“You think you’re the only one that had it so damn bad?” Yoder would toss out, as a challenge, their routine one-upmanship of misery, on twilit evenings when they sat on the dock, working their way through a case of Budweiser. “Hell, my stepmother was cold and wicked and hated my guts,” and he would recount tales about how his real mama took the cancer when he was only six, went downhill fast, and how it was clear to everyone that his daddy had “Miss Dinah” waiting in the wings long before the cancer ever even hit.
His memories of his real mama, Janine, were warm and conjured something like reassurance, despite the odd quirks she had, the rituals, a prominent one being the taking of the castor oil, every single Friday evening of every single week. “Folks just believed in it back then, believed it kept you regular, like it was good for you. Mama was the queen of poop.”
Yoder couldn’t remember a time in his life, post — potty training, when his mother did not insist on inspecting his bowel movements, to see if his excrement was healthy or if it demanded more attention. He and Gary sometimes had a good laugh about Yoder’s fecal foundation. “No sir, I wasn’t allowed to flush, not until Mama checked — and she’d say things like, Oh, that one looks real good, Yodie, or, No wiggle worms to be found, or, That one’s a pretty picture of health. I didn’t think anything about it — that was just how our routines went along, until she got the cancer.”
When Miss Dinah took over, her two brats in tow, she showed no inclination to study Yoder’s bowel movements. In fact, when, all of seven years old and eager to please his new parent, he finally offered to show her what he had landed in the toilet bowl, she scrunched up her face, shuddered, and said, “Why on God’s green earth would I want to look at anybody’s BM? Let alone yours.” And it was the way she said it, yours, that planted her hatred of him in his mind, hardening him to her, young though he was, and by adolescence the reciprocal disdain was set in his soul.
“She was my ruination,” he would lament, blaming her for his bad luck with women. “And yeah, I had to call the bitch Miss Dinah, just like my daddy did. He was one goddamned pussy-whipped somebitch. But she sure did pretend-dote on him, waiting on him, baking seven-layer cakes and all,” and Yoder would recount how the chocolate confections were locked in the china cabinet, locked away from him in particular, locked away in such a way as he would have to see the sheen of the chocolate each time he passed by, lust after it, wish for it, but he never, ever gave her the satisfaction of doing something as brazen or pathetic as, say, asking for a piece of it. Even when she brought it out as an after-school treat for her own two children, his “steps,” Yoder refused to ever ask to be included.
“Don’t you want a little bit, baby?” she would singsong, if his daddy was there, and sometimes Yoder would accept a piece, sometimes not.
The two men shared a bottle of Jim Beam down at the dock that evening, to chase behind the beer, as they typically did of a dusky sunset, having sprayed down with deet, thrown their feet up on footstools, spending hours swapping memories and disagreements, flicking cigarettes hissing into the low tide, the high tide, the ebb and the flow.
“I’ll get some prices, then,” Yoder said, finally, his way of acquiescing to his foe in the great septic dispute of 2010. “But you have to kick in something. You gonna take that panhandle gig? The one that gal Sissy or Missy or somebody told you about? Because I’ll be wanting you to throw in on the new septic tank. It handles your shit just as much as it handles mine.”
“It’s Misty,” Gary said. “Like the song. Like that Clint Eastwood movie, Play Misty for Me. And she says disaster money is almost like free money, depending.”
Depending on what? Yoder wondered, thinking Gary might need a good lookout on this Misty person.
Gary and Misty had reconnected via the Internet, a landscape he had only begun exploring around 2007, when Yoder was threatening to put his desktop out with the trash. Yoder had bought the thing as he entered the twenty-first century in a feeble attempt at technology — an attempt that turned into his certainty and fear that the government was spying on him.
“There’s a camera on the things, you know,” he said, disengaging all manner of cables. “Ever since 9/11 they’ve been watching us all.”
“Why don’t they just watch them Islams?” Gary pushed back. “It’s them Islams that’s bombing themselves and all.”
“Muslims,” Yoder sighed. “Islam is the religion. Muslims are the practitioners of Islam.”
“I don’t understand. Baptist is Baptist, Cath’lic is Cath’lic, what the fuck?”
“Never mind.”
“Okay. Never-minding.”
But Gary took on the surfing of the Net with uncharacteristic vigor, networking his way through Classmates.com, navigating over to the high schools of some of his old army buddies, reconnecting, flirting his way past a few former girlfriends, before finding Misty again, just after the explosion in the gulf. She talked him through the skyping process and schooled him on the larger landscape of the Internet. He boasted to her about his artist friend Yoder Everett, embellishing, “Yeah, he’s a big deal around here. He gets big money for his wind chimes — well, he ought to be getting more.”
“Is there a website where I can look at them?” Misty asked.
“Hell no — Yoder hardly never touches no computer. He thinks they’re taking over the world.”
“Ridiculous,” Misty said. “You have to have a website these days, to advertise, to promote, to sell — you two boys need me. I can do all of that.”
And that was the springboard for their planned reunion. After they rendezvoused in Florida, after the work for BP played out, they would haul her trailer back to Turkey Branch, and she would barter her promotional work on Yoder’s art for something like rent.
Yoder, however, was skeptical. “Normal people don’t do that, just pull up stakes, drive off to meet a stranger and start up a new life.”
“Aw, she’s a good ol’ gal,” Gary countered, filling Yoder in on how he had dated her briefly when he returned from ’Nam, during a short, drug-fueled stay on the West Coast. “She was one of them hippie chicks — you know, titties flapping and bouncing, hairy pits, the whole deal. Which I ain’t minded no hairy pits at all — all I needed was that one little particular patch of hairs, you know? I was fresh out of the army, son. Horny as hell. And she was a wild thing, always into something. Hell, man, she wants to help you sell your wind chimes.”
“What the hell? And don’t call me son.”
“Yeah, she’s gonna make you a website. Says nobody can’t do no kind of business without no website. Says she has real experience in all kinds of business doings, advertising and whatnot.”
“Then what’s she doing in a double-wide in Arkansas?”
“She’s been hiding out from an ex-boyfriend, a mean one, a stalker type. She ran off from him in Portland, changed her looks and all — you know, like that movie, like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy.”
“That’s even worse,” Yoder said. “All we need is some stalker nutcase to come around here. Hell, somebody’s likely to get killed.”
“Naw, man, you got it all wrong. Her guy can’t leave Portland, his job — and last Misty heard, he’s done took up with a whole ’nother woman. It’s cool.”