Why Dogs Chase Cars (2 page)

I said, “You've lost your mind. Did you have a dream last night? What're you talking about?”

“So then in years to come, long after I'm gone, somebody will buy up that land and set out to put down septic tanks. They'll unearth those drums and have no choice but to get scared and back out of the deal. I can't expect you to thank me now, but you and your wife will put flowers on my grave the day this all happens. Are you listening to me?”

I didn't say how I had a plan to move—if not out of America, out of the South. I didn't say how my entire life would not be worth living unless I got the hell out of South
Carolina, that I would find a way when traveling from, say, New York to Florida, to detour the state of my training in order not to buy gasoline and/or snacks. Even in 1976 the state sales tax went only to erecting roadside historical markers that described what pre–Civil War plantations stood nearby and how happy the slaves were there. I said, “Did you put anything in those barrels? What's in the barrels?”

I'll admit now that I wasn't listening, though. My mind wandered to some unknown woman I would meet in college, fall in love with, marry. My father said, “You don't think all those feral dogs just started chasing cars when you came along, do you?” He laughed hard, threw his head back, and pulled his cane back to hit me. I cringed and waited for the impact. When my father placed his cane on the kitchen table I went to get us beer out of the refrigerator and thought about how I had to get back my Gerber's label and replace it with the original photograph.

M
ISS
B
ALLARD SAID,
“I am proud of you, Mendal. I knew that you wasn't the model for the Gerber baby ad. I seen a magazine article one time about that baby. He ended up robbing banks for a living, and then moved off to Argentina where he's living amongst ex-Nazis.” Miss Ballard taught dummy English when she wasn't trying to lay out the yearbook. She subscribed to and taught from the
National Enquirer
. The football players and cheerleaders
were always talking about half-human, half-sheep children born in Alabama.

I said, “I want to go back to the old photo. It's the only one I got that isn't blurred. My mother took the picture. She wasn't much of a photographer.”

Miss Ballard lowered her head. This was at 8:25, right before the homeroom bell. Presently a member of the Junior ROTC would say the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom, then a prayer. The assistant principal would come on next and outline what car washes, candy bar drives, and PTA bake sales would take place in order to purchase new baseball bats, football helmets, basketball nets, track spikes, and orange cones for parallel parking in driver's ed. Our sad choir had robes so old and frayed that the altos might as well have stood there naked. They should've staged
Hair,
if anything. Miss Ballard said, “I heard your mother drank quite a bit. Maybe she shook bad, and that's why they blurred.”

I said, “No, she wasn't a drunk, Miss Ballard. My mother left for Nashville to become a singer.”

Miss Ballard shuffled through her manila envelope of photographs and found the torn Gerber's picture. I handed her the one of me standing next to the sign that said
IC UMP
. “Nashville,” she said. “I understand that there's a problem with heroin in Nashville. And it's also the last sighting of Bigfoot east of the Mississippi.” She took my three-by-five and said, “What does this mean?”

I looked at her scuffed metal bookcase with
National Enquirer
s stacked on top of each other working as bookends for the vertical stack of Dick and Jane classics, Bobbsey Twins, and search-a-word paperbacks. Her students would stay in Forty-Five, work for their own daddies, then marry each other and raise children. It was endless, and I knew it. I said, “Septic pump. We were at a water-treatment plant. Hey, Nashville has a large population of blind and deaf men. Maybe you should go visit there.”

She didn't get it. Miss Ballard said, “I've been about everywhere I want to go in this life. I've been to Myrtle Beach. I can't imagine no other place to go for more fun. I don't like to be disappointed.”

Her students filed in for homeroom. I looked over at Shirley Ebo and said, “Hey, Shirley.” She popped her head up once, then set two or three books on the desk.

“What're you doing in here, Mendal Dawes?” she asked me.

I said, “Before-and-After.”

Shirley said, “Too bad we didn't take a picture when you were a virgin, and one after. I guess they don't want to put a picture of you in the yearbook with your eyes closed both times all Chinesey. Like a moron or something.”

Sergeant Penny Yingling—who would see her way out of Forty-Five via the military—got on the intercom and started the Pledge. I stood there bent over Miss Ballard's desk. I looked down her dress front, at first by accident. Miss Ballard stood up and chimed in about “… and to the
public.” I leaned closer to make sure that she said, “… under God, in the visible,” and so on, like I knew she would. I looked back at Shirley Ebo, who, like me, didn't even try to mouth the words. Shirley stood up like everyone else, but stared at a poster of a cat and a pigeon sniffing each other's faces that Miss Ballard kept tacked on the wall.

I left my real photo on the desk and walked out during the Lord's Prayer. I knew that I had upwards of an hour before my first-period class would start, that I could go out to the parking lot, get in my Jeep, drive to Rufus Price's Goat Wagon store, buy an eight-pack of Miller ponies, drink half of them, and get back in time to say
“Buenos dias”
to my new Spanish teacher, a woman named Senora Schulze who thought we should all take a field trip to
Brazil
one day to perfect our Spanish.

I would think, Ic ump, ic ump, ic ump, the entire morning, and wonder if it meant anything in Latin.

Rufus Price was only three feet tall. He didn't have legs. He had stumps and had named his own little neighborhood store after the eight billy goats he liked to team up to trot him all over Highway 25 before, after, and during his hours of operation. Rufus Price's beard resembled his goats' faces—a long, long train of wild, wiry, grayish hair that came down in a point above his sternum. He wore a porkpie hat, always, and sat in a wheelchair once his goats brought him back to the storefront. Unfortunately for my father, Mr. Price had sold off some fifty acres of his own land to Harley
Funeral Home, and they made a perpetual-care cemetery out of the place, behind the Goat Wagon, before anyone could plant fake toxic drums. I said, “Hey, Mr. Price,” when I came in.

He said, “School not out again?”

I said, “Yessir,” and walked past the cans of pork brains in milk gravy, Spam, Vienna sausages, Hormel Deviled Ham, and various other potted meats. I passed the penny gums and the pork rinds. I walked around a display of watch-bands and another for Putnam Dyes. “I'm just taking a break before my first period.”

“Running a special on day-old bread, Mendal. You can get you carbohydrates out of bread, day-old or not.”

I was pretty sure that my father had asked Rufus Price to take care of me, but I didn't know for absolute sure. I said, “I'm getting something for Dad. I thought I might as well get it now than have to wait until after school. You might have a big rush between now and then.”

He creaked his wheelchair forward. Out beside the shotgun-shack building, Rufus Price's goats bleated and shuffled and banged their horns against the wooden slat exterior. He said, “Your daddy might want some gum, too. He might want some gum or Life Savers. He ain't starting up a pulpwood business these days, is he? I won't sell to pulp-wooders. You know why.”

As I pulled out the eight-pack, I wondered if my friend Compton would show up like normally, but remembered
how his art teacher had asked her students to come in early for an entire week so that they could go out on the football field and make a chalk collage of the history of Forty-Five Mills. The president of the place had promised to donate a picture book to the library about the history of textiles that he'd written and published himself.

I bought my beer, gum, and breath mints. Rufus shook his head at me. His beard swayed like a strange grandfather clock's pendulum. I said, “Ask my dad. This beer ain't for me.”

Mr. Price wore his usual overalls, the legs folded up neatly to his stumps. He said, “You need a girlfriend who keeps you inside the hallways of school, son.” He spat on his own floor. “You need a hobby. Don't end up like me. Don't end up like everyone around here. You smart, boy. Nothing's enough for some people. But nothing's a whole lot less than two minus one.”

Mr. Price liked to show off that he was a graduate of Forty-Five High, too.

I
'D BEEN KNOWN
to dig holes in my father's backyard when I knew he'd be gone for more than an hour. And I acted thusly if, and only if, I'd awakened in the middle of the previous night to hear him grunting and cursing, burying something that he either foresaw would be valuable in the coming years—old metal gasoline-station signs seemed to be his forte—or that he thought was an eyesore. He seemed
to have something against whatever Baptist preacher it was in Forty-Five who, plagiarizing roadside Burma-Shave ads, stuck
BIRD ON A WIRE/BIRD ON A PERCH/FLY TOWARD HEAVEN/FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
up and down Deadfall Road, Powerhouse Road, Highway 25, and Calhoun Drive. I made a three
A.M.
note to myself as to where the sound emanated from so I could later find the pine straw covering the freshly dug clay and find out what it was that he deemed worthy of concealment.

Driving back to school from Rufus Price's Goat Wagon, I knew I'd get out a spade later in the afternoon, seeing as my dad would be somewhere over near the Savannah River all day trying to figure out what useless piece of land would later be bought up by the state for ten times its worth so a roadside park could be built, or a boat landing that dropped down to a fishless dammed lake. Maybe I would walk back to the acreage owned by the Few family trust and see if phony toxic barrels were actually standing upright beneath the surface.

“
Presente,
” I said to Senora Schulze when she called the roll.

Libby Belcher said, “I smell beer. I smell beer coming from Mendal's direction. Senora Schulze, I smell beer.”

Senora Schulze said, “
Cerveza,
Libby. You smell
cerveza
.”

Well, ha ha ha ha ha, I thought. Libby had no way of knowing that I kept the other four beers in my backseat, that I kept the door unlocked so Senora Schulze could go
out there during her lunch break and down them. Libby Belcher's head turned toward me in midspasm. I shot her a peace sign, then curled my index finger away. Senora Schulze turned on the overhead projector to reveal a slew of irregular verbs that we needed to know. I leaned over to the left and whispered to Libby, “Why aren't you in Miss Ballard's class with the rest of the cheerleaders and football players? Why do you think you need to know a foreign language? Are you planning on having a Mexican baby or something?”

Oh, I could be as mean as my father back then. And I'll give Libby Belcher this: she grew up to get a doctorate in education, then become a superintendent of schools. But she didn't have the right answers on this particular day. She said, “I'm taking Spanish because I'm taking home ec. I need to know how to make tacos in an authentic manner.” Then she said, “I know you been drinking. And I saw your baby picture from yearbook staff. When're you going to understand that you can't trick everybody, Mendal Dawes? You can't. You been trying since first grade. We all know better. We all know.”

Senora Schulze said, “Oh, never mind,” and cut off the projector. “I doubt y'all will ever need to know these verbs. It's been my experience that you only need to know a bunch of nouns to get your idea across to foreigners.”

When the bell sounded I walked to the gym, found Coach Ware, and said I'd be willing to run track in May if he gave
me a note saying I needed to go home for the rest of the day. Forty-Five High couldn't afford to have its track team ride a bus to meets, but they splurged once a year and allowed us to take part in the regional meet. If anyone qualified for the Upstate, then his parents had to take him all the way up to Greenville—fifty-five miles away—in order to compete. I should mention that although no psychologist had invented attention deficit disorder in 1976, Coach Ware suffered from the malady. I went to him once a week and gave him my word about joining the track team, though he never took me up on it later.

Let me be the first to say that I felt bad whenever I drove home from school at midday. First off, Senora Schulze wouldn't get her
cerveza
—maybe the only word she really knew in Spanish. My biology teacher in second period wouldn't have anyone there to help him say “mitochondria,” a word for which he never figured out the right syllable to stress. The third-period history teacher who never blinked, and always found a way to relate everything that ever happened in America to the invention of the cotton gin—in a way she was before her time, in relation to focus and specialization—would miss me. She should've become a college professor, and then maybe a full-out dean. When she experienced slight petit mal seizures, I was the one who always said something like, “Could you explain the connection between the Great Chicago Fire and the cotton gin?” Forget trigonometry—that teacher said “maff” when
he wasn't undergoing coughing and/or sneezing attacks when someone asked for him to explain, again, how the notions of
sine
or
cosine
would be important to us later on in life.

And so on. But I got out of there. At this point I'd already gotten into a few colleges—the ag school that guidance counselor Mrs. McKnight made me apply to; all of South Carolina's state schools, including all-black S.C. State, just in case Shirley Ebo and I finally fell in love with each other; a liberal arts Baptist school my father said he'd let me go to if I didn't mind his daily visits with a firebrand to burn the place down; and an experimental place up in North Carolina founded by Unitarians, where I ended up going. It allowed students to double major in anthropology and basket weaving. Anthropology and pottery wheel. Anthropology and furniture making. Anthropology and metal casting. I knew to go into anthropology and geography, so I would know not to make a wrong turn and end up back in Forty-Five.