Between Wrecks Read online

  PRAISE FOR THESE PEOPLE ARE US

  “Every page has a sentence worth reading over again just to savor the image.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “George Singleton has the singular voice of a down-home schizophrenic. His stories are crazy mad fun.”

  —Playboy

  “George Singleton writes about the rural South without sentimentality or stereotype but with plenty of sharp-witted humor… A raconteur of trends, counter-trends, obsessions and odd characters.”

  —Morning Edition, NPR

  PRAISE FOR THE HALF-MAMMALS OF DIXIE

  “A miasma of flea markets, palm readers, bowling alleys, and alligators, offering a disturbingly askew—at times, downright surreal—vision of the South.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “When was the last time you sat reading, in a beach chair, and started laughing out loud? … George Singleton keeps the humor volume on high.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Sly, intelligent, hilarious.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “George Singleton is a madman. He’s also one of the most talented American writers the South has turned out in decades.”

  —The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

  PRAISE FOR WHY DOGS CHASE CARS

  “This is a South that knows something of suburbia and while the characters may not be in the best circumstances, this is a great new take on the hard-drinking, hardscrabble Southerner.”

  —Raleigh News and Observer

  “Singleton’s hilarious insights come early and often.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Singleton’s style lies outside the usual briar patch. It’s a cross between, say, Ralph Ellison and Molly Ivins… Singleton isn’t just a killer at the hilarious one-liner, he can keep riffing on something good paragraph after paragraph, page after page.”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  PRAISE FOR WORK SHIRTS FOR MADMEN

  “If there is a fiction genre blending the riotous, bleary-eyed excess and absurdity of gonzo journalism with the rather earnest sensitivity of a John Irving hero—who always does right by his wife in the end—Work Shirts belongs to it…it’s a fun read…an adventure to be undertaken.”

  —Newsweek

  “Smackover funny and rare, many of Singleton’s laughs come from deep wit and not easy Southern eccentricities and the rough-screeching Skoal crowd.”

  —Barry Hannah, author of Yonder Stands Your Orphan

  Between Wrecks

  Stories

  George Singleton

  In Memory of Harry, Barry, Larry, and Lewis

  CONTENTS

  No Shade Ever

  Traditional Development

  Which Rocks We Choose

  Operation

  Bait

  Tongue

  Between Wrecks

  Vulture

  The Sinkholes of Duval County

  Unfortunately, the Woman Opened Her Bag and Sighed

  Jayne Mansfield

  Leach Fields

  Columbarium

  I Would Be Remiss

  Acknowledgments

  NO SHADE EVER

  Because I’d seen part of a documentary on gurus who slept on beds of nails, and because I’d tried to quit smoking before my wife came back home after leaving for nine months in order to birth our first child—though she would come back childless and say it was all a lie she made up in order to check into some kind of speech clinic up in Minnesota to lose her bilateral lisp—I had a dream of chairs and beds adorned entirely with ancient car cigarette lighters. This wasn’t the kind of dream a person could forget or disobey. In the dream, I stood in the middle of a giant room filled with my handcrafted furniture. I didn’t remember making the works, but I understood that it was an art show, that I was the center of attention, and that I was going to make 14.5 million dollars. I kept thinking, Who would pay that much money to sit on chairs and beds that could offer only a tiny strange cushion effect? There were famous rich people at the opening, namely Ted Turner and the vice president of the United States. I thought in my dream, I don’t care that they’re probably not on speaking terms, as long as they buy my work. Some professional basketball players and golfers stood around wearing their uniforms and outfits. Hollywood starlets stood on the perimeter, but I could tell that they wanted nothing more than to grab me by the arm and tell me how they wanted their mansions out in California completely covered in car cigarette lighters, or at least the shiny silver ones found in 1960s models. A group of Japanese businessmen fought over a banquet table I’d drilled a thousand holes into in order to glue in Cadillac lighters. Of course, everyone wore tuxedos and evening gowns, and I stood around in my underwear pretending that I knew what I was doing, that it was some kind of statement, that I thought it important to show up at my first art opening clad in my work clothes. When I woke up alone, I certainly didn’t feel good about myself, and before I had my first cigarette of the morning—who could quit smoking with dreams like this?—it came to me that maybe I’d taken yet another wrong-headed turn over the last year.

  I’d given up on finding one more thesis-worthy subject for my low-residency master’s degree in Southern cultures studies at Ole Miss-Taylor. But I’d learned enough along the way to understand that the subconscious—or what one of my ex-interviewees called “the sumconscious”—held more power in Southern culture studies than in other branches of academia. So I got out of bed, walked down to the Unknown Branch of the Middle Saluda River, lifted a giant flat rock, unearthed a metal ammo box, and pulled out a pack of American Spirits I’d hidden from myself. I got back to the kitchen, poured bourbon in my coffee, poured bourbon and Pepsi into my Thermos, and drove straight down Scenic Highway 11—then south on 25, to where it no longer seemed scenic—to Doc’s Salvage in Traveler’s Rest. From the asphalt it appeared that Doc only had a collection of snail-back trailers, battered ski boats, a couple school busses, and a few Buicks without their hoods, but down the clay-rutted road leading to his raw-wood office there must’ve been enough wrecked cars to fill a mall parking lot. I did my best to dodge or straddle every nail, bolt, hinge, snake, rat, or hubcap along the way, and pulled up front, next to a moped leaning against a three-wheeled shopping cart leaning against a mound of crushed beer cans.

  Getting out of the truck, I tried to remember that experience of accomplishment and euphoria that I had felt in the dream. I tried to envision enrolling in a low-residency furniture-making class, or maybe an art school one rung above the ones advertised on matchbook covers, then constructing a giant chair be-jeweled with car cigarette lighters in a way that would match a petty dictator’s jungle-house’s throne. As I scraped my shoes on a rough-hewn welcome mat that read Beware of Junkyard God, I imagined my wife Abby and our child, who I still had reason to believe existed up there, standing around in one of my outbuildings converted to an art studio, watching me manufacture car cigarette lighter chairs and daybeds suitable for Hollywood movie sets and vacation homes alike.

  “Doc’s out back,” a man said when I finally got inside. “Doc’s out looking for a carburetor. You looking for a carburetor?”

  I assumed it was the guy with the moped. I said, “No. No, no carburetor for me.”

  “I ain’t Doc. He’s out in the yard. I’m Bobby Suddeth, but they call me Freebird. I might as well be Doc, much as I spend time here.”

  I said, “I’m Stet.”

  “I might as well be Doc, much time as I spend here,” Suddeth said. I wondered if he suffered from echolalia, and kind of saw him crashing off his moped one too many times without wearing a helmet. “Doc’s getting a carburetor. And I’m hoping he runs across a kickstand.”

  The room was like any
other salvage-yard main office I’d ever encountered. There were a few pin-up calendars scattered on the walls from the 1960s up until the present. All of them came from a place called S & M Towing, and I made a mental note to search this place out some time. Doc had written various notes to himself in ink, lead, and Magic Marker—“Coy needs Caliente pump 1964,” “Darryl Starter Mustang GT,” “Preston Alternator Lincoln,” plus enough telephone numbers to make up a small town—and the requisite dirt-, grease-, and oil-smudged paperback parts and price list directories atop the chest-high service counter. There were boxes of bolts scattered on the floor.

  The place smelled like a mixture of cilantro and fruity candle.

  “Got to get me a kickstand for my bike out front. I keep forgetting, and it falls over. In time I guess I’ll have to get me new grips on my handlebar, and then a new handlebar if it gets bent.”

  Normally I would know what to say to a man who liked to be called Freebird. I’d lost my touch. I said, “If gas keeps going up I guess we’ll all be riding scooters.” I couldn’t imagine any sane person in a three-state area saying such a thing. I hadn’t used the term “scooter” since about second grade.

  Bobby sat down on a sawed-off end to a telephone pole Doc had wedged in the corner of his office. I sat down on a brown vinyl-covered loveseat of sorts. There were no magazines scattered about. “I know about every square inch of this salvage yard,” Bobby said. “Tell me what you came for, and I can send you off in that direction.”

  I didn’t want to explain to this guy how I’d had a dream, and so on. Already this feeling of being an outsider started creeping up on me. It’s not like I didn’t have that feeling about every day while trying to conduct a thesis-worthy interview for my low-residency master’s. Believe me when I say that I finished more than a few, and although they weren’t exactly “scholarly” or “awe-inspiring” or “relevant” or “spectacular” or “research-laden” or “filled with forward-thinking relevance” according to my mentor Dr. Theron Crowther, I had placed them in various literary journals and quarterlies that published rhetorical nonfiction. Maybe my subject matter wasn’t on par with what’s expected of a southern culture studies master’s degree recipient, but it was good enough to get me anywhere from ten to fifty dollars a printed page, plus a year’s subscription. I’ve had profiles of a woman who thinks she met the devil working as a cemetery caretaker, and a man who thinks he can touch the image of a televangelist and make the guy ask people to send donations to the Humane Society, and a man whose wife is obsessed with putting “Before” photographs all over her kitchen before she remodels, and suburban meth labs and their importance to making people in the neighborhood getting friendly again, and a family that traveled all over the world trying out mission work before ending up in Las Vegas. There are others, too. Believe me when I say that whenever those essays get published and I get paid, it’ll be more than nice to show Abby how I can support a for-real newborn seeing as I kind of let my river rock business dry up even more so since she left.

  I didn’t want to explain any of this, but luckily Doc walked back in holding what ended up being the carburetor for a Ford Pinto. He limped visibly. I thought, Who would want to fix up a thing like that? but didn’t say anything. I said, “Hey, man.”

  “Freebird, buddy, I’m gone tell you one last time—I don’t have a kickstand for your moped. I don’t carry moped parts. I never have and I never will. You either have to walk to the moped store’s parts department and order one up new, or figure out a way to weld your own on. Like I said before, a length of rebar with some kind of swivel joint should work”

  Doc didn’t seem to be in the best of moods. He was a tall man, and he moved as though he once owned a belly that made all the decision-making as to where his body might follow. He had a receding hairline on only one side, which made him look as though he’d recently undergone brain surgery.

  Bobby said, “You never know.”

  I said, “Hey, man,” again, like an idiot. “You wouldn’t mind if I walked around your property getting cigarette lighters, would you? How much would you sell me car cigarette lighters for?” I reached in my pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and put it in my mouth. There were six ashtrays scattered around the room, and I’d found out early while doing research for my low-residency master’s degree in Southern culture studies that my particular lot of people felt more comfortable talking to strangers who cared zero about their health.

  “You want the shiny silver ones from days gone past?” Bobby Suddeth said. “Doc can tell you where they located. Doc has a phonographic memory.”

  I didn’t acknowledge Bobby. I kept eye contact with Doc. Phonographic memory!

  Doc said, “It’s true that I have a phonographic memory. I’ve told this story many times. I’ve never seen you around, so I’ve never said it in your presence. It’ll be something new. See, when a car comes in, the first thing I do, if the battery still works, is I turn on the radio. Whatever song’s playing, I’ll remember where that particular car’s parked. You say to me ‘1968 Corvair,’ and I’ll remember ‘Bone Dry,’ George Jones, Section 14. Oh, I keep a written record, too, just in case the Gift leaves me, but right on up till now I can still think back at songs and remember where cars are parked. My only problem is those times when I turn on the radio and it’s a good year for a hit single, you know. Then it might take me some time seeing as I’ll have about forty cars with, like, ‘Proud to Be an American’ stuck up here.” He touched the hairless side of his upper forehead.

  Bobby Suddeth said, “He’s got a good rememory.”

  Well, Goddamn, I thought. Anyone with that freakish mnemonic device won’t think anything weird about my dream. I told it. I told it all, including how my missing wife always wanted to be a TV anchorwoman but that she had a bilateral lisp that kept her from getting jobs. It might’ve taken me ten minutes to complete the story. If either Doc or Bobby had the wherewithal to undertake a low-residency master’s degree program in Southern culture studies, he might’ve perked up his ears and asked to interview me.

  Doc said, “I’ve never priced those things out. I have no clue. Maybe I should just sell them to you at scrap metal price, what I get for scrap metal.”

  Bobby said, “You should line a casket in cigarette lighters. You know, in case the guy went to Heaven and he was a smoker. Hell—you wouldn’t need lighters in Hell. But Heaven, who knows about that place?”

  I thought about a pine box covered entirely with car cigarette lighters. It would be cushiony. I wished that I had my notebook to write down such an idea, or maybe a radio playing a song so I could try out Doc’s method. I thought about covering an entire car with lighters—one time I went to an art car show and saw a woman who’d glued her cats’ toenails all over the hood of her Dodge or whatever—and then I started thinking about collecting the hotels and houses from Monopoly games and gluing them on, say, model airplanes.

  I thought too much. I lit my cigarette.

  “It seems like I should get at least a dollar each for a cigarette lighter, but if you wood-bored one down into a chair seat and sold it, who’s going to pay two hundred dollars for an old-fashioned ladderback chair?” Doc said. “Shit. I can’t imagine. Well, I can—there seems to be way too many people with way too much money down here these days, and way too many people with exactly zero money. Like Freebird. Freebird?—If I had a kickstand for your moped, could you pay for it?”

  Bobby said, “It’s not a moped. I like to call it a ‘Harley Light.’”

  “Could you pay for it? If you say ‘yes,’ then I’m gone think you the man talked me into taking pictures of my valuables, developed the things, then broke into my house, even though I’m pretty sure you’ve never held a job at One-Hour Snapshots.”

  There were no flies around. This was mid-summer, and there were no flies. That says something. Doc leaned hard on his counter, keeping weight off of his bad leg.

  “I’ve had jobs in the past, for your information,” Bobby s
aid.

  “You ain’t part of this conversation,” Doc said to him. “Go find something to do. Go ride your moped down into the slope where I keep the Chevelle parts. There’s a job for you. Bring me back the sound of a car horn. Not the horn itself, just the sound.”

  Miss July 1972 on the S & M Towing calendar looked a whole lot like a really sexy Dorothea Dix. She was in a nurse’s outfit, for one. To Doc I said, “What? Say that all again, about the man breaking into your house?” No matter how much I tried staying away from Southern culture studies, I couldn’t help but notice a probable good scam. And in Southern culture studies, daily life pretty much depended on scams of one sort or another.

  Freebird left the building. Doc said to me, “What did I do to deserve his hanging around every day? Listen, like I said, I’m about broke, so I’ll do you a deal. In all these years—I worked here with my daddy, too—I don’t remember anyone ever wanting to buy one car lighter, much less an armload. I’ll sell by weight. There’s got to be some copper in those lighters, so I’ll sell you at the going rate of copper.”

  I agreed to Doc’s offer. He asked if I wanted to take along a pistol. I said I wasn’t scared of snakes, and that I wasn’t a great shot. He asked if I’d be willing to shoot Bobby Suddeth.

  Doc didn’t lock his office door. We started down a trail of Plym-ouths and Chryslers. With each step Doc pointed at a car hood and either sang out some lyrics or hummed. We went from “Achy-Breaky Heart” down to “Stairway to Heaven.” Doc stopped and looked down in a valley of dead cars, then said, “I think some of your best car lighters came out of your Oldsmobile, so let’s walk on down this way.”

  I picked up a stick along the way. Though I wasn’t afraid of snakes, I wasn’t all that familiar with the audacity of feral cats. Doc, I noticed, no longer limped. I said, “How long you had this salvage yard?”