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  Tammy felt her face redden. She waited after the beep, then said, “Hey, honey. It’s been hectic up here. This is Mommy. I’m sorry that I missed your call. Please call me back between five and six o’clock tonight. I’ll be here.” Tammy spoke as if she tried to lure a stray dog toward her. She looked at Lamar. He shrugged, then took one of the flasks and drank straight from it. “Sometimes the devil is able to tap into our phone lines here, and that’s what happened last night. But don’t worry about me, and remember that I love you.”

  Lamar said, “It’s okay to drink at the flea market? I don’t remember Dad ever drinking behind the table.”

  “That’s the difference between a man who believes in nothing and a man who still has hope, Lamar. Goddamn you, play along with some things every once in a while. The one thing you have to learn at the market is that you have to play along with people.”

  “What’d I do? What the hell, was that Fagen that called last night?”

  “This isn’t a good start to the day. I might know that I’m a fake, but I do believe in omens, voodoo, curses, karma, haints, specters, next-lifes, and that what-goes-aroundcomes-around theory. God’s going to come down on me for what you’ve done, Lamar. I bet you a dollar not one person wants a palm read today.”

  Lamar put the flask in his hip pocket. “Listen. If you multiply two negatives you get a positive. That’s all I have to say. When something goes wrong in life, I just try to find another negative. Then everything’s back to normal.” He bounced his head up and down like some kind of sideways metronome.

  Madame Tammy reached down, squeezed his testicles, and said, “This is what our daddy used to do to me back when I wasn’t but six years old. It’s okay, understand. I’m not mad about it. I just want you to know.”

  Lamar placed his rolled fist back down. “Well. I guess that’s the kind of negative you can’t double.” When Tammy showered he hit redial on the phone, got plain Eddie’s aunt Jojo’s answering machine, and said, “This is Saint Peter. I’m the gatekeeper guy. You can see your mother in person at the flea market this morning. I’m in charge of letting people in or out, and your mom’s going to be out.”

  LAMAR DIDN’T THINK to steal egg cartons from behind Bi-Lo, Winn-Dixie, Food Lion, or Harris Teeter so he could display his unwashed balls to the public. The eight-by-four-foot tables at the Pickens County Flea Market weren’t made up of anything but one-by-four pine strips, with an inch between the boards. Lamar set his balls down in rows and hoped the wind didn’t blow them away.

  “You don’t know me,” Tammy said. She shone her flashlight in his face. “No matter what happens, we don’t know each other. If I yell out for help, don’t come over the boundary, Lamar.” She drug her pointy shoe on the red clay.

  Tammy kept a fake crystal ball and real tarot cards on her table. Lamar only had his balls. They were across from Fagen with his pelts, and a guy named Weigel who seemed to specialize in alligator heads and turtle shells. Weigel kept saying, “Snappa, snappa, snappa, snappa,” when people walked by shining their own flashlights on his products.

  “Golf balls. Golf balls. Balls for golf,” Lamar said.

  Madame Tammy didn’t talk.

  “When it’s dark, we want light. When it’s light, we want cloud coverage,” Fagen said. “When the woman comes by wanting table rent we wish we were invisible.”

  Lamar laughed. He pointed at Fagen and said, “Listen to this one—the summit angles of a Saccheri quadrilateral are equal. Dig: the line joining the midpoints of the equal sides of a Saccheri quadrilateral is perpendicular to the line joining the midpoints of the base and summit.”

  Fagen held one rabbit pelt in midair before setting it down on his table. “You talk like that to regular people, boy, you won’t sell your balls.”

  Tammy didn’t hold her hands together as if in prayer or anything, but she kept her head down and seemed to concentrate. She said, “Lamar, you’ve turned into an idiot. Please don’t tell me that you’re an idiot.”

  Weigel said, “There’s a difference between a crocodile and an alligator. I’ve seen gators. I go down to Florida and kill me alligators every winter. I don’t go to Africa for crocodiles. There’s where crocodiles live. In Africa. They got different noses and teeth. They’re different.”

  Fagen walked away from his table and said, “This is Tammy’s brother. You ain’t got to sell him. He knows you ain’t ever wrestled a real alligator.”

  The sun barely labored itself upwards on the horizon. “Twelve balls, one dollar!” Lamar yelled. He’d been to flea markets over the years and knew the going rate was usually four-for-a-dollar, at best. Already people walked the tables, mostly antique dealers looking for cheap yellowware, or stolen service-station signs. Lamar said to everyone who came by, “If you see another guy selling golf balls, tell him I’ll sell my entire stock for twenty bucks.” It seemed the quickest way to lure his father.

  Tammy looked up at the fading stars. Fagen said, “Don’t sell off all your stock at once, Lamar. If you do that, you’ll just end up sitting in front of an empty table. If you leave, then some asshole wanting to get rid of his pit-bull puppies will show up, and no one can sell with pit bulls in the vicinity, I swear.”

  Lamar handed Fagen the flask. “Oh, I got more balls in the van. I’m just saying that. I got it under control.”

  Madame Tammy said, “I’m undergoing a vision wherein you need to go find another job teaching math, far, far away. I’m having a vision that there are geometry-deprived students in Alaska, Lamar.”

  BY EIGHT-O’CLOCK—not two hours into daylight—no other golf ball dealer had taken Lamar’s bait. He’d sold a few dozen balls to regular customers, though, and after the woman came by wanting the five dollars for table rent Lamar stood only two dollars in the hole. He didn’t respond to Weigel or Fagen when they remarked how it was probably a good thing that he got out of education. Tammy sat in her fold-out metal chair and watched the crowd. When this full-time flea-market wheeler-dealer came up to her and said, “I got a proposition—you tell people that their lives will turn around if and only if they go buy a yardstick, slide rule, or micrometer from me, then I’ll give you ten percent of the profit,” Tammy shook her head no. “I don’t believe in measurements. Measurements cause wars, ultimately. I won’t have anything to do with that. To be honest, I’ve gotten caught up in this game before and it just didn’t work out.”

  Lamar looked over to the man and said, “We use a baseten method. But there are cultures that go by base three, or base sixty. Look it up. It’s in the history of mathematics.”

  The man selling measuring devices walked away as Lamar tried to arrange his balls on the table to give a specific example. He was engrossed in showing how some cultures have a counting system that goes, “One, two, two and one, two twos, many,” when plain little Eddie and her aunt Jojo walked straight up to Madame Tammy’s table.

  Tammy recognized the woman immediately, and pulled the gossamer veil over her face—not so much to hide herself from the kid as from Aunt Jojo. Aunt JoJo said, “Special Eddie? This woman here can conjure up your momma. She can use your momma’s voice, just like in them seance movies we watch Friday nights.”

  Lamar looked up. Aunt Jojo’s normal voice came out as if she spoke to someone a hundred yards away. Even Fagen and Weigel knew something different and decidedly odd was going on at the flea market that morning.

  Tammy said, “I’m doing fine, Eddie.”

  The little girl looked up. Tammy figured out that Eddie wasn’t more than ten years old. She wore a pair of overalls and had pigtails. Her blank, flat face pretty much worked as an advertisement for what her future held: a ninth-grade education at most, two children by the age of eighteen, a single-wide mobile home, and a husband who’d beat her whenever possible. Little Eddie said, “I done good on my spelling test, Momma.” She spoke to Madame Tammy in the same way a child speaks to big walking stuffed animals at Disney World or Chuck E. Cheese.

  Lamar looked u
p from his balls. He said, “Spelling’s important, but math’s best.” No one looked his way.

  Madame Tammy said, “Run for your life, Eddie. That’s all I have to tell you. Move to another state. Stick out your thumb and hitchhike to Iowa or Wisconsin as soon as possible. Don’t eat any more sausage, white bread, Vienna sausages, baloney, or bacon. Kick in the television set. Never, ever watch afternoon talk shows. And don’t let anyone ever, ever take you to the flea market again.”

  The girl pointed at Tammy and said, “That’s my mommy.” She turned and looked at Aunt Jojo. Eddie said, “One, two, three, four, five, six,” evenly.

  Aunt Jojo lurched across Madame Tammy’s table, knocked over the crystal ball, scattered the tarot cards, and grabbed for Tammy’s neck. Tammy tried to hold the woman back, tried to use what yoga and tae kwon do knowledge she had to repel the attacker. Aunt Jojo spit, clawed, and yelled, “Don’t you talk to your own baby that way. We’re doing the best we can do, and not getting no money for it.”

  Lamar picked up one golf ball and threw it hard. He hit the woman in the left temple and stunned her momentarily. Fagen and Weigel rounded their respective tables and pulled the woman down to the ground. A crowd appeared and circled the area.

  Fagen said, “That might run her out of business for good. When a seer can’t see trouble right in front of her, she ain’t doing her job.”

  Madame Tammy unraveled her veil. She reached out for Eddie, led her to the van, and drove away.

  “I SAW EVERYTHING that happened. I got my table over there, and I saw it all. If you need some kind of witness, I’m the one. I’m Heidi.” Heidi stuck out her hand to Lamar. She pointed again toward her table, filled with milk glass. “I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen here. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.”

  Fagen said, “Goddamn, Heidi. When did you come back? I heard you moved to California or something. I heard you gone back to teaching college.”

  Aunt Jojo shook her head twice, looked around confused—kind of like a fainting goat, Lamar thought—and instead of yelling out, “Where’s my baby, where’s my baby?” like in any ordinary documentary, she only brushed off her pantsuit and walked away. Was she embarrassed? Did she hope that no one saw what happened? Did she think to herself, Well, that’s taken care of? When she got about five tables down the row she turned and said, “I was wondering when God was going to let me know what should happen.”

  Lamar smiled and waved at her. He turned to Heidi and said, “I used to teach. You used to teach? Man, what happened? I was teaching only a week ago.”

  Heidi said, “That woman attacked that woman.”

  Lamar said, “No. Not that. I mean, what is it that drove you to work flea markets?”

  Fagen walked back across to his table. Aunt JoJo walked out of sight. Heidi smiled and shook her head. Weigel said, “Snappa, snappa, snappa, snappa.”

  Lamar said, “Somebody’s got to give me a ride back. My sister’s left me.”

  Heidi said, “I don’t know what happened.” Then she said she could take Lamar wherever he wanted to go right after eleven o’clock. She said she’d never sold a piece of milk glass after eleven, that she’d not taken any kind of poll about it or marked down a calendar, but that’s the way things worked out. “Plus, that guy selling all of the rulers and whatnot is going to start bothering me pretty soon, if I remember his ways correctly.”

  LAMAR HAD NO more bags, what with his sister gone. He didn’t have his full allotment of golf balls. He stood there watching everyone, content with waiting. Lamar watched Heidi across the gravel walkway and a few tables down. He thought, I still don’t believe in chance, but things aren’t looking so bad.

  He thought, cos a=cos b cos c + sin b sin c cos A, for no reason in particular. Weigel and Fagen watched him nonstop, and he felt their stares. Lamar nodded at them occasionally, and even told men who came by his table that if they were looking for a deal, they should go buy a pelt, or Davy Crockett hat, or an alligator head.

  Now, in the real world Lamar and his new colleagues would’ve worried about Madame Tammy; they would have packed up and driven up the mountain and found a way for Tammy to either turn herself in or take plain little Special Eddie back to her aunt’s house. No one would’ve put the incident somewhere in the back of his head, only to bring it up later inside a bar where Fagen was conning some frat boy into betting who’d pee first. In the real world this incident of mistaken mother, chance, and loud-mouthed unemployed brother would not end up in the Rolodex of flea market stories on a par with how Frank McNutt and his kid Jacob used to sell Sears Silvertone radios when Jacob crawled into them with his tiny transistor radio, et cetera.

  From what everyone understood later, Madame Tammy got the girl home and simply held her for a good twenty-four hours before calling the Department of Social Services and explaining things. On different occasions Tammy would tell people that she told the little girl that there was no God whatsoever, or that God indeed took care of everyone. It’s pretty much documented that she made plain Eddie repeat, “The bleak shall inherit some mirth,” over and over until she got it right.

  In the real world someone would’ve stayed with Madame Tammy for more than a week, just to make sure she overcame the depression that set in, the extended hours of walking back and forth in her small silent house.

  Heidi packed up her milk glass in old newspaper and packed her trunk. She almost skipped over to Lamar and asked if he was ready to go. They left. Ten minutes later a tiny man walked up to Fagen and said, “I heard that some fellow this way sold golf balls cheap. He leave already?”

  Fagen pointed at the empty table. “Boy had to go check on his sister. He was selling twelve for a dollar when he was here.”

  “Damn. I get me four bucks a dozen. Course mine are clean. I scrub mine down with Clorox and all. I use me a toothbrush. I ain’t one them men sticks the cuts and scruffs downward in the egg carton.”

  Fagen nodded. “Good for you. You seem like a real moral man. You should’ve been here earlier. There were a bunch of teachers who seemed to have problems. Maybe you could’ve helped them out. You could’ve been named Mayor of Flea Market.”

  The man looked at Lamar’s empty table again. He said, “I used to be a stuntman out in Hollywood. I’ve fallen off ten-story buildings, and been drug by wild horses.”

  Fagen smiled. He asked the man if he drank beer much, if he’d like to see a stunt Fagen could do with his bladder. The man said he couldn’t. He said that he’d had to retire, and came back south in order to track down his son and daughter. And although Fagen knew deep down that this man was Shorty—Madame Tammy and Lamar’s father—he didn’t ask, or offer information. Like everyone else in the flea-market business, Fagen knew that this man might be faking it, that he might work for some branch of the government, that he might be trying to chum up with everyone in order to make a bust.

  Fagen looked at Weigel. They packed their wares simultaneously and drove away while Madame Tammy’s father pulled out a ripped and faded photograph of two children.

  FRESH MEAT ON WHEELS

  BEFORE CEREMONIALLY BURNING DOWN A LIFE-SIZED replica of the Calloustown Courthouse—which never existed in the first place—built over the previous year in a field adjacent to Mr. Morse’s tree farm and nursery, it was tradition to take every sixth-grader to the various attractions nearby. This included the Finger Museum, where a man had severed digits floating in formaldehyde from all the pulpwood men who had chainsaw accidents over the years. Then we would all go, via minibus, to a taxidermist’s place where he’d set up The Safest Petting Zoo Ever. Our sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Whalen, said we were to understand what there is to appreciate about our hometown before viewing what General Sherman could’ve done if he’d understood Calloustown’s meaningfulness, and not veered away on his march between Savannah and Columbia. My heart wasn’t into this bastardized field trip because—and it’s not like I had ESP back then—I foresaw the possible arguments, fis
tfights, and one-upmanship that would occur. If I had extrasensory perception back then I would’ve found my mother in the organic berry field she and my father operated and said something like, “Please tell me the sexual intercourse y’all have told me about is not like sticking your penis in an armpit filled with deep-cleansing moisturizer.”

  Since the invention of the minibus, sixth-grade boys at Calloustown Elementary spent the night at Ms. Whalen’s house, for early in the morning her husband, whom up until this point I’d always thought an otherwise good man named Ben who somehow broke away from local DNA and closed-mindedness, would get us together and drive us around the countryside in order to point out what General Sherman missed by swerving away from Calloustown. The sixth-grade girls, I learned, all stayed at the other sixth-grade teacher’s house, a woman named Ms. Harrell, in order to learn about what was going to happen to their bodies soon. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but before the minibus the Calloustown kids stayed at other ex-teachers’ households for the night before embarking on mule-led wagons. And before the mules, those poor Calloustown kids had to plain walk to, say, the Finger Museum, which probably only held one finger on display.

  “Do not bring up how we’re Democrats, Luke,” my mother reminded me as she pulled up to Ms. Whalen’s house. “If anyone asks you if you’re a Christian, it’s best to go ahead and lie. What’s it going to matter, seeing as we don’t go to church anyway? If your teacher offers you a baloney sandwich for breakfast, just go ahead and eat it seeing as it’s not going to kill you much.”

  I said, “Why am I here again? What’s going on?”

  My mother put the car in neutral, and then seemed to experiment with reverse and one of the lower gears. She said, “Are they not teaching you any existentialism at Calloustown Elementary?”

  I didn’t get it. I said, “Tell me again who Sherman was?” It’s not like I wasn’t from the South—it’s just that my parents watched the news at night, and read books written by people who won awards, and they didn’t sit around moaning about how things could’ve been, like my classmates’ parents seemed to do. “And go through Jesus again, just in case.”