Why Dogs Chase Cars by George Singleton Page A

empty.” She pulled her cotton dress halfway up her thigh and scratched at a bite.
    I remained crouched. “My father wouldn’t lie to me about this. He couldn’t. He’d end up getting drunk and telling me the truth.”
    Shirley said, “Now’s the time if when you sing ‘Amazing Grace’ or ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ you can hear the dead sing along. I don’t know the words but my daddy do.”
    By the time I quit staring at the jar—by the time the mother-of-pearl buttons quit reflecting what light remained in the sky—Shirley Ebo had vanished from the circle.
    In later years I would say that I walked out of there calm as a wealthy man’s cat. I would say that Shirley must’ve played a trick on me and that I followed the same path out that we took in, that I saw Shirley and her father sitting on their stoop drinking iced tea and that I hollered over to them, “Thanks, Shirley! Good night!” But that wasn’t the case. Once that goddamn “Battle Hymn of the Republic” tune came into my head and I felt an urge to vocalize, I took off running blindly through a land I’d never explored. And within about fifteen seconds I reached Deadfall Road, maybea quarter mile up from my house. Shirley and I had cut a giant fishhook-shaped path through those woods, and the slave graveyard, in actuality, rested a cheap BB gun’s arced shot away from where we’d begun.
    Marching home, slowly, I caught myself whispering
“Glory, glory hallelujah.”
I didn’t hear any choir providing backup, though.
    M Y FATHER WASN’T HOME, and because I noticed a new pack of matches from Gruel’s All-U-Can-Eat BBQ on the kitchen table, I knew that he’d been there, then home, during my little excursion with Shirley. So I got in the Jeep and drove straight to the Sunken Gardens Lounge. My father and Mr. Lane sat straight up at the bar, across from bartender Red Edwards. From outside the plate-glass window I watched my father in midstory, holding his hands a couple feet in front of his face, palms upward, jerking them back and forth. It looked as though he was shoving an imaginary watermelon to his mouth.
    I walked in and said to Mr. Red Edwards, “A draft beer and a shot of bourbon, please,” like I knew what I was doing. Like I wasn’t the kind of high school–skipping teenager who tried to sell his teachers unpacked tea leaves for pot. Like my misspelled name rightly derived from the eastern Semitic word
Mendel,
meaning, “A man who gains knowledge by experience and study.”
    My father swiveled somewhat and yelled out, “Mendal! My son, Mendal! Hotdamn, boy, grab yourself a seat overhere.” He patted the red-vinyl stool on the other side of him.
    Mr. Red Edwards said, “You want that straight up or on the rocks? House bourbon okay, or are you celebrating something, boy?”
    I knew what “on the rocks” meant, but didn’t cotton to drinking anything Red Edwards bottled on the premises. I said, “I want it straight up, and I want something that’s not house bourbon.”
    Mr. Lane said, “Where’s Comp? How come my son ain’t with you?”
    I said, “I was with him earlier, but he didn’t have to go find out where his mother ended up being dead,” trying to be all cryptic and telling. “So he went on home to have a peaceful night.”
    Mr. Red Edwards slid my beer over to the other side of my father’s space. He handed me the shot of bourbon across the bar. My father said, “Mr. Lane and I just came back from Charlotte. Boy-oh-boy, we had us some business dealings up there.” He lifted his bottle, as did Comp’s daddy.
    I didn’t have the patience to wait for a perfect time to bring up what I thought I knew: that my father had murdered his wife, buried her in a slave graveyard, and used some kind of clay jug for a pathetic