Why Dogs Chase Cars (28 page)

Lyla poured her drink into a plastic Tupperware tumbler and finished it off. I said, “What's up with you? Where've you been all day? I kind of have some good news.”

My wife had taken a job as a substitute teacher at Forty-Five High while she puzzled out what we would end up doing and where we'd go after I settled my father's strange and cumbersome affairs. Lyla also volunteered for the literacy program and taught the teachers of Forty-Five Middle
School and Forty-Five Elementary on Tuesday and Thursday nights. In January she would sign on to teach Intro to Archaeology down the road at this place called Anders College and would come home every night saying she'd discovered another Cro-Magnon alive and walking the campus. “Lookee here what was in our mailbox.” She pulled a recklessly folded sheet of typing paper from her shirt pocket.

I read aloud, “‘Last year the Sherwood Forest Homeowners Association voted unanimously that your father's house and property was an eyesore to the surrounding community. Since then, we have never heard from your father. We invited him to clean up his yard, put siding on the house, and join us—even though the house isn't even close to our three-thousand-square-foot requirement. We are hopeful that you will be more flexible and understanding in our concerns. You wouldn't want a KOA campground surrounding your property, would you?'” It was signed, “The Concerned Residents of Sherwood Forest.”

I said, “Concerned residents. Well, I better walk out back and hunt down Friar Tuck or Robin Hood and see what this is all about.”

Lyla said, “I'll stay here for the rest of our lives out of spite, Mendal. I will! These idiots obviously haven't ever tangled with an archaeologist with minors in anthropology and art.”

I stood up and stretched my aching back, ruined from backyard excavation and Internet retrieval. I didn't say anything
about how I knew my father well enough to know that he'd managed to ruin these people's lives without knowing them. “I sold all the heart pine today.”

Lyla turned from the kitchen window as if I'd zapped her with a cattle prod. “No. No, no, no. If you sell that wood, they'll think they've won. If we sell anything—anything we spent all that time digging up—these hammerheads will see it as a victory for their little club.”

I shook my head no. I raised my palms. Lyla stormed around the house, put Southern Culture on the Skids in the CD player, and worked one speaker out of the den window, aimed toward Sherwood Forest. It was too loud for me to tell her how, when I wasn't but maybe five, my father had foreseen this day and made me help him with a gross of fifty-five-gallon drums, that I even had a picture in my year-book as part of a Before-and-After extravaganza.

C
OMPTON
L
ANE, MY
best friend growing up, found his way out of Forty-Five, South Carolina. He became a veterinarian and then quit his profession altogether when a strange group of people threatened his life daily for fixing AKC bitch dogs after they'd hooked up accidentally with nonpurebreds. At least that's what he told me over the telephone once, right before his crazy father died in a tragic, fluke incident involving a gust of wind and a less-than-stable Duke Power electrical line. Comp took a job in Montgomery,
Alabama, straight out of vet school and spent a decade as an upstanding member of the George Wallace–loving community until somebody decided that God didn't cotton to abortions of any type if said animal had once lived in the Garden of Eden. According to Comp, a pregnant snake was held in more esteem in Montgomery than anyone knowing post-1865 history. He came back home after demonstrators regularly held
FICKSING IS BAD
and
NEUTER IS A GEAR, NOT A LIFESTYLE
signs outside of his clinic. It made the national news, and about three years later—just as the Forty-Five town council voted that a cable television company could open up—there was a front-page item in the local paper about Compton's woes. He lived quietly in his old house, intent on writing something better than all those other writing veterinarians.

“Now you know what it's like,” he said to me the day after Lyla got our ultimatum in the mail. “It'll get worse. My first anonymous letter back in Montgomery went something like, ‘It's okay to litter.' And there was a Xerox of an X ray. That's how it started.”

Compton got started on veterinary science because Forty-Five's only vet had found an odd Christian Science God in the middle of his career, and whenever anyone took a rabid, wormy, or car-struck hound to him, Dr. Wimmer just said, “Let's have a little prayer,” or “If God wants Gypsy to get better, Gypsy will get better.” Then he charged five dollars for the visit.

C
OMPTON AND
I sat in my father's kitchen, drinking beer and bourbon at ten o'clock in the morning. Lyla was off subbing for forty dollars a day. Although Comp and I hadn't stayed in touch very well over the years—I'd seen him only once, at my daddy's viewing and funeral, since I'd returned home—we fell right back into our old ways as childhood friends fall, no awkwardness evident. I said, “I can't remember if you were in on this, man, but do you remember when I found out how my father bought all those fifty-five-gallon drums? Did I let you in on that?”

Comp turned a jigger upside down and chased it. He said, “This is just like those times we cut school in seventh grade. And eighth, ninth, tenth…” Although he still had a boyish face, his eyes showed the strain the people of Montgomery had forced upon him. He said, “Kind of. I remember your dad and mine always up to something, trying to teach some do-gooder a lesson. I remember the bait-shack scam.”

“That Before-and-After picture of me in the yearbook was from this particular episode in Dad's life. He went and got ahold of a bunch of steel drums and he buried them for some reason. I was too young to recall the incident. It's kind of like a dream now, but then again most of the time I feel like that when I go back to ages three through eighteen. My father got these big drums from somewhere, and we buried them because he had a plan of sorts. He painted
TOXIC MATERIAL
on each one and buried them over there at Sherwood Forest, I
believe. I don't think I'm dreaming all of this up. I don't think he told me a lie, either.” I got up and looked out the window. “This is weird, but when Dad told me all about what he did, he kept telling me that I wasn't listening to him—which I probably wasn't—but that I'd thank him one day. He even said that my wife and I would thank him.”

Compton stood up and looked out the window into my excavated yard. He nodded his head to
Workingman's Dead
blaring out of my father's console stereo in the den, an album I'd not listened to since 1976 or thereabouts, a band that in Forty-Five, South Carolina, only Comp and I knew. He said, “Toxic. Yeah. You told me. We were stoned, or trying to get stoned. Or we were selling Lipton's tea to those two teachers. Later on my father told me how he had some of those metal stencils you piece together and spray paint over. Your father borrowed them and sprayed
TOXIC WASTE
on those drums. Dad helped him bury a couple right back there.” He pointed to what used to be good farmland, toward the subdivision. “I kind of remember the Before-and-After picture, but I have to admit I haven't looked at our old yearbook. There are people around here we went to school with who keep theirs on the coffee table. It's the only book they own.”

I poured two more shots and said, “This old boy named Terrell Smoot is showing up later to pick up all the leftover heart pine. I ain't figured it out yet but I'm thinking I'll get a few hundred thousand dollars for Dad's big collection.
Who'd've known he knew what he was doing all those years saving torn down barns.”

“My dad said that your dad pissed in those fifty-five-gallon drums before burying them. The time my father helped, they drank beer and peed a bunch, and from what I heard, your father kept saying, ‘This'll get 'em good,' every time he dropped one into the ground.”

Comp and I sat there like deaf-mutes for a half-hour before he finally asked if I got the Animal Planet network on cable. Then he moved to the den and watched a documentary on North American burrowers.

M
R
. S
MOOT BROUGHT
his two semis, five men, and a number of tape measures. He said, of course, “I got to tell you. A lot of this wood is worthless. A lot of these boards have too many nail holes and splits in them.”

Lyla had come home from sub teaching early. Comp sat in the den staring at the Animal Planet channel. I walked in once to get beer for the workers and felt pretty sure that Compton had been crying. On the TV they were showing emergency surgery on a dog that had fallen off a cliff trying to get to its buddy that fell off first.

“Oh. I'm sorry to've wasted your time,” I said to Smoot. “Hell, I thought you could use this. Let me let y'all go, and I'll get back in touch with
plankpine.com
, or one of those others.”

His workers—Jose, Jorge, Pedro, and Senor Jorge—
continued to measure out lengths and yell “ten!” “twelve!” or “sixteen!” which a short man, who looked like Pepino on
The Real McCoys,
wrote down on a legal pad. I knew that they'd probably slipped a couple hundred feet into the trucks without my noticing, but it didn't matter. Smoot said, “I'm not saying we won't take your wood. I'm only saying we've gotten better lumber over the years.”

“Don't let me go down in history as saying I offered up the worst wood,” I said. “Come on. Y'all take that lumber out of the truck and I'll write you out a check for the gas money it cost y'all to come up here.” I pulled my arms in the international sign for unloading the loaded and said, “And let me go inside and make some barbecue sandwiches for your drive back home. Doggone, I'll have bad dreams about this the rest of my nights.”

The Mexicans stopped for about two seconds in my front yard, then continued calling off lengths and stacking wood. Smoot said, “We're good. You and me, we'll be all right,” and he laughed.

Lyla came out of the house and said, “Hey, Mendal, I don't want the homeowners association thinking that we've caved in. I ordered a bunch of plastic pink flamingoes over the phone, if you don't mind. I'm going to get some lawn jockeys, too, and paint their faces white. I'm going to buy some cement birdbaths.”

I said, “Where's Compton? Is he okay in there?”

“There's got to be a junkyard around here. I want to get
some old cars to park around the yard. I wish we had a big oak tree to string up an engine in.”

Smoot said, “Oh, I'm gonna buy this heart pine. But the lengths you had resting on the naked ground are ruined.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. I slapped his back. “Tell it to the idiots you sell this stuff to for twenty dollars a square foot in New Mexico and Connecticut. My father's first batch of this wood pretty much decorates the insides of some of the first Cracker Barrels. You ever eaten there, on the interstate exits? They didn't seem to complain.” I knew, also, that even though Lyla and I had uncovered all of those signs, my father had sold just as many more to these same Cracker Barrel–type, old-timey restaurants.

And then, as if a shaft of daylight beamed down from the heavens, it came back to me. I doubt it would've been clearer if my father had come back to life in front of the cement-block house, the Smoot operation taking place in his midst. I saw my father talking on a black, black clunky rotary-dial telephone and actually heard his voice say, “Oh yeah, in time, buddy. If it ain't in our lifetime it'll be in our boys' time.” He said, “Forty-Five's going to grow. It'll double. Where else will people have to move? You can't build houses on water or asphalt, but by God you sure can set one down in a cow pasture.” I could hear the clink-clink-clink in his glass.

Lyla said, “What else? What else? There has to be something else that'll make those homeowners association people
so mad they won't know whether to zip their pants or scratch their ass.”

I looked at her eyes. The Mexicans shuffled lumber in such a way that it sounded like emery boards over snagged fingernails. I said, “What? What're you on, honey?”

She looked like she was just a shell filled with throbbing adrenaline. Her feet danced in eight directions. “Oh, I'm just mad. You know I get this way.”

“We're fine,” I said and put my arm on her jittery shoulder. “You and I are fine. I'm kind of worried about old Comp, though.”

At dusk Terrell Smoot handed me a check. He said I could cash it immediately. “I'm kind of surprised you didn't use that good wood to side your own house,” he said. “God-damn, you don't see too many houses like yours anymore. Does it sweat real bad on the inside?” He pulled at his balls. “I'm betting you can tear down this place and make more money off the lot, what with what's surrounding you. All these big houses.”

I didn't punch him in the nose. I said, “I grew up this way. I grew up here.” I didn't say anything about how it was hard enough selling what my father stole, buried, and stored for thirty years. When Smoot backed out onto Deadfall Road I yelled out, “If you see any stray dogs trying to chase your wheels, stop and pick them up. They're only trying to get out of here, like the rest of us.”

I
DON'T WANT
to cast aspersions on the people of my hometown, really, but exactly nobody had that star-69 feature on his or her telephone, either, because it cost some money or because of the number's connotation. I know this: a week after Lyla pulled that homeowners association letter out of our mailbox, and a day after she stuck pink flamingoes and whirligigs in the front, side, and backyards, plus the roof, she called the Department of Health and Environmental Control to say in a disguised, overly southern dialect what I had written down on a piece of yellow notepad, namely, “Nuclear waste been dumped down in Sherwood Forest.” My wife drawled, “I don't want to reveal myself none—and I don't want to alarm the neighbors—but I went out to bury the cat and dug up a drum called
TOXIC
. I'm feared they's all over the place.”