Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  Patience stage whispers, “Oh, we don’t talk about that.”

  A spray of Billy’s tobacco juice hits the window separating me from the scalding heat of an early June day in the cradle of the Gulf Coast. He pops a CD into the player on the dash. “There’s a porn burglar on the loose.”

  “I’m sorry?” I say, the Black Eyed Peas muffling the first part of Billy’s bulletin.

  “Somebody’s breakin’ into single guys’ houses with a crowbar and stealin’ their porn. He’s hit Griff Watson twice—some of his classic Ginger Lynn you know he’ll never replace. You ’member that girl Brianne you used to date in college? Her sister’s the detective on the case.” Billy swerves to avoid a speeding ambulance. “My side of the road!”

  Just ahead, a farmer hauling hay in an ancient truck approaches in the opposing lane of Highway 43. There’s an old Southern superstition: if you ever meet a hay truck, you’re supposed to make a wish. But it’s very important you don’t look back. Because even if you see that hay truck in your rearview mirror, your wish won’t come true.

  Billy pulls at a scab on his elbow, our colossal vehicle moving into the direct path of the truck.

  Patience screams to me excitedly over the seat. “Hay truck, make a wish. Don’t look back!”

  Bowing my head, I try to think of something good to wish for. I quickly decide on wishing the events of the past few days are a figment of my imagination.

  Billy whistles, swerves back into our lane and turns up Fergie. “You didn’t look back, didja?”

  “No,” I say. “I can’t believe they still do this down here.”

  “What’d you wish for?” Patience says.

  “I think I wished that we wouldn’t run into that hay truck.”

  “Birdie Haines saw a hay truck in her rearview mirror and both her babies were born dead,” Patience says.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “They were too born dead,” she retorts.

  “I believe that,” I say. “I just don’t think the hay truck had anything to do with it.”

  “Suit yourself,” Billy says. “See if we care, Mr. California Know-Everything.”

  Patience chimes in. “Yeah, Mr. California Know-Everything.”

  Patience covers the rearview mirror with her hand.

  Like a good Southern boy, I bow my head and close my eyes again, giving the powers that be one more chance to make all this insanity right.

  10

  I wave goodbye to my old friends, watching as the cement truck chugs out of sight of the big Tudor house on Blue Forest Road. Approaching the carport with my luggage, I prepare to meet head-on these dear people I see for a few days once a year. They will greet me with all the love and understanding they can muster for someone who left the small-town south for a life of smog and godlessness. They will wait on me hand and foot, call in long-lost friends and relatives, and for the time being pretend, as they always do, that their prodigal son has made a valiant life for himself.

  But this time no one is here to greet me. I glance into the top of the monkey pine my grandmother Stalworth planted near the swimming pool. A hawk swirls in the edges of a cloud beyond the uppermost bough. If I were in one of the spaghetti westerns I spent time with as a boy, I’d check the water in my canteen and pray the hawk sensed something else half-dead in the area.

  A brand-spanking-new ivory pickup sparkles next to my mother’s five-year-old powder blue Lincoln Town Car. My father has bought a new pickup every other October as long as I can remember, as soon as the new models come out. He studies the brochures all summer long from his La-Z-Boy in the living room. He falls asleep for his afternoon nap looking at them, and they’re the first thing he picks up when he pads out of the bedroom at five thirty a.m.

  It’s cool in the carport, and it smells like gasoline and pool chlorine. I hear a phlegmy wheeze from the adjacent storage room my father calls the Little House, its door standing ajar. A tiny sneeze from the area of the refrigerator freezer summons me closer. A mangy-looking Yorkie mix carefully creeps down the two cement steps to the carport, baring its two remaining teeth as I gingerly set down my luggage. It smells old, wet, and sour.

  “No way,” I say out loud. The beast moves an inch closer with a low growl, flies swarming around her oozing eyes and a dirty butt she’s too old to clean.

  “Here, Puffy-Puffy-Puffy!” Jewel Ann crows from her house across the road.

  There’s an old saying: “There’s a mean dog for every Baptist south of the Mason-Dixon Line.” This is true. Our nearest neighbor, Jewel Ann Crenshaw, adopted Puffy from the pound after the death of her husband. Puffy was a six-pound Yorkie mix who had hated me ever since I turned the garden hose on her when I was sixteen. Doing the math, the mutt had to have found the Fountain of Doggie Youth.

  The dog looks in the direction of Jewel Ann, then back to me, its top lip quivering in anticipation. I raise my hands a few inches from my sides like Gary Cooper before a gunfight. “Hello, Puffy, you ugly little motherfucker.”

  A firm hand on my shoulder startles me back to reality.

  “It is a thing of woe.” Fanny blows her nose into a handkerchief.

  I’m not sure if she’s crying or not. “Yeah, well, let’s don’t dive off a burning bridge just yet,” I say, giving her a hug.

  “I taught you that,” she says without a lick of sentiment. The only wrinkle in her face is a near-straight line between her big dark eyes. A single strand of gray swoops across the top of her coal-black shoulder-length hair. She takes my hand.

  I indicate the dog still standing guard like a sentinel at hell’s gates. “Is this—I mean, this can’t be—”

  “Puffy.” Fanny sniffs.

  “But—”

  “Number Three.”

  “Gotcha,” I say, wondering how I missed Number Two.

  Fanny points to the sunroom straight ahead. Through the spotless panes, I can see Tina perched on a stool on the brick patio.

  I tiptoe across the wooden sundeck for a closer look at her before I announce myself. When Tina is really plugged into her painting, she squints at the canvas until her eyes appear closed, like what she’s seeing is too vivid to take in with her naked eye.

  “Hi,” I finally say.

  Tina squints over the canvas and smiles the way she always did, as if doubting the world would smile back. “Hi,” she says. She puts down her brush and walks over. Although the two of us are facing each other, neither of us makes a move to embrace. I think we both feel it may be too much on the both of us. Her hair, colored a natural-looking brunette, is cut short and stylish with lighter highlights, a trick that makes her come off freshly scrubbed and youthful. I take her hands in mine. “Hey.”

  She sighs, another smile. “It all started with a cough,” she says, as if she still can’t believe she has inoperable lung cancer and is standing here in the middle of this seemingly perfect day. “I was having trouble on my walks, you know, climbing the hills? They checked my heart, took an X-ray, everything was fine. Few weeks later, they took another X-ray and found it. Doctor even called me at home to tell me I had lung cancer. Didn’t even ask whether or not I was by myself, which I was.” Tina looks to the sky and points. “Did you see these clouds?” she says, squinting. “Look, there’s a giraffe! Or is it a bird?”

  I take Tina in my arms and hug her tight. She seems smaller, thinner, like some kind of bird herself. She pulls back and studies my face.

  “There’s the big city boy.”

  My father’s voice blasts from the patio steps behind me. Unlike my mother, my father had not once visited me in the sixteen years since I had left. Tina turns me to face him like it’s my first day of school. Garrett slaps my belly with the back of his hand. “Getting a little soft there, huh?”

  I know I’m supposed to find humor in the remark, but I don’t. “I guess. You look…” I say, trying to sort out a compliment for this man I always thought so much more handsome than me.

  “Still one ninety-fi
ve, stripped,” he says, puffing his chest and slapping his belly.

  I’m trying to remember whether or not we shook hands or hugged the last time we greeted each other when I notice Sis standing directly behind him, dressed in her Sunday best like Garrett. “We were at a funeral,” she says, giving me a quick hug. “Ginny Ezell’s sister. You remember her?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “So,” Sis says, going to retrieve my luggage, “are you here to take over?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, he is,” Tina says with a wink, her eyes never leaving mine.

  11

  I brought books. Lots and lots of books.” I speak carefully and purposefully in what my father calls my brogue, the clipped Standard American English one learns in speech class the first semester of college to keep prospective employers north of the Mason-Dixon Line from branding you a halfwit. The blades of the overhead fans keep a lazy downbeat for the cicadas outside the sunroom. I recorded the sound on my first trip home from L.A., something to drown out the din of my apartment complex neighbors fucking and fighting in languages I’d never heard.

  “Tina,” I say from the white birch love seat in the corner. Tina snaps to attention, her tiptoes halting the basket swing, a decorating fiasco from the seventies. I grab You Can Heal Yourself from the carry-on by my side and hold it next to my face.

  “The theory is we cause our disease through our thinking,” I tell her, feeling my heartbeat in my ears. “Lung cancer can actually be caused by holding in our true feelings.”

  Garrett and Sis, perched on identical rockers, are looking anywhere but at me. Tina stares blankly at the book. “Good God, has it always been this hot down here?” I say, mopping the flop sweat from the back of my neck with a tissue. Tina takes the book. Sis rolls her eyes. Garrett pushes an unruly lock of silvery mane from his face, the result of too many three-dollar haircuts from Frank Whitman, an elderly barber who should have been forcefully retired from service years ago.

  “You know what, punkin?” Garrett says to Tina. “I’ve had a cancer policy on you since we were married. If a medicine or a procedure costs whatever, the policy’ll pay that amount, plus they’ll pay us again the same amount for our trouble.” He shoves another fistful of white hair over his ear with a prideful glance at Tina, who smiles and lightly touches Garrett’s knee in silent thanks.

  “Well,” I say, grabbing another book from the carry-on, trying to retain control of the situation, “that’s good to know. But it would be really great if we could rely on Western medicine as little as possible. I mean, I know you’ve decided on having the chemo, Tina, but still…” I stall for a moment before finally stepping into the wobbly abyss. “Sis, read this—Recovery—about a woman with lung cancer who heals herself with macrobiotics.”

  Sis, now the size of a twig and looking so much like her mother, takes the book and fans herself with it. “This isn’t one of those California things, is it?”

  “No,” I say, like she’d asked if it was a treatise on devil worshipping. “It is not.”

  “Good. ’Cause if it is—”

  “It is not one of those California things. Now.” I wave another book through the thick, sultry air, this one a tome of almost eight hundred pages, perhaps not the best choice. “Macrobiotic philosophy teaches cancer is caused by an imbalance in the body brought on by unbalanced eating.”

  Swatting an invisible mosquito, I check their reactions. Sis picks a broken nail, Garrett yawns, and Tina chews her bottom lip in concentration. “This diet requires a great deal of study and preparation. It yields best results under a completely controlled organic environment.” I turn to a glass-eyed Garrett and proceed with caution. “Garrett. I’m g-g-going to have to teach you how to cook.” I pray my father doesn’t notice I actually stuttered like I did for a short time when I was five.

  Garrett rolls his eyes at Sis, then sets his sights back on me. “Are you sure this isn’t one of those California things, Skeeter?”

  “It is NOT one of those California things!” I say, standing, unconsciously caving in to my need to feel bigger than them at this moment. “It is Japanese. Way, waaaaay across the Pacific far, far away from anything California. Okay?” The mosquito truck backfires, heading up the hill in front of the house. Everyone jumps like a bomb went off. For a split second, I think how much easier it would be if I were instead attempting to soothe a roomful of egomaniacal Hollywood hotheads.

  I check my list on a nearby end table and sit back down. “Now. In the next couple of days, I’m going to completely rid the whole place of all household chemicals. No pesticides, polishes, or cleaners. We can make our own soaps and shampoos.”

  Garrett says “Ha.” Sis snorts. Tina masks a smile of mortified intrigue, stealthily watching Garrett and Sis’s reactions.

  “Tina,” I say, “there’s a couple who teach at a place in Tennessee. It’s a community of people, not really a commune.”

  “Commune?” Tina says. “In Tennessee?”

  “Well, it’s a ten-hour drive. It’s a weekend thing. If you’re up for it.”

  “Commune,” Garrett says. “Isn’t that—”

  “It is not—” I snap, slapping the same mosquito hard on the back of my neck. “Shit!”

  Tina winces.

  “Watch your mouth,” Garrett says.

  “Sorry.”

  “Commune,” Garrett says to Sis, and they both snort. Tina has pulled her blouse up around her throat, attempting to disappear.

  “Some sort of sex camp,” Sis says, trying to catch her breath from a deadly case of the giggles.

  Snatching a moment to clear the air, I glance around the room at nothing in particular. But all eyes are still on me, everyone waiting for another punch line. Garrett and Sis exchange another look before breaking into hysterical laughter.

  “Well,” I say, my voice cracking. “I think it could be a good thing,” I say, trying to keep Tina’s focus.

  “Commune,” Sis says.

  Rattled, my face flushed with heat, I scooch down on the Mexican tiled floor and quietly ask for a cold, damp cloth for my face.

  Later that night, as I’m finally drifting off in my room at the end of the hall, I feel my father’s hand tousle my hair. It isn’t the only time I’ve felt it since my childhood, as it has become a practice reserved solely for the first night of my visits.

  I know the day will come when I’ll miss it.

  THE DIXIE

  May 16, 1999

  Crime Scene

  In the past few weeks, Clarke County residents have been entertained by reports of a nude man living it up next to the county’s busiest road. In one case, a caller said he was wearing a cap and sneakers. The next one said he was only wearing a fishing shirt. Local pundits have dubbed him the Naked Man, and he seems to be working his way into local legend. Many are doubting his existence, even after Deputy Larry Jay Motts claimed to have discovered the man pulling on his pants across the street from the old drive-in movie theatre on Highway 43 just before he disappeared behind the snack bar. “It doesn’t make sense,” Kristy Kelp, owner of the Walker Springs Grab & Go says. “Streaking went out thirty years ago. What could he be thinking?” Fruitlessly trailing the Naked Man down a logging road and through PeeWee Rivers’s gravel pit, Motts and his fellow deputies said they could tell from his footprints he was moving pretty fast.

  12

  “So, here’s this,” I say, handing Tina the brochure. The two of us are perched on the creek’s bank, soothing our feet in the icy water at the bottom of the hollow behind the house. Thankfully, I am considerably more calm and collected this time around, with nary a heckler in sight. “There are macrobiotic counselors all over the world. They’re like natural foods physicians. The closest one is the Village in Knoxville, Tennessee. Run by a husband and wife team, Justin and Marsala Rosen, it’s a base camp bed-and-breakfast nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains National Park. There are six other houses on the property. We can take the scenic route,”
I say, trying to gauge her final reaction to my hard sell. “So. Are you up for it?”

  Tina smiles and takes my hand.

  * * *

  I am standing with my mother on the sundeck of the expansive mountain home, nervous and energized by the alien surroundings. On the hill beyond the house, a handful of people are harvesting something green from neatly tended rows in a garden. A life-sized granite statue of a woman with a gigantic vulva stands on the far end of the sundeck. I feel as though I’ve stepped into the cover of a gorgeously illustrated box of raisins.

  An older man, stooped and cheery with dyed auburn hair, answers the door, smiles, and greets us in a big, booming voice. “Weeelcome to the Village. My name is Justin. I’m the only Jew in a tri-county area. There will be time for pictures later. Ha!”

  Tina looks at me with a big fake smile.

  Justin eyes the harvesters and rings a dinner bell mounted on the wall next to the door before stepping aside. “Please. Come in. Kindly remove your shoes. It deposits all the outside chi on the doorstep.”

  We enter and take off our flip-flops, leaving them next to a fat yellow cat snoozing in the sun. Justin smiles, nods, farts, and turns. Tina and I follow him to a cluttered desk in the corner of the rustic glass room overlooking the mountains. “One thousand for the weekend includes your own rooms on the property here and all meals prepared by us,” he says. A plain, barefooted woman enters, whisks away our flip-flops, and disappears. “It also includes a counseling session to get you started.” Justin trails off into another part of the house. Tina and I hustle to keep up.

  * * *

  Ten or so students of all ages, sizes, and ethnicities are standing at the long wooden dining table set with chopsticks and Japanese soup bowls. Everyone smiles at the two of us. We nod back nervously as the remnants of an early evening thunderstorm fire one last flash of electricity over a mountain that looks like a pyramid in the encroaching darkness. A gray-haired woman of seventy motions for us all to sit.