Between Wrecks (15 page)

I looked across at him. The drunk guy at the counter got up and saluted two men who walked in. He said, “Ford ate hour. Y'all hear? Y'all scared check point, too? Got-damn. Can't get to the red dot store now.”

Stan said, “I really
smoked
a sex education course I had to take. I made a 69. I think it was the oral exam that put me over the top.”

More people walked into the diner. Laurinda came by and said, “Either y'all ever cooked, washed dishes, or waited tables before? I need me some help. I should order up some wrecks more often. Or a rock slide.”

I said to Stan, “Whoa, whoa, whoa—you met Abby? You came onto my property and met my wife at some time?”

Stan said to Laurinda, “You ever hear the one about the popular blind waitress who spent most of her time shaking up bottles of ketchup? I got to work on that one. Something about how they're not really bottles of ketchup, but men with their pants down.”

Laurinda went off saying, “I'll comp your meal if you pitch in.” She turned around to the Second Comers and said, “Y'all's food's getting cold. My booths aren't rented by the day.”

I didn't have time to think about theories of synchronicity; or why we're all put on this planet; or the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, or Jean-Paul Sartre wherein characters are stuck endlessly against their wills; or Martin Luther King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; or how the best way to kill yellow jackets is to let them all get in their underground nest at dusk, then pour gasoline into the hive hole and light it; or how sharp fronds prevented fish from swimming out of baskets used by prehistoric Native Americans, thus trapping them; or the history of alienation in regards to psychology; or how helpless, distraught, confused, frightened, and relentless squirrels can be, once caged.

Well, no, I did have time to think about that last part, because the man at the counter announced to everybody, “I got enough squirrels in my cage. I don't need none of that.”

I said to Stan, “I'd be willing to bet that that guy's just as irrational sober as he is drunk.”

The Second Comers remained bowed. I reached over and grabbed the father's bacon. Stan leaned over and said, “I didn't know she was leaving you. If I'd've known you back then, I wouldn't've helped your wife move out. She didn't seem to know how to use bungee cords, and luggage wouldn't stay up on the roof rack, you know. I was walking down the road picking up aluminum cans, 'cause it's free money, and the more I save the easier it is for me to buy gold, and then I'll turn in the gold bullion later in order to fly to Illinois and get a cell phone with a valid area code so my mother thinks I'm truly at the University of Chicago, and then I'll still have enough money to pay for my apartment up in New York while I'm doing the comedy circuit and telling my mother and dead biological father that I'm attending and passing all of my American studies, philosophy, art history, linguistics, classic rhetoric, and interpretive dance classes. Anyway, there I was with my burlap bag of crushed Budweiser cans—you know it only takes about twenty-five cans to make up a pound, and aluminum's going for fifty cents a pound—and your wife was hunched over the hood of her car half-crying. I said, ‘Hey, you got any beer cans in the back seat?' and she said she didn't. I tied up her trunk and couple suitcases, she handed me two dollars, and I walked back home realizing that I probably wasn't going to find another two hundred cans on that particular afternoon. It'll get worse if more of these Second Comers show up, seeing as they don't tend to drink a lot of beer and throw their cans out moving car windows like the rest of us.”

Stan finished off his sausage biscuit. I said, of course, “You selfish little bastard. I knew you'd turn on me sooner or later. Sometimes you really scald my testes. Ingrate!” for I felt sure that it's what a regular father might say. Then I got up to help Laurinda with the dishes.

The drunk said, “Ford ate hour” as I passed him. I listened to Stan slide out of the booth and follow me.

I leaned over the man, smelled plain beer, and said, “Bush ate whole years.” I thought, What hour did you awake in order to get this intoxicated?

My protégée Stan called out, “Wait up.”

Here's what I thought, perhaps. Here's what I thought up elbow deep in dish water, without a Hobart machine in the kitchen of Laurinda's diner: If I were a father, I would want my son to know manual labor. I thought, If my son were a stand-up comedian, I would want him to know that there's not much funny in working for minimum wages, which in turn, somehow, made it all that more comedic. Why would anyone choose to wash dishes for a living unless he either had lost hope altogether or never knew that there were self-satisfying vocations out there, like digging holes in the ground and filling them back up. Stan worked beside me with large white towels draped over both shoulders and one in his hand. I said, “This is not how I planned to spend my day. But we must pitch in and help the community. We're not doing a bad thing, understand. If there's a heaven, maybe we'll be remembered for helping out Laurinda. Even if there's not, we can feel sure that by helping her out, she won't later go nuts from being inundated and go off on a shooting spree. Shooting sprees aren't good things.”

I wished that some of this was on tape, so I could show both my rational side and my stern side to Abby up in Minnesota. Then maybe she'd return, give birth to our child, and believe me when I said that this place was the best of all possible areas to raise a child, four- to eight-hour road congestion or not.

Stan smiled. He handed a plate back to me and pointed at some egg yolk. “You don't officially have to do all this,” he said. “You can ask my mom out on a date if you want. Ya'll've been watching too much TV. In the real world I don't think prospective boyfriends really have to hang out with the mother's kids and act all cool and normal.”

I handed Stan the rewashed plate. I looked through the kitchen porthole and noticed that the Second Comers finally began their meals. Laurinda cooked and talked loudly over her shoulder to the customers. A state trooper walked into the door and took off his Smoky Bear hat. I said to Stan, “What? What're you talking, man?”

“It's a great idea if you ask me—my mom has the arrowhead business, and you have the rock business. You're single and she's single. Even if y'all end up not liking each other—and you will, because you're both smart and stuck in a place where brains isn't exactly the first organ mentioned when people ask to list them out—it's a smart idea business-wise. Economically speaking, you know. Like a family that owns the Pepsi distributorship and another that owns the bottling company.”

“Maybe you can get a job running one of those Meet Singles agencies if you don't go to college or end up making it as a stand-up comedian, Stan.” I pronounced his name “Stain,” like he wanted.

“That's ‘Pimp Daddy Stan' to you, my man.”
Pimp Daddy Stain
didn't sound very hygienic.

I unstoppered the sink. I said, “I'm still married. I'm not looking for a girlfriend, I'm sorry to say.”

Stan smiled at me. He loaded a caddy of clean silverware. “I'm thinking about joining a Hermits Anonymous group, but I have a feeling that no one will ever show up to the meetings.” He looked at me. “Would it sound better as ‘Hermits Anonymous,' or ‘Misanthropes Anonymous'?”

I said, “I used to be a member of Cannibals Anonymous. Great buffet.”

This might be selfish on my part, but I enjoyed spending time with Stan Renfrew not for the right reasons: To be honest I didn't give a crap about his self-esteem, or the so-called weighty decision before him involving whether to forgo college to make people pay money in order to laugh. As far as I could tell—and I wasn't but some sixteen years older than Stan—no children made less than a B in high school or college anymore, and then they graduated and found high-paying jobs without ever having to know the discomfort of blisters. I had read an article somewhere about a group of college graduates who
didn't
get high-paying jobs and successfully sued their alma mater. Pissants.

We caught Laurinda up with clean dishes, pots, and silverware, then took to reloading spring-action napkin holders, checked on the salt and pepper shakers, gathered up wet dishrags and tossed them in a take-home hamper. Stan and I walked around with coffee pots, topping off people's mugs. I didn't have time to think about my low-residency master's degree projects that I would probably never finish, about the prospective theses that I didn't want to undertake. And I didn't have time to think about my confused, determined, wayward, pregnant, and estranged wife.

“Y'all sit down and have some pie,” Laurinda said. “I wonder if I'll have everyone here for dinner, too, what with the road blocked.”

“Ford ate hour,” the drunk man said, though his eyes looked much clearer.

I hadn't paid much attention to the Second Comers, who had finished their praying somewhere along the line and eaten their meals—I assumed—without complaint. I said, “I'm still full,” to Laurinda.

Stan said nothing, but turned to look at the patriarch of this particular religious cult family. The father stood up and held both hands up high. To me Stan said, “Here it comes. Here's the reason why they have to pray so long.” I waited for him to finish up a joke of some sort. He didn't.

“While y'all are all trapped here I guess it's as good a time as ever to make you an offer.”

“They're grave robbers,” Stan whispered to me. We leaned against two stools adjacent to the drunk man. “I've followed them around before. They're grave robbers.”

The man must've only stood five-five at the most, which I couldn't tell when he kept his head bowed. His blue jeans showed patches of red clay at the knees. I leaned forward to see both of his children staring down at their empty plates, appearing embarrassed. The wife looked up at her husband in that beautiful, hopeful, dreamy way that only women can pull off. Abby once looked at me that way when I added transmission fluid to her car, I remembered.

“As y'all may or may not know, the price of gold has skyrocketed what with our being in a war and amid high fuel costs and on the brink of upcoming inflation. Not to mention the end of the world as we know it, praise Jesus.”

I started to laugh. Stan said to me, “Hallelujah.”

“Anyways, gold's now upwards of six hunnert dollar a ounce, and I'm talking the good kind of gold the dentist puts in your teeth. Anyways,” he reached into his pocket, “I got here with me a nice collection of gold teeth I'd be willing to sell right at half the price of what they got it going for up in New York and down in Hong Kong.”

I looked at Stan and craned forward to look at what the man held in the palm of his hands. Stan turned to me and said, “I told you so. That's why they pray for so long—in case grave robbing's frowned upon by God. And of course it won't be, seeing as God told them to chisel gold out of dead people's heads.”

“Sister Rebecca?” the man said. She stood up—her pants held mud stains, too—opened her purse, and pulled out a set of scales best known to small-time drug dealers.

I said, “Damn. What's the world coming to?”

The drunkard blurted out, “Why'd anyone want to buy gold if it's the end of the world like y'all're saying? I thought you couldn't take it with you, end of the world and whatnot.” He stood up, and for a second I thought he was going to attack the family of grave robbers. He said loudly, “Does anybody have a got-damn bottle of
booze
stashed in your car outside?” and banged his right fist against his thigh.

The grave robber, of course, said, “We have some communal wine out in the van we'd be willing to sell.”

Stan smiled. He said, “Man, I'm going to get a whole mother lode of jokes out of this place. Get it?”

I kind of wanted some booze, too, at this point. I wasn't proud to say that since Abby had taken her “necessary sabbatical,” I had gone from stealing a shot or two of bourbon a week—maybe a can of beer if I was interviewing prospective Southern culture studies subjects worthy of a thesis—to a good near-fifth a day. I had gone from telling myself I wouldn't drink until dusk, and then that went backwards to happy hour, and then that went backwards to as soon as the sun was one degree past its zenith. I had made a point not to've slugged down a sixteen-ounce plastic cup of bourbon and Pepsi before going to pick up Stan. I rummaged around the cupboards until I found a pint of boysenberry-flavored vodka—Abby's—and glug-glugged a couple shots into my coffee. I learned that if I ever lived in the Land of Only Boy-senberry-flavored Vodka, I would be a sober man.

“You ever had a drink, Stain?” The grave-robbing Christian and the drunk had left for the parking lot. “Maybe you and I could get in on some of that wine action. I think it's my duty as a big brother to make sure you know how to handle your inebriants, or whatever. Your beers, wines, and liquors.” Let me say now that I felt like an idiot saying all this. I understood that Stan was smart enough to figure out my ulterior motive.

Stan said, “I spent ten days with my biological father. Then he died.”

I took that answer as meaning that he'd been drunk, and he'd done some drinking afterwards in order to ease his guilt, pain, wonder, misery, flashbacks, Oedipus complex, no sense of worth, anxiety toward college, and/or panic attacks about jokes that don't get laughs. I said, “Let's you and me go meet Mr. Gold and see what kind of deals he has, seeing as we're stuck here.”

We aren't stuck
, I thought as I was shaking the Second Comer's hand.
Stain and I can drive right back home between the two wrecks
. The drunk man said, “Ford ate hours. I can't wait that long. This is my idea of Hell.”