Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  I got up and served myself at least another three fingers.

  “Shit, man, I was born dead,” Mike said.

  I became fascinated with the insect world at an early age, collected specimens, went to college, and in my junior year veered away from the agriculture and life sciences department with an emphasis on entomology in order to study philosophy. My father—a tobacco farmer, among other things—didn’t actually say, “You’re disinherited,” but when he had to sell off the land later he made a point of telling me, “It’s your fault,” and “You’ll remember this day when I die and you see my will.”

  I went to graduate school to concentrate in medical ethics, of all things, but halfway through my second year a professor said to me, “Hey, you’re a farm boy. My daughter, Beauvoir, has a class project to finish up that involves bugs. She’s scared to death of the things. Is there any way you could help her? I’m not exactly enthralled by the insect world, a priori, or a posteriori, either. I mean, could you come talk to her, and maybe hold some crickets and worms so she can see that they’re not deadly?”

  Who the fuck talks like that? I thought right off. And I thought, Why would I want to spend my time with people who throw in stupid Latin terms rightly or wrongly every day, much like lawyers did?

  Not only did I come over and handle the crickets and worms—plus explain the benefits of their droppings in regards to fertilizer—but I volunteered to escort the girl to her sixth-grade class, pretended to be an expert, and taught her classmates all about why they should never kill honeybees, wasps, spiders, wooly bears, ants, beetles, and so on. Beauvoir’s teacher—who had lived in L.A. for the first eighteen years of her life and became my second real girlfriend—thought so much of my expertise that she said, “I am going to make a few calls. We can get you some grant money. We’ve had people come in here with injured birds of prey and snakes to teach or scare the children, but nobody’s ever been so funny and qualified and comforting.”

  Maybe I didn’t have enough courses in regular ethics, for I didn’t say anything like, “I’m not really an entomologist,” or “Because I’m more interested in medical ethics it might be more beneficial for me to teach your sixth graders about how God gave us the gift of life, and if it’s a true gift then we, as humans, should be able to return the gift whenever we feel necessary, i.e., commit suicide.” No, I said, “I would be honored. You want to go get a drink after you’re done today?”

  And then I got hired on to visit other middle schools regularly, and elementary schools, and the occasional vocational school where students arrived in short buses, so I dropped out of my graduate program. I got asked to talk to scout troops, retirement centers, the Optimist Club, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Upstate, and so on. Understand that after helping out Beauvoir—who names a kid that? Did she have a brother named Jean-Paul and cousins named Nietzsche?—and getting Justine’s backing, I had to go out and collect worthwhile venomous and parasitic insect specimens, which, here in the South, took upwards of two hours. And then four inconsequential years later a goddamn kid named Jacob, afflicted with OCD, and ADD, and ADHD—born to a mother who drank tequila and smoked crack during her pregnancy—supposedly stuck his hand in an ex-pickle jar filled with black widow spiders, got bitten, went home and told his white-trash mother, and she made some phone calls to the police, the school district, an attorney, and so on.

  Listen, I’d been doing well as a fake non-bonded entomologist with no credentials for all this time. When my situation became newsworthy—Jacob’s mother had called various local media outlets, including the station with the helicopter that flew above Crosby’s bar—reporters went out to ask “regular” citizens their views on the situation, as was their wont. The spider bite was the least of their worries. Everyone believed that I had infiltrated the schools with Buddhism, what with all this talk about not harming insects.

  For thirty-six hours, unemployment, two wars, a Gulf of Mexico oil spill, droughts, a heat wave, serial killers, border conflicts, global warming, tainted food, car recalls, and Bank of America bailout scams took a back seat on the local news to my supposed “ulterior motives.”

  Like I said, there at Crosby’s bar, sitting with Mike the Liar, I thought about two things: leaving town and killing him.

  When my cell phone rang I looked down and saw that it was Townes Bannister IV, a man Justine had told me to hire on. Mike the Liar said, “Your phone’s ringing. I remember when my phone rang one time and it was Jayne Mansfield asking me to come over, play some strip poker with her because she’d missed my birthday and she was in town. Back when I found myself living in Biloxi.”

  I answered. Townes Bannister IV said, “Where are you, my man? We need to go celebrate somewhere. I got to the bottom of everything.”

  I said, “I don’t know that I can leave, because of the manhunt.”

  Mike the Liar said, “I don’t even know of a bank nearby. I think it’s something else going on. Maybe it’s finally come to us turning into two planets.” He grabbed my arm hard as Townes Bannister IV said something about “long story short” and “charges dropped” and “foster family.” Mike pulled the cell phone away from my ear. “See, the Gulf Stream and whatnot’s going east to west, but below the equator the water’s moving the other way in the opposite direction. Eventually all that erosion’s going to turn the Earth into looking like an hourglass. And then it’ll finally pinch itself into two orbs, you know. I’m of the belief that they’ve been hiding it from us for a while, that we’re about to be pinched in half because once they decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet official-like, they needed to add another planet to keep things in balance. We needed a ninth. There were nine, then Pluto wasn’t one so there were eight, and now we need to split apart so there are nine again. Because nine is three threes. And threes is important on Earth, what with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

  I pulled back my arm and said to the lawyer, “Sorry.”

  Townes Bannister IV said, “You might not be able to go around showing bugs to kids anymore, but it’s come out that the kid probably got bitten at home a long time ago. I called some bluffs is what I’m talking! It’s like the first thing you learn in Trial Lawyering 101. Ipso facto!”

  Either Townes hung up or the call was lost due to heavy helicopter turbulence in the surrounding area. I said, “I got the next round!”

  “Exactly,” Mike said. “We can probably leave, but why would we want to?” He held out both hands and touched the beer taps.

  “Roadblocks mean breathalyzers, and I don’t need to call a lawyer again,” I said.

  “Anyway, where was I? I couldn’t become an astronaut, so I went to college on the GI Bill and almost got my doctorate in chemistry, what with what I know about chemicals. But my advisor didn’t like that I knew more than he did, and he wouldn’t pass me.”

  It sounded like two helicopters hovered above the bar. I looked at the TV, took the remote, flipped to the other local channel, and sure enough they had a pilot in the air too. Then I saw Crosby, running atop his establishment, trying to gather the banner that flapped and blew across the roof. I said, “He’s going to fall off, not paying attention. Or get himself shot by a cop thinking he’s a bank robber.”

  Mike said, “I been shot six, seven times. That’s on the unofficially dead list.”

  There’s a good chance I’m going to kill you, I thought. There’s a more than likely chance that, when you stand back up to steal a beer while Crosby’s up on the roof, I’m going to kick the legs of the bar stool beneath you and crush your skull atop the bar counter right about the time your chin hits it. I envisioned everything, the murder of near-astronaut Mike the Liar, in the same way I saw myself in night dreams: pissing on a politician’s shoes; putting a favorite, though feeble, dog to sleep; taking the stage to sing along with Jason and the Scorchers; or co-starring in a movie with Bill Murray. I said, “I need to get out of here, really. I need to call up my wife before she takes off on me.”

  Hi
ppocrates gets all the glory, but in my studies of medical ethics I found that the Oath of Maimonides often helped me get through the day when dealing with living organisms. Like a mantra, I repeated to myself, “May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.” I bet I repeated that part of Maimonides’ oath about ten times a day, especially when bitten by an uncooperative insect, or when dealing with a kid who said I was creepy.

  Mike got up from his seat and wandered behind the bar. He picked up a bottle of Jim Beam, set it on the bar, and slid it my way. He said, “Not on my birthday, you’re not.” He said, “First off, you ain’t married. If you was married, you’d wear a ring. Two, I haven’t even told you how I got all my money through the lawsuit. I can tell from listening that that was your lawyer calling you, and you got good news. I recognize you from there,” Mike said, pointing at the television. “Bug man.”

  I didn’t say “yes” or “no” to him. I needed to call Justine and let her know that she shouldn’t be moving back to L.A. or wherever she planned to go right in the middle of her school year. I pulled out my cell phone but couldn’t get a call through. I stood up to use Crosby’s land line and Mike said, “I was in Chicago to throw the first pitch at a Cubs game, and the hotel where they put me up had some kind of elevator problem. I’m talking I was on the fourteenth floor. Don’t tell nobody, but maybe I’d been doing some drinking. Anyway, next thing you know, I thought the door was open and I stepped in. Fourteen floors later, I understood that both the Otis elevator corporation and the Hyatt had made a mistake. You ever fallen fourteen floors down an elevator shaft?”

  I picked up the receiver behind the bar and turned to look at the TV screen. The reporter back in the studio was saying that eyewitnesses described the bank robbers as white men, between twenty and seventy, between five-two and six-seven, between 130 and 240, with tattoos on both their inner forearms.

  The description matched me exactly, seeing as I had a cicada tattooed on one arm and its vacant shell on the other. It had always been a high point of my presentation to elementary school kids, the way I could press my arms together and show the cicada emerging from its husk. I made a high-pitched drone when I performed the little trick, too, in order to sound like cicadas stuck to the sweet gums they’re prone to use for nighttime tarmacs.

  I said to Mike the Liar, “Don’t call me ‘Shaft.’” I said, “I’ve never fallen down an elevator, no. You haven’t either. While you’re up, grab some of those peanuts Crosby keeps back there.”

  Mike bowed up and said, “Okay, fucker. You don’t believe me? Okay, fucker. You calling me a liar? You saying you don’t believe me?”

  I started laughing. I looked behind Mike and noticed a moth fluttering toward the ceiling—an army worm moth—probably in need of foliage. I said, “Yeah, you’re a liar. You’re not even close. If you want to lie, tell lies that can’t be traced back on the Internet, my man. I mean, it’s easy to look up who threw the first pitch at every Cubs game in history. Or who used to bomb Indochina. I tell you what—I’ll believe the February thirtieth birthday, but that’s about it.”

  “It’s my birthday right now!” Mike yelled out. He came around the bar my way, his mouth held open, his fists clinched. “Warner! One who warns! I better warn you about what’s about to happen, man.”

  May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.

  I said, “I’m not looking for trouble, buddy. Sorry. I mean, yeah, I think you’re a world-class bullshitter, but so am I. It doesn’t matter when it comes down to everything.” I pointed at the newscast. “Let’s you and me sit down here and look for Crosby.”

  I should mention that all of this took place in mid-afternoon, when it wasn’t unusual for Crosby to have fewer than three patrons inside the bar. I dropped in most days after school let out, after I’d taught students the importance of pollen and/or antennae. On other days I continued reading all about medical ethics, just in case I wanted to return to school. Or I daydreamed of learning how to play guitar. Or I daydreamed of writing a crime novel wherein the bad guy carries a satchel of bedbugs around with him and stays in the classiest hotels for free. Or I tried to antagonize my collection of live rhino beetles into warfare.

  Mike took a wild swing at me, missed, fell to the floor, and began to cry. The only thing sadder than a sixty-five-year-old drunken liar crying on an unclean bar floor is, of course, a seventy-year-old drunken liar, et cetera. Or a woman of any age, I imagine, at least for me. Mike reached his arm up for help. I didn’t respond, for I knew the trick—certain members of the insect world do the same thing, namely hornets. They’ll be all buzzing on their backs, twirling in circles, acting as if they’re about to expire, and then when something comes by to flip them over, they sting. Mike said, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry on my birthday. Damn! I promised not to fall down, and not to cry. The last time this happened was down in Biloxi, right after playing strip poker with Jayne Mansfield. I don’t need to tell you what happened to her later that night, down in Slidell.”

  I thought of Maimonides again: “May neither avarice nor miserliness, nor thirst for glory or for a great reputation engage my mind,” and reached out and helped Mike up. He patted down his backside, cleared his throat, and sat back down. He quit crying, sniffled, and I could tell that he hoped I’d soon forget the occasion of his frailties revealed and observed. I pointed at the television screen. I said, “Maybe I should go see if Crosby’s okay up there.”

  Mike said, “I never knew for sure, but I think Jayne wanted to be naked. I think she folded her cards even when she had, you know, a full house or a flush. And then she’d take off a glove, or her bra. You should’ve seen her! Those were the days.”

  The bar’s land line rang, so I got up and answered “Crosby’s Bar,” like that, like a professional. Justine said, “What’re you doing?”

  I said, “Hey.”

  She said, “Did Mr. Bannister get you?”

  Mike the Liar began making some dry-heave noises. I said, “All is well, evidently. Are you home?”

  Justine said, “All is not well, Warner, as I think you know.”

  “Okay. Well, okay. Do what you think you have to do. From what I understand, I’m stuck here because the cops have cordoned off a few blocks in order to look for a couple bank robbers. I guess now would be the perfect time for you to pack up and go. I ain’t leaving. I mean, I’m innocent—I don’t need to pack up and go.”

  Justine remained silent on the other end. I thought about how she kind of looked like Jayne Mansfield, minus the blond hair and unnaturally large breasts. I thought about how it would be nice for me to get out of the bar, go home, and play some strip poker with her. She could tell me about her day, and I could tell her about Mike. Justine said, “What’s that noise?”

  I said, “It’s either helicopters overhead or Mike the Liar about to throw up.” I said, “Hey, turn on channel four, and I’ll run outside and wave. You can see me on television.”

  “I’ve seen you on television enough,” she said.

  Crosby came back in and said, “Did I look normal?” He dragged the banner behind him and limped visibly. He said, “I got yelled at by a cop on the roof of the Christian Science Reading Room. I thought Christian Scientists were all pacifists, or whatever they’re called. I bet y’all can’t say you got yelled at by a cop standing on a roof.” He looked at Mike and said, “What’s up with you? Have you fixed the toilet yet?”

  I said, “You were supposed to be fixing the bathroom?”

  Mike said to Crosby, “This guy is that pedophile they keep talking about on the news who goes around making spiders bite little boys.”

  Crosby dropped the end of his banner. “Fuck, man, you mean to say I can’t leave my bar for an hour without this happening? How long was I gone? I wasn’t even gone an hour. Y’all kiss and make up. I can tell that something happened.”

  Crosby took his skinny self back behind the bar. He said to me, “You want another
bourbon?”

  “Crosby knows all about my predicament, Mike, you asshole.” To Crosby I said, “I got a call from my lawyer and all the charges were dropped. Those parents confessed that they made up everything, or at least some kind of truth came out about it.” I held my left hand up, as if taking an oath. “What’s the story going on outside?”

  I looked at the TV set and noticed that regular programming had resumed. Like I said, there was unemployment, two wars, a Gulf oil spill, droughts, a heat wave, serial killers, border conflicts, global warming, tainted food, car recalls, and Bank of America bailout scams going on, but the local mid-afternoon programming involved a talk show wherein a questionable judge listened to a newly married bride plaintiff complain that the defendant, a florist, hadn’t offered the best arrangements for her recent wedding. The plaintiff argued that because the roses weren’t but half-bloomed, she shouldn’t have to pay but half of the bill.

  “Maybe some of them flowers had some of your bugs inside the petals,” Crosby said to me.

  Mike the Liar laughed. He said, “Maybe that florist had a thing for convicts and that’s why he was watching you,” which, of course, didn’t make any sense.

  Crosby said, “Goddamn it to hell, Mike, go fix my commode.” To me he said, “I’d be willing to bet that the bank wasn’t really robbed. I’m thinking that someone wanted a distraction while he did something else illegal, but that’s just a theory.”

  I said, “You looked good up on the roof, Crosby. You almost looked lifelike.” Mike the Liar shuffled off to the back hallway, mumbling. I said, “I ought to kill you for leaving me with that guy. Where’d he come from?”