Calloustown (29 page)

Mrs. Timms said, “This air. Not all air. This air. It's got too much argon. Tony's allergic to argon, as are we. It's a congenital condition.”

I didn't know how to respond. Well, I knew enough to say, “Get the fuck out of my classroom, you idiotic people.” Then I ripped the mouthpieces away from their faces and chased them away. I screamed out, “This is what you get for naming your child after an adjective,” because I'd been thinking about kids named Tony, Misty, Merry, and Randy.

As it ended up, those were my last official words in my teaching career with American students. Later on, standing there with my five or six colleagues, waiting for our brick-and-cement-block school to become dust for the townspeople to breathe in and sneeze out, I imagined what my last words might've been had I taken a job at a less sickly and paranoid school district. Would I have said, “I've enjoyed every minute” or “There's forty years I'll never get back”? Would I have shaken hands with administrators even though I believed them to be a cross between weasels and newts? Would I have felt as though I made a difference in some teenager's life?

The principal, whose name I never learned and who hadn't shown up since we dwindled down to ten students, drove up on his new Harley-Davidson. He yelled out, “Good news! I've been hearing the rumors, but I didn't want to let y'all in on it until it was official. They've postponed demolition! We've been chose by the government to be a Special Ambassador School. We got us forty children showing up tomorrow from a Chinese leper colony.”

He said that even Mr. Lawson would return to teach woodworking, no longer embarrassed to reveal his nub.

I shook my head. “Don't count me in,” I said. “This has all been sad, confounding, and miserable enough. Do you know what happens right after all these new students die off? I'll tell you. Amphibians from the sky. Fire everywhere. Winds we've never imagined. I don't believe much in the Bible, but I do believe that Revelation section.”

The principal forgot to put down his kickstand and the motorcycle toppled over. He said, “There will be a need for extra grief counselors, if you're right. What's your name? I'm going to see if I can get you promoted to vice principal. If the end of the world's coming like you say, then we need more vice principals with similar farsighted thoughts.”

As if I'd arranged it beforehand, three claps of thunder sounded. Everyone ran inside except for me. I righted the principal's Harley, started it, and rode off in search of a high bridge with low guardrails. Speeding down the corrupted road, though, I understood that I didn't have what it takes to end my own life. Being a scientist of sorts, I needed to view firsthand what happens after lepers.

What Could've Been?

Take a left out of the driveway. Take a left at the stop sign. Drive to the first convenience store—which used to be a 7-Eleven, or Pantry, or Quick-Way, but now offers scratch cards and Fuel Perks—and take another left-hand turn. Get in the slow lane.

Drive past the elementary school that looks nothing like the one you attended. A row of brick ranch-style houses. Maybe a set of clapboard mill village houses. At the light—there will be a McDonald's here—take a right. Pass the Dollar General, or the Dollar Tree, or the Dollar Store. Look to the left and see how the pawnshop sells guns and buys gold, as always. Pass the grocery store that used to house a different chain, that used to house a different chain, that used to house a different chain—Publix, Bi-Lo, Food Lion, Ingles, Winn-Dixie, Community Cash, IGA, Piggly Wiggly. You'll try to remember the succession.

The same will occur at the Bank of America. Nationsbank, FirstUnion, C&S, that other longtime local savings and loan where you started a checking account in high school.

Drive past a barrage of fast-food restaurants that includes a Burger King, Hardee's, Dairy Queen, Sonic, Chick-fil-A, Zaxby's, Pizza Inn, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Little Caesar's, KFC, Bojangles, Captain D's, et cetera. Outback, Chili's, Ruby Tuesday, Applebee's, Moe's Southwestern, TGIF. Subway, another McDonald's, Firehouse Subs, Taco Bell, another Bojangles, Ryan's, Red Lobster, IHOP, and so on. Huddle House, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel, Shoney's. This will take about two miles. In between there will be a Walmart, a vacant Kmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, and Big Lots. Exxon, Texaco, BP, Citgo, Shell, Kangaroo, Sunoco—none of which have full service, or mechanics available who can fix a flat or check transmission fluid.

Take another right onto the four-lane road that used to be a two-lane country road forty years earlier, where you and your friends drove around smoking cigarettes, drank Miller Ponies, pulled over with the overhead light on into rusty-gated pasture entrances so someone could fumble with Zigzag rolling papers. Drive past the dilapidated wooden building that housed the little store where your father bought Nehi grape sodas, or NuGrape—it's the place where the owner got murdered and the police never caught a killer. Or it's the place that the owner's children didn't want to operate, seeing as their father sent them off to college. Or it's the place where the owner had diabetes so advanced that the doctor said a leg needed amputation, and the owner felt as if he had no better choice—what with all the grocery stores nearby—than to put a shotgun in his mouth behind the ancient tree behind the property. One of your friends used to claim that a man got hanged from the lowest branch of that tree. One of your friends carved his initials, plus the initials of, say, Ann Guy, in that tree. Years later—twenty years later—you figured out that the “A. G.” really stood for a boy who didn't smoke cigarettes, roll joints, or drink from tiny beer bottles: Alan Gray, or Alvin Gillespie, or Aaron Giles. He was the boy who got accepted to a college where no one from your hometown went, and he made a mark on the world before dying in a tragic manner, not much different from the owner of the store where your father bought bygone classic sodas, which made him smile.

Pass a junk shop that holds as much merchandise outside as inside the cement block building. There's a sale on drive-in speakers.

You're not that far away. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for British monarchy. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for famous golf courses of the world. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for Ivy League colleges. Pass a subdivision of lookalike houses wherein all the roads are named for Native American accoutrements.

You will reach the land where the drive-in movie theater once stood. The screen's structure remains, though the front of it peels away. Metal posts stand without their speakers, like the headless parking meters at the beginning of
Cool Hand Luke
, which you probably saw here. You should park your vehicle and walk these grounds—already scoured by men and women with metal detectors, already used for a makeshift flea market that somehow failed, already surveyed for a three cul-de-sac subdivision called Hollywood Hills that will offer nothing but drainage problems for the houses built closest to the screen.

Go to the back row—or at least where you think the back row might've been. Forget about the snack bar/projection booth. Weave through high weeds to the back row and think about how the windows fogged up. Think about how you never, through all of the pre-planning, imagined what difficulties a steering wheel might offer, or how the seats might nearly concuss both of you after pulling the levers, or how you tried to maneuver into the backseat as if you'd had experience as a rock climber and high hurdler. Think about the difficulties both of you encountered, brought about by a triple row of brassiere metal eye hooks there on your first real date, or at least the first date remembered. Think about the bad acting, the car chase, the unreal setting, the chainsaw, the shark, the blob, the giant insect, the monster, the seemingly normal neighbor with the unruly, untoward, and despicable urges. Think about tires on gravel and how you hoped the driver continued on, that it wasn't anybody you knew, that it wasn't your parents.

Were there swing sets down by the screen, where children played before the movie? Did you think to yourself, “Those poor idiot parents, bringing their children to a place like this on a Saturday night?” Was there some kind of Coming Attractions? Did you say to the person next to you, “I got your ‘coming attractions'” and think it was the wittiest thing ever said?

Stand on that spot.

Stand where you think your Opal, Datsun, Ford, Chevy, Buick, Toyota, MG Midget, or parents' Lincoln or Cadillac might've stood. Look at the compromised screen. Go ahead and say, “Fuckin' A—how did I make it this far?” Say, “Jesus Christ, all that bad living. All those close calls. What could've been? What could've been? What could've been?”

Then there's the mother or father standing there, thirty minutes after curfew, and the story you have memorized. You have twenty lies, all of which you'll recycle for the rest of your life, though you didn't know it then, in the driveway, looking at your hand on the gear shift, thinking about putting it in reverse.

Acknowledgments

I am happy and proud to work with editor Guy Intoci. Thanks for putting up with our quirky dialect down here. Thanks to Steve Gillis and Michelle Dotter at Dzanc. I hope that my students and colleagues at Wofford College know how much I cherish their hard work and relentless esprit de corps. Bless you, Glenda Guion, for moving from one Calloustown to another.