Between Wrecks (3 page)

I unloaded my pockets, Doc unloaded his, and then I emptied a plastic Spinx station bag I'd found stuck on a briar along the way. I had a good hundred lighters, with which I knew that I'd never do anything. No, I would go home eventually, sleep one off, wake up, then start doing research on the importance of car junk yards in the South. I'd try to make a connection between junk yards and Antietam, or Bull Run, or Andersonville Prison. Then I'd send it off to Dr. Crowther and he'd say it wasn't a very good idea. By that time I'd have another dream, or begin obsessing more so on Abby and the child I thought she had but never really did, et cetera.

Doc said, “I got an idea. I got a great idea. Since most of my valuables got stolen, and since I got some insurance money for them, why don't I give you all these lighters here. You make me a special chair or bench—yeah, make a bench so I can get rid of this telephone pole stool—and then I'll let you go out and get another sack of lighters for free. How's that sound?”

Bobby Suddeth said, “You should make a chair that only has one lighter sticking straight up from the middle. It could be called the Happy Chair for Women, you know.”

“Or the Happy Chair for Bobby Suddeth's Ass,” Doc said. He exhaled loudly.

Bobby Suddeth said, “Y'all been drinking without me? I smell it on both y'all. Where'd y'all get the liquor? I didn't hear y'all leave.”

I started laughing. I said, “We got it over by the collection of kickstands Doc has piled up.” I felt like I had the right. I felt like I belonged in the club. “Hey, I got a thermos of bourbon out in my truck. Let me go get it. Damn it to hell, I know better than to start. If I start drinking, I can't stop until I'm asleep.”

“Yeah. I'll drink some bourbon,” Bobby Suddeth said.

I looked at Doc. He took up his limp again and scooted two stand-up ashtrays against the wall. He said, “I guess. Normally I'd say ‘no,' but this seems like a different kind of day.” He took his leg and scooted the loveseat back against another wall. Was he expecting us to need room for a bigger dance floor? I thought. Was he later going to sweep his office?

When I got to my truck I could hear Bobby Suddeth saying, “You crazy, man. Doc, Doc. You crazy, you old crip.” It was what they might call, in the Southern culture studies world, a “plaintive cry.” He yelped it out quickly.

By the time I picked up the thermos—this was one of those nice ones, with the plastic cup that screwed to the top—I expected to hear two pistol reports. Instead I only heard some pings. Ping, ping, ping. Ping-ping-ping-ping. Because I'd not lived long enough with car cigarette lighters in my possession, I didn't connect the sound with that of lighters being thrown hard and ricocheting off of Bobby Suddeth's forehead, the cash register, windows.

My first thought, of course, was to get in my truck and drive off fast. I'd done it before. I had sprayed gravel out of the Modestine Duncans' trailer park with all their weird Book of Revelation quotes printed on their mobile homes, and out of the barren fat lighter farm, and out of the He's Out Casting bar when I got the pet monkey, all in the name of a low-residency master's degree. I'd been spraying gravel directly or metaphorically since birth, I realized, and it didn't seem to matter. It was like I took off out of one trouble spot only to arrive at another. I could never find a place to flat-out hide.

But I didn't drive away. I sauntered back inside Doc's Salvage to find Bobby Suddeth smiling—was there a trick being played on me?—and Doc picking up my car cigarette lighters from the floor. He said, “I'm just frustrated, you know. You imagine how frustrating all this can be.”

Bobby Suddeth said, “Hey,” to me, as if we'd never met before. I could tell that he almost said, “You looking for a carburetor?”

I said, “Here's some bourbon.” I said, “What's going on in here?”

“So after about a year what you can do is get me to go sell off that silver and that paper money. And you already got the insurance money. I don't want to brag none, but I would think that this is a good idea, and for it you'd give me a cut, you know,” Bobby said. “If I leave here tomorrow,” he sang out, “and you go turn in the silver, somehow you're going to get caught for insurance fraud.” He said, “Hand me that thermos.”

“I'm serious when I say I want that bench,” Doc said. He reached behind the counter and pulled out two coffee mugs. Bobby Suddeth poured Doc some, then poured himself to the rim, then handed me back the Thermos. “Jesus S. Christ.”

We drank. Bobby said something about how those cigarette lighters hurt. He said it reminded him of playing dodgeball with rocks and hardboiled eggs back when he was a kid. I couldn't wait any longer and said, “What's that mean, Doc? Tell me what ‘Jesus S. Christ' means. I've never heard it that way before.”

He wouldn't make eye contact. He limped over to the counter, picked up the phone, and said, “I'm calling Gloria.” I could hear it ring a good ten times. No answering machine picked up. “She must be at Wal-Mart again. That woman won't be happy until she buys one of everything sold at the Wal-Mart.”

I sat down on the loveseat. I wanted to go nowhere. For a second I thought about asking Doc if I could rent out some space here, maybe set up a studio, maybe in one of the junked buses. Then I thought about Abby up in Minnesota, and imagined her strolling around the baby section of Wal-Mart, picking up bibs and whatnot. Why hadn't she called me? Why had she asked that I not contact her, ever?

Doc said, “Shade. It stands for ‘Shade.'”

I nodded. I thought about Jesus on the cross, probably hoping that there was some shade to comfort him a little. The three of us sat in silence for an uncomfortable amount of time. Doc said how he couldn't be selfish anymore, and pulled a brand-new bottle of bourbon from beneath his counter. We passed it around. He said, “I'm not going to kill you, Bobby, though I ought to. I know you're living back there.” He pointed with his thumb.

I said, “I need to get home,” but didn't move.

I didn't move, for I knew that our story together wasn't finished. I closed my eyes and inhaled the odd smell of cilantro and candle. Later on, I knew, we would get in my truck and drive to that nursery. Doc would ramble around pretending to buy a couple saplings to plant around his salvage yard, but really he'd be taking mental notes. Bobby Suddeth would look for things to steal while no one watched him. I'd end up maudlin, remember too many songs that played back when my wife and I underwent rites of passage, then make some more promises to myself I would never keep, and from which I'd never be able to escape.

TRADITIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Mal Mardis spun two spent rolls of color film on the bar, didn't look up at Gus, and realized that cutting basic cable alone wouldn't solve the problem. He'd also have to find a way for his wife to quit subscribing to the magazines. This morning's mission was no different than when Brenda renovated their bathroom, den, or what used to be a two-car garage. Mal was supposed to drop off the film at any of the one-hour developers twenty miles from their house, use that time to buy at least two dozen frames, go back to the developer—Eckerd, Jack Rabbit, Wal-Mart, One-Hour Photo—select the nicest shots, and ask that the person behind the counter now blow them up into 8 x 10s. Then Mal, according to his wife, could use that hour to visit Gus, have two non-brown liquor drinks, return to get the enlargements, and come home. Soon thereafter, Brenda would nail up on available wall space twenty-four photographs of the old kitchen, all of which looked down on the new tiled countertops, the laminated flooring, the new cabinets that replaced a gigantic island that once took up so much space they had to move the table outside to rot. Mal didn't get it. Keeping pictures of old rooms on the wall pretty much, to him at least, kept the new room looking old.

“You don't see women getting face lifts then plastering pictures of their old selves all around the vanity,” Mal said to Gus. He sat at the counter. At the far end sat a man known as Windshield, who claimed that he still had tiny fragments of glass imbedded in his face from when he took a hard exit out of a Ford truck. Gus's bar had a sign out front that only read “Gus,” for back when he bought the place he couldn't remember if it should be “Gus's Place” or “Gus' Place.” Neither looked correct. No one who ever came into Gus Place knew the grammatical rule or cared. One time some fraternity boys came by and painted an H on the end of his name. Another time somebody from the Latin Club came and changed it to read “Caesar Augustus,” which Gus kept for a good month until Mal told him that it might be an omen that he was going to get stabbed by an everyday regular drinking customer.

Mal tried to think of another analogy about the new kitchen, something about a hip replacement.

“Missed you at Frankie Perkins's funeral Sunday,” Windshield called over to Mal.

Mal spun a roll of film then set it upright next to the other. He said, “I didn't know Frankie Perkins.”

“Well he was asking about you,” Windshield said in a voice that started off a baritone and ended up so high he could've done a Memorex commercial for breaking wine glasses.

Gus leaned over to Mal and said, “Don't mind him. He said the same to me. For some reason he thinks this dead guy used to frequent the bar. Anyway, Brenda called and said you weren't allowed bourbon. She said you can have two vodkas.” He laughed. He poured a jigger and a half of bourbon, placed it in front of Mal, then reached down and got him a can of Pabst. “I'm just kidding. She ain't called this time. Yet.”

“Those fuckers on TV. How many shows are on about renovating or redecorating or do-it-yourself-ing? There's got to be twenty of those shows on nonstop between channels 70 and 80. Who are these people? I'm surprised there are any contractors left out there doing real work.”

Gus stood up straight and half-turned. “I been thinking about changing around the bar. I'm getting tired of y'all getting to stare down at the water. Some kind of flood or freak tidal wave shows up, I ought to be the first to know about it, not my customers.”

Mal stood up from his stool and craned his neck to look at the Saluda River. He said, “Beavers still working hard down there. Maybe Brenda can come on by and help them out with the interior of their den. I guess she'd have to use some kind of underwater camera for the before-and-after shots.”

“Lodge,” Windshield bellowed out. He stood up and looked out of the plate glass window too. “Beavers live in something called a lodge. Moose don't, even though they call it the Moose Lodge. My daddy used to be a member. I didn't notice neither of y'all at his funeral neither.”

Gus said, “Don't make me cut you off, Windshield. I'll cut you off. You know that.”

Windshield grabbed his can of Budweiser and stood still.

Mal drank the bourbon in two gulps. “I wish to God I'd never won that money from the scratch ticket. Who wins money off a scratch ticket? Back in the old days renovating the kitchen meant getting a new toaster oven.”

Gus poured Mal another bourbon. He said, “You should've quit your job. Then you'd be home more to take the distributor cap off Brenda's car so she couldn't go down to Lowe's or wherever.”

“I should've. I could hide the mail when those magazines show up and I could monkey with the TV and say the cable's out.”

“Where you work?” Windshield said. He sat back down. “Where you work, Frankie?”

Mal said, “Home Depot. I'm in charge of the garden center at Home Depot.”

When the door to Gus opened, Mal Mardis looked down at his two rolls of film. He should've at least taken them by One-Hour Photo and left them and then come up with some kind of excuse. He could've said that the digital camera boom finally caused the death of traditional development. Or Mal could've at least placed the rolls in his pocket so that when Brenda stormed into Gus he could say he'd been by the film place, that they were backed up, that they apologized for having to become Six-Hour Photo.

Mal tensed, waiting to hear his wife's voice. Instead, a man who sounded already drunk called out, “You mind if I bring me a video recording device in here on a tripod?”

Gus looked up. Windshield smiled, and Mal turned around to find a stranger. Was this some kind of joke? he wondered. Is somebody playing a trick on me? Gus said, “What?”

The man walked in. He wore cowboy boots. “Pat Taft,” he said, as if everyone should recognize him. He stuck out his hand to shake with Gus. “Prison Tat Pat, they call me. I need to film myself everywhere I go. It's a long story that involves an ex-wife.”

Mal said, “Okay. Funny. I don't get it yet, but I know that Brenda's behind this somehow.”

Gus said, “Long's it don't end up on
Cops
or
America's Most Wanted
, you do what you want.”

“It'll end up on one of the goddamn home decorating shows, believe me,” Mal said. “Ha ha ha. I get it. Brenda's gone too far this time.”

Prison Tat Pat seemed to have a thyroid problem, which made the regulars think that he kept a look of surprise on his face. He said, “I've been doing it between here and Nashville. Everywhere I go. I just set up the camera and prove that I act and react normal with people. My ex-wife says she left me 'cause I couldn't act and react properly in public. I'm going to send her the video, when the time's right.” He screwed the camcorder onto a miniature tripod and placed it on the far end of the bar, opposite of Wind-shield. He got behind it and looked through the eyepiece, focused.

Windshield said, “This ain't ever happened here. You gone be famous, Gus.”

Gus said, “Tell me again what this is all about? There's a six drink minimum for capturing our essence.”

Mal looked at Gus and squinted. “
‘Capturing our essence'?
What'd you do, go to perfume college?”