Why Dogs Chase Cars (10 page)

I punched his arm. The only thing Compton got paid for at this point was riding around with his daddy, pretending to be helpful and needed. He would live his teenage years without ever having to fill out a job application, though Mr. Lane did make him partake in some questionable activities for which Compton got money. Sometimes I did, too. One time Compton's father had invested money in a dent-and-fender man's shop, and then Compton got paid to go out with a roofer's hammer and ding just about everybody's car hoods and roofs and trunks, just as though a nighttime hailstorm had traveled through.

I didn't help him out that night. It was ten days after the Duke Power meter reader came through, and—as always—I had to help my father jerk out our pronged meter, turn it upside down, and run our electricity bill backwards for a while. A couple weeks later we'd unplug it again, shove it in right side up, then wait for the meter reader to come by. He'd write down the number and drive away wondering how we lived off four bucks' worth of heat and light, I imagine.

Let me say that, although Compton Lane was my same age, I believed about everything that he said. He wasn't bigger and didn't hold his mouth half-open like my classmates and their parents, and he wasn't any smarter than I was. But he could flat-out tell lies. Compton could look George Washington in the face and convince him that George
hadn't
chopped down the cherry tree, after all. So you can't blame me for showing up to retrieve slung vegetables and fallen silverware wearing a big yellow rain suit and galoshes, Playtex rubber gloves, and a pair of work goggles my father wore when he dealt with car batteries and chain saws.

Mr. Alexander said, “Well, Mendal, I'm happy that you showed up early. Why exactly are you dressed such?” He looked outside. “It ain't raining, is it?”

This was 3:30 on a Wednesday. I'd taken my outfit with me to school, changed in the boys' bathroom, then ridden my bicycle the three miles out to the nursing home. I got
there as residents rolled into the dining hall—it still had a
LUNCH ROOM
sign on the door from the old days. Man, I felt like a regular breadwinning adult. I said, “My father doesn't want me messing up my good clothes,” as if I had any.

“Huh,” said Wylie Alexander. “Well. I'm no psychologist or anything, but I'd be willing to bet that that cap and goggles might confuse some of the older residents here. You kind of look like the Morton Salt Girl's crazy brother, son.”

He held out his hand. He said he'd put my unneeded belongings in the ex-janitor's office, beside the nurse's handbag. Then he told me to fetch Mr. Self and push his wheel-chair as slowly as possible in any direction until I saw a property stob. Mr. Self, I soon learned, was prone to stealing food from anyone not paying attention.

I
'M NOT SURE
what a regular, square elementary classroom's dimensions might be—at least forty by forty—but the Forty-Five Longterm Care facility, which was once known as Forty-Five Black School, had been refurbished in such a way that the entrance to any classroom turned hard left, then three pie-shaped rooms shot off to the side. The first room always held a chalkboard. When viewed from above, if there had been no roof, it would've looked as if a warped hard-boiled-egg cutter had come down and inserted walls. Forty-Five Black was a one-story L-shaped elementary school, as opposed to the one-level U-shaped old Forty-Five
White, first through sixth. When Forty-Five Black became a nursing home, for what reason I didn't understand until much later, no white man would place his mother or father there unless a certified medical doctor admitted that the parent's condition had gone past any capability of recognizing family. Oddly enough, the Forty-Five Longterm Care facility may have been the only bastion of nonracist thought or action in town, if not in all of South Carolina.

The dozen chalkboard rooms were given to men. My father said it was due to notch-on-bedpost mentality, and that the chalkboard's presence helped preserve their sense of manliness. Yellow sticks of chalk even stayed on the shelves, which I thought wasn't all that smart a move when asthmatics moved in. Maybe it was done intentionally. The male patients did seem to die off faster.

I pushed wheelchairs and emptied trash cans. I learned to grasp the hands of old men and women who stretched their arms out when I walked in. On Wednesday nights—church going nights in the rest of Forty-Five—I helped people turn the pages of their useless hymnals in what used to be Forty-Five Black's sad, poor auditorium, which wasn't anything more than two classrooms without a partition in between.

I did my work a few good Wednesday/Sunday stints before Mr. Self said, “You know they using you. I hope you smart enough to know how you smarter than any doctor they bring rambling through here to check us once a week. I can
tell.”

We had circled the playground and gone past the track on our way to a yellow metal property stob south of the home. Up to this point Mr. Self had only rattled on about things like how cotton didn't loom like it used to in the mills he once owned, or how a nurse named Glorene shuffled his balls a little roughly while giving him sponge baths. I said, “I'm supposed to keep you out of the way until all those old women get done eating. It's corn-dog night, from what I understand. They have you figured out.” Wylie Alexander had taught me how to hard-lean a wheelchair back in case Mr. Self or anyone else looked like he was about to conjure up some leg muscles.

“If you're smart as I think you are, then I think you know how I'm not touched in the head. And I'm not that old, either. At least not as old as a man should be to be put in a nursing home.” He started hacking like an ex–chicken plucker. “On my honor,” he forced out.

“I'm just doing what I'm told,” I said, which was true. What else could I say? “I'm doing what I'm told, and they ain't paying me under the table like they said they would.”

Mr. Self kicked his legs in the air like a tar-stuck yellow jacket. “Snot-nose,” he said. “I'm telling you, boy. I'm telling you. They're paying another fellow twice as much to push me around nights you're not here. I'll ask him for the exact amount tomorrow and get back to you on all this.”

I could only look at my watch, see that it was past five
o'clock, and say, “Yessir.” I put Mr. Self's front wheels down and started rolling him back toward home. I said, “People might get paid more than I do, but they have taxes taken out. I get flat-paid money Mr. Alexander says I make.”

Mr. Self opened his eyes wide. “That right? Well I'll take note of that. Do you know what I did before my kids slapped me in here, boy? I'll tell you. I was an accountant. I was an accountant, and I was an IRS agent. A T-man they call it. I worked with the mafia. My brother and I cracked the code so we didn't have to stay in the war as long as people thought we'd be—the war the mafia got that country to start up with us.”

I pushed, knowing better. These were the kinds of stories I had hoped to hear from these folks all along. I dodged gravel. I knew what Mr. Self really had done for a living and wondered how his mind contorted fabric- and yarn-making into the world of bookkeeping and espionage. I said, “Y'all had something to do with the atomic bomb?”

“World War I!”
he yelled. If his back hadn't been fused together like beef jerky, he would've turned in his wheel-chair and walloped me across the face. “Foxholes and nerve gas, little boy.”

We approached the nursing home's back patio. The ambulatory patients walked toward the cinder track. A black coworker named Mr. Perlotte was hovering behind them like a good herding dog. I called out to him, “Is the cafeteria open?”

He nodded. “Ain't no food left for Mr. Self in the kitchen, though. Sorry.”

He had said the same thing every other time I worked. Mr. Self stuck out the wrong finger—his ring finger—and said, “Up yours, Honeypot.”

Mr. Perlotte laughed. He clucked his tongue toward his charge, as one might to a horse. “We ain't in your cotton mill no more, is we, Leonard Self? Un-uh.”

Mr. Self said to me, “And then when I figured out how to get us all out of the Depression, I took over for my daddy at the mill. Do you appreciate the shirt you're wearing, son? Well, do you? Sometimes you taint my blood, what with your inconsideration. All of you and your people.”

I pushed him into the cafeteria, went past tables, and left him in front of the ice dispenser. I said, “I'll be right back. I need to go into your room and rifle through your belongings.” It's what I always said. It was a way to get Mr. Self to clear out his air passages before meals, which allowed him to swallow easier, which kept any of us from having to stick our fingers down his throat in search of lodged corn bread, biscuits, and so on. At least that's what my boss told me.

In reality, Mr. Self owned nothing at the facility. His relatives had made sure of that. On the chalkboard in his room I printed out,
POUR SALT ON SLUGS
, not because Wylie Alexander had said I looked like the crazy brother of the Morton Salt Girl, I don't think, but because my father told me this every morning when I got up to get the newspaper.

Later on, after I left my part-time job, I would learn that pouring salt meant a number of things.

T
HE RESIDENTS TOOK
to me like grids on a waffle iron, no lie. Whenever I walked in—after I'd parked my bicycle straight up in azalea bushes out front—every wheelchair-confined invalid scooted toward the front door, propelling themselves with their standard-issue house slippers, until it looked like one giant demolition-derby clog. Everybody's hubs got stuck in someone else's spokes, and my first job, always, was to back them out one at a time, pushing them to their own quarters, or the TV room, or the cafeteria. I pushed them wherever I thought was best, and told them they'd have dinner soon.

Alzheimer's hadn't been invented at this point, of course. I let men and women alike call me “son,” “wife,” “husband,” “daughter,” “doctor,” “waiter,” “car mechanic,” “house-painter,” “teacher,” “ship captain,” “Fuller Brush man,” “Avon lady,” “veterinarian,” or “maid.” One man was so old he thought I was his
slave,
and he threatened to take me back behind the tobacco barn in his mind and whip me silly for juking with the white girls. I could only think, Man, please let me get to the same point before I'm thirty. I thought, I want to be able to say anything I like, all the time.

But after I rolled the shovees into the cafeteria, I always went straight back to Leonard Self, took him outside no matter the weather, and inched along until I knew that, back
inside, the last lima bean had been slurped up and gnashed into nothingness. “Other boys getting paid union wages,” Mr. Self said a month before I quit for good, seeing as I had a B in math. “They getting upwards of three dollars an hour.”

There were no unions in South Carolina, and Mr. Self had fought hard against them for most of his life, according to my dad. My father also kept me apprised daily of the evils of capitalism in general and Republican leaders in particular, and let me know early on that I'd be better off running a truck farm off Highway 25 during drought than upper management at one of the cotton mills.

I said to Mr. Self, “I don't care. I'm fine getting what I get. And there aren't any unions, by the way, in case you've forgotten.”

“There's a
town
called Union, so that's where you're wrong. I own a mill in Union. Almost wanted to have the name of the town changed before we built it there.”

“There's a town,” I said. This was late October. The leaves had turned somewhat, even though it was still eighty degrees outside going toward dusk. I should've been thinking about what I'd wear on Halloween, but instead I felt confident enough to argue with a man whose family made entirely too much money off the labors of Forty-Fivers. “I thought you meant labor unions. You got me.”

Understand that I'd about gotten to know everything about Leonard Self—he kind of repeated his stories—outside of the subject of his adult diapers. Mr. Self looked forward
as I pushed him uphill on the asphalt walkway between the fifth- and sixth-grade wing and the cinder track. “Let's you and me go beyond the line this afternoon,” he said. He reached into his pajamas and produced an old-timey tweed riding cap. “Let's see what's on the other side of those trees.”

We went slowly. I said, “I don't know.”

“You afraid that when we don't get back in time Wylie Alexander will call the sheriff's department and they'll get you for kidnapping a tycoon?”

“Yessir. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.” My father had taught me never to trust anyone who'd had more than one person working for him, ever.

Mr. Self reached back in his pajamas and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. “I can't imagine bail being more than this. Here. Take this money. Show me where other people live. I won't even tell on you about how you're sticking Mexican jumping beans beneath old Blindman Martin's bed, driving him crazy. I won't do that.”

I said, “What? I don't stick anything beneath his bed.”

Mr. Self laughed. His thin white hair stood up like a poor, deranged Mohawk. “I can do or say anything I want around here. Like always. Who do you think owns this place?”

I could not call my father for advice. There were no pay phones on the edge of Forty-Five Longterm Care, and this was a thousand years before cell phones. I'd never seen a fifty-dollar bill, although I'd heard that they existed in exotic
faraway places like Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville. My father and Compton's daddy didn't know I was standing on the other side of a door once, when Mr. Lane said he drove up to Charlotte to a titty bar and gave a strange woman a fifty-dollar bill to do something I couldn't quite envision. This little act of eavesdropping occurred not long after my own mother had skipped town, and Mr. Lane evidently tried to talk my father into going on the next excursion. For a half-year after this incident I would check my father's pockets at night, hoping to find a pack of matches with a naked woman pictured on front. But for the longest time I found nothing worthwhile and quit searching altogether after my dad—who somehow became aware of my nosiness—stuck safety razors in each pocket, then waited for me to come wake him up as my sliced index finger bled between the yellow, curled kitchen linoleum where he'd left his dirty clothes and the brown, curled linoleum where he slept, always, on Mom's old side of the bed. He didn't take me to the hospital—which looked similar to Forty-Five Longterm Care. My father took me into the bathroom, poured plain isopropyl in a metal bucket, forced my hand in, and said, “It looks like Kool-Aid, don't it?” as my blood mixed in. “I'm going to put a butterfly stitch on this. And then maybe every time you see a monarch flit by you'll remember not to rifle through my clothes looking for money. Don't be like your momma, boy.”