Calloustown (7 page)

I said, “I'm not blaming you on the price of gas, buddy. I know.” I didn't tell him how I'd become aware of every goddamn gas station in America dropping prices when fewer people pulled into stations, when the “average price per gallon” people went around and concluded that things weren't as bad as they seemed.

“You are my favorite customer, Mr. Finley,” Raj said. I'd heard him say it to people named Mr. Bubba and Mr. Larry, to Ms. Darlene and Ms. Tiffany, when I stood nearly out of earshot at the twelve-packs.

I started to say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah but I never see you giving me some lamb saag or whatever it's called.” I started to say, “I sure could use a little of that good goat vindaloo that we can't get around Calloustown.”

But I couldn't, because the blackberry dude charged in and yelled out, “I can get y'all a deal on telephone poles! Who needs some beet sugar? I can get y'all sugar, beans, gourd birdhouses, snow peas, book matches, and rebuilt carburetors. Y'all need of those things? I got a line on Royal brand typewriters. I got fescue, putters, fog lights, boogie boards, aluminum siding, fire ant killer, and plas tic lifelike nativity scenes. Did I mention telephone poles? And blackberries.”

I stood there staring at him. He came across much taller inside the store. I'm talking this guy might've been six-four or six-six, tall enough to've played some basketball in his day. He should've been selling peaches, apples, or oranges, what with that height. I said, “I only need the gas.”

Raj Patel said, “Hello, Mr. Ruben Orr. How are you today, fine sir?”

“I got everything cheap and legal, as usual,” Ruben Orr said. “Chief.”

“You got any ukuleles?” I asked him. If he did, then I knew he'd stolen them from me. Me, I had gone from being a normal luthier to specializing in ukuleles—an instrument that had become more sought after that most people believed, probably because of ADD.

“Little guitars? Ukuleles, like tiny guitars?” Ruben said. “I had me some sitars while back but Rajer here bought all them things up.”

“My nephews back home are very good sitar players. They are professionals!” Raj said. He nodded and didn't blink. “One of them is now the number-one steel sitar player in all of India.”

I said, “Huh,” handed Raj over three twenties and two fives, and walked out to pump my gas before it went back up in price.

I didn't have my camper top attached. I'd only had to put the thing on one time in order to transport sixty custom-made Finley Kay ukuleles to a group of Hawaiian music enthusiasts who wanted to break some kind of world record in regards to number of people standing waist-deep over in Lake Calloustown while strumming and singing “Tiny Bubbles.” So it wasn't difficult to see, in my rearview mirror, Mr. Ruben Orr tailing me on his moped. Six-four or six-six on a moped, is what I'm saying. I took some turns—there weren't many options—onto Old Savannah Road, then Old Charlotte Road, then Old Myrtle Beach—and the guy stayed behind me. I thought, fuck, do I want to waste all this cheap two-pennies-off-normal-price gas trying to keep a blackberry-to-telephone-pole-selling, moped-riding lunatic from perhaps following me back home? Maybe he actually lives on the route I'm taking, I thought.

I looked down at my gas gauge and noticed how I'd already spent a good eighth of a tank trying to lose the guy. I turned left, then right, then right again until I got on the road where I lived—where my ex-wife and I lived until she said out loud how she didn't believe in a ukulele-making husband and took off for Raleigh, North Carolina, where, evidently, men have jobs that're more secure and less suspect.

I checked my rearview mightily, and sure enough Mr. Ruben Orr continued behind me, scrunched down as if to be more aerodynamic.

I don't know that this has much to do with my story, but I don't believe in the NRA. I mean, I believe the NRA exists, just like I believe that the Bible exists, for I've seen it, but I don't believe in those virgin birth, parting of the Red Sea, burning bush, dead guy Lazarus returning, water to wine kinds of stories. Anyway, I don't believe that the Second Amendment allows all of us to carry little pistols around whenever we want, for the only purpose to shoot people we fear. No, I believe in taking care of things otherwise.

I got out of my truck, reached beneath my seat, and pulled out half a Louisville Slugger. I pulled out nunchucks I didn't know how to use. Farther back I found an old length of a telephone line, maybe eighteen inches in length, notch marks at one end for a better grip. In my pocket I knew there was a razor-sharp folding Buck knife, but that would be my last option.

Mr. Ruben Orr puttered up behind my truck. He smiled and said, “Hey, you remember me from Rajer Dodger's?”

“What're you doing following me, man?”

He set his kickstand and turned the ignition. “You never let me finish my sentence. I thought you'd be coming back in the station. Anyway, sure enough I do have a couple ukuleles back at the trailer. Well, back in one of the filled-up trailers I got to the side of my doublewide. I got kerosene lanterns, pup tents, crockery, model cars and airplanes in the box, alligator heads, a stuffed bobcat. All kinds of shit. And two ukuleles, but I imagine the catgut's somewhere between compromised and useless.”

I said, of course, “Well I sure would like to take a look at the things.”

Ruben Orr said, “I tell you what, Finley. Do you mind if I call you Finley, or Fin? Raj told me your name. I tell you what. I'll go home, get the ukuleles, and bring them back over to Rajer Dodger's. I shouldn't've left all my blackberries there in the first place. You drop on by later and I'll have them there waiting for your inspection.”

I closed my truck door so that Ruben couldn't see my nunchucks, sawed-off bat, or copper-wire-and-rubber billy club. I said, “I got some work to do around here, but I'll come back on by about after lunch.”

“Sounds good,” Ruben said. He stretched his back. “You got a nice little setup here,” he said. “Damn, son, you look like you done good for yourself.”

“In a previous life,” I said, which was true, seeing as I'd married up. “Used to have a rich wife and a regular job.”

Ruben Orr straddled his moped and turned the ignition. “I hear that,” he said. He turned the ignition off and on again. “Same story as me, except for the rich wife and regular job.” He shook his moped, then opened the gas tank lid and peered down close.

I said, “Let me guess.”

“Goddamn it. This wouldn't've happened if you'd've pulled over when I kept buzzing my horn and flashing my lights. Man, I took off following you before I could even fill up at Rajer's. You know, they all drop their prices from about nine in the morning until when people get off work. I seen a thing on the news about it.”

I had zero cans of gas in my possession, seeing as I feared my ex-father-in-law showing up, spreading it around, and burning me clear out of the state. Or of dousing the place myself and sitting in the middle of it all, surrounded by custom-made ukuleles that weren't selling like a year earlier. I said, “Let's get that thing in the back of my truck and I'll drive you over to Rajer's. I don't have gas here, and I fear siphoning out of my own tank.”

“Goddamn it,” Ruben Orr said. “I hate to put you out.”

He picked the moped up by himself and laid it down on its side. Ruben strode over to the passenger side of the truck while I closed the tailgate. I said, “I'm not in a giant hurry today.”

“Hey, what are all those weapons of questionable destruction doing on your bench seat?”

I couldn't lie. It's a fault. Not being able to lie ruined my marriage. Making and selling ukuleles doesn't require lying, since they are what they are. I dropped out of college first semester junior year because I enrolled in an acting class, and as it ended up I couldn't conjure up a dialect outside the one I owned, or memorize lines I'd've never said in a social situation.

I said, “Well. I don't own a gun. I don't own rifles or pistols.”

Ruben Orr laughed. He banged his giant hand on my dashboard. “I had an old boy hit me upside the head with a two-by-four one time and I didn't even swerve off the road.”

I tried to visualize a man getting whacked thusly while straddling a moped. I said, “I don't even know how to use nunchucks, to be honest,” and backed out onto the road.

“I got this idea,” Ruben said. “I don't live far from Rajer Dodger's, and I got gas at my own home.”

A fireplace poker would fit nicely beneath my truck seat, I thought, and made a mental note to ask if he's got fireplace pokers for sale when we get there.

“Mahogany's good for a ukulele, isn't it?” Ruben said as we pulled up to his mobile home, which appeared to be surrounded by four single-wides, two Airstreams, and two yellow school buses plugged without wheels into the clay yard. When viewed from above, I imagined that his arrangement of aluminum abodes looked similar to ancient hieroglyphics, or one of Carl Gustav Jung's mandala examples, or a carton character's slit eyeball with crow's feet. “Over the years I think I had a couple oak wood ukuleles. One time I had one built out of balsa wood but I had it outside on a windy day and never seen the thing again.”

I said, “If you have a mahogany uke—like a Gretsch, or a Harmony Company Vita-Uke signed Roy Smeck—I'd be interested. I'd be surprised, and I'd be interested.”

Ruben pulled his moped out of the truck bed, straddled it, turned the ignition, and rode it forward when it started. He steered it thirty feet to a four-foot-high, tin-topped, three-sided enclosure of sorts and pulled the kickstand back down. “I'll be damned,” he said. “I guess I had enough gas in it after all. Must be a jiggle-needy starter that's the problem.”

I can't lie, like I said. I said, “I think you brought me out here on a ruse. I'm thinking that my ex-father-in-law hired you out to kill me.”

He smiled. “You got you some kind of paranoia going for you, son. Look. I will confess to a thing or two, Finley Kay. First off, I know who you are. Two, I'm about broke. I just thought that if I could get you over here, you'd be the kind of fellow who'd appreciate my collections and possibly want to buy something. Everybody knows how much money you getting for custom-made Finley Kay two-tone soprano ukuleles, plus that monetary award you got from the arts commission for Craftsperson of the Year, beating out all the basket weavers down in the low country. That's it, I promise.”

I believed him, I suppose. A mixed-breed dog came out from beneath the livable trailer, stretched, then slunk back in. “How come you didn't just show up at my house and ask me, then? Have you been hanging out at Rajer Dodger's waiting for me? Did someone say I could be lured by thorny-vined fruits?”

Ruben Orr pulled a ring of keys from his blue jeans and opened the door to the closest storage trailer. He propped the door open, then walked counterclockwise to open the other ones on the property.

I closed my truck door, finally, after feeling for my knife. “You start rummaging in that first one. Yell if you got any questions. I'mo go inside and make us some special Old Fashioneds. I hear you got a thing for the bourbon.”

Fuck, I thought. I thought, Who drinks Old Fashioneds these days, outside of ninety-year-old Kentucky women and twenty-six-year-old hipsters obsessed and nostalgic for Brylcreem, money clips, cuff links, Vitalis, manual typewriters, turntables, cat-eye eyeglasses, and vintage paneled station wagons? I thought, my wife somehow got ahold of Ruben and told him how I never understood the notion of moderation, except in matters of love and mother-of-pearl inlay.

“I hope you don't have any raccoons holed up in here,” I said, but Ruben had already entered his abode. I said to myself, “Go in, pick out a couple things, pay for them, and get the hell out of here.” I walked up three concrete steps to what had once been a classic, off-silver and aqua single-wide, probably one of the remaining few manufactured circa 1960 that hadn't uprooted and flown away via tornadoes. Pick two things, pay what he asks, go home, and call somebody to install a home security system. Call up Rachel and tell her I'm not planning any surprise trips to Raleigh, should she worry, unless a knot of ukulele troubadours request some specialized instruments worthy of viable amplification.

I looked back at my truck to make sure there wasn't a visible bomb strapped to the undercarriage. And then I turned my head to inside the trailer: stuffed bobcats, coyotes, wild turkeys, hawks, owls, coons, skunks, a river otter, maybe a badger, groundhogs, one small pony, a nutria, foxes, two armadillos, and coiled venomous rattlers roamed the floor. I'm talking, again, that this was a sixteen-by-eighty-foot trailer. Mounted heads of deer, wild boars, one moose, and a two-headed calf adorned the upper parts of the walls. I looked in between and saw no ukuleles, for one, or anything else I might be interested in transferring to my own living conditions. I should say that in between there were stacks of popsicle-stick baskets, tools, single- and doubletree yokes, a history of the boom box, and enough vacant wasp nest stucco apartments hanging from the ceiling to satisfy a homeopathy-leaning Chinese woman masterful in ancient reliable tonics and salves.

So I ventured over to the next trailer—a perfect Airstream—and looked in to find plastic bins of ashtrays, bottle caps, rocks, peach pits, and car cigarette lighters, among other things. Hubcaps covered the walls.

I thought, you need to call up that TV show where pickers come in and relieve people of their relentless habits before they end up on that other TV show that delves into people who won't ever discard anything, including trash.

“You found anything yet?” Ruben Orr yelled from the doorway.

I jumped in a way that didn't make me proud. I might've blurted out, “Not now!” or “This isn't how I'm supposed to die!” like that. I said, “Man, I've never seen anything like this. Do you have a website? You need to have some of your stuff listed on eBay, or Craigslist, or something like that.”