Calloustown Read Online Free

Calloustown
Book: Calloustown Read Online Free
Author: George Singleton
Tags: Calloustown
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he spoke to a volleyball, or his wife Jenny died and left him with that bastard child, or he opened up a big soulless bookstore and forced that woman out of business, or that gigantic prisoner’s pet mouse got smushed, or he decided he didn’t want to be big anymore after talking to that mechanical fortune teller, or he came back to Normandy and talked at a grave marker.
    I’ll give Mella this: She learned to mask her public orgasmic outbursts into sounding like something else. In a movie theatre she could make the noise of a rusty film reel spinning, for example. At a New Year’s Eve party, when that big ball’s going down and everyone’s crying, Mella sounds like champagne corks exploding. She’s an Amazonian bird in that way. She’s like nothing else in all others, though.
    She got disability early on, of course, even though a qualified doctor finally signed her off as having some kind of rare chronic pain syndrome because he knew he’d be laughed out of the medical community if he wrote down somewhere on an official document, “She can’t work seeing as every workplace is sad and sadness makes her orgasmic,” blah blah blah. Between marriage and age thirty Mella worked as a high school English teacher who never gave less than an A, seeing as she couldn’t take the kids flipping out saying their parents would kill them or that they wouldn’t be able to get into college. I met Mella in college—we went to a place that had a perennial 0–11 football team, and let me tell you I got lucky every Saturday night after the autumn games. Hell, I thought every woman was like Mella and wondered how come the boys on my hall had such trouble getting laid—“Take them to a football game,” I said. “Then when you get back to your room, bring up something about how the quarterback got a concussion, which meant he’d probably be suffering from dementia later on in life. Go ahead and start taking off your clothes at this point while putting a Tom Waits album on the turntable.”
    Anyway, Mella “retired” from the workplace and diddled around, so to speak, until eBay showed up. I had a regular job doing regular things that brought us a regular paycheck. I’m an actuary. An actuary! I’m supposed to be able to predict how long people will live, and whether my company can make money off of them. It’s more complicated than that, certainly, but not by much. Let me say this: I have professional friends in the business that I see daily. If I had to predict, and that’s what I do, how many times they have a meaningful, productive, non-reproductive, sexual experience with a woman, I’d say the odds were something like, oh, infinity-to-one.
    â€œOh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker that was good, Tank.”
    She rarely called me “Tank,” but that’s how good it was there, pulled off on a dirt road outside Calloustown, South Carolina, on a Saturday morning, driving around aimlessly in search of small boxable items she could sell on eBay—advertising ashtrays, for instance, or first-edition books, or silver salt spoons. My father understood that people named Henry got called Hank. He wanted to name me “Tank,” my mother said no, and he somehow convinced her that he had an old uncle named Tenry: “I want to name our first son after my old Great Uncle Tenry,” he supposedly said.
    â€œTenry!” my mother said there on a bed after her water broke. “That’s different! With a name like that, he won’t be something everyday.”
    Like an actuary.
    My father called me Tank, my mother called me Tenry, I went to college, and I met a beautiful woman who should’ve been a Sioux named Mella-Who-Cries-and-Seizures-Loudly.
    We had pulled off on the dirt road some seventy miles from where we lived and thirty miles from our destination because I’d made the mistake of putting the radio
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