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SHOOTING REPUBLICANS
George Singleton
I started getting ideas after subscribing to small-town weekly newspapers.
Some of them weren’t more than photocopied sheets of typed articles
from places like Blenheim, Cheddar, Gruel, and Ember Glow, but every week—usually
below the front-page crease if the paper could indeed be folded—there
was a story about someone wanting to prove he or she’d made a mark
on this planet. I got a grant from the nearest humanities council. I’m
not sure why there are any hungry people in America, seeing as you can
get a grant for about anything. I thought about requesting a grant in
order to study people who requested grants, but that might have been pushing
it. That might’ve offered up a red flag for any future projects
I conceived. Plus, I felt pressured to finish my low-residency master’s
degree in Southern culture studies from Ole Miss-Taylor before pursuing
more global—or at least national—issues that puzzled common
and sane citizens of South Carolina.
“I’m not going with you to uncover one more freak,”
my wife Abby said as I pointed out an article from the Hickory Tavern
Hey Neighbor. “I have this theory. The more nuts out there
trying to make a name for themselves, the better the odds you’ll
get killed talking to them.” She put on her redneck, chicken-eating-corn
drawl: “‘I never made the biggest cabin out of Popsicle sticks,
but I broke the record for dead bodies found beneath the crawl space of
a cabin made of Popsicle sticks.’”
•§•
My wife’s speech impediment vanished when she used this voice. I
didn’t say how she might should use it more often. I said, “This
guy has invented over ten thousand ways to remember the planets in order.
Listen to this: ‘Mary verifies every mint julep so Ursula never
partakes.’ Get it? M stands for Mercury, V stands for Venus.”
“I get it,” Abby said. “‘My vagina emits moist
jelly somewhat unusually, Nelly Poontang.’ That’s how I learned
it. That’s how my mom made me learn the planets’ order.”
Man, I thought. Abby’s drunken parents would’ve been investigated
by social workers had they not been lawyers for the poor. I said, “This
guy,” I looked down at the paper, “Ather Cartee probably doesn’t
have that one yet. You could give it to him. It’ll make you feel
good about yourself.”
“I already feel good about myself,” Abby said. “Except
I never got to follow my dream of being a tv reporter. Except my husband
had a middle-aged crisis ten years early.”
Abby pushed against our front door, I supposed stretching one of those
back-of-the-leg muscles. I said, “The door pulls toward you. It’s
always pulled in.”
“You’re funny, Stet. Real funny. I’m going out for a
run. Don’t leave before I get back. I might as well go see you get
shot.” She pulled her right ankle halfway up her back. “That
one that you read, Ather only has to plug in another woman’s name
for ‘Mary’ and he’ll get another however many mnemonic
devices.”
She wasn’t close to pronouncing “mnemonic” correctly.
I said, “You’re right. I’m thinking that you might help
him get up to eleven thousand. Okay. When you get back, we can go after
you take a shower. How far are you running?”
“About a mile into the first lake I come across.”
Abby stretched her other leg, then stepped back, opened the door, looked
at me as she might consider an old dog that turned incontinent, and ran
down the front yard. She followed the path south down by the river and
hurdled the last piles of river rocks I had stacked before unofficially
closing the family business, right before getting accepted into the low-residency
master’s program. I sat down on our front porch with my notebook
of possible scholarly essay ideas. When Abby became a dot, I couldn’t
tell if she stopped to throw rocks back in, or to retrieve nice flat skippers
should I change my mind.
I turned to an empty page and wrote down “MVEMJSUNP.” I had
never thought about how “SUN” stood right there in lineup.
I made a note to ask Ather Cartee about it—if he thought it was
by accident or “intelligent design.” After a minute I wrote
down, “Malt vinegar eases most joints’ seriously unrelenting
nagging pains.”
I thought, This is not good. I thought, This could become an obsession....
