Free Between Wrecks by George Singleton Page B

mention anything about how my father may have killed a racist and then absconded to one of the lesser-known islands located between Puerto Rico and Venezuela. I could choose from “They’re on business trying to sell barbed wire for the business” or “They’re dead.” If asked about how come I got homeschooled, I’d been prompted to admit that it wasn’t my parents’ idea, that I had a problem way back in first-through-fifth grade beating up other kids on a whim, and that my teachers and classmates’ parents worried over school violence. We did not have a name for Asperger Syndrome in the late seventies/early eighties. And, to be honest, I liked only to punch people who said stupid things regarding race relations, cafeteria food, TV shows that involved characters with IQs less than 100, bad pop music, anti-union thought, people who thought pro wrestling wasn’t a hoax, gun worshipping, and another hundred things. I didn’t possess a syndrome-to-be-named-later. Something about rattail haircuts set me off, it seemed. Mean, angry, nonplussed, committed kid—that was all—when it came to me.
    â€œYou’re going to want to use some them big words like ‘inured’ and ‘absconded’ and ‘nonplussed,’ I know,” Cush said to me not two weeks before the caseworker showed up uninvited. “You can’t use them kinds a words around a person with a bachelor’s degree in the sociology. I mean it. You gone have to talk stupid.” He pulled his Fu Manchuu out at forty-five degree angles so that it looked like a hirsute caret pointing toward his nostrils, as if a copy editor wanted to delete his nose in order to add a word or phrase like “Stop” or “Not now.”
    This conversation took place in the middle of the night as we snipped somebody’s perfectly good barbed wire in hopes of their calling us up later to help them out with new fencing. After my father and mother left, that’s what we did. It came off more as an adventure than an act of meanness. We ran Southern Barbed on our own terms. Plus, Uncle Cush kept saying things like “You will understand later” and “We need some money for what’s going to happen” and “Goddamn America ain’t what it used to be.” He said things like “Jesus L. Christ do you know how much I miss Fenfang Yang back in the Vietnam area, the best woman of the universe?” and “You’re only fourteen or fifteen.”
    I didn’t answer much back at him. On one occasion I said, “Stretching wire can become debilitating.”
    He nodded and said, “Hey, if a caseworker shows up, don’t use the word ‘debilitating,’ or that other word you keep using.”
    I said, “Child labor?”
    â€œHirsute,” he said. “And don’t mention child labor, either, goddamn it, unless you want me to quit buying you good used textbooks so you can learn more than anyone else your age.”
    The Department of Social Services woman showed up at eleven o’clock in the morning, right when I would’ve been taking the mandatory seventh-grade class in South Carolina history had I gone to Poke Middle. She was an albino whitish woman, as opposed to an albino African-American. It was hard not to stare at her, what with the nearly opaque skin, naturally platinum hair, and oversized sunglasses normally seen on elderly people exiting an ophthalmologist’s office. In the past, Uncle Cush had made a point of introducing me to one-armed men, limpers, the overly obese, and tracheotomy victims so that I would never feel sorry for myself, but he’d forgotten to throw an albino into the mix. Fuck, I’d seen white rabbits with more suntan lines than this particular functionary.
    I opened the door and didn’t laugh or jump. I said, “Hello.”
    â€œAre you Saint Arthur Waddell? I’m looking for Saint