Calloustown Read Free Page B

driving on the sidewalk, passed us with its lights on but no siren blaring.
    â€œI have no clue. I asked him, he said I asked too many questions, and that was it. He said it might be best if I never brought this up to Lincoln’s daddy, so I have a feeling he plain stole the cones,” I said.
    â€œYou come from a fucked-up place,” June said. I looked forward. The driver in front of me put on his left-hand blinker and crept slowly ahead. June said, “First off, you could’ve potentially killed people with the potholes, and then your father could’ve gotten you killed—or kidnapped—leaving you there in the middle of the road.”
    I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t mention how Calloustown wasn’t the kind of place, back then, where hit-and-runs or kidnapping occurred.
    When we got to the site of the wreck, June rolled her window down. She said, “Is everyone all right?” to a highway patrolman who brandished an unlit flashlight.
    He said, “Mexicans. Three dead, one unconscious. One of them might be all right, unless the emergency room doctor does the right thing. Maybe they’ll send him back before he wakes up.” I had never known a highway patrolman to offer the results of a car wreck to passersby and wondered if he’d committed some kind of misdemeanor.
    My wife laughed.
    I looked at her and said, “That’s not funny. What has happened to you?”
    June said, “Give it a break, Reed. I’m only interacting with another human being.”
    I thought, mass murderers might say the same thing on a witness stand. Rapists might do the same, and child molesters.
    She said, “At least I didn’t break my mother’s ribs.”
    When we got to the lecture, people filed out of the auditorium. June and I took a different route back home, and we didn’t speak, that I remember. In the kitchen, later, June looked at a calendar she kept on the side of the refrigerator. She mentioned that we had a cooking demonstration the following night at six o’clock over at the farmer’s market, that the chef and author would be using kale in every recipe, and that nutritionists worldwide now touted kale as one of the new organic wonder foods, filled with vitamin A and calcium. June told me that vitamin A was all about eyesight and asked me if I cared to see well for a long time, or if I’d rather live in the dark like all my old friends in their underground lairs.
    I might’ve shrugged. I squinted to look at the calendar, but thought more about which vitamins best kept livers thriving. I thought about Lincoln, which made me think of emancipation. I wondered if there was a vitamin for foresight. We have all kinds of lectures and demonstrations to attend to straighten our lives, I almost said. And then I thought about those sadly doomed people born with holes in their hearts, on edge, I imagined, from impending merciless misfortunes.

Static, Dead Air, Interference, Memory
    My wife’s some kind of medical fluke, has a nerve running from her tear ducts to her pudenda. She can be out in the kitchen chopping an onion and the next thing everyone in the neighborhood’s wondering what’s got Mella ululating like a mournful Syrian. Back when we dated, and even for a few years after we married, I’d make sure one of those Feed Our Children telethons was on TV and begin to undress as Mella walked through the room, caught a glimpse of a peckish smudged-faced toddler, then cried until she neared climax as I found inconspicuous ways to pull off her panties. I don’t want to say that I’m lazy, but after twenty-six years I feigned the cable being out some nights when I knew that nothing aired save Old Yeller, My Dog Skip, Born Free , or any of those other sad movies. Maybe I’d tired of the bombardment of reminders that I couldn’t give Mella the satisfaction that, say, actor Tom Hanks could give her when in movies