Calloustown (8 page)

Ruben Orr handed me a delicate glass with a slice of orange hanging on top. He said, “What?” He held out his own glass to clink. “Now, this isn't your run-of-the-mill Old Fashioned.”

I waited for him to drink first, of course. I even thought to ask that we switch glasses, seeing as mine might be poisoned, but then I remembered a psychology course I took one time. Evidently people can smell paranoia, and they hold poisoned drinks in their own hands knowing that they'll be requested to switch.

My own ex-wife Rachel said that I let off distinguishable pheromones right before I admitted how I never wished to move out of Calloustown, work a regular job, have children, vote Republican, join a gym that offered spin classes, and promise that we'd one day own a timeshare in Myrtle Beach. That “vote Republican” part seemed to be what ended our marriage. Listen, I could've gone into the booth, come out, and lied, but it didn't occur to me until she'd already settled down doing whatever she found necessary.

“Cheers,” I said, and we drank simultaneously. I took one gulp, and Ruben drank his. I didn't care that I might be poisoned, understand. Indeed this drink wasn't the traditional Old Fashioned I'd ever read about. I said, “Goddamn, Mr. Ruben Orr, what is this?” for I'd never tasted anything such.

“I normally don't tell people my secrets,” he said. “Hell, I've had Worm offer me thirty-three dollars for this recipe, but I wouldn't give it to him. I might have to in time, what with my financial state, but not so far.”

We stepped out from the Airstream and moseyed over to one of the gutted buses. From the opened door I could view what looked like an entire room of wooden finials. I said, “How come you and I have never run into each other? Calloustown ain't exactly a metropolis. How long have you lived here? I've been here my whole life, except for a couple years.”

“The ukuleles ain't in this bus, I know. Let's go on to the next one.” He said, “Hold on right here,” and ran back to his trailer, opened the door, reached in, and retrieved an entire pitcher of his Old Fashioneds. “Here you go,” he said on return, filling my glass. He pulled out an orange slice from the pitcher and floated it atop my drink.

“I might be interested in a finial or two. I don't have a staircase in my house, but I got a thing for finials. Maybe I could make a ukulele with a finial at neck's end.”

“Most people insist on a couple dashes of bitters per glass. Me, I use muddled unripe raspberries. Most people insist on a maraschino cherry. I use a blackberry. See, I muddle blackberries, a lemon rind, a cube of brown sugar, the unripe raspberries, and I use rye whiskey instead of regular bourbon. I use a half and half mix of spring water and club soda. And then I put a taste of good moonshine in there—it's not more than a thimbleful per glass, you know. That's all I can tell you. There are two other secret ingredients I won't tell.”

I finished my second glass. Ruben and I passed the fourth outbuilding, and then five through eight. We went by the first again and kept circling. I kind of forgot that we meant to find a vintage stringed instrument formed of pure mahogany.

“We've seen each other,” Ruben said. “I guess you weren't paying attention.”

He and I rounded his place another half dozen times, high-stepping over broken glass, weeds, pottery shards, old vaccination tags, deteriorating tennis balls, broken bottles, doll limbs, and what appeared to be the sun-bleached skulls of songbirds. I tried to pace myself. I tried to convince myself that it was okay for one of America's premiere ukulele luthiers to partake of something other than straight bourbon or rum or vodka. As a matter of fact, I rationalized, a premiere ukulele maker might want to drink nothing but cocktails that required an intense, precise, and specific muddling process, garnished with paper umbrellas. I said, “I'm not the first person to say that I'm self-absorbed. I'm the second. Rachel used to say it all the time. I think that's what she kept saying. Maybe I wasn't paying attention to her, either.”

“I knew Rachel. She bought some Fire-King from me. As a matter of fact, I believe Rachel met my father one time. My one daughter. I believe you met her one time, too, son. At least one time.”

I picked up on all the repetitive words. It didn't take a master's degree in psychology to understand that he wanted to make some kind of point. I looked into Ruben Orr's face and, sure enough, recognized the resemblance in his eyes of a woman named Mayley I'd once known. Fuck, I thought. The one local ukulele-lesson-needy woman who required private lessons that I'd ever fallen for and—in my inability to lie—told Rachel, “Um, I met a woman I'm attracted to.” She wasn't even local, officially—just someone taking care of a sick relative for the summer months, as I recalled. Mayley'd signed up for the ukulele class over at the Calloustown Community Center, where I taught a six-class course. To Ruben I said, “Mayley Orr's your daughter?”

I guessed at the last name—our affair didn't last long enough for us to know family names. Well, I guess she knew mine, seeing as she strummed a Finley Kay ukulele.

“So, what do you think about buying a little something I got taxidermied now? Mayley's little boy ain't interested in animals at the time, but I bet he will be one day.”

_______

I had read somewhere along the way that owning a pickup truck between the ages of twenty-two and thirty created a number of inescapable furniture-handling weekends for friends and strangers alike, and that ownership past the age of thirty brought about requests from friends and strangers to borrow the truck in order to haul firewood, mulch, and potting soil. Whoever came up with this little truism needs to update his or her adage to include a menagerie of rabies-worthy stuffed animals. Well, not quite true. I felt obligated to buy every available bobcat, fox, raccoon, and beaver that Ruben Orr needed to evict from his storage unit.

“I'm going to use this money to start my grandboy up a college fund so he can be like you,” Ruben said as I tried to drive off. He said, “You know what his name is?” I didn't say “No,” for I felt pretty certain it was Finley. I stared at Ruben Orr. He said, “That's right, you know.”

I said, “I'll get you the rest of the money when I can,” for, even though he offered me a deal—we went inside and looked on his Mac at various stuffed mid-sized mammals for sale on eBay, Craigslist, and some kind of Mountain and Lake Cabin Interior Decorator's site—we wanted to make sure that neither of us over- or underpriced the value of a beaver.

I began driving home, careful not to veer across lines that weren't even painted on our back roads, my eyes in the rear-view mirror. I didn't want my animals to topple roadside, for one, and I feared that Ruben Orr might follow me. What would I do if, as I pulled into my own driveway, he puttered up to tell me how his grandson kept asking who his father was? Would I reach beneath my seat and pull out one of my so-called weapons? Would I cry? What kind of explanation could I summon up honestly should he bring along a lawyer, social worker, or Mayley Orr herself?

I looked down at my fuel gauge and noticed how I no longer owned a seven-eighths-full tank. My truck missed twice, and I said to no one, “That fucker siphoned gas when I wasn't paying attention.”

Rajer changed the price back up to $3.65 as I coasted into his convenience store. I looked at my wristwatch to read that, just like the smart man on TV pointed out, it would be between four and five in the afternoon. I looked over to check on Ruben's blackberry cartons, which seemed to be undisturbed. Rajer yelled out, “Hello, Mr. Finley, good to see you again! Are you going to construct a humorous diorama so that those weasels hold your special ukuleles? Very good! Very funny, when animals look like they possess musical abilities. I have seen many, many animals playing music on the Internet. Always good. Bullfrog with banjo!”

I said nothing to Rajer for two reasons. Later on I would fret endlessly that he considered it a snub. I didn't respond to him because I pictured all those stuffed animals actually holding ukuleles for some kind of promotional advertising, maybe in the back of
Taxidermy Today
or
Yuke and Yours
. Secondly, beyond the sparse afternoon Calloustown traffic I detected the faint sputtering—at first not unlike a brave gnat entering the ear canal—that turned to distant chainsaw, then unmistakable poor cousin of a Honda 150, or Yamaha 175, or Japanese electric turkey knife.

I said, “I know the trick y'all are playing on people, Raj. The noon news can do some kind of survey saying gas prices are low, but then y'all jack it up crazy when most people need to fill up.”

Ruben Orr neared. I imagined him riding that moped with sawed-off shotguns swathed around his back. Rajer got off his ladder. He didn't smile. “You shouldn't drive all day long. You filled up this morning! In my city back in India, gasoline costs $5.03 all the time, no $5.01 between nine and four.”

I started to say something about how my previous purchase must've gotten siphoned off, but Ruben Orr veered right up beside me and skidded to a stop. He cleared his throat hard twice, unstraddled the moped, cleared his throat twice again, bent over, banged his right knee with his right palm, straightened up, walked two steps toward my truck's bed, and petted the bobcat. He said, “I can't leave you, Robert. I'm sorry.”

I held the gas nozzle in my right hand. I'd already clicked down that little metal arm, so I was ready to look like One, I could pump either in my tank, or Two be a probable villain. I said, “You stole gas from me.”

Raj said, “Hello, Mr. Ruben Orr.”

“I made a mistake,” Ruben said. He touched every stuffed animal and called their names: Ringo for the raccoon, for example, and Slappy for the beaver. “Oh, God, I made some mistakes.” He looked like he might cry. “This would be a good time for you to say how you, too, have made some mistakes in your life, both personal and professional.”

He didn't look six-four or six-six anymore. As a matter of fact, he looked like the kind of man who could be a good grandfather to a ukulele-making man's bastard child. I said, “I have sure enough made some errors.” I said, “I know this won't make anyone involved feel better, but my own father thinks I'm screwed up, too.”

Raj went inside. I looked at what I carried in the back of my truck. Ruben Orr said he didn't want to go through with our original plan and gave me back the cash I'd handed over for starters. “These are like children to me. You can't just sell off or abandon children, right?”

I got it. I understood Mayley's father's less-than-subtle allusion.

I said, “I might want to rent out some of the animals in the future. I could use them for promotion, you know. We can talk about it after the blood tests.”

What else could I say? I foresaw our odd future connection. He asked me if I wanted Mayley's phone number right before I asked for it. I said, “I swear to God I was just about to ask for it.”

He said, “We should all get together some time, before and after, no matter the results.”

I believed him, and put the nozzle in my tank. I looked into the store to see Raj giving me the go-ahead to pump. I pulled the trigger and thought about what I rightly owed a lot of people. What a bad person I ended up truly, I thought—I needed to call Mayley, my ex-wife, and anyone I had deceived into thinking he or she could achieve peace when strumming four strings on a miniature instrument.

Invasion of Grenada

Maybe we weren't meant to be possible pre-foster-parents-to-be. It's important to learn these kinds of things early on, I would bet. My wife had signed up for the entire project, and some Department of Social Services people showed up to make sure we didn't have firearms scattered around the house or booze bottles within reach. That we didn't keep Pine-Sol bottles on the floor, or rat traps. I'm sure they looked into our backgrounds to conclude we weren't child pornographers, dope smokers, domestic batterers, gunrunners, arsonists, that sort of thing. I had some questionable decisions in my past, but nothing worse than anyone else. Vandalism, mostly. Trespassing. I'd been married before, too young, and the vandalism and trespassing involved her. But I wasn't violent, or a repeat offender. I walked onto my ex-wife's property once, spray-painted
CHEATER
on the side of her house, then left. I spray-painted that, plus
BITCH
and
TWO-TIMER
and
WHORE
and
EDUARDO–REALLY?
on the side of what used to be my van. I don't want to think that I'm a racist, but it hurt my ego that she'd fall in love with a Venezuelan over me.

“It's kind of like being on-call 24/6,” our personal social worker came to tell Bonita and me. I'll be the first to admit, psychologically-wise, that maybe I married Bonita just because she sounded like she might be Venezuelan, too. She's not. She's from West Virginia, insert joke here. When I met Bonita—at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America trade show up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, inside the old racetrack—that's how she introduced herself: “I'm from West Virginia, insert joke here.” When I told her I lived 127 miles from Myrtle Beach you'd've thought I asked her to move in with me to a five-bedroom mansion in some place like Orlando, or Knoxville.

For what it's worth, her West Virginia daddy owned a driving range outside Buckhannon, but he couldn't make it to Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Ranger Owners of America because of a bout of black lung he contracted from just breathing in the vicinity of coal mines, so he sent Bonita.

She and I had no other choice but to fall in love, what with all the complimentary range balls, hand towels, ball markers, and divot repair tools handed out, not to mention the free symposiums that involved everything from fescue to front wheel pickers to tee-line turf. By the time she and I wandered toward a man about to speak about the importance of ball washers we couldn't take it anymore and retired to my motel room where I had a good bottle of Smirnoff's.