Why Dogs Chase Cars Read online

  Why Dogs Chase Cars

  TALES OF A BELEAGUERED BOYHOOD

  GEORGE SINGLETON

  A Shannon Ravenel Book

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  For the bartenders and booksellers,

  plus Shannon Ravenel for putting up with me

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank agents Liz Darhansoff and Kristen Lang; everyone at Algonquin, past and present; wild copy editor Janet Wygal; Michael Feldman and the trio; my writer pals who pitch horseshoes, clean fish, drive far, vote sanely, and talk about things other than writing; the students, staff, and faculty of the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities; closet southerner Billy “Maine” Payne; Hollywood Lindy Dekoven; Mom and her one good doctor; all of Oxford, Mississippi; half of Dacusville; every stray dog that’s shared a roof with me, or at least considered it before taking off again; and mostly, Glenda Guion for letting me howl at will even when she knows it ain’t the time or place.

  CONTENTS

  NEARBY TOXIC WASTE DUMPS

  UNEMPLOYMENT

  EMBARRASSMENT

  A WHEELCHAIR’S TOO SLOW

  SEGREGATION

  ASPHALT’S BETTER THAN CINDER

  IN NEED OF BETTER HOBBIES

  NO FEAR OF GOD OR HELL

  MUFFLERS

  TIRED OF OLD TRICKS

  BLUE LAWS

  EVEN CURS HATE FRUITCAKE

  BETTER FIRE HYDRANTS, SHORTER TREES, MORE HOLES TO DIG

  THE EARTH ROTATES THIS WAY

  Also by George Singleton

  NEARBY TOXIC WASTE DUMPS

  I had to assume that my mother took the photographs of me standing near the alligator pit. The same goes for the ones of me standing next to Dad on the edge of Blowing Rock, and the ones in the cotton mill amid a thousand running looms. There’s a curled black-and-white picture of me somewhere on the roadside near Cherokee, North Carolina, with my hand inside a black bear’s cage. All of my childhood pictures had taken place in precarious situations: on my father’s lap aboard a tractor cutting through corn-stalks; at the rear end of a working cement truck’s trough; held in my father’s arms between two hot rods at the ready to race down Forty-Five’s main drag. There were pictures taken of me sitting in a stroller on the roof of the house, bricks braking the wheels while Dad cleaned our gutters. I know that sometimes people think that they remember a situation when really they just recall hearing family stories ten thousand times, or they’ve seen the photographs and/or eight-millimeter home movies a million. For me, the occasions for these snapshots remained as vivid and recognizable as when I first teethed, took a step, or got potty-trained, except for who had held the Brownie camera. I wasn’t three years old before I’d done about everything scary outside of flying upside down in a crop duster or shaking hands with Republicans. When the county fair came to town, my mother had evidently shot a series of photographs of me sitting on the laps of fat ladies, bearded ladies, geeks, Siamese twins, and knife swallowers—all people who could have kidnapped and made me part of their otherworld. I rode on the back of a two-headed calf. My father always stood nearby, usually only half his body in the frame, either smiling like a fool or as somber as any rebel soldier intent on being slain.

  “Just because you’re drowning in gasoline doesn’t mean you should light a match to enhance evaporation,” my father said when I asked him about the photos. I was seventeen, and full of myself, and although I remembered everything on a daily basis, this was the first time I’d seen those memories in monochromatic, two-dimensional splendor. These family photographs had remained in a shoe box tucked behind some pink insulation beneath a homemade safe in the attic. Now I needed to pick one out for some kind of Before-and-After thing Miss Ballard, the yearbook sponsor, wanted to try out.

  I didn’t know what my father meant by gas and evaporation, of course. “What’re you talking about, man?” I said.

  “Some things are best left alone. I was just trying to do what I thought best. Your mother had other ideas. If she’d’ve stuck around and had her way, you would’ve been brought up wearing safety boots and a helmet. I did the opposite. Sorry if you ended so messed up, son.”

  This was in mid-April of 1976, and the yearbook deadline approached. I already had a reputation for being some kind of loner hermit freak at Forty-Five High School because my father made me read all of Durkheim and Marx and recite it daily, because we didn’t go to a church of any sort, because I could run two miles in ten minutes but wouldn’t join the track team, because I planned on going to a college that didn’t offer agriculture science, because I talked to and admired my female black friend, Shirley Ebo, because I listened to the Grateful Dead, because I accidentally laughed uncontrollably when our revered football coach died of a heart attack on the sidelines losing 72-0 midgame, because my father made me lure stray and feral dogs from the tree farm across from our house on Deadfall Road and keep them until we could get them properly fixed or neutered, because I didn’t smoke cigarettes, because I knew early on that female genitalia wasn’t known as “cock,” though some of my idiotic redneck male counterparts called it that, because I could speak French perfectly without knowing what I said, because I wouldn’t participate in the Pledge of Allegiance or daily prayer each morning, and because I probably won the countywide spelling bee six years earlier only by enunciating f-o-s-s-o-r-i-a-l without counting on my fingers.

  I said to my father, “I’m not saying that I’m messed up, or that you messed up. I just need a picture of me when I was younger. We don’t have a picture of me sitting on Santa’s lap or anything like that? There’s got to be a picture of me riding a tricycle, or opening Christmas presents. I remember Mom taking a picture of me holding that rat snake.”

  My father held the shoe box on his thighs. We sat at the kitchen table. He shook his head sideways. “Your mother might’ve stolen some pictures with her back then, I don’t know. Your mother might’ve taken a lot of things from this house thirteen years ago or whenever, but I can’t be responsible for all that. To hell with me. Here.” He reached into the box and handed me a three-by-five photograph in which I stood beside a sign that bled off the left side of the frame. It only read IC UMP, and I wore a perfectly wonderful and crisp seersucker suit, plus a watch cap. My father’s arm came out of the right side of the picture. Did the sign say TOXIC DUMP from top to bottom? Were we in Savannah, or Nevada? Was my father touching my shoulder gently, or pushing me toward the hole? I kind of remembered the day, but seeing as I couldn’t read at the time, I wouldn’t have known what the sign read. Maybe it said PUBIC LUMP and we stood near another one of those country fair sideshow people. Maybe it read SCENIC JUMP.

  Or maybe the sign had read something else altogether, I didn’t know. I said it would be good enough for Miss Ballard’s yearbook, and got up from the kitchen table. I excused myself to go rig a garden hose from our car into the living room window, to rid our household of a probable degenerative disease passed on from father to son. My father said, “Make sure you come back in time for us to dig some holes in the backyard. I have a few more things to bury so you’ll have something to unearth and sell later on after I die.”

  I told my father to hide my childhood photographs somewhere else so I wouldn’t find them again, ever.

  MY CHILDHOOD TOOK place a few miles outside of Forty-Five, South Carolina, which meant I lived a hundred miles from any town with a population of twenty thousand or more people. Charlotte, Greenville, Augusta, and Columbia were far away. In between were places like Level Land or Graniteville, Ninety Six or Doweltown, Putdown or Takeaway. Gruel. Between those towns stood plain space. Here—a mile up the gray, bumpy asphalt—was Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon store, and down Deadfall Road
slanted a series of shingle-sided shacks where people like Shirley Ebo lived. Over in Forty-Five stood three cotton mills, their requisite villages, and my high school on Highway 25. Between the town and my house was a flat, flat, barren expanse of red clay nothingness and uncultivated scrub pine ready for development by people like my father, maybe the only man in all of Forty-Five with the ability to look past tomorrow.

  “I could take a photograph of some little child now and we could say it was you,” my father said on the afternoon after I turned my mysterious IC UMP photograph in. “We’ve got some pictures of your momma’s sisters’ kids we could turn in and no one would know the difference. I’ve been upset all day thinking about what few relics I have of you growing up, and therefore what you have of yourself.”

  I said, “Miss Ballard said she liked the one of me standing in front of IC UMP. She asked me where we were, and I said California. I said we were somewhere on vacation in California.”

  My father put his hand on my shoulder—at this point I stood nearly as tall as he did—and said, “I’ll tell you where we were if you promise not to tell anyone else. I mean, I’ll let you in on a mean-ass joke I played, if you can keep your big barbecue pit doused.”

  I had a story to tell him, too. I’d gone by the Winn-Dixie on the way to homeroom, bought a jar of strained Gerber’s pablum, taken off the label, then sworn to Miss Ballard later that I had been the child-baby actor who modeled for the picture. I said to my father, “Don’t hit me.”

  He had that look on his face. My father had taken to walking with a hard, hard cane for no reason whatsoever, and he liked to slap me across the hamstrings with it in a similar fashion to what most people used to pat someone’s shoulders.

  “That picture your mother took of you was taken right in the backyard there.” He pointed out toward a field owned by a man named Few, one of Forty-Five’s wealthier citizens, a man who kept land around because, over the generations, his kin had moved upstate from Charleston in order to escape heat and mosquitoes each summer. My father continued with, “I felt then and I feel now that, in time, that land will be sold to a land developer, and that that land developer will correctly begin making a subdivision out of it. You know for a fact that I would buy up the land if, and only if, I could sell it to land developers, but I don’t want a subdivision on our back property.”

  I looked out the window of our sad cement-block house. I saw weeds, goldenrod, scattered four-foot pines, the small crosses I had fashioned over the last ten years when I’d buried dead wild dogs that had chased cars badly out in front of our house. I said, “No it wasn’t. That picture was taken somewhere else. It doesn’t even look like the same place.”

  My father hit me with his cane. “Landscapes change over fifteen years, fuzznuts. You’re going to find out sooner or later, believe me. One day someone’s going to start digging back there, and your property value for this house will drop dramatically. But you won’t have a subdivision out the kitchen window. Those toxic-dump barrels will stop that little project.” My father swiped at me again with his cane. “You won’t ever remember this, though, seeing as you’re not even listening.”

  My mother had snapped the photograph in the early 1960s. Out on the West Coast, entire cities of near-prefab houses were being developed. My father foresaw the groundswell moving to the southeastern United States—and although he never put it down on paper, he often liked to predict what would happen to places like Atlanta and Charlotte. My mother still lived with us then; my father went out and gathered, according to him right there in our kitchen, some hundred black fifty-five-gallon steel drums. He borrowed a backhoe and bought stencils and spray paint, supposedly. “Your momma helped me spray-paint TOXIC MATERIAL or TOXIC DUMP or TOXIC WASTE on every one of the barrels. I put them in the ground all over the place one Christmas week when I knew that old man Few wouldn’t be over this way. He and his family always met down in the low country most of December and January, you know.”

  I said, “You’ve lost your mind. Did you have a dream last night? What’re you talking about?”

  “So then in years to come, long after I’m gone, somebody will buy up that land and set out to put down septic tanks. They’ll unearth those drums and have no choice but to get scared and back out of the deal. I can’t expect you to thank me now, but you and your wife will put flowers on my grave the day this all happens. Are you listening to me?”

  I didn’t say how I had a plan to move—if not out of America, out of the South. I didn’t say how my entire life would not be worth living unless I got the hell out of South Carolina, that I would find a way when traveling from, say, New York to Florida, to detour the state of my training in order not to buy gasoline and/or snacks. Even in 1976 the state sales tax went only to erecting roadside historical markers that described what pre–Civil War plantations stood nearby and how happy the slaves were there. I said, “Did you put anything in those barrels? What’s in the barrels?”

  I’ll admit now that I wasn’t listening, though. My mind wandered to some unknown woman I would meet in college, fall in love with, marry. My father said, “You don’t think all those feral dogs just started chasing cars when you came along, do you?” He laughed hard, threw his head back, and pulled his cane back to hit me. I cringed and waited for the impact. When my father placed his cane on the kitchen table I went to get us beer out of the refrigerator and thought about how I had to get back my Gerber’s label and replace it with the original photograph.

  MISS BALLARD SAID, “I am proud of you, Mendal. I knew that you wasn’t the model for the Gerber baby ad. I seen a magazine article one time about that baby. He ended up robbing banks for a living, and then moved off to Argentina where he’s living amongst ex-Nazis.” Miss Ballard taught dummy English when she wasn’t trying to lay out the yearbook. She subscribed to and taught from the National Enquirer. The football players and cheerleaders were always talking about half-human, half-sheep children born in Alabama.

  I said, “I want to go back to the old photo. It’s the only one I got that isn’t blurred. My mother took the picture. She wasn’t much of a photographer.”

  Miss Ballard lowered her head. This was at 8:25, right before the homeroom bell. Presently a member of the Junior ROTC would say the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom, then a prayer. The assistant principal would come on next and outline what car washes, candy bar drives, and PTA bake sales would take place in order to purchase new baseball bats, football helmets, basketball nets, track spikes, and orange cones for parallel parking in driver’s ed. Our sad choir had robes so old and frayed that the altos might as well have stood there naked. They should’ve staged Hair, if anything. Miss Ballard said, “I heard your mother drank quite a bit. Maybe she shook bad, and that’s why they blurred.”

  I said, “No, she wasn’t a drunk, Miss Ballard. My mother left for Nashville to become a singer.”

  Miss Ballard shuffled through her manila envelope of photographs and found the torn Gerber’s picture. I handed her the one of me standing next to the sign that said IC UMP. “Nashville,” she said. “I understand that there’s a problem with heroin in Nashville. And it’s also the last sighting of Bigfoot east of the Mississippi.” She took my three-by-five and said, “What does this mean?”

  I looked at her scuffed metal bookcase with National Enquirers stacked on top of each other working as bookends for the vertical stack of Dick and Jane classics, Bobbsey Twins, and search-a-word paperbacks. Her students would stay in Forty-Five, work for their own daddies, then marry each other and raise children. It was endless, and I knew it. I said, “Septic pump. We were at a water-treatment plant. Hey, Nashville has a large population of blind and deaf men. Maybe you should go visit there.”

  She didn’t get it. Miss Ballard said, “I’ve been about everywhere I want to go in this life. I’ve been to Myrtle Beach. I can’t imagine no other place to go for more fun. I don’t like to be disappointed.”

  Her students filed in for homeroom. I looked
over at Shirley Ebo and said, “Hey, Shirley.” She popped her head up once, then set two or three books on the desk.

  “What’re you doing in here, Mendal Dawes?” she asked me.

  I said, “Before-and-After.”

  Shirley said, “Too bad we didn’t take a picture when you were a virgin, and one after. I guess they don’t want to put a picture of you in the yearbook with your eyes closed both times all Chinesey. Like a moron or something.”

  Sergeant Penny Yingling—who would see her way out of Forty-Five via the military—got on the intercom and started the Pledge. I stood there bent over Miss Ballard’s desk. I looked down her dress front, at first by accident. Miss Ballard stood up and chimed in about “… and to the public.” I leaned closer to make sure that she said, “… under God, in the visible,” and so on, like I knew she would. I looked back at Shirley Ebo, who, like me, didn’t even try to mouth the words. Shirley stood up like everyone else, but stared at a poster of a cat and a pigeon sniffing each other’s faces that Miss Ballard kept tacked on the wall.

  I left my real photo on the desk and walked out during the Lord’s Prayer. I knew that I had upwards of an hour before my first-period class would start, that I could go out to the parking lot, get in my Jeep, drive to Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon store, buy an eight-pack of Miller ponies, drink half of them, and get back in time to say “Buenos dias” to my new Spanish teacher, a woman named Senora Schulze who thought we should all take a field trip to Brazil one day to perfect our Spanish.

  I would think, Ic ump, ic ump, ic ump, the entire morning, and wonder if it meant anything in Latin.

  Rufus Price was only three feet tall. He didn’t have legs. He had stumps and had named his own little neighborhood store after the eight billy goats he liked to team up to trot him all over Highway 25 before, after, and during his hours of operation. Rufus Price’s beard resembled his goats’ faces—a long, long train of wild, wiry, grayish hair that came down in a point above his sternum. He wore a porkpie hat, always, and sat in a wheelchair once his goats brought him back to the storefront. Unfortunately for my father, Mr. Price had sold off some fifty acres of his own land to Harley Funeral Home, and they made a perpetual-care cemetery out of the place, behind the Goat Wagon, before anyone could plant fake toxic drums. I said, “Hey, Mr. Price,” when I came in.