Between Wrecks Read online

  I called the phone number at the bottom of the pseudo letterhead but hung up when someone answered with “Taylor Grocery and Catfish.” I had only wanted to say that I too ran my river rock and field stone business on promised payments, that my father and grandfather operated thusly even though the mule warned to trust nothing on two legs. And I didn’t want to admit to myself or Abby that, perhaps, my low-residency degree would be on par with something like that art institute that accepts boys and girls who can draw fake pirates and cartoon deer.

  A day later I received my first assignment from my lead mentor, one Dr. Theron Crowther. He asked that I buy one of his books, read the chapter on “Revising History,” then set about finding people who might’ve remembered things differently as opposed to how the media reported the incident. He said to stick to southern themes: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, for example; the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro; unsuccessful and fatal attempts of unionizing cotton mills; Ole Miss’s upset of Alabama. I said to Abby, “I might should stick to pulling rocks out of the river and selling them to people who like to make puzzles out of their yard. I have no clue what this guy means for me to do.”

  Abby looked over the email. I was to write a ten page paper and send it back within two weeks. “First off, read that chapter. It should give you some clues. That’s what happened to me when I wasn’t sure about a paper I wrote once on How to Interview the Criminally Insane back in college. You remember that paper? You pussied out and wrote one on How to Interview the Deaf.”

  I’d gotten an A on that one: I merely wrote, “To interview a deaf person, find a sign language interpreter.” That was it.

  Abby said, “There’s this scrapbooking place next door to Feline Fitness. Come on in to work with me and I’ll take you over there. Those people will have some stories to tell, I bet. Every time I go past it, these women sit around talking.”

  We sat on our front porch, overlooking the last three tons of river rock I’d scooped out, piled neatly as washer-dryer combos, if it matters. Below the rocks, the river surged onward, rising from thunderstorms up near Asheville. I said, “What are you talking?” I’d not heard of the new sport of scrapbooking.

  “These people get together just like a quilting club, I guess. They go in the store and buy new scrapbooks, then sit there and shove pictures and mementos between the plastic pages. And they brag, from what I understand. The reason I know so much about it is, I got a couple women in my noon aerobics class who showed up early one day and went over to check out the scrapbook place. They came back saying there was a Junior Leaguer ex-Miss South Carolina in there with flipbooks of her child growing up, you know. She took a picture of her kid two or three times a day, so you can flip the pictures and see the girl grow up in about five minutes.”

  I got up, walked off the porch, crawled beneath the house a few feet, and pulled out a bottle of bourbon I kept there hidden away for times when I needed to think—which wasn’t often in the river rock business. When I rejoined my wife she’d already gotten two jelly jars out of the cupboard. “There’s a whole damn business in scrapbooks? Who thought that up? America,” I said. “Forget the South being fucked up. America.”

  “You can buy cloth-covered ones, and puffy-covered ones, and ones with your favorite team’s mascot on the cover. There are black ones for funeral pictures, and white ones for weddings. There are ones that are shaped like Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, dogs, cats, cars, and Jesus. They’ve even got scented scrapbooks.” Abby slugged down a good shot of Jim Beam and tilted her glass my way for more. “Not that I’ve been in Scraphappy! very often, but they’ve got one that looks like skin with tattoos and everything, shaped like an hourglass, little tiny blond hairs coming off of it. It’s for guys to put their bachelor party pictures inside.”

  I didn’t ask her if it smelled like anything. I said, “I wonder if they have any bullet-riddled gray flannel scrapbooks for pictures of dead Confederate relatives.” I tried to imagine other scrap-books, but couldn’t think of any. “When’s your next class?”

  We drove down the mountain on the next morning, a Wednesday, so Abby could lead a beginner aerobics class. Wednesdays might as well be called “little Sunday” on a Southern calendar, for smalltown banks and businesses close at noon in order for employees to ready themselves for Wednesday night church services. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, little Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—like that. My common-law wife took me into Scraphappy!, looked at a wall of stickers, then said, “I’ll be back a little after noon, unless someone needs personal training.” She didn’t kiss me on the cheek. She looked over at six women sitting in a circle, all of whom I estimated to be in their mid to late thirties.

  “Could I help you with anything?” the owner asked me. She wore a nametag that read Knox—the last name of one of the richer families in the area. In kind of a patronizing voice she said, “Did you forget to pack up your snapshots this morning?”

  The other women kept turning cellophane-covered pages. One of them said, “Pretty soon I’ll have to get a scrapbook dedicated to every room in the house. What a complete freak-up.”

  I had kind of turned my head toward the stickers displayed on the wall—blue smiling babies, pink smiling babies, a slew of elephants, Raggedy Anns and Andys, mobiles, choo-choo trains, ponies, teddy bears, prom dresses, the president’s face staring vacantly—but jerked my neck back around at hearing “freak-up.” I thought to myself, Remember that you’re here to gather revisionist history. You want to impress your professor at Ole Miss-Taylor.

  But then I started daydreaming about Frances Bavier, the actress who played Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show. I said, “Oh. Oh, I didn’t come here to play scrapbook. My name’s Stet Looper and I’m enrolled in a Southern studies graduate program, and I came here to see if y’all wouldn’t mind answering some questions about historical events that happened around here. Or around anywhere.” I cleared my throat. The women in the circle looked at me as if I walked in wearing a seersucker suit after Labor Day.

  Knox the woman said, “Southern studies? My husband has this ne’er-do-well cousin who has a daughter going to one of those all-girls schools up north. Hollins, I believe. She’s majoring in women’s studies.” In a lower voice she said, “She appears not to like men, if you know what I mean—she snubbed us all by not coming out this last season at the Poinsett Club. Anyway, she’s studying for that degree with an emphasis in women’s economics, and I told her daddy that it usually didn’t take four years learning how to make a proper grocery list.”

  I was glad I didn’t say that. I’d’ve been shot for saying that, I figured. The same woman who almost-cursed earlier held up a photograph to her colleagues and said, “Look at that one. He said he knew how to paint the baseboard.”

  I said, “Anyway, I have a deadline, and I was wondering if I could ask if y’all could tell me about an event that occurred during your lifetime, something that made you view the world differently than how you had understood it before. Kind of like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but more local, you know.”

  “Hey, Knox, could you hand me one them calligraphy stickons says ‘I Told You So’? I guess I need to find me a stamp that says ‘Loser,’” one of the women said. To me she said, “My husband always accuses me of being a germaphobe.” She held up her opened scrapbook for me to see. It looked as though she’d wiped her butt on the pages. “This is my collection of used moist tow-elettes. I put them in here to remember the nice restaurants we’ve gone to, and sometimes if the waitress gave me extras I put the new one in there, too. But even better, he and I one time went on a camping trip that I didn’t want to go on, and as it ended up we got lost. Luckily for Wells, we only had to follow my trail of Wet-Naps back to the parking lot. I don’t mind bragging that that trip was all it took for him to buy us a vacation home down on Pawleys Island.”

  I wished that I’d’ve thought to bring a tape recorder. I said, “That’s a great story,” even though I didn’t ever see
it as being a chapter in some kind of Southern culture textbook. I said, “Okay. Do any of y’all do aerobics? My wife’s next door teaching aerobics, if y’all are interested. From what I understand, she’s tough, but not too tough.” Inside my head I heard my inner voice going, Okay none of these women are interested in aerobics classes so shut up and get out of here before you say something more stupid and somehow get yourself in trouble.

  I stood there like a fool for a few seconds. The woman who complained about her baseboard starting flipping through pages, saying, “Look at them. Every one of them.” Then she went on to explain to a woman who must not’ve been a regular, “I keep a scrapbook of every time my husband messes up. This scrapbook’s the bad home repair one—he tries to fix something, then it costs us double to get a professional in to do the job. I got another book filled with bad checks got sent back, and newspaper clippings for when he got arrested and published in the police blotter. I even got ahold of some his mug shots.”

  It was like standing next to a whipping post. I said, “Okay, I’m sorry to take up any of your time.” The place should’ve been called Straphappy, I thought.

  As I opened the door, though, I heard a different voice, a woman who’d only concentrated on her own book of humiliation up until this point. She said, “Do you mean like if you know somebody got lynched, but it all got hush-hushed even though everyone around knew the truth?”

  Everyone went quiet. You could’ve heard an opened ink pad evaporate.

  I pulled up one of those half-stepladder/half-stool things. I said, “Say that all again, slower.”

  Her name was Gayle Ann Gunter. Her daddy owned a car lot, and her grandfather owned it before him, and the great-grandfather started the entire operation back when selling horseshoes and tack still made up half of his business. She worked on a scrapbook that involved one-by-two-inch school pictures that grade schoolers hand over to one another, and she had them under headings like “Uglier than Me,” “Poorer than Me,” “Dumber than Me,” as God is my witness. She said, “We’re having our twentieth high school reunion in a few months and I want to make sure I have the names right. It’s important in this world to greet old acquaintances properly.”

  I said, “I’m no genius, but it should be ‘Dumber than I.’ It’s a long, convoluted grammar lesson I learned back in college the first time.”

  The other women laughed. They said “Ha ha ha ha ha” in unison, and in a weird, seemingly practiced, cadence. Knox said, “One of the things that keeps me in business is people messing up their scrapbooks and having to start over. I had one woman who misspelled her new daughter-in-law throughout, the first time. She got it right when her son got a divorce, though.”

  “This was up in Travelers Rest,” Gayle Ann said. She kept her scrapbook atop her lap and spoke as if addressing the airconditioning vent. “I couldn’t have been more than eight, nine years old. These two black brothers went missing, but no one made a federal case out of it, you know. This was about 1970. They hadn’t integrated the schools just yet, I don’t believe. I don’t even know if it made the paper, and I haven’t ever seen the episode on one of those shows about long-since missing people. Willie and Archie Lagroon. No one thought about it much because, first off, a lot of teenage boys ran away back then. Maybe ’cause of Vietnam, I guess. And then again, they wasn’t white.”

  I took notes in a professional-looking memo pad. I didn’t even look up, and I didn’t offer another grammar lesson involving subjects and verbs. For some reason one of the women in the circle said, “My name’s Shaw Haynesworth. Gayle Ann, I thought you were born in 1970. My name’s Shaw Haynesworth, if you need to have footnotes and a bibliogeography.”

  I wrote that down, too. Gayle Ann Gunter didn’t respond. She said, “I haven’t thought about this in years. It’s sad. About four years after those boys went missing, a hunter found a bunch of bones right there about twenty feet off of Old Dacusville Road. My daddy told me all about it. They found all these rib bones kind of strewn around, and more than likely it was those two boys. This was all before DNA, of course. The coroner—or someone working for the state—finally said that they were beef and pork ribs people had thrown out their car windows. They said that people went to the Dacusville Smokehouse and couldn’t make it all the way back home before tearing into a rack of ribs, and that they threw them out the window, and somehow all those ribs landed in one big pile over the years.” She made a motorboat noise with her mouth. “I’m no expert when it comes to probability or beyond a reasonable doubt, but looking back on it now, I smell lynching. Is that the kind of story you’re looking for?”

  Abby walked in sweating, hair pulled back, wearing an outfit that made her look like she just finished the Tour de France. She said, “Hey, Stet, I might be another hour. Phyllis wants me to fill in for her. Are you okay?”

  The women scrapbookers looked up at my wife as if she zoomed in from cable television. I said, “We have a winner!” for some reason.

  “You can come over and sit in the lobby if you finish up early.” To the women she said, “We’re having a special next door if y’all want to join an aerobics class. Twenty dollars a month.” I turned to see the women all look down at their scrapbooks.

  Knox said, “I believe I can say for sure that we burn up enough calories running around all day for our kids. Speaking of which, I brought some doughnuts in!”

  I looked at Abby. I nodded. She kind of made a what’re-you-up-to? face and backed out. I said, “Okay. Yes, Gayle Ann, that’s exactly the kind of story I’m looking for—about something that happened, but people saw it differently. How sure are you that those bones were the skeletal remains of the two boys?”

  A woman working on a giant scrapbook of her two Pomeranians said, “They do have good barbecue at Dacusville Smokehouse. I know I’ve not been able to make it home without breaking into the Styrofoam boxes. Hey, do any of y’all know why it’s not good to give a dog pork bones? Is that an old wives’ tale, or what? I keep forgetting to ask my vet.”

  And then they were off talking about everything else. I felt it necessary to purchase something from Knox, so I picked out a rubber stamp that read “Unbelievable!”

  I’m not ashamed to admit that, while walking between Scrap-happy! and Feline Fitness, I envisioned not only a big A on my first Southern studies low-residency graduate-level class at Ole Miss-Taylor, but a consultant’s fee when this rib-bone story got picked up by one of those TV programs specializing in wrongdoing mysteries, cold cases, and voices from the dead.

  Since I wouldn’t meet Dr. Theron Crowther until the entire graduate class got together for ten days in December, I didn’t know if he was a liar or prankster. I’d dealt with both types before, of course, in the river rock business. Pranksters came back and said that my stones crumbled up during winter’s first freeze, and liars sent checks for half-tons, saying I used cheating scales. After talking to the women of Scraphappy!, I sent Dr. Crowther an email detailing the revisionist history I’d gathered. He wrote back to me, “You fool! Have you ever encountered a little something called ‘rural legend’? Let me say right now that you will not make it in the mean world of Southern culture studies if you fall for every made-up tale that rumbles down the trace. Now go out there and show me how regular people view things differently than how they probably really happened.”

  First off, I thought that I’d done that. I was never the kind of student who whined and complained when a professor didn’t cotton to my way of thinking. Back when I was forced to undergo a required course called Broadcast Station Management I wrote a comparison-contrast paper about the management styles of WKRP in Cincinnati and WJM in Minneapolis. The professor said that it wasn’t a good idea to write about fictitious radio- and television-based situation comedies. Personally, I figured the management philosophies must’ve been spectacular, seeing as both programs consistently won Nielsen battles, then went on into syndication. The professor—who ended up, from what I understand, having to resign
his position after getting caught filming himself having sex with a freshman boy on the made-up set for an elective course in Local Morning Shows, using a fake potted plant and microphone as props—said I needed to forget about television programs when dealing with television programs, which made no sense to me at the time. I never understood what he meant until, after graduation, running my family’s business ineffectively and on a reading jag, I sat down by the river and read The Art of War by Sun Tzu and Being and Nothingness by Sartre.

  I said to Abby, “My mentor at Ole Miss-Taylor says that’s a made-up story about black kids and rib bones. He says it’s like those vacation photos down in Jamaica with the toothbrush, or the big dog that chases a ball out the window of a high-rise in New York.”

  Abby came out from beneath our front porch, the half-bottle of bourbon in her grasp. She said, “Of course he says that. Now he’s going to come down here and interview about a thousand people so he can publish the book himself. That’s what those guys do, Stet. Hey, I got an idea—why don’t you write about how you fell off a turnip truck. How you got some kind of medical problem that makes you wet behind the ears always.”

  I stared down at the river and tried to imagine how rocks still languished there below the roiling surface. “I guess I can run over to that barbecue shack and ask them what they know about it.”

  “I guess you can invest in carbon paper and slide rulers in case this computer technology phase proves to be a fad.”

  All good barbecue stands only open on the weekend, Thursday through Saturday at most.

  I got out a regional telephone directory, found the address, got directions off the Internet, then drove around uselessly for a few hours, circling, until I happened to see a white plume of smoke different than most of the black ones caused by people burning tires in front of their trailers. I walked in—this time with one of the handheld tape recorders the bank was giving away for opening a CD, I guess so people can record their last words before committing suicide, something like “One half of one fucking percent interest?”—and dealt with all the locals turning around, staring, wondering aloud who my kin might be. I said, loudly, “Hey—how y’all doing this fine evening?” like I owned the place. Everyone turned back to their piled paper plates of minced pork and cole slaw.