Calloustown (14 page)

“If you want to see yearbook photos of people who did what they thought God wanted them to do, go check out any state's Department of Corrections file of mugshots,” she told her son often, as she had told her husband, Finis, before he gave up and died of a heart attack in the middle of trying to break the world record for smoking cigarettes in a twenty-four-hour period.

Mack Sloan drives up to Calloustown High and sees Brunson wearing vintage gray drawstring sweatpants down at the cinder track that surrounds what might have been a football field. There isn't but one goalpost, for the Calloustown Ostriches won a game due to forfeit three years earlier—the team from Forty-Five had been forced to suspend all of its players at the last minute when its appeal was denied by the South Carolina High School Athletic League, in regards to having a number of thirty-year-old players who didn't go to college—and the fans in attendance stormed the vacant field and with the use of Harmon Harrell's tractor knocked over the goalpost and carried it into town. From that point on, when a visiting team scored a touchdown, or wanted to attempt a field goal, the teams had to turn around if indeed they had no goalpost in which to direct a kick.

“You're Brunson?” Mack says when he gets down to the field. “You're Brunson's mom?” he asks the woman who stands there, holding what appears to be wide rubber bands meant for strapping furniture to a flatbed's frame. “I'm Mack Sloan.”

Mrs. Pettigru says, “I wouldn't be allowing this to happen if there was homecolleging.”

Mack says, “What are those things?” and points at the rubber bands.

He hasn't looked closely at his prospect yet. Brunson wears eyeglasses that appear to be fake, the lenses are so thick. He has them tied to his head with what looks like a bra strap. And in a voice that Mack would later describe as something between a tracheotomist's and a kettle spewing steam, Brunson says, “Because of the cardiovascular limits of the heart vis-à-vis oxygen intake, I tie my forelimbs with these industrial bands before I run so that my most vital organ vis-à-vis the running process does not need to validate anything between my glenohumeral joint and my phalanges.”

Mack looks at Brunson. He thinks, what if aliens come down to the planet and discover this guy? Wouldn't they wonder if they'd never left home? He says, “All right. You seem to be the kind of guy who might have pre-med in his future.”

Mrs. Pettigru, wearing a cotton-print dress, says, “My Brunson has always been interested in animals. Does your college have a veterinary program?”

“I like cheetahs,” Brunson says. “They're the fastest. If this school had been called the Calloustown Cheetahs, I might have had to fight my mother about allowing me to matriculate. What's your college's mascot?”

“It's a duck. They're not much on land, but they can fly. Some of them can fly.” Mack looks down at Brunson's shoes. The boy wears a pair of regular, flat and slick-bottomed Keds-brand canvas boatshoes. One of the Pettigrus took a bottle of Wite-Out and marked a Nike swoosh on the sides. Mack says, “Duck.”

Brunson twists and ties his upper biceps with the two rubber bands. He sits down cross-legged on the track. His mother says, “It's important for Brunson to achieve the correct amount of tingling in his arms before he runs a lap.”

Mack Sloan thinks, there's no way I'll ever recommend offering this kid a scholarship. He thinks, people think members of our track team are freaks already?—get a load of this new guy! He thinks, hell, I'm here—I might as well see what happens. He thinks, cardiovascular vis-à-vis cheetah glenohumeral joint and my phalanges veterinary school vital organ homecolleging.

“A fun thing to do is have me run a quarter mile without the additional garments, and then compare and contrast what happens once my heart no longer has to pump blood to needless expanses,” Brunson says.

“Okay,” Mack says. He'd dealt with runners who insisted on smoking pot the night before a race, runners who drank six beers the night before a race, runners who had to fuck two different women the night before a race and then another one a couple hours before the starting gun. Mack had dealt with runners—world-class runners—who insisted on eating sushi, or Vienna sausages, or Fig Newtons. He'd had runners who had to watch
The Godfather: Part III
the night before a big race, and others who insisted that virgins recite the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

But not this.

“You about ready?” Mack says.

Betty Pettigru says, “I'm going to take my spot in the stands. I always sit in the stands. When I'm in the stands, my son's never lost a race.”

“Wait a minute,” Mack says. “So you're on the track team here?”

“I've never been in an actual race,” Brunson says. “Do you think that might make a difference? I mean, psychologically, it might make me run either faster or slower.”

While I'm down this way, Mack Sloan thinks, I might as well go down to Myrtle Beach and kill that Coach Strainer dude.

“Uh-oh,” Brunson says. He stands up, and half lifts one arm toward the parking lot. “Somebody's here.”

Mack turns around to see every man whom he'd met at the bus depot. They walk down the embankment. One of them says, “We just thought we'd come on down here and see if we got us a savior.”

Mack pulls the stopwatch out of his pocket. He says, “I didn't even think to ask—are you sure this is a quarter-mile track? It looks like a quarter mile, but are you sure?”

“It's 440 yards,” Brunson says. “I've circled it ten times with the Lufkin MW18TP Measuring Wheel, and it came out to 13,200 feet. And then I divided that by three, which comes out to 4400 yards, and then divided that by ten, which comes out to 440 yards. I thought about doing a hundred laps, just to make sure, but it was getting dark and I still had to write a term paper for my mother comparing and contrasting the Suez Canal with the Panama Canal. A cheetah can swim across both of them, by the way. A cheetah's not the fastest swimmer, but it can swim.”

“I'm ready!” Betty Pettigru yells from the wooden bleachers.

The bus depot men arrive trackside. One of them says, “I don't know.”

Mack Sloan says to Brunson, “You don't need any blocks or anything? Don't you think you better stretch, or warm up a little? You might want to take off your sweats, too.”

Munny Munson says, “I still believe we got a better shot at making Calloustown famous if we become home to a serial killer, as opposed to a spastic.” He says, “Hell, Betty Pettigru's ex-husband had the right idea, up until he smoked himself to death.”

“I'd like to fuck her,” one of the Harrells says. “She ain't nobody's sister.”

Brunson says, “I've heard about those block things. Do you think they'll really help?” He pulls off his sweatpants to reveal what may or may not be an old pair of his mother's hot pants from the 1970s. When he toes the line, his arms swing half useless.

_______

“Go!” Mack Sloan says. He's performed this task so many times he can't remember. He has timed prospective athletes in thirty states. He's gone down to Central America and found sprinters, South America for middle-distance runners, and Africa for long-distance runners.

Brunson takes off. His mother bellows, “Catch that big cat, honey, catch that big cat!” and makes some odd noises in between, like long, extended Ummms that might point toward a nervous tic, or Tourette's. Mack Sloan keeps his eyes on his prospect, but the Munson and Harrell men stare up toward the stands. Betty Pettigru's mid-sentence, guttural noises—by the time Brunson hits the 220 mark—now sound as if they're caused by orgasm.

“Jesus Christ,” Mack says. “Twenty-two seconds flat.” He yells out to Brunson, “Keep it coming, my man. Push through it. Keep your form!”

Brunson takes the back straightaway and—there was no way for Mack Sloan to explain this later to his colleagues—his arms go haywire. He keeps running well, and stays in his lane, but his arms, out of blood flow, look similar to those twenty-five-foot ripstop nylon sky tubes normally used for advertising purposes in the parking lots of car dealerships, mattress warehouses, and buffet-style restaurants managed by the criminally insane.

Was the kid dancing? Mack thinks. Is he fighting demons that no one but his mother—still ululating in the stands—can see?

He clicks the stopwatch when Brunson hits the finish line, slows down to a jog, and continues forward, untying the rubber bands from his arms. Forty-six flat, sure enough, just like Virtual Coach Strainer declared. Mack Sloan looks up in the bleachers and notices how Betty Pettigru sits with her legs splayed open. He looks at the bus depot men and says, “I've never seen anything like this in all my years. I've been coaching since I was out of college. This is the damnedest place I've ever seen. Is this one of those trick TV shows? Is someone playing a trick on me, and I'm being filmed covertly?”

Munny Munson says, “I bet I know why old Finis's heart give out, and it didn't have nothing to do with smoking 144 cigarettes in a row the way he done. Hot damn that woman's a regular vixen.”

“She appears to love her son, you got that right,” says Mack Sloan. He calls Brunson back to him, but keeps looking up in the stands. Betty Pettigru has pulled her hair up in some kind of topknot. “Listen, don't you men have something to do with yourselves? I'm working here.”

Mack jogs down the track. He says, “Good God, man, you can flat-out fly. But I don't know about those rubber bands around your arms. I'm not so sure they'd let you run like that in a race, what with the possibility of injuring other runners. Especially in the eight hundred.”

Brunson says, “What about if I go ahead and cut off my arms? Is that what you want? I'm not going to cut off my arms just to please you.”

Mrs. Pettigru comes down from the bleachers and says, “Brunson. Don't start, Brunson.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Brunson has some anger issues,” Mrs. Pettigru says. “That might be an overstatement. He has some issues with patience.”

“Can I see you run without those strange rubber bands?” Mack asks.

Betty Pettigru stands close to Mack. Is she flirting with me? he wonders. Is this her way of seeing her son get a scholarship?

“Do you have no imagination?” Brunson blurts out. “You saw me run once. Now imagine me running again, without the rubber bands that enhance my cardiovascular capabilities.”

Mrs. Pettigru says, “Brunson,” again, this time drawling out his name, in a higher pitch.

“Is there any place we can sit down and talk?” Mack asks. He wonders if the rubber bands affected the oxygen supply to Brunson's head, thus causing the sudden evident fury.

“I'm sorry,” Brunson says. “I'm sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says, and takes off running around the track, then over a fence and into the woods.

Betty Pettigru looks at her wristwatch. She says, “I'm about ready for a martini. What about you, Coach?”

There's no one inside Worm's Bar and Grill. There's no bartender, either. Betty Pettigru walks behind the counter, pulls a fifth of Absolut off the shelf, and pours four shots into a metal shaker, throws in some ice, swirls it around, and pours two glasses to the brim. “I like mine dry,” she says. “You want an olive in yours? Worm doesn't believe in cocktail onions.”

“Yeah, I'll take a couple olives,” Mack says. He had followed Betty on the one-mile drive between the high school and downtown Calloustown, and noticed that she drank something from a Thermos along the way.

Betty Pettigru slides a jar of Thrifty Maid–brand green olives down the counter. She says, “This should answer any questions about why I didn't move away when Brunson's daddy died. Not many places around will let you walk in and drink on the honor system.”

“Will he be all right?” Mack asks. “I'm worried about him.”

“No, he's probably going to stay dead. We had him cremated, so even the most advanced advances in science won't bring him back.” She walks around the counter and sits down on a stool beside Mack.

She puts her hand on his shoulder.

“I'm talking about your son. Is he going to be all right, that's what I meant.”

“He's fine. He has a lot of things on his mind. He took the SAT and scored perfect on the math but only made a 740 on the verbal. He's taking the thing again.”

Mack drinks and says, “This is like straight vodka.”

“I don't know what I'm going to do when he leaves the nest. Listen. Do you think the university would want a student who scored a perfect SAT and can run that fast? I'm willing to bet that just about every college would want such a student.”

Mack thinks, is that lipstick, or are her lips really that red? He thinks, I need to make some promises I can't keep. “I'm thinking Brunson wouldn't have a problem getting a full ride.”

“And what about me?” Betty says. She scoots over closer. “I hear tell of some colleges hiring on parents, you know, to work at the college. Coach. Work as a secretary. Me, I could fit right in teaching in the education department, seeing as I'm batting nearly perfect with my past students.”

Mack Sloan nods and laughs. He says, “I don't know of any bars that'll let you go in there and drink on the honor system, though.”

She puts her hand on his left thigh. Mack thinks, no, no, no, no, no. He says, “It's only track and field, Ms. Pettigru. It's not like football or basketball.”

“I like to do this in alphabetical order,” she says, getting up from the barstool. “Absolut done, Grey Goose next.” She looks at the bottles lined up. “Worm got some Ketel One! That'll be a good segue before I get on to that cheap shit Seagram's and Smirnoff, before heading out to the,” she picks up a bottle and raises her eyebrows to Mack, “Three Olives.”