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  He said, “No one’s ever mentioned where your mother is now. Where’s your mother now? I mean, if you didn’t finish the deed of pouring her onto your father’s grave site, then what happened to her?”

  I taught him well, I thought. “She’s still in the little snapshut plastic container that they gave me at Harley Funeral Home over in Forty-Five. She’s on the mantel back home.”

  Buck said, “I know I didn’t take any psychology courses over at Anders. I majored in sociology. But I learned enough in your Raymond Carver class to know that you still want to spread her ashes on your daddy’s grave. Am I right?” He wore a suit that came from Gruel Modern Men’s Wear, I could tell. The lapels could’ve been torn off and used for curtains. “Understand that I have to tell you what you have to do, and what’s right, and all that. I have to tell you not to return to your daddy’s grave armed with a dead mother, you know. I got to tell you never to dig up any ground in a graveyard, no matter what you think’s for the best in the long run.”

  I said, “Hey, Buck, if I finish everything y’all tell me to do before a hundred and eighty hours is up, do I get to leave? Or will y’all find more things for me to do? Should I spread out my time, or work my butt off?”

  Buck Hammond had a photograph of the president behind his desk, beside a framed miniature reproduction of the Bill of Rights. Off to the side was a needlepoint Lord’s Prayer. “I trust that you would know what to do. Do the same thing any of those characters in a Raymond Carver novel would do.”

  I said, “I got it,” and winked without winking. I smiled, but then wondered if it was all some kind of trick. Did I accidentally give Buck a B? I wondered.

  “I think we have us something like two or three other men and women doing community service here in Gruel right now. Picking up trash on the roadside. Talking to teenagers about the dangers of smoking pot—that’s the easiest community service there is right now seeing as there aren’t but about two teenagers left in all of Gruel. Next time you decide to confront the law, you might want to get caught for smoking dope, Mr. Cary—you can get done with your community service in about thirty minutes.”

  I said I’d keep that in mind. I said, “What do I do, check in with you or someone every morning? I’m staying over at my parents’ old place while all of this is going on. Hell, I guess I’ll be staying there after it’s done, too, seeing as I don’t have a job.”

  My ex-student the parole officer said, “Ellis Cary. That kind of comes out like a complete sentence, don’t it? Noun, verb, adjective. Is scary an adjective or an adverb? I was always taught that adverbs come right after verbs.”

  I shook my head. I wondered where my father’s specter drifted at the moment, whether he spooked a germ-free lab or hovered above the crystalline air of Mount Whitney. Did my mother feel trapped within her plastic confines? I said, “There are too many rules in language, and there aren’t enough at the same time, Buck. It’s one of those things. I can’t explain it all.” He handed me a can of paint and a four-inch brush. “You might as well start with the hydrants, I guess.” He said, “Listen, I can bring in Les Miles and that graveyard guard on the pretense of asking them questions, if you want. I’ll let you know. I’ll call them in, and then you can go spread your momma anywhere you want without them putting you in jail.”

  I told Buck Hammond that I should’ve given him an A plus.

  I walked off from the office like Michelangelo, thinking but one thing: Raymond Carver could’ve written a novel if he’d only given the main male character the same name throughout every story. Sure, the guy would’ve had a different wife every chapter, and a different job or lack thereof, but pretty much it would have held the same voice. I walked to the first hydrant, right in front of Roughhouse Billiards, and set down my can. It wasn’t eight thirty in the morning. Some fellow came out and bet me a dollar he could put a cue ball on the sidewalk, strike it hard with his eighteen-ounce stick, and get it to bounce off my can of paint and balance, finally, on the fire hydrant. He said he was training to be the best trick shot player in history, and that people were out there already writing novels about him. I suggested that he talk to a man or woman somewhere in the vicinity doing community service lectures about the evils of drug usage.

  I WORKED DILIGENTLY until noon and had all of Gruel’s fire hydrants sparkling red. I thought to myself, one hundred seventy-six hours to go. I walked back to Buck Hammond’s office for another can of paint to say that I would start the alleyways, but he was at lunch. One of my community service comrades sat in Buck’s office—the woman—and I said, “I’m betting you have to talk to people about pot.” She wore a tie-dyed skirt and matching bandanna, a torn tank-top shirt that exposed her belly button ring, and a tattoo on her left bicep that looked like a bull’s-eye, like a target.

  “That’s the other guy. I’m doing community service for throwing an apple core out the car window. The judge didn’t believe me that an apple core will disintegrate into roadside compost. He got me for littering. Either a month in jail and a thousand-dollar fine, or two hundred hours of cleaning up the town.” She slid her index and middle fingers beneath her nose and I thought for a second that she’d give me the secret Phi Beta Kappa handshake presently, but she didn’t. “Are you the guy painting? I’m supposed to follow around behind you and clean up any drips you leave.”

  I introduced myself quite clearly: “My…name…is…Ellis…Cary,” so she wouldn’t hear “Hell-is-scary.”

  She stuck out her hand. She looked about the age of some of the first students I ever taught at Anders College, maybe thirty years old. She said, “Wow. Weird. I’m Cashion,” She stuck out her hand. She didn’t say her last name. And it was Cashion who said, “Hey, if I married you my name would be Cashion Cary. Like some kind of grocery store.”

  I don’t know if it was because I was the kind of man who could figure out ways to get paid in full to teach textless classes, but I was way ahead of her. As soon as she said “Cashion,” I had spelled it correctly in my mind, figured out what people would call her if we became betrothed, and in my mind’s eye foresaw how we’d decorate my inherited house in Gruel. I said, “Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Is Cashion some kind of family name? I get it.”

  She nodded. “I wonder what time this guy’s coming back. I need to see if I can take tomorrow off. I think I have the town pretty cleaned up. You haven’t dripped a bunch of paint, have you?”

  Ding-ding-ding! I thought. I thought, I will from now on.

  I said, “What’s going on tomorrow?”

  “For some reason I decided to go back to college after all these years. It’s a long story that involves wanting to follow The Dead around straight out of high school, you know, but then Jerry died. I followed some other bands around, but it wasn’t the same. I made enough money selling ginseng I probably wasn’t supposed to dig up in Tennessee, but nothing felt right. So I came back home here and enrolled in a couple classes over at Anders. I either want to become a nurse or a financial planner. I want to help people.”

  Please never come back, Buck Hammond, please never come back, Buck Hammond, I thought. I said, “You’re having to take all those general education requirement courses, I’m guessing. I used to teach there.”

  Get this: Cashion Cary-to-be said, “The dean said I could come in as a sophomore due to life experiences. I mean, I’m having to pay for everything myself—I didn’t get any scholarship money—but I’m not having to take English comp and all that. Maybe I should have. I’m kind of having trouble in this course called the Novels of Raymond Carver. Dr. Blocker said we’re supposed to find out what we’re supposed to find. Every day he sends us to the library to do research, but I have no clue what he really wants.”

  The Novels of Raymond Carver! I thought, setting down my new paint can. “You have to believe me when I say that I can help you immeasurably,” I said. “I haven’t been this serious since I told my father that it wasn’t healthy to take a bath every hour. But that’s another story. Listen
, if you want help on the novels of Raymond Carver, then I’m your man. I’m the idiot who designed that class. You either have to hand him twenty blank pages stapled together at the top left or you and I can come up with a fake paper that’ll make him scurry around trying to check your citations for the rest of his life. I’m willing to write the fake paper for you, if you want. I can do it in a second. We just have to come up with one or two made-up titles. This’ll be fun. This’ll be easy.”

  I waited for Cashion to say, “You’re my hero, Ellis Cary. How can I ever repay you?” She didn’t.

  Buck Hammond walked back from lunch and I yelled out, “Tell this woman how much I taught you in my Raymond Carver novels class. Tell her. Tell her this very instant! Tell her now.”

  I TOOK THE paint can home and poured half my mother inside. Listen, I stirred her in. I whipped those ashes, no matter what. At one point my paint stick popped the sides of the can in a way that sounded like “Froggy went a-courtin’ and he did ride, uh-huh” over and over. I pureed. As I figured it, my mother would infiltrate and dust up Gruel full-time should my mean weird father decide to revisit his homeplace.

  “He seemed to write a bunch of short stories,” Cashion said from the dining room table where she spread out a slew of blank pages. “I read, I think, all his stories—some of them seemed to be the same, with only different endings or beginnings. And he wrote some poems, too.”

  “You damn right,” I said. I wore a pair of goggles in case my mother’s ashes flew up in my face. I’d read and taught Sophocles enough to know better. “Listen, tomorrow when I go to paint, I promise you I won’t spill anything if you promise not to leave me alone. Litterbug.”

  “Grave robber.”

  “Weird hippie who can’t predict a band member’s death.”

  “Loser.”

  Oh, we went on and on. I got all giddy and found myself daydreaming about discovered lost manuscripts of Raymond Carver, or of taking the time to write an entire novel about a wife who leaves her husband for smoking too much dope, and the blind man the husband brings in as a boarder. Or maybe a novel about a man who runs a drying-out facility and all of the funny-sad stories he hears from clients and visitors alike. I thought of a novel told from the point of view of a scared, scared divorced man who takes to carrying a gun at all times, eating rat poison on purpose, or maybe a guy whose wife leaves so he puts all their furniture out on the front lawn, arranged perfectly.

  And so on. I fantasized about a life with Cashion, one where we would travel far from Gruel to live out our days. I would come back yearly, at night, to visit my parents’ remains. “You’re not really going to paint your mother in town, are you?”

  I said, “My mother became attached to the town after Dad died. Her neighbors slowly accepted her when they found out she wasn’t afflicted with germophobia. It seems logical to me. As a matter of fact, that should be a law—that every dead person get painted to a storefront or alleyway. Make kids think they’re being watched all the time. Kind of like animism.”

  Cashion continued to sit at my mother’s dining-room table and printed her name in the dust. She said, “I was only kidding earlier about being a nurse. I’m not freaked out by molecules, but—still—there’s no way I could see people dying all the time.”

  I finished sieving Mom thoroughly. Would I keep the other half of her remains in a glazed clay vessel for the rest of my life? Would I come back in a year and risk getting caught by Les Miles and Mr. Niblock again? Cashion picked up one of Raymond Carver’s collections and opened it up in the middle. Fifteen minutes later she said that the characters came across a dead woman in the river, but did nothing. She didn’t think it right. I said it was only a story, it was only made up.

  We stared at the paint can for too long, then walked over to the pool hall an hour before it unofficially closed. Our parole officer never said we couldn’t offer toasts to one another and to those surrounding us. I didn’t say anything like, “Here’s to my spending more than my allotted time cleaning up this town.” I didn’t say, “Here’s to a woman destined to clean up after my mistakes.” The bartender slid two shots our way. He said that he’d met more desperate people in Gruel, that we shouldn’t get optimistic.

  OUTLAW HEAD AND TAIL

  NORMALLY I COULDN’T HAVE MADE THE TAPE THAT Saturday. Right away, right there during the job interview a few weeks before, my soon-to-be-boss had said, “Ricky, is there anything about this job that you have a problem with?”

  I didn’t say, “I can’t work for a man who ends sentences with prepositions.” I couldn’t. It was a job bouncing, or at least talking. I was going to be something called a “pre-bouncer.” If some guy came into the Treehouse and looked like he meant trouble, I was to go up to him and start a little conversation, and let him know this wasn’t the kind of place to throw a punch without inelegant and indubitable consequences.

  I have a way with words. I’m synonymous with rapport.

  I said to Frank, “Well, I’d rather not work Saturday days, ’cause my wife has to go to temple and I have to drive her over there. I don’t go to temple. Hell, I don’t even go to church,” I said. “I don’t mind working Sundays, but I’d really like it if you could get someone to work afternoons on Saturday for me. Night?—Saturday night—I’ll be here. The only thing I ask of you is that I don’t work Saturday afternoons, say, until six o’clock.”

  Frank said, “You know, you talked me into it. Man, what a way with words! It’s a deal. You’re a godsend, Ricky. I lucked out getting you as a pre-bouncer.”

  Frank had opened the Treehouse a year earlier, but didn’t hire a bouncer or pre-bouncer right away. About the same time his insurance agent told him his payments would soon double, though, he hired me and a guy named Sparky Voyles to keep things down. During his first year, Frank put in claims for a whole new set of glasses, from shot and snifter to the special two-foot beer glasses he ordered, plus twelve tables, sixteen chairs, another tree stump to replace the one that caught on fire and caused smoke damage to the ceiling, and forty-two stitches to his own head one night after a fearful brawl erupted over whether Chevys or Fords would dominate the circuit in the upcoming season.

  Frank bought the Treehouse because of insurance, ironically. He’d worked in the pulpwood trade and one day a load of logs slipped off a truck he stood behind, came rolling right off like a giant wave, clipped him behind the knees so hard they said he could run as fast backwards as forwards there for a few days. Of course, he couldn’t run at all, and had to get fake knees installed. His lawyer also got him another quarter-million dollars or so due to a lifetime worth of pain and subsequent nightmares. Frank took most of that money and made the Treehouse, a regular small warehouse he furnished with tree trunks from floor to ceiling, so if you blindfolded someone and took him inside the bar, then took off the mask and showed him around, he’d have the feeling that the whole building was up above the ground, built into the forest.

  So during the first year there were fights and insurance claims, but the second year started right off with me and Sparky there to quiet things down. Frank didn’t want us to be too heavyhanded, though. He didn’t want the bar to end up so quiet it looked like a flock of mute birds built their nests in the Treehouse. He only asked for stability.

  Sparky went the same route as Frank—he worked at the railroad before becoming a bouncer, getting paid under the table because he took in disability checks from when both of his thumbs got cut off between two boxcars that clanged together and weren’t supposed to, and he erroneously thought he could prevent it from happening. He couldn’t. Sparky had been a brakeman originally, out of Lexington.

  Anyway, I worked hard pre-bouncing, and kept up with what I had to know, which was mainly words. This is how I get back to the tape and that Saturday. What I’m saying is, because I’m so conscientious about my job, it could’ve killed my marriage.

  On the previous Thursday, Jessie went in to her doctor’s office to have him finally go ahead and
do that sonogram thing. She couldn’t wait to know what our first baby was going to be, building her argument around the fact that we didn’t make all that much money, and if it was a boy we needed to pinch even harder and save up for his circumcision.

  Jessie works as a freelance interior decorator. She got her degree in art history and felt like it gave her the right.

  I took Jessie down to the doctor’s office, but she couldn’t get an appointment before four o’clock in the afternoon. I got clearance from Frank to get off work on Thursday, but that meant I had to come in Saturday morning at eleven ’cause the guy who normally worked Saturdays needed to go to a wedding anyway. It ended up a simple and clean swap. There didn’t seem to be that much of a problem.

  So I took my wife to the doctor and she did what she had to do, but the doctor still couldn’t even take a stab at it, for the baby kept turned around the whole time. I was hoping it’d be a girl. I never have seen myself as being the father of a shy son.

  Two days later I drove Jessie to synagogue. I drove back home in time to throw in a tape and set the VCR so I wouldn’t miss Bonanza, which showed in syndication every Saturday on one of the cable channels. I set the station and time to record, then left for the bar.

  I WATCH BONANZA every week. That’s where I get my ways. That’s where I get my ability to talk people out of starting fights. One time this burly truck driver-type came in and seemed upset that a white guy came into the Treehouse with an African American woman. There’d been a similar episode on Bonanza one time when Hoss piped up to a stranger, “Well, would you rather be blind and not have to see the ways of the world?” He said it to a redneck, of course. Words of wisdom, I thought right there and then. I’d thought “words of wisdom” on more than one occasion while watching Ben Cartwright bring up his boys the best he could. I remembered watching Bonanza when I was a boy, too, and how I admired the way Little Joe and Hoss and even Adam handled themselves in town. My father, though, used to throw beer cans at the television set and say, “What them boys need to use a little more often is their trigger fingers, not their tongues.”