“Okay, let’s just settle down. It’s only been a couple weeks. Things will smooth out,” I said. I drank my ginger ale and burped accidentally, which made Bonita glare at me.
Pine shook his head. He said in that ancient voice — just a grating rasp off of being that of an old-school tracheotomy victim—“I’d like to go visit that drugstore my parents tried to hold up. I got me some money. I’d like to go to that drugstore, maybe buy me a Timex watch.”
Bonita held a self-satisfied smile I’d not seen since she found some kind of study that ranked West Virginia ahead of my home state in regards to education and quality of living. I felt pretty sure she wrote it herself, sent it to a friend somewhere, and had that person post it on the Internet. I said, “Well, then let’s go to that drugstore.”
I loaded Pine into the car and off we went. We drove past the remnants of the Invasion of Grenada reenactment to see straggling “Cubans,” “Grenadians,” and “Americans” laugh and clink beer cans, gauze wrapped around their heads. We drove by Old Man Reddick’s nursery, and the defunct bus station where men still met mornings in order to think up ways to resurrect Calloustown. Out on Old Charleston Road we passed children selling used golf balls — under normal circumstances I would’ve stopped to make sure they weren’t stolen from me — and then another group of children selling sweet potatoes.
Pine made his noises off and on, I assumed spelling things out in Morse code. I didn’t have it in me to tell him to stop, that he should speak English. Little steps, I thought, kind of like spreading democracy whether Third World nations wanted it or not. I said, “Is there a reason you have to go to this particular Rite-Aid?” I didn’t say, “I understand how you might want to apologize for your parents, that it’s a healing process,” that sort of thing. I didn’t even think about it until later that night, when Alberta came to pick Pine up and take him out of our home.
Pine shook his head. We got there. The saleswoman took a small key and opened the rotating Timex display case. Pine chose a regular, old man’s silver wind-up wrist-watch with a stretchy flexible band that caught arm hairs too much, in my opinion. He shoved it all the way up his arm past his elbow, stuck his ear to it, and said, “Tick tick tick tick tick.”
The woman said, “I bet we can find you a watch with a band that’ll fit better.”
Pine shook his head. “I’m going to use it to make a bomb anyway,” he rasped away. The woman stepped back a bit. “Y’all took my parents away from me after they came in here to get what they needed. I’m going to make a bomb.”
Maybe there’s a reason Bonita and I never had children of our own. I didn’t know what to say or do. My father would’ve beaten me with a nine iron right there next to the perfume counter, but I knew that kind of behavior no longer found acceptance. Should I have laughed and said the boy was kidding? Should I have told the woman she should feel honored that he didn’t say that entire monologue in Morse code? I guess, in retrospect, I should’ve waited thirty minutes in line for the pharmacist and asked him or her to explain to Pine how scared everyone gets when a robbery takes place, and how a nation cannot be considered civilized until its citizens stop attacking each other with little provocation. Evidently the wrong thing to say was, “You got that right, son. I don’t blame you.”
Sonny Boy Williamson for Dinner
Normally I don’t answer the side door if a man’s knocking outside while holding a shotgun in his crooked arm. I don’t even have guns in the house. It’s not like I tell everyone around here — that could only lead to break-ins, and talk that I was truly queer, capricious, unpatriotic, and/or nonresistant — but I don’t keep guns, rope, safety razors, gas stoves, tall kitchen plastic garbage bags, garden hoses, or pills around. There’s a chance that my DNA makeup isn’t the same as my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents on both sides, and some stray cousins, sure, but I don’t want to take the chance. Because I might have what microbiologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, and palm readers haven’t yet discovered — the suicide gene. I won’t marry, I won’t have children, I’ll barely have a pet unless it’s a shelter dog over the age of nine. I’ll drive on occasion, but always attempt to take routes without bridges or thick roadside trees seeing as I might become manically depressed and veer. I’ve been thinking about moving to one of those southwest deserts — no rivers to cross, and most cacti are probably no match for my pickup — but the boredom there might, of course, send me outside to juggle vipers in a careless fashion.
It’s not like I’ve always been aware of my family’s sudden choices to exit a world made up of unemployment, broken hearts, IRS audits, early onset arthritis, hypertension, lackluster restaurant choices, terminal skin conditions, and alcoholism. I grew up with parents who understood their ancestors — thus why they would let me read everything except Hemingway, or why they blacked out Greco-Roman history tomes when Nero showed up, or told me I needed to swerve from any Rothko paintings should I ever take a field trip to a museum of modern art.
They brought me up as best they could, shielded me from how my uncle Carl asphyxiated himself, how my aunt June cut her wrists with a Bowie knife, how one of my grandfathers stepped in front of an Amtrak and the other went skydiving without a parachute. Then my mother and father — right after I graduated college — spent a Sunday night drinking bourbon while eating a special barbiturate pie. I took some jobs, I did some family research, and then I retreated for the most part. No matter, if I make it to forty-nine years old I’ll hold the record for longest-living Gosnell on this particular sad branch.
I expected my “common-law wife” Harriet to be knocking on the door, locked out, and that’s why I thought nothing of opening up without considering what dangers could be out there. Harriet doesn’t have the possible gene. She’s originally from North Dakota and has a great-aunt who’s something like 114 years old. Sometimes I say things to Harriet like, “What does a woman who’s 114 years old do?” and the answer’s always, “She looks forward to making peanut brittle for the volunteer fire department’s annual fundraiser.” Makes fucking peanut brittle once a year! Sorry, but I side with my dead family members when it comes to this. I side with Socrates — who drank some goddamn hemlock — when it comes to how the unexamined life is not worth living. Harriet says, “Well, maybe she’s examining whether or not she can make the perfect peanut brittle each year, just like you think you can design the perfect kitchen utensil.”
I said to the shotgun guy, “Hey. Hey, hey, hey,” and looked behind me for some kind of weapon while closing the door.
This was from my ex-garage, which I used for a workshop. People who know of my possible genetic flaw say to me, “Duncan, why would you leave a job finally making such good money as an optometrist in order to move to the middle of nowhere and run hand tools that might backfire on you?” They say, “What’s to say you won’t get depressed one day and run the circular saw across your jugular?”
To them I say, “What’s to say I wouldn’t get depressed from women arguing with me about how they don’t need bifocals, then one day self-dilating my eyes and run out into midday traffic?”
“I ain’t here to hurt no one,” the man said from the other side of my door. “I’m kind of your neighbor. Here. I’ve put my gun up leaned against your truck.”
I cracked the door back open, armed with my DeWalt Variable Speed belt sander in one hand and a Black & Decker cordless twelve-volt lithium drill in the other. For some reason I thought it necessary to blurt out, “I know all about the goddamn Second Amendment.”