Tim Sandlin: Social Blunders

After I added one more star for my own Manor House, the pattern on the map was not unlike the six stars on the front of a Subaru. Skip Prescott and Cameron Saunders lived next door to each other in the Starmount Forest development, which surrounded the Starmount Country Club—home of the Bull Run model golf cart—and meant big money.

William Gaines was just off the west edge of Starmount Forest, not three blocks from Tex and Shirley’s Pancake House. It was a sharp edge, cash wise, but still respectable enough to mean his life hadn’t been a bust. Babe Carnisek lived south of downtown. Men in his neighborhood drove American pickup trucks sporting South-Shall-Rise-Again bumper stickers and worked by the hour for people they didn’t like. A number of my golf cart welders came from West 23rd.

Jake Williams’s star sat dead center of a black neighborhood I’d never actually driven through, although not so much because it had a reputation as dangerous. The area just hadn’t come up.

Time to move. I wished I could arrive in my 240Z, or at least a Dodge Dart with a muffler, but some days you’ve got to take action now, to hell with the conditions. You wait for conditions to be right and nobody’d ever do anything. Twenty years after first hearing of my fathers, I was finally going to meet them. As Shannon said—more than once—the night before, it was about damn time.

A man with glasses was kneeling in a garden in the side yard of 147 North Glenwood. The man didn’t look like a rapist. Rapists don’t garden. The house was one of those two-story red brick jobs that sprang up like hives across the South after World War II. A screened-in porch ran the width of the front, through which I could make out a figure at a table.

As I climbed out of the Dart, the man in the garden looked over and waved. I waved back and walked up the crushed rock walkway to the front door. The whole scene felt domestic, as regular as hell. When I knocked on the screen door, a tenor voice barked. “What?”

Inside the porch, a teenage boy sat at a card table, writing furiously in a store-bought journal. As I slid through the door, his face kind of jumped out. He stared at me with anger and said, “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.”

I said, “Walt Whitman.”

He said, “Nine out of ten men are suicides.”

I said, “Benjamin Franklin— Poor Richard’s Almanac . You’re going to have to do better than that to beat me at death quotes. When I was your age, I knew them all by heart.”

The boy was dressed in black. He stared at me with what I took as a tragic sneer. His neck had the rose speckle of recently cleared-up acne.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll get over it.”

“Are you here to fix the freezer?”

I tried reading his journal upside down, but all I made out was his name—Clark Gaines—in the top left corner and the word PUTRID, underlined three times.

The boy’s forehead puckered into a series of folds. “I’m dying. Did you know I’m dying?”

“I hope it’s nothing genetic.”

Obviously not the response he’d hoped for. “Genetic?”

“Inherited. I hope you didn’t inherit whatever you’re dying from.”

“What difference does it make what anyone dies from? I’m dying, you’re dying, the whole planet is rotting like a dead cat’s eyes gorged with tiny white worms.”

I saw the picture. “Then you’re dying as in ‘We are all dying every day.’ You’re not dying as in knowing when or how.”

“Do you realize all the humans on Earth are loose excrement, including you?”

There’s nothing sadder than a Southern male poet. “This is a stage, Clark. Someday you’ll grow out of it and look back and gag that you were ever like this.”

“Who are you to say I’ll outgrow death?”

Who indeed? But I considered myself an adult, and one of the duties of an adult is to tell the young that when they grow up they won’t be miserable anymore.

Time to bring the conversation back to my mission. “William Gaines?”

The boy nodded toward the man in the side yard. “Saint Billy is tending his garden.”

“Why is he Saint Billy?”

“Old Billy Butch believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. Religion to him is garden tomatoes and calling his mother Miss Ellie. The sap would be hilarious if he wasn’t my father. Have you read Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre?”

“When I was considerably younger than you are now.”

The kid seemed surprised. “Then why haven’t you experienced suicide?”

“Sartre didn’t know his ass from an avocado.”

Clark’s forehead rippled like he expected me to hit him. Or wanted me to. I swear, tears appeared in his pained eyes. I decided it was time to talk to Saint Billy.

He had a face like Dennis the Menace’s father—the TV show, not the funny papers. He wore cotton gloves and sturdy shoes that L. L. Bean makes especially for people who work in dirt. As I approached, he stood up with a small spade in his right hand.

“Thank God,” he said.

“Why?”

“You’re here for the freezer.”

I didn’t say anything. There’s an awkwardness to telling a man he may or may not be your father. What if he tried to hug me?

Billy said, “Come on, then,” and, pulling his gloves off as he walked, he led me around the house. I watched him for signs of me. He was thin, like I am, but also tall, wore glasses, and had straight hair—no matches. Billy probably wasn’t the one, and, if so, did I have the right to bring back an act of violence from years ago? Maybe I should fix his freezer and go home.

“Two days ago when Daphne opened the lid, it made a whistle sound and the motor quit,” he said. “We’ve kept it closed since, but goods are beginning to thaw.”

We stepped into the back utility room, which held wasp repellent, used flower pots, a washer and dryer, and a chest-type freezer, what grocers call a coffin case. Billy stood looking at the freezer as if something might happen, then, after a short pause, he opened the top and a wave of warm air drifted into my face. Fish—the warm air carried fish and a hint of spoiled milk. In the freezer, rows of butcher-papered and neatly labeled foods leaked on each other.

“I did not come to fix your freezer.”

He looked up from his soft fish. “I’m losing a lot of meat here.”

“Do you remember a girl named Lydia Callahan? You knew her in high school.”

He folded his gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket. “No, I don’t recall a Lydia Callahan.”

I counted to three and jumped in. “Lydia is my mother. She says you and four other boys had group sex with her on Christmas Eve 1949.” I couldn’t bring myself to say rape . “I was born nine months later, so there’s a five-to-one chance you fathered me.”

Silence. Billy’s facial color dropped a shade, but other than that I saw no physical reaction. He blinked a couple of times, watching me.

“That night was an unfortunate mistake,” he said.

“For everyone but me.”

Billy took off his glasses and looked down at them in his hands. “I shouldn’t have been there.”

Sometimes it’s best to shut up. Billy seemed lost in memory, not really seeing me or the open freezer or anything. I suppose he was reliving the ugliness, wishing he could change the past. I suppose.

“Have you told the others yet?” Billy asked.

The door to the house was open and I couldn’t help but wonder if Clark had slipped in to listen. “You’re the first.”

“Mr. Prescott isn’t going to like this.”

“Skip Prescott?”

He nodded. “He owns Dixieland Sporting Goods. I’m in charge of footwear.”