Calloustown (22 page)

Gripe Water

I assumed that my wife's childhood friend, Dottie, never encountered an etiquette handbook, or never had the common sense and decency to consult any number of social skills experts who offered advice in daily newspapers or Internet web sites. How hard is it to take a deep breath, drop the knitting needles, and contact a grief counselor or birth consultant in these days of omnipresent bloggers? You'd think that the first half-dozen times Carol miscarried would've taught Dottie to stay home and wait for an all-clear. I don't want to accuse my wife of impatience, but maybe—with three early miscarriages behind her within two years, six or eight since we officially married—she shouldn't have told her friend Dottie, or my relatives, or even me. One time I got on the Internet and found a pregnancy authority who said that, until every childhood disease had a cure and car seats got deemed foolproof and failsafe, an expectant mother shouldn't announce her pregnancy until the kid enrolled in second grade. Maybe the specialist exaggerated. I'm beginning to think that a number of everyday bloggers like to show off their sarcastic viewpoints, that they sit back in their rooms alone laughing over what people might undergo in the realm of bad luck and poor judgment.

“You might as well leave now,” Carol told me right before Dottie showed up the early afternoon after the last miscarriage. This was a Saturday. Two nights before, Carol went to the bathroom. We didn't go to the emergency room, or call an ob-gyn. I always said, “Do you want me to take you to the ER?” because it worried me. I would always say, “We need to see someone more specialized than a general practitioner.” I think I stole that line from a husband character I saw one time in a made-for-TV movie.

She and I didn't even have regular GP doctors. It's not like we were Christian Scientists. Carol and I, it seemed, were the type of people who believed that bad news and worry caused sickness and premature deaths.

“It's nothing,” my wife always said. “It's not even noticeable. There's not much difference than sitting down first thing in the morning and finding out your period started in the middle of the night.”

I'd looked up some information myself, quietly. I ruled out some kind of Munchausen syndrome, seeing as Carol would more than likely deliver a child and then push it down a flight of steps if that were a valid diagnosis.

“Please don't let Dottie come over,” I said. “She's an idiot, and you always get upset afterwards.” I didn't say anything about how, on top of her initial stupidity, Dottie'd gotten “born again,” and couldn't participate in a two-person conversation without Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark horning in and spouting off.

Here's Dottie: Carol announced her pregnancy, way too early—“A miracle, at age thirty-six!” or -seven, -eight, -nine, and Dottie got to work knitting an afghan. Two or three weeks later my wife would tell everyone about the miscarriage, and Dottie would show up with one square of the baby's afghan, announcing, “You can use it for a trivet,” or oven mitt, or something to set down between a terracotta planter and wooden table.

Carol said to me, “Go to the bar for a few hours. Go watch football games. Call up Eddie and Albert and have them meet you down at the Side Pocket. I'll be okay with Dottie. She means well, really. And if you're here I'll get all nervous and either be mean to her, you, or both of y'all.”

That's another thing that showed up in all my miscarriage research: certain women can't be left alone, certain women insisted on being left alone, some women preferred only the company of strangers, and others sought out old childhood friends in order to reminisce about middle school P.E. teachers that they later realized were lesbians. The percentage of those women who eventually left their husbands was pretty high.

What I'm saying is, there's an infinite number of possible ways each mourning near-mother will act. I guess if I should ever weigh in on the subject and leave a comment on some of those blog sites, I might add, “Certain women lose all rational abilities and force their husbands to go out binge drinking with Eddie and Albert,” et cetera.

I left the house but didn't contact my friends. We worked together, the three of us, thirty miles away at Die-Co, the die-cutting outfit. Eddie and Albert were my best friends, but even after working together fifteen years, whenever I saw Eddie and Albert I thought “Eddie Albert,” which made me think of the actor who played Oliver Douglas on
Green Acres
, which caused that theme song to play in my head for some time afterward.

Or I thought of the actress Eva Gabor who, from what I learned, got married five times and never had a child.

Eddie and Albert didn't know about Carol's other miscarriages. They never said to me, “When y'all going to have some kids?” even though Eddie had three daughters and Albert a son named Albert Jr. I don't accuse my friends of being inattentive or self-absorbed. Die-cutters, on the whole, think about protecting their fingers most of the day, and at night the severed fingers they've seen on the floor.

Maybe I didn't always feel like drinking outside the house when Carol's friends came over and my wife shuttled me out. Carol worked the cosmetics counter at a Belk department store thirty miles in the other direction of our Calloustown abode. Her coworkers—I forget their names, but they worked Fine China, Lingerie, Children's Shoes, and Handbags—showed up at times, always complaining about the store manager, no commissions, mothers who accused their kids of growing out of clothes on purpose, and the lack of basic human civility in general. Anyway, the coworkers drove all the way out to our house on occasion, and Carol requested my absence.

Like almost every time this occurred, on this particular day I drove into Calloustown, parked my truck, and found myself inside Southern Exotic Pets, a place that specialized in reptiles, tropical fish, the irregular chinchilla, and—according to rumor—trapped and shipped dingoes from Australia. If I know my canines, the dingoes were nothing more than pointy-eared thin dogs from the swamps down in the lower part of the state and southeast Georgia called, plainly, Carolina Dogs, and recognized by the AKC. For what it's worth, unlike typical, non-feral purebreds, Carolina Dog bitches underwent three estrus cycles in quick succession, much like my wife.

Southern Exotic Pets stood between the Side Pocket bar and Calloustown Grill. Across the street we had a pawn shop, a fireworks outlet, and a storefront long vacant and unrentable due to the ghosts living inside ever since Grady Dorn shot and killed his entire family and then hanged himself there inside what had been his Calloustown Florists business. It's not like a curious person couldn't wile away a good few hours, which often made me wonder why Calloustown never seemed to attract northern retirees and/or fugitives in need of relatively safe refuge.

I walked into Southern Exotic Pets and waved at Spence, the owner. He yelled out, “Sorry to hear about Carol!” too loudly. I nodded, held up my hand, and turned toward the stacked-up aquariums. I passed blue neon guppies, tetras, angelfish, the usual. I tried to stare down an apartment complex of Siamese fighting fish, but they seemed bored. On down the aisle Spence kept a couple piranhas and a slither of eels—which made me think that a sushi joint should open up in Grady Dorn's old flower shop, seeing as the chef could cross the street and get his fresh ingredients—and then I rounded a corner to a line of snakes, lizards, salamanders, and tortoises.

If a five-year-old boy had not mistaken me for his father—at least that's the original scenario I concluded—I might've leaned down to a ball python and thought about Dottie showing up and constricting all the air out of our house. But the kid, two terrariums down from me, tapped on glass and said, “Here's what I want. It's a corn snake, but I can tell everyone it's a coral snake. ‘Red touch yellow, kill a fellow.' This has red touching black, so it's a corn snake.”

I walked over and bent down to see. He looked up and said, “Hey, you're not…”

Growing up, I had mistaken strangers for my father too, a number of times. I never decided if I was the one who strayed off inside grocery and hardware stores or if my father wasn't the most conscientious guardian. To the kid in front of the snake I said, “How long will that corn snake get?” and hoped he wouldn't start screaming out, what with how modern parents implant fear and paranoia into their children's heads, rightly or not, to the point of it being impossible to approach any child aged two to nineteen and say, “Hello, kid, do you know anything about how that Kentucky Fried Chicken box you're holding got die-cut?” without a mother appearing out of nowhere, already punching 911 on her cell phone.

“Hey,” the boy said. He didn't need to introduce himself, I thought. He wore a stick-on “Hello My Name Is” nametag on his shirt with R
EX
written in block letters. Who let his kid walk around in public with a nametag? Now that was an unconscientious guardian.

“Hey back at you, Rex. I'm Duane.” I said, “Do you want me to help you find your father or mother?”

Whenever Eddie, Albert, and I got together, Albert got stuck thinking nonstop about Duane Eddy, the guitarist who recorded the 1960s instrumentals “Peter Gunn” and “Rebel Rouser.” Sometimes when Albert didn't respond to questions both Eddie and I knew he'd gotten those twangy notes stuck in his head.

Rex looked like he belonged in a breakfast cereal commercial. There weren't many children left in Calloustown—occasionally someone over the age of forty might have an unplanned pregnancy—and I thought about how I'd never seen this kid before. Maybe he lived in a town even smaller than Calloustown, a place like Gruel or Level Land that couldn't support a store that specialized in pets other than calicos, Dachshunds, and minnows.

Rex said, “A coral snake's one of the most dangerous snakes in America. There's the rattler, and water moccasin, and copperhead. But the coral snake's better.”

I'm not sure why I decided it was the proper time to tell this little innocent boy about a nonexistent mythical creature my crazy uncle Dillard told me about when I was Rex's age. I said, “Coral snakes are scary, but not like a pine gator. I doubt they sell pine gators here. They're too rare and vicious.”

Rex shook his head sideways, then said, “What?”

“A pine gator,” I said. “It's kind of like a regular alligator, but it has a monkey's tail. Pine gators are shy, reclusive animals that mostly live in the Appalachian Mountains. They hang down from tree limbs, you know, and wait for people to walk by. Or deer. Pine gators have been known to eat the heads off bears that aren't paying attention, or that are spending too much time by a pine gator's personal tree sniffing around for honeybee hives. You can hardly even see them, they're so camouflaged. A pine gator's hide looks just like pine tree bark.”

I felt sure that Rex wasn't from here, or even the state of South Carolina. It's not difficult to make out a stranger—the men have haircuts performed by professionals, the women pluck their eyebrows consistently, and the children don't squint, stammer, and wear long sleeves in summer to hide their scars and bruises. Strangers ask for directions back to I-26, I-20, I-85, or I-95; they try too hard to use double negatives when talking to us; they leave tips at the Calloustown Diner.

Rex said, “I used to have a pine gator for a pet. I had one.”

“You did?” I said. “I never had one. I've seen a couple, but I got scared and ran. I didn't want my fingers bitten off, seeing as I already work as a die-cutter.”

“Mine's was named Gypsy,” Rex said. The corn snake in front of him lifted up toward its cage's roof then dropped down.

“That's a pretty good name for a pine gator,” I said, though I didn't mean it, seeing as we didn't live far from Irish Travelers, and I knew that the term “gypsy” wasn't all that right a thing to say. “I believe that if I ever had the good fortune of owning a pine gator, though, you know what I'd name him? Gypsy! I'd name him Gypsy, that's what I'd do, no doubt.”

“Hey, that was my pine gator!” Rex said. He laughed and stomped his feet. “I just said that!”

He walked toward me, and then, without my having to take his hand or shoulder, followed me to the cash register where, I assumed, we'd find his parent. “I came across this little snake aficionado over in your snake section,” I said to Spence.

“You did?” Spence looked over his drugstore-purchased reading glasses. “Nothing I like more than to have a herpe-tologist in the room.”

The kid said nothing. Spence and I stood there looking at each other for too long, then we looked around to find no other adult in the pet store. I said, “Rex, was your father or mother in here with you earlier?”

He said, of course, “Why do you keep calling me Rex?”

_______

We ran outside and yelled for help. We looked down aisles, behind aquariums, in the storage room, in the restroom. We did everything three times. In between I said, “What's your name?” and “How did you get here?” Looking back, maybe I didn't give the kid enough time to answer. When he started crying—wailing, really, just like any kid in a movie about divorced parents or not getting a toy—I didn't know what else to do outside of calling Carol and interrupting her sullen rendezvous with Dottie.

“We got this kid down here at the pet shop don't know his real name his father or mother seems to have abandoned him!” I yelled over the phone.

My wife said, “Try ‘Jacob.' Try ‘Jacob,' ‘Jason,' ‘Joshua,' or ‘Jeremy.' Those are the most popular names right now.”

I looked at him and asked if those were his names. He said, “I'm not supposed to say my name to strangers.” He'd quit crying, but Spence needed to hold a Kleenex to the boy's nose. I wasn't going to do it.

“Just bring him home,” Carol said. “We'll figure this out.” She turned her head from the mouthpiece and said to Dottie, “You see any ‘Lost Child' posters on your way over here?” To me she said, “Dottie says check his pockets and tags of his shirt and underwear.”