Calloustown (21 page)

Mr. Whalen reappeared and said, “Hey, I got an idea. We might as well go through the whole nine-month process,” and he told the boys to throw their hooks back down. To me he said, “Hey, Luke, do me a favor. This is going to be fun! Place all the hooks around your belt loops. Go ahead! I won't let you get hurt none.”

Ms. Whalen's sixth-grade boys pulled me up through the hole in her den floor. I have no clue what kind of test line they used, or how the bamboo poles didn't break under my weight hanging there in the crawlspace, but Ben Whalen told me to start screaming like crazy, and I did. What else was I supposed to do? I couldn't see any of my unlikely deliverers, for they'd had to back down the hallway pulling.

Mr. Whalen stood there leaning against a bookcase that held a dictionary, a number of ashtrays, some candles, and framed photographs of dead deer. He yelled out, “Okay, y'all run back in here,” as I gathered myself on the lip of the hole, surrounded by ice bags.

No one said, “Are you all right?” Ms. Whalen yelled from a back room something about how we needed to settle down so as not to fall back in the hole.

Ben Whalen said, “And that's how a baby is born, but without the ice or clothes that Luke is wearing.”

My teacher's husband shoved what ice hadn't melted over the hole's lip. He slid the makeshift hatch over his own crawl-space, and covered the exposed wood with a rug that wasn't much bigger than the jagged edges it needed to hide. “I'm going to make a spiral staircase down there one day,” he said, apparently to himself.

I said nothing about all the cool Matchbox cars my sixth-grade classmates and I would sleep directly over. I wanted to tell someone about it, but already understood that, if I revealed what I had discovered, somehow a Donnie, Lonnie, Gary, or Billy would label me a big baby for liking toy cars over the real ones that they swore they drove around all the time when their parents weren't home.

My teacher said, “Now, no horseplay tonight, boys. Y'all stretch out your sleeping bags in here and go to sleep. Mr. Whalen will be walking y'all up early-early-early. ‘What Does Sherman Know?' is a long and tiring day. I made some special treats for tomorrow in the freezer, so don't go around snooping.”

“Goodnight, Ms. Whalen,” we said in unison. I have no idea what happened to her husband, but I heard the back door squeak open while our teacher warned us against cutting fool all night.

She turned off the lights. We made no noise. Then Stonewall Harrell giggled. He'd commandeered the flashlight at some point after I got birthed. Stonewall said, “I know what a woman's nookie looks and feels like for real. It ain't like what he told us.”

I don't want to say that my organic-farming, ex-corporate-lawyering parents sheltered me. But I'd never come across this “nookie” term. I knew poontang, beaver, snatch, trim, twat, quim, muff, quif, box, cooter, and meat wallet, but not nookie.

Lonnie and Donnie said, “No you don't,” and then there was a bunch of uh-huhs and don't neithers.

“I can prove it,” Stonewall said. “Y'all cover me. I'm going into the bathroom.”

I didn't mean to say nookie out loud, but I did just to get a feel for it. It's not the kind of word, I knew, that I could use daily, like when I said something about a box or beaver.

“Stonewall better not come back in here dragging along Ms. Whalen,” Donnie said.

He didn't. No, Stonewall returned with a gigantic blue jar of women's nighttime facial cream. He said, “What I'm about to show y'all is something my cousin taught me last year. Now, everyone slop some of this stuff on your wiener, and then come stick your wiener in my armpit.” He slung off his T-shirt and got down on his knees. “You got to close your eyes, though, for it to work best.”

I'm not sure what happened after that. This isn't one of those “selective memory” occasions. I'm not being judgmental for what those Munson and Harrell children did the night before “What Does Sherman Know?” but I didn't join in—perhaps because I thought a joke was being played on me. I got up from the floor and grabbed the flashlight. I went to the bookcase and opened up the dictionary to find everything marked out by black Magic Marker. It's like an entire language disappeared, page after page. I turned to the Gs to see if maybe they'd left “God” there, but they hadn't. I turned to the Js, for Jesus, but it was marked out, too. I picked up the dictionary—this was one of those Thorndike-Barnhart red hardbacks, probably stolen from our classroom at Calloustown Elementary—and went out the front door with it. I walked without paying attention, as if on automatic pilot—which they say General William Tecumseh Sherman mastered above all else—and skirted the briars and next-door pit bull successfully. No noises emanated from the den at this point. I opened the door to beneath the house and found Mr. Whalen seated cross-legged, surrounded by his Matchbox car collection. He had a drop light hanging from a floor joist, and he didn't turn his head.

“You want to play a little game I like to call ‘What Does Henry Ford Know?'” he asked me. “You want to play a little game I like to call ‘What Does Detroit Got that We Don't?'”

I should've jumped, but I didn't. I should've either said yes or no instead of pointing to the floorboards above me and whispering, “They're fucking each other's armpits upstairs with your wife's Noxzema.”

Mr. Whalen said, “Now, not everyone likes a tattletale, Luke. I do, though, so you came to the right place.” He handed me his plastic cup, told me to take a drink if I wished—I did, only to learn that he partook of Pepsi and George Dickel, a combination I'd had before—and got up from the cement floor without grunting. He whispered, “Unfortunately, your teacher threw away all the boxes to these cars. They'd be worth a lot more money if I still had the boxes. Don't forget that, Luke. Sometimes a box is more valuable than what goes inside it.”

Years later I would realize that he still worked on his sex lesson. I said, “Yes, sir.”

“What're you doing with that dictionary?” he asked me quietly. I shrugged. He leaned in closer and said, “I blacked out every word in there except for ‘desperation.' Go ahead. Turn to page 275. I keep waiting for Monetta to open the thing up. Maybe she already knows all the words inside.”

I drank more from his cup, not thinking.

Mr. Whalen kept a stepladder in his crawlspace, of course. I took a theater appreciation class in college my freshman year and learned three things: If there was a pistol on the set, it would be fired at the end of the first act; if there was a telephone on the bedside, it would ring, usually not on cue. I learned, too, that most drama majors were obnoxious and insecure, and that if they didn't make it in a summer rep group they'd go off to law school, eventually get disenchanted should they have any sense whatsoever, then finally give it all up in order to farm berries, sing campfire songs spontaneously, and teach their children most of the euphemisms for female genitalia.

So I wasn't surprised or shocked when my sixth-grade teacher's drunken husband said to me, “Let's stand this alu minum ladder up right under the hole where I'm going to eventually build a spiral staircase.” He kicked it open, then tested the floor for balance. Ben Whalen held his index finger to his mouth for me to be quiet, then took his plastic cup of booze from me.

Here's the scariest segment out of the most freakish night in my life up until this time: Mr. Whalen offered no pantomime hand gestures à la high school ROTC members obsessed with semaphore. He looked at me once, didn't smile, and we simultaneously climbed up both sides of the stepladder—he on the “Do Not Use for Steps” side, and me on the traditional silver treads—like Olympic-caliber synchronized swimmers, or champion ax men at a logging competition in the Pacific Northwest, or adjacent geysers at a national park. Ben Whalen put his plastic cup in his mouth, we placed our palms up to the makeshift hatch, and shoved hard so mightily and fast that not one Munson or Harrell child had time to react. Listen, these guys never exactly reacted quickly most days—thus all the bruises during baseball season—but you'd think that an eruption of floor below a cheap throw rug might cause four prone Harrells getting faux-screwed in the armpits by Noxzema-slathered Munsons to yelp, run, or fight before their discoverers underwent sensory-based deductions, which could only end, later on, in blackmail situations.

“What the hell you boys doing?” Mr. Whalen yelled out, even before the circle of floor tipped over entirely against the useless bookcase. He emerged into his living space, took two or three determined steps, and flipped the light switch. By the time I came out of the hole all of my sleepover comrades rushed to find their pajama bottoms and hide both erections and tainted, compromised armpits. There would be talk of my being “born again,” within the next six months, and—like an iconic unseemly act performed in public by a celebrity—by the time I left Calloustown for good it seemed as though everyone aged twelve to forty had been present and witnessed the occasion. “What the hell you boys doing to each other?”

Before anyone could answer—and I'll admit that I started laughing uncontrollably, which is why I don't play poker—our sixth-grade teacher flew into her own, now corrupted, den. She got that look on her face that meant “I'm calling your daddy,” and without raising her voice much said, “Get your clothes back on, boys.” She reached down to the floor, picked up her fouled jar of night cream, and said, “Where'd y'all get this?”

Oddly, she looked straight at her husband. Did I mention that he never set down his plastic cup throughout the spooky entrance, or how a pint bottle peeped out of his left back pocket?

“We was just playing a game,” one of the Munson boys said.

I quit laughing long enough to say, “Playing Pin the Pecker on an Armpit,” and, perhaps affected by a jigger's worth of good bourbon, lost my balance and fell back down the hole, half-sliding down the ladder's stringers.

You'd think that I'd've heard one of the adults say, “Uh-oh” or “Are you okay?” I swear, though, between terra firma and the cement floor I heard my sixth-grade teacher say, “No wonder Sherman swerved from this wasteland.”

I regained consciousness with my head against a dirt mound built for Matchbox car coasting. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee stood beneath my eyes, and Jeb Stuart covered my up per lip. Ms. Whalen held the three in place, delicately. What would've been our little surprise treats sometime between the Finger Museum and the Stuffed Wild Animals petting zoo—Kool-Aid frozen in ice-cube trays, with plastic confederate soldiers frozen into them to be used as handles—now worked a secondary mission, namely to keep the swelling down from the tumble I took down Mr. Whalen's imaginary ice hole/vagina.

I woke up and said, “What day is it?” like that, like I always had done in the past after getting knocked out.

My teacher shushed me and said, “You're a different kind of Calloustowner, Luke.”

Upstairs, though I didn't know it at the time, all the Munson and Harrell boys had been locked up inside the Fresh Meat on Wheels refrigeration truck in order to keep them out of the way and unable to call their parents. Somehow, if I knew the parents of Calloustown, the entire Noxzema incident would be interpreted as the Whalens' fault. She'd get released from her teaching duties, and every Harrell and Munson would go back to eating non-fresh meat bought from a grocery store chain's amateur butcher.

“I called his parents but didn't get an answer,” Ben Whalen said to his wife.

I sat up and said, “I like the ambulance best,” referring to the Lomas Ambulance #14 Matchbox car that Mr. Whalen—during playtime—had backed beside a #57 fire truck, both of which were in front of a #13 Dodge wrecker, which seemed to be aiding the grenade-throwing army man who had just wrecked his #73 Mercury station wagon.

“You don't need an ambulance,” Ms. Whalen said. “By the time an ambulance gets here you'll have healed these bumps and grown new ones.” She took Jeb Stuart off my lip and put him in her own mouth. “You're okay, comparatively.”

I said, “I think my parents drove down to Columbia to see a movie, that's where they are.” I got up and said, “I'm okay.”

Mr. Whalen didn't offer me another sip of George Dickel. He said, “I got a good mind to leave them boys in the truck for the rest of the night. We got any Pine-Sol? I need to go scour down the den from whatever emissions those boys made up there.”

My teacher leaned in to look at my pupils. I thought she wanted to kiss, but she said, “What's the capital of Florida?”

Immediately I said, “Miami.”

“He's all right,” Ms. Whalen said, and her husband nodded.

We walked out the crawlspace door. When we passed Mr. Whalen's work truck he banged on the panels hard a few times. Inside the house my teacher put on some rubber gloves and covered the hole in the floor, then the rug, then scooted a table over the hole. She told me to try my parents again, I think just to see if I could remember the number. My mother answered on the first ring. She said she and my father had decided against going to a movie, that they'd been there all night, that the phone hadn't rung. I told her she needed to come get me, and when she asked why I didn't say, “Because I know anatomy,” or “I don't fit in,” or “There's a chance I'll turn to alcoholism if I stay here much longer,” or “My teacher doesn't know state capitals.” I said, “I hit my head when we were playing freeze tag.”

Ms. Whalen took the receiver from me, finally, and said to my mother, “Luke was It,” among some other things. Again, in retrospect, I think she might've been speaking metaphorically.

So I missed another ceremonial burning of the Calloustown Courthouse. I heard later that Mr. Whalen's minibus didn't start up the next morning and that he had to drive my classmates around in the back of his work truck. Those idiots said they were surrounded by hanging meat for the entire day, by carcasses meant to be bought by their kin. I shrugged a lot over the next six years and lied back at them. I told them my father let me take dates out on his cherry picker once a year to see our hometown fake burn, and it worked in regards to getting girlfriends amorous. When, finally, I told my parents the truth about that one night I had with the Whalens, my father made a point to order a gigantic box of sausage, though he only cooked the patties and set them out for crows to eat, then fly around our hometown fouling windshields and rooftops. My father believed that a modern-day Sherman might act likewise.