Scott McClanahan - The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I

My dad got out and said, “Hey buddy, I saw what happened to you back at Captain D’s. And I just wanted to give you this so you could go and get something to eat.” Then he reached into his wallet and pulled out a twenty dollar bill and handed it to the old man. The old man blushed and took the money. Then the old man’s daughter raised her hands up into the sky and said, “Hallelujah. Hallelujah.”

The old man said, “Yeah I don’t know why that card didn’t work. I don’t know why.”

My dad said, “Yeah sometimes it takes a couple of days.”

The old man’s daughter just kept shouting, “Praise Jesus. Praise his holy name. Praise him.”

And then my dad said bye and got back into the car. And then my parents drove away. When my mother looked back in the mirror — the last thing she could see was the old man and his daughter, walking back to Captain D’s so they could get something to eat.

Sometimes when I was a boy I used to imagine that the coal was turning into diamonds…And one time I even tried making it happen. I heard my mother talking about it one day. A couple days later I took a chunk of coal and I dug a hole with an old rock. Then I put the coal into the ground and I thought, “Now all I have to do is wait a couple of days and I’ll have some diamonds. Mom said all you have to do is wait a long time and it will happen.” It was called time.

So I waited around for the next couple of days waiting for it to change. I played Six Pack with my neighbor Deborah. Six Pack is this crappy Kenny Rogers movie where he’s a stock car driver. I was pretending to be Kenny Rogers and she was pretending to be the girl part. And I hated it because she always wanted to kiss me and she tasted like little girl spit. I took off and went out to my hole and started thinking about the diamonds and how I couldn’t see them now, but how I could imagine them changing beneath the ground into shiny things.

After that a week went by, and I stood in front of the little hole I dug in the dirt pile and I took a big rock to use as a shovel. I thought for the umpteenth time about how everything changed. I told myself all I needed was time. I dug with the dirty rock and my face shined and the whole world did too. I dug and I dug, expecting to see the shiny thing. I dug one more time and there it was. But it wasn’t a diamond. It was just a stupid chunk of coal. It was just a stupid chunk of dirty black coal. Shit.

I went all the way back home and I told my mother it didn’t work.

She told me yes it does.

I told her about putting the coal into the ground and waiting for a couple of days.

So she laughed and said that a couple of days wasn’t a long time, that it takes longer than that. She told me that sometimes you have to wait a million years.

And then she laughed again and said that a piece of coal was worth more than any stupid diamond. She giggled and repeated that five days wasn’t a long time at all. But it was to me.

So I just closed my eyes and all I could see was blackness. I knew all we’d have to do was wait long enough and one day we’d come driving off of Sewell Mountain in some space ship and it would all be different. All we had to do was wait for a million years and one day we would return again in our spacesuits and it would all be there — just waiting for us. And it would all be shining.

I just wanted to be changed. I wanted to be changed more than anything in this world. That morning I was down at Rite Aid with my uncle Terry copying some of my grandma’s old pictures when I felt this pain in my back. Of course, I didn’t pay it any mind and just kept copying the picture of this old black and white shot of my grandfather from the late 30s.

It was one where he got in a fight with a police officer and they put him in jail.

It was a mugshot picture.

There was another picture of him somebody took a couple of years later, after he got religion.

He was sitting on the hood of a car, holding a Bible in his lap.

I stood and stared at the pictures and the pictures stared back. I thought about my grandfather who was a moonshiner once and then gave it all up to follow the Lord. I thought about Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus and being struck by a blinding light. He heard a voice and changed his name to Paul. That’s how easy it was — you just had to change your name to Paul.

My uncle Terry put the picture of my grandfather Elgie holding the Bible on the picture scanner.

I giggled again because it was so stupid — the way it all sounded.

It all sounded so ridiculous really, how all of these visions were always about good and evil, God and the Devil.

We copied the Bible picture down and I started feeling this pain even more. I leaned over the counter hoping it would go away.

Go away. Go away.

But it didn’t.

My uncle asked me in his strange hillbilly/New York/New Jersey/San Francisco accent, “You all right boy?”

So I smiled and said, “No I’m fine. I’m fine.”

At first it came in waves, but then I was in pain.

“You need to go to the doctor boy?” he said again.

I shook my head no.

And so we finished up the pictures and I tried pretending I was fine.

I’m fine.

I’m fine.

Besides that I had to go to work that evening. I’d just luckily found a job a couple of weeks before and I couldn’t lose it now.

But when I got home I could barely walk I was in so much pain.

I thought, “Oh shit, I think I’m having kidney stones.”

So I sat around for another hour or so and took a whole handful of ibuprofen, hoping that would take care of it. But I needed to get going. I couldn’t lose this job now. Things had been going so bad lately. I got into my car and started driving the hour it took to get to work and the pain was still surging in my back.

On the way there I thought about my grandfather and the road to Damascus.

“You’re fine. You’re fine.”

But about halfway into the drive, I couldn’t take it anymore.

I pulled over to this nasty little gas station and I went inside. My kidney stones were hurting me so much by this point, I had to bend over and start looking for a bathroom.

Picture this: A grown man bent over and searching desperately for a bathroom.

There was a pot-bellied woman working behind the counter who’d just finished checking in some deer this guy had killed, and there was an old man in there too spitting his Skoal spit into his Skoal cup and saying, “That Summer’s County Bobcat defense sure is awesome this year. Might even take them to the playoffs.”

He was smoking a cigarette too and holding it between his middle and ring fingers.

Spit. Smoke. Spit. Smoke.

I asked, “Where is your bathroom?” all out of breath and about ready to fall over. The old woman looked at me like I was some kind of meth-taking crazy man and pointed at the door towards the back.

“You got the shit pains don’t you boy?” she said.

I smiled and shook my head like everything was okay and went into the bathroom all bent over and shut the door behind me. There wasn’t a lock. There was a hole in the floor someone had stuffed a bunch of trash inside: cigarette packages, used tampons, candy wrappers, old newspapers.

“You’re fine. You’re fine,” I kept saying to myself, and I could hear them talking outside.

I put my hand against the wall and I felt something stabbing me in the back. I breathed deep and the whole world went black.

I passed out.

The floor was cold and I dreamed my kidney stone dreams. I dreamed about the mugshot picture of my grandfather. I dreamed about my grandfather on the front of a car with a Bible on his lap, and a blinding light.