Why Dogs Chase Cars (19 page)

The blindman on the other side of the curtain laughed and laughed. He said, “I didn't really splash battery acid in my eyes, either.”

The doctor dropped the mallet on the floor and put his middle and index fingers to my jugular. He said, “I believe he's lying to us now, Lee. His pulse is too rapid for honesty.”

“Uh-huh,” my father said. “Maybe I should get both Shirley Ebo and her daddy in here to clear this up.”

“Whoa. You should feel his heart beating now, boy. Everybody stand back—I think Mendal's fixing to explode.”

I said, “No I'm not,” but just sat there.

“Where's ye erection now, boy?” the blindman on the other side of the partition yelled out. “That'd get your blood slowed down in the neck area.”

I paid attention to the voice, finally. It could've been my high-school principal. It could've been the man who gave my father the cement truck. Hell, it might've been my mother.

A
TOWN WITHOUT
whores must invent its celebrities. Ours was a man named Sonny Pearman who visited the schools on a bimonthly basis. Mr. Pearman had a passion for mimickry and deceit, and worked, for whatever reason, as a special guest speaker of sorts. I had known Mr. Pearman in real life—he worked as a housefather at the local orphanage,
ran a plant nursery, and walked around Forty-Five swinging an empty watch chain. He tipped his hat to passersby, and spoke in foreign accents. He wore fake facial hair of one kind or another, always.

On the day after my syphilis/gonorrhea exam I went to Coach Tappy Pinson's first period P.E. and found a slightly familiar-looking man sitting at the locker room's desk. Coach Pinson said, “Boys, we have a real treat today. This here's a real, live ex–major league baseball player who's come to talk to y'all today. I want all of you to listen close. This is Mr. Eli McClintock, the old center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. He has some things he wants to talk to y'all about.” As soon as he said that I figured out it was really Sonny Pearman, wearing a perfect handlebar moustache.

Coach Tappy Pinson wasn't but a step up from being a waterboy for the junior varsity football team, but he took himself seriously and seemed to know a little bit about foot and ankle injuries when one of us tripped while running up the bleachers every morning. This Eli McClintock was also the famed world-bounding travel writer who came into my English class the previous nine weeks. The year before, he was a famous good-hearted medical doctor who worked in Uganda and talked to my biology class about the dangers of an unhygienic lifestyle. When I was in the seventh grade Mr. Pearman showed up to my Civics class as a purported descendent of Stonewall Jackson.

“Howdy, fellows,” the fake center fielder said. “How many of y'all like the game of baseball? How many of y'all like football, baseball, basketball, and a good fight song?” We raised our hands because our parents had told us to be polite. Mr. Eli McClintock's moustache danced like electrons around Sonny Pearman's face. He smiled sideways and had that faraway look in his eyes that let me in on the fact that he'd given this speech before, beneath a giant evangelical tent erected beside a country store on par with Rufus Price's Goat Wagon down on Highway 25. Sonny Pearman used the lilting melodic voice of a hypnotist or animal-control specialist.

He also owned the voice of the blinded man next to me at the emergency room.

I should mention that Sonny Pearman—no matter what historical or made-up expert he chose to be—ended every session, no matter what the topic, by getting students to join him in prayer and to recognize that there was no peace without Jesus Christ in their lives. He meant well. I didn't care. Later on, after I finally escaped my hometown, Sonny Pearman pretended to be Hal Holbrook pretending to be Mark Twain at the Forty-Five Little Theatre. It got rave reviews in the
Forty-Five Platter
.

Anyway, we sat there in our short gym pants, our tube socks, and our T-shirts that all read 45. Fake Eli McClintock said, “I want to tell you about the time I hit for the cycle two games in a row. Y'all know what a cycle is, don't you?”

My friend Compton Lane said, “It's the best time not to get a girl pregnant.”

Glenn Flack yelled out, “My daddy used to have a motorcycle back when he fought in the Korean War.”

Sonny Pearman didn't veer off. “It's a single, double, triple, and
home run
in one game. It don't have to be in that order, but you have to get all of them.”

Coach Pinson said, “The odds are against it happening. One time I got two singles in a row playing church league softball, but that was it.”

I wanted to go outside and run around the cinder track until I got rubber legs and fell down face first. I wanted to walk over to the home ec class and stick my hand beneath the sewing machine needle. Compton Lane hit my bare leg and whispered, “Ask Coach Pinson if they were single men or single women.”

Sonny Pearman droned on and on about his fake major league career, and then finally said, “And we have no other recourse but to be proud that God invented a pastime such as baseball.”

Don't ask me why I raised my hand when Eli McClintock asked if we had any questions prior to our obligatory prayer, or why I wanted to prolong our special get-right-with-God-and-you-can-do-anything pep talk. I said, “Mr. Pearman, are you of the belief that all of God's creatures are splendid and special?” like I'd heard him say when he was pretending to be a hundred other people.

He said, “Son, I'm Eli McClintock, the world-famous center fielder from the St. Louis Cardinals.”

I said, “Uh-huh.” And then, for no reason outside of hardheaded meanness, I said, “To play baseball, God made trees, then trees get cut down and made into bats. God made horses, then horses get slaughtered so their hides can make balls. Gloves made from cows. Rosin bag made from rosin.” I kept going. I went into bleachers, and popcorn boxes, and hot dog wrappers.

Compton said, “Foul ball, foul ball, foul ball,” with each of my examples.

Coach Pinson said, “Hey, that'll be enough, Mendal. That's enough.”

Before Sonny Pearman led us in prayer as Eli McClintock, he said, “That's right. God gives up horses, cows, and trees so we can enjoy our nation's pastime. Isn't God wonderful?”

To me Coach Pinson said, “You think about that when you're burning in Hell.” Then he gave me two demerits for talking back.

I
MADE IT
through the remainder of the school day without dropping my lunch tray, and without Melissa Beasley or Libby Belcher raising their hands to tell a teacher that I didn't go to church on Sundays, that my father didn't have a real job, or that my mother traveled with a pack of gypsies. I got home, though, to find Sonny Pearman waiting on the front porch. My father was off looking for cheap
land to buy up at one-tenth its true value once some land developer decided to make a golf course subdivision there.

I said, “Hey, Mr. Pearman.”

“Hey you own goddamn self, boy,” he said. He didn't wear his St. Louis Cardinals uniform anymore, even though he held a thirty-four-ounce wooden Louisville Slugger. “You go and try to make a fool of me one more time in public and I'll beat your face in. You do it in private, and I'll see to it that you dead.”

I could actually feel my knees knocking together. I thought for sure my cling peaches, corn bread, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and sloppy joe sandwich would find their way out of my body one way or the other. I said, “My father told me to say all that. He just got a thing in the mail from some environmentalists saying we should care about the trees. I guess I had it on my mind.”

Mr. Pearman's hair was perfectly greased back in swirly Vitalis waves. I couldn't help but picture tiny men surfing down his forehead and temples. “You got hit in the head yesterday by a man with the IQ of a desk clerk's bell. I know your daddy told you not to question Marvin Childress, ever. And now today. Don't you learn? I thought you was smart. I got boys at the orphanage who don't stick their hands in a rat trap twice. I got plants at my nursery that don't let aphids bother them none.”

My brain worked way ahead of itself trying to think of excuses. I didn't say, “How in the world would you know
about Marvin Childress popping my head with a rock unless my father planned some grand scheme that involved your hanging out next to my emergency room bed?” I said, “Was Eli McClintock a real baseball player? I thought you did a wonderful job. It was right up there with the time back when I was in seventh grade and you came in as Booker T. Washington's great-grandson. That was cool. You must've had to do a lot of research on that guy.”

Sonny Pearman pointed his bat at my chin. He said, “There ain't but a few of us left in Forty-Five who have any hope for the future of our community, Mendal. You need to know this. Me and some other men and your father know that it could all go away unless there's some smart leadership. And smart leadership don't happen with a man who makes fun of the retarded or the Christian.”

It probably didn't start with a boy who would turn around and urinate right onto the front-yard boxwoods, either, but that's what I did at this particular moment instead of peeing my pants. I said, “I couldn't hold on anymore. Excuse me.”

“You our little Dalai Lama, Mendal Dawes. You go on and pee where you want. Nothing's enough for you, bubba. Nothing's enough.”

I said, “The Dalai Lama is
picked,
I know. But who's the
old
Dalai Lama of Forty-Five? Are you the current Dalai Lama, Mr. Pearman?”

Sonny Pearman tapped his boot heels with the bat. He threw back his head and laughed. “You know I ain't that
wise. And if you're the next one, you should know already.”

I said, “I'm getting out of Forty-Five, though. I'm going off in a few years to a real college.”

Sonny Pearman put on his Shakespearean-actor voice. He was being either Lear or Richard III. He said, “And then please come back.” Or maybe Desdemona. “A man must experience life in order to offer life experience.”

He tapped the bat against his boots some more, then took a stance as if a knuckleballer stood sixty feet, six inches away. Mr. Pearman swung at the imaginary ball. He looked at a point forty-five degrees on the horizon, as if he'd hit one out of the park, out of town, out of South Carolina. I zipped up my pants and followed his gaze. I saw exactly nothing—not even a cloud. Across the woods I heard Shirley Ebo's father's donkeys call out. Mr. Pearman didn't look over in that direction, past the cement truck, but I knew that he, too, could tell that their two-syllable cries sounded like “Men-dal, Men-dal. Men-dal, Mendal.” If we'd've had a travel agent in town, I would've booked a plane to Mississippi, or any of those other states where I could get lynched quickly and without notice—just so I could flat-out
die
without much fanfare. I looked back to that imaginary spot in the sky and thought about how my mother should've
been around to witness this spectacle.

I thought, Joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. That's it. I didn't nod, or shake my head, or shrug. I didn't shake his hand. Mr. Pearman said, “You don't even have to think about it. There's nothing to think about. It's predestined. Like a dog that has no choice but to chase cars, you know. They're pretty much predestined to get run over.”

He left, swinging his bat. He walked up Deadfall Road, not in the direction of the orphanage. I looked back up at the sky but saw nothing different to note later on. Dogs bayed off in the distance, mournful, not urgent.

I walked down the road to Marvin Childress's church. I sat on the stoop there, hoping that some power would come down and offer me solutions. Evidently Marvin Childress had spilled much of his honey on the porch. An inordinate number of flies thrived there, two feet from God's front door.

If my father had had a friend in the parole and probation office or working with the district attorney, I might have been fitted for a monitoring device around my ankle. But whatever spy gadgetry might have existed in 1974 South Carolina, it would not make it to the town of Forty-Five until decades later.

When I got my driver's license legally, at the age of fifteen, there were still party lines for all of our residents, and I'm pretty sure that some neighbors wired up tin butter-bean cans with string between their houses.
Gone with the
fucking
Wind
didn't make it to our sad drive-in movie theater until the late sixties, and it wasn't until then, when word of that movie and the South's loss spread, that a large portion of our black population felt free to move on. Men still trapped animals by digging deep holes and covering them with thin reeds and pine straw, and most mornings, thirty minutes before school began, the cries of woods-living children yelling “Help” could be heard. The CB radio, a fad that had trickled down from truck drivers to regular citizens in other towns, seemed too extravagant for the residents of Forty-Five. My biology teacher owned and operated a ham radio set, but communicated only with another biology teacher in France.

Hell, I remember when Lanky Jenkins walked into class one day all excited from learning that some French guy had figured out how to make milk last longer.

Oh, sure, I exaggerate somewhat. But I would bet that if a pollster came down to Forty-Five and asked about man landing on the moon, half of the population wouldn't know about it, and the other half would pronounce “Mojave” as two syllables.

So, because of the lack of technology and my father's basic parental understanding that teenagers needed constant supervision, the first car I bought with money I'd saved from a variety of tragic and misguided part-time jobs lost its muffler before I had put five miles on the odometer. This was a giant, baby blue, slanted-upward Ford Galaxie that—
with
its muffler—could be heard all the way over in tiny, reckless downtown Forty-Five, and probably all the way out to Gruel. “We're taking off the muffler so I'll always know where you are,” my father said. “In case I need some help and have to come get you.” He got beneath the Galaxie's carriage with a couple channel locks and ten minutes later said, “Start this thing up, Mendal.”