Calloustown

Spastic

The Calloustown station remains open twenty-four hours a day, though no Greyhound or Trailways bus has pulled up for passengers to disembark in fifteen years. The building — plastered-over cement blocks that nearly look stucco, thus exotic among the mobile homes, wooden bungalows, shingle-sided shotgun shacks, and fieldstone salt boxes — holds, still, a linoleum-floored waiting room with chairs shoved in three rows along the walls. There are two restrooms, both with working sinks and toilets, and a glass-fronted booth where someone sold tickets, offered advice, and tagged luggage. A television’s mounted in the southwest corner of the waiting room, six inches from touching the ceiling. There’s a half-filled gumball machine, the proceeds of which aid small children with birth defects. No one has ever thought to crack open the globe and steal its pennies. An empty cigarette machine with a rust-splattered mirror and rusted silver knobs stands in the corner—$1.75 a pack for Lark, Camel, Lucky Strikes, Pall Mall, Viceroy, Kent, Winston, Marlboro. There’s the smell of Juicy Fruit in the air, of plastic, of instant coffee.

The personnel’s vanished, the bus line having chosen a different route between Columbia and Savannah, but the electricity’s still on. Because there’s no community center, YMCA, Lions Club, rec center, Moose Club, Jaycees, Ki-wanis International, Rotary Club, or Shriners Club in Calloustown, the more community-minded men — the ones who’ve lived to retirement age, or given up altogether — meet daily at the depot. They have come to realize that their town needs a famous resident in order to attract tourists, which will revive the economy. They have realized that it’s better to have a diverse population instead of nearly everyone named either Munson or Harrell. These free thinkers have concluded that annual festivals — such as their own Sherman Knew Nothing celebration to point out all that the general missed by swerving away between Savannah and Columbia during his march — don’t bring in the recognition or revenue. How can, like the old days, a Calloustown child grasp enough knowledge and culture to understand the importance and benefits of fleeing?

Munny Munson says daily, “If our kids fear the outside world, or never comprehend its offerings — good and bad — then those kids will remain here. You think the gene pool’s not wet enough to emit a mirage now, just wait another two generations. We got to do something.”

On a particularly bleak day, there in the waiting room, one of the other Munsons, or one of a number of men named Harrell, might say, “Low IQs means less personal hygiene. Less hygiene means more contagious diseases. And then everyone dies and people elsewhere might never appreciate William Tecumseh Sherman’s apparent myopia.” Or one of the men might go off saying, “Lower IQs means less ambition. Less ambition means not taking care of the yard. High grass means field rats. Field rats attract snakes. Bite from a viper on an ambitionless slow-witted person with influenza would be fatal.”

For eight hours a day these men nod, clear their throats, blurt out versions of slippery-slope possibilities, all the time while watching The Price Is Right, soap operas, reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island, and Hogan’s Heroes. They veer from local, state, or national news—“I’m depressed enough, change the channel, I think that one station’s doing an Addams Family marathon”—and no one ever questions how they could get cable television in a closed-down bus station where no one admits to paying the electric or water bills.

They don’t brag about sexual conquests, or reminisce about first times, for each of them has a wife whose brother and cousins stand nearby.

Mack Sloan wipes his soles on the worn rubber Trailways mat out front, turns the knob, and walks into the waiting room. At first he thinks that the men congregated inside laugh at him — as if they judge a man by the overalls he wears and anyone who decides to go out in public wearing fluorescent warm-up pants and a matching windbreaker stands worthless. Then Mack Sloan realizes that the laughter emanates from the television program’s laugh track, the volume cranked full. The men watch The Honeymooners.

Mack Sloan nods. Munny Munson stands up and turns the volume knob. He says, “Are you the man from the Guinness Book of Records we been waiting on?”

Mack shakes his head. He says, “I’m turned around a little. Any of you men know where I can find the local high school?”

Flint Harrell stands up and leans backward awkwardly so that this stranger — the first non-Calloustowner to enter the bus station in fifteen years — can admire Flint’s gold-plated belt buckle embossed with SOUTHERN REGION DISTRICT 4 LEVEL 6 SENIOR DIVISION THIRD PLACE HORSESHOES. Flint says, “If you looking catch a ride there from here, you’re late by 1996. Last bus come through ended up taking people down to those Atlanta Olympics.”

Mack Sloan does not feel threatened. He almost laughs. This is perfect — he loves being the first scout in a backwards area, coming out of nowhere like some kind of savior to extract an unknown high school athlete from humble beginnings, promise questionable future monetary outcomes. “No, I got a car out front. Just looking for the high school.”

Munny Munson says, “We been waiting on the World Record fellow. Me and Lloyd one time played dominoes for sixty-seven straight hours straight. That’s got to be some kind of record.”

And then, as if in a rural AA meeting when the floor opens up for personal testimonial one-upmanship, each man offers his declaration:

“I can lace a pair of logging boots in fourteen seconds.”

“I ate four whole barbecued armadillos in twelve minutes.”

“I’ve stared at thirty-two solar eclipses and ain’t gone blind yet.”

“I trained an ostrich to clean gutters.”

Mack Sloan says, “Okay. This sounds like quite a town. Listen, I know it’s pretty small here and everyone’s probably related to one another. Do any of you know about Brunson Pettigru, the track star? I’m supposed to go clock this fellow and see if he can really do what they say.” Sloan pulls a stop watch from the pocket of his windbreaker, as if to prove his being an authority.

The waiting room regulars quit talking. What did this man mean by “related to one another”? Had word seeped out about the gene pool?

Munny Munson says, “Track star? No. Never heard of him.”

“We don’t even have a team anymore, not that I know of,” says Flint Harrell.

“Let me see that fancy timepiece,” Lloyd says. “I could use one these when I dismantle and reassemble my 1970 Allis Chalmers D270. I believe I got the record unofficially, you know.” Then he went into how the world record take-apart-and-put-back-together-a-tractor man might pull in visitors to Calloustown, and then they’d buy hot dogs, and then everyone would gain financially, and then there would be no more threat of pestilence within the failing, bleak, doomed community.

Mack Sloan, indeed, had not heard of Brunson Pettigru via Track and Field News, The Florida Relays, Runner’s World, or Parade magazine. No, a man named Coach Strainer — who taught PE over the Internet through the South Carolina Virtual School — boasted of his unknown students on his Facebook page wall: 57 % of his students could figure out their BMI. One kid had taken online physical education so seriously that he’d dropped five pounds over the semester, and another could explain all the rules of two different darts games, plus badminton. And then there was Brunson Pettigru of Calloustown, a homeschooled white kid, a six-foot two-inch, 155-pound country boy who had — once he fully understood the cardiovascular system’s nuances — dropped his quarter-mile time from fifty-five seconds to forty-six, his half mile from 2:08 to 1:50.

Sloan understands that, even at a regular high school with traditional teams, coaches exaggerate. He’d scouted, in the past, a boy who heaved a shot put eighty feet, only to find out the boy’s father worked in a machine shop and had shaved weight from the iron sphere. So Mack contacted the S.C. Department of Education, which sent him to the Department of Charter Schools, which sent him to the Department of Online Schools, which eventually offered to have Coach Strainer—“one of our finest educators”—contact Mack in Oregon.

“I didn’t believe the kid, either,” Strainer had said from his office in Myrtle Beach, which doubled as his dining room. “But I seen it with my own two eye! I got me a friend retired down here from the CIA and he seen it, too, and says they’s no way the tape’s been sped-up doctored.”

One of the waiting room men points out the door and says, “School’s down there a piece. You won’t miss it. They mascot’s a ostrich, so they’s a big bird right out front of the place. I mean, a sculpture one.”

Another man says, “I know who you mean. He ain’t no runner, though. He’s a spastic.”

“We don’t want to be famous-known for spastics,” says Munny Munson.

Brunson Pettigru’s mother homeschooled her only son, for she viewed the public school system in general disdainfully, and the Calloustown school district in particular. Mrs. Pettigru did not fear that her child might receive secular teaching in regards to science, literature, and religion. To the contrary, she believed a public school filled with children of one denomination only — a school with a population made up almost exclusively of Harrells and Munsons — might corrupt her son into believing in virgin births, no dinosaurs, ribcage wives, and talking bushes. Unlike ninety-nine percent of homeschooling parents in South Carolina, she didn’t choose to direct her son’s studies so that they would include daily recitations or sing-alongs of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer, the Star-Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, and the Second Amendment of the Constitution. No, Betty Pettigru feared that touched-by-God born-again teachers might chance reprimands and recrimination for “doing what God believes to be right.”

“If you want to see yearbook photos of people who did what they thought God wanted them to do, go check out any state’s Department of Corrections file of mugshots,” she told her son often, as she had told her husband, Finis, before he gave up and died of a heart attack in the middle of trying to break the world record for smoking cigarettes in a twenty-four-hour period.

Mack Sloan drives up to Calloustown High and sees Brunson wearing vintage gray drawstring sweatpants down at the cinder track that surrounds what might have been a football field. There isn’t but one goalpost, for the Calloustown Ostriches won a game due to forfeit three years earlier — the team from Forty-Five had been forced to suspend all of its players at the last minute when its appeal was denied by the South Carolina High School Athletic League, in regards to having a number of thirty-year-old players who didn’t go to college — and the fans in attendance stormed the vacant field and with the use of Harmon Harrell’s tractor knocked over the goalpost and carried it into town. From that point on, when a visiting team scored a touchdown, or wanted to attempt a field goal, the teams had to turn around if indeed they had no goalpost in which to direct a kick.

“You’re Brunson?” Mack says when he gets down to the field. “You’re Brunson’s mom?” he asks the woman who stands there, holding what appears to be wide rubber bands meant for strapping furniture to a flatbed’s frame. “I’m Mack Sloan.”

Mrs. Pettigru says, “I wouldn’t be allowing this to happen if there was homecolleging.”

Mack says, “What are those things?” and points at the rubber bands.

He hasn’t looked closely at his prospect yet. Brunson wears eyeglasses that appear to be fake, the lenses are so thick. He has them tied to his head with what looks like a bra strap. And in a voice that Mack would later describe as something between a tracheotomist’s and a kettle spewing steam, Brunson says, “Because of the cardiovascular limits of the heart vis-à-vis oxygen intake, I tie my forelimbs with these industrial bands before I run so that my most vital organ vis-à-vis the running process does not need to validate anything between my glenohumeral joint and my phalanges.”

Mack looks at Brunson. He thinks, what if aliens come down to the planet and discover this guy? Wouldn’t they wonder if they’d never left home? He says, “All right. You seem to be the kind of guy who might have pre-med in his future.”

Mrs. Pettigru, wearing a cotton-print dress, says, “My Brunson has always been interested in animals. Does your college have a veterinary program?”

“I like cheetahs,” Brunson says. “They’re the fastest. If this school had been called the Calloustown Cheetahs, I might have had to fight my mother about allowing me to matriculate. What’s your college’s mascot?”

“It’s a duck. They’re not much on land, but they can fly. Some of them can fly.” Mack looks down at Brunson’s shoes. The boy wears a pair of regular, flat and slick-bottomed Keds-brand canvas boatshoes. One of the Pettigrus took a bottle of Wite-Out and marked a Nike swoosh on the sides. Mack says, “Duck.”

Brunson twists and ties his upper biceps with the two rubber bands. He sits down cross-legged on the track. His mother says, “It’s important for Brunson to achieve the correct amount of tingling in his arms before he runs a lap.”

Mack Sloan thinks, there’s no way I’ll ever recommend offering this kid a scholarship. He thinks, people think members of our track team are freaks already? — get a load of this new guy! He thinks, hell, I’m here — I might as well see what happens. He thinks, cardiovascular vis-à-vis cheetah glenohumeral joint and my phalanges veterinary school vital organ homecolleging.

“A fun thing to do is have me run a quarter mile without the additional garments, and then compare and contrast what happens once my heart no longer has to pump blood to needless expanses,” Brunson says.

“Okay,” Mack says. He’d dealt with runners who insisted on smoking pot the night before a race, runners who drank six beers the night before a race, runners who had to fuck two different women the night before a race and then another one a couple hours before the starting gun. Mack had dealt with runners — world-class runners — who insisted on eating sushi, or Vienna sausages, or Fig Newtons. He’d had runners who had to watch The Godfather: Part III the night before a big race, and others who insisted that virgins recite the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

But not this.

“You about ready?” Mack says.

Betty Pettigru says, “I’m going to take my spot in the stands. I always sit in the stands. When I’m in the stands, my son’s never lost a race.”

“Wait a minute,” Mack says. “So you’re on the track team here?”

“I’ve never been in an actual race,” Brunson says. “Do you think that might make a difference? I mean, psychologically, it might make me run either faster or slower.”

While I’m down this way, Mack Sloan thinks, I might as well go down to Myrtle Beach and kill that Coach Strainer dude.

“Uh-oh,” Brunson says. He stands up, and half lifts one arm toward the parking lot. “Somebody’s here.”

Mack turns around to see every man whom he’d met at the bus depot. They walk down the embankment. One of them says, “We just thought we’d come on down here and see if we got us a savior.”

Mack pulls the stopwatch out of his pocket. He says, “I didn’t even think to ask — are you sure this is a quarter-mile track? It looks like a quarter mile, but are you sure?”

“It’s 440 yards,” Brunson says. “I’ve circled it ten times with the Lufkin MW18TP Measuring Wheel, and it came out to 13,200 feet. And then I divided that by three, which comes out to 4400 yards, and then divided that by ten, which comes out to 440 yards. I thought about doing a hundred laps, just to make sure, but it was getting dark and I still had to write a term paper for my mother comparing and contrasting the Suez Canal with the Panama Canal. A cheetah can swim across both of them, by the way. A cheetah’s not the fastest swimmer, but it can swim.”

“I’m ready!” Betty Pettigru yells from the wooden bleachers.

The bus depot men arrive trackside. One of them says, “I don’t know.”

Mack Sloan says to Brunson, “You don’t need any blocks or anything? Don’t you think you better stretch, or warm up a little? You might want to take off your sweats, too.”

Munny Munson says, “I still believe we got a better shot at making Calloustown famous if we become home to a serial killer, as opposed to a spastic.” He says, “Hell, Betty Pettigru’s ex-husband had the right idea, up until he smoked himself to death.”

“I’d like to fuck her,” one of the Harrells says. “She ain’t nobody’s sister.”

Brunson says, “I’ve heard about those block things. Do you think they’ll really help?” He pulls off his sweatpants to reveal what may or may not be an old pair of his mother’s hot pants from the 1970s. When he toes the line, his arms swing half useless.

_______

“Go!” Mack Sloan says. He’s performed this task so many times he can’t remember. He has timed prospective athletes in thirty states. He’s gone down to Central America and found sprinters, South America for middle-distance runners, and Africa for long-distance runners.

Brunson takes off. His mother bellows, “Catch that big cat, honey, catch that big cat!” and makes some odd noises in between, like long, extended Ummms that might point toward a nervous tic, or Tourette’s. Mack Sloan keeps his eyes on his prospect, but the Munson and Harrell men stare up toward the stands. Betty Pettigru’s mid-sentence, guttural noises — by the time Brunson hits the 220 mark — now sound as if they’re caused by orgasm.

“Jesus Christ,” Mack says. “Twenty-two seconds flat.” He yells out to Brunson, “Keep it coming, my man. Push through it. Keep your form!”

Brunson takes the back straightaway and — there was no way for Mack Sloan to explain this later to his colleagues — his arms go haywire. He keeps running well, and stays in his lane, but his arms, out of blood flow, look similar to those twenty-five-foot ripstop nylon sky tubes normally used for advertising purposes in the parking lots of car dealerships, mattress warehouses, and buffet-style restaurants managed by the criminally insane.

Was the kid dancing? Mack thinks. Is he fighting demons that no one but his mother — still ululating in the stands — can see?

He clicks the stopwatch when Brunson hits the finish line, slows down to a jog, and continues forward, untying the rubber bands from his arms. Forty-six flat, sure enough, just like Virtual Coach Strainer declared. Mack Sloan looks up in the bleachers and notices how Betty Pettigru sits with her legs splayed open. He looks at the bus depot men and says, “I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years. I’ve been coaching since I was out of college. This is the damnedest place I’ve ever seen. Is this one of those trick TV shows? Is someone playing a trick on me, and I’m being filmed covertly?”

Munny Munson says, “I bet I know why old Finis’s heart give out, and it didn’t have nothing to do with smoking 144 cigarettes in a row the way he done. Hot damn that woman’s a regular vixen.”

“She appears to love her son, you got that right,” says Mack Sloan. He calls Brunson back to him, but keeps looking up in the stands. Betty Pettigru has pulled her hair up in some kind of topknot. “Listen, don’t you men have something to do with yourselves? I’m working here.”

Mack jogs down the track. He says, “Good God, man, you can flat-out fly. But I don’t know about those rubber bands around your arms. I’m not so sure they’d let you run like that in a race, what with the possibility of injuring other runners. Especially in the eight hundred.”

Brunson says, “What about if I go ahead and cut off my arms? Is that what you want? I’m not going to cut off my arms just to please you.”

Mrs. Pettigru comes down from the bleachers and says, “Brunson. Don’t start, Brunson.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Brunson has some anger issues,” Mrs. Pettigru says. “That might be an overstatement. He has some issues with patience.”

“Can I see you run without those strange rubber bands?” Mack asks.

Betty Pettigru stands close to Mack. Is she flirting with me? he wonders. Is this her way of seeing her son get a scholarship?

“Do you have no imagination?” Brunson blurts out. “You saw me run once. Now imagine me running again, without the rubber bands that enhance my cardiovascular capabilities.”

Mrs. Pettigru says, “Brunson,” again, this time drawling out his name, in a higher pitch.

“Is there any place we can sit down and talk?” Mack asks. He wonders if the rubber bands affected the oxygen supply to Brunson’s head, thus causing the sudden evident fury.

“I’m sorry,” Brunson says. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says, and takes off running around the track, then over a fence and into the woods.

Betty Pettigru looks at her wristwatch. She says, “I’m about ready for a martini. What about you, Coach?”

There’s no one inside Worm’s Bar and Grill. There’s no bartender, either. Betty Pettigru walks behind the counter, pulls a fifth of Absolut off the shelf, and pours four shots into a metal shaker, throws in some ice, swirls it around, and pours two glasses to the brim. “I like mine dry,” she says. “You want an olive in yours? Worm doesn’t believe in cocktail onions.”

“Yeah, I’ll take a couple olives,” Mack says. He had followed Betty on the one-mile drive between the high school and downtown Calloustown, and noticed that she drank something from a Thermos along the way.

Betty Pettigru slides a jar of Thrifty Maid — brand green olives down the counter. She says, “This should answer any questions about why I didn’t move away when Brunson’s daddy died. Not many places around will let you walk in and drink on the honor system.”

“Will he be all right?” Mack asks. “I’m worried about him.”

“No, he’s probably going to stay dead. We had him cremated, so even the most advanced advances in science won’t bring him back.” She walks around the counter and sits down on a stool beside Mack.

She puts her hand on his shoulder.

“I’m talking about your son. Is he going to be all right, that’s what I meant.”

“He’s fine. He has a lot of things on his mind. He took the SAT and scored perfect on the math but only made a 740 on the verbal. He’s taking the thing again.”

Mack drinks and says, “This is like straight vodka.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do when he leaves the nest. Listen. Do you think the university would want a student who scored a perfect SAT and can run that fast? I’m willing to bet that just about every college would want such a student.”

Mack thinks, is that lipstick, or are her lips really that red? He thinks, I need to make some promises I can’t keep. “I’m thinking Brunson wouldn’t have a problem getting a full ride.”

“And what about me?” Betty says. She scoots over closer. “I hear tell of some colleges hiring on parents, you know, to work at the college. Coach. Work as a secretary. Me, I could fit right in teaching in the education department, seeing as I’m batting nearly perfect with my past students.”

Mack Sloan nods and laughs. He says, “I don’t know of any bars that’ll let you go in there and drink on the honor system, though.”

She puts her hand on his left thigh. Mack thinks, no, no, no, no, no. He says, “It’s only track and field, Ms. Pettigru. It’s not like football or basketball.”

“I like to do this in alphabetical order,” she says, getting up from the barstool. “Absolut done, Grey Goose next.” She looks at the bottles lined up. “Worm got some Ketel One! That’ll be a good segue before I get on to that cheap shit Seagram’s and Smirnoff, before heading out to the,” she picks up a bottle and raises her eyebrows to Mack, “Three Olives.”

“You’re going to have to go that route alone, I’m afraid,” Mack says. “I got to get down the road and check out a two-miler from somewhere,” he lies, though in fact he’s scheduled to talk to a distance runner from Georgia tomorrow.

The phone rings. Betty shrugs and picks it up. She says, “Hello?” instead of “Worm’s Bar and Grill.” Mack stands up and thinks about going to his car and driving away. Betty says into the receiver, “I’m not doing anything wrong. You can come on over here and see for yourself,” and then the door opens, Brunson walks in with a cell phone to his head, and both he and his mother hang up.

Brunson says, “I told you I could rig this cell phone to get good reception, even here where we don’t get reception.” He says to Mack Sloan, “I’ve been reconsidering.”

His mother walks back carrying the bottles of Grey Goose and Ketel One. She says, “I’m about to get you a football scholarship, too, boy.”

Brunson says, “Can I have a beer, Mom?” He says, “After I drink some olive juice to replace the salt I lost running, can I have a beer?”

Betty reaches over the bar and slides back the cooler top. She reaches in and gets a can of PBR. To Mack Sloan she says, “I’m not a bad mother. Or a whore.”

Worm walks in through the back door. He says, “Well, well, well, I heard we had us a bigshot stranger in town. Hey, Betty Pettigru.” He keeps his eyes locked on Mack. “Hey, Brunson. You got your ID for that beer?”

Brunson says, “I forgot it again.”

“Bring it on in next time,” Worm says. He wears a sleeveless white dress shirt, blue jeans with holes in the knees. He sports a tattoo on each arm — a speed bag on his left, and a heavy bag on the right. To Mack he says, “Just come back from the depot. You’re the talk of Calloustown.” Worm sticks out his hand to shake, which Mack does. “Next to some old boy from the Guinness World Record book showing up, I guess you’re about all that and a roll of duct tape, ain’t you?”

Mack doesn’t know what he means. He says, “Are you a boxer, or ex-boxer?” and points to the tattoos. Betty Pettigru leads her son over to the jukebox. They stare at its buttons and choices as if it were a time machine.

“That’s the way we are here in Calloustown,” Worm says. “We try to make things easier for everything. Back in the day, my great-great-grandmother went out to what’s now I-95 and tried to lead General Sherman back to Calloustown so he could burn it. Least that’s the story. Anyway, back when I was in junior high school I got bullied a bunch seeing as I’m so skinny and got called Worm, so later on — maybe in the tenth grade — I went over the state line and got these tattoos so my enemies would have a target to punch, you know.”

Betty and Brunson return to the stools. Worm goes around the other side, to work as the bartender. Brunson says, “I guess I could try out as something like a kick returner. If you confess that my mom’s not a whore, then I’ll be willing to try out as a kick returner.”

Mack tries to think if he actually called Betty a whore. Worm slides another double shot of cold vodka his way. He says, “Because all that reading you do, Brunson, I’m sure you’ve come across how constant — heck, even infrequent — constriction of limbs can result in nerve damage. Next thing you know you got gangrene and have to have the limb amputated.”

Brunson drinks his beer like a professional. He says, “I don’t care. What would it matter? If getting my arms cut off in the future is the only way I can get out of Calloustown, so be it.”

“You don’t mean that,” his mother says.

“Come over here and hit me in the arm,” says Worm. He tenses his muscles. “What you need, boy, is a tattoo like mine. That’s what’s made it worthwhile for me to stay.”

“When’s the last time the cigarette man came by here, Worm? I want me a pack of cigarettes, but I don’t want any of those you got in there stale. As I recall, Finis bought his last cigarettes from that machine,” Betty says. She pulls the hem of her dress right on up to her eyes and wipes them, showing off a pair of panties that weren’t bought anywhere in South Carolina, Mack thinks — SHAKE, RATTLE, AND ROLL printed in red lettering across the front. She says, “I’m sorry. I don’t even think Brunson knows this, but it’s our anniversary.” To Mack she says, “How about you giving me an anniversary present?”

Brunson hits the floor. He either wants attention or undergoes a full-scale seizure. Mack says, “I have a carton of cigarettes out in the car. Let me go get you a couple packs.”

“Menthol?” Betty says.

“Yeah. Let me go get them right now for you. Is Brunson okay?” he asks as he opens the door.

Mack Sloan starts up the car and takes off. He needs to U-turn at some point, but he wants out of there. There’s something bad in the water here, he thinks. He thinks, I will go back home and say that the virtual high school P.E. teacher didn’t know what he’s talking about. He turns on the radio and hits Search, only to find nothing, then switches over to A.M. stations, hits Search, and still finds nothing. He thinks, a forty-six second quarter-miler with a near-perfect SAT. When will I ever come across another one of those? Mack flips open his cell phone and gets no signal.

When he approaches the bus depot he notices that a number of handwritten signs now dot the roadside: Told You So. Don’t Come Back Unless You Mean It. Sherman Sucked, Too.

What can he do but turn around? What can he do but try not to think ahead to the future, when he’s sitting around his house at night, awaiting a knock at the door, knowing that someone wants to come in and talk about his or her problems in regards to homesickness, or nerves? The radio catches a station. A man gives the weather report and says that the drought has been modified from extreme to exceptional. He reminds listeners to put water out for animals, and notes that not all foaming-mouthed dogs have contracted rabies.