Why Dogs Chase Cars (29 page)

Oh, we watched. We got out the binoculars and telescope. We set up and pointed toward the subdivision, and we watched as DHEC officials ran their specialized detectors aboveground.

“You ought to go ahead and fashion a letter about how you don't appreciate a nuclear dumping ground behind the house,” Lyla said. “Listen.” She stuck her hand to her left ear. “Can you hear the sound of falling property values?”

W
ITHIN THE WEEK
they had pulled my father's fake toxic drums out of half the lots. It made the front page of the newspapers all over the state.
NO ONE KNOWS
, ran the
headline up in Greenville. In Columbia, the investigative reporter wrote a series on the history of illegal toxic dumping in the state. Our hometown paper, the
Forty-Five Platter,
in a bigger font than for V-Day, ran
SHERWOOD FOREST CALLED A DUMP
. At this point no one had tested the barrels' contents only to find an inch or two of human urine, if indeed it hadn't seeped through or evaporated.

Lyla and I walked over there once the yellow plastic
DO NOT CROSS
lines went up. I couldn't help but wonder, How did my father know this would happen? How did he know to plant drums in what would one day be nouveau riche people's front yards?

This was seven o'clock in the evening. No one was sitting on front porches, or cutting grass, or washing an SUV in the driveway. Lyla and I walked down the middle of Desdemona Lane without threat of traffic. Brown free-tailed Mexican bats flitted barely above us. A few children peeked out from their parents' living room windows. I said, “This is nothing but cool.”

Lyla said, “It might be the meanest thing I've ever witnessed.”

I tried to not consider how the scams I had connived during my lifetime emanated directly from the small town that spawned me. I said, “Yeah. Who'd've thought that my dad would've seen this far ahead? Damn his time.”

But what a great trick! I tried not to giggle or jump up and click my heels three times. Lyla and I walked through Sherwood Forest holding hands. It was as if we were the
only living human inhabitants in the middle of a disaster zone. No dogs ran out toward us baring teeth. No person stood stupid with a rake in his hand, staring. “From above, I bet it looks like giant groundhogs came through here,” Lyla said. She ran her hand through the air, gesturing at heaps of red clay piled beside the holes.

“My father kind of had a Sisyphus complex. Instead of rolling boulders to nowhere he just dug holes, it appears. Who in Greek mythology kept digging holes for nothing?”

Lyla said, “I bet it was Diogenes. The dog philosopher. So, not a myth—a real person.”

I let go of Lyla and stepped over someone's caution tape. The man of the house opened his kitchen door and yelled, “Don't do that, man. Get away from that hole unless you're from the nuclear facility.”

I looked at him and ambled across his once perfectly manicured patch of Bermuda grass. I said, “I live over there,” and pointed to the back of my property. “Are you one with your homeowners association?”

He closed his storm door and watched me through the glass. I walked toward him and slid my hand across his Jeep Grand Cherokee, parked—I assumed not in his garage so he could make a better getaway—in the side yard. “Yes,”
he said.

“Tell your people that my wife and I don't appreciate how y'all's yards are bringing down our property value. We can't get anyone to look at the cement-block house, seeing as prospective buyers fear all of y'all's open holes.”

From the driveway Lyla waved like a float-riding beauty queen. At first I thought she was taunting this poor man—a fellow named Klauber, I learned later, who commuted all the way to Columbia daily in order to talk state legislators into backing prayer in schools, Confederate flags on public buildings, no lotteries, no Sunday sales of booze, no abortions, and so on. He was a pathetic Conservative lobbyist concerned with holding people back from their inalienable rights unless they had to do with firearms. But as Lyla and I trekked home, I realized that she had waved to me, too. Was she saying good-bye? Was she practicing one of those yoga poses?

I said something about how I would confess to my father's trick, how I would use our heart-pine money to clean up what yards lay behind us. After I interpreted my wife's face I knew that it wouldn't matter, that she'd shifted her views from victimizer to victim. After I volunteered to side our house with yardsticks—thus making it easier to figure out its overall square footage—my wife, I felt certain that night, would apply to a university somewhere far away in order to take additional courses in anthropology before going on with her life, either emptied or fulfilled.

If forced to reflect on when my marriage might have started to fall apart, I began with how I'd told Lyla I once owned a significant collection of Houdini memorabilia that had simply vanished into thin air. We weren't even married yet—this was second-date material. It took me eighteen-plus years to understand the root of our problems. I'm talking I went backwards in time with the marriage counselor.

Lyla studied his wallpaper, as best as I could tell, while the counselor twisted hairs on his beard, on the left side of his lip like, I'm sure, he'd seen in movies. I said, “I was brought up believing that the whole process of death begins the moment you're born. Every day gone is a day of dying. Maybe it's the same in marriage. Like, as soon as vows are taken there in a Gatlinburg wedding chapel, the process of divorce kicks in. I'm a big-time believer that marriage is the number one cause of divorce in America, doctor. You
are
a doctor, right?”

The counselor pointed at three diplomas and a series of bona fide certificates. Lyla said, “I knew you wouldn't take this seriously, Mendal.” To the counselor she said, “What did I tell you.”

My wife and I sat together on a couch, and Dr. Boyce sat behind his desk. This was all the way up in Asheville, a three-hour drive away for us. Lyla'd seen Boyce do an interview concerning life choices, the alignment of planets, and carbohydrate intake on some ETV show. That's all she needed to be convinced.

“Yes, I am. I'm serious,” I said to the psychologist. “Is there any way we could turn off those fake-waterfall machines over there? The sound of running water makes me want to pee.”

Boyce got up and unplugged a miniature statue of urns, one tipping into another, and another, and another. He was wearing wool pants in summer, I noticed. “Y'all are what—early forties? Don't think you're alone in this situation. I'm always happy when patients come in without black eyes and slashed wrists. I think we can work this out.” Then he reached into a drawer and said, “Who wants a Rice Krispie Treat?”

Lyla and I shook our heads no. He unwrapped his and started crunching away. I got up and turned one fake waterfall back on. Lyla said, “Control freak.”

Dr. Boyce said, “You may be a confused water sign. Are you Pisces or Aquarius?”

You'd have to know me to understand how little I respect people who ride the pop-psychology/zodiac wave blindly toward rocky, oil-slicked shores. Anyway, I said, “Taurus.”

“Aaah.”

Lyla stood up for no apparent reason. I sat back down. She said, “First off, I want to say that I have a sense of humor. Take me to a comedy club and I'll be the first to slap my knee. But when nothing's funny, I'm not going to let out big fake belly laughs. I'm sorry. Mendal was brought up to believe he was dying every minute, and I was brought up thinking that what's not funny shouldn't be laughed at.”

I laughed. Dr. Boyce looked at me in the same way that Mrs. Hawthorne used to back in high school when I thought Ethan Frome's sledding disaster was sidesplitting. Boyce said, “This may or may not have anything to do with your situation particularly, but how often do you two spend time apart from each other?”

We both said, “Never,” simultaneously. It didn't take some kind of FBI voice-recognition expert to notice the edgy diminuendo in our responses.

From his desk, Dr. Boyce picked up a softball-sized beanbag with the continents sewn onto it and tossed it to me. “I want y'all to stand six feet apart. Mendal, I want you to gently throw the beanbag to Lyla, and while it's in midair quickly state something that bothers you. Lyla, after you catch the Earth, take a step back and do the same. You catch it, Mendal, take a step back, and so on.”

The room was a good twenty-four-feet wide. I tossed the Earth in a high arc and said, “Thinks I'll cheat on her when I really only want to play poker on Monday nights with a couple buddies.” Understand that I had to speak fast.

My wife caught the bag, stepped back, and underhanded me one. “Thinks my yoga class is stupid.”

I nodded. I stepped back. “Thinks I'm forcing myself into her archaeological territory when in fact I'm only trying to make ends meet and give us a brighter financial future.”

Lyla caught it, stepped back, and threw the Earth at me in a way that would've made any major-league pitching coach proud. “Self-absorbed.”

Dr. Boyce said, “Wow. Good catch, Mendal.”

I tossed the beanbag back to my wife and said, “Inferiority complex.”

She stepped back and said, “Thinks he's smarter than anyone—which might be true in the hellhole town in which we live.” Lyla threw another strike, Nolan Ryan style.

I caught it, stepped back, and said, “Can't admit when she's wrong.”

This went on. Dr. Boyce said he'd never had clients make it all the way to his walls without dropping the beanbag. My wife and I kept our backs to the perimeter for six or eight more turns. Lyla threw another and said, “Still has a crush on Shirley Ebo, this woman who he loved from second grade on, or whatever.”

I threw it back and said, “Doesn't like turnip greens.”

“Scared of the dentist,” Lyla said—that's how far we'd gotten.

I caught the Earth in my mouth.

I
ENDED UP
having to explain to the good doctor how I'd gotten it in my mind that I could be a buyer for the Cracker Barrel chain of interstate-exit country stores and restaurants, what with all the old signs I'd found buried in my dead father's yard. I told Boyce how everyone in my hometown of Forty-Five, South Carolina, probably—perhaps rightly—had deemed my blood crazy, seeing as my father, over a thirty-year period, had disassembled, saved, and stored every outbuilding, barn, and slave shack in a hundred-mile radius of our house. Dad had been forced to buy extra land just to stack twelve-by-twelve-by-twelve-foot pallets of lumber. It angered me that I—not my father—would be the person to gain financially.

“Y'all's problem has exactly zero to do with you finding old advertising signs,” Dr. Boyce said to me. To Lyla he said, “And it's not about your
not
finding what's been buried. It's not about heart pine, or dead parents, or missed opportunities along the way, really. Are you happy, Lyla? Would you be happier if you got to teach again at some point in time?”

My wife said, “Yes,” from the other side of the room.

“Are you jealous that Lyla wants a career, Mendal?”

I said, “Not at all.”

Dr. Boyce spread out his arms. “You have both just spoken the truth.” He clapped his hands. Although no one would believe me later, he actually quivered back and forth like a baseball-player bobble-head doll. “I know the problem already,
but let me tell you what both of you need to do.”

At that juncture Boyce motioned for us to stand together in front of his desk. Lyla said, “On that show I saw you on, you said the colon was more important than the lungs. Is that true?”

I got a better look at his diplomas and certificates. I thought, I'll give him Duke, Vandy, and Chapel Hill, but scoffed at an Institute of the Spleen certification, framed next to one in glandular studies. I said, “I'm not an organ donor but I'm thinking about giving away my pituitary glands so some little person can grow. How about
that
?”

“The colon's very important,” Dr. Boyce said to my wife. “I might've been exaggerating, though. The guy running everything told me to be somewhat controversial.”

I said, “What's that other gland? I might die and donate that other gland so people can have a better life. I'm that way. So they can spit and such.”

Boyce said, “I want y'all to hold hands now and close your eyes. I don't want you to move, or squeeze your palms. Just close your eyes and nod up and down for yes. Don't move for no.”

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I wanted a drink. I wanted bourbon.

W
HEN MY WIFE
and I approached the therapist's desk there in his office on Trade Street I could tell by the
look on her face that we weren't so hopeless as a couple. If Boyce had put a gun to my head, though, I wouldn't have been able to explain it.

Boyce said, “I'll close my eyes, too.”

I took the beanbag Earth from my mouth and set it on the edge of his desk. Lyla and I held hands. I said, “How're you going to see us nod up and down or not if your eyes are closed?”

“Oh, yeah. I messed up. This is a new exercise I developed last week. Y'all are my first patients to try it on. Let's start over.” Lyla squeezed my hand, even though it was against the rules. “I'll close my eyes and ask questions. Y'all answer out loud yes or no, and pretend I'm not here.”

I said, “That's better. That's much better. It's kind of like having an invisible wizard in charge, or the voice of God.” Then I worried that he'd think I meant it. “Let's get this thing going. Are you ready, Slick?”

Boyce turned his face toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. I let go of Lyla's hand, picked up the beanbag, and shoved it down the front of my pants. Boyce said, “Yes or no—I believe that it's better to be a good person as opposed to a bad person and that—although it's not written in stone, or in a philosopher's handbook—I have a pretty good idea what the difference is between good and bad. Yes or no. Y'all can take your time before you answer.” He spoke in a rhythm that would've been perfect for counseling turtles.