Calloustown

Static, Dead Air, Interference, Memory

My wife’s some kind of medical fluke, has a nerve running from her tear ducts to her pudenda. She can be out in the kitchen chopping an onion and the next thing everyone in the neighborhood’s wondering what’s got Mella ululating like a mournful Syrian. Back when we dated, and even for a few years after we married, I’d make sure one of those Feed Our Children telethons was on TV and begin to undress as Mella walked through the room, caught a glimpse of a peckish smudged-faced toddler, then cried until she neared climax as I found inconspicuous ways to pull off her panties. I don’t want to say that I’m lazy, but after twenty-six years I feigned the cable being out some nights when I knew that nothing aired save Old Yeller, My Dog Skip, Born Free, or any of those other sad movies. Maybe I’d tired of the bombardment of reminders that I couldn’t give Mella the satisfaction that, say, actor Tom Hanks could give her when in movies he spoke to a volleyball, or his wife Jenny died and left him with that bastard child, or he opened up a big soulless bookstore and forced that woman out of business, or that gigantic prisoner’s pet mouse got smushed, or he decided he didn’t want to be big anymore after talking to that mechanical fortune teller, or he came back to Normandy and talked at a grave marker.

I’ll give Mella this: She learned to mask her public orgasmic outbursts into sounding like something else. In a movie theatre she could make the noise of a rusty film reel spinning, for example. At a New Year’s Eve party, when that big ball’s going down and everyone’s crying, Mella sounds like champagne corks exploding. She’s an Amazonian bird in that way. She’s like nothing else in all others, though.

She got disability early on, of course, even though a qualified doctor finally signed her off as having some kind of rare chronic pain syndrome because he knew he’d be laughed out of the medical community if he wrote down somewhere on an official document, “She can’t work seeing as every workplace is sad and sadness makes her orgasmic,” blah blah blah. Between marriage and age thirty Mella worked as a high school English teacher who never gave less than an A, seeing as she couldn’t take the kids flipping out saying their parents would kill them or that they wouldn’t be able to get into college. I met Mella in college — we went to a place that had a perennial 0–11 football team, and let me tell you I got lucky every Saturday night after the autumn games. Hell, I thought every woman was like Mella and wondered how come the boys on my hall had such trouble getting laid—“Take them to a football game,” I said. “Then when you get back to your room, bring up something about how the quarterback got a concussion, which meant he’d probably be suffering from dementia later on in life. Go ahead and start taking off your clothes at this point while putting a Tom Waits album on the turntable.”

Anyway, Mella “retired” from the workplace and diddled around, so to speak, until eBay showed up. I had a regular job doing regular things that brought us a regular paycheck. I’m an actuary. An actuary! I’m supposed to be able to predict how long people will live, and whether my company can make money off of them. It’s more complicated than that, certainly, but not by much. Let me say this: I have professional friends in the business that I see daily. If I had to predict, and that’s what I do, how many times they have a meaningful, productive, non-reproductive, sexual experience with a woman, I’d say the odds were something like, oh, infinity-to-one.

“Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker that was good, Tank.”

She rarely called me “Tank,” but that’s how good it was there, pulled off on a dirt road outside Calloustown, South Carolina, on a Saturday morning, driving around aimlessly in search of small boxable items she could sell on eBay — advertising ashtrays, for instance, or first-edition books, or silver salt spoons. My father understood that people named Henry got called Hank. He wanted to name me “Tank,” my mother said no, and he somehow convinced her that he had an old uncle named Tenry: “I want to name our first son after my old Great Uncle Tenry,” he supposedly said.

“Tenry!” my mother said there on a bed after her water broke. “That’s different! With a name like that, he won’t be something everyday.”

Like an actuary.

My father called me Tank, my mother called me Tenry, I went to college, and I met a beautiful woman who should’ve been a Sioux named Mella-Who-Cries-and-Seizures-Loudly.

We had pulled off on the dirt road some seventy miles from where we lived and thirty miles from our destination because I’d made the mistake of putting the radio station on NPR on a Saturday morning before Car Talk, and there was this goddamn piece about an ex — opera singer who had at one time sung that sad “O Mio Babbino Caro” song in some kind of production in Tampa, which is sad enough without the story of this ex-opera star having fallen upon such hard times that she had to eat cat food because she didn’t have money, and her leg had some kind of nerve damage that made her foot flop around, and a daughter of hers died from a Lortab overdose, and her faithful husband died in a boating accident that involved two manatees, and then the bank finally foreclosed on her house because she’d missed a mortgage payment by several minutes.

“Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker,” Mella said, and I got back in the driver’s seat in order to take us onward. She put her seat back up. “I’m sorry. I needed that. I couldn’t handle it alone. Thank you. Thank you, Tank.”

I said, “Uh-huh.” I’d been preoccupied, up until that point, with the odds of a man living to the age of seventy-six after he’d been in cancer remission since the age of forty-five. What with all the new drugs and experiments and treatments, it wasn’t easy.

We drove back down the highway. I turned the radio off. I said, “You got anything special you’re looking for?”

My wife said, “Something’s wrong with the car.”

I thought we’d been hitting potholes, that maybe my eyes failed to discern changes in the macadam. I said, “Calloustown seems like the kind of place where you’ll find some old syrup containers, or singletrees, or metal Pepsi signs, or turkey calls, or battery-operated clapping monkeys, or Underwood typewriters, or arrowheads, or Edgefield pottery, or Vietnam-era Zippos, or confederate money, or dinosaur bones, or…” The car hopped onward, sure enough. And then that temperature needle flew up, showing that we overheated. I knew if I drove much longer my engine wouldn’t live another day. I said, “I need to pull over.”

Mella started crying.

I’m not sure what kind of so-called qualified town wants to have a funeral home as the first business after the “Welcome To” sign, but I eased into the parking lot of the Glymph Funeral Home and put it in park. I said to Mella, “This is not sad. This is one of those things. Do not make a scene, please. We’re all right.”

I got out and opened the hood, as if I knew what I was doing. Well, I did know that every damn belt shouldn’t be snapped and dangling from its water pump, alternator, power steering, and A/C compressor pulleys. I looked down into the mysterious cavern of my car’s innards, saw what seemed to have sprang, and yelled out to Mella, “Look what we did at our age! We’re fifty! We killed us some rubber gaskets and whatnot, is what I’m saying. Goddamn. You and I were humping so hard we broke everything.”

The front end steamed and pinged and tick-tick-tick-tick-ticked to the point where I could do nothing but close down the hood for fear of getting shot in the head by a rod. Mella nodded inside the car, then patted the driver’s seat. She said, “I’ve seen this happen on TV. It’ll be all right. I saw this happen one time in a movie that involved these two guys having to drive through the desert.”

I remembered the time she’d watched that movie — a lizard died, and Mella started crying, and the next thing you know I had her backed up against the bookcase. I remember it well, because Mella was the reader in the family, what with her English teacher background, and while I had her there I got to looking over the titles and thought, I really ought to read Of Human Bondage, and Wuthering Heights, and Ethan Frome. That’s what I thought back then. But here I said, “We need to call Triple A.”

She said, “If I call them, and they come out here to help us, the next thing you know our rates will go up.”

There were no clouds in the sky. I reached down at my slightly wet balls and jerked my khakis left and right a few times. I said, “Don’t do this again, honey. Please don’t do this.”

One time we had a hailstorm that damaged our roof and cars mercilessly, but Mella wouldn’t call the insurance agent seeing as it would jack our bill.

She cried. She got out her cell phone, though, and flipped it open. “I don’t know Triple A’s number,” she said. “Here.”

What did I know? I punched up my buddy Aaron the actuary, seeing as I knew his number, but I learned that we were in a place with no bars. We were stuck in a “fuck you for trying to contact the outside world” kind of place.

“Man, we need to find a payphone or something.” I thought, when’s the last time I saw a payphone? I thought, Mella ought to buy up payphones and sell them on eBay. I said, “Please don’t cry. I’ll go inside.”

“I’m not going to wait out here in the parking lot of the dead. The parking lot of people who wait to go see the dead. The parking lot.”

I doubt I have to go into much detail or speculation about what might happen to an orgasmic-by-sadness woman walk ing into an institution of embalmment. I’d learned to live by the “we probably won’t see these people again” dictum long before. I said, “Let’s go see if they got a landline.”

Funeral homes in the South, for the most part, do not vary. This was a big antebellum structure with a foyer and four viewing areas that had one time been parlors of sorts. The family lived upstairs, I supposed, and the bodies first showed up downstairs, just like in the movies that caused my wife to cry. I said, “Anyone home?” like people do.

My wife and I held hands.

Listen, the stereotypical mortician didn’t come out from behind some curtains there at the Glymph Funeral Home. I don’t know where he’d been standing before, but he plain appeared. He said, “Are you here for the Munson services?” And like that, I jumped. And Mella began laughing. Laughing! What kind of weird dyslexia is that? Right away I thought back about to how she and I had never been to a funeral service together — both our parents seemed needful to crank onward to the age of 140 or thereabouts, something I’d never have predicted as an actuary, and was glad that they all had different supplemental health insurance policies than the one offered by my company.

I said, “No,” after making a noise that might’ve sounded like “Muhhh!” according to Mella. “No, it seems that every belt under my hood popped at the same time and our cell phones aren’t working for some reason.”

The funeral home director said, in that quiet voice always used by funeral home directors — what did their college football team’s cheerleaders sound like? — “You’re early for the Munson viewing. His family’s receiving friends at two o’clock.”

Mella shook her head. She laughed again, but she said, “I was so sorry to hear about Mr. Munson. Tragic, really.”

I said, “My name’s Tenry,” and stuck out my hand. I’d never shaken hands with a funeral home director, and I wanted to see if his hand felt dry and scaly from all the embalming fluid. It didn’t. “No, we’re not here for the Munson thing. I was wondering if we could use your phone.” I looked at my wristwatch. We had an hour.

“Harold Glymph,” he said. “I see. I’m sorry. I was preoccupied. There’s some talk that there might be a little bit of a brouhaha at the viewing. Nelroy Munson’s widow has reason to believe that…well, you know, seeing as where Nelroy had his heart attack.”

Mella said, “Who could blame her?!” and I understood that she’d ventured into some kind of role-playing improv game. She said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to ask a funeral director one question, and that question is, ‘Why?’ I mean, I know most of the time a son takes over for his father. I wonder what percentage of morticians come from a family of morticians.” She looked at me. I shrugged. “It’s like sourdough bread starter.”

I said, “I guess I don’t really need to use your phone if you can just give me the name of a decent mechanic. Place this small, I can probably just walk over there.” I looked past Mr. Glymph into the next room and saw a white-white man laid out in a casket, or at least his head. He parted his hair in the middle in such a way that made him look like he’d just broken a lake’s surface.

“I think it’s quite a percentage,” Mr. Glymph said to my wife. He pointed to the left, toward Calloustown’s couple blocks, I think to show me where a mechanic worked. “I don’t know for sure.” He started smiling and shook his head. He touched my wife’s upper arm. “A lot of young men become lawyers in order to work in their daddy’s law office. Dentists seem to have dentist sons. But it can’t be anywhere near what it is in my line of work. I might be one of the exceptions. You know why I got interested in running a funeral home? I got picked on bad as a kid here. I wasn’t one of the Munsons or Harrells. About ninety percent of the population here in Calloustown’s made up of Munsons and Harrells, and they’re all still ticked off that General Sherman swerved away from their ancestors’ town because he didn’t see it fit to waste fire on. I don’t know when exactly I realized that my best bet for retribution came in seeing my classmates naked. I’d be the only one in town to say I’ve seen everyone who ever made fun of me naked. Harold Glymph,” he said, and stuck out his hand to shake again.

Well of course Mella started crying when he finished the story. She said, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” which was hyperbolic, seeing as the saddest thing she’d ever heard had to do with Tom Hanks walking away from Meg Ryan without knowing the truth of the situation.

“I might be the richest man in Calloustown,” Harold Glymph said. “It ain’t all that sad. Listen,” he turned to me, “there’s one real mechanic in town. I’d rather not send business to this old boy named Mink, if you know what I mean. He’ll more than likely fix your fan belt and puncture your radiator. So you can borrow my car and drive out to an AutoZone about ten miles away. If you ain’t comfortable driving my car, we can take the belts off mine — if they fit — put them on yours, and then you can drive back here and we’ll swap everything back to normal.”

Listen, understand that the first thing I thought went something like, what a great, generous man. How lucky were we to have car trouble right by the Glymph Funeral Home?

I said, “Oh, I don’t want to bother you any. It would probably be faster and safer just to deal with that Mink fellow.”

Mella walked right off from us. She started sniffling, and then she let out one of her loud blurts. She wandered into the viewing room of Mr. Munson, draped herself on the closed-up end of his casket, and started having orgasms. Harold Glymph said, “Is she all right?”

“No,” I said. “She has some kind of weird thing about crying.”

“I’ve seen it before,” the mortician said. “Some women have a nerve that goes directly between their tear ducts and nookie. I’ve talked to doctors about it before, but they say it’s a medical impossibility. Who would know better? I’ll tell you who: the man who drains a woman and looks around, and a husband, that’s who.”

Before we could get back on track concerning my automotive predicament, the door opened and a middle-aged woman came inside wearing a lavender hat with four-inch black netting in the front. Harold Glymph said, “Ms. Harrell.”

She looked like she used the same make-up as dead Mr. Munson. She said, “We know how everyone’s talking. We thought I’d come early and get out of here so’s they’s no trouble.”

“This is Mr. Tenry,” the mortician said. I didn’t correct him. What would it matter? It wasn’t like I’d see these people again.

Mella let out a giant moan in the other room. One of those oh-god-oh-god-oh-god-yes-yes-yes moans. “Mr. Tenry’s wife,” Harold Glymph said, jerking his head once to the back. “Let me go make that call about your car.”

“We had car trouble,” I said to Ms. Harrell. “We’re not from around here.”

The woman looked at me for about five beats too long, the same way I look at people with vertical wrinkles lined up like hatch marks between their noses and upper lips when they tell me they’ve never smoked. The woman stared at me, then moved her head toward Mella in the next room. “Well, welcome to Calloustown, Mr. Tenry,” she said. “Is that a French name, Tenry?”

I couldn’t help myself but to say, “Oui, madame,” only because I realized that no other actuary in America, at that particular time, spoke French. Or at least the likelihood of it was miniscule.

Ms. Harrell curtsied, I swear to God. My wife blurted out from the viewing room, “Right there, right there!” like that.

“I better go check on Mella.”

Ms. Harrell grabbed my arm. “Are you okay with this?”

I said, “She’s got a problem. She has an undiagnosed problem.”

She walked two steps forward and craned her neck into the other room. “Well I guess I can say that I have a problem with it. I thought I was Nelroy’s only mistress.”

I thought, the chances of Nelroy’s parents being named Nelta and Roy were one hundred percent. Ms. Harrell started walking into the other room with some conviction. I said, “No, wait,” but evidently she didn’t hear me. Mr. Harold Glymph floated back into the room and said, “Mink will be at the viewing today. He said he’d be more than happy to work on your car after he pays his respects to the deceased.”

Mella walked back in without Ms. Harrell and said, “Let’s go sit in the car and wait.” I knew what that meant — she’d been interrupted, and she needed to “complete” her little “chore.”

I said to Harold Glymph, “Um.”

Ms. Harrell started making noises there next to Nelroy’s casket, noises that sounded like the blubbery sobs my wife had made earlier, but without the additional outcome. The last thing I heard was her yelling, “We were supposed to be together, Nelroy. You know that for a fact. You and I and God knew it. And the fellow who checked us into the room.”

I wanted to be home, looking at meaningless paperwork.

We sat in our car with the ignition turned on, the windows cracked, the radio turned to the only station we could find in Calloustown, an AM selection that on this particular Saturday morning ran one of those doctor call-in shows. People called up this guy and asked questions about snake bites and numbness, about temporary blindness and bleeding pores. I couldn’t tell if it was a local doctor or one of those syndicated shows. As an actuary I guess I’m supposed to love doctors who do call-in shows — I need people to live a long time so they keep paying off monthly premiums but don’t get sick enough to go see a specialist — but nowadays I feel as though too many doctors won’t let people plain die when they should. And it all goes back to the insurance companies, which makes me sad. It doesn’t make me so sad that I cry and soil my underwear in half-zygote, but it makes me feel as though everything’s doomed and hopeless.

“I’d like to have those wrought-iron wall sconces inside the funeral home,” Mella said. “I could sell those things for some good money on eBay. There’s a whole wrought-iron sconce-collecting community out there.”

From where we sat in our car we would be able to see everyone who came in to look at dead Nelroy Munson. I could tell already that it was going to be similar to sitting at a drive-in B movie horror show, or like standing off to the side of a fair’s freak tent. I said, “I just want to get the car fixed and get out of here.”

A woman called in to the radio program and said, “Long time listener, first time caller, Dr. Ubinger,” which made me realize that we listened to a syndicated show, seeing as there was no one named Ubinger within four hundred miles of where we, minute by minute, succumbed. “I have been passing out for no reason over the last year or so. My blood pressure’s fine. I’m thirty-six years old. I’m five foot six and weigh 145 pounds. I work out four times a week at the gym and take yoga classes twice a week. I lift weights, do aerobics, swim, and I ran a marathon last year! I rode my bike in the P-to-P road race on Groundhog Day! But I’ll be walking out to get the mail, and the next thing you know my neighbor’s throwing water on my head trying to revive me.”

Dr. Ubinger said, of course, “P-to-P?”

“Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney. It’s a big thing around here — for cyclists, at least. Which means it’s a big thing!”

I said, “She’s passing out all the time because she doesn’t have any oxygen going to her brain.”

Mella said, “You remember that time?” which I knew she would say. If I’d’ve turned on the radio to a hard rock station and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name?” or “That Smell” came on, she’d find a reason to tell this story, too.

A carload of mourners drove up and parked. The women looked like Ms. Harrell and the men like dead Nelroy Mun-son. I said, “Go on.”

“Man, you’d think none of those men had ever seen a prone woman.”

We’d been at the mall. It wasn’t my idea. I went off somewhere to buy Mella some overpriced Le Creuset cast-iron pots, because she thought she couldn’t pour a can of Campbell’s soup in anything less. She went wandering around, as far as I could piece together later, and saw a sad kid sitting on Santa’s lap who asked for a bottle of hand sanitizer only so that when her daddy hit her momma on the face she no longer got infections from his germ-ridden fingernails. Mella cried, she got all orgasmic, and she crumpled to the floor. Someone yelled out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” just like on the TV shows.

I lugged my pots back to where I was supposed to meet my wife — right by a temporary special occasion holiday incense kiosk — to find her surrounded by a female allergist, a male dermatologist, a guy with a Ph.D. in history, a woman gynecologist, a chiropractor who seemed to be ambisexual, and two men wearing tweed coats with honorary doctorates for their contributions to the well-being of South Carolina. When Mella came to she said both “What’s your name?” to the strangers who wanted to know what caused her to flail around orgasmic, and “What’s that smell?” to the incense nearby.

There in the stalled and relentless car, I said to my wife, “Yeah, I remember.”

I didn’t hear what Dr. Ubinger said to the faintful woman. The next caller came on after a commercial concerning Gold Bond foot powder to say he had a boil on his next-to-big toe. He seemed to be either in pain or ecstasy about the situation.

Mella said, “You should pop the hood. Maybe this mechanic has a good soul and will understand how he should come over and fix us up before he visits the dead. The dead can’t do anything about it. Pop the hood.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. I reached down and pulled the latch, then got out of the car to lift the hood rightly. I thought about Thucydides as I performed this action, for I thought of Thucydides on an hourly basis — he might’ve been the godfather of actuaries. At least that’s what an economics professor told me in college. I don’t know if Thucydides had anything to do with insuring soldiers during the Peloponnesian War, but if he did I bet it was an easier time than my insuring that Mella didn’t unconsciously act fool in public.

The time passed, as time does. People showed up. Dr. Ubinger talked to a man about his theory that lima beans might ward off skin cancer. Mella and I watched as people dressed in polyester suits and near-gingham dresses got out of Ford and Buick sedans, out of Dodge and Chevy trucks, in order to look down on a man who may or may not have owned a quirky ability to woo local women outside of his betrothed.

“There are people called Slopeheads up in Tennessee,” I said. “They’re not supposed to be insured, according to all the actuarial charts and tables. I might have to talk about people around here to my bosses. This could mean a big bonus for me, one way or the other.”

“It’s sad,” Mella said.

“Please don’t start.”

“I mean it. People dying every day. Before their time. Look inside there.” She pointed to Harold Glymph’s establishment. “You know for a fact that we just witnessed unrequited love involved in that tragedy. I’ve never known unrequited love to really happen in the real world. If Calloustown is the real world.”

The parking lot filled up. Mella got out and slowly walked around, looking through people’s car windows. Sometimes she wondered what people kept in their backseats, and she made a point to later acquire and sell these objects over the Internet. At least she didn’t cry or howl. I tried to imagine what went on inside the funeral home. Did Ms. Harrell stand in the receiving line, right next to Nelroy Munson’s widow? Did she consider the sconce as a likely weapon?

Mella wandered back, smiled at me, and closed our hood. When she got back in the car she hummed one of the more famous dirges, though off-key. She told me that everyone in Calloustown took great care in keeping their car interiors free from collectibles, child safety seats, or fast-food wrappers, though she did spy more than a few empty liquor bottles. Something happened to the radio station, and we barely heard the doctor talking about the importance of old-fashioned hardback books, for a reason that I couldn’t tell. I think the topic dealt with either depression or carpal tunnel syndrome.

I said, “Why’d you close the hood? The mechanic might not find us.”

Mella scooted over. She said she wanted to look at the sky in front of us, seeing as there were clouds that looked like the ones she remembered from childhood.