Calloustown (3 page)

June said, “Give it a break, Reed. I'm only interacting with another human being.”

I thought, mass murderers might say the same thing on a witness stand. Rapists might do the same, and child molesters.

She said, “At least I didn't break my mother's ribs.”

When we got to the lecture, people filed out of the auditorium. June and I took a different route back home, and we didn't speak, that I remember. In the kitchen, later, June looked at a calendar she kept on the side of the refrigerator. She mentioned that we had a cooking demonstration the following night at six o'clock over at the farmer's market, that the chef and author would be using kale in every recipe, and that nutritionists worldwide now touted kale as one of the new organic wonder foods, filled with vitamin A and calcium. June told me that vitamin A was all about eyesight and asked me if I cared to see well for a long time, or if I'd rather live in the dark like all my old friends in their underground lairs.

I might've shrugged. I squinted to look at the calendar, but thought more about which vitamins best kept livers thriving. I thought about Lincoln, which made me think of emancipation. I wondered if there was a vitamin for foresight. We have all kinds of lectures and demonstrations to attend to straighten our lives, I almost said. And then I thought about those sadly doomed people born with holes in their hearts, on edge, I imagined, from impending merciless misfortunes.

Static, Dead Air, Interference, Memory

My wife's some kind of medical fluke, has a nerve running from her tear ducts to her pudenda. She can be out in the kitchen chopping an onion and the next thing everyone in the neighborhood's wondering what's got Mella ululating like a mournful Syrian. Back when we dated, and even for a few years after we married, I'd make sure one of those Feed Our Children telethons was on TV and begin to undress as Mella walked through the room, caught a glimpse of a peckish smudged-faced toddler, then cried until she neared climax as I found inconspicuous ways to pull off her panties. I don't want to say that I'm lazy, but after twenty-six years I feigned the cable being out some nights when I knew that nothing aired save
Old Yeller, My Dog Skip, Born Free
, or any of those other sad movies. Maybe I'd tired of the bombardment of reminders that I couldn't give Mella the satisfaction that, say, actor Tom Hanks could give her when in movies he spoke to a volleyball, or his wife Jenny died and left him with that bastard child, or he opened up a big soulless bookstore and forced that woman out of business, or that gigantic prisoner's pet mouse got smushed, or he decided he didn't want to be big anymore after talking to that mechanical fortune teller, or he came back to Normandy and talked at a grave marker.

I'll give Mella this: She learned to mask her public orgasmic outbursts into sounding like something else. In a movie theatre she could make the noise of a rusty film reel spinning, for example. At a New Year's Eve party, when that big ball's going down and everyone's crying, Mella sounds like champagne corks exploding. She's an Amazonian bird in that way. She's like nothing else in all others, though.

She got disability early on, of course, even though a qualified doctor finally signed her off as having some kind of rare chronic pain syndrome because he knew he'd be laughed out of the medical community if he wrote down somewhere on an official document, “She can't work seeing as every workplace is sad and sadness makes her orgasmic,” blah blah blah. Between marriage and age thirty Mella worked as a high school English teacher who never gave less than an A, seeing as she couldn't take the kids flipping out saying their parents would kill them or that they wouldn't be able to get into college. I met Mella in college—we went to a place that had a perennial 0–11 football team, and let me tell you I got lucky every Saturday night after the autumn games. Hell, I thought every woman was like Mella and wondered how come the boys on my hall had such trouble getting laid—“Take them to a football game,” I said. “Then when you get back to your room, bring up something about how the quarterback got a concussion, which meant he'd probably be suffering from dementia later on in life. Go ahead and start taking off your clothes at this point while putting a Tom Waits album on the turntable.”

Anyway, Mella “retired” from the workplace and diddled around, so to speak, until eBay showed up. I had a regular job doing regular things that brought us a regular paycheck. I'm an actuary. An actuary! I'm supposed to be able to predict how long people will live, and whether my company can make money off of them. It's more complicated than that, certainly, but not by much. Let me say this: I have professional friends in the business that I see daily. If I had to predict, and that's what I do, how many times they have a meaningful, productive, non-reproductive, sexual experience with a woman, I'd say the odds were something like, oh, infinity-to-one.

“Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker that was good, Tank.”

She rarely called me “Tank,” but that's how good it was there, pulled off on a dirt road outside Calloustown, South Carolina, on a Saturday morning, driving around aimlessly in search of small boxable items she could sell on eBay—advertising ashtrays, for instance, or first-edition books, or silver salt spoons. My father understood that people named Henry got called Hank. He wanted to name me “Tank,” my mother said no, and he somehow convinced her that he had an old uncle named Tenry: “I want to name our first son after my old Great Uncle Tenry,” he supposedly said.

“Tenry!” my mother said there on a bed after her water broke. “That's different! With a name like that, he won't be something everyday.”

Like an actuary.

My father called me Tank, my mother called me Tenry, I went to college, and I met a beautiful woman who should've been a Sioux named Mella-Who-Cries-and-Seizures-Loudly.

We had pulled off on the dirt road some seventy miles from where we lived and thirty miles from our destination because I'd made the mistake of putting the radio station on NPR on a Saturday morning before Car Talk, and there was this goddamn piece about an ex–opera singer who had at one time sung that sad “O Mio Babbino Caro” song in some kind of production in Tampa, which is sad enough without the story of this ex-opera star having fallen upon such hard times that she had to eat cat food because she didn't have money, and her leg had some kind of nerve damage that made her foot flop around, and a daughter of hers died from a Lortab overdose, and her faithful husband died in a boating accident that involved two manatees, and then the bank finally foreclosed on her house because she'd missed a mortgage payment by several minutes.

“Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker,” Mella said, and I got back in the driver's seat in order to take us onward. She put her seat back up. “I'm sorry. I needed that. I couldn't handle it alone. Thank you. Thank you, Tank.”

I said, “Uh-huh.” I'd been preoccupied, up until that point, with the odds of a man living to the age of seventy-six after he'd been in cancer remission since the age of forty-five. What with all the new drugs and experiments and treatments, it wasn't easy.

We drove back down the highway. I turned the radio off. I said, “You got anything special you're looking for?”

My wife said, “Something's wrong with the car.”

I thought we'd been hitting potholes, that maybe my eyes failed to discern changes in the macadam. I said, “Calloustown seems like the kind of place where you'll find some old syrup containers, or singletrees, or metal Pepsi signs, or turkey calls, or battery-operated clapping monkeys, or Underwood typewriters, or arrowheads, or Edgefield pottery, or Vietnam-era Zippos, or confederate money, or dinosaur bones, or…” The car hopped onward, sure enough. And then that temperature needle flew up, showing that we overheated. I knew if I drove much longer my engine wouldn't live another day. I said, “I need to pull over.”

Mella started crying.

I'm not sure what kind of so-called qualified town wants to have a funeral home as the first business after the “Welcome To” sign, but I eased into the parking lot of the Glymph Funeral Home and put it in park. I said to Mella, “This is not sad. This is one of those things. Do not make a scene, please. We're all right.”

I got out and opened the hood, as if I knew what I was doing. Well, I did know that every damn belt shouldn't be snapped and dangling from its water pump, alternator, power steering, and A/C compressor pulleys. I looked down into the mysterious cavern of my car's innards, saw what seemed to have sprang, and yelled out to Mella, “Look what we did at our age! We're fifty! We killed us some rubber gaskets and whatnot, is what I'm saying. Goddamn. You and I were humping so hard we broke everything.”

The front end steamed and pinged and tick-tick-tick-tick-ticked to the point where I could do nothing but close down the hood for fear of getting shot in the head by a rod. Mella nodded inside the car, then patted the driver's seat. She said, “I've seen this happen on TV. It'll be all right. I saw this happen one time in a movie that involved these two guys having to drive through the desert.”

I remembered the time she'd watched that movie—a lizard died, and Mella started crying, and the next thing you know I had her backed up against the bookcase. I remember it well, because Mella was the reader in the family, what with her English teacher background, and while I had her there I got to looking over the titles and thought, I really ought to read
Of Human Bondage
, and
Wuthering Heights
, and
Ethan Frome
. That's what I thought back then. But here I said, “We need to call Triple A.”

She said, “If I call them, and they come out here to help us, the next thing you know our rates will go up.”

There were no clouds in the sky. I reached down at my slightly wet balls and jerked my khakis left and right a few times. I said, “Don't do this again, honey. Please don't do this.”

One time we had a hailstorm that damaged our roof and cars mercilessly, but Mella wouldn't call the insurance agent seeing as it would jack our bill.

She cried. She got out her cell phone, though, and flipped it open. “I don't know Triple A's number,” she said. “Here.”

What did I know? I punched up my buddy Aaron the actuary, seeing as I knew his number, but I learned that we were in a place with no bars. We were stuck in a “fuck you for trying to contact the outside world” kind of place.

“Man, we need to find a payphone or something.” I thought, when's the last time I saw a payphone? I thought, Mella ought to buy up payphones and sell them on eBay. I said, “Please don't cry. I'll go inside.”

“I'm not going to wait out here in the parking lot of the dead. The parking lot of people who wait to go see the dead. The parking lot.”

I doubt I have to go into much detail or speculation about what might happen to an orgasmic-by-sadness woman walk ing into an institution of embalmment. I'd learned to live by the “we probably won't see these people again” dictum long before. I said, “Let's go see if they got a landline.”

Funeral homes in the South, for the most part, do not vary. This was a big antebellum structure with a foyer and four viewing areas that had one time been parlors of sorts. The family lived upstairs, I supposed, and the bodies first showed up downstairs, just like in the movies that caused my wife to cry. I said, “Anyone home?” like people do.

My wife and I held hands.

Listen, the stereotypical mortician didn't come out from behind some curtains there at the Glymph Funeral Home. I don't know where he'd been standing before, but he plain appeared. He said, “Are you here for the Munson services?” And like that, I jumped. And Mella began laughing. Laughing! What kind of weird dyslexia is that? Right away I thought back about to how she and I had never been to a funeral service together—both our parents seemed needful to crank onward to the age of 140 or thereabouts, something I'd never have predicted as an actuary, and was glad that they all had different supplemental health insurance policies than the one offered by my company.

I said, “No,” after making a noise that might've sounded like “Muhhh!” according to Mella. “No, it seems that every belt under my hood popped at the same time and our cell phones aren't working for some reason.”

The funeral home director said, in that quiet voice always used by funeral home directors—what did their college football team's cheerleaders sound like?—“You're early for the Munson viewing. His family's receiving friends at two o'clock.”

Mella shook her head. She laughed again, but she said, “I was so sorry to hear about Mr. Munson. Tragic, really.”

I said, “My name's Tenry,” and stuck out my hand. I'd never shaken hands with a funeral home director, and I wanted to see if his hand felt dry and scaly from all the embalming fluid. It didn't. “No, we're not here for the Munson thing. I was wondering if we could use your phone.” I looked at my wristwatch. We had an hour.

“Harold Glymph,” he said. “I see. I'm sorry. I was preoccupied. There's some talk that there might be a little bit of a brouhaha at the viewing. Nelroy Munson's widow has reason to believe that…well, you know, seeing as where Nelroy had his heart attack.”

Mella said, “Who could blame her?!” and I understood that she'd ventured into some kind of role-playing improv game. She said, “You know, I've always wanted to ask a funeral director one question, and that question is, ‘Why?' I mean, I know most of the time a son takes over for his father. I wonder what percentage of morticians come from a family of morticians.” She looked at me. I shrugged. “It's like sourdough bread starter.”

I said, “I guess I don't really need to use your phone if you can just give me the name of a decent mechanic. Place this small, I can probably just walk over there.” I looked past Mr. Glymph into the next room and saw a white-white man laid out in a casket, or at least his head. He parted his hair in the middle in such a way that made him look like he'd just broken a lake's surface.