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Authors: Steve Yarbrough

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“Then I’ll transfer some from savings.” What I said next is something that in retrospect was really stupid and would’ve annoyed me just as much. “When you’ve had time to think about it,” I told her, “you’re going to realize this argument was about nothing.”

She stood and propped her hands on her hips, slinging that blonde hair out of her eyes. “In the context of a marriage,” she said, “that’s just a chickenshit way of saying it’s about everything.”

And so it was. In the debate that followed, each of us adhered to advice James Carville reportedly gave Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign: Stay on message.

Her main themes? Due to having grown up in relative poverty, I raised our daughters to think money fell from the sky, and because of that she’d be driving up to Delta State and its retarded administrators and freshmen until she turned seventy, just to pay off all the loans we’d taken out. To forestall my objection that I’d be working just as long, she reminded me that I liked my job whereas she loathed hers.

The gist of my position, on the other hand, was that whenever
either Candace or Trish wanted something their mother considered frivolous or inessential, they always approached me first, so I was constantly being put in this miserable position.

Plagiarizing Lennon and McCartney, she countered that money couldn’t buy me love.

Because I recognized the inarguable nature of that insight and felt the ropes and turnbuckle gouging my back, I said, “Even if it could, I’m not sure how much yours would be worth.”

The pleasure I felt when she burst into tears and stalked out of our study lasted at least two or three seconds, before the wave of shame washed over me.

Instead of eating a steak at Mann’s I was back in my room at the school that night and enjoying a Big Mac, fries and a diet soda. For a while, I listened to the Loring-Indianola game on the portable stereo I keep in there to play my students stuff like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, but we soon fell so far behind that I lost interest and switched it off. After finishing my dinner, I turned on my laptop.

Every now and then, when I’ve gotten interested in something I don’t know much about, I type in strings of words on Google to see what comes up.
Nadine + Arlan + Calloway + Loring + Mississippi + 1962
produced few results, none of which bore any relationship to the event I was interested in. When I typed in
Arlan + Calloway + Radford + Virginia
, though, I found a small article that had been published in the
New River Valley News
in 1996, under the heading “Twenty-Five Years Ago This Week”:

A bunker exploded yesterday at the Radford Arsenal, authorities said, resulting in the deaths of two men. Sam Martin, public affairs officer at the facility, said that Arlan Baker Calloway,
45, and Johnnie Lee Sturgis, 28, both of Radford, were working in the facility when the explosion occurred. No cause, as of now, has been identified, according to Martin.

That was all. Arlan Calloway had been reduced to his demise. When I typed his name in along with
Needles + California
, nothing relevant appeared. I messed around a little bit longer, trying unsuccessfully to find any reference to the Nadine Calloway I’d known as a child. I couldn’t find anything for a Wesley Bevil in Shreveport, or anywhere else in the United States, either, and nothing came up for Ernest Crawford in Rolling Fork. There were a few references to Maggie Sorrentino, including a listing on PeopleFinders with her address in North Carolina, her home phone number and an offer to sell me a “one-time search report” on her for $7.95, which would list her birthdate, previous addresses and known relatives. I also found an article from the
Durham Herald-Sun
that named her and all the other members of the local library association.

For a couple of days, I’d been thinking off and on about Ellis’s inability to recall Andy Owens. He hadn’t gotten his hair cut at Sturdivant’s—due to his politics, he wouldn’t have been welcome in there—but since he was a newspaperman with a prodigious memory, it seemed strange that the guy who delivered the Memphis paper for so many years could’ve slipped from his mind.

I myself had no idea when Andy left Loring, or where he went: one day he just wasn’t there anymore to cut my hair. So I returned to PeopleFinders and typed in his name. Something like one hundred twenty-five different listings came up, beginning with an Andrew A. Owens, who lived in Murray, Kentucky. In most instances, an age appeared next to the entry, as well as the names of people associated with that particular Andrew Owens. My impression was that the Loring Andy had been about thirty-five in 1962, which would make him almost eighty
if he was still alive. He’d probably been married—I seemed to recall his mentioning a wife during one of those sessions when the men were complaining about their spouses—but I wasn’t even sure about that.

Only one Andrew Owens lived in Mississippi, down on the Gulf Coast in Pass Christian, but if he hadn’t been blown away by Katrina, he’d only be twenty-six years old, too young, I figured, to be our Andy’s son. Anyway, I checked the list of associated names and found an entry for Robert C. Owens, also of Pass Christian, age fifty-five, in all likelihood this particular Andrew’s father. I played around a bit longer and came up with two Andrew Owenses of about the right age—one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas (no middle initial, seventy-seven), and another in Christiansburg, Virginia (Andrew N., eighty-two). Pine Bluff is just across the river, about forty miles south of Little Rock, and I’d been there a few times. I couldn’t place Christiansburg, though, so I got on MapQuest and discovered it was in the western part of Virginia, just north of Interstate 81. Then, as I was about to click out of the map, I noticed the name of a nearby town: Radford.

I sat there for a moment staring at the map. The towns were no more than seven or eight miles apart.

I clicked the back button until the browser returned to the
New River Valley News
article about Arlan Calloway’s death. Then I went to the newspaper’s homepage and found a search box.
Andy Owens
produced no results, and neither did
Andrew Owens
.

At Ole Miss, I once took a class with a professor who said, “If the historian isn’t careful, he or she can start to resemble the district attorney who, having to stand for reelection, becomes a little too willing to find connections where none exist.” The fact that somebody named Andrew Owens had lived close to Arlan Calloway in two different places probably meant nothing at all, especially since both
Owens
and
Andrew
are among the most common Anglo-Saxon names.

•   •   •

I turned off the laptop, went out, and got in my car to go home. But driving by my parents’ place I saw Jennifer’s Corolla parked in the drive beside my father’s van. I’d turned my cell phone off to keep her from giving me any more grief about the football tickets, so I knew immediately that Dad must have phoned the house. I pulled in behind her and jumped out.

An awful odor permeated the hallway. I heard moaning and figured Momma must have freed herself from the wheelchair and fallen again. She had a pin in her right hip, and when my dad brought her home from the rehab center, against the advice of both her regular doctor and the surgeon who’d operated on her, they’d warned him that if she fell again and that pin broke, she was going to suffer indescribable pain.

She was in bed, rather than on the floor like I expected, and was completely naked, her mouth wide open, her hands clawing at my father’s face while he leaned over the bed trying to hold her, whispering to her like she’d probably once whispered to me back when I was a baby. On the floor beside the bed stood a bucket, and over in the corner lay a bunch of shit-streaked sheets and bedclothes. There were big brown blotches on the mattress, and Dad’s shirt was soiled, too.

I heard footsteps coming from the bathroom, and then Jennifer brushed by me. She walked over to the corner and picked up the smelly linen, and when she looked at my father bending over my mother, trying to give her the only kind of comfort available to a person who’d been betrayed by both body and mind, you didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know what she was thinking. Where do you find love like that?

T
HE TWO HUNDRED
and forty dollars turned into thirty pieces of silver, material evidence of my betrayal. But even as she stopped speaking to me unless it was absolutely necessary, she started going by my parents’ house every morning before class and most afternoons, too, helping Dad to change the diaper Momma now had to wear and to give her a bath. They were eligible for Home Health, but he was frightened by the medical bureaucracy, as he termed it, and believed that if he let its representatives into his house, they’d try to force him to put her back in the rehab center. So for all practical purposes, Jennifer was their nurse, even though nothing was more precious to her than time.

I went there every day myself, usually after dinner, but was a lot less useful. Generally, what I did was wash dishes, carry out the garbage and pick up Dad’s bills, which I paid online when I did my own each month, so he wouldn’t have to write checks. Once or twice I sat with my mother long enough for him to take a shower. Every now and then she’d raise her head and look at me, and I’d fool myself into thinking she was about to experience a moment of lucidity, but as far as I could tell that never happened.

Dad never really went to bed anymore, just slept sitting in a recliner near Momma’s bed, the various medications he took for
high blood pressure and diabetes lined up on the floor beside the books piled there, mostly stuff he’d been rereading for sixty years—Ernie Pyle’s
Brave Men
and Richard Tregaskis’s
Guadalcanal Diary
—but a couple more recent titles as well, like Stephen Ambrose’s book about Eisenhower.

One evening, I noticed a green spiral notebook at the bottom of the stack, a BIC ballpoint clipped to the cover. When I was twelve or thirteen, he’d caught me reading a journal of sorts that I’d found tucked away behind his tackle box in the smokehouse. After snatching it out of my hands, he cuffed the side of my head and swore that if I ever said a word about it, he’d whip my ass so hard I’d have to shit standing up. What I’d been reading was intriguing:
I get to thinking about that girl in Manila sometimes and wonder how it would of been if me and her could of said more than just a few words and I had not of made a fool of myself by pointing like I did
.

Recalling that, I didn’t pick up the spiral notebook, but when he came back from the shower, still toweling his hair, I casually pointed at it and asked if he’d been doing a bit of writing.

He balled the towel up and dropped it into the clothes hamper, then leaned over and pulled out the notebook and glanced at it before laying it on the dresser. “Yeah,” he said, “I been making a few notes.”

“On what?”

“The kind of stuff you historians get wrong.”

“I’m not a historian. I’m a history teacher.”

He laughed. “That’s like saying ‘I don’t speak English. I just teach it.’”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, the difference, whatever it is,” he said, “must be too fine for an old fool like me to grasp.”

•   •   •

T
HE CHECK ENGINE
light on Maggie’s Mercedes never went off, and when she mentioned that at lunch the following week, I told her she’d better call Import Auto in Greenville and make an appointment. Whoever she spoke to over there said she ought to have it towed, so after school I hung around with her in the parking lot until the tow truck hauled it away, and then I drove her over to the Greenville airport, the closest place to pick up a rental. While we waited for the clerk to complete the paperwork, she asked if I’d like to stop by her house for a drink.

I’d been planning to invite her to dinner, maybe with Ramsey and his wife and Ellis, but I figured I’d better wait until Jennifer calmed down. Her attitude had shown signs of softening in the last day or two, and the previous evening she’d walked into the living room with a student’s paper and said, “Listen to this from one of my little Republicans. ‘People that are down on Don Rumsfeld need to remember he was secretary of defense twice before, in the Reagan administration and also for President Bush’s father, and this means he knows what he’s doing’” She stopped reading. “Is that right?”

“That Rumsfeld knows what he’s doing?”

I wouldn’t say she gave me a half smile, it was more like a third, but it was still a lot better than the habitual frown. “No, that he was secretary of defense twice before.”

“Just once,” I said, “under Gerald Ford.”

She turned and left the room without saying anything else, but I knew my stock was rising and might soon be worth as much as two hundred forty dollars.

There at the Hertz desk, when Maggie invited me over, I didn’t see any reason why not. It was Wednesday, so Jennifer had her night class, and I wouldn’t have to explain where I’d been. Besides, having a drink with a colleague didn’t constitute a crime. I’d done it before, though in the past the colleague had always been male. In fact, it had always been Ramsey.

BOOK: Safe from the Neighbors
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