Calloustown (2 page)

So we ate fish, waited for nightfall, then emerged from the bunker. Mr. Massey checked the bed of his truck and said out loud, “Shovel, pick, pick.” He touched his temple, looked at us with those beady eyes, and said, “Map.” And then we drove off, found quiet country roads with little traffic until teenage drinkers and dope smokers came out, wary and trustful that highway patrolmen stuck to more traveled stretches of blacktop, got out of the truck, and invented potholes where otherwise good asphalt existed.

“My daddy has to do this in order to keep his job,” Lincoln said each night, like I didn't remember. “He says when the world runs out of potholes, he'll run out of paychecks.”

Lincoln and I remained friends throughout our time in Calloustown, then he went off to college and, from what I heard last, worked as a lobbyist in D.C. Fortunately for him, he looked a lot like his mother, though I tried not to think about that when my pillow groaned beneath me on those confusing and hormone-ridden nights.

“Don't tell anyone about this, Reed. You know that, don't you? One day you'll want people to keep your secrets, and they ain't going to do it if you tell on me. That's how it works. I'm not sure how or why, but that's the way things go.”

I never planned on telling anyone about the potholes, especially my parents. I didn't want Mass Massey finding out, then springing toward me one day from his trapdoor.

June rolled down her window. This was in April. The night before we'd gone to a lecture at the Georgia Center for the Book given by a man who published a memoir on his childhood, living with a manically depressed mother and a skeptical father. Personally, I had sat there mostly unmindful. I had caught myself trying to think of anyone I knew in Calloustown who wasn't depressed or skeptical, and how perhaps a memoir of an exhilarated and gung-ho family upbringing might offer an obsequious and prurient reading experience.

June said, “See? This is what I'm talking about. How long have we been together? I can't believe you've never told me this story. You're not making this up, are you?” And then she stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Goddamn it to hell, move! Drive! Somebody pull onto the side of the road!” To me she said, “This isn't one of those stories you heard from one of the barefoot people, is it?”

June never understood how or why I would work for the nonprofit Shod America, or find both joy and meaning in talking shoe companies into donating their products to poor Appalachian people. My wife, I feel certain now, envisioned herself going from food writer to editor of the Lifestyles section of the paper, then trudging forward from there. June, at this point, liked nothing more than to accept assignments from the paper to cover meaningless black-tie fetes of the unworthy, and then write, in my opinion, insipid narratives of how the chocolate fountain was the hit of the night. She wrote about or how the Pyramid of Cheops ice sculpture coupled with the monoliths of pâté formed to recreate Stonehenge seemed destined to live together at every social function.

When we sat at lectures and demonstrations that were supposed to strengthen our unrevivable union, I thought about how she no longer criticized our state's politicians or the president. She no longer blurted out things about home-school parents, and in the afterlife I'm going to ask someone in charge if my ex-wife voted libertarian.

“It's a real story from my life, June,” I said. We didn't move. A black man walked by on the sidewalk, and June rolled up her window and clicked her door lock. I said, “What the hell's happened to you?”

“Fuck you, Reed. I would've locked the door if a white guy came our way.”

I didn't say “Bullshit,” but I thought it. In the afterlife I'd hunt June down and say, “Liar.”

How come I had never told my wife of the Masseys? Because when we got along, I didn't want her to make some kind of unqualified leap in logic, which was how this entire conversation would end. Perhaps in some kind of passive-aggressive way it's how I wanted our relationship to finally end. Maybe I'd gotten tired of June saying things to me like, “You've never had any ambition! What's the next big career move for a man who doles out new shoes to poor people? Belts? Are you going to move up the ladder and start handing out neckties?”

When we met I had plans for graduate school in anthropology. I'd been accepted into two of the best programs there were, but June had that meaningless degree in journalism and had taken a job in Atlanta because their last food writer died—get this—when her gall bladder exploded. June had said to me, “I am not moving to Michigan or Chicago. How many columns can I write about bratwurst?” Before Shod America, I worked in the Textiles and Social History collection for the Atlanta History Center, receiving and cataloguing more than ten thousand pieces. June had said to me—though she was drunk at the time—“What's your next step, plastics and social history? Something and anti-social history? You don't have any sense of drive or accomplishment.”

I don't know when the transformation took place within her. In the beginning we got along. I don't want to make any presumptions, but she might've thought that my family name—Reddick—meant that I was related to the Reddicks, the ones who made their money in oil, then in newspapers. June drank a bunch for the first few years of our marriage, as did I, so maybe she kept forgetting when I told her I was from the Calloustown Reddicks. Maybe she thought I lied, that I paraded an anonymity-prone nature. I don't know. From those early years I can only recall June looking like she emerged from a shower with Modigliani, and that she pitched a Sunday column called Bar Naked to her editor, which would include the mastery of mixology coupled with True Weird Tales from real-life publicans. The editor said it might work in Portland, Seattle, or Laramie, but not in the South. June quit drinking. I drank more, haunted daily by quilts and samplers on my job at the museum, then by wingtips and cheap canvas boating shoes when I got to Shod America.

I turned on the radio and tried to scramble past evangelists, country singers, and rappers—who all, oddly, seemed to comment on the same topics—trying to find the Road and Weather Conditions station. June looked at her watch. She said, “There's no way we'll make it to the lecture. Damn it. I wanted to learn more about kilns. I'd like to learn how to cook something in a horno, then write about it in my column.”

“Kilns get hot,” I said. “They get hot enough to turn dirt into a brick.” I couldn't pass up the perfect segue, or what in my wet-brained mind I understood to be perfect and serendipitous cause and effect. I said, “You never met my father, but he knew how to turn clay into bricks, and bricks back into ground, kind of.”

So I had driven around on weekend supply-and-demand forays with Mass Massey and Lincoln, and when I came home on Sundays my mother looked up from her baskets to ask, “What did y'all do this weekend? Did you go fishing?”

“Who names their kid Lincoln in the South?” my father would bellow. “I'm not saying anything racist, but you'd think that more black people would name their kids Lincoln. If I were black, you'd be named either Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, or Brown Versus the Board of Education.”

And then I'd ask, “How come you named me Reed?” knowing all along—because my grandfather got drunk and told me—that I'd had a brother named Ed who died long before my birth, and that in actuality my name was Re Ed.

“Never mind that. It's a good name. In those baby books, it means, ‘cleared land,'” my mother would say.

“And it means something that grows near the water. So you got it either way, either cleared land or something growing on the land,” my father said.

We went through this incessant charade for, I guess, about half the Sundays of every year for three or four years. And then one rainy day I returned from school to find my pure and patient mother crying. My father was to have driven her somewhere with her baskets earlier—she'd improved to the point of people asking if she had nimble-fingered Cherokee blood in her background, had three craft galleries carrying her work in towns where people had money to buy baskets that didn't hold green plastic grass and screw-top eggs filled with cheap chocolate—and she carried them on her lap. She didn't want them in the back of the truck, seeing as it rained. My father hit a pothole, she lurched forward, the baskets got crushed, and she broke two ribs.

She didn't blame him because, for once, it wasn't his fault. The particular pothole—and I remembered shoveling it out while Mass and Lincoln Massey picked extra hard, out near the center of the blacktop—must've been eighteen inches deep. The hole disappeared once rainwater filled it up, at least to an unsuspecting and non-prescient driver.

My mother's ruined baskets ended up reparable, as did her ribs. But my father took it as a sign: that he'd been punished by God because of his own shortcomings, failures, and mean-spirited acts that he wouldn't divulge completely. I remember only his getting home, having me help him try to bang out the damaged left front rim of his truck, and saying, “There are some incidents for which I need to atone.” I remember all of this because it came out so grammatically correct and biblical. “I'll probably need your help.”

My father fixed his wheel as best he could. He checked in on my mother, fetched aspirin and ice packs, asked if she wanted any gum, and handed me a ball-peen hammer. Out back, below the homemade fire tower that at this point stood eight or ten feet high, my father kept a stack of broken bricks. He retrieved a washtub and two old stumps for us to sit on like ancient narcissistic whittlers. He stood up and stared at an outbuilding, told me to go fill up a wheelbarrow with some sawdust he had piled up in case I ever decided to become a pole vaulter or high jumper, and came back with a bag of cement. I said, “There's no way we can glue these pieces of brick back together.”

“No,” he said. “No, we're doing the opposite.” And then my father told me to break the bricks up further and transfer any pieces smaller than dimes into the washtub. We worked hard together, and played a guessing game with our plink-plink-plinking. “Three Blind Mice” was easy to make out, but not so songs like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” or “Back in the U.S.S.R.” My father mixed the brick crumbles, sawdust, and cement together, and three hours later we loaded the heavy, impossible mixture into the back of his truck and took off with a hoe, two broken shovel handles, and a dozen plastic jugs of water.

I said, “Why don't we just call the South Carolina Department of Transportation? Why don't we go over to Lincoln's daddy's house and tell him about the potholes? He works a job telling people to fill the things in.”

My father didn't say anything about Mass Massey being communist, Catholic, atheist, or werewolf. He said, “Mr. Massey has enough things to do besides having someone outside of his work tell him he doesn't have enough things to do.” And then, mostly beneath his breath, he said, “I need to do this in case there's really a Heaven.”

Was he feeling guilty about naming me Re Ed, and dooming me to live up to my unknown dead brother's prospective reputation? Had he wronged my mother more than what was perceptible? Was my father feeling guilt for never living up to my grandfather's expectations? I never learned the truth. We found the first overt and culpable hole, filled it up, poured water on top, and mixed it together into a foul ashen sludge. Drivers slowed and veered.

“How long will it take for this to dry? Maybe we should borrow some of those orange cones and put them around this thing so people don't drive into it,” I said. “I know where to get some. Mr. Massey keeps a bunch of cones in the back of his work truck.”

My father stretched his back and groaned. He said, “I didn't think about that. Huh. Damn, I didn't think about that, Reed. Good thinking. It'll stay gummy too long for us to hang around waiting.”

I stood there alone while my father drove to my best friend's underground house. He tied a red oil rag to one of the broken shovel handles and said, “Stand in front of the hole and wave this around. If it looks like someone's not going to slow down or move over, jump.”

It all worked out well. People saw me and they slowed. A few drivers asked if I was okay, I explained the situation, and they thanked me. One guy said there should be a Boy Scout badge for such community-spirited causes. My father returned, we put up two cones, and we drove onward to the next potential disaster.

“Did your father explain it all to Mr. Massey?” June asked me in the traffic jam. An ambulance, driving on the sidewalk, passed us with its lights on but no siren blaring.

“I have no clue. I asked him, he said I asked too many questions, and that was it. He said it might be best if I never brought this up to Lincoln's daddy, so I have a feeling he plain stole the cones,” I said.

“You come from a fucked-up place,” June said. I looked forward. The driver in front of me put on his left-hand blinker and crept slowly ahead. June said, “First off, you could've potentially killed people with the potholes, and then your father could've gotten you killed—or kidnapped—leaving you there in the middle of the road.”

I didn't argue with her. I didn't mention how Calloustown wasn't the kind of place, back then, where hit-and-runs or kidnapping occurred.

When we got to the site of the wreck, June rolled her window down. She said, “Is everyone all right?” to a highway patrolman who brandished an unlit flashlight.

He said, “Mexicans. Three dead, one unconscious. One of them might be all right, unless the emergency room doctor does the right thing. Maybe they'll send him back before he wakes up.” I had never known a highway patrolman to offer the results of a car wreck to passersby and wondered if he'd committed some kind of misdemeanor.

My wife laughed.

I looked at her and said, “That's not funny. What has happened to you?”