“You're going to have to go that route alone, I'm afraid,” Mack says. “I got to get down the road and check out a two-miler from somewhere,” he lies, though in fact he's scheduled to talk to a distance runner from Georgia tomorrow.
The phone rings. Betty shrugs and picks it up. She says, “Hello?” instead of “Worm's Bar and Grill.” Mack stands up and thinks about going to his car and driving away. Betty says into the receiver, “I'm not doing anything wrong. You can come on over here and see for yourself,” and then the door opens, Brunson walks in with a cell phone to his head, and both he and his mother hang up.
Brunson says, “I told you I could rig this cell phone to get good reception, even here where we don't get reception.” He says to Mack Sloan, “I've been reconsidering.”
His mother walks back carrying the bottles of Grey Goose and Ketel One. She says, “I'm about to get you a football scholarship, too, boy.”
Brunson says, “Can I have a beer, Mom?” He says, “After I drink some olive juice to replace the salt I lost running, can I have a beer?”
Betty reaches over the bar and slides back the cooler top. She reaches in and gets a can of PBR. To Mack Sloan she says, “I'm not a bad mother. Or a whore.”
Worm walks in through the back door. He says, “Well, well, well, I heard we had us a bigshot stranger in town. Hey, Betty Pettigru.” He keeps his eyes locked on Mack. “Hey, Brunson. You got your ID for that beer?”
Brunson says, “I forgot it again.”
“Bring it on in next time,” Worm says. He wears a sleeveless white dress shirt, blue jeans with holes in the knees. He sports a tattoo on each armâa speed bag on his left, and a heavy bag on the right. To Mack he says, “Just come back from the depot. You're the talk of Calloustown.” Worm sticks out his hand to shake, which Mack does. “Next to some old boy from the Guinness World Record book showing up, I guess you're about all that and a roll of duct tape, ain't you?”
Mack doesn't know what he means. He says, “Are you a boxer, or ex-boxer?” and points to the tattoos. Betty Pettigru leads her son over to the jukebox. They stare at its buttons and choices as if it were a time machine.
“That's the way we are here in Calloustown,” Worm says. “We try to make things easier for everything. Back in the day, my great-great-grandmother went out to what's now I-95 and tried to lead General Sherman back to Calloustown so he could burn it. Least that's the story. Anyway, back when I was in junior high school I got bullied a bunch seeing as I'm so skinny and got called Worm, so later onâmaybe in the tenth gradeâI went over the state line and got these tattoos so my enemies would have a target to punch, you know.”
Betty and Brunson return to the stools. Worm goes around the other side, to work as the bartender. Brunson says, “I guess I could try out as something like a kick returner. If you confess that my mom's not a whore, then I'll be willing to try out as a kick returner.”
Mack tries to think if he actually called Betty a whore. Worm slides another double shot of cold vodka his way. He says, “Because all that reading you do, Brunson, I'm sure you've come across how constantâheck, even infrequentâconstriction of limbs can result in nerve damage. Next thing you know you got gangrene and have to have the limb amputated.”
Brunson drinks his beer like a professional. He says, “I don't care. What would it matter? If getting my arms cut off in the future is the only way I can get out of Calloustown, so be it.”
“You don't mean that,” his mother says.
“Come over here and hit me in the arm,” says Worm. He tenses his muscles. “What you need, boy, is a tattoo like mine. That's what's made it worthwhile for me to stay.”
“When's the last time the cigarette man came by here, Worm? I want me a pack of cigarettes, but I don't want any of those you got in there stale. As I recall, Finis bought his last cigarettes from that machine,” Betty says. She pulls the hem of her dress right on up to her eyes and wipes them, showing off a pair of panties that weren't bought anywhere in South Carolina, Mack thinksâS
HAKE
, R
ATTLE
,
AND
R
OLL
printed in red lettering across the front. She says, “I'm sorry. I don't even think Brunson knows this, but it's our anniversary.” To Mack she says, “How about you giving me an anniversary present?”
Brunson hits the floor. He either wants attention or undergoes a full-scale seizure. Mack says, “I have a carton of cigarettes out in the car. Let me go get you a couple packs.”
“Menthol?” Betty says.
“Yeah. Let me go get them right now for you. Is Brunson okay?” he asks as he opens the door.
Mack Sloan starts up the car and takes off. He needs to U-turn at some point, but he wants out of there. There's something bad in the water here, he thinks. He thinks, I will go back home and say that the virtual high school P.E. teacher didn't know what he's talking about. He turns on the radio and hits Search, only to find nothing, then switches over to A.M. stations, hits Search, and still finds nothing. He thinks, a forty-six second quarter-miler with a near-perfect SAT. When will I ever come across another one of those? Mack flips open his cell phone and gets no signal.
When he approaches the bus depot he notices that a number of handwritten signs now dot the roadside: Told You So. Don't Come Back Unless You Mean It. Sherman Sucked, Too.
What can he do but turn around? What can he do but try not to think ahead to the future, when he's sitting around his house at night, awaiting a knock at the door, knowing that someone wants to come in and talk about his or her problems in regards to homesickness, or nerves? The radio catches a station. A man gives the weather report and says that the drought has been modified from extreme to exceptional. He reminds listeners to put water out for animals, and notes that not all foaming-mouthed dogs have contracted rabies.
These Deep Barbs Irremovable
After Louise took off, and seeing as I didn't fully believe my doctor's prediction in regards to what would happen inside my liver should I ever attempt to dry out the states of Kentucky and Tennessee again, I found myself wanting to enter Calloustown proper and find a bar. I'd gone beyond thinking rationally and mentally side-stepped loading up on sweets or downing six pork chopsâeverything I'd read up on in regards to ways to quench a sudden urgent bourbon twinge. This was at my dead mother's house, which had been my parents' house where I grew up before Dad got sent to prison. I returned to settle affairs, as they say. I had to go through personal effects, pile things up for auction, retain what I found necessary to keep for sentimental reasons. I had at this point only set aside my father's .22 rifle, an item that indirectly offered me the notoriety I'd received from the age of thirteen on. Maybe I wandered around the house talking to myself. Maybe I felt certain that Louise had waited for the right time to leave our marriage and used my mother's death and my new entrepreneurial mishap as her excuse.
To be fair, “took off” isn't exactly what Louise did. “After Louise changed all the locks on our doors back when I returned to Calloustown, the place of my upbringing, in order to bury my mother and work as the executor of the will,” might be a more appropriate way to put it. This was sixty miles from where Louise and I had lived together for fifteen years. Louise called to say I could return for clothes, but that her lawyer advised her not to let me take anything else. “My lawyer says you should probably stay in Calloustown. You can come get your clothes. And your goddamn pets, which are driving me insane.” I doubted she even had a lawyer at this point but found no reason to argue.
I could've easily told my wife to turn off the heat and lights, but thought this: if she couldn't withstand an entrepreneurial mishapâespecially after everything else I'd endured in regards to jobs and the Guinness World Records anthologyâthen I wasn't going to give her any pointers. I never found out, but I might've been roaming aimlessly in my mother's house actually saying aloud, “Turn off the heat and lights if you want to quiet my so-called pets,” when I realized that a woman stood on the porch, cupping her hands into the screen door.
She wore a nametag with A
DAZEE
printed out in block letters. She said in a quiet voice, “I know you. You're that guy in the famous book.”
My first words to Adazee, as she stood there wearing an apron, holding one of those cheap, unhealthy, overly frosted rectangular sheet cakes, were, “No. No, I'm not in the Bible.” It's a response like that that got me fired from my last job, something I said drunk to strangers wanting to pay good money for a sub-par education.
Listen, not everyone knew my story. People already knew that Louise left me, probably, but not everyone in the county knew how my father gathered bald-faced hornets' paper nests and then sold them to the Chinese for medicinal purposes, how he would shoot nests the size of medicine balls off of oak tree limbs with a .22 and I would stand below to catch them so they wouldn't get damaged. My father used high-powered binoculars and watched the prospective nests for activity. It's not like he was an idle, irresponsible father. Before I helped him he had learned the nuances of paper nestâcollecting through trial and error; thenâafter I became his thirteen-year-old assistant and the accident happenedâhe never relied on first frosts killing off all members of the hive.
I said, “I'm kidding. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm still in that book, from what I understand,” though to be honest I bought the latest edition each September and looked for my name. “It's plain called the Guinness World Records book, by the way. Most people call it the Guinness Book of World Records, but they're wrong. It's the Guinness World Records book, and then a year after it.” I didn't go into how a few of the new editions had special features, like how the 2008 anthology had glow-in-the-dark sections, and 2009 featured “all new 3-D photography.” Personally, I thought the Guinness people should go back to a plain old black-and-white format, but that's just me.
“Tell me how many times you got stung,” Adazee said. I thought, oh, I get it: A to Z. Her parents were idiots.
I said, “Do you want to come in?”
Adazee didn't move. “I work over at Tiers of Joy bakery, and we've been remiss in sending you a cake. No one's ever made it official, but we're like Calloustown's Welcome Wagon, especially now that we don't have a florist anymore.”
“I forget how many stings,” I said, and hoped she didn't bring up how some guy named Johannes Relleke got stung 2,443 times by bees back in 1962. First off, that was in Rhodesia, which isn't still around. Two, a bee's stinger is probably one-third the size of a bald-faced hornet's. I said, “I still carry some stingers beneath my skin, they say, so the official count's not exactly official.”
Beneath her apron spilled out on her chest an A and a Z, left to right. I wouldn't know until later that she wore one of those tourist shirts from Alcatraz, with a number beneath it, as if the old famous convicts wore such garb. Adazee said, “Buzz something. Your name is Buzz something or other.”
I shook my head. “I was just thinking about cake, I swear to God,” I said, but didn't go into details about how I'd been shaking and wanting booze.
No, I thought about how I got called Buzz, all right, from the moment I returned from the burn clinic in AugustaâI still have no clue as to who thought that would be the proper setting for a boy with a thousand-plus hornet stingers in his bodyâto my desk at Calloustown Junior High, then right up until I understood that I needed to vacate my hometown's limits, go to college, get married, attempt to change the world, lose my job due to “unprofessional behavior and insubordination,” then return half-heartedly without my wife to settle my mother's affairs.
My father, still alive, couldn't work as the executor seeing as he lived in prison for selling bald-faced hornet nests to the Chinese without fully understanding antitrust laws plus forgetting to pay taxes over twenty years, among other questionable practices in the realm of business ethics.
“Buzz Munson? Buzz Harrell?” Adazee said, hopeful, smart enough to know that since ninety percent of Callous town's population ended in a “Munson” or “Harrell” she would likely hit the mark.
Man, by this point there with lovely AdazeeâI had already experienced my near-daily flashback of standing beneath a paper hornet nest that hadn't gone inactive, mid-November, my father aiming for the slight branch that sagged from the gray orb's weight, the shot's crack, my perfected soft catch, and the hornets streaming for neck, face, hands, and bare armsâI jonesed for booze worse than a stung boy yearns for a slather of saliva-enhanced cigarette tobacco atop his wounds. I looked at my wristwatch and said, “If you ain't coming inside, how about you show me the closest bar in town? I need a drink. I'll buy.”
Adazee smiled. “Here you go,” she said, handing over the cake. “It's the freshest we had. Well, it's tied for freshest with six others that no one came to pick up. Ever since they changed the requirements for high school graduation, not everyone quite made it, I guess. Or their parents forgot what they ordered, but I doubt it.”
She handed over a cake that read M
ISTY
: C
LASS
OF 2010!
C
ONGRATULATIONS!
in gray and black frosting, the school colors for the Calloustown High School Fighting Ostriches.
I said, “I don't get it,” because I wondered if she meant to bring the cake to someone else. “I'm not Misty. My real name's Luther Steadman.”
Adazee said, “Seeing as we're not officially the Welcome Wagon, we just give out cakes that we either messed up or that the people didn't come get.”