Why Dogs Chase Cars Read Free Page B

these verbs. It’s been my experience that you only need to know a bunch of nouns to get your idea across to foreigners.”
    When the bell sounded I walked to the gym, found Coach Ware, and said I’d be willing to run track in May if he gaveme a note saying I needed to go home for the rest of the day. Forty-Five High couldn’t afford to have its track team ride a bus to meets, but they splurged once a year and allowed us to take part in the regional meet. If anyone qualified for the Upstate, then his parents had to take him all the way up to Greenville—fifty-five miles away—in order to compete. I should mention that although no psychologist had invented attention deficit disorder in 1976, Coach Ware suffered from the malady. I went to him once a week and gave him my word about joining the track team, though he never took me up on it later.
    Let me be the first to say that I felt bad whenever I drove home from school at midday. First off, Senora Schulze wouldn’t get her
cerveza
—maybe the only word she really knew in Spanish. My biology teacher in second period wouldn’t have anyone there to help him say “mitochondria,” a word for which he never figured out the right syllable to stress. The third-period history teacher who never blinked, and always found a way to relate everything that ever happened in America to the invention of the cotton gin—in a way she was before her time, in relation to focus and specialization—would miss me. She should’ve become a college professor, and then maybe a full-out dean. When she experienced slight petit mal seizures, I was the one who always said something like, “Could you explain the connection between the Great Chicago Fire and the cotton gin?” Forget trigonometry—that teacher said “maff” whenhe wasn’t undergoing coughing and/or sneezing attacks when someone asked for him to explain, again, how the notions of
sine
or
cosine
would be important to us later on in life.
    And so on. But I got out of there. At this point I’d already gotten into a few colleges—the ag school that guidance counselor Mrs. McKnight made me apply to; all of South Carolina’s state schools, including all-black S.C. State, just in case Shirley Ebo and I finally fell in love with each other; a liberal arts Baptist school my father said he’d let me go to if I didn’t mind his daily visits with a firebrand to burn the place down; and an experimental place up in North Carolina founded by Unitarians, where I ended up going. It allowed students to double major in anthropology and basket weaving. Anthropology and pottery wheel. Anthropology and furniture making. Anthropology and metal casting. I knew to go into anthropology and geography, so I would know not to make a wrong turn and end up back in Forty-Five.
    I should mention that Mrs. McKnight got some kind of yearly districtwide award for Miss Guidance, though she never understood the pun.
    Anyway, I left Forty-Five High School and went back to Rufus Price’s Goat Wagon. Rufus sat outside handing his goats the stale and expired products. When I got out of the Jeep he said, “School not out
again?
” He might’ve been kin to Coach Ware, for all I knew.
    I said, “Hey, Mr. Price. I’ll leave the money on your counter if you trust me.”
    He held out a piece of Little Debbie Snack Cake to three-horned Tripod, my favorite goat. “I don’t trust anybody, son. The last man I trusted said the pulpwood truck wouldn’t roll forward while I worked on its radiator.” He dropped some oatmeal cake on his lap by accident, and Tripod gathered up the crumbs. Mr. Price leaned his head backwards.
    I nodded. I said, “Yessir, I remember.” I thought about doing anthropology and condemnation, mostly because my father had me read Schopenhauer when I finished those other books he ordered from publishing houses that never sent