Kenny says, “When it first started happening — or when I first learned about it a year or so ago — she said she wanted to start up some kind of museum. She said she wanted to open up the kind of museum people would drive off the highway to go visit. Like those giant balls of string, or giant balls of tinfoil, or giant balls of rubber bands. We was all for it. We could use some visitors, you know.”
Harold shakes his head. He doesn’t smile. He says, “How’s Dora and the kids?”
“Kids’re fine. Dora don’t want me asking Mom much about her museum, seeing as Dora thinks if we bother her too much she’ll evict us from the will. You know what I mean? Dora thinks at least we’ll get a bunch of pictures of Mr. Ed and Lassie when Mom dies, as long as we don’t piss her off none. And Cheetah. Did you know Cheetah just died a month or so ago? He was eighty years old. Mom’s got two signed photos from Cheetah, from the old Tarzan movies.”
Harold stares at his brother but he’s not listening. He wonders if perhaps he should’ve stayed in Calloustown. What if he’d taken over Calloustown Extermination, as was his father’s plan? He’d be living in a regular house somewhere nearby — Kenny made enough money to buy an old farmhouse and a hundred acres he leased out to dove and deer hunters in season — and would’ve probably kept his mother’s dream of an Animal Picture Museum from ever forming.
Worm says, “Back in go to have I,” and waves his right arm out, ending at the cash register, in the international way of letting the brothers know that they’re in charge of retrieving their own cans of beer and putting the money in the cash drawer should they so choose.
Harold says, “I guess there can be worse hobbies. Worse dreams.”
Kenny nods. He finishes his first beer and opens the second. “Sometimes I have to hire out this old boy to help me out, you know. He’s pretty good at cockroaches, fire ants, and termites. Name’s Bobby, but I call him Cool Breeze ’cause I swear to God he comes in and the women around here fall for him so much they got him setting traps for badgers and mongooses in their crawlspaces just so he’ll stick around. His momma ain’t but something like fifty, and she’s already showing signs of crazy, you know? Won’t pay nothing but the minimum on her credit card each month ’cause God told her to be that way. Drives in reverse half the time thinking it’ll turn back her odometer and keep her younger, I guess. Shit like that.”
Harold says, “I miss my kids.” He says, “Sometimes I kick myself for not taking over Dad’s business, so my kids could take over mine. There ain’t no promise they can become an Other Medicine manager just because I’m an Other Medicine manager.”
“It sure makes it easy knowing what to get Mom for birthdays and Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Me and Dora got her one of those publicity shots for that cat that used to do the cat food commercials. I think he’s dead by now. Anyways.”
Harold says, “Has a woman named Berta Parks called you up about her cussing a bunch at little Mexican kids, something about telling off-color jokes about Br’er Rabbit?”
“About Berta Parks cussing a bunch, or Mom cussing a bunch.”
Harold looks at his little brother. He says, “Mom. We’re talking about Mom. Has Berta Parks ever called you?”
“Yeah. She’s called twice. She’s got a bad rat problem too — at the community center, and at home. She called me up twice, and I went out to set out poison and traps both.”
Harold thinks, Now I remember why I got out of my hometown.
Harold leaves his brother at the bar. He puts down money and tells Kenny to hold some cold-pressed sunflower oil under his tongue for thirty minutes, then brush his teeth with baking soda in order to detoxify. Harold says, “I’m going back. I don’t want to leave here feeling bad about Mom.” He doesn’t say, “What if she dies and this is my last memory of her?” though he thinks it.
Kenny says, “I got me a sweat lodge I built. That’s how I sweat out the poison.”
Harold wonders what his wife and that chiropractor are doing at the moment. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and he imagines that his children are now home, that his ex-wife is succumbing to an adjustment of sorts. He drives a back road to the house of his upbringing and plans to park up the hill in the direction his mother would never take upon leaving for anything Calloustown had to offer, unless she wished to view a swamp, the town dump, or Mr. Reddick’s nursery that he’d surrounded with a five-foot-high fence made up entirely of grout and liquor bottles.
There, hidden halfway behind a live oak a quarter mile away, he calls his wife’s new house, gets the answering machine, and says, “Hey, kids. I’m in Calloustown if y’all need me, but I got my phone. Can’t wait to see you on Friday.” He forgets to say “I love you,” calls back, but it’s busy. He waits five minutes — his eyes focused on the estuary made up of his mother’s driveway and the ancient asphalt — calls again, but it’s still busy.
Ruth Lumley backs out and points her Lincoln away from Harold.
He lights a cigarette — Other Medicine sells packs of additive-free tobacco products with Bible verses on the flip-tops — squints, pulls down his visor. He turns on the radio to find, as in his childhood, Calloustown only receives a gospel channel clearly. Harold hums along to “It Is Well with My Soul” and wonders how he knows the melody. “Wasn’t there something tragic about the man who wrote this song?” he wonders. “Wasn’t there something about a young son dying, and four daughters lost at sea, and some kind of relentless fire?”
He watches his mother weave almost indiscernibly, then reach Old Calloustown Road and turn left, toward what remains of the town. She drives in the direction of Worm’s and the community center. She drives past Tiers of Joy bakery. Harold remains a safe distance behind her, crawling along at twenty miles an hour. He watches as his brother comes from the other direction and notices how Ruth doesn’t seem to notice. Kenny waves at their mother, then blows his horn and swerves toward his brother, a big open-mouthed laugh on his face.
The ember falls off of Harold’s cigarette right onto his lap. He brushes his pants quickly, flicking the ember, somehow, straight into a crease between the sock on his right foot and his loafer. In an attempt to toe the shoe off completely with his left foot, he steps on the accelerator and, not watching the road, rams into his mother’s car. Harold’s two front teeth, capped, break off on the steering wheel. The airbag doesn’t deploy as it does on Ruth’s car — Harold’s father had bragged about the 1988 Lincoln Continental being one of the first vehicles out of Detroit to have driver’s-side bags.
“Son of a bitch,” Harold yells out, throwing his shoe across the road into a ditch. He holds his hand to his mouth, spits two teeth out, and then reaches down to take off his sock. By the time he reaches his mother she’s already out of the car, her eyes shut tight from whatever chemicals or gases had released.
Ruth says, “What the hell are you doing, boy?”
He doesn’t say anything about the cigarette. He doesn’t want his mother to know that while she wasted money on cartoon characters he spent money on what would eventually kill him. He says, “I must’ve blinked. You stopped for no reason, and I must’ve blinked.”
She says, “I didn’t want to hit those rats crossing the road. Did you see those rats? There was a line of them, just like deer but smaller. That’s bad juju to run over the helpless.”
They walk together to view the damage. Harold’s car’s radiator spills antifreeze on the pavement. The Lincoln appears barely damaged, though several of the small dings have now transformed into one large dent. “Is there a dentist left in this town? Damn, damn, damn. I can’t deal with customers if I look like this.”