Between Wrecks (23 page)

People kept honking the horn as they drove by. I probably lost a few years of my life from what these thirty days did to my nerves. I said, “Go on, my man.”

You wouldn't believe how many ticks live in roadside high grass. I'd say that three ticks show up about every ten steps. I kept pulling them off of me—and thinking how I needed to tell Clean Up South Carolina how it wasn't fair to offer a post-graduate fellowship without Lyme disease protection—and seeing them on Sarly Fink. I told him, but he kept walking, high-stepping, looking for trash.

“I sucked other people's crap,” Sarly said finally. “That's what I done for a living. It's what I do now, and what I will do in the future. I got the equipment.”

I said, “Look at how bleached out that dead deer's skull is,” and pointed.

He stabbed it. Sarly said, “Hear this, Barry. I ain't proud of it all.”

“I'm not proud of my quarter-mile time,” I said. What could I say?

“I've been thinking about telling a psychiatrist all about it so we can write my story.”

We continued walking through sweet grass taller than the average third-grader. I tried to concentrate there on the side of the road, but looking back I probably thought only about how I would soon no longer be a decathlete officially. I felt pretty sure that some kind of federation stripped people of what they called themselves if said people didn't compete over a certain period of time. Like an accountant can't call himself one anymore if he forgets to punch in some numbers over, say, two hours.

I found a 16-ounce beer, half full, and drank from it. That's how I was back then.

“I kept track of people,” Sarly Fink said. “I drove around and looked. I watched. People always looked down on me for what I done for a living, and I reciprocated duly.”

I didn't say anything about how “reciprocated” might be a big word. Reciprocated? I said, “Is that a copperhead down by your foot?”

Sarly said, “Man and woman. Husband and wife. Rainfall for a month. Septic tank needs cleaning out 'cause they ain't played by the septic tank rules for years. Do you know septic tank rules, Barry? There are rules. No grease dumped down the drain, for one. There are eighteen others. Anyway, they call me up like it's my fault. So I show up with a box of rubbers in my truck and have them opened and unstrung, you know. People who yell at septic tank cleaners ain't going to come out there and look at their own shit, you know.”

Of course I pretended to know what the hell Sarly Fink meant. Was he speaking in some kind of stream-of-consciousness? Was he imagining things? I said, “I'll be damned.”

“Let's say a married couple needed their tank cleaned. I'd show up, and dig a foot or two down to the coffin lid, you know, that covers the tank's opening—right there when the pipe leads from the house. If I felt they didn't respect me and mine, I'd drop ten or twelve opened rubbers down there to float atop the water, maybe stick two hanging right there from the pipe like they'd not finished their journey. Then I'd call the man and woman out and say, ‘Y'all shouldn't throw all these here condoms down the commode.' You see what I'm talking about? That's what God's mad for.”

I said, for no reason whatsoever, “My least favorite event's the long jump. I think it has to do with a fear of fouling there at the board.”

“So then a woman would say, ‘My husband don't wear no rubbers,' and a husband would say the same. He thinks some old boy's showing up when he's away, you know, screwing his wife. And she thinks that a woman's showing up when she's off somewhere. Do you see what I'm saying? Can you picture the scenario in your mind's eye?”

Telling Sarly's story later, I see one of his eyes twitching, maybe sweat draining down the sides of his face. I didn't say, “That's kind of cruel,” though I thought it.

“I bet I done this little trick a couple hundred times. See, then they would divorce because they don't trust each other. That's what happens. They divorce, the house comes up for sale cheap, and I buy it. Or at least I had plans to buy those houses and resell them later, but I never had the money.”

I turned around to look for the guard, who wasn't paying attention. I said, “Wait. You threw rubbers in the septic, and then asked a husband and wife to come look at the things?”

“College boy. I told them they shouldn't dispose of rubbers down the commode, among the seventeen other things. Feminine hygiene products. Paper towels. Grease. Rocks.”

“I get it. They accuse each other of cheating. If a husband's cheating, he doesn't want to get another woman pregnant. Same with the wife.”

“Not to mention the transference of likely sexually transmitted diseases. The clap. Gonorrhea. Herpes. Syphilis. Those other ones. I believe there are eighteen of them, too.”

I said, “Huh. That is bad. Thanks. I mean, I felt bad for getting drunk, stealing those signs, burning them on the roadside, emitting toxic fumes into the atmosphere which would harm the ozone layer, and the rest of it. Not so much, though, after your story.”

“It ain't all about loitering and shoplifting,” Sarly said. “I'm paying for what I done to innocent victim married couples, just because I knew how they said things behind my back like how they didn't know how anyone could clean up other people's shit and the like. I know that I'm not a nice person.”

I walked onward. I couldn't tell if tears mixed with Sarly Fink's facial perspiration. Finally I said, “There's rape and murder. Those are worse than what you did.” I tried to think of at least eight more things worse than ruining a good marriage, but couldn't. Sarly Fink's actions, in my mind, tied with kidnapping.

The guard yelled at us to keep moving. “You won't learn this in school,” Sarly said, “but it's always best to live in a house connected to the city sewer.”

I did my time and made a point to disregard politicians altogether for the rest of my life. In a way, I came to believe, people who run for elected office are exactly the same as Sarly Fink. They promise to clean up a sudden mess, and in the process point out some kind of unforeseen disaster that was a predecessor's fault. Sarly Fink put out roadside signs for his septic services, as did political hopefuls. The world, or at least America, or at least the South, seemed to rely on such odd connections.

This is my story: I went AWOL from Clean Up South Carolina, got a number of blue-collar jobs, and paid back my student loans in a traditional manner. I became a citizen, more or less, and only tore down political signs if I thought they obstructed a driver's view of oncoming traffic.

All political signs, by the way, obstruct someone's view.

Eventually I went to grad school and got a master's degree in something called American Studies, with an emphasis in Class Struggles and Unspoken Caste Systems. My thesis, I swear to God, is titled “No Shit: Divorce Rates Vis-á-vis the Disappearance of Outhouses in the Rural South.” You can look it up on Google. While you're at it, see how Gaylord French died in a mysterious explosion in a mobile home owned by a man who owned a florist's shop.

I got a job teaching at a technical college where the unscholarly and unathletic matriculate in hopes of transferring to a state university so they can undertake useless political science courses, go to law school, and eventually represent me on some level. Not that I'm one with any of the mostly Asian religions, but I start each day with a mantra of sorts, a chant that goes, “Sarly-Fink-Gaylord-French-Big-Man, Sarly-Fink-Gaylord-French-Big-Man.”

Sometimes at night I go out to my campus with a flat screwdriver, pry out a small water meter cover from the sidewalk, and throw it like a discus. Then I run away, jumping over hedges, benches, and signs placed sporadically to remind students of upcoming orientation events.

COLUMBARIUM

Not until my father walked into the post office—or perhaps it was a few days earlier at the bastardized crematorium—did I understand how much he despised my mother's constant reminders. For at least fifteen years she substituted “No,” “Okay,” or “I'll do it if I have to,” with “I could've gone to the Rhode Island School of Design” or “For this I gave up the chance to attend Pratt” or “When did God decide that I would be better off stuck with a man who sold rocks for a living than continuing my education at Cooper Union?” I figured out later that my parents weren't married but five months when I came out all healthy and above-average in weight, length, and lung capacity. To me she said things like, “I should've matriculated to the Kansas City Arts Institute, graduated, and begun my life working in an art studio of my own, but here I am driving you twenty miles to the closest Little League game,” or “I had a chance to go to the Chicago Art Institute on a full scholarship, but here I am trying to figure out why the hell X and Y are so important in a math class,” or “Believe you me, I wouldn't be adding pineapple chunks, green chiles, and tuna to a box of macaroni and cheese for supper had I gotten my wish and gone to The Ringling School of Art.”

I went through all the times my mother offered up those blanket statements about her wonderful artistic talents—usually by the fireplace while she carved fake fossils into flat rocks dug out of the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River—there at the post office while my dad and I waited in line. She sold these forgeries down at the Dixie Rock and Gem Shop, or to tourist traps at the foot of Caesar's Head, way up near Clingman's Dome, or on the outskirts of Helena, Georgia. My mother's life could've been worthwhile and meaningful had she not been burdened with motherhood; had she not been forced to work as a bookkeeper/ receptionist/part-time homemade-dredge operator at the family river rock business; had she not met my father when her own family got forced to move from Worcester, Massachusetts, because her daddy was in the textile business and got transferred right before my mother's senior year in high school. There were no art classes in the schools here; she could only take advanced home ec and learned how to make fabric and dye it, just as her father knew how to do at the cotton mill, more than likely.

“I could've gone to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had I not been forced to take an English class that I'd already taken up in Massachusetts and sit next to your father, who cheated off my paper every time we took a multiple-choice test on
The Scarlet Letter
. I blame all of this on
The Scarlet Letter
, and how your dad had to come over on more than one occasion for tutoring,” my mother said about once a week.

I didn't get the chance to ever point out to her how Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Massachusetts. A year after her death I figured out the math of their wedding date and my birth, and didn't get to offer up anything about symbolism, or life mirroring art, et cetera.

My mother died of flat-out boredom, disdain, crankiness, ennui, tendonitis from etching fake fossil ferns and fish bones into rocks, and a giant handful of sleeping pills. Her daily allotment of hemlock leaves boiled into a tea probably led to her demise, too, if not physiologically, at least spiritually.

According to my father, the South Carolina Funeral Directors Association didn't require normal embalming and/or crematorial procedures should the deceased have no brothers or sisters and should said dead person's parents both be dead. Looking back, I understand now that my father made all this up. At the time, though, I just sat on the bench seat of his flatbed, my mother in back wrapped up in her favorite quilt inside a pine coffin. “We're going up to Pointy Henderson's, and he'll perform the cremation. Then we'll scatter your mother down by the river so she can always be with us.”

Mr. Henderson was a potter and president of the local Democratic Party. About once a year he came down from the mountains and enlisted young democrats—and we all joined seeing as once a year, too, he held a giant shindig that included moonshine for everyone willing to either vote right or, if underage, at least put yard signs up.

“Cremation takes two to three hours at 1400 to 1800 degrees,” Henderson said when we got there. “I did the research long ago.” He got his two daughters to heft my mother off of the truck and carry the box to the groundhog kiln, which appeared to be dug into the side of an embankment. “My fire reaches near two thousand degrees on a good day,” he said. “After Mrs. Looper cools, I'll go to ashing down the hard bones, if that's all right.”

My father nodded. He'd done his crying the night before, as had I. “We'll come back in a couple days,” my father said.

“You and me's kind of in the same business, I guess,” Henderson said. “You take rock and sell it to people want paths to their front doors and walls to keep them out, and I take clay and sell it to people who want bowls on their tables.”

I didn't get the connection. I guessed that clay was kind of like ground-down rocks, to a certain extent. I looked at Mr. Henderson's daughters, who were my age, and were so inordinately beautiful that no one spoke to them in school. If Homer came back to Earth and met the potter's daughters, he'd've had to rewrite the Siren section of
The Odyssey
. One of them said, “Sorry.”

I said, “I'm a democrat,” for I could think of nothing else. “I'm thinking that some laws need changing.”

The other daughter said, “Sorry.”

My father and I drove back home, as they say, in silence. Right before my mother slumped over in her chair dead at the age of thirty-three, she had set her last pancake-sized rock, a fake millipede etched into it, down on the stool. For her carving tool she'd been using a brand-new single-diamond necklace my father bought her. I don't know if her engagement ring, which she normally used for such forgeries, had worn out or not. My father had bought the necklace as a way to celebrate a new account he'd won—as the sole river rock supplier for an entire housing tract deal down in Greenville that would include a hundred patios and driveway-to-front-door paths.