Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  Billy Wade snorts from behind the wheel of the cement truck. “Oh, brother.”

  “Selfish!” Patience hollers.

  I hush both of them with a cold stink eye, and Patience points at a road sign. “Mile seventeen marker!”

  “Shh!” I hiss to no avail as Joe puts his hand over mine. In the rearview mirror, I can see Patience pretend she didn’t see it as I gently push his hand away.

  Billy Wade swerves down a distant kin of drivable road. “THIS IS IT!”

  “I gotta go, Frances. Visitors’ hours are almost over.” I toss the cell on the seat next to me. “So,” I say to my fellow trekkers, “do I get to know where we’re going?”

  Patience bounces like a toddler. “It’s a surprise!” she says, turning around and flinging a Cheshire grin at me, then at Joe, then at me again, her happiness in being in on the secret more than she can bear. I stare back, chewing my lip, something she always said I did whenever she was pissing me off. She takes another pull off her beer and flings the bottle out the window at a yield sign on the side of the road. The glass shatters, and she and Billy Wade whoop.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I say.

  “Ha ha! Two points!” she says with a wink at Joe before focusing again on me. “Okay, remember Jimbo Pritchett?”

  Billy Wade waves Patience down with a wild arm. “Shush!”

  “The Piggly Wiggly Easter Bunny?” I say, pushing Billy Wade’s arm back into his own territory.

  “Yessiree.”

  I turn to Billy Wade, hoping he’s giving me more.

  “Let’s just say,” Patience says, choosing her words gingerly, “the biggest stars are not always found in Hollyweird.”

  “Oh, shit,” Billy Wade says, pulling the car to the side of the road with a skid as a hay truck passes in the other lane.

  “Hay truck, bow your head, make a wish!” Patience hollers.

  “Bow your head!” Joe hollers at me through a half-serious grin, tucking his head behind the seat.

  “What are you wishing for?” I ask Joe, bowing my head.

  Joe lowers his voice. “That when we get home, you’ll try that thing you wouldn’t try the other night.”

  “I heard that,” Patience says.

  Genuinely embarrassed, I lower my head even more, giggling like a hyena.

  Once we’ve avoided the wrath of the hay truck’s curse, Billy Wade pulls back into the highway before he quickly makes a left turn, maneuvering the vehicle through a rocky stream and up a narrow, washed-out hill. “Hold on to whatcha got.”

  * * *

  Our motley crew joins a group of twenty-five others outside a crumbling turquoise house trailer. Ancient aluminum lawn chairs have been assembled in the muddy yard, a sort of audience directed at the tiny front porch. Billy Wade pushes me down into an aisle seat next to Joe. Patience motions Billy Wade to sit next to her in one of the shortie beach chairs down front.

  A nervous, buttoned-down business type across the aisle from me avoids eye contact with anyone, while one of a pair of would-be female sumo wrestlers seated next to Joe whispers, “First time here?”

  The crowd begins to quiet in anticipation as someone turns down the camp lantern hanging from a nearby cypress tree. An announcement, an English woman’s voice through a cheap sound system, opens the dubious proceedings. “Ladies and gentlemen, the management would like to remind you that the use of cameras, recording devices, and cell phones are strictly prohibited in the amphitheater. And now it is our great pleasure to once again ask you to put your hands together and give a warm Gulf Coast welcome to the incomparable—the irrepressible—Miss—JEANNIE LEE WAGNER!”

  A mechanic’s shop light positioned over the porch flicks on as someone resembling a chunky dime store version of Elizabeth Taylor exits the front door of the trailer. Jimbo Pritchett, aka Jeannie Lee, twists and gyrates to the first few bars of a country tune I’ve never heard like he’s playing the main room at the Sands. Pulling seductively at the hem of his mini, he adjusts the back of his wig with a tug, tracing the side of his face with a white-gloved hand as he begins to lip-sync over the fans’ wild applause.

  Billy Wade and Patience turn around to check my reaction. Still attempting to find my footing in this Deliverance-tinged wonderland, I whisper, “Jimbo Pritchett is a drag queen?”

  Billy Wade snorts. “First Friday of the month here. And every other Saturday at the Foxx Club in Mobile.”

  I look up to find Jimbo’s eyes locked on mine, and he’s prancing my way. I pray that if I look straight ahead with enough steel cold horror in my eyes, he’ll look somewhere else. Or choke on a chicken bone. Anything.

  And just like that, I have a two-hundred-pound drag queen sitting on my lap. Jimbo pulls a giant feathered boa around my neck and breaks his tune to address the audience. Trying to go inside myself to see if I can will my own death, I think I hear him say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a celebrity in the audience tonight.”

  Uh-oh, here it comes.

  “Miss Frances Newman’s boy toy, Phillip Stalworth. All the way from Hoooollywood!”

  Everyone whoops and hollers, even Business Type. The sumo wrestlers next to us hold up their beer cans, crashing them into other beer cans around them.

  Holding up my own beer, I take a healthy slug before toasting Joe and everyone else around me. Jimbo pats me gently on the back, and I belch like a sweetly rocked baby.

  * * *

  The gentle heat from Jimbo’s primitive fridge is finally beginning to dry the night mist saturating my sweatshirt from an hour-and-a-half show and two curtain calls. Nursing a plastic cup of wine I retrieved from a box on the trailer steps, I’m doing my best to avoid one more question about my famous pedigree while Billy Wade, Patience, and Joe cut a tiny space of rug in Jimbo’s living room. I make my way discreetly past a wall of country music collector plates to a card table bearing Hydrox, chips, and California dip.

  “Stay on the plywood, the rest is rotten.” Jimbo, still in drag, points to the planks of plywood on the floor in a husky voice. “Don’t wanna lose any Hollywood royalty.”

  “Oh. Right,” I say, eyeballing the decking beneath our feet with suspicion.

  Jimbo offers up a plate of dubious delights from the back of the table. “Have one—it’s the good Cheez Whiz.” Jimbo takes off his wig and glances at Joe, who’s dancing like a high school principal, his stiff arms resting on top of his head. “Joe Tischman’s still hot as hell. You think he’d go out with me?”

  I take a healthy slug of my beer, noticing Joe has one shoe on and one shoe off. “Prob’ly.”

  20

  In the South, folks have told stories from their front porches for eons, most of them tall. And more often than not, they will end the tale with, “I kid you not, this is a true story!” Now, I don’t know if it’s the heat, the religion, our history of hysteria, or our hysterical history, but the place breeds peculiar natives. With this many peculiar people on one land mass, peculiar happenings are just part of the landscape. “This—is a true story.” This just means, if you’re a Yankee, and you think what I’ve just told you couldn’t possibly have happened, then think again. ’Cause this shit might not happen in Bangor, Maine, but you can bet your sweet ass it happens here.

  There is a brand of mind control called the Silva Method that’s been around since the sixties. Developed by a pseudoscientist from Europe, it entails whipping yourself into a state of alpha where, through creative visualization, you can accomplish anything: write the Great American Novel, climb the corporate ladder, heal your body from disease or—my favorite—heal someone else’s body for them. You can imagine my enthusiasm when I saw there would be a class taught in Mobile, an hour away.

  It’s really very simple: One sits on the edge of his or her bed every morning upon rising. This is where the magic happens. The first week is preparation. One starts the day by counting backward from fifty—slowly—in complete and utter silence. That’s it. For the first week.

&nb
sp; But then…you pick what you want to do—and you picture it—eyes closed. This puts you in alpha. For the second week.

  Then, as soon as you feel comfortable, you tilt your head up, keeping your visual intact, but your eyes closed. Tina and I were told that this initially makes most people feel light-headed, like someone kicked the feet out from under them. And it was no different for us.

  So pay attention, ’cause now you’re ready for the big guns: TRANSFER YOUR VISION TO THE LEFT.

  So. That’s:

  Close your eyes

  Visualize something

  Move it up

  Then move it to the left

  This is where things get a little dicey, and frankly, from a storytelling point of view, I have no yardstick to measure any of it against. So this is exactly what happened:

  I was hoping to get the morning paper before Puffy got up and off her stoop. Instead, I find her standing on the grass below our front porch steps, top lip aquiver. “Hello, Puffy,” I say, kneeling slowly to pick up the weekly edition of The Dixie. “You ugly little motherfucker.”

  “HEEEEERE, PUFFY-PUFFY-PUFFY!” Jewel Ann hollers, making a beeline for me and the miserable little Yorkie before I turn quickly and head back up the steps like my pants are on fire. “Phil!” Jewel Ann shrieks and I grudgingly turn around, bracing myself for another acid reflux anecdote. “What was the counting this morning?”

  I pull my robe close around me to prevent any awkward surprise appearances. “Huh?”

  Jewel Ann scoops up Puffy, checking the pooch’s ragged little nails. “I heard counting this morning. Sounded like counting—coming from this direction. A man, best I could tell. Loud, no voice I knew. Sounded like somebody counting backward. Did you hear it?”

  Since Tina and I were the only two who took the class and, so far, hadn’t shared any of the details with Joe nor anyone else, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Since the two of us would have been counting in silence, as instructed, all I could offer Jewel Ann was a weak “Hu-uh” before going back inside.

  Later, while reporting the story to the other members of my family, there was no explanation. No one seemed particularly spooked by the tale. It was just this creepy, crazy story that I’m sure in my later years will disappear completely from my radar. But I hope like hell it doesn’t.

  21

  The grandfather clock gongs midnight, eliciting a tiny jerk from my wobbly body as I creep down the hallway to my bedroom, having seen Joe for a second time today. Making a mental note to remember to tell Garrett to oil my squeaky bathroom door, I brush my teeth and fall into bed.

  Waiting on my bedside table are the last few chapters of a memoir written by a Philadelphia physician who, upon receiving the news of his inoperable cancer, went on macrobiotics and lived well for seven years before trading it briefly for a diet of red meat and cheese while touring Europe. Within two months, he was dead.

  At three a.m., I finally turn out the light, the musk of Joe’s aftershave clinging faintly to the T-shirt I’ve decided to sleep in for that very reason. Instantaneously reanimated, I make another mental note to pass the book on to Tina, with strict instructions to finish it tout de suite.

  Plumping the down pillow, I roll on my stomach, recalling Joe’s amusement when he told me that, during the peak of passion, I said a word he swore sounded just like koirnk! Having no recollection of this moment or that word, I good-naturedly called him a lying sack and vowed to never again make any sound whatsoever in his presence. I kept my vow until he retrieved an imaginary dictionary from underneath the futon, reading aloud the definition of koirnk: “a really good word used by only the most extraordinary of Southern gentlemen indicating, more frequently than not, zeal, fervor, and enthusiasm.”

  Right after this exchange, Joe reminded me it had already been nine months since we met, or re-met. Nine months since I had tossed my useless life in the toilet and returned to a place where I’d presumed I had nothing. I had done my best to conceal how touched I was he was keeping track.

  Taking another whiff of the shirt, I reach over and, feeling for the diet book, toss it on the floor so I’ll bump into it in the morning on the way to my day.

  * * *

  Having uncharacteristically overslept, I had been forced to postpone my run, instead heading directly into breakfast preparations. A few hours later, the Gulf Coast breeze keeps me relatively cool as I finally complete my jog, entering the house to the unmistakable aroma of Sunday dinners past. No meal is as important as Sunday dinner, the highly anticipated repast rewarding those who have endured their fair share of hellfire and brimstone.

  As I make my way toward the kitchen while fanning my sticky shirt in the welcoming frost of the air-conditioning, Garrett calls from where he stands at the bar, pulling bucket after bucket of Colonel Sanders from four large white paper bags.

  “Hey, Bo Skeet, how was the jog?” he says.

  “Excuse me,” I say, momentarily checking the lunacy-tracking device in my head, “but what are you doing?”

  “I got dinner,” he says with a big grin. “To celebrate. Sis just sold two houses, so she’s gonna be staying with us for a couple of weeks. You know, change of scenery.”

  My feet are cemented to the bright yellow tile like bridge pilings. “You…”

  He brandishes a stack of Chinette he takes from a grocery bag. “See? I even got plates.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I say, offering him one last chance to get on the train.

  “I just thought for one day, we’d have a change. Um,” he says, snatching a drumstick from one of the buckets, tearing into it while he continues unpacking. He dangles it in front of my face. “Extra crispy.”

  “I don’t—this is—” I sputter, turning around, searching for the macrobiotic book of horrors I’d brought downstairs with me. I toss Garrett a menacing look over my shoulder before I find the memoir on a living room end table, holding it next to my face as first and only evidence. “Do you want this to happen to Tina?” I ask, my eyeballs bulging like a thyroidal Pekingese.

  Garrett rolls his eyes and brings two buckets to the breakfast table. “It’s just one meal.”

  I point sharply at the book, taking two big steps closer to my father. “That’s what he said. And now he’s dead.”

  Sis enters from the patio, tossing her backpack on one of the breakfast room table chairs. “Oh, my God, chicken!” she says to Garrett, tilting her head in my direction. “Is he gonna let us have this?”

  “I’m sure fucking not gonna”—I say, whispering so that Tina, wherever she is, won’t overhear—“let us have it!” Grabbing the bags, buckets, and half-eaten chicken legs in one fell swoop like a selfish toddler, I open the patio door with two free fingers and head to the garbage cans.

  “That’s thirty dollars’ worth of chicken!” Garrett yells out the door.

  “I want you both out of the kitchen,” I say. “I’m going to prepare a special treat, something I had already planned for Sunday dinner if you had just given me the chance.” I drop the buckets and slam the lid on the can. “Tina deserves our support. It’s the least we could do to keep any fast food aromas off the premises.” I take two steps behind one of the receptacles in case someone decides to throw something.

  Sis mumbles to Garrett. “Probably mung beans and boiled crap. No, crap would be considered flesh,” she says, pleased with her stinging, nonsensical aside.

  “Just go,” I say, moving a bit farther behind one of the cans. “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  Tina, her hair still wet from a late morning shower, enters the kitchen and sniffs the leftover chicken air. “Yuuum,” she says, “when what’s ready?”

  * * *

  You haven’t lived until you’ve been to the grand opening of a Walmart in a town of four thousand people. It’s like somebody dropped New York City smack dab in the middle of Mayberry. The town is a frenzy. My father is beside himself.

  “Y’all better be gettin’ down to that Walmar
t. Why, somebody said they got all kinds of exotic fruits and vegetables the likes of which this town, or any other town, ain’t never seen.”

  I wondered if Walmart could be the answer to our natural living prayers since our dimwitted friend at Healthy Way Foods wasn’t yet set up for produce. I was one of the first to line up at the door, third only to Percy Janks, a prehistoric postman from Walker Springs, and Cal Hunt, a former classmate of mine who stored the boogers he ate for recess underneath his desk well into eighth grade.

  At seven a.m. promptly, I burst through the sliding glass doors past an old lady who yodeled, “Welcome to Walmart,” as she jammed a sale paper into my side.

  “The produce,” I say, “fresh produce.” She points. I speed past the scores of pop culture junk and stop, frozen, unfazed that “O Little Town of Bethlehem” is coming through the PA system with two months left of spring. Directly in front of me is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Throngs of crisp, freshly picked vegetables—bok choy, daikon radish, lotus root—the staples of macrobiotic cooking. I begin to pick as if from the Tree of Life itself. I pick and pick, and then I pick some more. I want it all, just in case it was only for opening day show, so they’ll be sure to order more. I picture a sepia-toned scene, the Walmart manager dressed in a bolo tie and butcher’s apron, frantically calling through the mouthpiece of one of those ancient wall phones. “Send more parsnips immediately. It’s a matter of life and death!”

  And it would be.

  I gather with the rest of the town on the bright green lawn outside. Mayor Nellie Huff christens the day “A New Age of Shopping in Clarke County,” a title more relevant for me than most of my fellow shoppers.

  Fingering my bags of produce, I look to the heavens over the LOW PRICE LEADER sign, my heart full of gratitude. “Thank you, Jesus.” I positively radiate.