“Please don’t let Dottie come over,” I said. “She’s an idiot, and you always get upset afterwards.” I didn’t say anything about how, on top of her initial stupidity, Dottie’d gotten “born again,” and couldn’t participate in a two-person conversation without Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark horning in and spouting off.
Here’s Dottie: Carol announced her pregnancy, way too early—“A miracle, at age thirty-six!” or — seven, — eight, — nine, and Dottie got to work knitting an afghan. Two or three weeks later my wife would tell everyone about the miscarriage, and Dottie would show up with one square of the baby’s afghan, announcing, “You can use it for a trivet,” or oven mitt, or something to set down between a terracotta planter and wooden table.
Carol said to me, “Go to the bar for a few hours. Go watch football games. Call up Eddie and Albert and have them meet you down at the Side Pocket. I’ll be okay with Dottie. She means well, really. And if you’re here I’ll get all nervous and either be mean to her, you, or both of y’all.”
That’s another thing that showed up in all my miscarriage research: certain women can’t be left alone, certain women insisted on being left alone, some women preferred only the company of strangers, and others sought out old childhood friends in order to reminisce about middle school P.E. teachers that they later realized were lesbians. The percentage of those women who eventually left their husbands was pretty high.
What I’m saying is, there’s an infinite number of possible ways each mourning near-mother will act. I guess if I should ever weigh in on the subject and leave a comment on some of those blog sites, I might add, “Certain women lose all rational abilities and force their husbands to go out binge drinking with Eddie and Albert,” et cetera.
I left the house but didn’t contact my friends. We worked together, the three of us, thirty miles away at Die-Co, the die-cutting outfit. Eddie and Albert were my best friends, but even after working together fifteen years, whenever I saw Eddie and Albert I thought “Eddie Albert,” which made me think of the actor who played Oliver Douglas on Green Acres, which caused that theme song to play in my head for some time afterward.
Or I thought of the actress Eva Gabor who, from what I learned, got married five times and never had a child.
Eddie and Albert didn’t know about Carol’s other miscarriages. They never said to me, “When y’all going to have some kids?” even though Eddie had three daughters and Albert a son named Albert Jr. I don’t accuse my friends of being inattentive or self-absorbed. Die-cutters, on the whole, think about protecting their fingers most of the day, and at night the severed fingers they’ve seen on the floor.
Maybe I didn’t always feel like drinking outside the house when Carol’s friends came over and my wife shuttled me out. Carol worked the cosmetics counter at a Belk department store thirty miles in the other direction of our Calloustown abode. Her coworkers — I forget their names, but they worked Fine China, Lingerie, Children’s Shoes, and Handbags — showed up at times, always complaining about the store manager, no commissions, mothers who accused their kids of growing out of clothes on purpose, and the lack of basic human civility in general. Anyway, the coworkers drove all the way out to our house on occasion, and Carol requested my absence.
Like almost every time this occurred, on this particular day I drove into Calloustown, parked my truck, and found myself inside Southern Exotic Pets, a place that specialized in reptiles, tropical fish, the irregular chinchilla, and — according to rumor — trapped and shipped dingoes from Australia. If I know my canines, the dingoes were nothing more than pointy-eared thin dogs from the swamps down in the lower part of the state and southeast Georgia called, plainly, Carolina Dogs, and recognized by the AKC. For what it’s worth, unlike typical, non-feral purebreds, Carolina Dog bitches underwent three estrus cycles in quick succession, much like my wife.
Southern Exotic Pets stood between the Side Pocket bar and Calloustown Grill. Across the street we had a pawn shop, a fireworks outlet, and a storefront long vacant and unrentable due to the ghosts living inside ever since Grady Dorn shot and killed his entire family and then hanged himself there inside what had been his Calloustown Florists business. It’s not like a curious person couldn’t wile away a good few hours, which often made me wonder why Calloustown never seemed to attract northern retirees and/or fugitives in need of relatively safe refuge.
I walked into Southern Exotic Pets and waved at Spence, the owner. He yelled out, “Sorry to hear about Carol!” too loudly. I nodded, held up my hand, and turned toward the stacked-up aquariums. I passed blue neon guppies, tetras, angelfish, the usual. I tried to stare down an apartment complex of Siamese fighting fish, but they seemed bored. On down the aisle Spence kept a couple piranhas and a slither of eels — which made me think that a sushi joint should open up in Grady Dorn’s old flower shop, seeing as the chef could cross the street and get his fresh ingredients — and then I rounded a corner to a line of snakes, lizards, salamanders, and tortoises.
If a five-year-old boy had not mistaken me for his father — at least that’s the original scenario I concluded — I might’ve leaned down to a ball python and thought about Dottie showing up and constricting all the air out of our house. But the kid, two terrariums down from me, tapped on glass and said, “Here’s what I want. It’s a corn snake, but I can tell everyone it’s a coral snake. ‘Red touch yellow, kill a fellow.’ This has red touching black, so it’s a corn snake.”
I walked over and bent down to see. He looked up and said, “Hey, you’re not…”
Growing up, I had mistaken strangers for my father too, a number of times. I never decided if I was the one who strayed off inside grocery and hardware stores or if my father wasn’t the most conscientious guardian. To the kid in front of the snake I said, “How long will that corn snake get?” and hoped he wouldn’t start screaming out, what with how modern parents implant fear and paranoia into their children’s heads, rightly or not, to the point of it being impossible to approach any child aged two to nineteen and say, “Hello, kid, do you know anything about how that Kentucky Fried Chicken box you’re holding got die-cut?” without a mother appearing out of nowhere, already punching 911 on her cell phone.
“Hey,” the boy said. He didn’t need to introduce himself, I thought. He wore a stick-on “Hello My Name Is” nametag on his shirt with REX written in block letters. Who let his kid walk around in public with a nametag? Now that was an unconscientious guardian.
“Hey back at you, Rex. I’m Duane.” I said, “Do you want me to help you find your father or mother?”
Whenever Eddie, Albert, and I got together, Albert got stuck thinking nonstop about Duane Eddy, the guitarist who recorded the 1960s instrumentals “Peter Gunn” and “Rebel Rouser.” Sometimes when Albert didn’t respond to questions both Eddie and I knew he’d gotten those twangy notes stuck in his head.
Rex looked like he belonged in a breakfast cereal commercial. There weren’t many children left in Calloustown — occasionally someone over the age of forty might have an unplanned pregnancy — and I thought about how I’d never seen this kid before. Maybe he lived in a town even smaller than Calloustown, a place like Gruel or Level Land that couldn’t support a store that specialized in pets other than calicos, Dachshunds, and minnows.
Rex said, “A coral snake’s one of the most dangerous snakes in America. There’s the rattler, and water moccasin, and copperhead. But the coral snake’s better.”
I’m not sure why I decided it was the proper time to tell this little innocent boy about a nonexistent mythical creature my crazy uncle Dillard told me about when I was Rex’s age. I said, “Coral snakes are scary, but not like a pine gator. I doubt they sell pine gators here. They’re too rare and vicious.”