Why Dogs Chase Cars (12 page)

My father and I stood in the backyard, planting tomatoes a month too late. “Listen, boy. You think
we
ain't got nothing? Try the Ebos. Go on over there and see what they got. How many times have we eaten
grass soup
for supper? Never. The Ebos eat grass soup when they can't catch catfish down on the Saluda. Or when Mr. Ebo can't veer just right and take out one of those suicidal strays chasing his truck.”

I'd grown old enough to know not to ask if my mother whored around but not enough to know not to say, “Grass soup? They eat grass soup and dead dogs?” My father found a tomato stake that could've been used in the Kentucky Derby and whipped me like a gelding wanting to turn around
in the middle of the second turn. He snapped my hamstrings until I made my way out of the garden. I might've said, “Hey, you son of a bitch, that hurts like hell.” Or I might've said, “Hey. Hey, stop, sir, please. Hey, hey, ouch.”

It doesn't matter. My father said, “You'll find a way for Shirley Ebo to read, you understand me, son? There's no question about any of this. You'll find a way to change Shirley Ebo.”

S
HIRLEY NEVER SPOKE
in class because she had what I learned some years later was called “dialect interference.” That would've been a nice and bland term to explain Shirley's speech. No wonder she only stared straight ahead when called upon by our teachers.

My father drove me over to the Ebos' house, a mile away from mine, let me out, and drove away. Mr. Ebo answered my knock. He said, “Mendal Dawes. I forgot total.” It was noon. He worked midnight to eight over at Forty-Five Cotton; Mrs. Ebo worked there first shift as a secretary for one of the purchasing agents.

I said, “I brought along a couple books. I thought we might just start reading a couple books.”

Mr. Ebo stepped back and yelled, “Shirley Ebo! Mendal here to teach you,” as if she might've been lounging around at the far end of the Biltmore Estate. The Ebos' square, shingle-sided home wasn't any larger than a classroom, and was divided into three rooms. An add-on toilet/shower installation
stuck out from the living room.

Shirley slumped out of her bedroom as if she was facing two bushels of hickory nuts to crack. She barely held up one hand toward me, I supposed in greeting, and her white palm glistened. I said, “Hey, Shirley. I brought along a couple books. I thought we might just start reading a couple books.”

I didn't make fun of Shirley Ebo then, and I don't want to now, but she said, exactly, “They weren't no monkeys on the
skreet
? How you get here? Anaconda's
skrong,
knock you off your bike.”

I said, “I could've ridden my bike. My father was going by this way so he brought me over.” I patted down my wonderfully new and mostly maroon plaid short-sleeved shirt.

Mr. Ebo left the house. He said, “I got to go to the doctor, babydoll. I'll be back before your momma.”

I said good-bye, Mr. Ebo drove off in his old pickup, and Shirley sat down on a love seat. “Daddy's heart's hurting. He got to have a skress test.”

I stood there like a dumbskruck white boy in a black family's house for the first time. But this wasn't the case, really. My father, in an attempt to make me know that people lived differently than we did, went out of his way to find albinos, one-armed men, burn victims, waterheads, and vegetarians for me to meet. He drove me all the way over to Augusta, Georgia, the previous summer to shake hands with Siamese twins joined at the chest. So I'd been in houses owned by
members of the African-American community, but I'd never been alone with a girl whom I may or may not have secretly desired to kiss, feel up, and see what other parts of her body faded away from the dark-dark skin of Shirley Ebo's face, arms, and legs.

I said, “Have you had a good summer so far?”

Shirley rolled her eyes. She wore a thin, thin, cotton dress, mostly pink, that seemed to be see-through in my mind. Shirley said, “Well, I guess. It only been three days, Mendal. I ain't seen no movies or nothing.”

The Ebos' house smelled different than anything I'd experienced nasally before. Its scent was a grand mixture of collard greens, pomade, boiled sweetmeats, fatback, and maybe witch hazel. The word
permeate
did no justice to what the heavy gray air that filled Shirley's home did. I looked at my own arms to see what kind of odd plaster cast had formed on my skin as I still stood in the middle of the room, within a couple yardsticks' reach of a console TV, a ceramic sculpture of a donkey, a ceramic sculpture of a black man wearing overalls and a straw hat, two ladderback chairs, and Shirley in the love seat. Four or five steps away stood a metal-legged table, an old-timey Hoosier cabinet, and a chest-high refrigerator with a chalkware sculpture of an African queen on top. Two hot plates stood on either side of a double-drainboard white enamel sink. I said, “Yeah. Yeah. Me either.”

Thank God Shirley got up and went toward the table. She
pulled out a chair for herself and said, “We can read here. I got growing pains and need to skretch my legs 'bout every ten minutes.”

In a movie there would've been a close-up of my face, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, and a
boy-yoi-yoi-yoing
sound effect would've taken over.

But at the time, no movie companies chose to film in Forty-Five, South Carolina, instead of on Hollywood lots. I said, “I brought a book called
The Strapping Stray Dogs of Street and Stream,
” as a joke. At least that's how I remember it, and the reason she held up her open palm as if to slap me.

D
AD PICKED ME
up ninety minutes after our agreed-upon time. I hadn't been supposed to teach English to Shirley Ebo for but an hour. Her father never showed up, either. Shirley and I got through half of some book I brought along about a little boy who complained and whined because no one liked his artworks, and in the end he found out that everybody in town outside of him was a genius—including the one man who liked the boy's paintings. And that man was blind. I think my father had found the old, worn story and given it to me as some kind of lesson to stay away from all those whiney “misunderstood” artists.

Shirley and I read a couple pages of the second book, about a white dog that ran loose and attacked the main character,
who “skruck it and skruck it with a skraight, hard skick,” according to Shirley Ebo.

I said, “I don't know how to tell you this, Shirley, but you have some kind of weird speech impediment. Say ‘string.'”

“Skring.”

“Do you hear that? Can you hear the difference? You're making a
K
sound when it should be a
T
sound. Say this.” I had to think a minute. I had to exhale the dull, thick air. “My father doesn't want to have a stroke.”

She said, “Skroke.” But she smiled and slapped her bony knee. “Daggum. I hear it! Hey, I also say ‘ax' instead of ‘ax,' like ‘Ax me a question.'”

I said, “Uh-huh. I was going to wait on that one. We were going to get to that one, too.”

She shrugged. She stood up, sat down, and performed a side-to-side stretch when the growing pains came on. Shirley said, “My momma made some brownies for us to eat. I guess we better eat them.”

It was obvious that she hadn't planned to offer me these homemade brownies ever, but with my father so late she had little choice. We dug in. Shirley took a serrated knife, split the pan into quarters, and shoved her delicate fingers in. Listen. I've thought about the next part of this story almost daily for thirty years. It doesn't even make sense, logically, stylistically, or oratorically.

With her mouth full of brownie mix, Shirley Ebo said,
“My momma says this goes straight to your butt. It makes me feel stronger, though.”

If we'd've taken a French class at Forty-Five Junior High I might've screamed out “Voilà!” If we'd've known more about anything else outside of South Carolina, from Greece to Gold Rush, I would've yelled “Eureka!” I took Shirley's hand, took her out on the porch, looked around, then walked her out into the middle of Deadfall Road. I'd been taught well enough by my tardy father never to curse inside anyone's house against whose walls curses might never have reverberated previously. I said, “Goddamn, Shirley, can't you hear yourself? When you have something stuck inside your mouth, you end up speaking perfectly.”

I'll admit that I wouldn't figure out until about my sophomore year in college how I could've taken advantage of the situation.

Shirley swallowed. “Quit yelling out here, man. You crazy? Get back in the house and quit skrutting around.” In a high, piercing voice she squealed, “I don't want no one seeing me out here with no fool white boy.”

Listen, this would be a good time to go fill the roof of your mouth with anything from Cheez-whiz to white bread. Go say the word “strumpet.” Notice how it comes out more like “skrumpet,” and wonder how Miss Shirley Ebo maneuvered backwards through this whole process.

Well, anyway that's what I did after my father finally showed up. I said to him, “Where the hell have you been?”

My father tooted the horn at no one in particular, and drove in the wrong direction for our pathetic cinder-block house. He said, “Wait'll you hear what I just discovered.” I could smell his breath across the front seat. “If you urinate Pabst Blue Ribbon on fire ant mounds and molehills, they leave. Don't think I'm not thinking about calling the patent office in Washington right before I call the people at PBR.”

I slumped deep down in our front seat holding my two books. I smelled my index and middle fingers, only because my friend Compton Lane had told me a joke one time. “What?” I said.

“There ain't no mole can't live nowhere when I'm out pissing,” my father said. “Beat
that,
English professor. Another
quadruple
negative I've designed.”

I looked out the window and laughed. “A zebra has skripes,” I said. “Skripes. What did Darwin think about that?”

My father floored it. He didn't say how he wished he'd never bought me a set of encyclopedias. “How'd it go with Shirley Ebo?”

I turned in my seat. “She can speak right with her mouth full, but can't otherwise. She'd be fine reading out loud in school when the teacher asks, if the teacher would let her eat about ten pieces of taffy right before.”

My father eased off the gas. He turned left on Northside Drive. “Obviously I wasn't the best husband ever, and that might be why I don't know what's better—a woman who
can't speak closed-mouth, or a woman who can rattle on while holding a banana in her mouth.” My father flipped the radio on. I didn't follow what he'd said. “Hell, maybe either both are good or neither's good, I don't know.”

I didn't know what he was talking about and figured—as usual—that he was continuing some imaginary conversation he'd been having with himself earlier. I said, “Next week we're going to concenkrate on verbs.”

T
HIS WAS EITHER
selfish or all-out mean, but I started taking my set of encyclopedias to Shirley Ebo's house, and I didn't start with the A–B volume. No, I went straight to the S volume of a New Standard Encylopedia and jumped to the
str-
section. I'm talking we started off with
strabismus,
and we ended with
strychnine
. In between we learned all about
stroboscopes, Strindberg,
four or five different
Strausses,
and
Stratford-on-Avon,
among other things. We learned that Shirley couldn't pronounce a
str-
word correctly with an empty and hollow soft palate, but she could enunciate like any anal-retentive spelling bee champion when she shoved marshmallows, pimento cheese, or homemade white bread way up there in the cavern—the dome—I couldn't see without dental and/or caving instruments.

“We never heard her talk funny or different than us,” Mrs. Ebo said one afternoon when she'd gotten half a day off on the Fourth of July. “'Cause I guess every time we talk
to her, it's with her mouth full. Dinner and breakfast.”

I said, “My father thinks maybe an orthodontist might have some kind of contraption to shove up Shirley's mouth roof, kind of like a retainer. I'm going to get braces in August up in Greenville and I'll ask.”

Mrs. Ebo sliced pork shoulder on the countertop, then minced it. On one of the hot plates she simmered a concoction of vinegar, mustard, scallions, ramps, and hot peppers. “We'll make do with something, Mendal. Don't you worry. But I can tell you right now, we ain't got the money for no fancy dentist.” She walked over to the tiny refrigerator and pulled off an oven mitt she'd stuck there with duct tape.

I thought to volunteer my dad but knew that he didn't have the money to get braces for even me, really. He had agreed to trade out free installed flooring in the orthodontist's house, plus he would spend a weekend or two painting the doctor's place of work, both inside and out. I said, “Maybe my father can invent something. He's always inventing devices and cures.” I didn't go into what he thought was patentable.

The whole time I spoke with Mrs. Ebo, watching her hand flake pig, then knead sauce into it, Shirley sat on the love seat, drumming and tapping her fingers on a one-by-six piece of pine maybe eighteen inches long. Every half minute she said, “Ding.”

I looked behind me and said, “What're you doing, Shirley Ebo?”

She raised her white palms. “Momma taught me how to type. I'm practicing.”

“When she gets good enough I'mo let her sneak in the mill and work on mine. Best a black girl can do in South Carolina these days's work as a secretary,” Mrs. Ebo said. In that high, whining, barely audible voice her daughter always used on me when things seemed wrongheaded, Mrs. Ebo said, “Harder to trace a threatening letter or ransom note typed up on a Royal.”