Calloustown (28 page)

I had to admit it seemed like a viable and worthy television commercial for a dimpled ball or oversized clubhead. I said, “Put on your shirt and let's go to Worm's.” I said, “Do you have any other ideas for commercials? I have a buddy in Charlotte who works at an ad agency.”

My father hit one more ball into the woods, topping this one so that it never reached knee high, then ricocheted off a pine tree and nearly came back to us. “So what did you think of Hannah?” my father said.

I handed him his shirt and tried not to make eye contact with those lesions. “She was kind of abrupt with me. Who the hell is she? I don't remember her whatsoever.”

My father left his driver on the ground. He didn't pick up his tee, which hadn't moved through any of his swings. We walked on a veer toward my car. He said, “One day gas will be solid, and the Earth will be gas.” At the unlocked car my father said, “That Hannah woman used to call me up every day, thanking me for the way I brought you up. She says she wouldn't have become the woman she is if it weren't for you. She used another word for ‘woman.' I forget it. Hell, she called so much your mother got to thinking that we were having an affair. I kept telling her—your mother—that everything was backwards.”

I drove to the bar, but I didn't pay attention to Sin's constant monologue. I thought, how many times have I unwittingly caused someone to choose a path in life? I thought, I wonder if there's a woman out there that I should've married—one who never had to unravel yarn, or who never attempted to manufacture mittens in the first place. And then I got stuck thinking, what if my mother met the retired Air Force colonel before he retired, and he became my father? What would I be doing now? Would I be working in the restaurant, shucking oysters for the hungry masses? Would I be delivering shells to people who wanted crushed driveways? Would I encounter some kind of shellfish allergy and break out in hives?

Sin said, “I kind of miss her.” I didn't ask him if he meant my mother, my wife, or the woman at the clinic. I even thought that, perhaps, by “her” he meant “him.”

We got in the car and Sin picked up my cell phone from the console. I got on the two-lane to drive into Calloustown proper. He pressed the receiver icon as if to make a call, then said, “I knew it would be you.” Was Patricia on the other end? Did that Hannah woman somehow retrieve my number, maybe through my father having written it down under Emergency Contact during another visit to the clinic?

Sin listened—or feigned listening to a made-up caller—and I thought about all the things that hadn't turned backward in his life: The trees in his yard didn't lose leaves in May, for example. His plates didn't come out of the dishwasher dirty. His clothes didn't appear to become dirtier straight out of the washing machine.

I pulled into a parking space in front of the bar. My father said over the phone, “An oyster-shucking knife isn't sharp, but it can still cause harm. I met a hand doctor one time who invested in oyster-shucking knives.”

I turned off the ignition and said, “That's not Mom.”

Sin said, “Hello?”

After School

Later on, in the parking lot waiting for bulldozers, we thought back at how a young girl—no one remembered her name—transferred from either Arizona or North Dakota, suffering from allergies we couldn't comprehend. This was 1970 or thereabouts. Her parents brought along what appeared to be a certifiably genuine prognosis from an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Ragweed, goldenrod, dandelions, crabgrass, centipede, pine bark: this girl seemed to be pretty much allergic to everything the South had to offer. Back then we were all young, and we thought things like poor thing, et cetera. This was a time before charter schools and school choice and private schools and home schools. Our custodian, Mr. Willie, wasn't pleased, but there seemed to be no choice but to kill all the shrubbery, cut down trees, gravel over every inch of the school grounds, spray DDT on the ball fields, and remind each other that no roses could ever be delivered on anyone's birthday, Valentine's Day, Secretary's Day, and that all future proms would be corsage- and boutonniere-less. No one argued about it—we wanted to make this little girl and her parents feel welcome in the community.

She graduated. She matriculated to Arizona State or the University of North Dakota, as I recall. I'm not sure why someone on the school board never piped up, “Well, now that that's over, we need to replant some azaleas out front.” We just remained barren. I still taught only biology and chemistry back then and even kept nothing but plastic and/or ceramic accessories in my classroom aquarium, or the little habitat I sketched out for box turtles that Mr. Lawson constructed with his third-year Advanced Shop students.

It took another decade before—again, this was a child who transferred from northern Minnesota—we found ourselves liable if anyone brought peanuts, walnuts, or pecans onto the school grounds. I remember this particular case only because the tenth grader, Marty Mortensen, had an hourglass-shaped head. I'm saying, it looked like a peanut rested atop his shoulders. I wouldn't be surprised if his parents—I think they moved down here because the whole family suffered from that depression that supposedly sets in from short days and long nights—acquired a questionable medical professional to make up Marty's allergy, as an attempt to thwart likely and subsequent days when they served boiled peanuts in the cafeteria and one of our more observant students yelled out, “Hey, my plate's filled with little Marty Mortensen heads!” like that. Sometimes children throbbing with hormones don't think about how words can echo in a fragile peanut head right on up until about the twenty-year reunion when he returns to the Moose Club with an automatic weapon.

So there we were in a school that looked plopped down in the center of a wasteland, forever wanting nuts in our brownies or cookies. Plus the Snickers, Payday, Almond Joy, Reese's Cups, and Baby Ruths disappeared from the vending machines and we opted for either plain Hershey's bars or plain M&Ms.

As an aside, how come blind people don't have that seasonal disorder all the time? I never heard about Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles or Helen Keller moaning around how they needed more sunlight.

Anyway, it might've been 1984 when more than a few children realized they were allergic to cigarette smoke. There went the outdoor smoking area, there went teachers smoking in the lounge. Deep down I understood that everyone should quit anyway. I showed a filmstrip that involved healthy lungs compared to coal/asbestos/glass dust/cigarette-damaged lungs. But goddamn. We got to where we took turns being late to our own classes. One day I'd pretend to need to check oil in my engine block between second and third periods, just to stand outside and smoke while Mrs. Allen looked in on my class. Other days Mrs. Allen feigned forgetting her extendable pointer in the trunk of her car and I told her history class stories that weren't in the textbook. Our P.E. teacher flat out took showers at the end of every class and smoked in the stall.

I think it took almost six years before we had a child so allergic to dust mites that our whole home ec division got wiped out mid-semester. Soon thereafter we had a couple students show up with medical forms saying they couldn't be within a hundred feet of anyone wearing perfume or cologne. This included deodorant, pomade (Mr. Willie's), hairspray, and acne cream. I didn't bother taking down precise notes to all of this—I had enough to worry about, seeing as kids needed to dissect frogs, the district couldn't afford ordering the things, and I spent many a Saturday night/Sunday morning gigging—but this seemed to be when our school really started to deteriorate.

A whole knot of tenth graders, out of nowhere, learned that they were allergic to both paint fumes and alumina, one of the central ingredients in glaze. So we quit offering art classes and the two part-time teachers got laid off. On top of this, Mr. Willie couldn't paint over graffiti. “General upkeep” vanished from our work environment.

I kind of liked one of those art teachers. She let her students paint still lifes and imagine what a walnut would look like resting atop a pear, banana, orange, or mango. Call it passive aggressive, but she always hung her students' canvases in the hallways.

Mr. Lawson couldn't take it anymore. He smoked and had a hard time waiting for the three o'clock bell. His students—in the past they'd been best in the state for their cabinetry skills—could now only wish to gain employment at Naked Furniture, what with the “no paint” directive. Lawson, on one particularly bleak winter day when he caught his students firing nail guns at one another, walked over to his miter box, placed his arm down, and cut off his left hand.

Gary Doherty sprang into action, evidently because he'd almost made it up to Webelo in the Boy Scout hierarchy. That kid ran directly to the first-aid station, extracted gauze, a compress, surgical tubing, and those gloves. He staunched Lawson's bleeding long enough for the EMTs to show up, take the shop teacher down to the emergency room at Gray-wood Emergency Regional Memorial, and not connect his hand back on like they do at regular hospitals filled with doctors who paid attention in med school.

When everything settled down, that's when we learned that Doherty had a latex product allergy.

From what I heard, his doctors told him he could never use a condom. From what I heard, Doherty succumbed to a number of sexually transmitted diseases by the time he almost finished his associate's degree in pulpwood management at one of the technical colleges.

And then—perhaps a geneticist or eugenicist could explain this—everyone became allergic to something. Maybe a clinical psychologist, or that absurdist playwright I read back when I thought I wanted to be a big-game veterinarian and came across a book called
Rhinoceros
, has something to say about how no one wants to be left out. We had students coming in with doctors' notes saying they couldn't be around PVC pipes, copper tubing, plaster, Styrofoam cups, everything. A swarm of young girls were afflicted with migraines due to fluorescent lights. The offspring of the Perfume People decided they couldn't be near hand soap of any type, from GoJo to Ivory. By this time one of the many right-wing governors of ours had made it so anyone could call him- or herself a certified teacher, open up a certified charter home school, and let the kids play video games and read the Old Testament all day in order to make them better soldiers.

The school pretty much emptied by 2010. I had planned to retire in another year. We dropped from a student population of 1,200 back about the time Nixon took off on a helicopter all the way down to one student: Tony Timms. We wondered how come the school district didn't shut us down. Tony Timms could be bused to another district, we all thought, for a cheaper price than keeping biology, algebra, remedial English, Spanish Uno, and history teachers on the payroll, not to mention the cost of electricity and the Department of Health and Environmental Control sending out inspectors tri-weekly.

It's because our school board members didn't believe in busing, and hadn't since 1970—coincidentally the year when our allergy-prone students' parents became so protective, holy, and litigious.

I won't say that it wasn't great having one student for ninety minutes every other day because of that A/B schedule. Tony Timms had me fourth period, after lunch, but I still clocked in at 7:45, stood around front as if I had bus duty, went to my room and played around with my collection of Bunsen burners. Sometimes I stood in the cafeteria and pretended I needed to break up a food fight on tater tot day. Mostly, though, I sat in my room and wished that over the years I had paid more attention to all the latest student-friendly lab experiments they'd developed that didn't involve baking soda and vinegar.

Finally, in what seemed like the school's final days, Tony Timms came into my class without his book or calculator. He didn't have the slide rule I'd let him borrow either. He said, “Have you talked to my parents yet?”

I looked up to see him standing in the doorway with a plastic Bi-Lo bag over his head.

I said, “No. Was I supposed to? Did I miss a PTA meeting? Do they want to discuss your grade in here? Are they concerned that my trying to teach you how to master a 1964 Pickett No. 120 Trainer-Simplex slide rule is on par with our old home ec teacher years ago teaching her students how to darn socks and cobble shoes?” Perhaps I spent so many hours in silence at the school that, when asked to speak, I released all of my trapped thoughts. I said, “Did they watch that television program aired last night on NBC about the history of inappropriate teacher-student conduct? Is this about my saying I couldn't offer you a strong recommendation to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the University of North Dakota, or Arizona State because you've not recognized the difference between helium and hydrogen on the Periodic Table of Elements?”

Tony Timms lifted the bag. I saw, per usual, his mouth open enough to view his uvula. He said, “Here they are,” and moved closer to the doorjamb.

I turned to find his parents, dressed—oddly, I thought—in what appeared to be the latest swimwear. They wore scuba masks, too, and had those diving cylinders strapped to their backs. I said, “Hey. Y'all please don't stand next to the Bunsen burners.” I said, “Is this one of those days when parents come in and tell everyone about their jobs?”

Even before real and imagined allergies took their toll on the student population, I dreaded Bring Your Parent to School Days, seeing as most everyone's parents started up their employment descriptions with, “Well, I used to be a loom fixer over at the mill, but now I'm a…” whittler, small engine repair fiend, jockey lot entrepreneur, birdhouse maker…

Mr. Timms handed me a signed document from his son's doctor. I read it twice. “He's allergic to air?” I said. I looked at Tony, my final student. “That's why you're such a mouth-breather, because you're allergic to air?”