Calloustown (24 page)

“This is Berta Parks. I'm the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center down in Calloustown.”

Harold thought, “How did I get Pickens or Pickering out of this? Maybe I'm the one who needs to be reported for dementia.” He thought, “Wasn't the old Miss America master of ceremonies named Bert Parks—man, how much crap did this woman get for her name?” He said, “Is my mother all right?”

Harold felt guilty about not visiting more often. Evidently his brother, Kenny, visited her two or three times a week. But with a divorce, two high school kids on weekends, and an ever-present rotation of minimum wage–earning high school graduates who confused Niacin with acai, vitamin B with bee pollen, and nickels with quarters, it seemed as though he spent eighteen hours a day outside of his own apartment. He brought his mother up for every other Christmas, for every other birthday. “I can't come down to spend two or three days in Calloustown,” he used to say. “First off, it sends me into depression and flashbacks of growing up there. Two, I'd get stolen blind if I left someone else in charge of the store.”

To Berta Parks he said, “Okay. Okay. I talk to my mother all the time—almost daily—and she doesn't sound any different to me. Kenny says she's doing well, too.”

He'd not spoken to Kenny, who lived in Calloustown still after taking over their father's extermination business, since he didn't know when. Berta Parks said, “The elderly find ways of masking their frailties and insecurities. They find ways to adapt, you know. If you start talking to them about an open wound on their head, they can find a way to veer the conversation into something that happened to them in 1945 when open wounds were all the rage.”

Ever the salesman, Harold said, “I can get you some ginseng, gingko biloba, gotu kola, yerba mate, and rhodiola rosea if you think it would be a good idea to have some on hand for any of the older people who frequent the community center. These are all fine herbal supplements. They're not necessarily approved by the FDA, but we all know the FDA is holding back the American public when it comes to valid, non-traditional antidotes to some of the more common ailments from which the public suffers these days. In our fast-paced modern world.” He had taken a community college public speaking course, and the instructor had advised everyone to use “fast-paced modern world” whenever possible.

Berta Parks said, “I'm just saying. I've been taking notes, and I'm about to start tape-recording some of the things that your momma's saying. I tried to call your brother, but he got all choked up and said he couldn't deal with it. He also said he had enough going on what with the field rat infestation we got going all over here.”

Harold tried to imagine a plague of rats overtaking the Calloustown Community Center, or Tiers of Joy Bakery, or Worm's Bar, or the clapboard house where he grew up. He could imagine the fear that must have consumed a dwindling population on its way to attaining ghost-town status, and could smell the ammonia of a rat-infested abode, seeing as a teenager he'd been forced to exterminate with his long-deceased father. He envisioned his mother sitting in that La-Z-Boy chair in front of the TV—maybe one of those competitive cooking shows airing, or a
Green Acres
marathon—with rats flitting back and forth unperturbed.

“What's she doing that's so peculiar?” he asked Berta Parks. “I mean, Jesus, old people—sometimes they finally realize they can say anything they want to say. I hope I get to that point. I want to get to the point where I can look a customer in the eye and say, ‘No amount of milk thistle is going to heal that enlarged liver of yours, ma'am.' You know what I mean?”

“I might as well go ahead and get to the point,” Berta Parks said. “You can do what you will with it. Let me say right off that we appreciate the hours and hours Ms. Lumley's put in at the community center as a volunteer. She's done more than anyone else around here. That being said, she's started using a lot of profanity that we think is unnecessary. Somewhere along the line she became convinced that the little Mexican children should hear Br'er Rabbit stories in order to understand English better—you know those stories by Uncle Remus?—but she keeps adding all these curse words in between that aren't part of the original stories.”

Harold didn't hear, exactly, all of Ms. Parks's complaint. He got stuck on the “that being said” part, which was another thing his community college public speaking instructor advised using whenever possible. Harold wondered if Berta Parks might've been in the same class he took. He said to her, “I remember those old Br'er Rabbit stories. We used to have some kind of storyteller woman show up and tell those stories to us back at Calloustown Elementary. Something about Br'er Rabbit living in the briars all his life. Or Br'er Rabbit going down into a well, stuff like that.”

“Uh-huh. But you probably don't remember Br'er Rabbit saying stuff like, ‘I'mo blank your blank sister if'n you don't get that blank tar baby outta my blank field of vision, you son of a blank.' Ms. Lumley's saying those kinds of things to the little Mexican children. We have come to believe that—illegal immigrants or not—they don't deserve such lessons.”

Harold said, “Oh come on now. Are you sure? Sometimes my mother has a speech impediment.” He tried to think back to when she ever said a curse word. He said, “Well that doesn't sound all that great. At least Spanish-speaking muchachos might not understand what she's saying!”

“Like I said,” Berta Parks said, “it's what we have before us. We just think it would be good if you could talk some sense into her, or see if there's a better place for her to be.”

“I understand. Okay,” Harold said. He thought about how he'd not fire anyone today. He thought about how he probably needed to visit his brother, too, if his car could make it through a roadblock of vermin on the outskirts of Calloustown.

Ruth Lumley's car isn't in the carport, and she's not home. The side door's locked, and Harold finds her extra key hidden in the same spot where his parents kept it when he grew up: in a conch shell sitting atop a clay flowerpot filled with playground sand, previously used as an outdoor ashtray when Mr. Lumley held his annual “I Exterminated You” BBQ for the year's clients. Harold has thought often about how, in a strange way, he became interested in herbs and vitamins due to these yearly fetes, how in between sneaking drinks from the bar he thought of how all these people would one day suffer from the effects of even the lesser pesticides and insecticides his father sprayed beneath their abodes and how one day they might be in need of something like detoxifying herbs such as burdock and dandelion root.

“Why even lock the house?” Harold thinks. “Who would break in here?”

He unlocks the door and finds the familiar smell of his childhood: Pine-Sol, boiled cabbage, cigarettes, Pledge, coffee grounds. He would think something like, “My mother hasn't changed whatsoever,” but he finds himself mesmerized and bombarded with what she's hung on the kitchen, then the den, walls. Ruth Lumley has, evidently, joined the computer age and—addicted to eBay—bought every available eight-by-ten promotional photo of TV and motion picture animal stars. Harold looks up at the nicely framed pictures of Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Flipper, Gentle Ben the bear, Trigger, the Lone Ranger's horse Silver, that Jack Russell terrier Eddie from
Frasier
, Zorro's black stallion Toronado, Clarence the cross-eyed lion from
Daktari
, and Festus's mule. He walks into the den to find some of those same photos, plus ones of Tonto's horse Scout, Fred the cockatoo from
Baretta
, the fake shark from
Jaws
, Willy the Orca, a bundle of rats from
Willard
, and a snake from one of the snake movies that Harold doesn't know. She has three photos of Duke the bloodhound.

Then there are the animation cels: Heckle and Jeckle, Dino, Marmaduke, Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, Astro, Tweety Bird, Roadrunner, the Tasmanian Devil, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Yogi and Boo-Boo. Harold's mother had gotten rid of a bookcase in order to fill the wall behind it with eight-by-ten framed cels of Deputy Dog, Droopy Dog, Goofy, Hector, Huckleberry Hound, Mr. Peabody, Odie, Pluto, Snoopy, Spike, and Underdog. He feels bad about thinking, “Good God, there goes the goddamn inheritance.” Framed photos of Br'er Fox, Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Terrapin, and Miss Possum line the very top of the wall—all from
Song of the South
.

He calls Kenny and says, “Hey, man, where are you?”

“I'm on Mr. Reddick's roof because he has these rats stuck in his gutters running in some kind of race. You ought to see it, man! It's like a living river of smooth brown hide. It's like some kind of bizarre stock car race.”

Harold says, “I'm at Mom's house. You been here lately?”

Kenny says, “If I'd've known it was this bad I'd've brought a Gatling gun up here with me. You ought to see these things go. Hey, come on over! I ain't but a mile away.”

“What's the story with all these photos on the wall? Have you been by here? I don't know if I can even count as high as how many pictures she has on the wall.”

“Jesus, I'm going to have to go get a flute and see if I can lead these things out of here. Hold on. Let me get down off this roof, which means we'll probably lose the connection.”

“Did you give her all these pictures? I hope to God that's the case. Because if it's not, then we might have a problem.”

“What pictures? Pictures like you look at, or pitchers like you pour tea out of? I might've given her one of each. Over time I might've given her one of each. I sent her a picture of me and the boys and Dora last Easter in front of that big cave opening.”

Sure enough, they lose their connection.

Harold enters the hallway to find nothing on the walls except finishing nails sticking out a half inch each, apparently in wait for more publicity shots and/or animation cels. He enters his and Kenny's old bedroom, which appears untouched, then goes to the guest bedroom to find his mother's laptop turned on and stuck to a page that shows an eBay auction for a Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey cel, at the moment going for $99.99 with three hours left.

“A hundred goddamn dollars? Are you kidding me?” Harold says out loud.

He looks down to an old Calloustown Extermination notepad that his father gave to clients thirty years earlier and reads, “Password—ImNotOld81” and “UserID—Im-NotOld81.”

He locks the side door and places the key back in the conch shell. Harold thinks about going over to the community center and sitting down with Ms. Parks but realizes that—in a small town—sometimes people exaggerate the quirks of the elderly.

So he drives over to the Reddicks' place to talk to his brother first. Harold passes his mother coming toward him, a mile from his house. He waves at her, but she doesn't seem to see him. She wears oversized sunglasses handed out at the ophthalmologist's office, her eyes an inch above the steering wheel.

Harold turns quickly into an old logging road, backs out, and accelerates to catch up with his mother. She drives twenty-five miles an hour, so he meets up with her in a matter of seconds. He flashes his lights. He blows his horn and waves. She doesn't notice. He veers left and thinks about pulling up beside her on the straightaway. She has a number of dings and scrapes on the back bumper of the 1988 Lincoln Continental, the last model bought by Mr. Lumley after what he labeled the Great Bee and Bat Scare of 1987.

Harold's phone rings and he picks it up off the passenger seat without looking down. Kenny says, “I figured we'd get cut off.”

“I'm behind Mom right now,” Harold says. “I'm following behind her. I was calling you earlier about her house. When's the last time you went inside there?”

“I don't know,” Kenny says. “It's been a while, now that I think about it. We meet for supper over at that Ryan's a couple times a week. She can almost eat for goddamn free if we get there by four thirty.”

Harold watches as his mother sticks her left arm out for a turn signal instead of hitting her blinker. He thinks, “She probably thinks it costs money to use any of the electrical system. She'll spend ten thousand bucks on weird cartoons, but she won't use her blinker.”

“You want to come on over and meet me at the house? I believe this might be one of those intervention kinds of things that everyone's talking about all the time. Is she drinking?”

Harold wonders if he's lost another phone call. He pulls in behind his mother in the driveway. Then he hears his brother going, “Rat in the truck, rat in the truck!” followed by brakes screeching.

In Ruth Lumley's mind, Harold should've taken over the family business. He was older than Kenny by four years, and he had the education and business acumen to turn Calloustown Extermination into a thriving chain throughout the lower piedmont region of South Carolina. But Harold went two states away in order to get an associate's degree in hospitality and tourism, received a job immediately at a resort down in Myrtle Beach, then turned his back on the entire industry in order to explore the burgeoning world of non-traditional herbs, roots, and panaceas amply supported by a number of medical personalities that provided free advertising daily on the talk shows—something both his ex-wife and mother always deigned snake oil salesman at best. He'd gotten into a conversation with the man who ended up hiring Harold away from Wild Sea Oats Resort and Spa, an entrepreneur of sorts named Bill Will who'd recently diversified from land development into what he explained to Harold as “making up for ruthlessness.” This was at a tucked-away local hangout called He Just Left. They had an all-you-can-eat Fish Sticks Night on Friday, and before Harold needed more tartar sauce he'd become convinced that his destiny involved echinacea, St. John's wort, and garlic bulb tincture. It involved horny goat extract known as epimedium, though that word reminded him of “epicedi-um,” a word that had to do with funeral dirges that Harold learned in an English class taught by an overeager instructor who insisted on vocabulary memorization. Bill Will said he had a feeling, and hired Harold immediately, right there at the bar. Within a month Harold learned from his own wife Mollyanna that he'd become irresponsible, that he wasn't thinking about the kids, that a place called Other Medicine didn't exactly provide his children with unlimited swimming pool usage or free driving range privileges. He learned, too, that she'd been seeing her chiropractor on the sly for over a year.