Why Dogs Chase Cars (15 page)

“I kind of like Shirley,” I said. “I know she's black and all,
but I think she's the prettiest girl at school.”

Bennie laughed and scratched his head with his left hand. “I kind of think of her as my girlfriend, too. She won't talk to me, though. She don't talk to hardly anyone, as far as I can tell.”

I said, “She comes over here sometimes. I'm betting that she'll come over. Hey, you want to pitch pennies or something?”

Bennie shook his head. “My brother says that I'll last longer now for beating myself earlier. I wonder if Shirley might be interested in my playing her A-side. I'm thinking her A-side might sound better than her B-side. She's got a nice face and all.”

I stared at Bennie Frewer like a good cat stares down a snake. I wasn't sure what he meant—he might as well have been speaking in tongues—but it didn't sound like he wanted to treat my friend Shirley in a way befitting a sad, sad girl who didn't want to hang out with white people all the time.

“Don't talk like that,” I said. In my mind I went through how three of a kind beats two pair, a straight beats three of a kind, a full house beats a flush, and so on. This is funny—when I finally got a real girlfriend in college I ran these options through my head while making love and almost made it all the way to royal flush one time.

Bennie bent over and got a can of beer out of the ice. “I know you make all A's in school, bubba, but you aren't all
that smart when it comes to the ways of women, are you? I can tell. Man, when I was making the documentary I learned all kinds of things from my TV mom. She used to be a model. She almost made it up in New York on one them soap operas.”

I said, “You lie.”

I could hear gravel crunching on the driveway. Both Bennie and I stood up and looked to the side of the house. Shirley Ebo ambled up as if she was waiting for a late bus. “Y'all ain't drunk, is you?” she said.

Bennie Frewer said, “Would you please tell Mendal what it means to play a girl's A-side and B-side? He doesn't even know. I told him that I would play your A-side, Shirley. That's a real compliment.”

Shirley walked to the fire and stuck her toe on a piece of molten pine. She stepped over and picked up a beer. “What?”

Bennie spread his hands out and sighed. “What am I doing in Forty-Five?” he said. “I got to get my parents to move us to a place where people know some things. Like Florida. Shirley, get in this tent with me and let me show you some things. I'll give you a dollar.”

I think it was my second punch that made him lose his balance and fall into the fire. Shirley yelled out for me to stop. Bennie's head fell right onto a smoldering log, and the only thing I could think about was how a head louse would probably pop in the same way a swollen tick did. I pulled Bennie from the fire and pushed him toward the ice pit.
There was an audible sizzle and the smell of burning hair.

Bennie pushed himself off the ground and said, “I'mo tell on you. I'mo kill you,” which is the same thing I would've said and done, I know.

“I didn't like the way you talked to her,” I said, pointing to Shirley. “It's also not good to go over to someone's house and pull your pecker out. I read it somewhere. In one of the advice columns.”

Shirley stepped back twice and said, “Y'all gross. Y'all too weird for me.”

Bennie Frewer pulled his sleeping bag out of the tent, rolled it up haphazardly, and got on his bike. He rolled away awkward as an escaped hubcap. I yelled, “I didn't mean for you to land in the fire,” which was true.

“I was trying to show you something that felt good! Maybe you don't want to feel good ever, for the rest of your life! I hope you don't!” Bennie screamed over his shoulder.

Shirley Ebo said, “What did he mean? What did he mean, Mendal?”

I couldn't tell her that I didn't know. My new male ego wouldn't allow for it. I walked behind the tent, reached up, and got the half-pint down from its noose. At the time I didn't know that this entire incident pretty much shut up Bennie for the rest of his days in Forty-Five; we'd be in some of the same classes, but I would never hear him really speak again.

Nowadays I wish I could've patented whatever happened,
bottled it, and learned to shut up about everyone else.

M
Y FATHER LATER
told me that he almost hit Bennie Frewer, that the stupid kid was riding his bicycle in the middle of Deadfall Road with his sleeping bag unzipped and slung all the way down his body. Dad said that it looked like a giant blue cocoon coming up the macadam. Shirley and I remained in the backyard, coughing on peach bounce like fools. We roasted marshmallows, and then the hot dogs. Shirley said that she didn't know the final score of the football game, seeing as the scoreboard didn't go past ninety-nine.

We were drunk, drunk by the time my father returned all smiles. He said, “What did you do to Bennie?”

“Mendal saved my life, Mr. Dawes,” Shirley said. “We ain't real sure what ever happened, but we think that Bennie had some ideas.”

I said, “Go ahead and get the yardstick out. I know you're not going to believe me. Go ahead and hit me right here in front of Shirley Ebo.”

My father toed the fire. “Bennie's having a rough time of it as of late, son. His daddy told me that he ain't got no friends, for one. If y'all kids ain't accusing him of having head lice, then y'all're accusing him of being some hotshot TV star. Is that true?”

I said, “Is this really homemade peach bounce or did someone pee-pee in the jar?”

Shirley laughed and slapped her ashy kneecap. “Oh, it home brew. I had my daddy's peach bounce before.” She slid on the ground toward me and put her hand on my bicep. “Mendal my hero tonight. That Bennie kept talking about doing something to my B-hind.”

My father crouched down. He stood on both knees and pulled his pockets inside out. They were empty. He said, “In case you want to know how I did tonight, I won. I took everyone's money. And we were playing high stakes, son. We played dollar ante, twenty-dollar limit.”

My father took the last beer out of the ice pit and opened it. I said, “Where's your money, then?”

“I owed. I owed some to Mr. Frewer, you know. If your mother ever calls up and asks how I'm taking care of you, please don't tell her that at times I lose money and then I have to make up for it. That's all I ask.” My dad reached over and tousled my hair. He pulled on one of Shirley's thousand pigtails. He looked at his watch and said, “Man. It's almost midnight. Shirley, do you want me to drive you over to your house, or do you want me to call up your daddy and say you're safe here for the night.”

Shirley shrugged. “I might need to sit here make sure Mendal don't get sick to his stomach. You got more beer inside?”

I'd like to say that a shooting star streaked across the sky like some kind of omen. I stretched out on the ground and put the back of my head, plus my hurt fist, in the ice pit. I looked upward, started to count stars, then fell asleep.

Nowadays I like to tell people that my father went inside to call Shirley's father, and Bennie's father, that Shirley struggled me up and put me atop my sleeping bag. I tell people that she unzipped the shell, splayed it out, and when we woke up in the morning I was on my stomach, she on her back.

I tell people that I knew exactly what Bennie Frewer meant about the two sides of a woman, but it doesn't have to do with his A- and B-side versions: it has to do with kindness and patience, or patience and tolerance, or giving and forgiving. It has to do with respect and capabilities, with capabilities and truth.

But really, I woke up alone—which also happened more often than not later on in life—with my bike moved right outside the pup tent's entrance, leaned fully on its kickstand. There was a piece of paper folded up and jammed into the grip of my handlebars, with “I owe” written on it, barely, in charcoal. She wrote, “FO, Willie Mays, Joe Willie Namath, Willie Mays.”

Like I said, Bennie Frewer never really spoke much to me again. I think that somewhere in that period my father broke Mr. Frewer's jaw for cursing at him. Shirley Ebo, though, spoke with me daily for the rest of my life, if only
through her eyes, her swishing down school hallways, her wagging finger and smile, the shake of her wild head.

Coach Adair prided himself on transforming boxwoods into topiary figures without the use of hedge clippers. According to him, our seventh-grade coach, he could stare down and persuade a wisteria into becoming one of the Seven Dwarves, or a redbud into a groundhog at full roadside attention. Of course he couldn't, but we never challenged our insane coach's ability to control his own plants, bushes, trees, or lawn. Adair shied from regular topiary figures: stallions, Disney characters, grazing sheep, historical figures. Instead, the coach trained his personal botanical treasures into giant cobras—our junior high's unlikely mascot. Right there in class, Coach Adair swore on the Bible that he had only to stare down a plant in order to make it permanently flange out a hood, then sway east and west. When we look back on things, maybe it didn't take that much mental telepathy to bend a rose of Sharon or Leyland cypress into an erect, hooded viper.

We did our sit-ups, squat-thrusts, push-ups, pull-ups, and hurdler's stretches there on the hardwood gymnasium floor third period, and we ran those stupid things called suicides that ruined our tennis shoes. On occasion, Coach Adair took us outside to play dodgeball, using unripe peaches that he gathered from a tree in his backyard, which, he said, would
one day grow into the biggest cobra north of Panama.

We said, “Hey there, Coach Adair,” when we passed him in the halls.

He said, “A-dare,” like that. He wore short gray coach's pants every day, and a Clemson University T-shirt. Black-rubber-soled shoes and white tube socks. Adair was the offensive line coach for football each fall, assistant basketball coach in winter, and golf coach each spring. Our golf team consisted of a half-dozen white boys whose daddies worked in Forty-Five Cotton Mill management. When he didn't coach P.E. he taught a course in South Carolina history for students who hadn't quite passed it in first, third, or fifth grades. From what I understood, Coach Adair skipped over people like John C. Calhoun and General Francis Marion, the entire Fort Sumter Civil War episode, and Dixiecrats, in order to focus on various questionable horticulture experiments going on at state-supported agriculture colleges—namely Clemson—ranging from edible kudzu to seedless fruits. From what I heard, he spent most of his time explaining how South Carolina's chief crops—tobacco, cotton, and soybeans—could probably be coaxed into lifelike topiaries, which could only aid in the tourist industry.

One time in the middle of P.E. class he even piped out, “Y'all boys get in good shape maybe you can get jobs on golf courses down Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, Charleston. Tourism's the quintessexual job future for me and you.”

I couldn't make these things up.

Coach Adair's best—we learned later that it was his only—friend at Forty-Five Junior High was the shop teacher, a man named Mr. Finger, who made everyone build caskets to be used down at the county farm for prisoners buried in a potter's field out back. I didn't take shop, but I heard boys in the smoking area laugh about how Mr. Finger would start every day off by saying, “Fingers is important, boys. They the second best friend a girl can have, you'll learn later in life. So don't cut y'all'ses off.”

And I should mention that, although the school budget got cut something like 50 percent every year after the nearby bomb factory laid off workers as Vietnam slowed down, the Forty-Five Junior High football team always had enough booster club money to buy new uniforms, pads, helmets, grass seed, and chalk. This went unnoticed by every Forty-Five resident, probably, outside of a good, serious science teacher named Lanky Jenkins, who tried to run his class without Bunsen burners, petri dishes, test tubes, beakers, dissection frogs, tongs, goggles, and scalpels.

Mr. Lane, my friend Compton's father, drank with Lanky Jenkins on Wednesday nights, when the rest of Forty-Five attended Baptist church services. According to my father, Mr. Lane was a communist and the only other person in town who seemed to understand the need for unions. Mr. Lane got tabbed an instigator only because he sold some land in a white neighborhood to a black funeral home director richer than 99 percent of the town. Over time, the story
turned into how Comp's daddy actually had given the two acres away just to upset longtime residents still worried over particular stations in life.

Maybe he had. I only know that Comp and I got paid good money to sneak onto Coach Adair's property one Wednesday night—when no one would be around what-soever, seeing as they sang the doxology and those other hymns in their weird churches—armed with scythes, limb cutters, machetes, and sling blades to cut Coach Adair's cobras down.

W
E DIDN'T KNOW
that Mr. Lane believed that pathetic Forty-Five would one day shrink to become a town of even simpler-minded misfits unless a slew of teachers either got fired or quit and a whole new batch replaced them. Whenever I was over at Compton's house—usually drinking bad cans of cheap beer right in front of Mr. Lane, seeing as he handed them over like most Forty-Five fathers handed over shotgun shells to their sons—I bet I heard his daddy say “zeitgeist” at least once per visit. I thought maybe he had sneezed or had heard one of us do so. When I was a sophomore in college, one of my professors used the term and I pretty much jerked straight up in my seat. The professor had said, “Spirit of the time!” like that, staring at the ceiling, his little pencil-thin moustache winging out like a tiny, tiny turkey vulture in midglide.