Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  Justin stands at the head of the table, acknowledging the gray-haired woman on the other end. “This is my wife, Marsala.” Marsala nods as Tina and I take our seats on the benches. Justin introduces the assorted dishes on the table like Ed Sullivan announcing his enviable guest lineup: “This is brown rice with millet, adzuki beans with chestnuts, steamed kale, and,” he says, more playfully here, “hijiki sea vegetable. First, the grace.” Justin sits, farts, and bows his head.

  Clearly, beans was Justin’s macrobiotic protein of choice.

  Tina stifles a laugh and tries not to look at me as Justin begins. “O universe, we thank you for this well-balanced meal. For the farmers who grew it and the distributors who brought it to our table.” He nods at Tina and me through one squinted eye. “For friends in our home, and most importantly, for our teachers—Michio and Aveline Kushi at the Kushi Institute in Beckett, Massachusetts—for bringing this wonderful lifestyle into our midst. Amen.” Everyone smiles in agreement as they pass bowls from left to right.

  Tina clears her throat to address our two hosts. “Well, I agree with the Bible that the Jews are God’s chosen people.”

  Looking for something to do besides screaming “WHAAAT??” to my mother like a bug-eyed cartoon character, I attempt to change the subject. Glancing dramatically into a nearby pot with a tiny gasp, I raise both eyebrows in gleeful anticipation at the sight of something stewed and orange.

  “Thank you, Tina,” Justin says pleasantly. “My wife isn’t Jewish, though. Marsala was raised Catholic.”

  “But I consider myself Presbyterian,” Marsala says, offering Tina a bowl of brown, squishy discs. “Lotus ball?” Tina takes the bowl and looks inside as Marsala prattles on. “I’ve seen macrobiotics change so many people’s lives. Why, it’s brought Justin and me glory and riches beyond anything we’d ever…” Marsala is suddenly lost.

  Everyone looks respectfully into their laps as Marsala attempts to remember the rest of her train of thought. She shivers and whimpers twice like a tired Chihuahua.

  Justin interjects. “My wife had a mini-stroke some years ago. She gets lost, but never you fear, she’ll find her way back.”

  And she does. “It’s really quite impressive, the things you see,” Marsala says. “People healing themselves of advanced stage cancers, like Gina, here.”

  Gina, sixty-something, stops slurping her soup long enough to smile through questionable dental work.

  Marsala plows ahead. “Careers turning around for the first time, relationships blossoming. You see, when you’re eating according to the natural laws, you experience a spiritual, mental, and physical clarity so that all the bullshit you’ve allowed in your lives is finally recognized and…” With another whimper, she’s lost again.

  Justin takes over with gusto. “Seaweed fajita, anybody?”

  * * *

  “You okay?” I ask, entering Tina’s tiny brown paneled room. Japanese art with fat naked Japanese people wrestling and screwing adorns the walls; overstuffed pillows and warm-colored throws are tossed haphazardly in every available corner. Vaguely remembering some ridiculous Don Knotts movie I’d seen as a kid where he was a reluctant guru to a band of hippies, I’m suddenly wondering if it’s too late to get us both out.

  Tina brushes her hair contentedly in front of a small vanity. “Well, I suppose they’re both very nice,” she whispers, “if a little excitable.” Holding back her hair from her face, she checks the effect in the mirror. “The view is breathtaking.” I’m taken aback by her apparent newfound narcissism until I realize she’s talking about the mountains. “I think I could live up here if it weren’t so far out in the wilderness,” she says, taking my hand, sitting me on the bunk bed next to her. “Hey, whoever thought I’d be eating with chopsticks, huh? But I suppose Justin is right, they are a more peaceful utensil.” Tina takes in a quick breath of astonishment. “And what about getting rid of all the electrical appliances, even the stove? I mean, I haven’t cooked on gas since…Oh, and giving up the television? What will your father do without Fox News?” She gets up and rummages through her overnight bag on the chest of drawers. “So. The consultation is tomorrow. Marsala said she would examine me. Do you know they can tell where your cancer is just by looking at you?” She glances out the window once more, this time like a kid pondering Christmas. “Yes, there’s definitely healing in the air here.”

  * * *

  While I am seated with the rest of the students on the sundeck atop the mountain, Marsala stands directly behind Tina on a sort of outcropping, a round, stage-like area over the steepest part of the canyon. I’m thinking if we were in L.A., this back porch in the clouds would be the last place I’d wanna be during a killer quake.

  Marsala positions Tina so that she’s in full view of the group, her hands on either side of Tina’s face. “See this redness on the upper cheeks? That’s Tina’s lung cancer. As she continues on the diet, this will begin to vanish. Do you tend to hold things inside?” Marsala asks Tina.

  “Well…” Tina clears her throat.

  Marsala walks Tina around the sundeck, parading her in front of the rest of the eager students like a first-class specimen. “Most lung cancer patients do. I’m going to recommend you scrub your entire body from head to toe every morning with fresh ginger. This will rid your system of the chemotherapy when you begin your treatments. I also want to teach you how to breathe.” Marsala points to Tina’s diaphragm. “From here,” she says, “not from your chest. Now. Would you like your son to leave the area before we discuss your sex life?”

  Tina glances sheepishly in my direction. Unlike all my friends’ parents, my parents’ sex life was still terrific. The bedroom was probably the one place where they still communicated and communicated well. I know this because my father has always insisted on giving me unsolicited booty call reports. “Well, I’m still liking that stuff a coupla times a week. And I usually get it, too. And half the time, it’s your mama’s idea!” Many were the nights when, home for the holidays, I would come home from a night of carousing to spy their bathroom light aglow as I drove into the carport, a sure sign since my youth not to come a knockin’.

  I wave goodbye to Tina in haste, tripping over the fat yellow cat as I make my way awkwardly down the sundeck stairs.

  * * *

  With a new lease on life, we return to the Gulf Coast from this hallowed place where happy, skinny people in hemp wear and Birkenstocks spoke of spontaneous healings and miraculous conversions.

  Two mornings later, Garrett and Sis watch frozen from the kitchen window as I direct an old pickup loaded with shiny appliances down the driveway and out onto Blue Cove Road. Jewel Ann Crenshaw, now eighty-five and looking every minute of it, studies me from across the road with two other blue-haired biddies, waving cheerily, their faces a trio of question marks. I wave good-naturedly and go back inside, barely catching the word “California” in a disparaging tone from their vicinity.

  I recall a story I’d heard on the radio about an old dying man whose son comes home with a miracle cure he’d completely fabricated. But because of his faith in the boy, the old man actually got better and lived well for ten more years. Little did we know one of the biggest challenges lying in wait would be something as basic as sustenance, and where the devil to find it.

  * * *

  Tina and I peer skeptically through a dingy window on the backside of Fairlane Plaza, a near-deserted shopping center in Mobile long past its prime. Healthy Way Foods, one of the only natural foods stores in a sixty-mile radius, hunkers down between Oasis Bible Book Store and an abandoned establishment quietly heralding Adult Videos across a blacked-out door. We brace ourselves for the worst and step inside.

  Tina follows me down a row of sad-looking bulk items: dried lima beans, a paltry mound of wheat flour, a few sad grains of brown rice. As I pull a package of mystery noodle from the shelf and blow off a cloud of dust, Tina wrinkles her nose.

  A wormy manager changes a fluorescent bulb from a wobbly stepladde
r at the end of the row.

  “Excuse me,” I say, “do you have any quinoa?”

  “Quin-what?”

  “Quin-oa. It’s a grain.”

  “Not that I know of,” he says, uninterested.

  Tina looks at me and shrugs. “Let’s just go.”

  “You’re not sure,” I say, spellbound by the dense dusting manager who’s already forgotten us.

  The manager mumbles over his shoulder. “You can look around. Some of this stuff has been here for years.”

  “Well, that much is clear,” I snort.

  Tina tugs on my shirt sleeve. “It’s okay, Bo Skeet, let’s go.”

  I watch the manager for a moment longer, dusting his little cans in a miasma of ignorance.

  Tina motions once more for me to come along, but something deep inside me breaks. I feel like I can scrape all the indifference in the world off this pinhead with my fingernails. Tina looks worried.

  “Let’s try this again, shall we? Hello. Phillip Stalworth.” I say my name like it’s a hallowed celebrity handle, holding out my hand for him to reach down and shake, which he finally does. “What’s your name?”

  “Glen,” he says, like he’s not quite sure.

  “You know, Glen, there’s not a lot here for a health food store. I mean, where’s the seaweed, huh?” I ask, hauling something off the shelf I’m not certain how to pronounce. “I mean, sure, here’s some out-of-date kombu,” I say, tossing the package back on the shelf, “but where’s the nori? That’s standard for any macrobiotic diet.”

  Making my way back to the manager, who has made no move to continue his bulb-changing, I come in for the close. “Now. We’re not gonna be your run-of-the-mill customers who come in once a month for a jug of vitamins and a carton of soy milk,” I say, looking over at Tina, who has planted herself invisibly next to a rusty display rack of lo-fat carrot chips. “We’re gonna be in here on a daily basis, understand?” I say with a nod to Tina before looking back to the manager. “We’re gonna be needing everything, okay? We will be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars, okay?”

  The manager finally offers up a firm “Okay.”

  “So,” I say, crossing my arms across my chest, “how long you think it’ll take you to get some of that seaweed in here?”

  * * *

  My family gathers around the rambling cherrywood table in the anodyne dining room, a place still reserved solely for birthdays and Christian holidays. The most Tina and I have gotten from my father on the TV front is for him to agree to turn off the set at mealtimes. The table is laden with an impressive array of fresh grains and vegetables, the colorful spread bathed in the glow of nontoxic dinner candles. Garrett and Sis look on impatiently as I enter with another dish. Wiping my hands on my apron, I skirt past their backsides and take a seat next to Tina, who grins at me in approval. Sis crosses her arms across her chest as Tina passes a bowl to a suspicious Garrett.

  “I still don’t know why we have to eat seaweed,” Sis says.

  “Does smell kinda like cat pee,” Garrett says, sampling a taste with his fingers. “But it’s really not so bad.”

  Tina takes a whiff of the sea veggie. “I told you all if you wanted to go by Kentucky Fried, then—”

  “So the seaweed thing is just what?” Sis says.

  “It’s supposed to be full of nutrients and vitamins,” Tina says.

  “Well,” Sis grins, “so is field dirt but you won’t see me making cornbread out of it.”

  Sis tries to get a fellow rise out of Garrett, but he’s already on his second helping of dulse. Sis raises a finger. “And another question—”

  I drop the dish I’m currently passing with a thud. “For God’s sake, you don’t have to eat the seaweed!” I say, my voice getting too high for comfort. “Just—God. You know, I’m not your little brother anymore. That was a long time ago and now I’m just—”

  “Calm down,” Sis says, like I’m the one who started it.

  Tina grabs my hand and bows her head. “Oh, God,” I begin like there’s a gun to my head. I remember to loosen my shoulders and breathe. “We thank you for this well-balanced meal, for the farmers who grew it, for the distributors who brought it to the table, and most importantly, for our teachers—Justin and Marsala Rosen, at the Village in Townsend, Tennessee—for bringing this wonderful lifestyle into our midst. Amen.”

  Sis leans in my direction and whispers. “And you will always be my little brother. Pass the seaweed, please, Garrett.”

  13

  VAN HALEN FOR PRESIDENT. I study the white decal still plastered to the inner reaches of the rolltop desk Garrett bought for me as a study incentive when I was twelve. The decals, obtained from the rock group’s fan club, were handed out by a few of us to the student body of my alma mater, the University of Montevallo, in protest of Ronald Reagan’s imminent sweep of the White House in ’81. The remaining contents of the desk, a crystalline arrowhead I found on a Boy Scout camping trip, a tiny photo of Billy Wade, Patience and me at a high school toga party, and a set of rattles from a snake my father killed with a stick on my sixteenth birthday, have been pushed to the back to make way for the things Garrett accumulated during his tenure in the business world: a picture of him shaking hands with pharmaceutical bigwigs on a ship somewhere, the name plate from his desk—GARRETT BOYD STALWORTH—and the gold Rolex he received at thirty years of service.

  You’ve got mail.

  I glance at my laptop, a token from Frances on my first day of service, and find two other messages from Her Highness. Frances’s idea of being respectful of my time here entails calling me no more than three times a day and emailing me no less than fifty. Ignoring the emails, I open my writing program and stare at the blank page.

  I’d told friends on more than one occasion I’d never felt anything of consequence had ever happened to me. Despite half a life lived in Tinseltown, I’d never reaped the benefits of any substantial achievement. No long-term relationship, no job satisfaction, no real home to hang my hat. After reaching into the top desk drawer for my secret stash of SweeTarts, I place the roll of candy next to my laptop and type this sentence:

  Yesterday morning I awoke in a self-sustained cooperative in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  Several minutes pass before I type the next sentence and, in some sort of involuntary act of rebellion, toss the SweeTarts into the trash.

  * * *

  With my encouragement, Tina became obsessed with the lifestyle. Justin and Marsala cut out all bread, meat, sugar, and dairy, and Tina investigated anything she could dig up on macrobiotics. Driving away one Sunday, Justin and Marsala waved from the Village. “Drive carefully! You’re in the fold now. Wild and wonderful things will begin to happen!”

  And they did.

  I have been a runner since reading Jim Fixx’s book as a senior in high school, just before he died of a heart attack during an afternoon jog. Although the incident placed the fear of God in me for months, the fact that running had allowed me to unload the thirty pounds of baby fat I had still been carrying keeps me running to this day.

  When one jogs in the heat and humidity that is the Deep South, the goal is to always be done before the rising sun changes the surface of the Tombigbee from ochre to silver. To finish any later would be dancing with the same devil that took Jim out of this world. Like a day had never passed, I grab my shoes by the sunroom entrance and dash through the carport, trying my damndest to make it past Jewel Ann’s front porch before Puffy rouses herself from old dog slumber.

  Pushing as hard as I can up the biggest hill on Blue Cove Road, I spy her from the corner of my eye, sleeping on the mat at the top of the old wooden steps. I entertain the possibility that she may not even be lucid before noon. “Hello, Puffy,” I say, under my breath like a warning, “you ugly little motherfucker.”

  She bolts, nipping my heels in no time with a series of threatening wheezy yips.

  “Pig-eyed piece of shit,” I say, remembering how, even
though the varmint’s attacks rarely drew blood, they hurt like hell and threatened to sabotage one of the few joys in my life. Attempting to block out the ruckus, I remember poor dead Jim’s advice to move effortlessly, hands at your side, as if pulling your way on a fixed rope. I feel a slight pain in my chest and wonder if Jim’s final run around the track started like this, until I hear Jewel Ann’s voice cracking under the hill, “HEEEEERE, PUFFYPUFFYPUFFY!”

  And that, at least for the present, takes care of that.

  * * *

  “HEY, HOLLYWOOD!” A baritone voice startles me out of my endorphin-induced contemplation as I run back through my parents’ neck of the woods. “OVER HERE!”

  Running in place, I track movement atop the bare-bones frame of a house camouflaged by a row of cedars straight ahead. A lone figure in jeans and a T-shirt waves his hammer in my direction from atop a second story of construction scaffolding. Shielding my eyes from the rising sun, I jog tentatively down the oyster shell driveway.

  “Hey, how far do you run, anyway?” The lanky carpenter flashes an amiable smile from underneath a Braves baseball cap, a sign he must have connections at New Era, a local factory making hats for major league baseball teams. Although the public was occasionally allowed to purchase a few of the caps, the Braves had always been a hard commodity to come by.

  “Did you hear me?” he says, “I asked you how far—”

  “I heard you,” I shout. One of the most maddening things about going home again is dealing with those who, since they never left, remember high school like it was yesterday. Everyone recognizes you, but you remember no one. “I’m not sure,” I say, hoping that much will suffice so I can get on with my constitutional.