Novella by George Singleton

Porchlight is proud to continue the American tradition of serialization by offering a novella, What I Can’t Repress by George Singleton. Following is the first of five installments.

George Singleton has published eleven collections of stories—most recently, Wounded Boarders—two novels, a book of writing advice, and a collection of essays. Over 250 of his stories have appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, his non-fiction in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, and Best American Food Writing. He’s received a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

What I Can’t Repress

1.

My father moved the telescope over a couple inches, bent down, and said, “He got a new one, sure enough.” Our neighbor Splotch came through the door to the screen room, as he did most early evenings. He said he could no longer hear the camel, that it sounded like a regular horse. 

Behind our house, after a fence, a copse of pines, and a one-acre enclosure in front of the wealthy gynecologist’s house, stood, sure enough, a zebra. I don’t want to surmise that the gynecologist suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder, but at least once a month he procured and kept, somehow, an exotic animal. This was about two hundred yards away from our back door. Over the years we’d witnessed his obsession with an albino deer, two Shetland ponies, an ostrich, a longhorn steer, and what may or may not have been a pair of Galapagos tortoises. This was occurring in the mid-Eighties. Reagan happened to still be president, and maybe he’d found a way to lift sanctions against purchasing, importing, then quarantining rare and endangered species. There’d been a kangaroo, or wallaby, one or the other. Instead of regular black locust fence posts, the gynecologist hired an outfit to pile drive telephone poles around his yard, then strung barbed wire lines all the way up, more than ten feet, I guess so a kangaroo or albino deer couldn’t hop out. We missed the day he acquired a troop of howler monkeys, who plain climbed the telephone poles and barbed wire, then escaped. To this day, according to my now-aged father, the weekly Bark Barker offers anecdotes about local citizens shooing howler monkeys off their backyard dogwoods, off the ladders of their above-ground swimming pools.

The gynecologist didn’t abuse or neglect his animals. He’d paid someone to build a stall of sorts, a couple of low bastardized metal-roofed pole barns, I guess to offer any animal a way to get out of the elements, should a thunderstorm approach. Someone fed and watered the beasts pre-dawn, for we never saw him or her. But hay bales appeared, or pulled-from-the-ground shrubs, a mixture of cacti and fruits for the tortoises, et cetera. Maybe those howler monkeys wanted more than bananas. 

“Get down here and set your eye to this zebra,” my father said to Splotch Hopkins. Splotch’s real name happened to be plain James, but he had what I learned later to be a vicious cycle of purpura on his hands and forearms, making him appear polka-dotted in short sleeve t-shirts. Splotch is the one who came over one afternoon and told my parents and me to refer to him as Splotch from now on, that that was how he’d sign his paintings from here on out. I was twelve, then thirteen, brought up in the South, so I called him Mr. Splotch, of course. A boy that age in South Carolina couldn’t come off as snooty or superior. My father hired out a part-time worker at the bait shack, a boy just out of high school, mentally deficient, not able to further his education. I called that boy Mr. Glen.

“Whoo-wee,” Splotch said. “I ain’t seen one them things since an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom a while back. Look at that mane standing straight up. From his back pocket Splotch pulled out a miniature sketch pad and a graphite pencil. I don’t know how he did it, but he kept his right eye to the scope, and drew what ended up a pretty good rendition of a confused animal that may have been living in Namibia a week earlier. “I wish this dude would hurry up and get a giraffe, or rhino.”

Splotch worked as a carpenter for something like forty years, then—like all the great Outsider artists of the South—had a vision. He painted nothing but animals on scrap pieces of plywood, siding, slate shingles, knotty pine paneling, the occasional found-roadside hubcap. He encircled these animals, always, with miniature angels. Then he signed “Splotch Hopkins” down at the bottom. Looking back, I find it sad that he put a sign up in his front yard with “Art for Sale,”and an Open or Closed sign beside it. Unfortunately, he normally forgot to change Closed. I think my parents bought the only two things he ever sold—a local cow that hung in my room, and a warbler that hung in our kitchen.

“Well, I better get home and get to work.” To me he said, “Carnell, you going to help me out tomorrow?”

I could work every day—my summer break had started earlier in the week. This was June, and already maybe too hot and humid for anyone to fish past about nine in the morning. I looked at my parents. Sometimes I had to help out at Bark Bait, especially if it was minnow or cricket delivery day. My mother said, “I think that would be fine.”

Splotch raised up from the telescope at the moment someone rang the front doorbell. I ran to answer it. First off, this was Bark, South Carolina where people didn’t have to worry about a serial killer showing up and ringing your doorbell. And like I said, in the mid-Eighties child abduction hadn’t become a thing. I opened the door to encounter a man who looked slightly familiar, wearing a white lab coat. He said, “Are your parents here?”

I didn’t know any better. I said, “Come on in,” and led the guy through the house and onto the screened in porch where, at the moment, Splotch still stood there but my father took a turn looking at the new zebra. I said, “Dad, you have company.”

My mom normally took turns at the telescope, too, but she’d been in the laundry room trying to spray mud off a pair of my pants from the last time I helped Splotch gather scrap wood from a construction site being built in the middle of a red clay expanse. She walked in and froze. She said, “Hello, Dr. Vardry.” It hadn’t occurred to me that she might’ve visited Dr. Wayne Vardry annually.

My father stood up and plain stared. He said, “Hey.”

Dr. Vardry stood a lot taller than he looked when we’d seen him get in his Mercedes and take off for wherever. Vardry said, “It’s come to my attention that y’all are spying on me through that telescope.”

Splotch decided to say, “It’s my fault. I’m an artist.”

Wayne Vardry said, “I don’t really care about what you do. Are you painting my house? Anyway, I want you to stop.”

I don’t want to say I was a precocious child, but I said, “How did you know? Do you have a telescope pointed back toward us?”

My mother said, “Go find something else to do, Carnell.”

Vardry said, “I’m asking you, Ms. Nation, to talk some sense into your husband. I don’t want to have to call the sheriff’s department and charge y’all with stalking, or being peeping toms.” He didn’t say, “I hold a lot of power in Bark,” but you could tell he thought so by the way he tilted his head back.

Later that night I overheard my mom tell my dad that it surprised her that the gynecologist recognized her face, that he’d never made eye contact.

Splotch thought it necessary to say, “I built the cabinets for your place, in case you want to know. On top of that, I’m the man who taught that fellow on PBS how to fix an old house.” He tilted his head back so much he looked like he inspected the ceiling fan. “I taught Phil Niekro how to throw a knuckleball. Say, do you think you could hook me up with a sloth, or anteater? On top of that, I played bongos for the Rolling Stones. You ever hear ‘Sympathy for the Devil’? That’s me.”

Dr. Vardry didn’t respond. He turned and exited our house. My father followed him, locked the door, grabbed a bottle of bourbon hidden somewhere, and fetched two glasses, one for him and one for Splotch. He said to my mother, “Don’t say anything, Carrie.” He said, “Don’t say anything, Carrie” every time he took to the bottle, something I never understood until, at the end of my high school career, this buddy of mine and I drove a couple towns over and found a bar called Carrie Nation’s. We went inside, took stools as the bar, and asked this woman setting out beer mugs why the place was called such. She went into great detail about the prohibitionist Carrie Nation, and her hatchet or rocks, that the bar’s name fell under the category of “irony.” Then she asked for our IDs and asked us to leave.

My father poured. Splotch drank, then said, “I built cabinets for the governor’s mansion, too.” He lifted his glass and said, “Here’s to the Serengeti, the Outback, and South Carolina.”

~~~~~

My family’s last name is Nation. My father, Tarleton, got named after an American Revolution soldier who played for the British side, but showed great promise and courage when he lost at the Battle of Cowpens, up the road from Bark, the place of my father’s upbringing. My paternal grandfather didn’t want to name his son Daniel or Morgan—who won that particular skirmish. He didn’t want to name him Cowpens, either. Anyway, most people call my dad Tar which sounded like they were about to cuss when they called my dad out by both first and last names.

My mother got named Rosemary. Her maiden name was Dill. Rosemary Dill sounded like the beginning of a series of herbs someone wanted to plant in the backyard. Maybe that’s why she chose to marry a Nation, I don’t know. Me, I got named Carnell, which meant “defender of the castle” in one of those other languages. I cringed when people thought they knew me well enough to shorten it to Car, like I was some kind of boutonniere, or instant breakfast. My father inherited Bark Bait, on the road leading to Lake Bark, from his father, after he graduated college with a mostly worthless degree in history. For a while, though before my birth, my mom worked as a teller at Bark Bank and Trust, right out on the Cowpens highway. They’d gone to school together, never dated, re-met, and so on. My father’s parents died from a tragic gas leak. Bark Bait became my dad’s enterprise. I never heard him complain. As a matter of fact, I think he liked to stare down at the minnows and think about Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, Abe Lincoln, and whoever else oozed out of history. At the dinner table, if he wasn’t talking about red worms, night crawlers, rubber worms, spoons, floaters, crank bait, rattle bait, poppers, bobbers, weights, various-sized hooks, and the raw chicken livers stacked in the refrigerator for the Lake Bark catfish set, he found a way to bring up Jackie Robinson, Cochise, the Roosevelts, Crazy Horse, Lewis and Clark, Geronimo, Rosa Parks, ad infinitum. Looking back, it might have been why my parents weren’t often invited to dinner parties hosted by the swankier set of Bark’s 1500 residents, the movers and shakers, the people who owned a drug store, shoe outlet, or florist shop. Or maybe they felt guilty about not buying a fishing license from him, then getting caught by a Department of Natural Resources officer.

After Splotch got enough of the zebra and returned home to paint, my mother said, “Are y’all hungry? Who wants tuna casserole!”

We sat down. My father said, “I didn’t want to mention it, Rosemary, but after you left work I had a gigantic rush on, of all things, cane poles and bobbers.  I bet we haven’t sold a cane pole in five years. Anyway, some kind of church organization came in with their kids to teach them how to fish. I guess today’s lecture centered on that story in the Book of John. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to get into it.”

My mother said, “How many poles did you end up selling?”

My father said, “Three.”

“Where do you think you and Mr. Hopkins might be going tomorrow?” my mom asked me. “Don’t forget to wear your boots. No need to step on a nail again.”

I had no clue. Splotch liked to work without a plan. He kept up with new houses being built in the area. Bark might’ve been one of the first almost-recycling centers in the whole state, or at least there were areas next to dumpsters marked for motor oil and half-filled paint cans. I didn’t know if Splotch ever created anything not made from Sherwin-Williams, Porter, Glidden, or Valspar oil-based or latex.

I said, “I imagine we might end up at Lake Bark. He told me last time he needed to work on a series of fish, snakes, and a snapping turtle. And he likes to look at the ducks and geese.”

“Try to talk him into buying a cane pole,” my father said. “I’d have a stellar month if he did. Speaking of which, did I ever tell you about this one month in the life of President William Henry Harrison?”

My mother thought it necessary to say, “I need to find a new doctor, maybe somewhere in North Carolina.”

“This is the best tuna I’ve ever eaten,” my father said. Even at age thirteen, I thought he cracked some kind of inside joke.

My mother pointed her fork and me. “Don’t forget. Boots. And maybe take some sunscreen. And gloves so you don’t get splinters.”

I nodded. I stabbed at penne pasta. “I just hope he’s awake when I go over there.” I don’t want to call Splotch a pessimist. He claimed it was his just being considerate. But after he retired from being a full-time carpenter, he began sleeping on top of his bedspread in a body bag, so as to ease an EMT or morgue worker’s job.

~~~~~

Because Bark still operated in 1972 mode during the mid-Eighties, it wasn’t difficult to buy both a folding Polaroid SX-70 Instamatic, or whatever they were called, even though the things went off the market in 1977. Plus, it was easy to buy that film pack, there at Bark Drugs, then go out, snap photos, and have the results ease out the front of the camera as if on a conveyor belt. Then it only took about an hour of wagging the picture in the air before an image magically appeared. When out looking for new animals, Splotch made it my job to take these photos, so he could later remember animals we’d come across. He didn’t trust his memory, and in most situations he didn’t have the time to sketch, say, a hummingbird or Jack Russell terrier. Splotch made it my job to lug the camera around, and wave the film. Sometimes at night, after a particularly fruitful adventure, my right arm cramped up.

I thought of our missions as field trips. I’d been left out of such meaningful instruction growing up. Every year from about third to sixth grade, teachers took us to the local prison—an unassuming one-story red brick L-shaped structure. It didn’t look that much different than the elementary school I attended. I don’t know if this was a precursor to that Scared Straight program that’s so popular today, but the warden would always walk us through and offer up gems like “Crime doesn’t pay,” or “If you ain’t got the time, don’t do the crime.” Mostly we made up a game to see who knew the most inmates, or who had the most relatives incarcerated. By the seventh grade we had graduated to a tour of the local sewage treatment plant, where their warden walked us around and told us not to throw tampons down the toilet. That was it. I don’t know if it was an urban legend, but I heard that students in other parts of the country experienced field trips to museums, the state Capitol, minor league baseball games, a real library, the zoo, an observatory, the state mental institution, things like that. I figured I knocked out a couple of these field trip options every time I went out with Splotch. Animals made up for the zoo, and his typical aphorisms, lies, and demeanor made up for the mental institution part of the curriculum.

“I might be wasting your time today, Carnell,” Splotch said when we got into his pick-up truck, so old it didn’t have seatbelts. “I don’t really need any wood to paint on. I have enough for about the entire next month. I mean, if we see something along the way, I’ll stop and you can jump out and get it, but seeing that zebra yesterday has me all jacked up for more animals. Damn, I wish we lived in an area that hosted walruses and seals. The octopus. Blowfish. Pelicans. Maybe one day when you get a little older we can drive down to the beach. I need to get first-hand experience with such animals before I feel confident enough to paint one.”

I said, “Did you really build cabinets for the governor?”

Splotch always backed down his driveway so he could take right off. He put his truck in first gear and we sputtered out of there. We didn’t make it a mile down Old Cowpens Road when we came across three wooden pallets off to the side, in a ditch. Splotch pulled over and said, “Those things are heavy. I’ll help you.” 

After we got them in the bed of the truck I said, “Did you really teach Phil Niekro how to throw a knuckleball?

Splotch said, “I can cut the slats in half and have a bunch of canvasses. I guess I’ll have to concentrate on snakes and fish mostly, though. Eels. Slugs.”

I didn’t know where Splotch could keep much more wood unless he sold some pieces. Already his garage teemed with finished products, stacked atop one another. Monday through Friday he painted, and Saturdays were for scavenging. I don’t know what he did Sundays, outside of not attending church, like my parents—which might’ve been another reason they never got invited to parties hosted by what I’d considered Bark’s upper crust. You’d think Splotch would’ve served as a deacon or something, what with his angel obsession. I said, “Maybe you could put an ad in the paper. Maybe that would bring people out.”

“That reminds me,” Splotch said. “I need to buy a few NO TRESPASSING signs.”

We meandered slowly down the road until we hit the entrance to Lake Bark, there where my parents’ bait shop stood. There were no cars in the gravel parking lot, save my father’s 1961 Impala, which he’d also inherited. I didn’t say to Splotch, “If you put NO TRESPASSING signs around, then no one’s going to ever come tour your garage.”  I said, “Maybe we should go down to the lake, then come back and see if someone’s there wanting to weigh his bass,” which happened more often than not. My father bragged about No Charge for Weighing, hoping people might feel obligated to buy something. They never did. 

“You might be too young to remember Jacques Cousteau, but I taught him how to use a spear gun. It ain’t that much different than a crossbow.”

Jacques Cousteau specials still aired on TV, or maybe they were reruns. “Crossbow,” by the way, is another meaning for “Carnell.”

Splotch’s truck tick-tick-ticked downhill to the lake’s boat launch. On both sides of it were docks that jutted out maybe a hundred feet. People stood there dropping my dad’s worms down, hopeful to catch bream large enough to later fry. In a few years I’d learn that this was the place to go at night with a girl. “Everyone of those people are hooking fish through the eye, I bet,” Splotch said. “Fish don’t deserve such a thing. You know I’m a vegetarian, right? Been one ever since Mattie died. Her last words to me were ‘Don’t forget to eat your beets’ and ‘Don’t forget to paint…’ and then she passed a second later. That’s where I got my vision. Two visions, really.”

I’d never known Splotch’s wife. She died fifteen years earlier, from one of the cancers. Actually, Splotch said she owned all of the cancers: lung, bladder, kidney, blood, and bone, in her mid-fifties. Listen, I thought, That’s your vision? I thought, She probably didn’t stay alive long enough to finish her sentence with, “the house,” or “the patio furniture.”

We found nothing inspirational, nothing different, at the lake. Splotch and I got back in his truck and went up to Bark Bait. My mother stood behind the cash register while my father took inventory. “Well, it’s been a waste of your boy’s time, I’m afraid to say. Anything going on here?”

My father said, “I sold some Eagle Claw assorted hooks. Eighty count. Which means I won’t have to sell to those same people for probably a lifetime. I wish there were more places to snag down at the lake.”

The sound of a car coming in too fast made all of us look toward the door. It came to such an abrupt stop that gravel pattered up against the glass door. My father said, “Oh, good grief.”

The gynecologist walked in, wearing a nice gray suit. He was followed by another man, who wore some kind of felt Stetson hat. To my father he said, “I think you know Mayor Jimmy Davis Wingard, Mr. Nation.”

The mayor! I thought. Maybe they were coming in to ask my parents to attend a cocktail party. My father said, “Yeah, if you’re a democrat, I voted for you.”

Dr. Vardry said, “I explained to Mayor Wingard how I caught y’all staring at my house via telescope.”

Jimmy Davis Wingard said to me, “Why don’t you go outside and play.”

My mother said, “He was here first.”

Splotch said, “Why don’t y’all go down to the lake and fish in those suits? I’d like to see that.”

The mayor said, “Personally, I wouldn’t want to get involved. But I have to tell you, Mr. Nation, that it is against the law to spy on people around here. It would only take me one phone call to the sheriff’s office. As you may or may not know, I’m a lawyer here in town.”

“I was spying on his zebra, not him,” my father said. He pulled at the bottom of the red apron he wore at work, an apron to protect his shirt from minnow splashes when he extracted them with a small net and placed them in plastic enclosures, I guess. 

Splotch thought it necessary to say, “You’re my lawyer, goddamn it,” which I took to be a lie. “I might not look it, but I taught more than a few professional wrestlers the nuances of the pile driver.”

“It’s against the law to spy on people’s animals, for that matter,” the mayor said. “We don’t do no spying around Bark.”

“I didn’t vote for you, if it matters,” my mother said. I picked up a bobber in case I needed to hurl it. “Tar here didn’t either. Next election? We’ll put up signs for your opponent, I can promise you that.” 

Where the hell did all that come from? I thought. When did my mother take a class in sassiness? Maybe it was a trait of all ex-bank tellers. 

I said, “We got a sale on cane poles.”

Looking back, I wonder if at some point my father played poker well, and perfected the bluff. I have to admit my view of him at this moment wasn’t positive. He smiled, and stuck out his hand to shake with Dr. Vardry, who then, without smiling or bidding adieu walked back out of Bark Bait. When the door shut, my father said, “Well, maybe I know how to contact the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who might be interested in illegal international animal trade.” He said, “I wish to hell I’d taken some photos when that peckerhead had the kangaroo and Galapagos tortoises.”

I’d be saying the word “peckerhead” from that point on, all the way to now.

“No problem there,” said Splotch. He pointed at the camera around my neck. “As long as y’all don’t sue me for coming on your property and taking pictures. Plus, I got my paintings.”

My father reached behind a display for Heddon River Runt Spook Floaters and pulled out a half bottle of Old Grand-Dad. Behind a cardboard display for various weights, he pulled out some lemon juice and simple syrup. He declared, “This seems like an Old Fashioned kind of day.”

~~~~~

My father didn’t take down the telescope. He said he couldn’t be bullied. My mother fretted, though. She said, “I hope to goodness I don’t get so wound up that I come down with something like endometriosis and have to go visit the gynecologist.”

Again, this was the beginning of June. My father didn’t give a reason, but he said, “Carnell, I’m going to need you down at the store for a couple weeks.” Not that I had a crystal ball, but I understood that he figured Vardry might be unhinged enough to hire out someone to burn down our house, or kidnap me. “Don’t you have some summer reading to get started on? In between working, you can sit outside under the pecan tree and get a head start.”

I didn’t say, “If I read the book now, I’ll flat-out forget it come next September.” 

Of course I didn’t know it at the time—who understood South Carolina’s curriculum in 1984—but going into the seventh grade you’d think they’d have us read Animal Farm, or Anne Frank. At Bark Junior High, which consisted in grades seven through nine, they gave us a choice between Charlotte’s Web—which ended up being on about a fourth grade level—and To Kill a Mockingbird, which might’ve been a little beyond most of our abilities. After doing as much research possible at an old Carnegie library there in town, I chose Harper Lee’s book only because of that character named Dill, and Dill being my mom’s maiden name. Actually I wanted to read both, and come up with a scenario where that mockingbird ate the spider. 

Bark Junior, for the first time ever, would offer a Drama class, taught by a woman who agreed to work in an “underserved area” of South Carolina, which pretty much meant 98% of the state. In return, she got paid and had her student loans forgiven. I’d not met her yet, but she’d thrown in a play for anyone to read for extra credit. It happened to be Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The school ordered all of these books—we had to pay for them, naturally—because the closest bookstore stood fifty miles away.

I said, “Yes sir.”

As an aside, Splotch showed up one late afternoon and caught me reading the book. This edition had a nice picture of a mockingbird on it. Splotch examined the cover, handed it back to me, and said, “I have to go home and get to work.” For about the remainder of June he concentrated solely on birds he claimed to see in his yard. He basically disappeared until he invited everyone over to check out his goldfinches, robins, pileated woodpeckers, Carolina wrens, downy woodpeckers, and crows. He’d perfected likenesses of turkey vultures, that original mockingbird, black buzzards, cardinals, bluebirds, bluejays, one indigo bunting that must’ve gotten sick while migrating at night. I didn’t believe all these birds showed up at his one feeder, especially the buzzards and vultures. He portrayed a whippoorwill and a Chuck-will’s-widow, two types of ground birds one might hear, but never see. 

When I said, “There are no roadrunners around here, Mr. Splotch,” I felt bad. 

“If you know the right call, they’ll show up, son,” was his answer. Then he looked at my father and said, “You heard anything else from the idiot?” and pointed toward Vardry’s house and animal pen. 

My mother said, “How much for the warbler?”

“Not a word. The zebra’s still there, I’ve noticed. It’s about time for him to take in another species, don’t you think?”

Splotch wore overalls. He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a corn cob pipe. I’d never seen him smoke. He stuck it in his mouth, empty, and looked like a pixilated Popeye. “You called the wildlife people yet?”

My father shook his head. “I’m waiting for something along the lines of a really, really endangered animal.”

My mother picked up the warbler and held it to her chest. “I like this one the best. They have such a beautiful call.”

Splotch said, “I don’t know. Free paint. Free wood. How about nothing.”

My father said, “You can’t be giving your work away, James. You need to make some money to buy more beet seeds, right?” I’ll admit that I thought my father suffered a seizure. I always forgot Splotch’s real name. 

“I didn’t think about that,” he said. “How about five dollars.”

I’ll jump ahead and say that, in the year 2020, just as Covid took hold, one of Splotch’s birds sold for $600 at a gallery up in Asheville called Come Outside, a place that held nothing but outsider artists like R.A. Miller, Howard Finster, Mose Tolliver, Minnie Evans, and Big Al Taplet. Because Splotch saw an artistic side of me that I didn’t yet recognize, I inherited every one of his remaining works, some thousand-plus pieces.

I own the Come Outside gallery. 

~~~~~

The week continued, and sure enough the gynecologist tired of his zebra and brought in two gazelles. None of us were smart enough to identify whether they were Grant’s or Thomson’s gazelles. Hell, they might’ve been antelope from our vantage point. My father dropped me off at the library, but there were no books on African animals. I found whole shelves dedicated to the importance of textile mills in South Carolina, which seemed passé seeing as a slew of cotton mills had closed completely or burned down mysteriously by 1984.

Anyway, my parents, Splotch, and I voted that those two animals weren’t pronghorns from Wyoming or wherever, weren’t dik-diks, weren’t impalas because it would be too coincidental to have two on Vardry’s land, and one parked in our driveway. “You stay here with your mom,” my dad said to me one night as he and Splotch got in the Impala. They drove to Dr. Vardry’s driveway entrance, where a mailbox stood. I’d ridden my bike out that way over Christmas holiday after I had noticed, through the telescope, that Dr. Vardry and his wife packed up the Mercedes and left. I had to go the opposite direction of town and Bark Bait on Old Cowpens Road, maybe for a mile, then take a left on highway 56 and ride another couple miles. Vardry had a gate so big a Trojan horse couldn’t fit.  I’m no mathematician fluent in geometry, but someone could figure out that one mile out, two miles over, meant a driveway that must’ve covered, I don’t know, two and a quarter miles, through pines, edging a pond, past old slave cabins and a graveyard. Maybe there was a stand of bamboo. Maybe the front of their house faced a small mountain no one else knew about, with a visible cave entrance.

I let my dad leave. I could’ve told them the exact address, had they asked.

I’ll never know if my father and neighbor drove down the long driveway to get a closer look of the environs. They came back as if they’d merely driven to the closest Quik Way for an Icee. My mother, I guess resigned, already brought out the hidden bourbon (where the hell did Dad hide his bottles, anyway?) and set it out on the screened-in porch, two glasses and a bucket of ice at the ready. Me, I sat in our den, next to a lamp, trying to keep up with Jem, Scout, and Dill. Of course I’d gotten past the mention of them wanting Boo Radley to come out and, to be honest—though I understand this novel to be one of the Great American Novels—I could’ve used a lot more Boo. Years later, I thought it would’ve been appropriate to make Boo Radley an Outsider Artist, a self-taught Naif artist, a guy minding his own business, maybe painting animals on discarded pieces of plywood. 

My father and Splotch drank their bourbon. They talked about baseball. One of them said how maybe they could go to the closest minor league game at some point, which happened to be a hundred miles away for a measly Single-A game. My mother said, “I’ve been thinking about getting another job, Tar. I don’t see where you really need me at Bark Bait.”

They didn’t seem to hear her. I did. What would she do? Did she want to go back and be a bank teller? Why would anyone want to do such a thing, I thought, unless they had a foolproof way of stealing from the till and not getting caught? Did she want to become Splotch’s agent, his business manager? I had a hard time concentrating on my summer reading. I tried to envision my mother doing anything outside of doling blue plastic tubs of night crawlers to optimistic people who dreamed of a fish fry in ten hours.

I heard my father say, “I’ll call in the morning.”

Splotch said, “You don’t want to call from here. And you don’t want to call from your store. What you need to do, is gather up some quarters and find a pay phone in town. You need to be anonymous, you know. Just in case the gynecologist’s already tapped your phone lines. Even disguise your voice.”

My father leaned over and looked into the telescope. He said, “Too dark to see anything. They’re probably in the stable anyway.” He said, “You’re right about the pay phone.”

I think about this evening every time I pass an old, non-working pay phone out on street corners, or attached to convenience stores, or slapped down haphazardly in parking lots, those silver metal cords that once held a telephone directory dangling. It reminds me that it’s impossible to make anonymous phone calls anymore, which, to me, seems disheartening. 

I don’t want to proclaim that nearly every denizen of Bark ran on paranoia and superstition, but I know for a fact that one burglary, maybe back in the Sixties, caused everyone to change their doorknobs and locks every six months or so. It’s been a long-known fact that one Mr. Edwards, of Cowpens Hardware, started a rumor that plumbers, electricians, house painters, carpenters like Splotch, refrigerator repairmen, and the like had certain putties they could squirt in doorknob keyholes, then take those templates to a key place and have duplicates made. Therefore, every time anyone required a serviceperson to enter their abode, they ran off to purchase new knobs from Cowpens Hardware, and so on.  My father didn’t believe such a legend, or else he’d change locks after every time Splotch entered our house, which probably averaged five times a week. 

“Take some notes with you so you don’t get all flustered,” Splotch said. “Start right off asking about the Endangered Species Act. Ask them about the Lacey Act, which passed in 1900 during McKinley’s presidency. You’d know better than I whether McKinley had a soft spot for Nature, but that’s when it got passed.”

I wasn’t old enough back then to think, How does Splotch know such esoteric historical facts? What did he read during lunch breaks back when he cut meticulous angles with his miter saw? 

I guess not to be outdone, my father said, “McKinley was an asshole. He set up all these tariffs that didn’t really help our economy. And he was always trying to bully his way into getting new territories, like Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Because Spain wouldn’t give up Cuba, he started the Spanish-American War. Then he got assassinated. Thank god we’ll never have another president who’s as big a prick.”

My mother said, “I’ve always wanted to run a school cafeteria. I think children would like my tuna casserole.”

I set down To Kill a Mockingbird and picked up the Beckett play, unaware that it would cause me to see the world in a different light from that moment onward. 

~~~~~

Splotch declined to ride along. I would bet that he didn’t want to be seen at a payphone, that if my father got caught tattletaling somehow Splotch would be an accessory. Anyway, my father took me with him. I set down Beckett’s play—I’ll be honest and say that it seemed so weird that I started it about a dozen times, then went back to page one—and got in the passenger’s side. My father handed me a spiral topped memo pad turned to a page with a 1-800 number at the top. Then in big, capital letters he’d printed out the questions he wanted answered. He said, “You’re going to be doing the talking, Carnell. Like Splotch said, we need to disguise our voices. I’m not good at that. I never took a class in drama as an elective.”

He slipped in the quarter and I dialed. A woman answered with “Fish and Wildlife.”

My father bent down to keep his ear close to the receiver. I chose to use a voice that sounded like an insurance spokesman doing a commercial to explain how much funerals cost. My father smiled and gave me a thumb’s up. He pointed at the memo pad. I said, “I need to speak to someone about the Lacey Act.”

The woman said, “What is this referring to?”

I didn’t want to get smart ass. In the sixth grade my English teacher had a thing about not ending a sentence with a preposition. My father kind of paddle-wheeled his right hand for me to hurry up. I said, “The Lacey Act.”

She told me to hold on, and then this man came on saying, “This is Agent Jørgensen.”

Agent! I thought. And I thought, Jørgensen isn’t the kind of last name you come across in Bark, South Carolina. What was that, some kind of Scandinavian name? Luckily I’d gone through puberty a little early, so my voice didn’t crack. I said, “Hey, Agent Jørgensen. My name’s…”

Through all this planning we hadn’t come up with viable code names. I paused, and then blurted out, “Mayor Jimmy Davis Wingard.”

My father had to step back a few feet and stifle a laugh. I understood that this might’ve been one of the few times I made him proud, kind of like the time I accidentally picked up a copperhead. Agent Jørgensen said, “How can I help you, Mayor Wingard?”

My father pointed down to about number six on the sheet. I read off, “I’m not sure about the Ins and Outs of the Lacey Act, but if,” I had to turn the page, “I believed someone had been importing exotic animals illegally, should I tell you about it?”

I don’t know how old the furniture at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife office happened to be, but I could hear Jørgensen roll his swivel chair back. Either his wheels squeaked or the backrest moaned. He said, “What kind of animals are we talking about?”

My father turned the page again and I listed off “Antelope, zebra, camel, kangaroo, and Galapagos tortoises.” Because I felt fairly sure that Jørgensen was truly a Scandinavian name, I lied. I finished up with, “Reindeer. Musk ox.”

Although our Carnegie library didn’t have a book on African animals, I’d come across a thin volume titled Arctic Circle Animals. Someone must’ve donated it. I don’t want to say that I have whatever the opposite of ADD might be, but back then I could become either obsessed or enthralled with whatever stood before me. I suffered from Attention SurplusDisorder, if anything. I stared and memorized all those animals, thought about how I needed to let Splotch in on mammals that didn’t live in the southeastern United States, and memorized where this book got misshelved, using the Dewey Decimal System, right between the History of Reigel Mills and the History of Greenwood Mills. 

From there, of course, nothing much else happened, outside of my giving up the address of Dr. Wayne Vardry, gynecologist, and an explanation of the extravagant gate, and how there may or may not have been a stable boy of sorts, plus a wife. When he asked for my phone number my father made the international sign for me to hang up, which I did.

“I couldn’t have done that any better, Carnell,” my father said. He hugged me. He said, “You want to drive the car home?”

I didn’t. Our luck could turn at any point, I thought. We got home ten minutes later and my father drove past our driveway where my mother stood, holding a rake. I don’t want to say that my lifelong history of high blood pressure started on this date, but it might’ve. 

Of course we didn’t make it home. My father drove straight to Splotch’s house and eased the Impala up against Splotch’s forward-pointed pick-up, which I should mention was a nice, boxy, sky blue C-10 Chevrolet, usually seen in movies that involve someone parked outside of a Ghost Town’s general store. My father and I walked around the back of the house and entered Splotch’s erstwhile garage where he stood—I’m not lying about this—standing back from a piece of wood leaned against an easel, his thumb in the air staring at it. Also not lying: I don’t want to say that we lived in some kind of alternative universe there in Bark, South Carolina, but Splotch worked on a portrait of a musk ox, as if he’d talked to Jørgensen himself. 

My father said, “The man at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife place seemed quite interested.”

“Did he say when they’d be coming to check things out?” Splotch said. He looked at me and said, “Hey, young Carnell, you doing okay?”

I said, “I did the talking.” When I said such, I used my insurance man in a commercial voice.

“Good man,” Splotch said. “I’m sorry I chickened out going with y’all. To be honest, I asked Mother about it, and she said I might get in trouble.”

Sometimes Splotch called his dead wife Mother, though we’d never been introduced to any child she and Splotch raised. Maybe she got out of Bark fifteen years earlier when she got the cancers and decided never to return which, I have to admit, started crossing my mind about the time I started looking at colleges. 

My father said, “I didn’t have any idea it would go so smoothly. Carnell did an exquisite job. Hell, he should’ve been in charge of any talks during the Camp David Accords,” which hadn’t happened that long ago. I got the reference, is what I’m saying. I kind of saw myself in that moment shaking hands with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.

I envisioned myself grasping hands with President Jimmy Carter, trying to outdo his great smile, then going off to eat peanut butter sandwiches with him and his wife. 

Splotch said, “I think I’m done with this one,” and signed his name in the bottom corner. He looked at his wristwatch. “Tar,” he said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready, you know.” He shuffled backwards and reached behind a shelf that held a dozen or so half-empty cans of regular house paint. He pulled out a bottle of Four Roses. “I’ve been waiting for a special occasion.”

Not that I’ve ever been responsible, but I thought it necessary to say, “Are you not opening Bark Bait today?” to my father.

He shook his head. He took the bottle handed over by Splotch. My father said, “You really need to see a dermatologist, James. Or a real doctor. I’ve heard that people with leukemia sometimes have blood come out of their pores,” which wasn’t entirely true, I learned later that week at the Carnegie library. 

“Well,” Splotch said.

“I’m serious. There’s no dermatologist in Bark, but I’d be happy to drive you over the Greenville, or up to Charlotte.”

Splotch said, “We’re about not to have a gynecologist, I’m betting, too.”

I don’t know where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife people I called happened to be sitting—I figured Atlanta, some three hours away—but they showed up in force within two hours, maybe less. Splotch got in my father’s Impala and we drove over to our house where my mother no longer raked. We entered the house triumphant as my mother perfected a Sloppy Joe recipe should she, indeed, get a job at a school cafeteria. She said, “Y’all take your places and be my taste-testers.”

And I don’t know if Dr. Wayne Vardry held some kind of sixth sense, but we got settled in enough to find him and his wife throwing suitcases in their Mercedes. A North American Van Lines truck showed up, and there went their beds, couches, an armoire, boxes of kitchen ware plainly marked on the outside of the cardboard, everything. I guess the USFW people called ahead of time, like saying, “Hey, do you mind if we come and ask you some questions?”

That’s a move even Boo Radley wouldn’t make, if you ask me. Hamm and Clov wouldn’t act thusly, if you ask me. 

We took turns eyeing the telescope. The antelopes grazed. Splotch said something about he should’ve clipped the fence between our land and the Vardrys’ land, how he should’ve snuck up and clipped the barbed wire where animals remained separated from us. 

I wasn’t drinking, of course. I thought it would’ve been a bad idea. We already had those howler monkeys roaming Bark. Why would any of us need more?