He said, “Well, I don’t know.”
I said, “Listen, you can bring all the pennies you want, and I’ll set you out where there’s that track, while there’s that track.”
“I don’t know. Well,” he said.
Like I said, I normally didn’t drink that much. Maybe I wasn’t thinking correctly. It seemed like a good idea — normally I told half-hearted workers what to do, and then I sat around waiting for everyday citizens to call up complaining about something. My day went like this, mostly: “Hey, guys, today you need to go cut the grass around the fountain, corner of McDaniel and Lanneau.” Ring-ring-ring: “Your men are cutting the grass on the corner of McDaniel and Lanneau, and they’re not wearing shirts,” or “One of them’s cutting the grass while sitting down,” or “My tax dollars shouldn’t be spent on two men eating hot dogs out in the open.” Stuff like that, which didn’t get addressed in nine semesters of college horticulture classes.
I said to Lee Wayne, “How is this a bad thing? You’ll have a regular income, and you’ll have time to conduct your copper recycling business.”
Lee Wayne drank from his beer. He shook his head side to side. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking hard about some other options I have.” What options could my evidently new-ex-wife’s brother have? What was on the horizon for a man driving a half-electric car with an oogah-oogah-oogah horn? He said, “I was supposed to show up earlier. I was supposed to show up a couple weeks ago. I’ve been out of prison for a month, and Monica Marie wanted me to show up a lot earlier to beat you up or something.”
I said, “Why? Why in the world?”
“That’s exactly what I said. I said, ‘Has he hit you?’ I said, ‘Is he cheating on you?’ I said, ‘Has he taken y’all’s nest egg and turned it into pennies just so he could take them down to a railroad track and flatten them, then turn the things in to the nearest copper recycling center?’ Well, she didn’t have an answer. I know that I’m supposed to be on my blood kin’s side, Clewis, but I’d be willing to bet she’s seeing somebody else, I hate to say. When I was in prison, which was really just the county jail, people were always asking me to go beat up somebody just because they had a new boyfriend. And just because I had fighting arms, what with lugging pounds of pennies for so long. Weird place, prison.”
We sat there at the dining-room table. When Lee Wayne had come back in the house with two duffel bags he hadn’t closed the sliding-glass door all the way, so through the crack came strains of the neighbors talking, and yelling at one another in a friendly manner. They had traded playing music for a game of charades, it appeared. I went outside to smoke what ended up being my last five cigarettes ever — who knew this was all it would take to quit? — and my brother-in-law followed me out. We took chairs to the backyard, sat down facing the neighbors, and watched. I hadn’t played the game in years, but remembered quickly the signs for “movie,” “book,” and “song” title. Like I said, they weren’t a half acre away, pantomiming out prompts they’d pulled from an empty charcoal briquette bag. This was a mother and father, their son and daughter, and some other man and woman with a son and daughter. The more they reached in and played, the more they got charcoal on their arms and faces, what with the bag’s residual soot. I found myself in love with these people, I’ll admit.
“I don’t want to impose on you none, Clewis, but I kind of do really need a place to stay. I mean, I got out, I got my money, and I bought that car. I wasn’t thinking! I got that car, not considering that I needed to rent an apartment or trailer or something.”
I yelled out at my neighbors, “Gone with the Wind!” I yelled out, “Wait—‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ by Bob Dylan.” One of the young daughters looked like she tried to portray “wind.” She kept waving her arms from left to right, floating-like. I thought, maybe she’s doing one of those hula dances. I yelled out, “‘Tiny Bubbles’ by Don Ho.”
My neighbor smiled at me and waved. The husband waved, that is. I realized it might take time to win his wife over, especially if she’d somehow met Monica and they’d had a conversation that went something like, “I’m your new neighbor,” and Monica said, “I’m planning to leave my husband.”
Lee Wayne said, “This is what it should be all about. Minus my sister taking off. And having tacos that didn’t include real meat. This is what it should all be about. Hey, Clewis, give me a cigarette.”
I said, “No.” I watched the neighbors. I stood up and yelled, “Air! The Clean Air Act! ‘You are the wind beneath my wings’!” How come I wasn’t more distressed about Monica leaving? I thought. How come I didn’t get all upset and try to track her down? “‘Pennies from Heaven’!”
I turned to Lee Wayne and said, “What about wheat pennies? You didn’t put wheat pennies down on the railroad tracks, did you?”
“There aren’t that many wheat pennies. Most of them are worth two cents, though, if you wanted to sell them at the flea market. Maybe a nickel. It’s not right.”
I stood up and, as if on automatic pilot, walked over to my neighbors’ house. The smell of steak still hung in our humid air. They didn’t seem fearful of my approach. The young girl said, “It was Grapes of Wrath. It’s a book.”
I got it. She tried to portray the Dust Bowl. I nodded and laughed. I pulled my arm for Lee Wayne to follow me over and said to the neighbors, “Hey, my name’s Clewis. That’s either my brother-in-law or my ex-brother-in-law.”
The man said, “That’s an unusual name.”
I told him how my wife couldn’t take it either. I asked if Lee Wayne and I could join in. They said okay, and I took their turning their backs on us earlier as coincidence. As it ended up, these people weren’t members of an offshoot religion. They were normal. They explained how they believed in the extended family, and how playing games kept them closer, and how it’s what they did back in Michigan before it became apparent that they’d never work there again.
I stuck my arm in the charcoal bag and pulled out a song I’d never known. Or maybe I couldn’t concentrate, thinking about how I needed to drop by the bank the next day.
Fresh Meat on Wheels
Before ceremonially burning down a life-sized replica of the Calloustown Courthouse — which never existed in the first place — built over the previous year in a field adjacent to Mr. Morse’s tree farm and nursery, it was tradition to take every sixth grader to the various attractions nearby. This included the Finger Museum, where a man had severed digits floating in formaldehyde from all the pulpwood men who had chainsaw accidents over the years. Then we would all go, via minibus, to a taxidermist’s place where he’d set up The Safest Petting Zoo Ever. Our sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Whalen, said we were to understand what there is to appreciate about our hometown before viewing what General Sherman could’ve done if he’d understood Calloustown’s meaningfulness, and not veered away on his march between Savannah and Columbia. My heart wasn’t into this bastardized field trip because — and it’s not like I had ESP back then — I foresaw the possible arguments, fistfights, and one-upmanship that would occur. If I had extrasensory perception back then I would’ve found my mother in the organic berry field she and my father operated and said something like, “Please tell me the sexual intercourse y’all have told me about is not like sticking your penis in an armpit filled with deep-cleansing moisturizer.”
Since the invention of the minibus, sixth-grade boys at Calloustown Elementary spent the night at Ms. Whalen’s house, for early in the morning her husband, whom up until this point I’d always thought an otherwise good man named Ben who somehow broke away from local DNA and closed-mindedness, would get us together and drive us around the countryside in order to point out what General Sherman missed by swerving away from Calloustown. The sixth-grade girls, I learned, all stayed at the other sixth-grade teacher’s house, a woman named Ms. Harrell, in order to learn about what was going to happen to their bodies soon. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but before the minibus the Calloustown kids stayed at other ex-teachers’ households for the night before embarking on mule-led wagons. And before the mules, those poor Calloustown kids had to plain walk to, say, the Finger Museum, which probably only held one finger on display.