Wounded Boarders

 

An excerpt from George Singleton's Wounded Boarders. 

It started with a toaster and ended with a Maytag washerdryer combo and four new steel-belted radials. In between, the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s deliverer, or mail carrier set down on my front porch a Cuisinart blender, a fifty-pound bag of dog kibble, an ottoman, a six-pack of Yankee bird feeders, one vintage ukulele from a place called Imperiala all the way out in Santa Ana, California, plus enough Venetian blinds to darken one of those French cathedrals. There might’ve been other things. On days I found nothing misdelivered, I blamed porch pirates from one of the new modular-home-filled subdivisions up and down what was once, twenty years earlier, a country road. Everything delivered had the correct address—my address—but a name I didn’t know: Edmund Conyers. I’m talking the washer/dryer, ottoman, ukulele, blinds, etcetera, they all showed EDMUND CONYERS, and then the exact place where I lived on Carolina Ponyfoot Road, Cannonburg, SC.

I kept all these unordered gifts and even used the toaster and ukulele until I happened to watch one of those cable series shows about crooks that involved harboring stolen goods. Harboring might not be the correct term. On the show, the dude kept taking on people’s swiped sailboats. Receiving stolen goods, I guess. I didn’t want to be charged with receiving stolen goods—but if I did, I planned ahead of time to bring in the UPS, FedEx, Lowe’s person, and mail carrier as accessories. Oh, I had it planned out. Anyway, I got paranoid about bringing things I never ordered into my den, opening the boxes, then staring at them, these things Edmund Conyers needed, evidently. I imagined a man with his feet up, strumming his four-string, looking out at the birds through a bunch of slats, petting his dog, thinking about making one of those healthy green slushies, lulled by the rumble of a dryer while awaiting the time when he could drive off on Michelins. That’s me. I thought of those types of things.

I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but it occurred to me that perhaps one Edmund Conyers used to live here at 111 Carolina Ponyfoot Road, maybe thirty or sixty years ago. I’d bought the house, back when I was married, from, I don’t know, someone named Lagrone or Lagroon. I forget. We bought the place, I worked my job, my wife worked her job, she fell in love with her boss at the law firm and left me, and so on.

“This is starting to take up too much room,” I said to myself. I thought about moving, or at least calling a licensed contractor to add a nice twenty-by-twenty room at the end of the house. I’d like to say that I stood out front, awaiting the UPS woman, in order to say, “Hey, this isn’t mine.” But I did the opposite. One time I stood outside staring at a dying citronella plant when one of those people showed up, and I ran back inside and stood at a place in the kitchen where no one could see me if they peered in. Ten minutes later, I walked out on the front porch to find a box of vitamins, supplements, and such—A, Bs, C, D, folic acid, milk thistle, all the rest. A few of those bottles, I learned after doing some research, concerned memory problems. And that’s when it hit me: someone used to live in this house, they’ve forgotten, and they keep ordering shit and sending it to their old address. Somebody named Edmund Conyers has forgotten where he lives now. Oh, how sad, I thought. I thought, I need to run down the Conyers family and return what was theirs.

Listen, I’m not a detective. My last job happened to be as a door-to-door salesman selling welcome mats. You know how I did it? I put down a mat that read welcome, stood on it, then rang the doorbell. This was back when I had all my teeth. I smiled bigger than possible. Whoever answered the door, man or woman, always looked puzzled until I took my right forefinger and pointed downward. “Don’t you think you need something like this?” I might say.

“Don’t you want people showing up and feeling like they belong?”

Things started falling apart when people ordered their welcome mats online. I knew it because of the misspellings. There were too many people who kept mats that read things like the sinclair’s or the funderburk’s. Is there no one at the welcome mat store who contacts buyers and says, “Do you want me to add house or front porch at the end of this?” Though even then, it would only be the domain of only one singular Funderburk. Like I said, I’m no genius, but I know the rules of the apostrophe. Sometimes, driving around aimlessly, I saw such spellings on mailboxes and knew to keep going.

It’s not just mats that read welcome. I had a trunkful, all different shades, one of which read GO AWAY, ha ha ha. If I’d’ve had that particular mat on my front porch, maybe I’d’ve not gotten all the unsolicited packages that Edmund Conyers deserved. For the religious folk, I urged them to buy one that read, in tiny font, IF NO ONE ANSWERS, WE HAVE ANSWERED THE CALL OF THE SECOND COMING. It might’ve been my best seller.

For the record, I’m only missing one back molar, but it caused all my other teeth to space out like a worthless picket fence. People won’t buy welcome mats, evidently, from a guy with such spacing.

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