The physical therapist hovered, performing a series of warm-up exercises that involved stretching her deltoids, triceps, pectorals, and lower back. Me, I lay on the floor hoping that my left hip didn’t break again. I tried to concentrate. Somewhere in my head I thought it would be nice to say all of the state capitals I could think of, west coast to Maine. I tried to count off the presidents. It wasn’t easy trying to not imagine my tendons and ligaments snapping pow! in the middle of things. I went through all of the SEC teams, all the ACC teams, the PAC teams that I didn’t care about. I tried to go through twenty-five trees, twenty-five songbird calls, twenty-five seashells. In my mind I imagined what the woman who hit me thought about, this teenager, who wasn’t shy about saying to the highway patrolman, “I was texting, but only for a few seconds.” I tried to imagine her life after breaking my hip: dying her hair maroon, painting her fingernails black, getting Cs at the local community college in classes that would transfer nowhere. I wondered what my life would be like had a boy named Neville Ware not wiped his shoes on the top of mine—my favorite, lucky running shoes—and how I imagined, back then, limping through the Upstate finals cross-country race. Of course I said, What the fuck are you doing? and he said, There’s a lot of red clay on this course. And I said, Now my lucky shoes are useless. The next thing you know, I had to wear this secondary pair of Nikes normally used when running mornings, training. I’d come into the race with the second fastest time in the state—a 15:59 minute 5K. Then at the Upstate, I couldn’t break a six-minute mile pace. I came in something like thirtieth. I didn’t make it to the state finals. As a result, I got no track scholarship. So I ended up in college with a work-study thing, and I washed dishes every night in the cafeteria, which kept me from studying for two hours a day. I didn’t graduate with honors of any kind. And therefore I couldn’t go to law school. Jesus Christ. The next thing you know, I’m standing around with a degree in History, a 3.0 average, and a job driving around for ten years, working for Seafood Now. It’s a slightly long story, but a buddy of mine’s father—who worked hard on the coast—hired me on after his son actually got accepted into law school. Five or six days a week I drove shrimp and clams and oysters from the Atlantic Ocean to a number of restaurants in the midlands and upstate of South Carolina. Back and forth. Shark, Spanish mackerel, flounder, bonito, sea trout, sea bass, red snapper, dolphin.
The occasional few pounds of marijuana to a man with a front called Crabby Gabby’s off I-26, a “restauranteur” who was silent and hospitable.
Better than minimum wage. Basic insurance benefits, plus workman’s comp. Fresh flounder or shellfish out of the back for supper. Allowed me to think about things like the War of 1812, or the Crimean War, or the Reformation. It allowed me to shove my accelerator down stewing over the last election and making connections to January 30, 1933 Germany, and Now.
To go back, the only reason why I was second in the state occurred because a do-gooder missionary-type person “adopted” a Kenyan kid who could run a mile in four minutes, son-of-a-bitch. He ran a 5K in less than fourteen minutes. He got scholarships to Oregon, Arkansas, those other places. Last I heard, he wasn’t driving a refrigeration truck, veering from texting teenagers.
There on the floor I thought of everything. I said to my physical therapist, “I think I can drive now.”
She said, “Oh, you didn’t tell me that you played golf.”
*
It doesn’t take a geneticist or palm reader to understand how driving would end up my mission. Listen, I witnessed in the passenger seat as my father drove from Poke, to Portland, to Portland, and back to Poke, all the while maintaining a legally intoxicated blood alcohol level. This happened to be his third world record, though it would never be printed up and admired by strangers. This was 2003, when the country worried more about Al Quaeda and the Taliban than a drunk man on a mission. I’m talking we drove from the middle of north-central South Carolina to Maine, then across the country to Oregon, then back home to Poke. It took us most of July, came to something like 7,000 miles, and involved a chunk of Canada, plus ferry boat rides across two of the Great Lakes. If my father, Amos, didn’t have to spend a couple hours every morning getting properly imbibed, we could’ve covered this distance in less than twenty-three days, I feel certain. And if he didn’t have to check the portable breathalyzer every hour roadside, then either down another vodka tonic or twelve-ounce beer, depending on his calculations. I kept a notebook and scribbled out dates and hours, highway mileage markers, and anything from .08 to .16.
When we finished this trek, I thought Amos might’ve held a celebration of sorts, and at least let me have a glass of champagne. I was fifteen and—if I’d’ve had a valid license—would’ve driven in many of those states we crossed, should a law enforcement officer or concerned and meddlesome Welcome Center traveller directed Amos to hand over the steering wheel. I thought maybe my dad would gather my mom, my grandparents, and any cousins that weren’t in jail in order to regale them with our exploits, and so on. None of this happened. We pulled up our long, rutted, red mud driveway, he put the car in Park—I should mention that this all occurred in a finned 1963 Cadillac that got something like nine miles a gallon—and he took the last breathalyzer. He blew a .10, cutting it close. It was two o’clock in the morning. We lived ten miles from Halfway Barbecue, and didn’t even celebrate with a rack of ribs. We lived in a two story house once owned by people who owned slaves, down the road from another two-story house wherein slaves tended the fields. Poke. Then came cotton mills, then came the downfall of cotton mills, then came people like my daddy Amos wishing to make a mark on this world by setting unofficial, unprintable world records so that they—I figured out later—could feel good about themselves. Again, this was some seventeen years ago, and I’ve kept track of what goes on in my hometown. I’ve heard about every storefront closing, except the Poke Bottle Museum, maybe, and how the son and daughter-in-law of a whole other two-story house had returned in order to plop down a thousand storage containers converted into little houses so liberal Californians could emigrate to Poke, live rent-free, establish residency, vote in elections, and change South Carolina from red to blue.
My father pulled up to the house, put the car in Park, revved the engine twice, and said, “I will not allow the isosceles triangle to lose its power in the world of geometry.”
I told this entire story to my physical therapist, a handsome woman named Andrea who looked like she might’ve transported full ceramic beer steins at a German Hofbrauhaus in a previous life. She looked like she could swim across the English Channel and back again. Andrea stood six-one at least, and kept shoulder-length reddish hair pulled back so tightly I feared self-scalpification might take place. She looked like the kind of person who could leave the White Cliffs of Dover, come ashore in Calais, run and cycle through Belgium and into Germany, serve twelve thirsty men wearing funny hats in Aachen at the border, run and cycle to Calais, and swim back across. Then pull off her scalp like a swim cap.
I was on my stomach, and Andrea pulled my left leg out until I looked eight-thirty. She said, “I never told you that I’m taking classes Tuesdays and Thursdays to become a psychologist. I might be able to help you face any kind of trauma your daddy caused that you need to both confront and ameliorate.”
Ameliorate! What the hell kind of physical therapist uses that word?
I had my head turned so that one eye could stare at the ceiling. I concentrated on not biting my bottom lip off. This took place on my den’s wooden floor. Not that I’m attuned to all things uncomfortable, and not that I’m well-versed in the various degrees of sexual harassment, but I thought that my physical therapist—man or woman—might work better without a mattress and boxsprings in the room. I said, “You’re getting a doctorate?” I didn’t mention to her—how could I?—that I considered psychology the lowest of the social sciences. Amos figured into this belief, more than likely, probably while he drove drunk on the outskirts of Clinton, New York, where B.F. Skinner attended college at Hamilton.
“A master’s,” Andrea said. She said, “And three . . . two . . . one. Go ahead and ease your leg back so your ankles touch.” When she released my ankle and knee, my leg snapped back down like a travel iron’s retractable cord. She said, “You only need a master’s degree to offer most people any kind of registered therapeutic counseling.”
I didn’t know whether to say that was good or bad. I wanted to ask if that was the law everywhere, or just South Carolina. Like an idiot, I said, “I bet you’ll be good at ameliorating strangers’ demons.” From where I lay, I could see that I needed to shove a broom’s business end further beneath my couch. I should mention that this was the house where I’d been brought up, that my father had died, my mother moved away after I graduated from college, and this house remained vacant unless I needed to crash, so to speak, between, say, Greenville and Murrell’s Inlet. Maybe my mother visited the house of her marriage at times, too, for the electricity’d never been shut off, nor the landline.
After the teenager rammed me, I’d moved back to recuperate, and to finally try to get this house back on the market. I figured that once I could at least get around without a cane, I might re-open my father’s business, which had been shuttered completely, a place where pickers and antique dealers sometimes showed up, held their hands to the sides of their faces, and peered inside the the plate glass window of a 2000 square foot wooden warehouse.
I thought about the dust bunnies beneath the couch, and hoped that Andrea didn’t need to use the toilet, in case I missed a spot with the scrub brush and 409, which was entirely possible seeing as I could barely walk with a new fake hip. I looked like a rendition of Flute Player in old Native American tattoo parlance.
Andrea asked me to roll over so she could work on the opposite hip, which wasn’t injured. On the first day when Andrea arrived, right after I called out “I’m here on the floor,” she explained that she’d been trained to think both holistically and yin-yang. She said, “I’ve never met anyone named Amos. Is it Latin, part of the conjugation for ‘love.’?”
And she knows Latin? I thought. “Yeah. My father was named Amos, and I’m Amos Junior.” But that wasn’t the truth. My father was named for Alvin Childress, a skilled thespian who played a character named Amos on the old Amos ‘n’ Andy TV show. My grandparents on that side of the family weren’t exactly free-spirited and open-minded. They named my father for a black man so that he, Amos Sr., would learn to use his fists when confronted by schoolyard bullies. At least that was Amos’s story. “Love, and Love-Junior, I guess.”
“And three . . . two . . . one,” Andrea said.
This was the first time I considered how it might be cool to introduce ourselves at parties as Amos and Andrea.
*
It’s not like my mother condoned the escapades. She might’ve suspected ill-conceived capers, but she never questioned me or feigned knowledge. My father’s world records took place between 2000 and 2003, at least the ones I witnessed. I left for college, far enough away, then. He might’ve conducted secret feats before I could legally drive, and after I enrolled in my first Peace Studies and Conflict/Resolution class. Those thousand days in between, though—man, I’ll never have to buy a convertible or skydive to quench a middle-age crisis thirst.
That’s right, I took a course in Peace Studies and Conflict/Resolution, and it ended up being my minor. And I almost even had a job in that field at one point.
“We’re telling your mother that I’m taking you to Montgomery, Atlanta, Greenville, and Charlotte, Amos,” my father said three weeks after he recovered from the Isosceles Triangle escapade. “You’re supposedly going to help me haggle over some vintage cigar boxes I’ve come across on the world wide web.”
That’s how we always got away with leaving the house. My father owned and operated Carolina Tobacciana. He kept offices in Winston-Salem, Charleston, and Poke. The Poke store existed only because that’s where he was brought up, and back when there was a cotton mill that’s where he sold more, per capita, of cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and snuff. Since the downturn in users, he’d rightly turned his attention to collectibles: porcelain signs, cigarette cases, advertising ashtrays, rare flip-top lighters, Joe Camel paraphernalia, that sort of thing. Cigar cutters, well-kept magazine advertisements showing John Wayne and Ronald Reagan espousing Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields, hobo art that involved cigar bands, humidors, antique snuff tubes, beautiful mosaics made up entirely of the Surgeon General’s Warning. One framed and signed photo of C. Everett Koop that no one would ever buy.
Instead of looking for tobacciana, my father wished to set the unofficial world record for puncturing pick-up tires with an ice-pick. There happened to be four gun shows taking place on the same weekend, boom boom boom boom, right off I-85. I knew that he possessed some strong views regarding gun control, but not to the extent of ruining Second Amendment fanatics’ vehicles.
“Four truck tires cost about the same as a good semi-automatic. Or a ton of ammo. Here,” he said. He handed me an ice-pick. “I guess you’re old enough to be part of this. There are plenty of two-person world records. Like in bobsledding. Or one of those rowboat races on a lake. Buck-saw competitions.”
I think we got over eight hundred vehicles over a Friday night/Sunday morning period. We got at least two tires for each. I said to my father midway through, “Won’t these people have less money to buy tobacco products, too?”
I remember clearly how my father stood up straight from behind a black Chevy C10 short bed. He held his ice pick pointed upwards. “Sometimes I wonder if your momma had an affair on me,” he said, then leaned down and stabbed into the whitewall.
Andrea told me to roll over. She said, “It’s more than just the bone. It’s about ligaments and tendons and nerve damage.”
I said, “When he and I got back, my mother never even asked to see what we bought, which was nothing anyway.”
Andrea took my other leg and held it up at a forty-five degree angle, rotated it both clock- and counterclockwise, then asked if I could do this on my own. She let go. My leg dropped down on the floor so hard I wondered if I shattered my heel. Before I could say, “No, I guess not,” I thought about crawling around the house of my upbringing for the remainder of my life. I said to her, “I’ve been thinking about getting a dog. I’ve been thinking about how—when I get back on my feet better—I might like to have a dog, seeing as I don’t have any children. Or a wife. Or relatives, really.”
Andrea told me to roll over on my side and get up off the floor the way she’d taught me on the first physical therapy visit. While I rolled around helpless, she fetched my aluminum walker. She said, “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far in my psychology classes yet.”
I didn’t mean to sound pathetic, but I said, “It gets lonely way out here. I think I might’ve made a mistake moving back to my hometown.”
Andrea said, “I’m originally from Pennsylvania. I know how you feel.”
I didn’t ask her what brought her all the way down to South Carolina. I didn’t apologize by saying, “I’m sorry I live thirty miles out in the country from where you probably do most of your work.” I thought about going, “Pittsburgh? Bradford? Lancaster County? Not Philadelphia—you’re not from Philadelphia. Allentown? Scranton?”
Andrea carried my non-wheeled walker over to me, reached down, took my arm, and helped me off the floor. She said, “I was accused of setting my parents’ house on fire on the same day as 9/11. So it was September eleventh. It was a well-known fact that my father sexually abused me, and my mother wouldn’t recognize the situation. Thank God for forensic science. Just like on those TV shows, you know? Anyway, they figured out that I was innocent—this was when I was thirteen—and then I got sent down to live with an aunt and uncle down in Greensboro. Long story short, he had a thing about me, too. I just kept going further south, and here I am.”
I tried to do some math in my head. I figured Andrea to be a few years younger than I. I got on my legs, for the most part, hunched over. “I’ve seen those shows.”
“That plane that went down? That jet that wasn’t one of the World Trade Center towers, or the one that hit the Pentagon? That third plane crashed, and somehow, they figured, a spark traveled all the way to my house and caught it on fire.”
I took one half-step toward the kitchen even though Andrea didn’t tell me where to go. I took another. I looked up and saw my refrigerator. I knew that I still had a twelve-pack of beer in-side. I said, “I bet you’re from Somerset County,” because as part of my Peace Studies and Conflict/Resolution minor I needed to learn every goddamn place on the planet where conflict occurred at some point.
Andrea said, “Three . . . two . . . one.” She said, “Uh-huh. Berlin, Pennsylvania. Not as bad as it sounds.”
*
I’d been driving aimlessly, to be honest. When the light turned, I crossed highway 72 and got T-boned on the driver’s side. At that very moment I’d been thinking about leaving my rental apartment on the outskirts of Myrtle Beach, returning to Poke, and considering some options, if any existed. I thought about resurrecting Carolina Tobacciana, while painting the exterior of my parents’ house. It’s a long story. Not so long that it belongs in some kind of world record division, but long. My dad died, my mom took off without even trying to sell the house—seeing as no one would want to relocate to Poke—and then I returned not long after calling one of those injury lawyers.
I said to Andrea, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to hear about your past.” I said, “I have a freezer full of shrimp. If you cook it, I’ll pay.”
She said, “Do you need to take a break? I got nothing else to do. You’re my last client. I mean, I have tomorrow off, and I don’t have to go to class until next week so my professor can explain Oedipus Complex.”
I said, “I seem to have the opposite of all that, if anything.”
Andrea said, “I like that you’re motivated. Are you feeling any pain?”
I said, “Snapper. Sea bass. I got those filleted in the freezer, too, but they’d need thawing. Shrimp we can just place in some water and they’ll thaw quickly.”
I felt light-headed. Andrea asked if I’d been taking my pain medicine. I said, truthfully, “It gives me bad dreams and constipation and a sorrowful feeling worse than normal.” I said, “Or I could cook. I’ve turned into a pretty good cook, at least for three meals. Three seafood dishes.”
She walked into the kitchen. I heard her open the refrigerator or freezer, and when I tried to lean on my walker and look around the corner I lost my balance. I heard two beers open. She said, “You said earlier that you were getting a big settlement. I’m probably not supposed to ask this, but has the money showed up yet?”
I heard my prescription bottle rattle.
Had I mentioned to her that I’d ever called one of those injury lawyers? I’d made a point not to mention any settlement-to-be. The last thing I needed was to fully recover, paint the house, renovate the tobacciana shop, then have old classmates show up asking for me to loan them money I’d probably never see again. I thought, Was it on the news already? because, according to my attorney, who worked for one of those mega-firms made up of satellite offices all over the country, he felt confident at winning a world record in terms of a traditional unfocused-teenager-rams-person-with-right-of-way injury settlement against an insurance company—more than seven figures which, after paying him, the IRS, et cetera, still would allow me enough money to live for a good half-decade as long as I didn’t splurge on things like soft drinks or name brand trash bags.
It felt as though I cracked a rib. I tried to yell out, “I’m down here on the floor, again,” but it came out more of a droning whine. I tried to say, “Grab that bottle of bourbon below the sink,” but it sounded like a bad whistler’s bird-call. Then I tried to think of twenty-five different bourbon brands and passed out somewhere after Four Roses.
*
I awoke on my bed, Andrea by my side, hovering again. She held a pine tree car air freshener an inch from my nostrils. She said, “There, there. Nothing to worry about. You’re back among the living.”
I didn’t have time to remember that my hip didn’t function properly, and tried to sit up a little better. I said, “What?”
“I looked all around your medicine cabinet for smelling salts. You don’t seem to have any essential oils around this place, either. Best I could do was get this thing off my rearview mirror. Aromatherapy.”
Did Andrea pick me off the floor and carry me to the bedroom? I thought. I said, “I remember getting light headed. Did you get those beers by any chance?”
Andrea pulled the cardboard pine tree away and stood up to her full height. She said, “Goddamn it, I must’ve made you overdo it. Please don’t tell on me. I’ve been known to expect a little too much out of men and rehab.”
I said, “I’m okay. I just needed to take a break, I guess.”
Andrea walked around to the other side of my bed—which had been my parents’ bed. There’s probably something wrong with moving into one’s childhood home and claiming Mom and Dad’s bedroom in the first place, and not even ordering a new mattress on top of that. I blamed not thinking straight, from back when I pounded oxycontin.
“I’m probably not supposed to say this, but I think it’s not a bad thing for people in your condition to drink, say, six or eight beers over the course of a day. Or a pint of whiskey. I read this article one time about damage to a liver caused by pain medication mixed with pop.”
Pop! I thought. Who the fuck uses “pop” around here? I wanted to take Andrea down to Halfway Barbecue and see how the order-takers reacted to anyone ordering “pop.”
Andrea said, “So let me get this straight, Amos. I want to make sure that you weren’t hallucinating over the last eight or so times I’ve come over to provide PT. You went to college, you didn’t get into med school, you started working for a place called Seafood Now, you got hit by that girl, and you came back here.” I finished my first beer, there on my parents’ bed. I said, “I’ve told you all this?”
She said, “Something about Conflict and Resolution. Something about wishing that you’d had the money and connections to run against these goddamn republican congressmen. You’re thinking about renovating this cool house at some point, and maybe taking over your father’s old business—you said it’s a wooden structure, right?—it’s that place I pass on the way here, just a couple miles away on Old Union Road.”
I didn’t remember saying anything about running for office, but my father’d always told me that I had the capacity to serve the people. Sometimes he’d get drunk and say that he thought I might be perfect to work for a non-profit, seeing as I was a pussy who didn’t seem to care about capitalism. Don’t ask me why I thought it either necessary or admirable or timely to reach my right hand up and pull the stretchy-band from Andrea’s ponytail, let her hair fall down, then stroke at it. I said, “Uh-huh.” I could feel an erection rising in my flannel pajamas, like a false idol blossoming, like a windward heathen. I stroked and stroked at Andrea’s hair. She sat on the mattress in a way that would make a carpenter’s square proud, straight at ninety degrees, her toes pointed south to-ward the dresser drawers.
Then I thought about how all my father’s odd travels and attitudes might’ve been visionary, that my path in life held no Free Will whatsoever, and that I followed a destiny, from birth name to broken hip, to marry a physical therapist named Andrea.
“I might not be a full-fledged medical orthopedic surgeon, or psychologist, either, Amos, but I’m pretty sure that you shouldn’t try to re-open the tobacco memorabilia place. Standing all day long on a cement floor won’t be good for you. And then you’ll likely get depressed and be tempted into smoking, what with the bombardment of advertising. Then you’ll get cancer, and there’s no real physical therapy for a person without lungs.”
Andrea got off the bed without saying anything. She returned with an ice bucket I’d never seen before, two glasses, the bottle of bourbon. I said, “I don’t want to be a dead fish chauffeur for the rest of my life.”
She said, “Forget about driving. You won’t be able to drive, chip, or putt without lungs.”
*
I would later say that I bet Andrea slipped one or two pain killers into whatever I didn’t remember drinking. One of the prerequisites for a Conflict/Resolution minor is taking a course in Logic. If P, then Q, that kind of thing. For a History major there’s really not a prerequisite, oddly enough, besides taking either French, German, Spanish, or Italian. Russian. Portuguese if you’re not all that interested in history, you know. Anyway, I woke back up for about the third or fourth time on this particular day. Light no longer slanted through my parents’ Venetian blinds, which meant it was after seven-thirty. My eyes opened, I ran my memory back like a Rolodex, and then I looked to the right side of the bed to find no Andrea sitting upright like some kind of misshapen breadstick. I said, “Hey!” like that. I yelled out, “I didn’t mean to touch your hair. It’s the pain pills.”
Then I heard two sirens. They traveled east to west, I imagined, from either Union or Whitmire or Buffalo toward here. I swear to god I sat up the best I could and breathed deeply to make sure my own place wasn’t ablaze.
I imagined all those tiny houses down the road, filled with newly-migrated liberal-thinking Californians, and hoped that one or more of them had not left his or her hibachi unattended. I thought of thoughtless non-environmentalists that my father once knew, driving around aimlessly and flicking lit cigarette butts out their truck windows onto pine needle-strewn gullies abutted to pine needle-filled woods. Someone once told me that if you leave live oysters in a hermetically-sealed container for too long, gasses will form and the bin will eventually explode not unlike an IED in the Middle East, like grain can self-combust in a silo, like mulch heaps left unwatered. I thought back to remember if I’d unpacked my Seafood Now truck I’d had towed up to the end of the driveway right after the accident.
A third siren wailed, much closer. I said, “Andrea?”
The phone rang. My parents’ answering machine picked up—my mother’s voice still working it, sounding exactly like she did twenty years earlier. A man said, “Hey, Ms. Tollison, this is Marvin Mays over at Poke Volunteer? You home by any chance? Pick up if you’re there.”
My walker stood in the living room still, but I made my way to the front door, leaning on bed, chest of drawers, end table, door jamb, antique dining room table, and so on. I opened the door and smelled the fire, heard the sirens better, looked off in the distance to a glow in the sky. I don’t think that I imagined being able to smell old cardboard cigar boxes, paper advertisements, hundreds of pristine unopened packs of cigarettes from the past: Picayunes, Lark, Tareyton, Raleigh, Old Gold, Lucky Strikes, plus every packaging venture of Camel. I breathed deeply and could smell it all. I eased down onto the floor, door still open, and thought, Spark from that jet on 9/11, my ass—you are an arsonist.
She would return, I knew. She’d hope that I remained unconscious. I’d watch her drive up the rutted red clay, and after she’d gotten out of her car I’d yell out to let her know not to step on me. Did Andrea want to bamboozle me into marriage, then take off with insurance money? Was she truly some kind of prophetess who knew that I should never spend the rest of my life in Poke? Did it matter? I held my head down to the floorboard and—as if I kept my ear to a good seashell—heard nothing but the endless drone of daily life.
