You Want More: Selected Stories of George Singleton

THE HALF-MAMMALS OF DIXIE

ITOOK A FOLDING CHAIR IN THE BACK OF THE R AMADA I NN’S Azalea Room without looking for any of my coworkers. I’d parked next to the guest speaker’s car, I figured—the vanity tag read MOTIV8R —but restrained myself from slicing the goddamn evolved Lincoln Continental, headlight to atrophied fin, with my own car key. My boss had paid to have his entire six-person southeastern sales force attend, in hopes that we would pick up pointers on how to talk more seafood restaurants into setting up giant aquariums in their dining areas, stocked with everything from horseshoe crabs to sand sharks, cleaned and maintained by trained and licensed aquatic technicians who spent most hours thinking up ways to kill salesmen like me so they could travel from Virginia to Mississippi, lolling around places like Whitey’s Crab Shack, the Splashing Mermaid, and Grouper Therapy. I sat down and stripped the back of my name tag. I placed it askew over the Salty’s Showfish logo on my left breast pocket. Then I looked over at the woman seated next to me, a thirty-year-old wearing a black-and-silver skirt that provided her lap with only a cocktail-napkin-sized piece of cloth. She crossed her right leg over toward me in such a way that created a tunnel to look into. I thought, This ain’t going to be bad at all.

Then I looked up to see that her face had a giant tic-tac-toe pattern carved into it.

A man from the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce went to the podium and said, We want to welcome all of you to this workshop. As you can see from the agenda, after Mooney Gray speaks we’ll break for lunch, then reconvene in smaller groups to brainstorm. Also, as you can see in your packet, we have more than thirty businesses represented, and y’all know that it only takes two companies to get a little networking done, so there’s no telling what can happen here. Especially— this guy held up his hand as if holding a champagne glass shaking with plutonium —once y’all discover the two complimentary drink tickets stapled to the room-service menu.

I didn’t notice how everyone in the audience clapped or hooted, really. I focused on the podium but peripherally saw the woman’s scars. Her nose was in the center space, her eyes to the top left and right corners. The woman’s mouth took up the entire bottom middle space but spilled over to the lower corners of the game.

When I dropped my pen by accident, I pretended it hadn’t happened. But the woman bent down, tapped my knee, and said, Here you go.

I’m sorry. Thanks. I’m truly sorry, I said.

My name’s Lorene. She swiveled her torso a quarter turn and touched her name tag. I could only look at her face and wonder what had happened. The scars were deep, wide, and only a touch off being purple. It looked as though she had been placed belly down on a table saw set to cut grooves a half-inch deep. I tried not to think of those old silent movies wherein the hog-tied heroine barely gets saved at the sawmill.

I took off my name tag completely and said, I’m Drew Gaston. I couldn’t get the tag to stick on my shirt again. I work for Salty’s Showfish.

Mooney Gray came out wearing a blue suit. He took off his coat. He made a big point of ripping off the necktie, as if he didn’t trust it. He ripped off his pinstriped blue dress shirt in a way that made buttons fly off onto people seated in the front row. Mooney Gray now stood before the crowd of salespeople in need of motivation wearing his pants and a T-shirt that—from his right to left—had a picture of Moe Howard’s face, then a lowercase letter t that looked like a cross, and finally Darth Vader’s helmeted head.

Lorene said, I’ve seen this guy before. It gets worse.

I tried to remember if most children started in a corner box or right in the middle when they played tic-tac-toe.

I want to start off this morning by telling y’all a little story about two brothers. One was the ultimate optimist, and the other would take bets with complete strangers that the sun wouldn’t rise the next morning. You know this second old boy, I’m sure. They had the same mother and father, who fed them the same food, and enrolled them in the same schools, and provided for them the best they could. One turned out eternally optimistic, and the other damned toward pessimism.

I thought, This is easy. Cain and Abel. If he asks us if we know who he’s talking about, and if I were the kind of man who yelled out answers, I’d yell out Cain and Abel.

Lorene bent over with her pound-sign face and whispered, If he asks who he’s talking about, don’t yell out Cain and Abel.

I nodded. I tried to stick my goddamn name tag to my pants leg and wished that I’d gotten coffee so that I’d have an excuse to throw away a Styrofoam cup, or get a refill, or feign scalding myself.

Mooney Gray held one hand up to quiet the crowd of salespeople, all ready to yell out Cain and Abel. One an optimist, and one a pessimist. Well, these old boys liked to go fishing together, you see. The pessimist would just throw his hook in the water without any bait or anything. He’d say to his brother, ‘I ain’t gone catch nothing noways.’ And then he’d stand there on the bank watching his brother bring in fish after fish off his wormy barb, you know. Bream. Shellcrackers. Sunfish. Cats. Crappies.

Lorene scratched her chin. She said to me, You’re in the fish business. Which one would you hire?

I said, Look at my leg, and pulled my pants up to the knee. I showed Lorene a birthmark the size of a small pancake. A woman on the other side of her leaned over and looked, too. I said, Sometimes this itches, y’all, really bad. I don’t know why.

Mooney Gray walked from one side of the foot-high stage to the other. He looked at the ceiling. The pessimist brother never said a word until, one day, the optimist caught a fish so big that it doubled his rod in half. He pulled and reeled, and pulled some more. He’d snagged a grass carp somehow. Finally the fish freed itself, causing the hook to fly back out of the water at a speed so fast not even Superman could’ve detected what flew toward the optimist brother’s face. That hook ended up embedding itself into this old boy’s right eyeball, and it blinded him completely. Soon thereafter it got a serious infection, and the doctor had to take his eyeball out with a spoon.

I put my pants leg back down. I didn’t look at my seatmate but thought about how the perfect nine squares on her face resembled the shell of a box turtle. Then I could only think about how cruel this motivational speaker was to tell a story with such a maimed woman in the audience. I knew for certain that Mooney Gray saw Lorene in the audience—that’s what motivational speakers did best, wasn’t it? They noticed faces and memorized names. I said out loud, I think I’m in the wrong place. I leaned to stand up, but Lorene turned my way, uncrossed her legs, and kept them apart as if she practiced holding a kickball between her thighs.

Mooney Gray said, The pessimist brother said one thing. He looked at his brother in the hospital room and said, ‘You can buy fish in a market these days, buddy.’ So there you go.

Some people clapped. Once they began clapping, everyone else outside of Lorene and me nodded or laughed.

I looked at Lorene and said, I didn’t get that story. Did I miss something? I figured my mind had wandered up her dress or whatever.

Lorene said, You don’t have to show me all of your inadequacies. Don’t think you have to show all of your scars and blemishes. There’s no way you’ll catch up, dearie.

I picked one eye and focused. I said, I’m sorry. I’m trying not to look up your dress. I’m that way.

Mooney Gray yelled out, I see all of y’all nodding your heads and acting like you know what I’m talking about, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you is the worst thing about your salesmanship. That story I just told made no sense. But y’all didn’t want to look stupid. Here’s rule number one: If you’re lost while listening to a client, ask for a road map as soon as possible.

I was about to continue my apology for staring at Lorene’s disfigurement, but she raised her hand and said, Mr. Gray, this man here didn’t have a clue as to what you were talking about. He didn’t get it. She held her left hand up, her index finger down toward my scalp. When the rest of the seminar-goers turned around, though, I saw how they could only stare at mangled Lorene.

I KNEW THE rudiments of a filtration system better than anyone in America. I talked to prospective clients about how fish defecated in their own environment and couldn’t live long if no one came around to clean out the tank. That’s not what sold the product and services, of course. I had statistics concerning restaurants and bars without aquariums and the same establishments’ grosses after installing walls of glass, water, and sea bass. I provided legitimate telephone numbers for people to call in case they didn’t believe my claims. More often than not I dealt with ex-surfers, ex-Northerners, ex-husbands. I didn’t see many switchblade victims.

And I dealt with local oceanfront women who hung out at places like Blowfish Aft up in Murrell’s Inlet, sat with elbows propped on a foot-wide bar staring at miniature toy scuba divers, said things like, I picked out that hammerhead all by myself. I wasn’t prepared for the remainder of the world that lived and thrived on dry land.

Mooney Gray stalked the tongue-and-groove boards bending beneath his penny loafers. He jutted his chest and wagged one finger left and right as if to a James Brown song. You’ve learned to make eye contact. You’ve learned to shake hands with a firm grip. You’ve learned to shake hands and make eye contact before giving your spiel. So what? So what?! I have a dog that shakes hands and makes eye contact.

Lorene wore no underwear. I let my right hand fall to the side.

It wasn’t ten o’clock in the morning yet.

Listen, Mooney Gray said. Listen, I got a story for y’all. This’ll mean something. This ain’t no trick.

Lorene said to me, He’s going to start this whole thing, and then he’ll call for a break. Don’t get too wrapped up in it.

What happened? I asked, pointing to her face. I don’t want to be rude, but I have this problem with needing to know things.

Listen up, Lorene said. She took my hand and set it on her small lap. Even a man more worried about fish than anything else might want to know what this is all about.

I wasn’t sure if I then underwent my first petit-mal seizure or what, but my middle finger twitched uncontrollably for the first time ever. It went in X’s and O’s, as if I were playing tic-tac-toe on Lorene’s face. I felt the same warmth on my hand that I might have felt if petting a black poodle in the sun.

Mooney Gray continued. My daughter joined a gang when she was fifteen years old. We lived in Anaheim, California—you know, right next to Mickey Mouse and Goofy. Gangs don’t emerge out of Never Never Land. That’s what me and the missus thought. Well, my daughter didn’t take much stock in all that. She joined a gang, and as in all good gangs there was an initiation. She didn’t have to go out and kill anybody, thank God. No sir. Don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I think what she had to undergo was even worse. She had to self-mutilate herself.

I put my hand back on my own lap. I crossed and re-crossed my legs and pretended to cough. Looking back on it all, I kind of figured things out at about this point.

Mooney Gray shook his head over and over, then turned his back to the audience. Living so close to Hollywood, these gang members thought that they should scar up their faces as a protest to— he turned around and made quotation marks in the air ‘—the beautiful people.’ They got box cutters and sliced open their faces. One girl made an X right across her face. She could’ve been a model before her decision. One girl made like Frankenstein and just put incisions every whichaway.

I turned toward Lorene. This is your father?

Mooney Gray pointed at Lorene and said, My daughter in the back of the room decided that she wanted to stay young forever, and to do so she needed to slice a children’s game on her face.

This was Lorene’s cue. She stood up, walked past me, and joined her father on stage. Lorene said, You would think that I would have no sales ability whatsoever because of my face. Let me tell you that last year I cleared almost a half million. And you know that if I can get clients to buy my product without looking at my face, then you can sell whatever it is you sell.

For the first time in my life I thought about how I wished I’d married a woman who taught first grade. I didn’t want to sit around motivational speeches ever again. Somehow I knew that whatever Lorene would say, it would end up with me either buying her product out of pity or feeling a guilt known only to biblical characters.

Mooney Gray said, We’re going to take a break for those of y’all who smoke and/or drink coffee. When we reconvene my daughter will tell you everything she knows about selling audiotapes and Braille books to the blind.

I KEYED MOONEY Gray’s Lincoln down the driver’s side, from front wheel well to mid-back door. I rounded my own car, got in, and drove straight to a place called the Halibut Inn near Neptune Beach, thirty minutes away, where I’d once sold a wall aquarium to a joint that served mostly bikers. The aquarium kept clown fish only, seeing as they held the same colors as the Harley-Davidson logo.

Inside, I ordered a draft and said to the barmaid, I’m the guy who sold y’all the aquarium. I pointed behind her.

That’s not enough to get drinks on the house. The barmaid had her hair pulled back in a French twist. She wore leggings and a T-shirt that read IF YOU CAN’T LAUGH AT YOURSELF, THEN MAKE FUN OF EVERYONE ELSE.

I wasn’t looking for free beer. I got money. I was just saying.

She said, I remember when you came in here a couple years ago.

I said, Drew Gaston, but didn’t shake her hand or offer her a business card.

This biker sat down next to me at the bar and said, Gaston. Gassed on. Son, you must come from a people who got farted on. That’s how last names come about. People named Baker come from people who ran bread shops. Smiths are from horseshoers.

We don’t need no more aquariums, the barmaid said. I can’t say that this one does us much good. The owner’s gone crazy and talks to the fish most nights.

I looked behind the woman at their hundred-gallon tank—a small one compared with what I’d sold to places like Dale Ray’s Delray Bar and Grill, which only held skates and mantas, or what the locals grouped as devilfish. I been to some kind of motivational-speaker thing I had to go to. I’m not selling today.

I looked at the barmaid’s perfect face and thought, There’s something missing. She placed a glass of beer in front of me. I’ve seen those people on TV when I get home at three o’clock. In the middle of the night. That what you’re talking?

I watched the clown fish, which seemed to be healthy. I don’t know what I’m talking, I said. I looked at the biker, who wore an upside-down tattoo on his left arm that looked like a woman’s privates but ended up being the devil’s goateed face.

He said, My daddy was a motivational speaker of sorts. He ran the local KKK. Oh, he talked and talked and talked. Then somebody shot him in the eye and killed him. Up in a South Carolina prison.

I looked at the barmaid. Her jaw didn’t drop.

This man I went to see brought along his goofball daughter as a sidekick. She had scars from here to there. I zigzagged my hand like Zorro across my face. I don’t get what people are saying about anything anymore, man. I have no idea what anything has to do with selling what I have to sell. I’m thinking about moving to South Dakota or someplace.

Six clown fish wavered toward the biker and me in such a way that made me think of synchronized swimmers. The barmaid stood before us. She said, My best friend in high school got cut up while diving down in some of those underground caves over near there. She pointed west. She was lucky it didn’t snag her oxygen. She got cut up on coral or limestone. She got scraped like she got throwed from a motorbike onto pavement. To this day she looks like she had a bunch of skin grafts that didn’t quite take.

The biker waved at one of the clown fish, a tiny wave, as if to a newborn human baby. I looked at the barmaid, stood up, and dropped my pants. I showed her the scaly patches of psoriasis on my upper thighs. Did it look like this? I asked her. Look at me. I’m a goddamn skink, motherfucker.

The biker left his beer unfinished and said he needed to rough up someone for money. The barmaid said to me, Maybe you should lay off beer and drink pure water only. I read something about dehydration one time. And about water that’s ninety-nine percent free of lead and other toxins.

I ordered a bourbon and water.

I CALLED MY voicemail from the car. My boss had left one message for me to get in touch with a woman up in Savannah who owned a basement bar called Carpal Tunnel, which was supposed to be geared toward after-fiveo’clock secretaries. Seeing as ‘carp’ is part of the name, Drew, well, you can figure out how to talk them into an aquarium. Salty left another message that went, I didn’t pay all this money for y’all to get motivated properly only to have you drive around town listening to your messages. That was it.

I drove back into Jacksonville. I parked at the far end of Mooney Gray’s scarred sedan. Somewhere between the bar and the Ramada I had decided to ask Lorene out for a date that night, maybe take her back to the Halibut Inn. Maybe I’d ask the rest of my sales force colleagues to go there, too, seeing as the Brunswick-to-Fort Pierce section of the Atlantic coast wasn’t their territory.

I opened the trunk and pulled out an unopened pint of bourbon from beneath some Salty’s Showfish brochures, stuck it in my back pocket, and entered the Azalea Room meeting space just as Mooney Gray said, I hope y’all had a good lunch. Before we break up into groups I want to tell y’all a little story, seeing as that’s what I get paid to do.

I sat in my original chair. Lorene wasn’t around, but there was a piece of folded-over paper on her seat. She’d written FISH GUY on the top. I took it and read, I hope you don’t think I tricked you or anything. I didn’t intend to trick you. After my father got me to an anti-gang intervention expert one of the first things I had to learn how to do was quit tricking people. She signed it Sincerely.

While Mooney Gray went into a long story involving people who die to plan and those who plan to die, I shoved the note in my pocket. I got up and went to the reservation desk and said, I know there’s a bar in here open somewhere.

Yes sir. Second floor. The clerk pointed up. You can either take the elevator and then a right to the end of the hallway or climb those stairs at the end of this hall and it’ll spill you out where you want to be. Whichever’s easiest.

I found Lorene at the bar, drinking something that involved a paper umbrella. Most of the Salty’s Showfish sales force sat at a round table at the other end of the room. Mind if I join you here, lady? I said, pulling a leatherbacked stool out.

You get my note? In the near-dark Lorene’s scars blended into her face naturally. I wanted to run my hand over her visage, either for security or to make sure Mooney and Lorene hadn’t pulled some kind of makeup job to gain sympathy.

Nothing against you and yours, but I can’t take these motivational seminars. The last one I went to involved everybody holding hands and singing, ‘If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,’ which wasn’t easy, seeing as we were told not to let go of our partners on either side. I pointed at the draft beer dispenser. The bartender poured a pint and slid it over. From behind me I heard Mike Cobb bragging about an aquarium he’d sold to Dollywood when he was on his vacation, far from his Wilmington-to-Norfolk territory.

Lorene tipped her glass in a toast. I don’t travel around with Daddy often. We just happened to be in the same area. There are more than a few blind people in Florida, let me tell you. They want books on tape. They want Braille. I know he’s my father and all, but let me say that Mooney Gray is a moral person. He’s not like us. He genuinely wants people to succeed in what they do, and he believes in what he espouses.

I thought, Espouses. I would use that word from then on out. That’s a true story about the gang? What were you people thinking?

Lorene ran her index finger down the alluvial chutes of her face. I wanted to be queen of the gang, pretty much. Hell, any kind of self-etched disfigurement allowed a girl to join in. Some of my friends only scratched an inch-long crease into their forehead or wherever. She took the umbrella and straw from her drink. Lorene set them aside on a clean paper napkin. She slugged down the mixture like a shooter. It’s not easy living in such close proximity to women who can afford perfection long after their looks decline.

I turned to my friends. Danny Clement was in the middle of a story about how he went through some picayune town called Forty-Five somewhere in the Carolinas, how he sold two hundred-gallon aquariums to a man who owned the local cotton mill, how the man only stocked them with fishing lures he’d bought over the years at estate sales when his spinners, doffers, and weavers died. Mike Cobb caught my eye and gave a thumbs-up.

I RETURNED TO the seminar alone. I got in a group of five other men and a woman. Mooney Gray told us to close our eyes and envision anything that might make the world better that didn’t involve money. Mooney Gray said, You can’t think about turning slums into condos, seeing as that would take too much money. You can’t think about feeding kids in Appalachia or Rwanda, seeing as rice, flour, and wheat cost money. You can’t even think about cleaning up the environment, seeing as it’d cost money to filter out what toxins we pour into the Mississippi and places.

I closed my eyes and thought of Lorene’s scars. I tried my best not to think, a world without low self-esteem, a world without women who know that they can’t compete with what advertisers put in magazines and on television so that said women feel as though they need to lose anywhere from ten to a hundred pounds in order to look like an air-brushed woman midway through a two-hundred-page magazine with ten pages of actual text. I tried not to think, If people still had gills.

Okay. Now I want everybody to tell their secrets. Y’all vote on which one you think’s best in your group, and then I’ll vote on which one’s best overall. I believe I got another— Mooney Gray reached into his waistband —set of complimentary drink tickets for upstairs.

My group members stared at each other. One man said, Well, seeing as you’re in the club, why don’t you start off, to me.

I ain’t in the club. I don’t even know what the club is. I sell fucking aquariums.

I’m in golf balls, another man said.

The woman in the group said, My boss sent me here because I couldn’t talk people into two months’ worth of suntan sessions. We live in St. Augustine, by God! Who needs suntan sessions?

I said, Eeny-meeny-miney-moe, and went around until it ended with the guy next to me. You start.

It was worthless. Every salesperson said something that would’ve cost money—free cars for every American, free groceries, obligatory armed service. One guy said, To make the world a better place I’m thinking maybe we could all move to space stations and live above it all. He sold air purifiers door-to-door.

I wrote down every suggestion on the lined memo pad provided in each participant’s packet. When it got to my turn I said, The world would be a different and better place without mandatory motivational speeches to attend. My team members stared as if I’d piped up about how Jesus was a gay man who couldn’t decide which of the twelve disciples to date seriously.

That’s just plain mean-spirited, said a man who sold a cleansing agent called Scour Power. Go with the flow, man. Do you know how lucky you are to be able to spend a day not knocking on doors?

I stood up and looked at Lorene’s father onstage. I yelled out, It would be a better world if we wouldn’t have to go to motivational speeches, man. It would be a better world if parents could understand that their children cry out for help in ways unknown to the live-bearing population. It just came to me. I nodded twice hard, turned, and walked out of the room all slumpy and boneless, as if I wore a pimp’s costume.

LORENE SAID, I’M not ragging on your car or anything, but it would be nice to have a convertible right now. I’d gone back up to the Ramada bar, taken the scarred woman by the hand, and led her outside. We drove to the Halibut Inn.

When you first sat down next to me at nine o’clock this morning, did you intentionally show me your crotch? I want to know. It doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t. What I’m thinking is, a person with a, well, blemish of some sort might subconsciously redirect another person’s line of sight. I’m trying to figure some things out about the human condition.

Lorene adjusted the passenger-side mirror in a way that allowed me to see only the roadside ditch clearly. We couldn’t rob banks when I was in the gang. It was too easy for a witness to give clear descriptions. What we did, though, was hang out down in Beverly Hills and find ways to fuck movie stars. Men or women. I can give you a list of leading men to character actors to sitcom women who will never forget me. I’m etched in their minds, so to speak.

I got behind a slow-moving truck with WORLD’S LARGEST ALLIGATOR printed on the tailgate. I didn’t switch lanes and pass it. What?

Lorene studied strip malls. She kept her face turned away from me. Listen. I met a man who opened a New Age bookstore. He had this big gay-and-lesbian section. He had an entire wall of books on holistic healing, and another on how to garden without using any pesticides or insecticides. This was in New Mexico. You’d think that he’d’ve made a killing. This was in Santa Fe, where all those rich people come buy bad artwork to fill the walls of their new vacation homes up in Taos or wherever.

I listened to Lorene, but what I really wanted to know was if the world’s largest alligator was in the back of the pickup truck. It was one of those wide-bed trucks with four tires on back. I wanted the alligator—which certainly had to curl itself in half if it was the world’s largest—to raise its head.

He had a slew of those self-help books, from finding your inner child to finding your soul to finding your perfect mate. He had books on how to read tarot cards. You could even buy books on how to read crystal balls. There were books on discovering souls you didn’t even know that you had, like from past lives and whatnot. In the philosophy section he had everything from Plato to Shirley MacLaine. The world’s-largest-alligator truck turned off Highway 10 toward the Regency Square Mall. I fucking followed it. I want to see this thing, I said. The truck pulled into a Citgo gas station.

Well, this guy who owned the bookstore went out of business completely. As a matter of fact, he didn’t average selling more than a book a day over a six-month period.

I put my car in park. The driver of the pickup truck pulled to the pumps and got out. I yelled, You got the world’s largest alligator in back?

Lorene pulled me by the arm. Listen. This is important to me, man. You need to listen to what I have to say.

The guy pumping gas said, "I did. You ain’t seen her, have you?"

Lorene pulled and pulled. I said, Goddamn. I wonder if that thing escaped.

It ended up that this man with the bookstore had all of his feng shui books in the wrong spot. He had them in the wrong corner of the room, and pointed in the wrong direction. Faced the wrong way.

I looked at Lorene and imagined what her tears would do should she cry. She needed a gutter hanging off of her chin, I thought.

She’s loose? Wait a minute. You lost the world’s largest alligator? Lorene asked.

I stared straight ahead. That guy lost her. I put the car in drive and took off. Now that’s bad feng shui. He won’t be able to espouse his find anymore.

Lorene said something about how she appreciated how I listened to what she had to say. My father never listened until he had no other option, and then he only used what I said in his speeches across the country.

I turned back onto Highway 10. I turned up the radio. There was a local talk show going on. The guest and the disc jockey spoke of changing weather conditions. The guest was some kind of avant-garde meteorologist. He said it wasn’t impossible to imagine the earth reverting to another Ice Age. Likewise, it wasn’t farfetched to envision total water. I thought about saying how my business would probably go downhill if the world went all water. I stuck my tongue out and said nothing. Lorene turned toward me. She closed her legs intentionally and said something about how she got tired sometimes of dragging from one spot to the next.

A MAN WITH MY NUMBER

THE MAN INSISTED THAT I NEEDED STICK-ON NUMBERS . He carried a special case that looked like a shrunken steamer trunk, with one handle and three large metal clasps. By large I mean the length and width of a playing card. I didn’t check the thickness of each clasp. Most clasps aren’t any bigger than the ones on old lunch boxes, or maybe briefcases. These were big clasps. I became enamored with them, and thought about buckles on the shoes of Puritans. I remember thinking to myself, This guy should be out selling clasps, not stick-on numbers. Clasps like that—hell, you could keep roofs from flying off during tornado or hurricane season with some clasps like that.

The man himself looked normal enough, if standing five four and being thin enough to crawl into ductwork without grunting is normal. I was glad that I noticed this feature of him later. Also, it looked as if he combed his hair after a careful diagnosis from a slide rule, T-square, and micrometer. He had the eyes of a tent revival preacher, part blank and part bloodshot. I said, Say that all again, man.

This was at the front door. No one ever came to my front door. Hardly anyone ever came to the side door either, except for the mail lady when one of my machetes, oversized boots, or special bolt cutters finally arrived. Or the UPS guy. Or someone with a stray dog saying it showed up at their house and everyone says it’s probably mine—which it never has been seeing as I keep my dogs under control. If I had some kind of running-off dog, I could use one of the stick-on numbers guy’s trunk clasps to reinforce the dog’s collar and chain.

But my dogs never feel the need to roam. People who know me—people who don’t show up unannounced with a stray wondering if it’s one of mine—know that my dogs somehow understand boundaries. They show up at my house for a reason, then settle in. Dogs seem to sense things we cannot fathom. They know fear, sure, that’s all been documented. But they also know what kinds of people won’t feed or pet them if they (the dogs) run out into the road or chase birds on a whim. Dogs know good music when they hear it, too.

The man said, I notice you don’t have any street address numbers out there on your mailbox, or anywhere on the side of your house. So it’s your lucky day. I’m here to show you some stick-on numbers that won’t rust, peel, bleed, fade, or become compromised by the elements. You ever seen that number ten over there in London, where the prime minister lives? They’ve been showing that entrance with the number ten now since Winston Churchill. Those are our numbers.

I said, The nursery’s closed. I’m out of plants right now. But I’ll have some cypresses in the next few weeks. I had kind of presupposed, I suppose, what the man came for. When it wasn’t dogs or lost people or the mail lady, it was people confusing my one-man nursery across the street with my private abode. I said, Wait. I have numbers on my mailbox and right there on the side entrance so in case there’s a substitute mail lady or UPS driver they’ll know that they’re at the right place to bring my machetes, oversized boots, or bolt cutters.

From the front door, you can’t see the side of my house. It’s around the corner. There’s a jut. I hate to contradict you, Mr…. This guy was good. This guy had something else going for him besides the mesmerizing buckles. He had a clipboard that he could hold in such a way that I couldn’t tell if he really had any names written down, in up-and-down-the-road order, standing for the people who lived on Snipes Road.

I said, Beaumont. It was the fake name I used when I needed to use fake names when people showed up. People always felt non-threatened, at first, around anyone named Beaumont. It was the last name of the actor who played Mr. Ward Cleaver.

The stick-on number guy said, Here it is. Beaumont.

So I was on to him. Ha! To me he wasn’t much of an authority on the stick-on numbers game anymore. I kind of wish I hadn’t mentioned the things I collected, should he be one to collect the exact same things and want to come back and break in. I said, Or when the mail lady or UPS driver brings me one of my many assault rifles and booby traps bought from down in South America. I looked way out at the mailbox. I faced it directly, so couldn’t see if the numbers might be missing. I said, What’s your name, man.

He placed his clipboard down atop the trunk. He reached in his shirt pocket and produced an ID that can be bought at about any flea market worth its while. I had about twenty of the things I carried around with me at various times when I went out. He said, Mack Morris Murray. Three M’s. That’s one of the reasons I always knew I’d be perfect for this job. 3M, like the company that makes the best adhesives going around. People call me Mack Morris.

First off, I thought, Who would come up with a fake name like Mack Morris Murray? Me, my fake IDs weren’t all that different than John Smith, John Jones, Joe Smith, Joe Jones, Mike Smith, Mike Jones. People like to make the acquaintance of people with easy fake names. People don’t like other people with either A) a bunch of names that’re all first names like Mack and Morris and Murray, or B) a bunch of names that’re all last names like Pinckney and Calhoun and Sanders. Dogs don’t like people with those kinds of names, either. Go introduce your dog to someone named Mack Morris Murray or Pinckney Calhoun Sanders and see what happens. Growling dog, that’s what happens.

I closed the door behind me, not thinking. Looking back on it all, that’s another reason not to trust people with three first or last names in a row. They get a person too distracted.

I walked out into my front yard, which was four narrow acres, on a slant, until I noticed that, sure enough, someone had stolen the numbers off of my mailbox. There’s a place where I can look through the pine trees, winter or summer.

I walked around the jut of the house, stood on the gravel driveway, and learned that the same thing had happened to my house numbers. In my mind, walking back to this fancy-clasped salesman, I remembered what my numbers looked like in both places. I foresaw his opening the trunk, my seeing my numbers that he’d stolen some time in the past couple days, and then my going inside to get one of the machetes.

I said, I don’t have a lot of patience, Mr. Morris.

Murray. Mack Morris Murray. Please call me Mack Morris, he said. I don’t know if it’s the law around here, but in some towns it’s the law to have visible and easily identifiable house numbers. For the fire department, you know.

I said, Uh-huh. Well, ‘Mr. Beaumont’ might sound like a real nice guy, but he isn’t always. You can ask his sons, wife, or that kid Eddie Haskell.

I kept eye contact. So did Mack Morris Murray. And he smiled one of those smiles everyone’s seen. In Australia, smiles are frowns and frowns are smiles. I figured this Mack Morris Murray man to be Australian. He could disguise his frown just by living north of the equator. Mack Morris said, I’m not so sure I follow you. Maybe it would be best I come back at another time.

A couple of my dogs barked inside. There were more in the back, behind the Leyland cypresses I planted myself, which hid the stone wall I built myself, which hid the cedar plank privacy fence I built with the help of a man named Guillermo some years earlier when the dogs started showing up.

I said, No, you stay right here. Why don’t you open up that fancy trunk of yours and let’s you and me take a close inspection of what kinds of numbers you got for sale. I got a long address number, you know. It’s nineteen, thirty-three, seventeen. It’s one, nine, three, three, one, seven.

Mack Morris said, I got you. It’s a hundred ninety-three, three hundred seventeen.

It’s one hundred ninety-three thousand, three hundred seventeen, I said as fast as possible. I’d practiced it before. Sometimes I like to give out my telephone number like that, too.

He said, "We don’t offer any discounts on big numbers, if that’s what you’re asking. I can sell you one