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  Don’t think that I don’t know how there’s not been a whole lot of dialogue in my story up to this point: most people tell a story and there are all kinds of antagonists—or at least one good one—and they have to have some kind of talk in order to build up what scholars might call “rising action” or “conflict” or whatever it is that scholars talk about. Understand how this is how alone I had been, from the lice documentary on up until I started anew out of state. I went to school, I sat two desks from everyone else, sometimes my almost-friends Mendal Dawes and Compton Lane made eye contact with me, and then I came home. I grew up hearing only, “Ben Frewer’s got head lice” from people I spent the day with, and “Fucking fuck-fuck” from my father, and “We’re having Hungarian goulash,” from my mother. People always talk about dreaming in black and white or color. Me, my dreams never included sound, except when tiny insects closed in on my ear canals to say, “We’re having Hungarian goulash for supper tonight, you fuck-fuck-fucking Frewer with head lice,” I promise.

  IT DOESN’T TAKE a psychologist to understand how I went off to college in Minnesota, far from the South, in order to take a major in anthropology and minor in P.E. Baby, I wanted to understand from which gene pool I hailed, and I wanted to build tri- and biceps so large that should I ever run into a school chum in an airport it wouldn’t take much to beat the shit out of him or her. I’d’ve gone to college in Canada had my high school counselor not told me that there was no university system up there. Anyway, I met and married a woman named Gabrielle who—though self-conscious and unsure of herself—might’ve understood the stigmas I endured as a child should I have ever told her. It’s Gabrielle I blame for the second half of my life.

  “I think it’d be rude if you didn’t show up to your high school reunion, Bennie,” she said the morning after I’d gotten an invitation from Libby Belcher! Who said it’d be major fun! And that we’d have a big old dance! To music we loved in the seventies! “I mean, Christ, they’ve probably had one every five years and you haven’t been to any of them.”

  I had taken my degrees in anthropology and physical education and put them to good use over a twenty-five-year span. I refinished furniture in Colonial Williamsburg, and some days worked as a town crier when the regular guy—a man with a master’s degree in anger management—had to take off work. Gabrielle wrote little skits about frontier life or whatever when she didn’t don the costume of a bread-baking woman, waiting for tour groups to watch her shove loaves in a wood-burning oven.

  “I have no interest in what my old classmates have done in life, because I already know,” I said. “That sounds conceited, I’m aware of that, but it’s true. A couple of them maybe ventured off as far away as Clemson to get an education, then scurried back home to take over the one law firm, or the Mr. Quik Fried Chicken, or the bank, or the army-navy store. A couple actually got out of there like I did, and I know they won’t be going to any reunion. The boys married the only girls they’d ever had sex with, and the girls never evolved into the kind of women who second guess their boring lives to the point where they drink alone in the afternoon and down Valium at will. The best a young woman can do in town is marry a dentist. It’s sad.”

  We sat in a house we built ourselves on some land we purchased through luck after one of Gabrielle’s skits got bought up by the people who run summer productions near Plymouth Rock, the Lost Colony, and the Cherokee Indian reservation, among other places. She’d found a formula so that John Smith could become Francis Drake could become Chief Skyuka, and so on. She tried to make the skit fit Brigham Young’s life, but that never worked out.

  Gabrielle took off her apron and bonnet. “It sounds like a good town to bring up children in. You turned out all right. Go back to Forty-Five with a notebook and do some research, Bennie. Go there and figure out why your hometown has turned into an island in and of itself, you know.”

  My parents had moved to Florida when the local county council banned cursing in public, during my junior year in college. The sentence for anyone blurting out, say, “fucking fuck-fuck,” was either thirty days in jail or eight hours picking up trash alongside the railroad track that split Main Street in half. My mother wrote me a letter saying that she and Dad would be leaving in the middle of the night for Tampa, seeing as he had amassed either a year-and-a-half jail time or eighteen straight days with a nail-stick in his hand. My mother wrote to say that all of this had occurred in a two-hour period of time when she and my father had gone to an indoor movie that finally opened in town, had sat in front of a woman who owned the Debs and Brides shop and who kept calling out to everybody how she planned to order “this dress” or “that coat” for the next season. The movie was Star fucking Wars, and my father couldn’t take it.

  I reached over Gabrielle to pick up a Swiss Army knife in order to scrape beneath my fingernails the homemade stain I concocted out of plug tobacco and alcohol. Sometimes I used rusted nails and rainwater. I said to Gabrielle, “You know, you might have a point. Maybe I need to go in order to bury some deep-seated animosities or whatever.”

  “I never wanted to say anything about it, but you do yell in your sleep at night more often than not, and I’m sure it’s because you have some wounds that need closure.”

  I took my knife and scraped a dry patch of skin beneath my wristwatch. “This itches,” I said.

  This itches, y’all, I thought.

  NOT THAT I have any advanced degrees in anything, but I would bet that there’s something wrong—and telling—about an entire town of adults who still have first names ending in -y, -i, or -ie. No one of voting age should still call himself Tommy, Jimmy, Wendy, Windy, Windi, Wendi, Wendie, Windie, Jillie, Sammy, Freddie, Bobby, Johnny, or Libby, especially if they’ve developed stretch marks or been the contributing factor in them. Billy the Kid’s all right, but the rest don’t work.

  Understand that Gabrielle only called me Bennie, I was sure, because that’s how I introduced myself back at a freshman get-to-know-you party between a foosball table and Flipper pinball machine in the student center. To everyone else I was plain Ben, the furniture refinisher.

  My wife and I took some personal days off in June in order to attend the Forty-Five! High! School! Class of 1977! Reunion! held—get this—at the National Guard Armory. We walked up the walkway between a row of Civil War cannons, and from maybe fifty yards away could hear one of those disco bands singing loudly about roller coasters of love.

  Gabrielle, under oath, will attest to the fact that once we stepped through the doors a coagulation of people parted, stepped back, and stared. Wendy Teed said, “I’ll be doggone. Bennie Frewer.” She seemed surprised at her own voice, as if she’d not spoken with a cheerleader’s fervor since seventh grade or thereabouts. “We didn’t think you’d show up.”

  I said, “Wendy. This is my wife, Gabrielle.”

  Let me make it clear that Gabrielle came from a gene pool unknown to my people—my wife had Scandinavian blood, mixed with one of those other Germanic tribes. She stood tall and lean and naturally blonde, her hair not puffed up as if some kind of nuclear explosion had taken place on her forehead. Gabrielle had not emerged from a cotton mill-owning family who intermingled only with another cotton mill-owning family, or doffers who only married doffers. Her coat of arms showed something other than a cotton ball, a shotgun, and a car engine hung from a tree limb.

  Wendy Teed said, “Well. We heard that Bennie got married, but we didn’t realize. We just didn’t realize. Do you go by Gabby most of the time?”

  My wife laughed and laughed. She hit my arm. “Never.”

  I looked at the Jimmys and Bobbys, the Kennys and Donnies, took my wife’s hand, and said, “Y’all got any fucking booze here or fucking-fuck what?”

  I led Gabrielle through streamers hung from the armory’s I-beamed rafters. We walked toward a wall of blown-up yearbook photographs, of various Jennys, Timmys, and Kathis, all of whom were in attendance, all of whom either played football or waved flags and/or po
m-poms.

  I noticed not one African American person in attendance, though our high school must’ve been split fifty-fifty percentage-wise between blacks and whites. I led my wife toward the bar, thinking about the only people who ever spoke to me back then: Cheryl Puckett, Jacquelyn Sanders, Robert Perlotte, R.C. Threatt, Willie Goode, and Shirley Ebo. I turned and said, “Where are our black comrades, anyway?” One of the Larrys from the group following at a safe distance behind said, “They have they own reunion, Bubba.”

  Then he asked who’d like to go out in the parking lot and have a foot race.

  I looked at my wife and said, “Did you hear that? ‘They have their own reunion.’ Just like before segregation. I told you. I told you that time’s stopped here. I told you that this poor place ain’t changed whatsoever.”

  My wife looked over her right shoulder, away from me. A group of my old classmates started dancing to a Bee Gees song. “At least he called you Bubba. He didn’t call you Bubby, or Bubbie, or Bubbi.” She didn’t need to point out how she meant different spellings.

  I looked at the bartender and said, “Bourbon, bourbon, bourbon.”

  MY WIFE AND I sat alone at a table for four. We sat in the corner of the Forty-Five National Armory, amid pictures of my old classmates sporadically placed between photographs of World War II generals, tanks, and antiaircraft machinery. My ex-non-friends danced and danced; they formed lines and kicked their legs outward, is what I’m saying. I thought about my blacksmith friend, Amos, back in Williamsburg—he once worked for the Pentagon—and how he’d missed his chance in the mid-seventies to work as a drummer for any disco band that toured America. Gabrielle finally said, “We can leave, if you want,” maybe an hour into the situation.

  “I want you to see the finale,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure what would happen.

  Libby Belcher got up on the makeshift stage and pointed for the disc jockey to cut it down. “Now, like we’ve done every year, we’re going to give out awards. Our panelists are the 1977 class of senior cheerleaders!” The judges let out a war cry. “Okay. Most Successful again, is Mikey Self! Y’all know him because he runs the Mikey Self Pharmacy!” Mikey Self stood up and waved. He didn’t approach Libby, seeing as there wasn’t a trophy, plaque, or certificate for him to pick up.

  Libby Belcher went on through Most Changed, Best Preserved, Most Hair Lost, Most Children, Longest Married—which had a forty-seven-way tie, seeing as everyone got married the first weekend out of high school—forever.

  I cringed every time she opened her mouth. She said, “Our Traveled the Furthest Award would’ve gone to Bennie Frewer, who came all the way from Williamsburg up in—” she stopped, and her face let us know that she didn’t know the state “—a long way away. But Johnny Russell says he left home and flew around the world to come back. So, for traveling something like a couple hundred thousand miles—the award goes to Johnny Russell!” who lived next door to the armory.

  Johnny Russell’s father always ran the drive-in movie theater, right next to his TV and stereo shop, and Johnny went off to study mechanical engineering for about a year before returning home and taking over his dad’s business. I hated the little shit from third grade onward, even before my lice documentary. Johnny Russell had the IQ of an empty box of popcorn, and made—I imagined—six figures a year.

  “That’s not right,” my wife said.

  “I told you. But that’s not the least of it, I bet. You keep watching, baby doll.”

  Wendy Teed got up on the stage and listed out Most Dogs, Most Cats, Most Spectacular Vacation, Best Dressed, Most Likely to Succeed Late in Life, Best Turnaround, whatever. Then she said, “Our final category for Most Famous won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s been in attendance over the last four reunions.” I turned around to see who might’ve found a cure for cancer or developed a better penny wrapper. “Well, it might be a surprise to the boy who’ll get the award for the first time in person.”

  And then this old film clip came on behind Wendy Teed, of me saying, “This itches, y’all,” seated there on a barber’s chair. Gabrielle said, “How did you not win the Least Changed award? You look the very same then as now.”

  I said, “I told you. I told you. These people have something against me still, I swear. You saw it.”

  I didn’t imagine a hush over the crowd; my wife later said that there was that “eerie silence” usually associated with meteorologists or scholars talking about a writer’s response to anything involving symbolism. I whispered over to Gabrielle, “What’s going on?”

  She said, “They didn’t sit apart from you because they thought you had lice, idiot. They thought you were a movie star. They revered you, you hammerhead.”

  Wendy Teed, I realized later, paused a few times before introducing me. Finally she pointed my way from the podium and said, “I can’t believe that Bennie Frewer’s here, can y’all?”

  There wasn’t a spotlight or anything, but the way she pointed my way let me know that I should stick my arm up in the air. I did for a moment, then I brought it down on my scalp and reflexively scratched at the crown of my head.

  When Gabrielle and I were asked to lead the next dance—which happened to be “Free Bird”—I could only wonder if I’d made up everything throughout my life regarding these people. I thought, Could it be that I might’ve been laid every day of my life back then should I have wanted to? Was I just another snot-nosed one-shot child actor?

  I dipped my wife during the first guitar solo, naturally.

  People clapped and encircled us, but I swear to God by the next song everyone was doing some kind of made-up dance wherein they scratched their scalps as if rubbing flint for spark.

  MY WIFE AND I moved further south by the end of the summer. We drove from Virginia to Atlanta where I got a job restoring furniture for a number of antebellum plantations within a hundred-mile radius, all of which were on some kind of tour that people could take if they had a couple days to spare. Gabrielle and I drove to North Carolina, then took a sharp right at the South Carolina border, followed it until we hit Tennessee, then drove down from Chattanooga. I vowed to never pass through my home state again, much less Forty-Five.

  “I still think you’re overreacting,” Gabrielle said when we crossed into Georgia. “It was a coincidence, that dance that they did. And Wendy didn’t pause as much as you think. Who were they going to give Most Famous to—the guy who got acquitted for stealing a truckload of carbon paper?”

  I said, “Look. Forget about it. It’s a new life we’re starting. You know, that old guy who wrote Uncle Remus stories was from somewhere in Georgia. You might could take up storytelling, like you used to do. In between writing plays or whatever.”

  Gabrielle pulled her legs beneath her in the passenger seat. “I’m thinking about going over to CNN and seeing if I could get anything there.”

  Because we sold our large, open house and acreage in Virginia, we had enough money to either buy a small town house in the city or a twelve-hundred-square-foot house an hour away, next door to a primitive artist named R.A. Miller who made a living selling tin cutouts with “Blow Oskar” printed on the top.

  We stayed in the city, and I traveled against rush hour traffic each morning, on my way out to places like LaGrange, Winder, and Jefferson. I stripped down southern dining room tables only when necessary and spent most of my time finding ways to support legs invisibly.

  It wasn’t a week into our new lives when Gabrielle announced, “I didn’t get the job at CNN, but I got one with Channel Forty-five. It’s one of the public-access stations. Something just clicked, and the guy said I had the perfect face and voice to do human interest stories. And public service announcements.”

  I said, “No more free bread?” and kissed my wife. I could tell immediately that we would never again argue, that maybe we’d have a child in these, our later years, and that I might be able to bury whatever demons I may or may not have conjured up myself.

  When the Atlanta are
a became infested with cooties some month later, Gabrielle was the first on the scene, interviewing elementary-school nurses, nursing home directors, and everyone in between. Me, I picked up head lice for real from a house where Jefferson Davis once slept, all the way over in Athens.

  If I’d’ve known the politics and procedures of publicaccess stations, how their clips get bought up from bigger stations and so on, I wouldn’t have sat down with my wife and her cameraman to talk about how I might’ve taken a nap on a mattress where Jeff Davis slept, that I didn’t know of another place where I could have come in contact with the parasites. I had pet a horse that was from the same bloodline as Davis’s horse, but that seemed improbable.

  Gabrielle said, “Cut the camera, Gary. Hey, honey, what about you show everyone how to use a nit comb? The station will pick up the tab. I can go into an in-depth report about how to wash clothes and whatnot.”

  Gabrielle had never liked playing the bread-baking woman back in Colonial Williamsburg, I knew. I said, “Because I love you, and because you finally made it to where you want to be, I’ll do it. How many people watch Channel Forty-five anyway, like the six people who don’t have cable?”

  My wife and her cameraman took close-up shots of me scraping away tiny eggs above our bathroom sink. They showed me stripping our bed and sticking sheets into the washing machine. Gabrielle thought it might be fun if I said, “This itches, y’all,” right into the camera.

  When my mother called a couple weeks later she said something about how she got all confused, that she didn’t know if the nightly news on NBC somehow enhanced my early, early performance in grade school in a way to only make me look bigger. Gabrielle’s coworkers, of course, took her out that night in celebration of one of the networks picking up her human interest story. Me, I sat at home knowing that I’d never enter another mansion, never be hired to mask any scratches a demilune, drop-leaf, or gateleg table might suffer through accidental contact. I knew that I would get a telephone call later from my hometown, either to take away my award or give me another.