Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  Patricia said, “I’m so sorry that I ever doubted you.”

  I said, “Do we have any Pepsi, or did you hide that from me, too?” I got up and looked in the back of the refrigerator to find a sixteen-ounce bottle of ginger ale. It wasn’t my favorite chaser, but it wasn’t the worst.

  My wife got up, went into the garage, and came back with an eight-pack of tiny Pepsis. She said, “I had a feeling that this was going to happen. I looked ahead! I got these yesterday at the store. I knew it was going to happen!”

  Grapefruit juice is the worst chaser, if it matters, when it comes to bourbon. The tie for second place goes to Squirt, buttermilk, Fanta orange soda, soy milk, cranberry juice, and Mr. Pibb.

  I turned the page. I turned the page again and again: photographs of my wife and me sitting in the car, entering the automatic carwash down the road, of us walking in a park, of us dropping mail into a drop box. I went to the very back page—maybe Patricia had affected me—to see if there was some kind of plot. The last photograph showed my wife and me sitting inside a vegetarian café that I despised but frequented with her when she craved hummus. On a side note, if you ask me, Patricia and her cohorts should get a group of people to eat hummus, then stand around with matches in poor neighborhoods to keep itinerant and haphazard flames going.

  There I was cutting the front yard with Patricia watching me, and there I was opening the door to a convenience store for an old man, and there I with her picking up litter down the road from where we lived. More photographs with Patricia: inside a theatre at one of those goddamn movies wherein three or four women talk about the past, destroy men, and drink shots of beer; inside a yoga paraphernalia outlet; in a music store, standing between the goddamn Show Tunes and Folk Music sections; in the parking lot of the Humane Society before we went inside and ended up with a mixed breed we named Mule who looked like a bird dog with the face of one of those actresses who always show up in movies that Patricia made me attend with her.

  There were others. Some of them had a windshield wiper, or steering wheel, in the foreground. The only photographs of me alone—or at least not with Patricia—showed me at Skeeter’s bar in town, sitting on the first bar stool by the door, reading one of those goddamn classic books I’d promised to finish. There were a dozen of those pictures, and in each one I wore my favorite going-to-a-bar shirt with two pockets.

  I finished off the jelly jar and poured some more. I said, “Okay. I guess that this is going to either be about satellite imagery, or about my not really going to a book club on Tuesdays and Thursdays when you do those night classes.”

  Patricia taught Sociology 101 at the community college parttime to a number of unemployed, aimless drifters who never took the SAT and could go to college for free as part of the state’s unemployment package. She came home crying at least twelve times a semester, mostly because some kind of self-important ex-doffer from the cotton mill insisted that “mores” were eels. For some reason there had always been a man in attendance named Norm who would blurt out, “Here!” or “Present!” when Patricia used his name, and “norm” might be mentioned, oh, six thousand times in a Sociology 101 class.

  My wife pulled the jelly jar her way and took a sip—Patricia!—winced, coughed twice, and said, “I hired a detective to follow you around. Sorry. As it ends up, our marriage was fine all along!”

  I sat there trying to grasp the situation, and tried to look both pensive and slightly confused, much like the actors and actresses looked in those goddamn movies Patricia made me endure. I said, “Fine all along, huh? Well that’s good to know. Maybe we should celebrate by spelling out ‘OK’ in the front yard with some of your Colonial-style LED solar-powered landscape lights.”

  I learned that my wife had been watching too many of those after-the-evening-news programs that deal with famous acting people and their infidelities. One of the “psychiatrists” had mentioned that adultery was contagious, as was divorce, and that it wouldn’t be surprising statistically to find out that the only monogamous people in America were, oddly, polygamists. Patricia’d gone off and hired a local detective who specialized in cheating mates—a man named Vonnie Coggins, who had billboards advertising his services, plus a whole back cover of the telephone book where lawyers usually buy space. I always thought “Vonnie” was a woman’s name, but evidently it can be a nickname for someone of Italian heritage named “Giovanni.” Maybe “Coggins” is a shortened form of an Italian family name. I don’t remember ever hearing about a normal Italian named Coggins.

  Within twenty-four hours of watching Entertainment Tonight or Celebrities in Action! or Hollywood Today, Patricia got in touch with this detective via the dreadful, civilization-killing Internet. Here’s how it worked: Patricia got on the computer and found Vonnie’s website. He wrote back to her, “Send me a photo of your husband, and your address.” She did. He wrote, “Send me your Visa card number, I won’t steal from you, I’m bonded.” She did. Vonnie wrote, “I’ll follow around your husband, take some photos, and send them to you. Go rent a post office box so your husband doesn’t get the mail.” Oddly enough, I had, in the past, drank with Vonnie on Thursdays at Skeeter’s, across from the bookstore where I told my wife I met weekly with other literary enthusiasts. Patricia wasn’t a reader, among other things. I would come home from the bar with a copy of anything that wasn’t a tabloid and she’d say, “I don’t know why you read that stuff. It’s not true! It’s all made up. Why would you want to know anything that’s made up and spend time with other fools who did the same thing?”

  We had to get married, if it matters. If it explains anything. She was pregnant—she said, though I learned later that she made it up—we got married, and then she wasn’t pregnant. She didn’t have a miscarriage or abortion. She just wasn’t pregnant anymore. It’s not like I was the first man who ever fell for this ploy. I mean, in the history of marriage, I wasn’t the first to fall—I don’t think Patricia ever told another man, “I’m pregnant, marry me, don’t read books,” and so on.

  Vonnie followed me around for a while. He took photographs of me with “another woman,” who happened to be my wife. Vonnie must’ve thought that I was up to no good in Skeeter’s, seeing as I used an alias there: My real name’s Buddy, but in bars I go by Franklin. It’s not that odd. I don’t like turning my head nonstop whenever somebody says, “Hey, buddy,” inside a bar. People say “Hey, buddy” inside a bar more often than you’d think. My middle name’s Franklin. And I’m not an adulterous individual.

  As a side note, people use the term “buddy” a lot at the Humane Society, too. When Patricia and I were in there selecting Mule to be our dog—which ended up being more my dog, and I’m glad—all the other prospective adopters were in there bent down looking into cages saying, “Hey buddy, hey buddy, hey buddy,” which made me turn my head about as much as inside a bar. Could you imagine having the name Buddy and being a stray? That would be one skinny dog, always running up to people.

  Occasionally Vonnie sat two stools down from me—now I know it’s because he liked having the light behind him for better surveillance photographs. I read The Sound and the Fury, or Sanctuary, or As I Lay Dying—all meaningful titles, looking back on things. We watched reruns of the World Cup soccer matches that Skeeter had recorded and played over and over—from something like 1990 to the present because his family came from either England or the Netherlands. No one in the bar cared about soccer, but the hum of all those European chanting spectators, right on up to those vuvuzelas in South Africa, made us—I’m making an assumption here—feel safe. It made all of us drowsy. I didn’t want to tell Skeeter how to run a bar, but sleepy drinkers didn’t seem like such a great plan.

  The one time I actually spoke to the detective who followed me around, I said to him, “Scotch and whole milk, huh? I’ve read about that somewhere. It’s because of having an ulcer, right?”

  Vonnie wasn’t the most likeable bar patron. He said, “It’s because my family owns a dairy and I don’t wa
nt to see them go out of business.” That might’ve been the time he took a photo of me from his secret hidden camera gizmo. He said, “You worry about your drink, and I’ll worry about mine.”

  I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought “Dickhead.” After Patricia explained the photo album, and showed me Vonnie’s picture on the back of the telephone book, I wish I’d’ve said “Dick-head” and more to the guy. First off, if I’d’ve known everything, I might’ve said, “How smart is it to have your picture on the back of a telephone book? If you’re tailing someone, don’t you think he might’ve seen your face and say to himself, ‘Uh-oh, there’s that detective Vonnie Coggins with his weird non-Italian last name. I hope he ain’t following me around’?”

  I’d been back to Skeeter’s just about every Tuesday and Thursday night since that time, and not seen Vonnie again. Skeeter even said to me a couple times, “Hey, don’t scare off my customers anymore.” I thought he meant it because I had big hands that looked strangle-worthy.

  I sat there with Patricia. I understood that, subconsciously, maybe she wanted me to fool around on her so she could get out of the marriage. I wasn’t much of a do-gooder, and do-gooders who believe in an afterlife don’t want to be alone, more than likely. If they believe in Heaven and Hell, like Patricia did—wrongly, I believe—then they don’t want to consider living on a cloud with a harp, consumed with wondering how their non-do-gooder spouses are getting along with the fire and brimstone. I have no evidence to back this up. None of those Snopes characters ever brooded about it.

  I said, “What’s with the electric chair?”

  She got up from the table, opened the pantry door, dug around, and pulled out a tiny square bottle of expensive Cointreau I’d bought a few years earlier and thought I had finished off. Patricia went to the cabinet, pulled out a fancy hand-blown snifter of sorts, then dropped it accidentally on the granite countertop. She said, “Damn! It’s your fault, you know.”

  That’s what I do for a living, and what my father and grandfather did. I make and install granite countertops, and believe me when I say that—if I wanted to—I could have affairs with a number of unhappy housewives whose husbands try to assuage the daily matrimonial tensions with overpriced and unneeded kitchen accessories. I think that the wives believe that because I have big hands, maybe I have a gigantic pecker, like they say. Again—no scientific proof here—but the gigantic hands of granite countertop workers is a direct result of banging and smushing every finger, over and over daily.

  I said, “Use one of my jelly jars. And put an ice cube in the bottom of it first.”

  Patricia said, “The electric chair was supposed to be symbolic.” She came back to the table and sat down. She pulled the picture off the cover and said, “I guess I need to replace it with a dove, or a penguin. Those are animals that’re monogamous.”

  I didn’t say, “Black vultures.” Black vultures mate for life. I’d gotten all obsessed with vultures while reading one of those novels, and done some research.

  I said, “Black vulture.”

  Patricia stared at me and then shook her head. “You’re disgusting.” She thought I’d said something about vulva during this, our unplanned reconciliation I didn’t even know about.

  As anyone who’d ever watched an afternoon talk show might imagine, our marriage didn’t last much longer. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Sometimes Mule looks at me an hour after I’m supposed to feed her, and the look on her face says, “You’re not paying attention.” The look on her face says, “There’s a program on the Animal Planet I’ve been watching when you go off to work, and it’s about people who call in the cops on people who aren’t taking care of their animals.”

  Maybe Patricia met someone at the community college who planned to work for UNICEF, or Habitat for Humanity, or the United Way. Maybe the college hired someone to teach geography part time because of his experience in the Peace Corps. She woke up hungover the day after we looked at her clandestine photo album, said she was sorry, said she couldn’t spiral downward with my addiction and self-destructive streaks, said she couldn’t live with a man who never planned to go to college after dropping out after three and a half years even if he did so in order to get married and take over his father’s business, said that we were fortunate to never have had children.

  I got up out of bed with my thumbs hurting, as usual. I said, “What?” I said, “I didn’t cheat on you, Patricia. What the fuck more do you want out of me?”

  Mule didn’t get out of bed. Mule lay there like she always did, as if she wanted me to pick her up and take her outside.

  Call me irresponsible and inattentive and unobservant, but I’d not noticed that Patricia had already packed up her car the day before. As I figured it out later, she wanted me to throw a tantrum. She wanted me to look over those photographs of us together all the time, and say, “You didn’t trust me, bitch?!” like that. She wanted me to raise a hand in anger, to go burn somebody’s barn, to speak to her as if she were simple-minded, to threaten her with a corn cob, to take up wing-walking as a pastime and die. She wanted me to get a slight lobotomy and think that our world could be cured with no darkness available.

  “I appreciate your being patient with me” were her last words, which didn’t make a lot of sense, if you ask me.

  I had no other option but to call up Liz Pembroke—who was a nice, sane woman who didn’t go by Elizabeth or Eliza or Lizbeth—and say that, although I prided myself, as my grandfather and father had done, on being punctual and trustworthy, I couldn’t possibly make it to her kitchen for two days. I lied. I said, “I’ve been asked to send all my scrap granite down to the Gulf of Mexico in order to help with that oil spill.”

  Where did that come from? I even thought to myself.

  Liz Pembroke said, “I completely understand. What a nice thing you’re doing! Are they going to plug that leak with your granite? Will crushed granite stop the force of oil coming up to the surface? I guess it will, seeing as granite holds back oil everywhere else on the planet. I’ve been thinking about getting some one-of-a-kind sculptures in the back yard—not like garden gnomes, you know. Do you ever make one-of-a-kind sculptures for people, kind of like Stonehenge?”

  I said, “I have no clue.” I said, “I have no clue” about six times, like an idiot. My mind wandered over to Patricia having an affair with Vonnie Coggins, for some reason. I said, “I’ll take some money off y’all’s price, for my being late.”

  Mule got out of bed. She walked up to me and wagged her tail twice. I asked her if she wanted to go outside. She ambled toward the sliding-glass door. I watched her trot to the middle of the back yard, and then I thought—what the hell?—I can have some of that Cointreau seeing as I’m not going to work.

  When I walked back out to the sun room I saw my dog looking straight up into the air. Did she smell something dead on the horizon? Was she looking for birds of prey to swoop down? Was she merely stretching her neck in a way to relieve some tension?

  I looked down at my disfigured, ugly hands. They looked like talons, I thought. What woman, in the future, would ever want me to touch her kindly?

  THE SINKHOLES OF DUVAL COUNTY

  It’s not like I didn’t understand how we preyed on octogenarians, the shell-shocked, paint-fume addicts, and the superstitious in order to gain something for future use, though I couldn’t imagine the long causal progression at the time. This little scam and trek occurred in 1987 and would be considered the germ of what happened in 2008 when Uncle Cush, according to him, single-handedly maneuvered North Carolina’s electoral votes in the presidential election. Because my uncle could sew, and because he had access to free parachute-like material that he recovered from a questionably locked storage room behind the defunct Poke Cotton Mill—and because we’d both read Machiavelli and Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill—there seemed to be no other option but to pack up a step van and visit the faulty limestone foundations of Florida, two states south of us. I had turned eighteen a m
onth prior. This would have been some kind of slightly aberrant graduation present had I actually not been homeschooled since seventh grade and never undergone a traditional convocation.

  “I might’ve picked a bigger state to visit had you done gone to Poke High like every other goddamn linthead’s child wrongly hoping to be all valedictory in his or her wants,” Cush said right about the time we crossed the St. John’s River via ferry boat—my first time—and then pulled into a VFW lounge he’d researched. “I might’ve picked us Texas. But your momma was all worried about the violence in the schools.”

  This VFW took up the bottom floor of an ex-department store that appeared to be three stories high. It will matter.

  Anyway, I didn’t contradict him. He’d only been back from Vietnam for five years after choosing to stay there after the pull-out to hike Southeast Asia alone and mesmerize villagers with his spoon-playing repertoire. Uncle Cush’s softest visage compared to that of a trailer hitch, his normal eye contact that of two balls of barbed wire. On more than one occasion over the years we’d walked into convenience stores only to have the assistant managers raise their arms up in the air. One time when he was looking at new trucks over at Forty-Five Motors the lot manager went inside and called two deputies. People often took him for the actor Jack Palance’s crazed brother, if Jack Palance’s brother ever slicked back his black hair with shellac and let a Fu Manchu grow down below his clavicles.

  I didn’t say, “Mom wasn’t so concerned with the violence in elementary and middle school as all the other parents were, seeing as I beat the shit out of all those kids every day. The violence came from me.” I didn’t say, “I enjoyed being homeschooled without a Bible portion of the curriculum, seeing as I could be President of the Solitaire Club and captain the tetherball team.”