boy, I thought. “So your mother wants you to go to college, huh? She told me that you wanted to forego college and be a comedian.” I pulled over into Laurinda’s, which seemed to have more cars in the lot than usual. “I have a feeling your momma isn’t going to like my advice.”
Before Laurinda—she worked as cook and waitress, somehow—got to our booth, I looked outside and saw a man who, I thought at first, suffered from an inner ear problem. I’m that way mostly, I swear. I ignore people’s vices. I told Stan, “That guy either has an inner-ear problem or a gimpy leg.” The man weaved around the newspaper rack outside, then looked east up Highway 11. He took four mini-steps to turn around and look uphill in the other direction.
Stan said, “I’ve been thinking about going to the vocational school to study construction. Then I’m going to build a wooden house entirely out of yardsticks for the exterior. I figure it’ll make it easier to prove the square footage when it’s time to sell.” He didn’t laugh.
The man came inside, doffed his stained cap that advertised Celeste Figs, then sat down at the counter. “Chicken truck turned over three mile thataway, and a three-car wreck the other,” he said loudly to no one in particular. Laurinda flipped a round mold of hash browns over on the stove.
She said, “Coffee?”
“Well, two cars and a van of illegal aliens, you know.”
I said to Stan, “Order whatever you want. Except the sausage or bacon. I don’t want you clogging your arteries. Or the chicken, seeing as I guess we can drive down the road and get chicken for free.”
Laurinda came around the counter and said, “Stuck, too?” I didn’t nod or shake my head. I must’ve stared blanker than cornfed trout. “Are y’all stuck between the two wrecks, too?” she said.
Stan Renfrew said, “No, ma’am,” like a regular gentleman. He said, “We’re out looking for our trained cadaver dogs that got out of their pens. Is there a cemetery nearby, by any chance?”
Laurinda said, “Oh my God.” She set her coffee pot down on our table. “You mean those dogs go round pointing out dead beneath the rubble?” When she held her mouth open I noticed that she chewed two separate pieces of gum.
“I’ve heard both of those jokes, Stain,” I said. “The one about cadaver dogs. The one about yardsticks. Just order. There’s no snare drum inside here for rim shots.”
Laurinda stared at me. She closed her mouth and, with a look of impatience, shook her head. “Okay. You boys ready to order?”
The man with the inner-ear problem folded his cell phone in half, swiveled our way and said, I thought, “Ford ate.” Maybe he talked about himself in third person, I thought. Maybe he left a buddy named Ford at home, seeing as Ford had already eaten breakfast.
Laurinda turned over our coffee mugs without asking what we wanted to drink. She poured both cups to their rims without asking if we wanted milk. To the man at the counter she said, “Hours?”
“Yeah.”
I said, “What’s he saying?”
“Drunk say ford ate hours before the roads get cleared.”
Four to eight, I thought. “He’s drunk all ready?” I ki
nd of whispered. And I felt like a hypocrite, seeing as I’d been known to partake of bourbon shortly after sunrise. Laurinda nodded and looked out the window. Stan Renfrew asked if she served muffins, and I waited for some kind of off-color joke that he never delivered, even after she said, “Haven’t yet. Mostly serve hungry people, honey.”
“I’ve been to your house before,” Stan said. Laurinda brought him two pieces of toasted white bread cut into circles, scrambled eggs, and a hot dog. “Before and after you moved back there.”
“Did you know my father?” I asked. Abby and I moved back to my childhood home after I’d finished my fifth bachelor’s degree, and after Abby—who had a lisp—realized that she wasted her time trying to get an on-air reporter job at a TV station. My father had promised to let me “study myself out,” as long as I promised to return home to operate our family business.
Laurinda brought me a plate with six over-well fried eggs stacked atop each other. I had ordered pancakes. Stan said to me, “I never met your father, no.”
I said to Laurinda, “This isn’t mine.”
She checked her order pad, then looked at the booth parallel to ours. A family of four bowed their heads in prayer. Laurinda swapped eggs for pancakes, quietly, right beneath the praying woman’s nose. Six fried eggs! I thought. Who eats a half-dozen fried eggs at one time?
Laurinda placed her finger on her lips and asked us to keep the secret. Stan said, “That is so cool.” He leaned over and whispered, “Second Comers,” which were members of a religious cult that chose northern South Carolina to bombard with believers, thus taking control of the area after running for various councils. As far as I’d heard, only one family ever emigrated, and here they were stuck between scenic-highway wrecks. Stan got up, grabbed both of their syrups, and placed them next to my plate. He reached over again and took the man’s fork, then smiled at me. I wondered what a proper, responsible Big Brother or mentor would do in this situation. I probably should’ve said, “That’s not appropriate behavior,” or quoted something about having and having not. Instead, I nodded and smiled, and took a glass of water from their table. Stan said, “I know all about these people.”
I said, “Go ahead and finish the joke.”
Stan said, “No joke. But to answer your question: Nope. Never met your father. But I helped your wife move out, sort of.”
I looked across at him. The drunk guy at the counter got up and saluted two men who walked in. He said, “Ford ate hour. Y’all hear? Y’all scared check point, too? Got-damn. Can’t get to the red dot store now.”
Stan said, “I really smoked a sex education course I had to take. I made a 69. I think it was the oral exam that put me over the top.”
More people walked into the diner. Laurinda came by and said, “Either y’all ever cooked, washed dishes, or waited tables before? I need me some help. I should order up some wrecks more often. Or a rock slide.”
I said to Stan, “Whoa, whoa, whoa—you met Abby? You came onto my property and met my wife at some time?”
Stan said to Laurinda, “You ever hear the one about the popular blind waitress who spent most of her time shaking up bottles of ketchup? I got to work on that one. Something about how they’re not really bottles of ketchup, but men with their pants down.”
Laurinda went off saying, “I’ll comp your meal if you pitch in.” She turned around to the Second Comers and said, “Y’all’s food’s getting cold. My booths aren’t rented by the day.”
I didn’t have time to think about theories of synchronicity; or why we’re all put on this planet; or the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, or Jean-Paul Sartre wherein characters are stuck endlessly against their wills; or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; or how the best way to kill yellow jackets is to let them all get in their underground nest at dusk, then pour gasoline into the hive hole and light it; or how sharp fronds prevented fish from swimming out of baskets used by prehistoric Native Americans, thus trapping them; or the history of alienation in regards to psychology; or how helpless, distraught, confused, frightened, and relentless squirrels can be, once caged.
Well, no, I did have time to think about that last part, because the man at the counter announced to everybody, “I got enough squirrels in my cage. I don’t need none of that.”
I said to Stan, “I’d be willing to bet that that guy’s just as irrational sober as he is drunk.”
The Second Comers remained bowed. I reached over and grabbed the father’s bacon. Stan leaned over and said, “I didn’t know she was leaving you. If I’d’ve known you back then, I wouldn’t’ve helped your wife move out. She didn’t seem to know how to use bungee cords, and luggage wouldn’t stay up on the roof rack, you know. I was walking down the road picking up aluminum cans, ’cause it’s free money, and the more I save the easier it is for me to buy gold, and then I’ll turn in the gold bullion later in order to fly to Illinois and get a cell phone with a valid area code so my mother thinks I’m truly at the University of Chicago, and then I’ll still have enough money to pay for my apartment up in New York while I’m doing the comedy circuit and telling my mother and dead biological father that I’m attending and passing all of my American studies, philosophy, art history, linguistics, classic rhetoric, and interpretive dance classes. Anyway, there I was with my burlap bag of crushed Budweiser cans—you know it only takes about twenty-five cans to make up a pound, and aluminum’s going for fifty cents a pound—and your wife was hunched over the hood of her car half-crying. I said, ‘Hey, you got any beer cans in the back seat?’ and she said she didn’t. I tied up her trunk and couple suitcases, she handed me two dollars, and I walked back home realizing that I probably wasn’t going to find another two hundred cans on that particular afternoon. It’ll get worse if more of these Second Comers show up, seeing as they don’t tend to drink a lot of beer and throw their cans out moving car windows like the rest of us.”
Stan finished off his sausage biscuit. I said, of course, “You selfish little bastard. I knew you’d turn on me sooner or later. Sometimes you really scald my testes. Ingrate!” for I felt sure that it’s what a regular father might say. Then I got up to help Laurinda with the dishes.
The drunk said, “Ford ate hour” as I passed him. I listened to Stan slide out of the booth and follow me.
I leaned over the man, smelled plain beer, and said, “Bush ate whole years.” I thought, What hour did you awake in order to get this intoxicated?
My protégée Stan called out, “Wait up.”
Here’s what I thought, perhaps. Here’s what I thought up elbow deep in dish water, without a Hobart machine in the kitchen of Laurinda’s diner: If I were a father, I would want my son to know manual labor. I thought, If my son were a stand-up comedian, I would want him to know that there’s not much funny in working for minimum wages, which in turn, somehow, made it all that more comedic. Why would anyone choose to wash dishes for a living unless he either had lost hope altogether or never knew that there were self-satisfying vocations out there, like digging holes in the ground and filling them back up. Stan worked beside me with large white towels draped over both shoulders and one in his hand. I said, “This is not how I planned to spend my day. But we must pitch in and help the community. We’re not doing a bad thing, understand. If there’s a heaven, maybe we’ll be remembered for helping out Laurinda. Even if there’s not, we can feel sure that by helping her out, she won’t later go nuts from being inundated and go off on a shooting spree. Shooting sprees aren’t good things.”
I wished that some of this was on tape, so I could show both my rational side and my stern side to Abby up in Minnesota. Then maybe she’d return, give birth to our child, and believe me when I said that this place was the best of all possible areas to raise a child, four- to eight-hour road congestion or not.
Stan smiled. He handed a plate back to me and pointed at some egg yolk. “You don’t officially have to do all this,” he said. “You can ask my mom out on a date if you wa
nt. Ya’ll’ve been watching too much TV. In the real world I don’t think prospective boyfriends really have to hang out with the mother’s kids and act all cool and normal.”
I handed Stan the rewashed plate. I looked through the kitchen porthole and noticed that the Second Comers finally began their meals. Laurinda cooked and talked loudly over her shoulder to the customers. A state trooper walked into the door and took off his Smoky Bear hat. I said to Stan, “What? What’re you talking, man?”
“It’s a great idea if you ask me—my mom has the arrowhead business, and you have the rock business. You’re single and she’s single. Even if y’all end up not liking each other—and you will, because you’re both smart and stuck in a place where brains isn’t exactly the first organ mentioned when people ask to list them out—it’s a smart idea business-wise. Economically speaking, you know. Like a family that owns the Pepsi distributorship and another that owns the bottling company.”
Between Wrecks Page 11