Why Dogs Chase Cars (6 page)

I had asked my father about Gorky and what it meant to write an unfinished cycle of novels—what I'd read about, nothing more. Somehow he'd made a connection. I said, “Huh. What's a placenta?”

My father kept staring at the ceiling. He'd barely taken me to the Sunken Gardens Lounge, or any other drinking establishment at that point, much less explained the birthing process. I asked him again.

He explained everything. He went from courtship to marriage, erection to penetration, seed to egg. My father tried to explain DNA—which I'd come across in the dictionary and encyclopedia—and romance, which I'd not. He said, “And in some cultures the father goes out with a big shovel to plant the thing in the ground.”

I said, “That's the oddest thing I've ever heard,” which was true. “It can't grow
into
something out there, can it?” I didn't want to ever come across a fruit-bearing placenta tree, at least from the image he'd conjured.

My father looked me in the eye. He said, “I don't know what the Eskimos do, seeing as it's all ice up there. We didn't do the same thing for you, but we did for your brother.”

Again, it was the middle of the Vietnam War but before the Summer of Love. Up until that point I had never heard the term “brother” in our house—my father had none, and my mother was long gone by then. I said, “Say all that
again?”

“Your momma and me had another boy before you were born. I been meaning to tell you when the time was right. You mentioned Gorky, that led to placenta, and I remembered that your mother and I were going to name the child Gordon.”

My father had gotten out of his chair and taken me by the hand. We walked outside our cement-block house to the backyard, where he had just begun storing pallets of heart-pine lumber that he'd made me help him collect “so you'll have something to build on later in life, ha ha ha.” I said, “Gordon. My brother's name was Gordon?”

Dad sat down on some nice Bermuda grass. “It was your mother's idea, I forget why. It must've been someone in her family. His name was Sam until he showed up dead. Then she said she wanted to name him Gordon. Maybe she thought of it as ‘gored on.'”

In a few decades I would think about how most sane people wouldn't have told this story, at least not in this manner, to anyone under the age of twenty-one. I said, “Sam.”

“Anyway, he had a placenta and we planted the thing over there.” He pointed behind him, past the house and over toward the trees across Deadfall Road. “I thought you might want to know.”

My father had gotten up and gone back inside the house as if he'd just told me what a particular center fielder batted the previous year. I wouldn't get to the S sections for
quite a while—thus knew nothing of
symbiosis, synchronicity, symbolism,
and the like—and followed him saying, “What about mine, what about mine?”

“Your what?” he asked. My father walked to the refrigerator and extracted a can of Schlitz. He closed the door, reopened it, and handed me one.

I said, “What about my placenta?” I don't want to say that I was confused by the entire situation, but in my mind a placenta looked exactly like a piñata, especially after his explanation—all the bursting and spilling forth and falling out.

My father put his large hand on my narrow shoulder and led me back into the den.
Hee Haw
came on presently. “Your momma buried your placenta in the backyard there, but after she left us alone I went out and dug it up. Then I drove you and me down to the beach. We rented a boat, and I threw your placenta out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I'm figuring some little fishes ate yours up, and then larger fish ate those things, and then those fish got caught by fishermen and sold to the public. If you think about it, I'm thinking that every person on this planet has been eating a little of you all along the way. What do you think about that?”

He smiled in the same way that most fathers smile as their sons open up a wrapped bicycle or go-cart. I said, “Maybe I just sank to the bottom.”

“No. No, I saw sharks come up and swarm the whole
thing. It was still all blobby and red—I'd sealed it up tightly before burying it the first time, so dogs wouldn't get to you. Anyway, you were on the deck, but you were little. And looking off at a school of jellyfish on the port side.” My dad and I were standing in front of the console TV, a commercial went off, and the
Hee Haw
theme song started. I could feel my eyes squinting in disbelief, my head cocking to the left. “I'm sorry you had to learn about all of this so early,” my father said. “Hey, sit down next to me and let me tell you how I used to play baseball for the Yankees in the summer, football for the Packers each winter, and the Olympics every four years before you came around.”

I said how I needed to take something to show-and-tell the next day. My father held up his palm and said he had a variety of things for me to take, all of which would surprise and delight my teacher and classmates.

W
HEN
S
HIRLEY
E
BO
tiptoed, I did, too. We crept out of a copse of tulip poplars. Her daddy's three-room shack poked out of the clearing, and in the distance we saw Mr. Ebo with his back to us, gazing at his tomatoes and okra. Even I knew not to speak in a normal voice. I said quietly, “This is no cemetery, Shirley Ebo.”

We slunk thirty steps south, always facing her father, then returned to the woods. We walked through unkempt honeysuckle and briars over a football field's length, then turned toward a circular clearing no bigger than a flying saucer.
There were a dozen sandstone rocks the size of Sunbeam bread packages propped up haphazardly, spread apart from each other in a uniform manner.

Then off to the side stood a jug, and even from where I stood I recognized on it the buttons that had once clasped my mother's dress front. Shirley said, “They it is,” and pointed.

“Can I walk across here?” I asked. I looked straight up at the darkening sky, through the hole formed by missing trees. “I don't like walking on people's burial spots, man.” Shirley led me around the outer edge of the graves toward the jug.

More than buttons covered this earthen, gallon-sized vessel, too: paper clips, a metal fingernail file, pieces of thread, hair, two barrettes, a couple of false eyelashes, a shoehorn, what appeared to be tiny glints of diamond, the cap to an aspirin bottle, and a compass had been glued on it. Shirley Ebo said, “My daddy said it just showed up one day. He said I could look at it all I wanted, but not to disturb it. He calls it a memory jug some days, and a whatnot jar others. My daddy says a long time ago sometimes these worked the same as headstones for the dead.”

I didn't touch the jar. On my hands and knees I looked into the mouth, hoping not to find ashes—or another photograph of me, standing at attention beside my mother's sharp hips. I said, “My mother's not buried here, Shirley. Take it back. I know for a fact that my mother's not buried here. She used to call me up. My mother used to call me up
from Nashville, and New Orleans. She called from St. Louis one time, and another time from Las Vegas.” I turned my head and squinted one eye, but the day's sunlight in these woods had disappeared already.

Shirley stood up. “I took a flashlight one time and looked in there, but there ain't nothing. Don't worry. It's empty.” She pulled her cotton dress halfway up her thigh and scratched at a bite.

I remained crouched. “My father wouldn't lie to me about this. He couldn't. He'd end up getting drunk and telling me the truth.”

Shirley said, “Now's the time if when you sing ‘Amazing Grace' or ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic' you can hear the dead sing along. I don't know the words but my daddy do.”

By the time I quit staring at the jar—by the time the mother-of-pearl buttons quit reflecting what light remained in the sky—Shirley Ebo had vanished from the circle.

In later years I would say that I walked out of there calm as a wealthy man's cat. I would say that Shirley must've played a trick on me and that I followed the same path out that we took in, that I saw Shirley and her father sitting on their stoop drinking iced tea and that I hollered over to them, “Thanks, Shirley! Good night!” But that wasn't the case. Once that goddamn “Battle Hymn of the Republic” tune came into my head and I felt an urge to vocalize, I took off running blindly through a land I'd never explored. And within about fifteen seconds I reached Deadfall Road, maybe
a quarter mile up from my house. Shirley and I had cut a giant fishhook-shaped path through those woods, and the slave graveyard, in actuality, rested a cheap BB gun's arced shot away from where we'd begun.

Marching home, slowly, I caught myself whispering
“Glory, glory hallelujah.”
I didn't hear any choir providing backup, though.

M
Y FATHER WASN'T HOME,
and because I noticed a new pack of matches from Gruel's All-U-Can-Eat BBQ on the kitchen table, I knew that he'd been there, then home, during my little excursion with Shirley. So I got in the Jeep and drove straight to the Sunken Gardens Lounge. My father and Mr. Lane sat straight up at the bar, across from bartender Red Edwards. From outside the plate-glass window I watched my father in midstory, holding his hands a couple feet in front of his face, palms upward, jerking them back and forth. It looked as though he was shoving an imaginary watermelon to his mouth.

I walked in and said to Mr. Red Edwards, “A draft beer and a shot of bourbon, please,” like I knew what I was doing. Like I wasn't the kind of high school–skipping teenager who tried to sell his teachers unpacked tea leaves for pot. Like my misspelled name rightly derived from the eastern Semitic word
Mendel,
meaning, “A man who gains knowledge by experience and study.”

My father swiveled somewhat and yelled out, “Mendal! My son, Mendal! Hotdamn, boy, grab yourself a seat over
here.” He patted the red-vinyl stool on the other side of him.

Mr. Red Edwards said, “You want that straight up or on the rocks? House bourbon okay, or are you celebrating something, boy?”

I knew what “on the rocks” meant, but didn't cotton to drinking anything Red Edwards bottled on the premises. I said, “I want it straight up, and I want something that's not house bourbon.”

Mr. Lane said, “Where's Comp? How come my son ain't with you?”

I said, “I was with him earlier, but he didn't have to go find out where his mother ended up being dead,” trying to be all cryptic and telling. “So he went on home to have a peaceful night.”

Mr. Red Edwards slid my beer over to the other side of my father's space. He handed me the shot of bourbon across the bar. My father said, “Mr. Lane and I just came back from Charlotte. Boy-oh-boy, we had us some business dealings up there.” He lifted his bottle, as did Comp's daddy.

I didn't have the patience to wait for a perfect time to bring up what I thought I knew: that my father had murdered his wife, buried her in a slave graveyard, and used some kind of clay jug for a pathetic marker; that he told me over and over how his wife ran off to Nashville to become another Patsy Cline who wanted to croon in a way that would make men and women alike break down; that he hired some mysterious woman to call me up periodically on the telephone—or send sporadic birthday, Valentine's Day,
and Christmas cards—to say how much she missed me.

I said, “You haven't been to Charlotte. You've been to Gruel's All-U-Can-Eat BBQ.” I said, “I know how you killed Mom and buried her over by Mr. Ebo's farm.”

To our left, at the end of the bar, Dunny Dunlap urged the pinball machine from his wheelchair. His father stood behind him, feet pressed hard against the wheels so his son wouldn't roll backwards. The boy would graduate with my class, even though he only got to go to school because his rich Forty-Five National Bank–owning father had paid off the school superintendent somewhere down the line. Dunny's IQ couldn't have been much more than those of any of the feral dogs I'd ever encountered, but all of us knew that he'd end up running that bank once his father died off. Dunny performed with the high-school marching band, in his own way. The back of his wheelchair had been designed to hold a snare drum, and Nelson Townes paradiddled away in the rear, while shoving Dunny through the routines—the band members just had to stand together, start an off-key song, then walk to their spots to make a big 45 in the middle of the football field. Because our football team always lost, and because no girl from Forty-Five High would ever date either of us, Comp Lane and I usually sat in the short wooden stands on the visitors' side, hoping to make time with girls from Greenville, Aiken, McCormick, Ninety Six, Batesburg, Laurens, or Clinton. During the halftime show, from our vantage point, our band looked like it was spelling
out
S4,
which seemed appropriate.

My father said, “Boy, I hope you think you're only dreaming. Pain doesn't hurt as much in dreams.”

Mr. Lane got up and walked to the men's room. I said, “Shirley Ebo took me to the graveyard, and I saw that jug you put down for Mom's tombstone, and I saw all the buttons on it from that picture.”

My father's eyes looked exactly like those of the copperheads I'd seen before in the woods. He had his head turned funny, and I could tell that he had sobered immediately. He said, “You stupid son of a bitch.”

I said, “I saw what I saw,” threw back my bourbon shot, and proceeded to cough it right back out. My father hit my back until I quit. “I saw what I saw, and then I figured out what I figured out.”

Dunny Dunlap yelled out, “Neeee! Neeee! Neeee!” His father looked at the machine's back glass and tapped his son's head over and over.

My father looked at Mr. Red Edwards and nodded once. I drank half of my beer, cleared my throat, and coughed for five more minutes. “Is Shirley Ebo your girlfriend, Mendal?”