Why Dogs Chase Cars (14 page)

Dad held that yardstick like a saber. This is no lie: I wondered if a metric stick would hurt more or less, if the extra few inches caused more of a whiplash pain, or less. I said, “Yessir. Okay. I'll do it.”

My father said, “I can dig a hole out back, fill it with ice, and stick beer out there.”

I said, “Yessir.”

My father began twirling his yardstick in a way that didn't make me comfortable. It's not like I thought he'd
hit
me anymore—no, I worried that he had some kind of majorette tendencies. “You're now, what—twelve, thirteen years old?”

“Yeah. You're in the right vicinity.”

“I know I gave you a beer back in the third grade. And I've kept track of what beer I kept in the fridge, by the way, so I know you know.”

I didn't know. I thought my father couldn't even count, since he always told complete strangers that exactly zero wives—my mother—had left him in his whole life.

I tried to think of what I could talk to Bennie Frewer about in a pup tent. My father spent more time out there at night either pining about his wife, my mother, leaving, or digging these deep oblong holes he tended to dig in order to bury whatever he needed to conceal, things I pretended not to know about.

I said, “That tent smells like an old sock. It smells like bad cheese, like dirty wet towels, like a river-swimming dog,
like a basement bag of flood-ridden Bibles, like a Persian rug left outside during monsoon season.” We'd been studying similes in our weird sixth-grade class. I kind of got into it. I said, “That pup tent smells kind of like an ashtray filled with junebugs.”

My father stuck his yardstick through one of his belt loops. He looked at the ceiling. “And I'll throw in a half-pint of peach bounce,” he said.

W
HEN WE GOT
past the visitors' side—at the fourth curve of the track toward Forty-Five's cheerleaders—Bennie Frewer took one look at beautiful Ferrell Waldrep and said, “I would flip her over to the B-side and see what
that
song sounded like.”

Comp wasn't with us. When he found out that Bennie Frewer would be tagging along he called up and said, “Y'all go on without me. What's your father trying to do to you, man? You're going to end up just like Bennie if people see you with him.”

To Bennie I said, “What're you talking about?” I held a stack of wax Coke cups that, when stomped correctly, sounded like shotgun blasts. Bennie held another twenty or thereabouts.

Bennie smiled and nodded his head up and down as fast as a skittering metal toy frog. “
You
know. I'd do her from behind.”

Let me say here that my father had offered me zero sex
talks—another reason I figured he couldn't count—and, although I could come up with something like sixty similes in a minute, I knew nothing about human relationships beyond scratching a dog's side until she thumped a leg crazy. Oh, my father had tried once a few years earlier, but he happened to be drunk, and I pretty much guessed that he'd made things up, about seeds and eggs and placenta. I said to Bennie, “Yeah. I'd do that to her, too.”

We walked past the cheerleaders real cool and didn't look up at the parents, high-school students, and ex–Forty-Five football players who made up the crowd in the stands. I tried to either walk six steps ahead of Bennie or lag behind and search the cinder track for arrowheads. We made it past Ferrell, Bunny Barnett, and Julie Sizemore—Forty-Five could only afford three cheerleaders, and if there was ever a vote for Most Spectacular Pyramid Formation in the History of High School Cheerleading, my future school would come in dead last. The cheerleaders were finishing up that ubiquitous, “Unh, ungowah—you know we got the power” cheer as Bennie brushed up against Julie Sizemore. He said, “You got you a nice B-side, too.”

She held her pom-poms down against her thighs. “Get away from me, Head Lice.”

I took off running for a good twenty yards, which was okay, seeing as a Ninety Six halfback was going down the sidelines and it looked like I just wanted to keep up and watch better. When he ran out of bounds I stopped and began
my slow amble again. I didn't turn to see if Bennie Frewer had caught up with me. When he did, at the first turn around the track, I said, “Hey, let's go get a seat over on the visitors' side and pop these Coke cups.”

Bennie said, “I know all of our cheerleaders' phone numbers. You know how I can keep track of them all? By using either pro football players' numbers, or stock car drivers' numbers. It's easy. Everyone in Forty-Five has the first FO, you know. And then there's a nine for everyone. Then it's like this: Johnny Unitas, Don Meredith. That comes out to FO-nine-one-nine-one-seven. Or your number: FO-nine, Richard Petty, David Pearson. Ferrell Waldrep's is FO-nine, Bob Hayes, Fran Tarkenton. It's easy.”

We made it around the second turn of the track. Ninety Six scored for the third time in the first quarter. I said, “I use a phone book when I want to find out someone's number.”

Bennie Frewer scratched his head and veered off toward the wooden bleachers. I think he might've mumbled, “You would,” like that, but I wasn't sure. He said, louder, “These cups aren't going to make the same kind of noise on wood that they would over on the cement stands.”

We sat down away from the hundred or so people who'd traveled the fourteen miles between Ninety Six and Forty-Five, both towns named for an Indian maiden who ran that many miles to warn settlers of the invading British. I thought, What am I going to do in a pup tent with Bennie Frewer for the rest of the night? I thought, What did he mean by what he
wanted to do to Ferrell Waldrep's B-side? “I wish they sold Milk Duds at the concession stand,” I said.

We looked out at the field. For some reason Ninety Six decided to perform an onside kick, and they recovered it easily. Bennie said, “They're out for revenge, Mendal. Oh, they want to take us over. Last year they only beat us forty-eight to nothing. It was an upset, my father said. Some of the parlay-card people lost some money on that one. Ninety Six was supposed to win by sixty points.”

I didn't ask Bennie what “parlay card” meant. What did this poor guy think about between eight-thirty and three o'clock every day, seated two rows from everyone else because of his head lice, while the rest of us tried to think up similes and memorize the birth dates of John C. Calhoun, Francis Marion, and Strom Thurmond? I wanted the halftime show to include a display of some of Forty-Five High School's track and field stars. I wanted a pole vaulter to have his bamboo stick to shatter, for the shards to blind me. I wanted a javelin thrower to screw up and toss his spear through my brain.

I looked forward, and didn't feel the wooden bleacher plank bounce as Shirley Ebo—still the only black girl in our class—stepped our way. She said, “Hey, Mendal. When did you and Bennie Frewer 'come friends?”

I said, “Shirley!” and scooted over. “Come sit down right here. Why're you over on the visitors' side? Come sit down.” I patted the bleacher and got a splinter.

Shirley shook her head no. She wore a thin black and
gold cotton dress, the colors of the Ninety Six team. “Daddy and I sit over here every game. He says we got to pull for everyone else, he says. He says the best offense is a good defense, he says.”

Bennie Frewer didn't look up at Shirley. He kept his eyes on the field. “My dad says the same thing. Hey, Shirley—you want to come over to Mendal's house tonight? We're camping out in the backyard. We're going to have some beer and a fire.”

Shirley looked back in the stands for her people. “I might can come by there.”

Bennie said, “You're number's FO-nine, Willie Mays, Joe Willie Namath, Willie Mays.”

I wanted a shotputter to show up and land twelve pounds of iron on the crown of my head, a discus thrower to take me out between the eyes.

W
E POPPED OUR CUPS.
No one noticed. Ninety Six recovered fumbles and ran them back for touchdowns. One cornerback intercepted three passes in the second quarter. At halftime the score was fifty-six to nothing. Shirley went back up to sit with her mother and father. I said to Bennie, “Let's you and me go on back to my house. My father won't be there yet. He's playing cards with Comp's father. We can maybe find his stash of beer and add it to what we already have, you know. We can make some prank phone calls, seeing as you know all the numbers.”

Bennie stood up. “I don't have head lice. Everybody thinks I have lice, but I was just an actor in a documentary. No one in this town seems to understand. There's no real Godzilla, either, by the way. No matter how far people stretch, they're not going to find the truth they're looking for.”

I could've told Bennie that he shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition. I had no clue what he meant, seeing as he had the word “truth” in his statement, something everyone else in Forty-Five never puzzled over, either. I said, “Uhhuh,” and looked back for Shirley. She stood up, clapping and dancing as the Ninety Six band came out playing a selection that may or may not have come from
The Sound of Music
.

I said, “My dad says that my mother didn't keep him on a short leash as much as he just kept running around the stob until his neck was right up against it. He says it a lot. He promises it's the truth.”

We rode our bicycles back home. Me, I had only a spider bike one-speed, but Bennie had this thing that looked like a dirt bike, put out by somebody better than Schwinn and with this three-speed toggle switch in the middle. I was pretty sure that he got it from the money he made starring in that ETV-produced documentary. We zigged and zagged past each other up Powerhouse Road, and turned on Dead-fall Road, neither of us with headlights or reflectors. Because the entire town was at the football game we didn't pass a car in either direction.

At my driveway I said, “I hope my father put some batteries in the flashlight.”

“I hope he had some money left over,” Bennie said. “My dad says that your dad owes him some money. For something. My dad's playing cards with your daddy and Mr. Lane, too. I guess that's it.”

I didn't look at Bennie. I didn't say, “Well, I figured that out a long time ago, seeing as Dad made us be friends for the night.” I said, “Probably.”

We found a pit of ice holding a six-pack of PBRs. The canvas tent had five regular aluminum spikes holding it down, plus this one long thick metal stob. A fire pit two steps from the ice hole burned slowly, and a bag of marshmallows and Valleydale hot dogs were set right inside the tent's entrance. My own sad, red cotton sleeping bag had been rolled out next to Bennie's goose-down mummy bag. Bennie said, “I thought you said your father said we'd have some peach bounce.”

I walked around the tent and found a half-pint of homemade whiskey strung up from a pine branch, like a piñata. I said, “My father lies at times.”

Bennie said, “Yeah, tell me about it. My father's the same. And my father says your father lies all the time.”

Of course I wanted to punch him in the face hard, and I would've, had I not thought that I'd get lice on my fist. A few years later I would feel the same way when I realized how I could make fun of South Carolina, but if anyone from
elsewhere came down and said something like, “Hey, this state's got a collective IQ of something like eighty-eight”—which might have been true—I would start off with head butts and end with kicks to the crotch.

I said, “My father's many things, but he ain't a liar, Head Lice.”

Bennie crouched down next to the fire. He held his hands out. “It's going to be a long life for both of us. You'll see what I mean.”

We were twelve or thirteen at the time, understand. How did Bennie Frewer become so cosmopolitan and philosophical and worldly? Would he become a man who would later change the world in regard to cancer and/or world peace? Or would he become another pathetic loser running the South Carolina Student Loan Corporation? I said, “Don't call my father a liar. You have to take that back.” I stood up, like I would fight—something I learned to love doing later on in life, unfortunately.

Bennie said, “I was only talking. Nothing. I'm sorry if I insinuated anything.”

I was trying to figure out what “insinuated” meant when Bennie pulled down his pants right there outside the tent and said, “My big brother taught me how to do this. It feels good.”

I thought he was trying to pull off his pecker, that's what I thought. I won't lie and say I didn't watch. When it looked like Bennie Frewer had started peeing, though, I ran inside my father's house. At that moment I realized all the things
Bennie wouldn't be in life.

He yelled at me, “Come on, try this! Try it, Mendal! This is a feeling you ain't had in your life!”

I had never thought of myself as a prude, but even back then I knew that I could only put my hands to me ears and hum “Camptown Races,” and pray for the first time that my father would come home way earlier than he normally came home on poker nights. I yelled back toward the backyard, “No! No! No! I think I need to be in here in case Dad calls and needs a ride back home!” It's not like it hadn't happened before.

M
Y FATHER KNEW POKER.
He taught me early on that a straight flush beat four of a kind, and so on. I knew from the age of seven that three of a kind beat two pair. I don't want to sound like I got brought up in a den filled only with statistics and probability—I also knew how to make a variety of omelets—but that's how it went. I learned poker early on. We didn't have dog racing in South Carolina officially, or I would've learned how to bet those things, I'm sure.

“What do you think the odds are that Shirley will come by here after her folks go to bed?” Bennie Frewer asked me after I came back outside. I sat about twenty feet away from him, on the other side of the fire. I didn't want to chance his springing another leak or eruption.