And maybe those creatures did come out of Lincoln Massey’s house at night. I wouldn’t know, for we never stayed there. As soon as it got dark outside, Mass Massey loaded up his son and me in the truck, and we took off all over Gray-wood County, and sometimes right on over to the edge of the Savannah River, probably fifty miles away. Like I said, Mass Massey worked for the South Carolina Department of Transportation. He foremanned a road crew. And I guess with gas prices going up, inflation on the tilt, and the Office of the President being somewhat tenuous most days, Lincoln’s father feared getting laid off. This was the late seventies, both before and after the Iranian hostage crisis.
We got in his truck after supper — and I was glad to get out of their underground house, for the Masseys seemed to eat a lot of fish and the odor of cooked fish forever hovers interminably below the earth like stymied clouds. Maybe they were Catholics. There wasn’t a Catholic church within fifty miles of Calloustown, or a synagogue for a hundred. I never asked anyone’s religion, seeing as I feared a conversation that would include the question of my denomination. My father told me to tell people our preferred denomination was hundreds, then punch their noses if they didn’t laugh.
So we ate fish, waited for nightfall, then emerged from the bunker. Mr. Massey checked the bed of his truck and said out loud, “Shovel, pick, pick.” He touched his temple, looked at us with those beady eyes, and said, “Map.” And then we drove off, found quiet country roads with little traffic until teenage drinkers and dope smokers came out, wary and trustful that highway patrolmen stuck to more traveled stretches of blacktop, got out of the truck, and invented potholes where otherwise good asphalt existed.
“My daddy has to do this in order to keep his job,” Lincoln said each night, like I didn’t remember. “He says when the world runs out of potholes, he’ll run out of paychecks.”
Lincoln and I remained friends throughout our time in Calloustown, then he went off to college and, from what I heard last, worked as a lobbyist in D.C. Fortunately for him, he looked a lot like his mother, though I tried not to think about that when my pillow groaned beneath me on those confusing and hormone-ridden nights.
“Don’t tell anyone about this, Reed. You know that, don’t you? One day you’ll want people to keep your secrets, and they ain’t going to do it if you tell on me. That’s how it works. I’m not sure how or why, but that’s the way things go.”
I never planned on telling anyone about the potholes, especially my parents. I didn’t want Mass Massey finding out, then springing toward me one day from his trapdoor.
June rolled down her window. This was in April. The night before we’d gone to a lecture at the Georgia Center for the Book given by a man who published a memoir on his childhood, living with a manically depressed mother and a skeptical father. Personally, I had sat there mostly unmindful. I had caught myself trying to think of anyone I knew in Calloustown who wasn’t depressed or skeptical, and how perhaps a memoir of an exhilarated and gung-ho family upbringing might offer an obsequious and prurient reading experience.
June said, “See? This is what I’m talking about. How long have we been together? I can’t believe you’ve never told me this story. You’re not making this up, are you?” And then she stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Goddamn it to hell, move! Drive! Somebody pull onto the side of the road!” To me she said, “This isn’t one of those stories you heard from one of the barefoot people, is it?”
June never understood how or why I would work for the nonprofit Shod America, or find both joy and meaning in talking shoe companies into donating their products to poor Appalachian people. My wife, I feel certain now, envisioned herself going from food writer to editor of the Lifestyles section of the paper, then trudging forward from there. June, at this point, liked nothing more than to accept assignments from the paper to cover meaningless black-tie fetes of the unworthy, and then write, in my opinion, insipid narratives of how the chocolate fountain was the hit of the night. She wrote about or how the Pyramid of Cheops ice sculpture coupled with the monoliths of pâté formed to recreate Stonehenge seemed destined to live together at every social function.
When we sat at lectures and demonstrations that were supposed to strengthen our unrevivable union, I thought about how she no longer criticized our state’s politicians or the president. She no longer blurted out things about home-school parents, and in the afterlife I’m going to ask someone in charge if my ex-wife voted libertarian.
“It’s a real story from my life, June,” I said. We didn’t move. A black man walked by on the sidewalk, and June rolled up her window and clicked her door lock. I said, “What the hell’s happened to you?”
“Fuck you, Reed. I would’ve locked the door if a white guy came our way.”
I didn’t say “Bullshit,” but I thought it. In the afterlife I’d hunt June down and say, “Liar.”
How come I had never told my wife of the Masseys? Because when we got along, I didn’t want her to make some kind of unqualified leap in logic, which was how this entire conversation would end. Perhaps in some kind of passive-aggressive way it’s how I wanted our relationship to finally end. Maybe I’d gotten tired of June saying things to me like, “You’ve never had any ambition! What’s the next big career move for a man who doles out new shoes to poor people? Belts? Are you going to move up the ladder and start handing out neckties?”
When we met I had plans for graduate school in anthropology. I’d been accepted into two of the best programs there were, but June had that meaningless degree in journalism and had taken a job in Atlanta because their last food writer died — get this — when her gall bladder exploded. June had said to me, “I am not moving to Michigan or Chicago. How many columns can I write about bratwurst?” Before Shod America, I worked in the Textiles and Social History collection for the Atlanta History Center, receiving and cataloguing more than ten thousand pieces. June had said to me — though she was drunk at the time—“What’s your next step, plastics and social history? Something and anti-social history? You don’t have any sense of drive or accomplishment.”
I don’t know when the transformation took place within her. In the beginning we got along. I don’t want to make any presumptions, but she might’ve thought that my family name — Reddick — meant that I was related to the Reddicks, the ones who made their money in oil, then in newspapers. June drank a bunch for the first few years of our marriage, as did I, so maybe she kept forgetting when I told her I was from the Calloustown Reddicks. Maybe she thought I lied, that I paraded an anonymity-prone nature. I don’t know. From those early years I can only recall June looking like she emerged from a shower with Modigliani, and that she pitched a Sunday column called Bar Naked to her editor, which would include the mastery of mixology coupled with True Weird Tales from real-life publicans. The editor said it might work in Portland, Seattle, or Laramie, but not in the South. June quit drinking. I drank more, haunted daily by quilts and samplers on my job at the museum, then by wingtips and cheap canvas boating shoes when I got to Shod America.