Between Wrecks (19 page)

Uncle Cush and I stood back, the back doors to the step van swung wide open. He said to me, “This is working out a lot better than the grocery store trick I miscalculated. Way better.”

Uncle Cush had gone into a Winn-Dixie a month earlier with a specific grocery list: Sunbeam Old-Fashioned bread, 32-ounce Jif Crunchy, Wheaties, Oscar Meyer Beef Bologna thick-cut, large curd Breakstone's-brand cottage cheese, a gallon of whole Pet milk, that sort of thing. He bought it all, took it to his pickup truck, and set down the bags. Then he extracted the receipt and walked back in the store. Me, I sat in the truck reading a book called
A Theory of Justice
by John Rawls, a chapter on civil disobedience, because that's what I'd been trained to do. My parents—and Uncle Cush, for that matter—hoped that I'd be able to get out of Poke, South Carolina, and fix the world.

I wasn't smart enough to understand how much pressure they put on me, if it matters. I couldn't comprehend how much of my learning process at home depended on figuring out what
not
to do, how
not
to act in public, how it was important to learn the
opposite
of Good in order to appreciate and discern what was right. My father spanked me once and used a variety of lashes—a rolled magazine, a thin peach branch, his belt—so that I grasped what a cut-off piece of barbed wire felt like on the back of my thighs.

Anyway, at the grocery store, I plodded through a chapter called “Classical Utilitarianism,” then skipped ahead to “Principles for Individuals: the Natural Duties,” and didn't even think about how the milk might spoil back in the bed of the truck, how cottage cheese shouldn't sit out in the sun. I might have been absorbed and befuddled for an hour before I thought, I wonder if Cush got lost, had a heart attack, got caught for shoplifting, came back into the parking lot and got in the wrong truck, underwent flashbacks in the noodle aisle.

I walked into the store to find him standing there by a Buy One/Get One Free bin of damaged cans. He yelled out, “Where you been, goddamn it?”

I shrugged. He held onto the handle of his filled shopping cart. I said, “What?”

His whole plan was to buy foodstuffs, take his receipt back in, get the same items, and then if he got asked about his grocery shopping peculiarities he could pull out the first receipt and say, “Check it out, manager.” Then there would be the same items. The time printed out wouldn't be but five minutes' difference, as if he dallied by the fifty-cent claw machine trying to garner a stuffed animal. “Go back out to the truck and get me them bags from the first order. This ain't gonna work like I thought unless I can get my groceries in
bags.”

I don't know if my reading on civil disobedience helped me out at this point, or if it was a previous book on logic, but I said, “In the future you need to bring your own bags. It wouldn't kill you to go green, you know, like those people west of the Colorado River.”

He left his filled cart there and, out in the lot, said, “Well, I still did a good thing. Somebody inside will have to go place all those items back on the shelves. So I kept them a job. Listen here, Start—it's all about making sure people keep their jobs. If there weren't people like me going around like that, that Winn-Dixie manager might have to lay off people, saying ‘Hey, we don't need nobody to restock shelves.' Job well done!”

“Job well done!” Uncle Cush said there in the VFW parking lot to a preacher who bought a sinkhole parachute for every member of his choir.

I said, “I want to call home.”

Cush shook his head. “Listen, I can't blame you for not understanding everything, but we have to finish what we started here. You know how much land I can buy up in the North Carolina mountains for $200,000? It's a bunch. There's a man in trouble up there wants to get rid of his holding for a hundred dollars an acre. Do the math. We get that much land, we can set down teepees eight to an acre, easy. Four people per teepee, thirty-two per acre, all that times two hundred. Do the math. We get the right people from out in California who ain't needed in that state, that's enough to change the voting landscape. Sixty-four thousand new voters can change a place like North Carolina, what with the liberals living in the Research Triangle.”

Twenty years later I would convince myself that I came up with the idea—that finding a way for America to vote out the incumbent party was what my parents long ago trained me to do—and Uncle Cush would never deny me my pride. He'd go along with the gently forced mass migration and offer his congratulations.

I said, “I want to drink eighteen cans of beer. Would that be a record for an eighteen-year-old?”

He twisted one strand of his Fu Manchu and put his arm around my shoulder. “Don't try it. I drank twenty-two beers in 'Nam on my birthday. You know how come you never see me with my shoes off? It's because I'm missing a toe. It happened on that same day.”

Warren yelled out, “We ain't had a day like this since that Girl Scout cookie truck broke down here a couple years ago!” People bought parachutes, donned them like lucky capes, then wandered into the VFW as if they belonged, as if they once fought the mighty Hun, the mighty Cong, the mighty Grenadians.

Uncle Cush took folded-up twenty-dollar bills and shoved them into his pockets until he bulged like a multi-goitered Freemason. Then he pointed to me when buyers strapped on their emergency vests. I took in proceeds and—because of my age—thought about ways to steal from my own uncle, about a new stereo I could buy, about all the books I could buy new or used. I thought about how maybe I could drive into downtown Poke waving money around until a young woman I knew in elementary school agreed to accompany me to the nearby Forty-Five for a movie and special celebratory flounder dinner. I thought about how I could use the money for an airline or cruise ship ticket to visit my runaway parents, how I could acquire the best defense lawyers in the country. Then I got to daydreaming about booze, and how I might need that money compounding interest daily in a CD so I could afford rehab lessons at some point when my wife had had enough.

“Most people I ever meet need to have a tombstone that reads ‘Well That Wasn't Worth the Time,'” Cush said. “Mock it down: Everyone who buys a sinkhole-saving parachute here—or where we'll be going later—should probably die from a fatal unexpected fall into the depths of Duval County. Or, fuck, any county, any state.”

More people drove into the parking lot, people who must've gotten a celebratory and exhortatory warning, men wearing grease-smudged khakis and women in worn cotton-print dresses. Mothers showed up yelling, “Will it work for my bay-bay?” and men asked, “It ain't gone blow up like a airbag, is it? I don't want to be down there with the ancient coral alive but burned up like a bad wick.”

This particular scheme wasn't failing like the free groceries hoax. I would've pondered about it more, but well-meaning and hopeful derelicts stretched their hands my way as if I owned Fountain of Youth water best known down forty miles south of where we stood. I felt surrounded by zombies. I had witnessed late-night evangelical channels with similar desperate dawdlers hopping up to the stage in hopes of having that missing leg reappear.

I yelled out, “Step right up! Step right up! Step right up!” like any obnoxiously buzzed eighteen-year-old might do after realizing that he'd never see these people again. I didn't notice two things: First off, somebody had worried about their drug-addicted children who showed up after huffing fluorescent pink paint from paper bags. These kids—six of them, about my age—leaned down to idling car headlights, then stood erect to show off their glowing alimentary canal entrances. In the dusk, as they wandered around, it looked as if frosted strawberry doughnuts hung in the air, or like the little blips that live inside one's eyelids had taken steroids and threatened to run away. If they stood in a line according to height it looked like O O O O O O standing between our truck and the entrance to the bar. I got mesmerized for thirty seconds or so, and listened to these boys wearing my uncle's parachutes end every sentence with “dude.” I didn't notice, too, that said pink-encircled-mouth huffers found a way to ascend to the roof of the VFW lounge soon thereafter—again, three stories high—and yell down to us those words that never offer good news, viz., “Hey! Dude! Hey! Are y'all watching us? Get out of the way!”

“Get out of the way,” Uncle Cush said to someone as he got in the step van and turned the ignition. To me he said, “Close those goddamn back doors and jump in fast.”

I said, of course, “I think I'm going to regurgitate.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out what ended up being $900. What were all these people doing with a hundred dollars to spare? I thought. Or at least I thought it later. I thought about it twenty years later, too, when people made the news for falling into sinkholes every other day. From the way we were parked in front of the VFW, I was on the side closest to the door. People slammed their palms against the step van's panels like zombies looking for living meat. Like groupies hoping that the lead guitarist would emerge from the venue's back door with his pecker hanging out. Like Southerners wanting milk and bread at the grocery store when the temperature dipped below forty.

Uncle Cush turned the ignition and palmed the horn. In retrospect, I think he kept the horn going so as not to hear the sound of six deranged teenagers hitting the ground from thirty or forty feet up.

I grabbed Cush's arm and made the horn stop. And then I heard “Geronimo” and watched as one fluorescent pink circle fell from the sky, first quickly, and then slowed down. The five other circles followed with the same result. Cush backed up the step van and aimed his headlights toward where the boys had landed, all of them standing upright, their miniature parachutes unfurled on the ground like spent condoms thrown out of a moving vehicle.

Uncle Cush said, “I'll be goddamned,” and looked at me. He said, “The bridle pulled the D-bag out, the bridle pulled the D-bag out!” though at the time I thought he referred to the assortment of huffers as douchebags. He'd not gone into details about the technical terminology of a parachute, hand-crafted or not.

I said, “They're alive,” but not with much enthusiasm, for I still felt as though all those cans of Dixie beer might leave my body in an undesirable way.

Cush put the step van back in park. “Get out and let's get back to work,” he said to me. To Warren he yelled out, “If that ain't a commercial for how to survive a sinkhole attack, I don't know what is,” and Warren said, “Shit, man, let me go back inside and open the safe. I'mo buy me another dozen them things for resale.”

This was a time before cell phones. No one got on the World Wide Web and advertised how a Fu Manchu-ed Vietnam War veteran and his “son” brought lifesaving technology to the largest city area-wise in the United States of America. The paint huffers descended, landed safely, and somebody made another call from a pay phone in the parking lot of the VFW. Then the callee called some people, and they called some people, and so on—just like Malthus pointed out in
An Essay on the Principle of Population
, which I read in the fourth grade at the urging of my parents after I wouldn't finish the Catfish Surprise that my mother baked for supper, and which I think shouldn't have been called an “essay” seeing as it plodded on somewhere into the 42,000 word range.

“Sober up, son,” Uncle Cush said to me. “I don't mind a man drinking, but you need to know how to act sober on the spot, with no warning, when it comes to high finance. We get back home? I got some films of Wall Street tycoons testifying before Congress. They know how to do it better than anyone.”

We didn't sell out of the parachutes there in the VFW parking lot, but the huffers' questionable feats of daring helped us, I would bet, sell another sixty or eighty units over the next few hours. The crowd dwindled. The original nicknamed veterans had gone home to undergo their personal nightmares. Warren locked up the front door to his bar and told us he didn't mind if we stayed in the parking lot overnight to sleep, just like people did at Wal-Marts in their recreational vehicles. My uncle thanked the man, waited for his taillights to disappear, then got in the step van and said to me, “I pride myself on not making mistakes with the Singer machine, but I can't promise nobody's going to go jump off a bridge tonight and have a failed chute. No need to sit here like a radioman tattooed with bull's eyes, knowing snipers are everywhere, aiming for us.”

Cush drove and I unfolded a road map provided by a Texaco station down in south Georgia. I said, “Daytona Beach looks like the next best place for a VFW, if you want to get out of Duval County entirely.” I directed him toward Highway 1.

“Daytona Beach,” my uncle said. “That's the kind of place where people would want to live a long time, not fall victim to the earth's frail decisions. That's a type of place to grasp and decipher the truth.”

We didn't get two miles down the road when, up ahead, the headlights showed the round flourescent mouths of those daredevil huffers, turning around to hitchhike. I knew already what would happen. My uncle didn't say, “Hey, do you think I should pick these boys up and take them down to Daytona?” He didn't say, “What these boys need is a good role model, like me, so that they get off the paint fumes and quit acting like shell-shocked soldiers in a way that won't allow them to become comfortably superstitious octegenarians.” I read his mind though. He felt as though he could offer some of his hourly advice and turn them around, at least after they proved his mini-parachutes' worth when leaping from a Holiday Inn's tar-and-gravel roof, to the shock and amazement of local onlookers who—whether they admitted it or not—had long feared being swallowed up inside the bowels of a relentless state not known for moderation on any level.