Calloustown (27 page)

I don't like to think of myself as a bad son, but I drove my father straight to one of those emergency care clinics out off Highway 78 instead of the bar. I had called up Patricia from the driveway, for my father said he needed to go back inside and apply layers of black bloodroot salve on his torso and limbs before hitting daylight for too long, what with the lesions and hives and shingles that arrived like bad cousins, one after the other. To my wife I said, “I don't know why I'm here.”

She said, “Yes. That's one of the great existential questions. Sometimes when I'm unraveling, it's the only thought that goes through my mind.”

I told her how my father seemed listless and depressed, that he looked like he could no longer take the world, that he'd given up on fighting. “He wants to go to a bar, so I told him we could go there for a while. But in reality, I want to take him to see a dermatologist. Can you get on the Internet and Google something like ‘Dermatologist/Calloustown, South Carolina/unexplained neurological disorders/ex-wife married an oyster shucker,' and find out if there's any kind of medical center within a fifty-mile range?”

Patricia didn't answer immediately. Then she said, “I think it's you who wants to go to Worm's Place, but that's another story.” I heard her clicking away on the keyboard, and imagined her there in our den, a cell phone cradled to her delicate neck, enough merino wool yarn surrounding her to fashion a car cover.

My wife clucked her tongue, which sounded exactly like knitting needles clacking together when she was on a roll of knit-pearl-knit-pearl maneuvers for more than a couple minutes. I said, “No, I only want to drink all day long when I'm in my hometown, Patricia,” hoping that she'd think, “Because of me, is that what you're saying, because of me?”

She said, “There's a veterinarian who's still in business. Dogs get mange, and that's more or less what your father has. Why don't you go see the vet?” I didn't say, “Ha ha ha.” I didn't answer until Patricia said, “There's one of those doc-in-the-box places, and that looks like your only choice without driving all the way to Columbia or Charleston.”

I said, “I might have to spend the night here. I brought along my gym bag, just in case.” She got on Mapquest and gave me the directions. “If you've gotten to some kind of golf ball driving range, then you've gone two hundred feet too far.”

Anyway, my father said nothing when I pulled into the parking lot, but I could tell from the look on his face that he felt betrayed. He said, “I wasn't making a plea for help, Dust. When people make pleas for help, they take a bottle of aspirin, or cut their wrists in the wrong direction.”

I pulled right up to the front door—you'd think that an ersatz emergency room of sorts would have a handicapped parking spot or two, but this place didn't—and turned off the ignition. I said, “I could hear it in between the lines of your voice, Dad. Plus, once we get you diagnosed for real and get proper medicine, then we can go to the bar and drink without worrying so much about the future.”

“Right-o,” my father said. “I knew there was a reason why your mother and I paid for all that education.” He reached for and extracted his wallet. “I got my Medicare card with me. You going to sit out here in the car or are you coming in?”

I said, “What do you want? Of course I'm coming in.”

“Right-o,” he said.

I looked over at a man and kid hitting golf balls at the Calloustown Practice Range next door to the emergency clinic. The sign out front of the driving range had gigantic CPR letters out front, and I wondered if people in mid-heart attack ever got confused with which parking lot to enter. I said, “Why do you keep saying ‘Right-o'? Are you watching a bunch of British sitcoms or something? Let me guess, your TV only gets British stations.”

He got out of the car and said, “To be honest, what I'd rather do to save some time is have you let me go in here—I know you have to get back home—and while I'm talking to the so-called doctor or nurse practitioner or whatever they're calling these people nowadays, I'd appreciate it if you'd run into town and see if Tree Morse has any aloe plants for sale at his nursery. I've been reading up. Even if they don't work medicinally, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have something around that needed me, water-wise.”

“That sounds like a plan,” I said. I didn't mean it, of course. I knew my father just wanted me off the premises, that when I came back he'd be standing in front of the clinic after never checking in, and so on.

He shook my hand again for some reason and entered the building. I started my car and backed out of the parking lot, then put it in drive and returned to my spot. Then I reached beneath my seat and pulled out a squeeze tube of hand sanitizer, just in case my father's skin supported a contagion from which I could never recover.

A snake caught and ate his cat. Back in the old days he got drunk one night, got a tattoo that read “Sin + Soretta” and it faded invisible a week later. One time he bought a recapped tire and it ended up gaining tread. I talked him into driving all the way down to Myrtle Beach to take part in a speed-dating extravaganza one time after my mom left for the retired Air Force colonel, not knowing that there was a convention of stutterers in town who'd pretty much clogged the sign-up sheet. It went on and on. Back when he actually set up appointments with Dr. Stoudemire, he was told he needed to eat more hot dogs and processed meat, seeing as his sodium levels were dangerously low.

I sat in the parking lot a good hour. I mean, I waited twenty minutes, got out of my car, opened the door to the clinic, looked inside, and saw only a receptionist behind the desk, no one else in the waiting room. I thought, “Good.” I thought, “My father's in one of the examination rooms with a man or woman who probably half paid attention in medical school, more than likely in one of the Caribbean-nation medical schools.”

It doesn't take a brain surgeon who went to the Medical University of South Carolina to figure out what I couldn't: that there was a back door of sorts and my father sashayed his way straight through there without seeing a valid epidermal expert. The fucker. I waited my hour, I went inside the clinic and sat down for five or ten minutes, no one showed up with an accidental shotgun blast to their torso, and I said to the receptionist, “Are you doing a crossword puzzle, or a sudoku?” I said, “This isn't such a bad place, out here in the middle of nowhere. Let me guess: most of the people you get in here suffer from snake bites.”

She didn't look up. She said, “I know you. Do you remember me? Say. Say.”

I looked hard and tried to run a Rolodex of faces through my mind. I said, “Oh, Jesus, I haven't been back to Callous-town for so long.”

She looked anywhere between forty and sixty years old. I thought, “Was she an old teacher or something?” I thought, “Have the schools gotten so incapable of offering teachers a paycheck without a furlough—what with the idiot gover-nor—that people have quit in order to be paid-by-the-hour receptionists inside virus-filled cement-blocked buildings?” I thought, “Did I take this woman to the prom, and then she had no other choice but to age mercilessly like some old dug best known to Appalachian photographs?” I said, “I'm sorry. I'm consumed with my father's well-being.”

She tilted her head hard to the back corner of the building. “Well, your daddy seems to be consumed with not caring about his bank account.”

I looked at her hard, for I didn't know what she meant, then looked at the door that led to the examination rooms. A woman came out of there wearing a standard white frock. She said to the receptionist, “Sometimes I wonder why we even have to show up here, Hannah.”

I looked at the doctor and said, “Hey.”

“Of course,” I thought to myself, “Hannah Hannah Hannah?” I said to the doctor, “Is it leprosy? Is it just a case of hives or shingles gone bad? Does it have something to do with fire ants, or nerves?”

Hannah said, “She ain't seen him.” She said, “Back to what we were talking about, you asked me out one time I was in tenff grade you was in tweff and you never showed up. It wasn't anything like the prom or nothing but it was enough to make me know I should like girls the rest of my life.”

The doctor stood there staring at me. I didn't remember any of this at all. I said, “What?” I said, “Hannah, I'm sorry.”

The doctor said, “What are you talking about?”

I said, “My father.”

“He paid me twenty dollars to show him the back door out,” Hannah said. “Sorry.”

I said, “I don't think I called you up for a date. Are you sure it was me? I dated one girl the whole time I was at Cal-loustown High. Her name was Vivian. You remember Vivian? And then we broke up and I went to college, and then I met a woman I ended up marrying.”

Hannah stood up. She grunted. She shook her head sideways. “I knew you'd end up no good, even back then, cheating on Vivian like you done.”

The doctor said, “I don't know what you're talking about,” and retreated back into the examination rooms. I could see in her eyes, though, that she didn't believe my story, and that she felt sorry for her receptionist.

I said, “Someone played a joke on you. Or on me! On top of that, my father's telephone doesn't work right anymore. Maybe it didn't back then, either. Did you pick up the receiver and I was there already?” I looked in her face and tried to recognize anything. “Where's my father?”

Hannah said, “Search-a-Word. I'm doing Search-a-Words.”

My father swore that his doors changed overnight from opening in to opening out. All of them. He said he'd put his hand on a Bible and tell the story about how one morning, maybe six months after my mother left for the oyster entrepreneur in Sumter, he got up to go put black oil sunflower seeds in the Yankee feeders only to pull and pull on the door knob, thinking someone had come along post-midnight to shove silver slugs between jamb and lock prankster-style. He said he tried the front door, the back door, and a side door that went off to a sunroom of sorts. Understand that this was a good decade after I'd lived in the house, so I couldn't remember if doors went in or out in the first place. I didn't even remember a sunroom in my house of training.

I went back outside from the clinic thinking about this—I accidentally tried to pull the door toward me, then pushed it out—and wondered where my father might have gone. I tried to think backward. Would one leave a doctor's office and light out for the funeral home, or the maternity ward of a hospital? Would he hitchhike back home because he figured I would never think of him doing so, or toward Sumter, or to the opposite of Calloustown—which happened, in my mind, to be Asheville, North Carolina. Would he go to a wedding chapel?

“I'm over here, Freckle-dick,” I heard my father yell out. I looked at the CPR driving range and saw, still, that man and child standing there with three-woods in their hands. The man took his club and pointed down to the opposite end of the wide fairway. My father stood three hundred yards away and appeared to have a ball teed up to hit in the woods beyond the Calloustown Practice Range's perimeter.

And he had his shirt off so that, from where I stood, he looked like a man with a thousand ticks on his back. I started walking his way. I entered the driving range's boundaries and kept looking behind me in case the man and kid wanted to tee off in my direction, which is exactly what I would've done. My cell phone rang, I pulled it out of my pocket, and I noticed that Patricia was on the other end.

“Hey,” I said, breaking into a trot. My father addressed the ball. Where did he get the club? I wondered. Did the CPR hand out drivers to people who showed up clubless and unprepared? I said, “I'd be willing to bet I'll be staying here tonight.”

“I might've found a dermatologist in Calloustown, or someone who's a specialist,” Patricia said. In the background I could hear her yarn whispering down to the wooden floor of our den. “What's a dendrologist?”

I said, “No. That has to do with trees.”

“Well they have one of those people in your hometown.”

My father reared back and swung at the ball. He hit a beautiful tee shot over the scrub pines that edged Calloustown Practice Range's property. Behind me, a ball landed from the kid teeing off like a normal person perfecting his swing. I didn't want to say, “It might be time to look for a psychiatrist,” so I didn't. I said, “We got it all under control here. I'll see you tomorrow,” and punched End.

Sin teed up another ball. As I reached him he said, “Was that Patricia? Did you tell her I said hello? I don't want any shit from you about this. Listen, if I got my skin cleared up, then I'd end up being perfect. Can you imagine what it would be like being perfect? And then everyone around here would hate me all the time. People around here would kill a perfect person just so they wouldn't come up so short at home daily.”

“Why're we out here at the end of the range?” I asked him. I looked back. We were too far away to be in possible danger from anyone, unless they pulled out a modified potato gun and shot Titleists our way.

“I can't think up there. I can't think teeing off from where everyone else tees off. Listen to this idea, Dust. Listen to what I came up with just before you showed up: it's a commercial for either a golf club or a golf ball. The camera shows a man at a par three hole, you know, like 150 yards from the tee box. So he pulls out his gigantic driver, and his playing partner says, ‘What're you doing?' and the dude turns around with his back to the green. Then he rips one and—I think they can do this now, what with all the fancy cameras and computers—it goes around the world, like a meteor, and then plops down on the green and rolls in the hole. Can you see it? The ball goes 24,901 miles, and then he gets a hole in one.”