Why Dogs Chase Cars (18 page)

“I don't know what you're talking about, either.”

“Paper's made of trees. Are they not teaching you anything at Forty-Five High? Goddamn. This is called
logic
. You got people out there yelling about saving
trees,
and they're sending
letters
to tell you about it. No one knows nothing no more.”

I didn't correct his speech because I thought it might be a ploy to hit me on the hamstrings. I said, “Shirley Ebo got some scrapes on her knees and butt and elbows, but nothing else. And I got some on my knees and elbows, trying to get her out.”

My father didn't listen. He picked up the telephone and started calling people to see if they had gotten the same kind of mail. I thought about how things would be different if my mother hadn't run away from home. No wife would allow her husband to obsess over junk mail. Then again, no good mother would allow for a cement truck parked in the front yard, a giant, empty, inviting hole making up most of its being.

I
'D BEEN TAUGHT
that life was relatively meaningless, too. I had been taught that no matter how good or bad a man happened to be, when he died—in time and eventually
—he would be forgotten for what good he did or forgiven for what bad he did. My father said the same for women, I should mention. No matter what good a woman did—say Madame Curie—she would be forgotten with time. Animals fell into the same categories as men and women. No matter how many laughs Mr. Ed had brought on, or how many tears Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and Old Yeller, they would die off after a meaningless life, and the rest of us would trudge on for no apparent reason.

Oh, man, listen: our home teemed with optimism.

If we had lived in an entirely conservative Jewish neighborhood, my father would have sent me out every Saturday morning to work hard publicly. But we didn't, and he and I lived in a predominantly Baptist setting, a verifiable Christian area, and although I pretended to be proud of our refutation of those tall tales in the Bible, it embarrassed me to go out Sunday mornings to cut the grass between ten and twelve thirty, or to clean out the gutters, or dig out built-up silt from the drainage ditch and throw it onto the nearby macadam.

“This can wait until next Saturday,” I always said.

“There's no time like the present for doing something that won't matter anyways for people living a life that doesn't matter in the first place,” he always said. It didn't take an advanced degree in existentialism to understand my father's paradox. By the time I conjured up enough vocabulary to verbalize my skepticism, though, he had already begun
using a cane. It took one strike on my hamstrings to remind me that, as a species on Earth, we were supposed to shy from pain as much as possible. I didn't know anything about hedonism, really—back then, at least—but I soon learned that any supposed comfort was still better than outright pain.

So on Sundays my father sent me out to do meaningless chores that may or may not have needed doing. I pulled his car or pickup truck down to the end of the driveway and changed the oil; I cut grass; I crawled around looking for dandelions, and sprayed the boundaries of our land with a homemade insecticide made up of Dad-pee and cheap beer—which meant it was basically just Dad-pee. I burned leaves in a fifty-five-gallon drum; I followed mole holes to nowhere. Every Sunday I went out to do something and stayed out there until somebody came to tell me how the Lord made Sundays for rest.

It was almost always Marvin Childress who bestowed this knowledge upon me.

Marvin Childress was one of a number of town fools, but he was known as the official one. None of us ever used that term around him, of course. How could we? Marvin made everyone in Forty-Five feel better about themselves. He wasn't a drunk, and his IQ might've been quite high in regard to psychological standards. He was forty-five years old, always, according to him. Marvin tended to walk into social settings and blurt out stuff like, “I must go now—
I have an important lecture to give at the University of Moscow,” or “When I was at the Sorbonne, I ate many, many snails. I don't do that anymore, though. I'm forty-five!” He stood five feet tall, had graduated from Anders College when it was still a religious institution, and came from a prominent Forty-Five family that had somehow thrived outside of the cotton mill community. Marvin bought one vitamin daily down at Durst Drugs from a pharmacist named Byrd who could cluck his tongue and make it sound like a cello. Marvin Childress kept a paperback world atlas in his back pocket, pulled it out often, and when out shopping said things like, “Potenza, Modenda, Lacenza, Grosseto—I've been there. Oh, I've been there. Don't you think that I haven't been there. I'm forty-five! Ciao!” and then he'd take off swishy as an Olympic walker. Sometimes it was “Segovia, Palencia, Villa Real—I've been there. Oh, I've been there. Don't you think that I haven't been there. I'm forty-five! Adios!” and so on. A couple times Marvin cited Canadian cities and said, “Au revoir” and “Ta-ta” before exiting.

It's necessary to understand that as much as my father distrusted everyone, and downright hated most people, he taught me not to make fun of Marvin Childress. He told me just to agree with whatever Mr. Childress said, especially if it had anything to do with religion or science, no matter what I thought was incorrect. “It don't matter none winning arguments with a fool,” my father said more than once. “What
matters is not getting swell-chested or big-headed after walking away from a man like Mr. Childress. Who wants to have
WON ARGUMENT AGAINST IDIOT
on his tombstone? Not me. It don't matter. You remember to be nice to that old boy, Mendal. That's more important than being correct.”

All of this does have to do with my father getting that letter from the environmentalists saying how he should be more careful with cutting down trees, by the way. Hold on.

Forty-five-year-old Marvin Childress—for all of his supposed IQ and awareness—went to church every Sunday at the Forty-Five Three Holy Trinity Ten Commandment Church, which was the only other cement structure on Dead-fall Road. Anytime one of my teachers asked what church we attended and someone mentioned Forty-Five Three/Ten, I thought of pro-football quarterbacks calling a play. From the first grade on, my father told me to say that I went to the Sixty-Nine Church of Sacred Lips, and for me to come home and say which teachers laughed and nodded and caught on. I did. They didn't.

Anyway, Marvin's church of choice—for me—was a regular mathematics problem, and he rode his old one-speed Schwinn bicycle right past our cement-block house on Dead-fall Road one-seventh of every week. The Sunday after I told my father about Shirley and me, I was standing out there painting the cement truck a variety of swirling colors because Dad had read an interesting article on hallucinogens, thought he might throw a big southern Woodstock one day,
and wanted to turn the drum around to make people say “Far out, man.” Marvin Childress came up as per custom, except he was carrying a beehive. He carried the entire white box atop his bicycle seat as he rolled it toward Forty-Five Three Holy Trinity Ten Commandment, the queen bee inside, workers zipping all around his uncovered face. I said, “Hey, Mr. Childress.”

He stepped down his kickstand, but held on to the hive. “You ain't supposed to be working on Sunday, monsieur,” he said.

I said, “Yessir,” because my father made me. If it'd been the mayor, or anyone who worked high up in the cotton mill, my response was supposed to be, “Is there anything in the Bible about taking a vow of silence? Why don't you just goddamn shut up.” And then I was supposed to run away toward the front door.

Marvin Childress had eyes that would've made a shark's seem penetrable. He had the eyes of a molester, but the mind of sweetgrass. “I got my bees in this box,” he said. “I'm taking them to the church. The good people there can put their jars down and get them the best honey this side of Tupelo, Mississippi. I've been there! I attended the University of Mississippi. You want some of God's sweet Truth nectar, you come on up to the church.” Those bees flew into his eyes. They lit in his tear ducts, but Marvin Childress didn't swat once.

I had made a wide swath of swirled red going down my
father's cement truck and had used half the blue paint. It was going to be a patriotic, hallucinogenic, twirling thing that I would later paint two big tits on and call the “Red, White, and Boobs” when I drove it around town. I said to Marvin Childress, “Yessir.”

He didn't move. The church sermon will start in ten minutes, I thought. He needed to get along to pour his slow honey for not-allergic-to-bee-stings parishioners. “God wants us to preserve and take care of His inventions, son. That's what He wants. He wants us to take care of what animals grew up in the Garden of Eden, and of what trees He blessed with petals.”

I looked at Mr. Childress's wooden beehive and said, “Somebody chopped down a tree for you to make that hive.” I pointed at the Bible in his hand. “Bible's made of paper. Paper made of wood. Wood from a tree. Tree from God. You're a sinner.”

What was I—fourteen, fifteen—old enough to know that I'd always have more questions than answers, that maybe I should've taken a vow of silence myself. I lived. People had lived before. Something bigger than us had made the universe. My father would beat me with a stick if he heard that I'd questioned a simple man.

“God made everything, but He wouldn't be upset with a Bible,” Marvin Childress said. “Oh, He'd be upset with about everything else we've done with His creation. I studied up on these things when I was over at the University of
Tokyo, teaching classes on economics and agriculture.” He handed me a sushi-bar menu tucked inside his Bible, right about in the Mark section. Who ate sushi in Forty-Five, South Carolina?

I said, “This menu is made of paper. It's from a tree. God made the tree, right?”

“Jesus was a fisherman,” Marvin Childress said. “You can look it up. It's in the third chapter, second verse, of Warren.”

My father came outside about this time and yelled. He pointed at the cement truck. My father waved his cane in the air as if swatting at Marvin Childress's stray bees. I said, “I'm working, I'm working.”

Thirty seconds later Mr. Childress picked up a rock the size of a baseball and hit me in the back of the head. Right before I went down I heard him say something about how any prophet with a chisel could etch out the eleventh commandment on a good-sized stone.

M
Y FATHER DIDN'T
press charges against Mr. Childress, and didn't even tell the police that he wanted one of those don't-come-within-five-hundred-yards injunctions. “It's your own damn fault, Mendal,” my father said at the emergency room. “I told you, never taunt an idiot. I have a good mind to take this hospital bill out of your allowance.”

The back of my head didn't require stitches, but I'd been knocked unconscious for a few minutes, and my father worried.
It wasn't the first time I woke up on the ground yelling out, “What day is it, what day is it?” Not that I was a clumsy child and teenager, but my head had a propensity for finding hard objects, from cement floors to hickory trees. On this occasion, I had looked up at the red and half-blue cement truck and thought I'd been run over somehow.

Dr. Wiggins came in and said, “Hey, Mendal, how you feeling?” He grabbed my knee. Dr. Wiggins had been my pediatrician since birth and had treated my father for gout, migraines, boils, snakebite, and food poisoning. Forty-Five wasn't the kind of town for specialists.

I said, “Fine. I got hit in the head with a rock by crazy Marvin Childress.”

“Fine? Then what the hell did I bring you all the way over here for, son?” my father yelled. Someone on the other side of the curtain kept screaming about how he'd gone blind. “You didn't feel so fine all blubbering in the front yard.” My father pulled a tongue depresser out of its dispenser, broke it lengthwise, and started cleaning his fingernails.

The doctor shined a light in my pupils and asked me to follow his finger. He felt my skull and said, “I don't have any experience with phrenology, really. Have you always had these knots on your head?” Dr. Wiggins had said the same thing every other time I got knocked out.

I didn't have time to answer. My father said, “That's from his mother's side of the family. They're a bunch of knot-heads
from way back.” It's what he always said, too.

Dr. Wiggins didn't laugh. My father didn't say, “That was a little joke.”

“I'm of the belief that you'll be okay. You need to stay away from whoever threw the rock at you, though, or at least keep him in front of you at all times,” the doctor said. “Anything else?”

My father nodded up and down. And I never have figured out what secret sign language he and Dr. Wiggins knew, but before I could say anything, the doctor pulled out a special foot-long cotton swab. He reached for a rubber mallet normally used for testing reflexes. “The boy says he had sex with a girl in the back end of my cement truck. While we're here, you want to go ahead and test him for the VDs?”

Years later I would figure out that my father had
paid
Marvin Childress to hit me in the head, so then I'd have to go to the doctor, so then I'd learn my lesson about unprotected sex. I figured out that my father bought the cement truck so I'd have a dark place to take girls, and he took the truck in payment on purpose, and so on. The chain of events was monumental, well planned, and far-reaching. On the butcher-paper-covered examination table, though, I didn't understand all of this, how this cause-and-effect went all the way back to God, really. When the doctor told me to drop my pants, I could only blurt out, “I didn't really have sex with Shirley Ebo, Dad. I promise. I was only talking big. It
was a joke. I made it all up.”