Calloustown (25 page)

Parked in her carport, Ruth checks her rearview mirror and says, “What now?”

Harold gets out and approaches his mother's Lincoln. He bends down at the waist and counts all the dings—seventeen. After his mother closes her door and walks toward him he says, “You sure you should be driving?”

“Don't make me drive, don't make me drive! Law, whateber you do, don' thow me out into duh got-damn macadam!—Hey, I was born on the highway, Harold. Mind your own business.” She reaches her face upward so he can kiss her. “I have never had a ticket or wreck in my life, for your information.”

She smells like alfalfa extract, Harold thinks. She smells like a combination of baby powder, alfalfa, and chicken livers. “Well something's going on here. Maybe you're going so slowly down the road that deer are banging into the back of your car.”

She says, “All right. Who died? Why're you here?”

“You want to go inside?” Harold asks. “Let's you and me go inside and talk about the community center.” He knows that if she doesn't let him inside, then she's trying to hide all of the photographs and cels. If she appears unconcerned about her latest décor, then he might need to worry.

“I'm on my way to the community center right now, goddamn it,” Ruth says. “Move your car, you're blocking my way.”

“Wait a minute—if you're going to the center, then why'd you come home and park your car in the carport? That doesn't make much sense, Mom.”

“It's a habit I have, that's all. Don't you have any goddamn habits that people don't quite understand? Like having a perfectly great job and leaving it in the dust so your wife leaves you and your children now don't have much of a college fund because you gave up a hundred K a year for thirty?”

Harold wonders about her blood pressure. He can't quite tell if she's red in the face, due to the foundation she wears that must've come straight out of a local embalmer's stock overrun sale. He says, “I've already been inside. I've seen what you have on the walls. I got summoned here to see what's going on over where you volunteer with the little migrant workers' kids or whatever. But now I kind of want to know what's happened to the kitchen and den walls.”

The mail deliverer pulls in behind Harold's car and, even though it's obvious that his appearance is known, he honks his horn. Through the open window he yells, “Hey there, Ms. Lumley, I got you another delivery won't fit in the box without bending it.” He holds out three flat cardboard boxes.

“Just set them down there, Elwin,” Ruth says.

“On the driveway?”

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Ruth says, stomping toward the mailman. “Here. Do I need to sign anything?”

“No, ma'am. That's it.”

“Well make sure you're in reverse this time so you don't bang into my car again. Or I guess my son's car. Hell, keep it in drive and ram into his back bumper all you want.”

Harold says to Elwin, “Hey, Mr. Patterson.”

Elwin nods twice, grimaces, and backs out onto the road. Ruth Lumley's at the door, trying to fish keys out of her pocketbook and get inside so—Harold feels certain—she can lock him out. He runs up to her just as she's closing the door, gets his hand in, and pulls it back right before she slams his fingers in the jamb. “Go see your brother. Go visit your brother. There's a rat problem all around here and he could probably use some help.”

“Let me in,” Harold says. He bangs on the door, then presses the buzzer and holds it. Harold thinks, “I should let the air out of her tires.” He thinks, “I can take the battery out of her car and that'll keep her immobile for a while.” He begins laughing. “Come on, Mom, let me in. I'm having flashbacks of growing up and Dad wouldn't let me in the house until I hosed out the back of his truck.”

Ruth Lumley doesn't respond at first. Harold says, “Well, fuck it then,” and goes back to his car. She'll have to come out of there at some point, he thinks, driving down to Worm's, a place he'd not entered since high school. A couple beers, he thinks, and I'll come back when she's outside practicing her baton, or whatever she does.

He doesn't hear her yell at the closed door, “They make me remember happier times. Is there anything wrong with happier times?” He doesn't hear her tear open an envelope and exclaim, “Lamb Chop!”

When he enters the bar, Harold finds Kenny sitting on the first stool. The décor's not changed since about the time beer companies converted from pull-tabs to flip-tops. Half-naked women on auto parts calendars adorn the walls. There's a bumper pool table wedged uselessly in a corner, a jukebox that might offer the most selections of Conway Twitty, Ferlin Husky, and Jerry Lee Lewis on the entire Eastern seaboard. “I figured you'd be here sooner or later,” Kenny says.

They do not hug. Worm, whose father went by Worm, says, “See no time long.” He points to Kenny and shrugs his shoulders to Harold.

Kenny says, “That's enough of that. Worm's trying to break some kind of record for speaking everything backwards. He wants to be in that book.”

Harold says, “Coldest whatever's me give,” but it takes him a minute to say it in order.

“To get back to your question, yes, I know all about Mom's little hobby,” Kenny says.

Harold says, “They never have invented a better-smelling cockroach spray? Man, you reek of that stuff. It's going to get in your pores, and the next thing you know you'll be happy you got a brother who knows a thing or three about detoxification remedies.” He says, “I wouldn't call it ‘little' hobby, by the way. She must have a hundred framed photos on her walls. It's kind of creepy. It would make a nice veterinarian's office, though.”

Worm opens three Tall Boys and sets them on the bar, two in front of Harold and one more for Kenny. He says, “Here.”

Kenny says, “When it first started happening—or when I first learned about it a year or so ago—she said she wanted to start up some kind of museum. She said she wanted to open up the kind of museum people would drive off the highway to go visit. Like those giant balls of string, or giant balls of tinfoil, or giant balls of rubber bands. We was all for it. We could use some visitors, you know.”

Harold shakes his head. He doesn't smile. He says, “How's Dora and the kids?”

“Kids're fine. Dora don't want me asking Mom much about her museum, seeing as Dora thinks if we bother her too much she'll evict us from the will. You know what I mean? Dora thinks at least we'll get a bunch of pictures of Mr. Ed and Lassie when Mom dies, as long as we don't piss her off none. And Cheetah. Did you know Cheetah just died a month or so ago? He was eighty years old. Mom's got two signed photos from Cheetah, from the old Tarzan movies.”

Harold stares at his brother but he's not listening. He wonders if perhaps he should've stayed in Calloustown. What if he'd taken over Calloustown Extermination, as was his father's plan? He'd be living in a regular house somewhere nearby—Kenny made enough money to buy an old farmhouse and a hundred acres he leased out to dove and deer hunters in season—and would've probably kept his mother's dream of an Animal Picture Museum from ever forming.

Worm says, “Back in go to have I,” and waves his right arm out, ending at the cash register, in the international way of letting the brothers know that they're in charge of retrieving their own cans of beer and putting the money in the cash drawer should they so choose.

Harold says, “I guess there can be worse hobbies. Worse dreams.”

Kenny nods. He finishes his first beer and opens the second. “Sometimes I have to hire out this old boy to help me out, you know. He's pretty good at cockroaches, fire ants, and termites. Name's Bobby, but I call him Cool Breeze 'cause I swear to God he comes in and the women around here fall for him so much they got him setting traps for badgers and mongooses in their crawlspaces just so he'll stick around. His momma ain't but something like fifty, and she's already showing signs of crazy, you know? Won't pay nothing but the minimum on her credit card each month 'cause God told her to be that way. Drives in reverse half the time thinking it'll turn back her odometer and keep her younger, I guess. Shit like that.”

Harold says, “I miss my kids.” He says, “Sometimes I kick myself for not taking over Dad's business, so my kids could take over mine. There ain't no promise they can become an Other Medicine manager just because I'm an Other Medicine manager.”

“It sure makes it easy knowing what to get Mom for birthdays and Christmas and Valentine's Day. Me and Dora got her one of those publicity shots for that cat that used to do the cat food commercials. I think he's dead by now. Anyways.”

Harold says, “Has a woman named Berta Parks called you up about her cussing a bunch at little Mexican kids, something about telling off-color jokes about Br'er Rabbit?”

“About Berta Parks cussing a bunch, or Mom cussing a bunch.”

Harold looks at his little brother. He says, “Mom. We're talking about Mom. Has Berta Parks ever called you?”

“Yeah. She's called twice. She's got a bad rat problem too—at the community center, and at home. She called me up twice, and I went out to set out poison and traps both.”

Harold thinks, Now I remember why I got out of my hometown.

Harold leaves his brother at the bar. He puts down money and tells Kenny to hold some cold-pressed sunflower oil under his tongue for thirty minutes, then brush his teeth with baking soda in order to detoxify. Harold says, “I'm going back. I don't want to leave here feeling bad about Mom.” He doesn't say, “What if she dies and this is my last memory of her?” though he thinks it.

Kenny says, “I got me a sweat lodge I built. That's how I sweat out the poison.”

Harold wonders what his wife and that chiropractor are doing at the moment. It's four o'clock in the afternoon, and he imagines that his children are now home, that his ex-wife is succumbing to an adjustment of sorts. He drives a back road to the house of his upbringing and plans to park up the hill in the direction his mother would never take upon leaving for anything Calloustown had to offer, unless she wished to view a swamp, the town dump, or Mr. Reddick's nursery that he'd surrounded with a five-foot-high fence made up entirely of grout and liquor bottles.

There, hidden halfway behind a live oak a quarter mile away, he calls his wife's new house, gets the answering machine, and says, “Hey, kids. I'm in Calloustown if y'all need me, but I got my phone. Can't wait to see you on Friday.” He forgets to say “I love you,” calls back, but it's busy. He waits five minutes—his eyes focused on the estuary made up of his mother's driveway and the ancient asphalt—calls again, but it's still busy.

Ruth Lumley backs out and points her Lincoln away from Harold.

He lights a cigarette—Other Medicine sells packs of additive-free tobacco products with Bible verses on the flip-tops—squints, pulls down his visor. He turns on the radio to find, as in his childhood, Calloustown only receives a gospel channel clearly. Harold hums along to “It Is Well with My Soul” and wonders how he knows the melody. “Wasn't there something tragic about the man who wrote this song?” he wonders. “Wasn't there something about a young son dying, and four daughters lost at sea, and some kind of relentless fire?”

He watches his mother weave almost indiscernibly, then reach Old Calloustown Road and turn left, toward what remains of the town. She drives in the direction of Worm's and the community center. She drives past Tiers of Joy bakery. Harold remains a safe distance behind her, crawling along at twenty miles an hour. He watches as his brother comes from the other direction and notices how Ruth doesn't seem to notice. Kenny waves at their mother, then blows his horn and swerves toward his brother, a big open-mouthed laugh on his face.

The ember falls off of Harold's cigarette right onto his lap. He brushes his pants quickly, flicking the ember, somehow, straight into a crease between the sock on his right foot and his loafer. In an attempt to toe the shoe off completely with his left foot, he steps on the accelerator and, not watching the road, rams into his mother's car. Harold's two front teeth, capped, break off on the steering wheel. The airbag doesn't deploy as it does on Ruth's car—Harold's father had bragged about the 1988 Lincoln Continental being one of the first vehicles out of Detroit to have driver's-side bags.

“Son of a bitch,” Harold yells out, throwing his shoe across the road into a ditch. He holds his hand to his mouth, spits two teeth out, and then reaches down to take off his sock. By the time he reaches his mother she's already out of the car, her eyes shut tight from whatever chemicals or gases had released.

Ruth says, “What the hell are you doing, boy?”

He doesn't say anything about the cigarette. He doesn't want his mother to know that while she wasted money on cartoon characters he spent money on what would eventually kill him. He says, “I must've blinked. You stopped for no reason, and I must've blinked.”

She says, “I didn't want to hit those rats crossing the road. Did you see those rats? There was a line of them, just like deer but smaller. That's bad juju to run over the helpless.”

They walk together to view the damage. Harold's car's radiator spills antifreeze on the pavement. The Lincoln appears barely damaged, though several of the small dings have now transformed into one large dent. “Is there a dentist left in this town? Damn, damn, damn. I can't deal with customers if I look like this.”

“Why are you following me?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to kill me or something? Is that what this is all about? You out of money or something, son? Come down here finally to scare me to death, run me off the road, get you and Kenny what's left of the estate?” She holds the back of her neck. She opens one eye slightly.