Why Dogs Chase Cars (24 page)

“We have a request to pray for a man who has cancer of the eye. We have a request for a man who has cancer of the foot.” The background organ seemed stuck. “A good daughter has asked that we pray for her father's missing fingers after a chain-saw accident. We have a prayer request from a wife who can no longer tell taste. She asks the Lord to let her know the difference between salt and pepper.”

I turned the radio off. My father's pickup truck hummed and hummed up the road. I found myself singing Merle Haggard songs, though I didn't like or understand him at the time, though I wasn't quite sure about the true lyrics.

I
PULLED INTO
the Slabtown Diner's gravel parking lot and, as a joke, gunned the truck toward my father. He leaned hard against our old Ford Galaxie's hood, and didn't move even when it looked like I meant business. I screeched to a halt, got out, and went for my father's neck, half-joking. My father didn't move. Had he known that I would find my birth certificate? Was this his way of letting me understand how maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought?

“It ain't a dry county, or a dry township,” he said. “In case you were wondering. Hey, did you bring that letter?”

I pointed my thumb toward the pickup. My father reached behind himself and grabbed a pint of Jim Beam. “You want you a swig? You old enough still.”

I shook my head no. “Come on,” I said.

He tensed his lips, then said, “I'll leave the car here. Hand me the keys. I think I remember where this land I bought might be.”

“Hadn't you better call this William G. Franklin man? There's not going to be a pay phone out in the middle of no-where, likely.”

My father pointed at me and raised his eyebrows. He smiled. “I knew there was a reason why I wanted to have you as a son. You're pretty smart. One time this old boy said you smelled, and I said, ‘Like shit he does.'”

“That joke's getting old, Dad.”

My father took the keys from my right hand. He got in the pickup, I got in the passenger side, and he said, “You want an old joke, call up your mother.”

Here's the law in South Carolina: If someone's squatting on your land, and if said person has planted a crop, nothing can be done about it if the crop stands half-past harvesting. If someone takes over land you own and sets out corn, and the corn gets to three feet high, then the true owner of the land can't do anything about it. If he does go back and, say, burns down the crop, then he can be sued by
the squatter. It goes all the way back to Civil War times. It goes back to Job, or at least when some Mormons traipsed through the region on their way to Utah, my father said.

This all came into play when my father and I met William G. Franklin at some mostly useless flat acreage somewhere between the Chattahoochee and Savannah rivers, a place that—in my later life—my father would sell for something like a million-times profit to California land developers who planned and built a townhouse and golf course retirement community that also had its own airstrip. Dad shook Mr. Franklin's hand, pointed to the middle of his plot, and said, “That ain't my snail-back trailer,” which stood amid pole beans, tomatoes, and watermelons. Marigolds appeared to be planted randomly.

Mr. Franklin stood tall. He wore both plaid pants and shirt, plus red suspenders. His hair stood straight up in what would later on be a good punk style. Although he didn't chew tobacco at the time, he owned two good juice gutters that framed his pointed chin. Mr. Franklin stared at me as if I had something to do with the situation. “I've seen this once before,” he said. He leaned one hand on his own truck, a Chevy.

I said, “Well. My name's Mendal. I'm his son.” My father looked out at the trailer. There seemed to be no sign of life there. Whoever owned the place didn't have a car parked in the middle of the field, and there were no tire tracks going that way. The three of us stood on the berm looking west,
the sun in our eyes.

Mr. Franklin scratched his crotch. “Them fields seem more'n half-past ready.”

“How and why is this a fire hazard?” my father asked. “There's something wrong going on here, but I don't see the fire hazard. Fire hazard's when you got a big old tank of kerosene next to an open fire.”

I kind of wanted to pull the pint of bourbon from my father's back pocket. I kind of wanted to drive back to the Slabtown Diner, get on the pay phone, and ask Shirley Ebo to meet me at the tent revival. “Let's go down there and knock on the door, y'all,” I said. It didn't seem like brain surgery.

Mr. Franklin pulled a pistol out of his boot. He said, “I think it's the only thing we can do.” He looked at me, but spoke to my father. “If some shooting goes on, can we count on the boy to keep quiet?”

Dad looked at the snail-back. “Can you keep quiet? You got it in you to be quiet should something bad happen?”

I said, “Me? I wouldn't wonder about me. Do you?” I thought about taking my birth certificate out of my pocket, and would have done so hadn't Mr. William G. Franklin stood there all staring down at me. I said, “I'll be quiet. In case we have to kill a man and stuff him in a freezer or something, bury him out in the front yard.”

“We won't have none of that,” Mr. Franklin said. “But I might have to call Larry for some help. He's another volunteer
fireman. He's a good one. And to be honest, sometimes he's a little more rational than I am. Larry. Larry.”

We walked down through tomato plants that had recently sprung green fruit no larger than jawbreakers. There were an inordinate number of spiderwebs connecting these plants. We passed the tomatoes, then the newly tendriled watermelons, then the pole beans. Mr. Franklin held his pistol in his right hand, knocked with his left a good hard five times. All of us heard a woman singsong out, “Hold on one second,” and then the trailer's small aluminum door swung open.

“Oh, hey! It's about time,” this wondrous woman said. She wore a sundress with spaghetti straps. Her black hair flowed in curls that seemed to spell out “beauty/beauty/beauty” in cursive. I had never seen such a vision, and I knew that my father and Mr. Franklin hadn't either, seeing as my dad's knees actually buckled, and William G. Franklin dropped his pistol right there in the dirt. “I take it y'all are from the extension service.”

My father smiled and shook his head sideways. “Do you want some bourbon?” He spoke so slowly that it sounded like a 45-rpm record set on 33.

The woman stepped down the twelve inches from her trailer. “I'm afraid there won't be room for all of us inside. My name's Eva Laws. Come on this way and I'll show you what I'm talking about.” For a second I thought she introduced herself as “Evil Laws,” for what it's worth.

She jumped down from her trailer and didn't turn around. Mr. Franklin reached down and picked up his pistol. Eva yelled over her shoulder, “In all my years working experimental crops, I've seen nothing like this.” She swished her rear end in a perfectly natural manner.

Some years later I would think that the only fire hazard present on my dad's property might have been him, the volunteer fireman, or me spontaneously combusting from Evil Laws.

About a hundred yards into the walk with Eva I noticed how writing spiders took up most of the space between the tomatoes. I'd learned early on that if you found your name in a writing spider's web, death was on its way down from above. The chances of a spider spinning out “Mendal” were pretty slim, but I swore I saw “Lee”—my father's name—more than once.

Eva stopped finally, and William G. Franklin said, “I think you have us confused with some other people. I'm the fire chief in Slabtown. This here's the man who owns the land. I sent him a letter a while back saying he had a fire hazard.”

I said, “I'm his son!” like that, all excited, idiotic. My voice actually cracked in the middle of yelling out. I didn't think about my fake sociological marriage to Shirley Ebo, or how I couldn't tell whether my biological father was a madman or saint.

Eva turned and said, “Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought y'all were from the extension service. I think I've come across an
as-yet-to-be-discovered insect, and I wanted to bring someone down here. It looks like a praying mantis and a wolf spider got together somehow.”

“Like I was saying, we come out here for the hazard,” the fire chief said.

I couldn't stop staring at this Eva woman. I daydreamed about moving into the trailer with her, about fixing her breakfast each morning, about going out at daybreak to pick fruits and vegetables. She said, “My area of expertise is organic gardening. I don't use pesticides.”

I said, “That's good. I've been reading up on that lately.” My father grabbed my shoulder and pulled me behind him, out of the woman's view.

“W
HAT HAPPENED WAS
this,” Mr. William G. Franklin said. “I happened by one afternoon, and the sun beat down on your silver trailer, and a big glare shot off that way.” He pointed with a wave of his hand toward the pole beans. “I figured that it might be like holding a magnifying glass down toward dry grass, you know. That they was a chance the hot glare reflection could catch a leaf on fire, and then the whole place would go up.”

We stood in front of Eva's abode. My father said, “That ain't gone happen, Franklin. What are the chances of that happening?”

I couldn't help but stare at the woman. She said, “If I'd've known about that, I would've pitched a tent out here. And
the whole reason why I'm here is because my professor told me that this land was owned by the university. I'm sorry. I'll be leaving tomorrow.”

I said, “No, no, no,” as if I were in control. My father looked at me, but the fire chief didn't.

“You put a tarp on top your trailer, I think we'll be fine,” the fire chief said.

“Yeah,” my father said. “I got a couple extras back home. I'll bring them over tomorrow. What, again, are you doing here, though?”

Eva went into some long-winded discouse about how she planted her crops and marigolds in purposeful patterns. She said something about how tomatoes attract aphids, that aphids attract praying mantises, and that any spider with a mantis in its web is a contented spider. Eva said that if we viewed the field from above, we would see that she had tomatoes encircled by pole beans, encircled by watermelons. We would see other areas where marigolds stood in the center, followed by watermelons, then pole beans, then tomatoes. Oh, she went through every possible configuration, and I thought about this woman later on in college when I was forced to take a mathematics course involving statistics and probability. She finished up with, “You fellows want any coffee, or some iced tea? I feel badly that you came all the way out here.”

My father reached in his back pocket and pulled out his
half-gone pint. He said, “I don't reckon.”

William G. Franklin said, “No ma'am. I guess we're done here if you promise to cover your shiny edges with them tarps.” He backed up, then turned toward the road. “I need to get back to my real job. This is done business. If anyone needs some cabinet work, come see me. That's what I try to do when I ain't out looking for glares.”

I would later know that my father wanted me out of there, that he wanted to talk to this Eva Laws scientist all alone. But at the time I could only say, “I've always had a fascination with scientists. With science. I might go study up on some science when I go to college. I'm thinking about being a vegetarian.”

My father could say nothing. He looked at Eva, and then she said, “I came from a whole series of scientists, in their own ways. My mother dropped out of college to marry my father back in Chicago. My father's father was a carpenter, and my father ended up working for General Motors. But my mother always concocted home cold remedies and household cleaning products. My mother's brother ended up working in the nuclear power industry, and my father's sister and her husband raised milk cows up in Wisconsin. I have a cousin who invented a better milking machine. They send me cheese hoops every Christmas, and I send them canned vegetables.”

Here's what my father got out: “So you're not from
around here, are you?” And it was at this point that I understood how my mother, more than likely, got knocked up by some stranger, that I got born, and then my father married Mom out of pity, duty, or some kind of unresolved guilt.

Eva pulled her head back and laughed. “I've been down south now for six years. I guess if I live to be a hundred I still won't be from around here.”

I wanted to belt out, “Me either!” and take my birth certificate out, maybe explain how my biological father might've been a northern salesman, or a midwestern soldier. I said, “What's your last name again?”

“It's Laws. I'm legal.” She laughed.

Again I thought, Evil Laws. My father said, “Well, we better be going. I'll drop by tomorrow with the tarps. Maybe I can work out some kind of lease agreement with your people at the university for next year, you know. I hope you find out what you want to learn, whatever it is you want to learn.”

Eva Laws said, “I do, too. I'm small-time, but in the long run I'm thinking what experiments I'm doing might help us all be healthier.”

My father took the back of my neck and led us to the truck.

At the Slabtown Diner I opened the passenger-side door and got out before my father had stopped completely. He put the truck in neutral and got out. “I'll meet you at home,”
he said. “Maybe tonight we can go down to Forty-Five Barbecue and get us some ribs.”

I said, “Okay,” though I really wanted Shirley Ebo to come over so I could show her my birth certificate.

“All right. I'll be right behind you.”

I took off before checking if my father had accidentally left his lights on, or his door open, if his battery had worn down. But I didn't burn rubber out of the gravel parking lot. There was a straightaway down Highway 135, enough for me to look in the rearview mirror and see my father turn the other way, back toward Eva Laws's snail-back trailer.