Free Between Wrecks by George Singleton Page A

of there as soon as Raymus Cook turned around to tell Miss Hattie what he needed. I remembered that I forgot to turn on the tape recorder.
    On my drive back home I wondered if there were any low-residency writing programs where I could learn how to finish a detective novel.
    I told my sort-of wife the entire event and handed her half a Hog-o-Mighty sandwich. She didn’t gape her mouth or shake her head. “You want to get into Southern studies, you better prepare yourself for such. There are going to be worse stories.”
    Wershtoreesh . I said, “I don’t want to collect war stories.”
    â€œYou know what I said. And I don’t know why you don’t ask me. Here’s a true story about a true story gone false: This woman in my advanced cardio class—this involves spinning, Pilates, steps, and treadmill inside a sauna—once weighed 220 pounds. She’s five-two. Now she weighs a hundred, maybe one-o-five at the most. She’s twenty-eight years old and just started college at one of the tech schools. She wants to be a dental hygienist.”
    We sat on the porch, looking down at the river. Our bottle was empty. On the railing I had The South: What Happened, How, When, and Why opened to a chapter on a sect of people in eastern Tennessee called “Slopeheads,” which might’ve been politically incorrect. I said, “She should be a dietician. They got culinary courses there now. She should become an elementary-school chef, you know, to teach kids how to quit eating pizza and pimento cheese burgers.”
    â€œListen. Do you know what happened to her? Do you know how and why and when she lost all that weight?”
    I said, “She saw one of those Before and After programs on afternoon TV. She sat there with a bowl of potato chips on her belly watching Oprah, and God spoke to her.” I said, “Anorexia and bulimia, which come before and after ‘arson’ in some books.”
    â€œHer daddy died.” Abby got up and closed my textbook for no apparent reason. “Figure it out, Stet. Her daddy died. She said she got so depressed that she quit eating. But in reality, she had made herself obese so he’d quit creeping into her bedroom ages of twelve and twenty-two. Her mother had left the household long before, and there she was. So she fattened up, and slept on her stomach. When her father died she didn’t tell anyone what had been going on. But when all the neighbors met after the funeral to eat, she didn’t touch one dish. Not even the macaroni and cheese.”
    I said, “I don’t want to know about these kinds of things.” I got up and walked down toward the river. Abby followed behind me. “Those my-daddy-loved-me stories are the ones I’m trying to stay away from. It’s what people expect out of this area”
    When we got to the backhoe she climbed up and reached beneath the seat. She pulled out an unopened bottle of rum I had either forgotten or didn’t know about. “There were pirates in the South. You could write about pirates and their influences on the South. How pirates stole things that weren’t theirs.”
    I picked up a nice skipper and flung it out toward an unnatural sandbar. Then I walked up to my knees into the water, reached down, and pulled two more out. An hour later, I had enough rocks piled up to cover a grave.

OPERATION
    The Department of Social Services caseworker appeared at our door unannounced, like my uncle predicted. We’d already gone over what answers might work best when confronted by a government agency bureaucrat highly inured to vitamin B, C, and D deficiencies, head lice, rotten teeth, and lash marks, not to mention a child drooling while he sabotaged alphabet memorization. I was to use the term “sir” or “ma’am,” though I called my uncle plain Cush all the time. When asked about my parents’ whereabouts, I’d been tutored not to