Why Dogs Chase Cars (3 page)

I should mention that Mrs. McKnight got some kind of yearly districtwide award for Miss Guidance, though she never understood the pun.

Anyway, I left Forty-Five High School and went back to Rufus Price's Goat Wagon. Rufus sat outside handing his goats the stale and expired products. When I got out of the Jeep he said, “School not out
again?
” He might've been kin to Coach Ware, for all I knew.

I said, “Hey, Mr. Price. I'll leave the money on your counter if you trust me.”

He held out a piece of Little Debbie Snack Cake to three-horned Tripod, my favorite goat. “I don't trust anybody, son. The last man I trusted said the pulpwood truck wouldn't roll forward while I worked on its radiator.” He dropped some oatmeal cake on his lap by accident, and Tripod gathered up the crumbs. Mr. Price leaned his head backwards.

I nodded. I said, “Yessir, I remember.” I thought about doing anthropology and condemnation, mostly because my father had me read Schopenhauer when I finished those other books he ordered from publishing houses that never sent anything to our local library. But no one needed a minor in condemnation, I decided. Everyone in Forty-Five could brag about having a
major
in condemnation, whether they knew it or not.

B
ILLY
G
ILLILAND HAD
a photograph of himself sitting on a nice front porch while a Chihuahua licked his face. He wore what might've been knickers. Libby Belcher's picture had a fake background of Niagara Falls amid the Rocky Mountains. Timmy Stoddart stood in the middle of Ballantine Oldsmobile's car lot holding a car key in his hand, wearing a boat captain's hat. Helen Valentine wore a tutu. Glenn Flack looked angelically toward a wasps' nest. Bobby Coleman's red-topped head shone and shone as he looked straight at the camera from beside a land tortoise
housed at the Forty-Five Petting Zoo. Bobby Williams—the king of calling a woman's nether parts “cock” later on—had a picture of himself with his diaper on backwards, his hands covering his nipples. Peter Human, Frank Funderburk, Mack McDowell, Vivian Hulsey, Eugenia Wimmer, and Patty Addy all had childhood photographs taken up in Ghost Town in the Sky, standing beside a wooden cutout figure of one of those Indian chiefs, or General Robert E. Lee, or Paul Bunyan, or the Marx Brothers, or Eisenhower.

My friend Shirley Ebo's picture was taken in front of Forty-Five Indoor Movie House, a place that still had a balcony where blacks had to sit. As a matter of fact, she was standing in front of the sign out on the sidewalk. At the left of the photograph you could see
WHIT
with an arrow before it. To the right of Shirley Ebo there was an arrow pointing upwards. Her little figure blocked the printing, though—all but
OREDS
.

I shuffled through all of the pictures like an idiot. Miss Ballard had either left altogether or was standing off in the smoking area. Me, I'd already been home, rifled through every drawer and safe in the house in case Dad had hid something new, found nothing special, drunk my beer, put on running clothes, covered six miles in thirty-six minutes
without
even sprinting toward the end, put some clothes in the washing machine, then come back to Forty-Five High School like I meant to attend one of the after-school clubs or meetings. Like I meant to care about Spanish Club, or
Glee! Club! Like I went to the Ecology Club meeting, whose members went out once a semester with convicts from the county detention center and always complained that they got bullied out of their cigarettes.

I am not proud of any of this, of course. I'm a buffoon, understand. I took those yearbook pictures home, spread them out on my father's kitchen table, and said things like, “Look, peckerhead, these are the kinds of pictures that get taken of children when they are children,” et cetera. I accused my father of an abuse that wouldn't make the media for another decade.

“Listen,” my father said. He rolled his neck in all kinds of directions. “I see your pictures here.” He stared down at the kitchen table. It wasn't so much that I wanted to prove that everyone else had happy childhood photographs. No, I wanted
no one
to have them, I realized, even back then. Unfortunately, I wanted
no one
to have memories of happy days. “You have pictures of you
not
standing in front of a ditch, or poison ivy patch.
You just don't have those pictures in your possession,
fool,” my father told me.

The telephone rang. As my father walked toward it, I believed that it was either my guidance counselor or my mother. My father said, “Yes … yeah … I understand. … We'll see that it doesn't happen again, I promise.”

He hung up the phone and leaned on his cane. He didn't turn my way. I said, “That was Mrs. McKnight saying how I cut classes today, right?”

My father turned his head but not one bit of his torso. He said, “I believe you have something else to tell me, Mendal. Why are you acting up so much these days? I know I ain't done the best job raising you, but please, please understand that I've tried my best. Goddamn, son.”

Hell, I thought he was going to cry. I went ahead and told him all about buying two eight-packs of tiny beers, of skipping classes, and how I used hot water when I washed clothes, even though he'd told me he read something somewhere about how cold water cleaned just as well and didn't run up the electric bill. I even went back a couple years and admitted that a stranger hadn't really driven by and shot our cement-block house with BBs, that in truth I'd found a three-wood and a sack of golf balls in a ditch over by the all-black Cokesbury Hills Country Club's nine-hole course and tried to tee off over our house on a dare from Compton.

My father turned his body almost imperceptibly and faced me. He said, “That was Mr. Lane. He called up to say how we used some inferior hooks on a trotline we laid out on Lake Between. They're all bent straight down, and unless there's some hundred-pound catfish on that lake, we probably cut corners too much.”

I said, “There might be that big a catfish in Lake Between.” Already I could feel his cane hitting my hamstrings, triceps, or side. It occurred to me that my father spoke cryptically on the telephone at all times, perhaps readying himself for a day such as this.

He lifted his arm, shifted his weight, and laughed. He said, “A firecracker's still a firecracker, lit or not.”

I kept my eyes closed, waiting for him to strike me. I had no clue what he meant concerning pyrotechnics, and tried not to wonder about what a firecracker was after it exploded, outside of smoke and smell and nonflash.

I
DIDN'T TAKE
my classmates' baby photographs back to school the next day. My father had gotten up in the middle of the night and either buried or hid them somewhere. At the breakfast table—we ate grits every morning, with sausage balls to the side on special days—I asked, “Hey, I should take those pictures back. Where'd you put those pictures of everybody for their Before?”

My father tapped his cane on the linoleum. “That photograph of you was the only real picture. Where the heck do you see waterfalls around here?” He swung one arm. “I don't see any mountaingoddamntops. Give me a break. I knew I should've sent you to a private school. I'd've sent you to a private school if there was one around here that wasn't only a white-flight place. If there was one around here at all.”

I pretended that there wasn't too much butter in the grits. I tried not to think about how my English teacher said how all southern novels had grits in them, or a grandmother who didn't want to go to Florida, and how grits and grandmothers were symbolic of Good. I said, “I like public school,
Dad. I like meeting people of different ilks in life.” Well, maybe I just thought all of that later, like in college, when my new classmates all hailed from prep schools up and down the eastern seaboard.

My father got up from the table and opened the freezer door. He pulled out the manila envelope and tossed it like a Frisbee. “I was just playing with you. Go ahead and look through them if you want, make sure I didn't lose any of them.”

I poured them out. I don't want to accuse my Forty-Five classmates of crawling from a gene pool so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry, but I have to tell you that they all, as babies, had held the same broad, high foreheads and eyes that floated a little too close to their noses. Except for Shirley Ebo, it looked as though the same child had posed in front of Santa, or the fake nature backgrounds, and so on.

My father had me recheck the pictures for a reason. I didn't find the one in which I stood in front of the fake toxic barrel, but there was a nice black-and-white of me with my mother. I'd not seen a picture of her since he'd either burned, buried, or otherwise destroyed every single document that proved she'd had a part in the short-lived marriage. I said, “This is Mom.”

“I took that picture. Hell, it might be the only time I got the camera away from her. She was always a little shy about getting her photo taken. You'd think a woman like that, who ran off to Nashville, would want her picture taken a
thousand times daily. Publicity photos and whatnot for her singing career. But not your mother.”

I held it and pored over every square millimeter. My mother and I were standing in front of my father's old Buick. She wore a dress that seemed to have too many buttons. The neckline came halfway up her chin, like an old Puritan outfit. Shiny mother-of-pearl buttons clasped every inch down the front, all the way to the hem. Even in the black-and-white, I could see the bluish gray swirls of them. I imagined the dress in disuse, filleted out like a saltwater fish, those buttons off to one side like vertebrae.

She wasn't smiling. I wore some kind of ensemble made up of short pants and a jacket. I said, “I'd rather have my toxic-dump picture for the yearbook, Dad. This is too weird. They make enough fun of me over there.”

He said, “But if you ever lose this picture, then you'll have it for keeps in the annual. I'd go with this one. Do it for me.” He didn't tear up, or choke-voice. “Besides, I wasn't thinking right earlier. What if someone got real smart and saw that picture of you twenty, thirty years down the road, put two and two together, you know, and when the land developers started unearthing those barrels they thought you had a part in it all? You might go to prison for inciting a panic, or contributing to the delinquency of a businessman.”

His speech sounded practiced. I knew that he'd sat up all night working on his words. I said, “Thanks. That's a good
idea. Well, I better get going.”

My father said, “When you're over at Rufus Price's Goat Wagon pick me up some pipe cleaners. I've been coming up with such good ideas, I might need to take up smoking some Captain Black.”

I guess practicing words was a Dawes family trait: already I'd devised a way to explain to Miss Ballard how the photographs went missing originally, how I had accidentally picked them up off of her desk when I'd meant to pick up my Spanish project—a term paper detailing the life of architect Antonio Gaudí—and so on. I knew that Senora Schulze—bombed out of her mind—would back me up, seeing as she couldn't remember if or when her
muchachos
had special projects assigned or not. Then I could blame Miss Ballard for losing my research, and Senora Schulze would have no choice but to give me an A, and so on.

I drove east to school. The sunlight blinded me. All I could see were those buttons on my mother's dress. Later that day I would explain it all to Compton Lane. His mother had left his father, too, at about the same time. We always wondered if they ran off together, but this was a nice, naïve, quaint, and innocent time, before anyone knew about lesbians who finally figured things out between themselves and their bad marriages. I wasn't even sure that all of the Nixon Watergate stuff made it into the local weekly newspaper. The Forty-Five Indoor Movie House had been showing
Mary
fucking
Poppins
for an entire year.

M
ISS
B
ALLARD HAD
called in sick, evidently. I stood in her homeroom, waiting. Shirley Ebo said, “Mendal Dawes, what you think you are, some kind of teacher now? You can do better than that.”

I said, “Where's Miss Ballard?”

Shirley said, “Drinking beer with your Spanish teacher, out in your Jeep. I saw them driving around the parking lot, tooting the horn.” She got up from her desk. “Let me see those pictures of yours.”

Shirley lived on an island more deserted than mine. She was the only black girl preintegration at Forty-Five Elementary, and when integration occurred she was shunned by her black counterparts. Shirley survived six years of white kids mesmerized by her white palms and feet, then six years of white kids who no longer found her exotic and black kids who didn't trust her surrounded-by-whiteys past.

I said, “That's a good one of you, Shirley. If we had a Xerox machine at this school I might go copy some of these pictures and put them on my wall back home.”

Shirley said, “A
what?
” Everyone else in the room looked at me as if they'd heard me speak Russian. None of them knew of any copiers besides those mimeograph machines that produced purplish-blue inky facsimiles. Not much earlier—maybe in the 1960s—according to my father, Forty-Five High employed
monks
to handwrite duplicates.

Shirley slid out the photos and spread them on Miss Ballard's desk. No one in the homeroom got up to inspect them, which I thought to be odd later on. Were they so respectful of rules that they wouldn't get out of their desks until they were told to do so? Did they have no curiosity whatsoever? Had one of the dozen P.E. teachers told them that they should conserve energy in order to live a long, long life?

Shirley picked up the one of my mother and me. She said, “This is your momma?”