Between Wrecks Read online

  At the counter a short man with pointy sideburns and a curled up felt cowboy hat said, “We out of sweet potato casserole.” A fly buzzed around his cash register.

  “I’ll take two,” I looked up at the menu board behind him, “Hog-o-Mighty sandwiches.”

  “Here or to go?”

  “And a sweet tea. You don’t serve beer by any chance, do you?”

  “No, sir. Family-orientated,” he said. He wore an apron that read “Cook.”

  I said, “I understand. I’m Stet Looper, up from around north of here.”

  An eavesdropper behind me said, “I tode you.”

  “By north of here I mean just near the state line. I’ll eat them here. Anyway, my wife introduced me to a woman who told me a wild story about two young boys being missing some thirty-odd years back, and a pile of bones the state investigators said came from here. Do you know this story?” I mentioned Abby because any single male strangers are, in the sloppy dialect of the locals, “quiz.”

  “My name’s Cook,” the cook said. “Raymus Cook. Y’all hear that? Fellow wants to know if I heard about them missing boys back then. Can you believe that?” To me he said, “You the second person today to ask. Some fellow from down Mississippi called earlier asking if it was some kind of made-up story.”

  I thought, Goddamn parasite Theron Crowther. “I’ll be doggone,” I said. “What’d you tell him?”

  “That’ll be five and a quarter, counting tax.” Raymus Cook handed over two sandwiches on a paper plate and took my money. “I told him my daddy’d be the one to talk to, but Daddy’s been dead eight years. I told him what I believed—that somebody paid somebody, and that those boys’ families will never rest in peace.”

  People from two tables got up from the seats, shot Raymus Cook mean looks, and left the premises. One of them said, “We been through this enough. I’mo take my bidness to Ola’s now on.”

  Raymus Cook held his head back somewhat and called out, “This ain’t the world it used to be. You just can’t go decide to secede every other minute things don’t turn out like you want them.” At this precise moment I knew that, later in life, I would regale friends and colleagues alike about how I “stumbled upon” something. Raymus Cook turned his head halfway to the open kitchen and said, “Ain’t that right, Ms. Hattie?”

  A black woman stuck her face my way and said, “Datboutright, huh-huh,” just like that, fast, as if she waited to say her lines all night long.

  “You can’t cook barbecue correct without the touch of a black woman’s hands,” Raymus said to me in not much more than a whisper. “All these chains got white people smoking out back. Won’t work, I’ll be the first to admit.”

  I thought, Fuck, this is going to turn out to be just another one of those stories that’ve bloated the South for 150 years. I didn’t want that to happen. I said, “I’m starting a master’s degree on Southern culture, and I need to write a paper on something that happened a while back that maybe ain’t right. You got any stories you could help me out with?”

  I sat down at the first table and unwrapped a sandwich. I got up and poured my own tea. Raymus Cook smiled. He picked up a flyswatter and nailed his prey. “Southern culture?” He laughed. “I don’t know that much about Southern culture, even though I got raised right here.” To a family off in the corner he yelled, “Y’all want any sweet potato casserole?” Back to me he said, “That’s one big piece of flypaper hanging, Southern culture. It might be best to accidentally graze a wing to it every once in a while, but mostly buzz around.”

  I said, of course, “Man, that’s a nice analogy.” I tried to think up one to match him, something about river rocks. I couldn’t.

  “Wait a minute,” Raymus Cook said. “I might be thinking about Southern literature. Like Faulkner. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  I thought, This guy’s going to help me get through my thesis one day. “Hey, can I get a large rack of ribs to go? I’ll get a large rack and a small rack.” I looked up at the menu board. I said, “Can I get a ‘Willie’ and an ‘Archie’?”

  It took me a minute to remember those two poor black kids’ names. I thought, This isn’t funny, and took off out of there as soon as Raymus Cook turned around to tell Miss Hattie what he needed. I remembered that I forgot to turn on the tape recorder.

  On my drive back home I wondered if there were any low-residency writing programs where I could learn how to finish a detective novel.

  I told my sort-of wife the entire event and handed her half a Hog-o-Mighty sandwich. She didn’t gape her mouth or shake her head. “You want to get into Southern studies, you better prepare yourself for such. There are going to be worse stories.”

  Wershtoreesh. I said, “I don’t want to collect war stories.”

  “You know what I said. And I don’t know why you don’t ask me. Here’s a true story about a true story gone false: This woman in my advanced cardio class—this involves spinning, Pilates, steps, and treadmill inside a sauna—once weighed 220 pounds. She’s five-two. Now she weighs a hundred, maybe one-o-five at the most. She’s twenty-eight years old and just started college at one of the tech schools. She wants to be a dental hygienist.”

  We sat on the porch, looking down at the river. Our bottle was empty. On the railing I had The South: What Happened, How, When, and Why opened to a chapter on a sect of people in eastern Tennessee called “Slopeheads,” which might’ve been politically incorrect. I said, “She should be a dietician. They got culinary courses there now. She should become an elementary-school chef, you know, to teach kids how to quit eating pizza and pimento cheese burgers.”

  “Listen. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know how and why and when she lost all that weight?”

  I said, “She saw one of those Before and After programs on afternoon TV. She sat there with a bowl of potato chips on her belly watching Oprah, and God spoke to her.” I said, “Anorexia and bulimia, which come before and after ‘arson’ in some books.”

  “Her daddy died.” Abby got up and closed my textbook for no apparent reason. “Figure it out, Stet. Her daddy died. She said she got so depressed that she quit eating. But in reality, she had made herself obese so he’d quit creeping into her bedroom ages of twelve and twenty-two. Her mother had left the household long before, and there she was. So she fattened up, and slept on her stomach. When her father died she didn’t tell anyone what had been going on. But when all the neighbors met after the funeral to eat, she didn’t touch one dish. Not even the macaroni and cheese.”

  I said, “I don’t want to know about these kinds of things.” I got up and walked down toward the river. Abby followed behind me. “Those my-daddy-loved-me stories are the ones I’m trying to stay away from. It’s what people expect out of this area”

  When we got to the backhoe she climbed up and reached beneath the seat. She pulled out an unopened bottle of rum I had either forgotten or didn’t know about. “There were pirates in the South. You could write about pirates and their influences on the South. How pirates stole things that weren’t theirs.”

  I picked up a nice skipper and flung it out toward an unnatural sandbar. Then I walked up to my knees into the water, reached down, and pulled two more out. An hour later, I had enough rocks piled up to cover a grave.

  OPERATION

  The Department of Social Services caseworker appeared at our door unannounced, like my uncle predicted. We’d already gone over what answers might work best when confronted by a government agency bureaucrat highly inured to vitamin B, C, and D deficiencies, head lice, rotten teeth, and lash marks, not to mention a child drooling while he sabotaged alphabet memorization. I was to use the term “sir” or “ma’am,” though I called my uncle plain Cush all the time. When asked about my parents’ whereabouts, I’d been tutored not to mention anything about how my father may have killed a racist and then absconded to one of the lesser-known islands located between Puerto Rico and Venezuela. I could choose from “They’re on business trying to
sell barbed wire for the business” or “They’re dead.” If asked about how come I got homeschooled, I’d been prompted to admit that it wasn’t my parents’ idea, that I had a problem way back in first-through-fifth grade beating up other kids on a whim, and that my teachers and classmates’ parents worried over school violence. We did not have a name for Asperger Syndrome in the late seventies/early eighties. And, to be honest, I liked only to punch people who said stupid things regarding race relations, cafeteria food, TV shows that involved characters with IQs less than 100, bad pop music, anti-union thought, people who thought pro wrestling wasn’t a hoax, gun worshipping, and another hundred things. I didn’t possess a syndrome-to-be-named-later. Something about rattail haircuts set me off, it seemed. Mean, angry, nonplussed, committed kid—that was all—when it came to me.

  “You’re going to want to use some them big words like ‘inured’ and ‘absconded’ and ‘nonplussed,’ I know,” Cush said to me not two weeks before the caseworker showed up uninvited. “You can’t use them kinds a words around a person with a bachelor’s degree in the sociology. I mean it. You gone have to talk stupid.” He pulled his Fu Manchuu out at forty-five degree angles so that it looked like a hirsute caret pointing toward his nostrils, as if a copy editor wanted to delete his nose in order to add a word or phrase like “Stop” or “Not now.”

  This conversation took place in the middle of the night as we snipped somebody’s perfectly good barbed wire in hopes of their calling us up later to help them out with new fencing. After my father and mother left, that’s what we did. It came off more as an adventure than an act of meanness. We ran Southern Barbed on our own terms. Plus, Uncle Cush kept saying things like “You will understand later” and “We need some money for what’s going to happen” and “Goddamn America ain’t what it used to be.” He said things like “Jesus L. Christ do you know how much I miss Fenfang Yang back in the Vietnam area, the best woman of the universe?” and “You’re only fourteen or fifteen.”

  I didn’t answer much back at him. On one occasion I said, “Stretching wire can become debilitating.”

  He nodded and said, “Hey, if a caseworker shows up, don’t use the word ‘debilitating,’ or that other word you keep using.”

  I said, “Child labor?”

  “Hirsute,” he said. “And don’t mention child labor, either, goddamn it, unless you want me to quit buying you good used textbooks so you can learn more than anyone else your age.”

  The Department of Social Services woman showed up at eleven o’clock in the morning, right when I would’ve been taking the mandatory seventh-grade class in South Carolina history had I gone to Poke Middle. She was an albino whitish woman, as opposed to an albino African-American. It was hard not to stare at her, what with the nearly opaque skin, naturally platinum hair, and oversized sunglasses normally seen on elderly people exiting an ophthalmologist’s office. In the past, Uncle Cush had made a point of introducing me to one-armed men, limpers, the overly obese, and tracheotomy victims so that I would never feel sorry for myself, but he’d forgotten to throw an albino into the mix. Fuck, I’d seen white rabbits with more suntan lines than this particular functionary.

  I opened the door and didn’t laugh or jump. I said, “Hello.”

  “Are you Saint Arthur Waddell? I’m looking for Saint Arthur Waddell. Could you tell Saint Arthur Waddell that Ms. Perkins from DSS is here to ask him a few questions?”

  I said, “I had a feeling,” because it all came back to me about my uncle’s vision. I said slowly, “Me Saint Arthur. Me go by plain ‘Start,’ as in the beginning of ‘Saint,’ and the beginning of ‘Arthur.’” I opened the door and half-fanned my arm for her to enter.

  Ms. Perkins said, “Thank you, Start! My, what a grown-up looking young man you are!”

  I wanted to see her pink eyes, of course. I’d read about pink-eyed albinos, who preferred to be called “Pigment Challenged.” I said, “Come on in and sit down at the kitchen table,” but wondered if the term “PC” came from “Pigment Challenged.” It should’ve. That would’ve made sense.

  Uncle Cush came stomping in from the den. Understand that this was the house where I grew up and the house where Cush and my father grew up. Up until my parents left, Cush lived on some land up the hill, behind the Quonset huts where we kept rolls of barbed wire. After my parents took off he moved in to take care of me. It didn’t matter. He said, “Hey,” to the DSS worker.

  Ms. Perkins said, “Hello! Are you Saint Arthur’s father?”

  My uncle paused for what became, later, an uncomfortable, telling moment for me. He said, “No. Cush Waddell. Favorite uncle.”

  Ms. Perkins wrote something in her ledger. For what it’s worth, she wore a paisley outfit consisting of mostly greens and purples, which—against her translucent skin—looked like amoebas on a vertical Petri dish. She said all that stuff about where she worked, then, “We been asked to come by check on some things.”

  My uncle nodded. He said, “I understand.” He didn’t look at me, but I could feel his thoughts going This is what I was talking about that night when we clipped people’s barbed wire so they’d have to order more. I could feel him thinking You don’t want to live in a foster home, now, do you, boy? My uncle said, “You want me in or out the room?”

  “We ain’t accusing no one of nothing,” Ms. Perkins said. I looked at her neck and thought about a cave salamander I’d seen once time on ETV. She shuffled into the kitchen and sat down. I wondered if she normally used a cane, a walker, or had someone lift her elbow this way and that.

  I was fourteen years old and had been out of the normal school system more than a couple years. My uncle had attended to me less than eighteen months, though it seemed like a lifetime what with his aphorisms, insults, predictions, demands, expectations, and tall tales about Vietnam that probably weren’t true. I said, “Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation,” which came from Henry Fielding. I could’ve gotten thrown into a foster home, I thought, for having to read Tom Jones.

  Uncle Cush said, “Sit down and make yourself at home. You want any sweet tea? Pulled pork sandwich with or without cole slaw on top of it?”

  I sat down. I readied myself. I tried to remember everything my uncle told me to say. Ms Perkins kept her shades on and said No to my uncle, then to me said, “We’re just going to go through what the average student should know at your age, at least around here. Can you tell me what six times six equals?”

  Man, I didn’t wait. I didn’t pause. I said, “What is thirty-six!” as if I were on that game show. Ms. Perkins nodded and marked her ledger. She said, “Can you name me five colors?”

  “Well,” I said, “the primary colors are red, green, and blue. Then there are a bunch of secondary and tertiary colors. Orange, for example, and…”

  “Five colors,” she said.

  “Okay, those primary ones, plus orange, yellow, azure, magenta, purple…”

  “Okay,” Ms. Perkins said.

  My uncle opened up the refrigerator—mistake—and pulled out a can of Budweiser. He said, “My favorite color might be one y’all ain’t mentioned yet.” He said, “I know I’m not supposed to help out.”

  Ms. Perkins said, “Very good. Very good Saint Arthur! You know your math and your colors!”

  “You knew ahead of time I wasn’t the daddy. Was it old Matthew Foy who told y’all on me for taking over Start’s upbringing?” Uncle Cush blurted out. “Was it Junie Teter? I’mo tell you one thing—ain’t nobody bringing up a better boy than I’m doing right now, goddamn it.”

  I looked at Ms. Perkins the best I could and said, “One hundred forty-four times ninety nine equals 14,256.” I said, “Give me one. Ten thousand divided by pi equals 3,183—check it out.”

  My uncle said, “Hey, did me and you go to school together? I used to pull down the fire alarm thing, you know, and then when everyone went off into the playground, me and this girl would screw on the teacher’s desk. I’m talking like twice a week. Was that you? D
id you go to Poke Elementary, third grade?”

  Ms. Perkins shook her head No and smiled. I could tell that she didn’t like my uncle’s Fu Manchu. She said to me, “Are you taking any foreign languages? In the seventh grade you should be taking Spanish I or French I.”

  I said, “Here’s my favorite Bush poem, from the Bush people in Zimbabwe.”

  I started clicking and clucking like no one’s business, only because Uncle Cush taught me how to do so, seeing as how I hadn’t actually taken any courses in Spanish or French. I went all “Dok dok dok dok-dok dok-dok dok dok dok/dok dok dok dok dok dok dok dok dok dok/dok, dok dok-dok dok dok-dok dok dok dok,” with appropriate facial expressions. I said, “Not only is it Bush, but it follows the same meter as that famous Dylan Thomas poem. How about that?”

  My uncle started clapping. Ms. Perkins shook her head twice and wrote down a note.

  Not to brag, but when Ms. Perkins came over, according to Uncle Cush, I read on a twenty-ninth grade level. Before my parents took off, they’d attended to my reading the classics—Plato to Faulkner—but then when Cush showed up, and we rifled through the used textbooks at a number of college and university bookstores, I became proficient in the weird shit: Salinger, Cheever, Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Exley, Gass, Gaddis, and those others. I didn’t finish everything put before me, sure, but I probably had a better grasp of, say, Carlos Fuentes, than anyone teaching English or Spanish in Poke, South Carolina. Because I wasn’t but fourteen, I never thought to ask, “Hey, Cush, how can a high school graduate and Vietnam War veteran such as yourself know so much about what direction in which to point me?” I guess I figured that every human being one generation older than I—unless they were good-hearted social workers—read four or five hours a day growing up, seeing as the sitcoms of the day offered little in regards to humanist, secular thinking and outright hilarity when it came to human suffering, except for maybe The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle. Gilligan’s Island. I Dream of Jeannie. The Beverly fucking Hillbillies.