Why Dogs Chase Cars (5 page)

Compton turned around and walked to retrieve them. I didn't say anything one way or the other. We were both complete fools.

Outside the store Compton said, “We should ask Mr. Price if he has any of his goats' horns laying around somewhere. They're supposed to work as aphrodisiacs. We might should chew on some goat horn before we go over there.”

I got in the Jeep. I didn't respond. It's not as though I feared having sex for the second time in my life—and maybe for the first time with a woman who wouldn't make fun of me—but I kept thinking about those Before-and-After pictures that awaited. And then I started thinking about my mother's mother-of-pearl buttons and that hidden mysterious graveyard that I knew I'd visit before leaving Forty-Five, led by Shirley Ebo on a disastrous pilgrimage that could only scar and disconcert me forever.

S
ENORA
S
CHULZE SHOULD'VE
gone by “Senorita” in the strict world of Spanish language. She introduced herself as Senora Schulze on the first day of class, though, and back then no one knew the difference. She could've called herself
“Frau” or “Madame” and we wouldn't have known the difference. Back in mid-1970s South Carolina there were no migrant workers. Back then there were enough recently released ex-convicts who'd pick peaches, plus a variety of Shirley Ebo's relatives, who'd not been taught that Abraham Lincoln wrote a big old proclamation some hundred years earlier.

Unlike most Forty-Fivers, Senora Schulze's life wasn't fulfilled merely by her job. Teaching high-school students was only a way to pay her bills. Senora Schulze's life depended on earning starring roles in each Forty-Five Little Theatre production. “When it gets to the point where my name's not listed at least third on the cast of characters, I'll know it's time to move to a smaller town,” she once told me out in the Forty-Five High parking lot. But maybe she was telling it to God. She didn't make eye contact, and kind of held her head upwards to the sky. She said, “Drinking was a vice held by many of my favorite actresses, Mendal. So don't judge me. Just think of me as another Judy Garland!”

Comp and I drove over to Miss Ballard's house on the corner of Durst and Powerhouse Road, which might as well have been two states away from our homes. Comp said, “I want to be with Miss Ballard. If it all comes down to us not having a choice in the matter, okay. But if we do, I want Miss Ballard.”

I pulled into the driveway and parked behind Senora Schulze's Datsun. She liked to tell us that Liza Minnelli drove
the same kind of car up in New York, on her way to Broadway plays. I had no choice but to tell Comp, “If mine starts singing show tunes, I'm out of there.”

Comp and I argued a while out there on the gravel driveway, and then we flipped a coin. He said that some show tunes weren't all that bad, and I told him I was going to mention his love of
The Sound of Music
—which played at Forty-Five Indoor Movie House for an entire year, too—to anyone who would listen. We did eenie-meenie-miney-moe. We played rock/paper/scissors/dynamite. In the end, we realized that we would let the teachers decide, and that we would follow their lead.

Oh, we had everything figured out until the door opened and Shirley Ebo stood there, all smiles and crazy pigtails. “Hello, Comp. Hello, Mendal,” she said. Shirley closed the door behind her and doubled halfway over. She slapped her ashy gray knees. “Y'all got any Mad Dog in that bag there? These women only seem to like Skrawberry Ripple.”

By the time we made it onto the porch we could hear Senora Schulze in the background belting out “Que Sera, Sera” without any accompaniment. I said, “What're you doing here, Shirley Ebo?”

She said, “Miss Ballard made me the editor. She said that in the history of Forty-Five High there ain't been no girl editor, and she wanted to make a statement.” Shirley looked down at Comp's pocketful of tea and said, “What you got in there, boy?”

Senora Schulze kept singing. She rearranged the lyrics; what I'm saying is, she seemed to know all the words, just not in order. That goofball song would stick in my head for another six to ten years:
Whatever will be, will be. When I was just a little girl
. I said, “How'd you get over here? You don't know how to drive, Shirley Ebo.”

“I rode with them. I rode with Miss Ballard. Y'all come on in and see what I done with the pictures.” She reached behind and grabbed the doorknob. “Bring that beer inside. I wouldn't mind me a cold, frosty beverage about right now.” She said that last part in white-voice. It sounded like my father talking.

I don't know if Compton started sweating, but I distinctly smelled tea brewing from his pants pocket. I said, “Okay,” to Shirley and stepped into the den first.

Senora Schulze and Miss Ballard were waltzing—together. It was more than I could take. I didn't drop my bag of beer, sewing needles, apples, and tinfoil or anything. I looked back at Comp, though, and I could tell he was thinking exactly like I was—that either these two teachers were mercilessly making fun of us, or that they, too, would soon be leaving Forty-Five for Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, or any of those other cities that welcomed female crooners. Compton Lane reached in his pocket to extract the faux pot, and proceeded to spill it all over Miss Ballard's wooden floor.

Here's what Senora Schulze said to me, “Oh my God!—
do y'all smoke the marijuana?!”

I said, “Miss Ballard said she wanted something stronger. If I knew what she meant.”

Miss Ballard let go of Senora Schulze and said, “
Like wine
. Something stronger like wine, or maybe some
vodka,
Mendal.”

Shirley Ebo sat down on the floor, picked up some tea between her thumb and forefinger, and said, “This ain't weed. They was going to trick y'all and say you was smoking the real thing, Miss Ballard. They was going to sell y'all bag tea.” Shirley pointed at my face and said, “That was tea you brought over to my house last year, wasn't it, Mendal?”

I shook my head. I promised it wasn't. It wasn't. I'd brought over some dried-up okra leaves from my father's garden. Shirley and I pretended to smoke them in her daddy's corncob pipe.

“I'm glad y'all quit coming to school, both of y'all'ses,” Senora Schulze said. “You should be ashamed. We thought we were doing you a favor asking you over here. How many teachers allow their students in their homes? Not many. And there's a reason, obviously.” Senora Schulze tried to grasp Miss Ballard's hand again—the senora had led—but Miss Ballard stepped back.

Shirley Ebo said, “I guess I'mo have to stick these inserts in every yearbook all by myself. White boys. Y'all mess up everything.”

This all took place in about a minute, I should mention. My knees couldn't tell whether to bend or not. I said, “Well, I guess I won't have to share this booze,” which I would say more often than I would want, later on in life, when people threw me out of their parties, arenas, stadiums.

Shirley walked into the kitchen. Comp and I backed out of the house, got in the Jeep, and took off. About a mile down the road he said, “They're just mad because we figured out a way not to have to go to school anymore.” He dug out some tea leaves jammed under his fingernails. I swerved away from two chow-mix dogs standing at the edge of someone's yard, both perched as if on starting blocks, ready to follow my hubcaps down Powerhouse Road.

Comp said, “You know why dogs around here chase cars?”

I'd heard it before. “They can't form a noose without opposable thumbs. They don't know how to turn on the gas in a kitchen. It's impossible for them to slit their wrists. They don't have trigger fingers.”

S
HIRLEY
E
BO SHOWED
up at my house an hour before dusk and said we had just enough time to make it to the graveyard. She looked stoned. I'd never known her to partake of anything except for one time when my father left a quart bottle of malt liquor over at her daddy's house and another time when she and I snuck cans from a Fourth of July
party in her backyard. Maybe a couple other times. I said, “Did y'all get all those baby pictures in the yearbook?”

Shirley's hair stood out in a giant wedge. Since I'd known her she'd always had her scalp carved into anywhere from six to twenty pigtails, which hovered above her head like scattered question marks. She walked me to the end of my narrow gravel-and-clay driveway. “It might be important for your father not to be around, Mendal. Your daddy ain't home, is he?”

We crossed Deadfall Road onto a path that wound through pines. Shirley and I walked past the foundations of what had been a couple old cabins. We passed the sad indentions of dried springs and the creek beds those springs once fed. There were the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry, there were the pine trunks I'd notched with a folding Kut-Master to mark places where I'd seen copperheads. I wore a backpack in case I needed to hike something out. Shirley walked with swinging arms and otherwise seemed flatter than usual, barely three-dimensional.

We passed a place where she and I, maybe at the age of ten, had once played veterinarian, where she and I dropped our pants and looked to see if we had the same things our ex–stray dogs owned. I didn't look when we got to the place—maybe a quarter mile from my house—where my father once took me long ago to bury the china my parents had gotten for a wedding present.

Shirley walked with purpose; she strode out in a way that
I always thought she should've done when someone told a racist joke right there in front of her. A stilt-walker couldn't have strode as fast and meaningful. She said, “We finished. Me and those teachers finished. Though I did most of the work. Which don't surprise me none.”

I pulled off the path. I placed my hands on my knees to catch my breath. Shirley didn't stop. She didn't turn around and acknowledge my request. Shirley kept striding on, long-legged as a Dinka on the hunt. “I can't believe you ain't ever followed this path all the way to our graves,” she called over her shoulder. “You white boys don't have much sense of adventure.”

I didn't know about the rest of the white-boy race, but I knew for a fact that I didn't ever want to come up on bubbling Forty-Five Creek, which separated the Earth as far as I was concerned. I'd been on those banks before and then run home nonstop after witnessing the half-mammal, half-amphibians that lounged on its banks. This wasn't a dream: there were ape-animals with skink bodies, and salamanders with hairy, muscled arms living in the area. The place possessed a flat-out primordial landscape with all of the amenities. I had come upon these creatures one day in midsummer some ten years earlier, and then when I studied Darwin by pure accident I felt like maybe I was the only person on the planet who could snigger and feel special about how the Galápagos Islands had nothing on my hometown.

Shirley strode onward, and luckily when we got to the
creek the water was down and the animals were either still hibernating or had left altogether for more hospitable climates and societies, like maybe in south Georgia. I'd gotten to the point where I had forgotten the whole reason why we undertook the trek. I trotted behind Shirley, thinking all about going off to Miss Ballard's house, how Senora Schulze had sung and danced there, and so on. I thought about Compton ready to roll Lipton's, about Rufus Price's goats staring at me with their slashed pupils, tap dancing their hooves.

How could anyone live in a large town like Charlotte or Atlanta and keep his or her sanity?

“Just jump the damn thing, Mendal,” Shirley said. “It ain't like water got arms.” She was standing on the other side. I hadn't paid attention when she crossed over, and for all I knew she'd walked on the water.

I said, “I want to go up that way and see if there's a log, or a group of rocks.” I looked at Shirley's shoes, her socks, her ankles. She showed no signs of being wet anywhere, and Forty-Five Creek had to be ten yards across. If she'd jumped it, then she deserved to be on Coach Ware's track team.

And there were no footprints on the other side, either. I need to mention all of this—the banks were as forgiving as soft-serve ice cream. I looked and saw no indentions where Shirley Ebo might've plopped. She summoned me with one arm as slowly as she might've asked a ghost to join her.

Later on in my life I would look back at this day and remember
that my feet, too—my goofy tennis shoes—didn't get wet. I would remember that I matched Shirley Ebo stride for stride for the rest of the way, that we sprang across the pine-straw path in leaps as yet unknown to antelopes. We covered another mile in less than four minutes and only slowed when she needed to turn her head left and right at undetectable crossroads. And then Shirley Ebo took my hand, kept her face lowered, and said, “You can't tell my daddy or any other of my people about this place.”

I didn't nod. I didn't shake my head sideways. Either my heart had quit beating, or it was rattling so hard that it wasn't discernible.

M
Y FATHER HAD
told me early on about how some members of various Indian tribes planted the placentas of their children right after the birthing process. He'd read it somewhere. My father had sat drunk in his lounge chair when I was nine or ten, and imparted this knowledge. It all got started because I was up to the Gs in the dictionary and encyclopedia. He said, “You know—I don't know—it might've been the Cherokees, but I'm thinking more like it was the Hopis, or Navahos, or Sioux, who went out and buried the placenta of newborns out in the ground to be closer to the world. Or for good luck, I forget which one. Maybe it was just to get the thing away from the living space. I don't think it was the original Cherokees. Their land was a little rocky up there in North Carolina. Maybe Chippewas.”
He repeated “Chippewas” over and over, dragging out that last syllable.