Munny Munson says daily, “If our kids fear the outside world, or never comprehend its offerings — good and bad — then those kids will remain here. You think the gene pool’s not wet enough to emit a mirage now, just wait another two generations. We got to do something.”
On a particularly bleak day, there in the waiting room, one of the other Munsons, or one of a number of men named Harrell, might say, “Low IQs means less personal hygiene. Less hygiene means more contagious diseases. And then everyone dies and people elsewhere might never appreciate William Tecumseh Sherman’s apparent myopia.” Or one of the men might go off saying, “Lower IQs means less ambition. Less ambition means not taking care of the yard. High grass means field rats. Field rats attract snakes. Bite from a viper on an ambitionless slow-witted person with influenza would be fatal.”
For eight hours a day these men nod, clear their throats, blurt out versions of slippery-slope possibilities, all the time while watching The Price Is Right, soap operas, reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island, and Hogan’s Heroes. They veer from local, state, or national news—“I’m depressed enough, change the channel, I think that one station’s doing an Addams Family marathon”—and no one ever questions how they could get cable television in a closed-down bus station where no one admits to paying the electric or water bills.
They don’t brag about sexual conquests, or reminisce about first times, for each of them has a wife whose brother and cousins stand nearby.
Mack Sloan wipes his soles on the worn rubber Trailways mat out front, turns the knob, and walks into the waiting room. At first he thinks that the men congregated inside laugh at him — as if they judge a man by the overalls he wears and anyone who decides to go out in public wearing fluorescent warm-up pants and a matching windbreaker stands worthless. Then Mack Sloan realizes that the laughter emanates from the television program’s laugh track, the volume cranked full. The men watch The Honeymooners.
Mack Sloan nods. Munny Munson stands up and turns the volume knob. He says, “Are you the man from the Guinness Book of Records we been waiting on?”
Mack shakes his head. He says, “I’m turned around a little. Any of you men know where I can find the local high school?”
Flint Harrell stands up and leans backward awkwardly so that this stranger — the first non-Calloustowner to enter the bus station in fifteen years — can admire Flint’s gold-plated belt buckle embossed with SOUTHERN REGION DISTRICT 4 LEVEL 6 SENIOR DIVISION THIRD PLACE HORSESHOES. Flint says, “If you looking catch a ride there from here, you’re late by 1996. Last bus come through ended up taking people down to those Atlanta Olympics.”
Mack Sloan does not feel threatened. He almost laughs. This is perfect — he loves being the first scout in a backwards area, coming out of nowhere like some kind of savior to extract an unknown high school athlete from humble beginnings, promise questionable future monetary outcomes. “No, I got a car out front. Just looking for the high school.”
Munny Munson says, “We been waiting on the World Record fellow. Me and Lloyd one time played dominoes for sixty-seven straight hours straight. That’s got to be some kind of record.”
And then, as if in a rural AA meeting when the floor opens up for personal testimonial one-upmanship, each man offers his declaration:
“I can lace a pair of logging boots in fourteen seconds.”
“I ate four whole barbecued armadillos in twelve minutes.”
“I’ve stared at thirty-two solar eclipses and ain’t gone blind yet.”
“I trained an ostrich to clean gutters.”
Mack Sloan says, “Okay. This sounds like quite a town. Listen, I know it’s pretty small here and everyone’s probably related to one another. Do any of you know about Brunson Pettigru, the track star? I’m supposed to go clock this fellow and see if he can really do what they say.” Sloan pulls a stop watch from the pocket of his windbreaker, as if to prove his being an authority.
The waiting room regulars quit talking. What did this man mean by “related to one another”? Had word seeped out about the gene pool?
Munny Munson says, “Track star? No. Never heard of him.”
“We don’t even have a team anymore, not that I know of,” says Flint Harrell.
“Let me see that fancy timepiece,” Lloyd says. “I could use one these when I dismantle and reassemble my 1970 Allis Chalmers D270. I believe I got the record unofficially, you know.” Then he went into how the world record take-apart-and-put-back-together-a-tractor man might pull in visitors to Calloustown, and then they’d buy hot dogs, and then everyone would gain financially, and then there would be no more threat of pestilence within the failing, bleak, doomed community.
Mack Sloan, indeed, had not heard of Brunson Pettigru via Track and Field News, The Florida Relays, Runner’s World, or Parade magazine. No, a man named Coach Strainer — who taught PE over the Internet through the South Carolina Virtual School — boasted of his unknown students on his Facebook page walclass="underline" 57 % of his students could figure out their BMI. One kid had taken online physical education so seriously that he’d dropped five pounds over the semester, and another could explain all the rules of two different darts games, plus badminton. And then there was Brunson Pettigru of Calloustown, a homeschooled white kid, a six-foot two-inch, 155-pound country boy who had — once he fully understood the cardiovascular system’s nuances — dropped his quarter-mile time from fifty-five seconds to forty-six, his half mile from 2:08 to 1:50.
Sloan understands that, even at a regular high school with traditional teams, coaches exaggerate. He’d scouted, in the past, a boy who heaved a shot put eighty feet, only to find out the boy’s father worked in a machine shop and had shaved weight from the iron sphere. So Mack contacted the S.C. Department of Education, which sent him to the Department of Charter Schools, which sent him to the Department of Online Schools, which eventually offered to have Coach Strainer—“one of our finest educators”—contact Mack in Oregon.
“I didn’t believe the kid, either,” Strainer had said from his office in Myrtle Beach, which doubled as his dining room. “But I seen it with my own two eye! I got me a friend retired down here from the CIA and he seen it, too, and says they’s no way the tape’s been sped-up doctored.”
One of the waiting room men points out the door and says, “School’s down there a piece. You won’t miss it. They mascot’s a ostrich, so they’s a big bird right out front of the place. I mean, a sculpture one.”
Another man says, “I know who you mean. He ain’t no runner, though. He’s a spastic.”
“We don’t want to be famous-known for spastics,” says Munny Munson.
Brunson Pettigru’s mother homeschooled her only son, for she viewed the public school system in general disdainfully, and the Calloustown school district in particular. Mrs. Pettigru did not fear that her child might receive secular teaching in regards to science, literature, and religion. To the contrary, she believed a public school filled with children of one denomination only — a school with a population made up almost exclusively of Harrells and Munsons — might corrupt her son into believing in virgin births, no dinosaurs, ribcage wives, and talking bushes. Unlike ninety-nine percent of homeschooling parents in South Carolina, she didn’t choose to direct her son’s studies so that they would include daily recitations or sing-alongs of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer, the Star-Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, and the Second Amendment of the Constitution. No, Betty Pettigru feared that touched-by-God born-again teachers might chance reprimands and recrimination for “doing what God believes to be right.”