Calloustown Read Online Free Page A

station on NPR on a Saturday morning before Car Talk, and there was this goddamn piece about an ex–opera singer who had at one time sung that sad “O Mio Babbino Caro” song in some kind of production in Tampa, which is sad enough without the story of this ex-opera star having fallen upon such hard times that she had to eat cat food because she didn’t have money, and her leg had some kind of nerve damage that made her foot flop around, and a daughter of hers died from a Lortab overdose, and her faithful husband died in a boating accident that involved two manatees, and then the bank finally foreclosed on her house because she’d missed a mortgage payment by several minutes.
    â€œOh, Jesus Christ Almighty motherfucker,” Mella said, and I got back in the driver’s seat in order to take us onward. She put her seat back up. “I’m sorry. I needed that. I couldn’t handle it alone. Thank you. Thank you, Tank.”
    I said, “Uh-huh.” I’d been preoccupied, up until that point, with the odds of a man living to the age of seventy-six after he’d been in cancer remission since the age of forty-five. What with all the new drugs and experiments and treatments, it wasn’t easy.
    We drove back down the highway. I turned the radio off. I said, “You got anything special you’re looking for?”
    My wife said, “Something’s wrong with the car.”
    I thought we’d been hitting potholes, that maybe my eyes failed to discern changes in the macadam. I said, “Calloustown seems like the kind of place where you’ll find some old syrup containers, or singletrees, or metal Pepsi signs, or turkey calls, or battery-operated clapping monkeys, or Underwood typewriters, or arrowheads, or Edgefield pottery, or Vietnam-era Zippos, or confederate money, or dinosaur bones, or…” The car hopped onward, sure enough. And then that temperature needle flew up, showing that we overheated. I knew if I drove much longer my engine wouldn’t live another day. I said, “I need to pull over.”
    Mella started crying.
    I’m not sure what kind of so-called qualified town wants to have a funeral home as the first business after the “Welcome To” sign, but I eased into the parking lot of the Glymph Funeral Home and put it in park. I said to Mella, “This is not sad. This is one of those things. Do not make a scene, please. We’re all right.”
    I got out and opened the hood, as if I knew what I was doing. Well, I did know that every damn belt shouldn’t be snapped and dangling from its water pump, alternator, power steering, and A/C compressor pulleys. I looked down into the mysterious cavern of my car’s innards, saw what seemed to have sprang, and yelled out to Mella, “Look what we did at our age! We’re fifty! We killed us some rubber gaskets and whatnot, is what I’m saying. Goddamn. You and I were humping so hard we broke everything.”
    The front end steamed and pinged and tick-tick-tick-tick-ticked to the point where I could do nothing but close down the hood for fear of getting shot in the head by a rod. Mella nodded inside the car, then patted the driver’s seat. She said, “I’ve seen this happen on TV. It’ll be all right. I saw this happen one time in a movie that involved these two guys having to drive through the desert.”
    I remembered the time she’d watched that movie—a lizard died, and Mella started crying, and the next thing you know I had her backed up against the bookcase. I remember it well, because Mella was the reader in the family, what with her English teacher background, and while I had her there I got to looking over the titles and thought, I really ought to read Of Human Bondage , and Wuthering Heights , and Ethan Frome . That’s what I thought back then. But here I said, “We need to call Triple A.”
    She said, “If I call them, and