Why Dogs Chase Cars (11 page)

I said, “I'm not stealing your money.” I screamed. The
bucket turned redder, and my filleted finger throbbed. “I promise. I was looking for naked-women pictures.”

My father released my hand. “Goddamn it to hell, I told you not to be like your mother. Do I need to get your hearing checked?” He reached in the drawer and pulled out a circular tin of white adhesive tape. “Give me your finger.”

I did. Oh, I gave him my finger from then on out.

I pushed Mr. Self faster by accident and saw the property line ahead, the trees beyond it, and the path that led into some woods where the kitchen crew went occasionally to drink beer on breaks. Self held that fifty-dollar bill up and said, “Fitty, fitty, fitty, fitty, fitty. Just take me to the other side, son. I want to see what's on the other side. I'm betting that it's changed since when my brother and I used to come down here with girls my daddy would've killed us for seeing.”

Even back then I thought of that greener grass cliché. Because my father wasn't a churchgoer, thus making me the same, I didn't know how the other side could mean anything else.

L
EONARD
S
ELF FEIGNED
death thirty minutes past the kitchen help's secret hobo jungle. I stopped the wheel-chair there for a couple minutes, and we looked at four plastic chairs stolen from the cafeteria, a mound of malt-liquor bottles, an IV stand that the doctor brought over to the home one day in case anyone got dehydrated, and a still-smoking,
half-buried campfire of fat lighter, paper plates, old flower ar rangements, and lobby magazines donated by an auxiliary of women way over in Columbia who felt guilty about being married to rich doctors and lawyers.

There at the heap—and I'm sure he had in mind his fake death by this point—Mr. Self said, “This used to be a place where I hunted arrowheads as a child. I can't remember for sure, but I believe I got my first kiss here, way before I made my money. Long before I realized there are people who
want
to be held down.”

Even I, at this age, wondered if I'd heard him right. “No one wants to be held down, according to my dad. The only man wants to be held down either finds his way to prison on purpose, or moves to South Carolina on purpose from elsewhere. According to my father.”

Mr. Self stared straight ahead. His hair waved around slower than a sea anemone stuck in doldrums. “Well. I was born in the nineteenth century. I might be wrong, nowadays, boy. Both my parents were born before the Industrial Revolution.” Mr. Self pointed toward one tendril of smoke. “I always wanted to be a potter, to tell you the truth. Dirt lasts forever, you know.” He stuck out his hand like a referee calling first down.

Let me say here that Mr. Self didn't display exactly the same dementia that most of our residents did, but he tended toward non sequitur and flat-out mean lies. This particular fifty-dollar ride—and I had not touched the money by this
time—showed him to be a contrite, sad, and vulnerable ex–mill president. I said, “Dirt and cockroaches. I've heard say that at the end of the world the only things left will be dirt, cockroaches, and duct tape.” I pushed him through the woods and looked at the scar on my finger.

We made it to a clearing and a slight bluff overlooking the Saluda River below Lake Between's pitiful dam. A handful of men and women held cane poles and fished the water. They stood beside drywall buckets. I thought to ask Mr. Self if he wanted to join these folks, maybe see if they had an extra pole. I thought to say how we could go no further safely.

I said, “Maybe tomorrow we can head out in the other direction. There's a nice hill overlooking the county landfill. We can watch the seagulls. You can tell me about what you used to find in the dump way back when you were my age.”

I'd gotten outright giddy, and startlingly brave. Maybe I was feeling the preliminary twinges of false power one receives from newfound wealth. It would take thirty years before I would regain such a feeling. I popped old man Self's crown to get a response. And I got one—when he slumped straight out of his wheelchair onto the red clay that sloped down to the river.

“Hey. Hey, hey!” I said. Whatever jazzy kind of song had been running through my head—saxophones, clarinets, and trumpets—stopped.

Unfortunately one of the river people saw Mr. Self fall out and pointed us out to his fellow anglers. They dropped their poles and trudged up the incline as I tried to shove Mr. Self back into his chair. Just as this was a time before cell phones, it was a time before wheelchairs had good and trustworthy brakes.

The fifty-dollar bill must've flown off. I hate to admit it, but the closer the fisherpeople came, the more concerned I was with shoving fifty dollars into my pocket as opposed to getting Leonard Self in an upright position.

“He dead,” one of the men said. It was, luckily, a black friend of my father's, one of Shirley Ebo's uncles. “Mr. Self, he dead.”

Although it seemed like the most trivial and obvious pronouncement at the time, later I would have nightmares, from college Intro to Literature onward. I said, “I didn't do anything. He wanted me to show him the river. He said he wanted to see the other side.”

A woman said, “He finally got to see for hisself what we got to do for food, that sad money he pay at Forty-Five Cotton Mill.”

We got him into the wheelchair. Shirley Ebo's uncle said, “Wha'chew gone do now, pusher-man?” He said, “You ought to look through his pajamas, see what money he got wrapped around his belly. All them Selfs wrap they money around they belly. People think they fat. But it money.”

It seemed like Wylie Alexander or someone would've come looking for us. It had been a good hour since the last shovee had finished her plate of gray and yellow food. I said, “I guess take him back and tell them what happened is all I can do.”

“Let us look under his pajamas first,” the woman said. “Come on. I know you. You Lee Dawes's boy, right? I know Mr. Lee.”

Mr. Self's wrinkled clothes were full of clay. His hat brim was bent mercilessly. There was blood on the blade of his nose, and for some reason I could only worry about how he'd soon crap in his pants like dead people always did in the stories Compton and I told each other. I said, “That's not right.”

My onlookers backed off. One of the men said, “You want all that money for yourself, I bet. You should be ashamed, boy. Just 'cause he's a white man don't mean you got claim to everything.”

I began the long Forty-Five Longterm Care push homeward, and listened for followers.

N
OW IT DOESN'T
matter that I took dead Leonard Self back to the kitchen workers' hideout, that we waited there until an hour after the sun set, that no one seemed alarmed. I pushed Mr. Self toward the still-smoking fire pit, found stray branches and twigs, and heaped them atop what burnt-edged magazines lay frayed on the outskirts of the pit.
It doesn't matter that I considered looking for a sewn-in secret pocket down at the bottom of Leonard Self's pajama bottoms, imagining crisp fifty-dollar bills that I could shove into my own socks. I sat across from him on an upright oak stump, held my head in my hands, and cried in a way I'd not even done when my mother left for good.

I'd not even been to a funeral yet, at this time. I'd never witnessed a dead person. But that's not what made me un dergo my first of many near–nervous breakdowns. I didn't think of all the spinners, doffers, loom fixers, or supervisors that Mr. Self had killed off in his own way to amass the millions of dollars his heirs would squander over the next few generations. It wasn't the poor relatives of my classmate Shirley Ebo having to stick doughballs on hooks so they could make catfish stew to eat over a three-day period.

“I tried to give him CPR,” I told Wylie Alexander. “It didn't work,” I said when I finally got up the courage to push Leonard Self back to the nursing home. “He held his heart and let out a gasp. Then I got him out of the chair and performed mouth-to-mouth. I must've spent an hour beating his chest. He wouldn't come back.”

Wylie Alexander put his soft hand on my shoulder. “You done the best you could, Mendal. I don't know what else you could've done.” He turned his head toward the nurse's station and said, “Ain't that right, Lee?”

My father popped out from behind the counter. I began
crying again. “I didn't mean to be late for supper,” I said. My father had come looking for me, certainly, like any good single parent might.

“This is all my fault,” he said. “Hell, this would've been too mean if we'd've done it on Halloween
proper
like we first planned.”

Mr. Self
expelled a ton of air and said, “Try shallow-breathing for two hours! Someone owes me corn-dog suppers until the end of the year.” He looked at Dad and said, “You got you a top-notch son, Lee. Some of that stuff about beating my chest for an hour might be an exaggeration, but he didn't try to steal my money. And he wouldn't let anyone else do it either.” If Mr. Self had walked away from his wheelchair I would've gone home, swiped my father's thirty-aught-six, returned to the nursing home, and killed everyone involved. Mr. Self looked at me and said, “You got you some strange politics going on in your head, boy, but you all right with me.” He stuck out his hand to shake.

My bicycle still stood wedged inside the azalea bushes. I had no headlight or reflectors. For all I knew, my father and Wylie Alexander and Mr. Self had concocted this scam years earlier, to test my abilities to shun temptation. I almost hoped so.

But I didn't say anything when I went back inside to get my galoshes, hat, and yellow slicker. In the distance, a late-autumn thunderstorm neared, the smell of rain in the air. I said nothing to the three laughing men in Forty-Five Long-term
Care's lobby, and rode off into a darkness I had never known before. I could keep straight A's, I knew, and never return to my part-time job.

The rain began a half mile toward home. What had I said to Mr. Self over our time together? I tried to remember, pedaling hard. What secrets had I divulged? Would those men have considered me a better worker had I chosen to steal money, a better Forty-Fiver in the tradition of our cheating, lying, and stealing business and civic leaders?

Water shot off my front and back fenderless tires, soaking my pants. I rode slower and slower and couldn't believe that I didn't plain topple over during each weak motion. Lightning struck nearby. If it had been winter, and below forty degrees, the road crews would've been out throwing salt on all two-lane bridges. That would be perfect, I thought. I realized later that if lightning had come down from God to me—for whatever wrongs I'd accrued—my rubber suit might have helped ease the sting.

During the Summer of Monkeys and Anacondas I tutored Shirley Ebo in English, because Mr. Ebo and my father were friends and I was one of only two Forty-Five Junior High School students who'd scored above average in reading and comprehension. I liked Shirley enough at the time but had no idea how to teach, or even how to get her to speak. Over the years, our white teachers had called on Shirley regularly during the first six-weeks grading period, then given up altogether when she went from shaking her head no to plain staring them down. I never saw any of Shirley's report cards, but couldn't imagine her passing. Every August I felt surprised to see her in my same grade, always sitting in a desk as far from the door as possible.

“Tutor her for money?” I asked my father. This was June between seventh and eighth grade. “How much is Mr. Ebo paying?”

The Summer of Monkeys and Anacondas came at the end of the Fall, Winter, then Spring of Monkeys and Anacondas. A rumor started that the last county fair and freak show's traveling zoo had somehow become unlocked and that a dozen spider monkeys took off out of there. Of course every Forty-Five child and half their parents couldn't think
of anything better than to trap a spider monkey and bring it home as the family pet. Over at the Dixie Drive-In, I heard Glenn Flack's father tell somebody that there wasn't a better coon dog than a spider monkey.

At some point during all this, a rational person in our midst realized that Forty-Five children might actually
catch
a monkey and contract rabies. What would keep kids from wandering around our near-flat countryside in search of the kind of mammals that looked so cute on that
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
show?

Anacondas.

So word went out that the freak snake lady's two big anacondas—and we'd seen her up close wearing a two-piece bathing suit with forty feet of snakes around her body—had escaped, too. What did snakes eat?

Monkeys and children, nothing else.

All in all, it didn't matter that exactly zero monkeys or snakes had escaped. Later on I learned that a local bird lover had worried about all of us BB-gun-toting kids killing off jays, crows, grackles, cardinals, mockingbirds, and sparrows, and believed that whatever it took to keep us inside our houses would help in ornithological ways we would never comprehend. Bird Lover had anonymously started the monkey escapade.

My father punched me in the chest half as hard as he had the time I asked him if Mom was a whore with my best friend's momma, Mrs. Lane, up in Nashville. This time my
father pulled back somewhat. “Mr. Ebo ain't got money to pay for Shirley's tutoring, peckerhead. When're you going to learn that not everything's about money? Sometimes you scald my scrotum.”

I said nothing. I didn't say how my dad tore down heart-pine barns because he knew he could sell wood to rich folks in need of authentic flooring in the coming years. It wasn't possible, without near-fatal retribution, to point out how my own father found odd ways to scam unworthy men out of things once thought priceless or miserable, like baseball cards and Edsels.

I wanted to say, “Shirley Ebo's black, and everybody'll think I'm her boyfriend.” I knew no better at the time. I said, “How'm I supposed to teach English? I don't know how to teach English.”