Between Wrecks Read online

  My parents had me listen to Beethoven, Mozart, and Shostakovich, whereas Cush turned me on to the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, plus more-normal Neil Young.

  I read literature, and history, listened to music, and knew enough math to figure out my checkbook, in what should’ve been my seventh-grade year. I understood that one of my state’s previous senators beat somebody with a cane in the Senate chambers.

  But I didn’t know biology. I didn’t know science worth a shit. You’d think that I spawned from a tribe of holy-roller, anti-evolution fundamentalists.

  Because my uncle foresaw questions and/or developments in advance—for all I knew he’d already predicted this particular social worker’s next maneuver some years ago—he said, “Hey, let’s jump right over to biology. Let me get out the Operation game.”

  Listen, it didn’t take biology acumen to succeed in the Milton-Bradley game of skill, Operation. It took steady hands. The world’s best biologist in the world—let’s say Lewis Thomas, at the time—would’ve failed miserably at Operation, what with Dr. Thomas’s probable digital shakiness. Dr. Stephen Hawking? The world’s worst Operation player. High-stakes Las Vegas poker players might not know the difference between a spleen and a freckle, but by God they can play some fucking Operation.

  Cush left me there with Ms. Perkins. He went looking for the game, which we’d played about nightly for a month in the upstairs room that had the most unstable flooring, which made it that much more difficult to perform a successful extraction without touching the sides and killing the patient.

  Ms. Perkins whispered, “If I bring out a doll, can you show me where your uncle’s touched you?”

  I nodded and whispered back, “I don’t need a doll. I can show you right here,” and took my left index finger to point at my right palm. “Sometimes when I make him proud, he shakes my hand.”

  My uncle walked into the room with Cavity Sam and said, “You ain’t asked, but I’ll be the fifth person to admit I don’t take care of myself. First there’s good George Francis, the Lebanese liquor store owner. He’ll say I partake of too much bourbon. Then that girl Patsy, or Patty, or Bonnie over at Poke Sack ’n’ Go, where I buy my Winstons. You know we’re in the barbed-wire fence business here, and we’re up against these goddamn fancy rock fence people—and my main business enemy is this guy Looper up at Carolina Rocks who wants me to die so he can talk people from wire to rock easier. He’s number three. He’s always sending me moonshine and questionable baloney. Start here works as person number four, telling me to eat more vegetables and stay away from sausage. And then there’s me. But by God I make sure Start doesn’t drink, smoke, or eat sausage.”

  Ms. Perkins probably stared hard at Uncle Cush, but I couldn’t tell what with her sunglasses. She said, “Are y’all from around here originally?”

  My uncle set down the game. He said, “I just put in brand new triple-A batteries in this thing, so watch out. Old Cavity Sam’s nose might light up just from the tweezers getting close to the edges.”

  I said, “I can sing you a bunch of body organs to the opening tune of the National Anthem, if you’d rather I do that. Listen to this: Co-lon sto-mach spleen! Lungs, heart skin kidney, brain!” I said, “Uncle Cush taught me how to list off the bones to the tune of one of those other famous songs.”

  Ms. Perkins rotated her head in tiny circles, looking downward to Operation. She said, “I’m not very good when it comes to eye-hand coordination. As y’all have probably noticed, I possess albinism. Did y’all recognize it right away?”

  I didn’t know what to say, because, probably, I was fourteen years old. By that time I’d met little people, about a dozen men who put pistols toward their heads and either shot out an eyeball or lost a lower jaw but still lived, a hydrocephalic, some micro-cephalics—we still called them waterheads and pinheads, even though it probably wasn’t right—and a number of cross-eyed and cock-eyed people. I’d dealt with the blind, the deaf, the deaf-and-blind, and one time saw a woman at Poke’s All Bowed Up archery shop who was born without elbows. No albinos, though.

  “Pick up those electronic tweezers, Start, and pick you out whatever you need. This is biology in its most meaningful and basic form!”

  I said to the DSS caseworker, “This isn’t how it’s played. Usually there are two sets of cards—Specialist cards and Doctor cards. We used to have those things, but we played outside one time and the wind blew them away.” This wasn’t the truth. I beat Uncle Cush one night and he took the cards and threw them into our woodstove. I said, “I think I’ll go for Writer’s Cramp” and successfully pulled out the pencil stuck in the middle of Cavity Sam’s forearm.

  My uncle said, “Good man!” and shook my hand. He said to Ms. Perkins, “Pick you whatever you want.”

  She had her head down close to the board—like an inch away. She had the tweezers up against her temple, nearly tangling in her orange hair. She said, “I’m going for Wish Bone!” and immediately stuck the tweezers on Sam’s red nose, then scraped her way all over the board, from Adam’s Apple to Broken Heart to Wrenched Ankle. She zapped Butterflies in the Stomach, and Charley Horse, and Wish Bone, and Spare Ribs. At least that’s how I remember it. I know that we couldn’t play anymore because the red nose flashed so many times successfully that the brand-new batteries gave out.

  “I’m better at some other games,” Ms. Perkins said. “I can bowl, for example, if it’s at night.” She said, “Look, you seem fine, Start. This was a waste of my time, and yours.”

  For some reason my uncle decided to say at this point, “They ought to’ve put a pelvic bone in this game. One time I was traveling alone over in Laos and I kind of, you know, made an impression on this little woman. Well, you know how those Asian women tend to be skinny and all. You can’t barely even tell when one them’s pregnant! Anyway, I was going down on her right well thinking, ‘This is the hairiest quim ever,’ but as it ended up, this little thing gave birth at that very moment, and I was licking her newborn’s head. Goddamn. That was something.”

  Ms. Perkins opened up her mouth but no noise emitted from her throat. I stared hard, wondering if she might look like a cot-tonmouth behind her molars, incisors, and bicuspids—I might not’ve known anything about biology, but I knew some shit about dentistry, probably because I’d read both Jaws and Marathon Man. She said, “Mr. Waddell!” like that, all alarm and disgust.

  I said, “Cush. Come on. Tell her you’re kidding.” To Ms. Perkins I said, “I apologize for my uncle.”

  “What I’m doing is this,” Uncle Cush said, picking up the Operation game and standing up. “I’m showing that to know appropriate behavior, one must know inappropriate behavior. That’s what I’m showing young nephew Start here. See? He’ll now know not to go out into a public venue or job interview and say such egregious blasphemy.”

  I stuck my hand out to shake. I’d taught him both “egregious” and “blasphemy,” though I sometimes didn’t think he listened to me. To Ms. Perkins I said, “It’s true. It’s straight out of one of the either late-nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century philosophers. It’s either from Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein.”

  Ms. Perkins wrote down something on her chart. She said, “You two are a couple of japers, aren’t you? Ha ha. You got me there, Mr. Waddell. Do you mind if I call you plain Cush? I’m sorry, but I should’ve introduced myself as Carlotte. I’m Carlotte Perkins. Please feel free to call me Carlotte.”

  Later on, Uncle Cush—I think we were driving to a literacy association’s used-book sale so he could pick up a selection of biographies on major American industrialists—told me that it was at the moment Ms. Perkins asked if we japed people that he knew she needed a man like him. At the time, though, there at the kitchen table with the image of a newborn Asian child emerging into a war-torn country, I could think only of various members of the animal kingdom licking afterbirth.

  “Like Charlotte without the H?” Cush said. “Ca
rlotte. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Carlotte Perkins either nodded or trembled. She said, “Is it my denomination, or is it hot in here?”

  Ms. Perkins fanned her neck with the clipboard she carried. I looked at my uncle and could tell that he wasn’t going to stop. He would test this poor bureaucratic woman, fragile pigment or not. I’d seen it enough, before and after my parents “disappeared.” Uncle Cush would start up a conversation with a stranger at, say, the Mighty Pump gas station somewhere in the county. He’d let out a “damn,” and then a “hell.” If the bystander didn’t flinch Cush would say something sacrilegious and within three sentences sound much like Lenny Bruce reciting a George Carlin routine. Before his tank filled he might say, “That motherfucker inside needs to get that goddamn muscle-bound mouse painted on his sign and replace it with a big-dicked Mickey having at it with that Minnie bitch.”

  And then I’d say, “We have to go,” or “He doesn’t get out much,” or “He has that psychological problem.”

  “Okay, I tell you what else,” Cush said to Ms. Perkins. “I feel as though I need to put it all on out there, you know, to prove how I’m the best guardian possible for young Start here. I don’t know how the Department feels about having firearms in the house in general, or hunting in particular. We ain’t got no firearms in this house. Search all you want. Bring in a dog, or a giant magnet. But I do hunt, nearly every day during season so’s to pack the freezers we got down at the Quonset hut over there, other side of the property. I bet I’m like you, Carlotte—I don’t think hunting Bambi with a .30-.30 is all that fair. Bow and arrow, maybe. Traps like I seen in Vietnam, yes.”

  She said, “You’re on the verge of receiving a positive assessment. It’s probably best that you don’t say anything else.”

  “It’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I said, and stood up from the table. I tried to think of something intelligent to say in the realm of biology, and unfortunately blurted out, “They say skin is the largest organ!”

  Uncle Cush went and turned the overhead light off. He said, “I should’ve thought to’ve done that earlier. I apologize. My fault. Anyway, listen—and Start here can tell you—I hunt with a nail gun, that’s all. On a good lucky day here in the yard I can kill a deer and mount its head on the wall simultaneously, you know what I mean?”

  I laughed. I let out an uncontrolled nervous laugh that came out sounding like a Tommy gun, maybe through some kind of subliminal cause-and-effect what with the artillery talk. I said, “Come on back any time,” to the social worker.

  My uncle put out his palm for the woman to continue sitting. “Hey, back in Vietnam one time, I was doing this USO show, because I was a champion spoon player, you know. They brought me on stage, but the lights were so harsh that they’d put sandpaper duct tape around the perimeter so people wouldn’t fall off the stage. I think they got the idea from an albino guitar player of some repute. This was a real USO show, what I’m talking about, with Playboy bunnies and all that. Though none of them were pretty as you, Carlotte.”

  Ms. Perkins said, “It’s a lifesaver, that duct tape. Sometimes I’m asked to give presentations on the social worker lecture circuit.”

  I didn’t say, “There’s a social worker lecture circuit? Are you kidding me?” though I thought it.

  He said, “There’s a social worker lecture circuit? Are you kidding me? Hey, is there some kind of newsletter? I’d like to attend some them talks. I’m always looking for ways to better educate my nephew.”

  “There is a newsletter!” Ms. Perkins said.

  I thought, Okay, this would be a great time for her to leave with a good impression of the Waddell family as it were. But Cush said, “At that same USO show, Chuck Norris showed up. I’m talking Chuck Norris the martial arts movie star. He’d been Air Force, back before Vietnam. Anyway, he came out on stage blindfolded and did some moves, not even worried about that sandpaper duct tape. Pretty fucking amazing. Then he broke some bricks and boards and cement blocks. They brought out some kind of concrete life-size statue of a Cong, and he kicked it right in half. I was backstage and didn’t have the best vantage point. It might’ve supposed to’ve been Bruce Lee he kicked in half, but it don’t matter. What a man, Chuck Norris.”

  I’d heard this story a few times already and didn’t want him to continue. First off, none of it was true, outside of Chuck Norris having been in the Air Force back in the late 1950s up until a few years before the gigantic grind of Vietnam. I said, “Stop, please.”

  “I know who Chuck Norris is,” the social worker said. “A lot of my families—especially the white ones living in trailers—have posters of Chuck Norris in their dens and bedrooms.”

  “I don’t want to say him and me got close,” Cush said.

  I grabbed his arm, which he’d sent above his head and held still, as if he had just thrown a tomahawk. “Not now.”

  Cush hitched his pants. “But Chuck was there a few days. I got to run into him on a basis. Soldiers in the field have urges, you know.”

  Ms. Perkins made a noise. Fifteen years later I would hear a woman make that same sound, which was the exact replica of a green and black poison dart frog—Dendrobates auratus, technically. Anyway, these days, one can go to the Internet and find that sound. Back then, Ms. Perkins’s emission came out as surprising as a rubber-band ball unceasing itself.

  I said, “Not now. Please stop.” I looked at Ms. Perkins and said, “It’s a lie.”

  She took off her sunglasses and said, “Tell me about lies, boy. I’ve heard them all.” She took off the glasses, but had her eyelids shut, then balanced the glasses back on her nose.

  “Damn,” said Uncle Cush. “That kind of throwed me. Anyway, when Chuck Norris beats off, entire fully-formed children come out the end of his pecker. I’m talking one time I saw him behind a stand of bamboo and all these white kids shot out the end of his dick. No one believes me, but it’s true.”

  I got up from the table. I looked down at Cavity Sam and raised my eyebrows. Would my own nose one day turn so red? Would a real surgeon look into my cavities at some point and exclaim, “Well, this explains some things.”

  What would happen to me if I got sent to a normal foster family? I wondered.

  The caseworker stood up and didn’t laugh. She said, “I don’t want to say that I have the gift of soothsaying, Cush, but I’m thinking you and I might run into each other before long. Do you like martinis? You seem to be the kind of man who could make a perfect martini. After listening to the kind of shit and lies I come across daily, a perfect martini or four settles me down enough to feel like there’s hope for the real world.”

  She took off her glasses again and opened her lids. I stared. Ms. Perkins eyes weren’t pink, of course, but a pale blue on par with an abnormally bright sky, or a venerable ex-coquette’s perfectly sculpted hair, or the weakest visible veins rippling across the dugs of a shirtless crone. Uncle Cush said, “Let me walk you out to your car.”

  I sat in the kitchen alone for an hour. I thought how, metaphorically, the heart was an organ much bigger than skin. It’s what I thought, I swear—maybe because I’d read too much Flaubert by the time I was fourteen. Maybe because I’d seen hearts still beating in fish and deer, long after the skin quit twitching. I felt good about not saying, “I knew you were going to say, ‘I don’t want to say that I have the gift of soothsaying,’” seeing as I hailed from a tribe of con men, visionaries, hoydens, liars, quick-tempered reactionaries, contrarians, and hard-working near-anarchists, thus having visionary status myself. I considered looking out the window, but didn’t want to see my uncle’s truck bouncing up and down, or no truck at all.

  BAIT

  Although both of my parents insisted that he’d been my good friend—that somehow I must’ve forgotten him when we moved to Norfolk when I was six—I couldn’t place Frankie Hassett when we went to pick him up at the bus station. I mean, I pretended that I knew
the guy, but if he’d’ve been in a line-up with circus freaks only I wouldn’t have known my supposed good friend, who was now sixteen years old.

  “Shake hands with your good friend Frankie,” my father had said, pushing me out of the depot’s waiting room on Monticello Avenue.

  I said, “Hey, Frankie,” but he walked past me and shook hands with my father, saying, “Hey, Mr. Ecker. My mom says hey, and thanks for having me.”

  I got all caught up looking at the bus driver and his cool uniform with the greyhound on it, but thinking back on everything, I believe my mother stood off to the side, neither hugging Frankie nor shaking his hand or even acknowledging him. Maybe they greeted one another civilly after my father asked me to pick up Frankie’s duffle bag.

  We got in my father’s Oldsmobile and drove home, which at the time was way out in the country but today, I imagine, is part of Norfolk’s city limits, or at least part of the metropolitan area. We lived in Chuckatuck, some thirty miles away. Every time I met anyone not from Chuckatuck—Little League games, or the time I represented my school in the state spelling bee—they made fun of my hometown. It got to where I just kept saying I was from Jacksonville, down in Florida, no matter what. My father was a merchant seaman who worked mostly on oil tankers, and he probably spent six or nine months out of the year out on the water. My mother didn’t work. I’m not sure what she did during the day, but she didn’t go off somewhere to take shorthand, or write on a blackboard, or serve food with hush puppies on the side, I know that much.