Why Dogs Chase Cars (23 page)

Jimmy Wingard tried to run and hide from everyone. Bingham Bradham tagged along right at his side, all hunkered down and sideways. No one realized that it would've only took someone with a steady hand and a sharp knife to release these two fuckups. I would've volunteered if I'd've had the gloves in my possession.

M
Y FATHER SAT
up in his worn, green, pathetic cloth chair. After Compton and I left the pre-debutante party we drove around—as we were wont to do anyway—laughing about our little prank, as if it were the best thing this side of disposable lighters. Compton came inside with me to help me regale my father with our escapade.

We didn't get the homecoming we'd expected. After we told the story, my father sat up and said, “You should both be ashamed of yourselves. That's one of the worst things I've
ever heard of.”

In the previous dozen years or so I had witnessed my father gluing people's mailboxes so they wouldn't open, letting air out of their tires, placing fake auction notices in the newspaper so that strangers invaded an unsuspecting man's Saturday morning, and so on. I'd seen Comp's father do the same. My father had disguised his voice over the telephone daily one bleak winter and invited a hopeful cemetery-plot salesman over to all his enemies' houses.

I had sat in the den and listened back then: “Yeah, this is Gray Dunlap, and I'm wanting to talk to someone about getting an entire crypt for my family.” My father would give the address of Mr. Dunlap's house, hang up, then look at me and say, “I wish I could be a sweat bee flying around when that guy shows up and says, ‘Mr. Dunlap, I understand that you've finally come to grips with the inevitable.'”

My father knew the grave-plot seller's speech because one Saturday a year earlier—and for all I knew maybe Comp's father had sent the guy over as a practical joke—my father had listened to the pitch.

I pulled the Welch's jelly jar from Compton's borrowed coat pocket and said, “You want some rum, Daddy?”

He took it from me and set it on the end table. “You might be drinking too much. How're you going to concentrate in college, boy?” He looked at Compton. “Either one of you. They ain't gone be booze at every corner of the dorm when y'all go off to college. Maybe y'all should try to wean yourselves
over this next-to-last summer. Those smart college boys ain't gonna be too keen on your silly hoaxes. They won't fall for them, and they'll get even.”

I'll give myself this: I never contradicted my father when I learned that he really didn't know about college. I never pointed out that, first off, there
was
booze at every corner of the dorm, and that supposedly smart college boys—especially the ones from up north—did indeed fall for such pranks.

Compton said to my father, “Maybe you're not getting a true visual of this situation. One end of the Chinese handcuffs was on Bingham Bradham's index finger, and the other was on Jimmy Wingard's tallywhacker, Mr. Dawes. They kept pulling and pulling it tighter.”

My father struggled up, grabbed his cane, took my jelly jar, and drank what was left. He said, “How would you like it if those boys did that to you? Y'all would be scarred for life. You'd never be able to come back to Forty-Five for the rest of your days.”

I didn't say, “I have no intention of coming back here again anyway.” I didn't say how they typed up
MENIAL
for my name tag. I said, “I'm sorry. I thought you'd think this was funny.”

“Well, maybe I would think it was funny if I could laugh without it killing my goddamn diaphragm.” He held his floating ribs.

I looked at Comp. I'm not one of those people who says later on that he saw a death mask on someone else's face a
day before that person died. But I foresaw the wrinkles and worry on Compton's face—though I couldn't know that he would eventually become a good veterinarian driven out of business down in Montgomery, Alabama, by a group of rabid right-to-life pinheads opposed to spaying God's creatures—and knew that he would end up in Forty-Five sad, puzzled, and alone. In that moment, too, I understood that I would be bringing a smart wife back home to Forty-Five, that she wouldn't be happy whatsoever, and that we would spend a year in my father's cement-block house trying to sell off what leftover heart-pine wood, what sunken signs, my father had made me gather and store, that she and I would dig holes forever to uncover those things my progenitor understood, rightly, as valuable.

I never foresaw the wild local curs giving up and settling down.

My father limped to the phone, dialed up the hospital, and directed his call to Herbert Coleman's room. I assume that Mr. Coleman answered, for my father said, “I got back home all right, and I remembered something I meant to tell you earlier.” Then he began singing “I'll Fly Away.”

I threw my car keys to Compton and told him to drive himself home, then come back and get me in the morning. I told him I would pay him cash money to help me take a
slave cabin down the next day on the old, old, old Latham land my father'd bought up thirty days beforehand. Compton shrugged okay.

My father continued singing. I went back to my bedroom and pulled out the journal. I wrote down what splinters I'd pulled out before putting on my borrowed suit. And then, without knowing that I'd do it, I began writing about what had happened at the party, and everything—and I mean everything—that had led to that day, empty or not.

The fire-retarded, triple-lined, steel-enforced Maxi-Cure safe stood inside a square false ammo box, inside a false cupboard, beneath a fake floor, behind a faux closet behind my father's empty rifle cabinet in the hallway. I had looked in there before, when I felt sure that he would be gone for more than six hours. There were skeleton keys with which to deal, then regular keys, then suitcase keys. The safe's combination was “left to 36, right to 24, left to 34”—what my missing mother's measurements supposedly were. My father had never divulged these numbers, but it didn't take but a few times of my looking on the backs of picture frames, family photos, book jackets, and beneath brown eggs in the refrigerator's dairy section to figure out why that series meant so much to him. Normally I only found a bunch of papers that dealt with land transactions. Sometimes I found a lucky acorn or arrowhead, a thick piece of quartz, maybe a buffalo nickel.

“I want you to go into the hallway and move the gun cabinet off to the right,” my father called to say one Saturday afternoon.

I had answered with, “Hey, Shirley, sweetie, what you want to do this fine day?” like an idiot, because my father had left a note saying he'd be gone until past supper, and
Shirley Ebo had sent me a note during class the day before saying she wanted to either have me sit still for a couple hours so she could paint me for her art class, or go see a crazy, white, traveling tent-revival evangelist who could make people fall down at will.

My father said, “Well I might have the wrong number, son.”

I about hung up. I should've hung up, and when he called back I could've said, “I've been here all day. I didn't just pick up the phone,” et cetera. I said, “Hey, Dad. I thought you were going to be Shirley. I was playing.”

“Listen. This is important.” I heard cars or trucks driving by. “A while back I got a call saying my twenty acres over here in Slabtown is some kind of fire hazard. I want you to go to the safe and find what that old boy's name was wrote me that letter.”

I still tried to think of excuses as to why I had called Shirley “sweetie.” I said, “I'll have to put the phone down.”

My father said, “Shirley Ebo your official girlfriend finally? I don't know what the people of Forty-Five will say about your white ass having a black girlfriend. But I ain't surprised in you, boy. Plums are good, but bruised plums make for better pudding.”

I set the phone down. I could hear my father laughing, then heard him say, “Hey, hey, hey! You got to listen to me on how to get here.”

I picked up the phone. “She's not my girlfriend. We're
taking that sociology course together. We got teamed up together and are supposed to act like husband and wife.” This had actually happened. “We're supposed to act in ways that'll keep one of us from leaving the other, out of the blue.” I knew that my father would change the subject when the notion of monogamy cropped up, or his mismanaged attempt toward it some decade earlier.

“You got to go beneath the house and get a crowbar, then crack open this place that looks like it got plain sealed up for good in the wall.”

I didn't say that I knew already. I didn't say how I'd learned to patch drywall all by myself because of cracking—then resealing—his hidden, hidden, hidden, hidden safe. I listened like the good son. I went “Yessir” when he was done.

My father said, “It might take you thirty minutes.” He went through where all of his odd keys hung. “The paper I want will say something about a fire hazard, and Slabtown. It should be near the top of the pile. The first four to ten envelopes is what I'm saying. I'll call back.”

“Where are you now?”

My father said to someone walking by, “Hey, is it true that this is still a dry county?” To me, he said, “I'm here. Don't worry about where the hell I am. You worry about finding that fellow's number before I stick another dime plus more in this telephone.”

I said, “Okay then,” and hung up.

It didn't take the beneath-the-house-crowbar to open up the drywall seams, let me say right now. I had a flathead screwdriver I'd been using since about the age of twelve, plus the sharp edge of a putty knife. I pulled the gun cabinet aside and slit the drywall tape, pulled the door open, and so on. I got to the safe, opened it, and noticed a mesh bag of handmade marbles that moved when I pulled the door my way. I started opening envelopes, and more envelopes. I went four-to-ten-envelopes down.

When I found what my daddy wanted, I set it aside. What other documents did he hide? I wondered. Oh, I found all kinds of IOUs from Compton Lane's father, and Glenn Flack's, and Libby Belcher's, and even Forty-Five's ex-mayor Dash Mozingo. They ranged from two hundred to two thousand dollars, and were dated from before my birth in 1958 right on up until 1975. I found something like two dozen four-leaf clovers, all laminated singly. My father had saved cocktail napkins from far-off places like Charlotte, Charleston, Atlanta, and a joint called the Wicked Witch in Greenville, up sixty miles north on Highway 25. He had an Esso map of the eastern United States with a thick pen mark showing the closest routes between Forty-Five and Nashville, and Memphis, and New Orleans. I found what I thought were my old dog's toenails in an envelope, what I thought were my baby teeth in an amber druggist's vial, and a rubber change purse with what I understood to be two gold fillings
that had once resided in the mouth of a man my father punched out, seeing as Dad had written, “I guess this makes us even” on the outside.

There may have been other little gimcracks and trinkets, I don't remember. I dove my hand down six inches and pulled out one thin sheet of paper. It happened to be my birth certificate. I looked and saw my mother's name, that I was twenty-two inches long, that I weighed an amazing nine pounds and fourteen ounces. The doctor's name was Wilson.

My father, the document read, was unknown.

When the telephone rang and I picked it up in the den, my father said, “Did you find that letter?”

I said, “Oh I got it, man. I got it.”

He said, “Have you been drinking?”

I heard more cars driving by on his end of the line. “No sir.”

“Hey, is there any way you can bring that over here? I might need the pickup in case I have to haul something away. Do you know where I am in Slabtown? I'm at the intersection, you know. We've been here before. In front of the Slabtown Diner on the corner of 86 and 135. It might take you an hour.”

I said, “What? I don't know, Dad. Shirley's supposed to come over here because the time's right for us to make a baby. What? What?” Then I laughed and laughed, and thought about my father's brown eyes, a face that wasn't close to mine, his nonchin. My mother had been gone so long that I
didn't even remember what she looked like. I said, “I can drive your pickup.”

Again my father asked somebody near his pay phone if it was a dry county, like he didn't already know every inch of South Carolina's Blue Laws, from Myrtle Beach to Caesar's Head. I'd seen him ask this question a thousand times before, and realized that he was only waiting for some stranger to tell him where a bootlegger lived.

I left the secret door to the secret cabinet to the secret safe in the false floor wide open, though I folded my birth certificate in half and shoved it into my back pocket. I took Highway 25 north toward Slabtown, driving with my right wrist draped across the steering wheel in the manner of my father—I even thought about how he drove thusly, how it must've been genetic. I didn't stop at Rufus Price's Goat Wagon for an eight-pack of Miller ponies or a mason jar of homemade peach bounce, should my father never learn Slabtown's local laws. I drove the speed limit, veered from potholes, and tried to find a radio station that didn't play country music.

“We have a prayer request for a nearsighted husband who keeps missing things by about two inches,” this radio preacher said on one of the AM stations. “We have a prayer request for a sister who has too much love. We have a request for a son who takes to the drink.” The background music wasn't any different from that played during a viewing. “We have a request for a boy who don't treat his parents
right.”

The letter from one volunteer fire chief, William G. Franklin, set opened on the bench seat. My birth certificate about burned a hole in my pocket. I sat up, pulled it from my backside, and reread, “Father Unknown.” How could I bring this question up to my father? Would I? Did it matter whatsoever that I might not know my own people?