(I took this picture on our Greer Spring hike last Saturday.--MT)
Chapter 4: A Detour for Grandma’s Biscuits and Sheryl Crow
Looks like a gloomy, rainy kind of day, so instead of yardwork or fishing down at the river, I suppose I might as well do a little gabbing in the form of writing. Pick you up a cup of coffee or other favorite beverage, take a load off, and have a little read. I think this may be a short chapter. We really need to get to the real action of the story pretty soon. Anyway, let me see where I was…Joey Bob and Eddie the Snake.
That Friday evening right at 10:30 pm, Joey Bob’s girlfriend drove us down into the old part of Conway somewhere around College Avenue. I have never been very familiar with Conway, so I couldn’t tell you exactly where I was, but some of the one-story ranch-style houses had the gray and brown cut stone exteriors that was only done during a certain time period, probably from the 1950’s and ‘60’s. You know what they look like. This story is set in the 1980’s, so, by then, the neighborhoods were kind of run down, and a lot of the houses were much the worse for wear. As we drove the streets looking for the address where we were going, not many lights were on in the windows of the domiciles, or they were covered with cardboard or aluminum foil to keep out prying eyes. The streets were empty, there was nobody around, and nobody looking, and I liked that. We eventually found the address Stainy had given me, and, sure enough, a brown Chevy S10 sat at the end of the driveway, its rear end poking out halfway into the narrow street.
Joey Bob’s girlfriend stopped her car in the middle of the street, and I got out, but Joey Bob didn’t immediately. I think they might have been smooching or who knows what. Remember how I told you about Joey Bob’s bad decisions? You should have seen this gal. I think her name was Latrina or some “La” name. It could have been Katrina. Who knows? Who cares? All I recall is that she had a nose like a beak, a chin like a nose, and teeth like a rabbit in a long horse face very similar to that Sex in the City actress. You know who I’m talking about? Anyhow, this here girlfriend’s arms and legs were the size and shape of toothpicks, but she had wide hips, so she seemed to wobble nearly out of control when she walked like she was on stilts. I can’t recollect a single attractive feature about that woman, but Joey Bob loved her. Everywhere they went, he had his hand on her back or on her butt or in her back pocket, gentle-like and protective not possessive. Joey Bob could be a sweet guy, but that woman…well, she coulda lost a beauty contest to a possum. Whatcha gonna do?
Anyway, while they were saying their goodbyes, their last ones ever as a matter of fact, I went over and looked in the S10. Three large duffle bags lay in the open bed pushed up to the front by the cab. They looked to be packed tight with rectangular-shaped blocks so that the zipper barely zipped. I didn’t bother to test this idea, to touch the bags, or to even look at them too close. It wasn’t my business what was or how much was in the bags. I took the key that Stainy had given me out of an inside pocket of my Navy longcoat, sat in the truck, and put the key in the ignition switch. It fit perfectly. I pushed in the clutch and turned the key. The truck started right up and seemed to idle out pretty smoothly. Sometimes, these shotgun vehicles weren’t much, seeing as how they might be left sitting on the roadside in a moment’s notice, but this one seemed to be in good shape mechanically. Nobody cared about what it looked like on the outside, and I don’t remember anything about it except it was brown and the wheels rolled. I put the gear shift in neutral and checked the parking brake worked. Then, leaving the engine running, I got out, removed my coat and my shoulder holster, rolled up the guns still in the holster inside the coat, and put the whole bundle behind the bench seat on the passenger side. Then, I looked to find out if Joey Bob was coming. All I could see of him and his girl were moving shadows inside her car. I actually thought they might have been humping right there in the middle of the street. Weirdos! I hollered out toward them.
“I’m leavin’ in thirty seconds.”
Both Joey Bob and Latrina probably wish that I had had a watch and that I had left without him in thirty seconds, but I never owned a watch, and I didn’t leave, so wishing wouldn’t change anything. I gave them five minutes to finish. Whatcha gonna do?
Turns out, that waiting five minutes caused us to be more than five minutes late, and we didn’t make it to the loading docks at the Furniture Factory by shift change at eleven mostly because neither Joey Bob nor I were familiar with the industrial park area. We did find the Furniture Factory on the first trip by but circled it several times before we figured out that the entrance to the loading dock was between a couple stacks of old rusty train-car shipping containers. When we finally did get into the shipping yard of the factory, I followed as instructed by Stainy and backed up to the loading dock. The concrete dock, meant to accommodate semi-truck trailers, was two foot higher than the tailgate of the S10. Nobody was on the dock, but a roll up garage-type door was open, and we could see people milling about inside the warehouse. We both got out, lit cigarettes, and leaned against the truck bed, talking about things I’ve long since forgotten. We were on our second or third name brand cigarette when a fork lift pulled out of the door and over to the edge of the dock right behind the S10. It had a stack of cardboard boxes four or five high that were four inches thick, four feet long, and two feet wide. The forklift drove to the edge of the dock and lowered its cargo down to a few inches above the sides of the truck bed. Then, it shut off with a jerk and a bark. A man who looked a lot like Stainy except for forty pounds heavier jumped off the forklift and came around to the side.
“You fellers need a couple of office chairs.”
Joey Bob and I looked at each other not knowing what we were supposed to say.
“You Eddie the Snake?”
That was me asking.
“Yeah, that’s me. You guys wanna throw those chairs in the back of the truck?”
“You know, I really don’t have any use for an office chair…much less two of ‘em.”
“Well, put’em in there anyway. I’ll find somebody who can use’em.”
Joey Bob and I stepped to the back of the S10 and grabbed opposite ends of the top box and turned it so the end labeled “Top” was laid in the bed of the truck and “Bottom” was propped up on the tail gate. We did the same with the other four boxes. The boxes weighed eighty to a hundred pounds apiece, so I suspect they were filled with some fine office furniture after all.
“I’ve got a bit of inventory to finish, so it’ll be a few minutes.”
Eddie the Snake jumped back onto the forklift, cranked it up, spun it expertly, and disappeared through the open door into a warehouse piled ceiling high with crates and pallets full of cardboard boxes similar to the ones we had just unloaded. Joey Bob looked at me like he wanted to say something that I might not like.
“Spit it out,” I told him.
“Now, we’re stealin’ office furniture?”
“It’s called the get-now-pay-if-you-get-caught program, I suspect.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“Me neither.”
We waited for Eddie the Snake for too long. That was my excuse then for doing something I normally would not have done, and I haven’t come up with a better excuse in the years since, so I will still use it. I failed to mention that in the bundle I had made of my coat, holster, and guns, I also had pint of a powerful name brand whisky. I’m not gonna say the name of the brand, but it was a 101 proof gold liquid that would make a feller gobble. After what seemed like hours, I was bored as hell of standing around in the dark, leaning on or sitting in the S10 truck, so I got into the big pocket of my Navy long coat, pulled out that pint of whisky, and started sipping from it. I kept it out of Joey Bob’s sight because he woulda downed it probably. Besides that, he had already over to a picnic table where some folks had gathered during a break and smoked some weed, so he had his own kind of buzz anyhow. At one point, after I was starting to feel a bit toasted by the whisky, I sat down in the truck, flipped the key to ACC, and turned the radio on. After two or three songs, the radio announcer said it was 1:30 AM. My frustrations at the wait started to boil up, and I took a big swig of the whisky, took it down below half, and immediately realized that the world around me was getting unsteady and shaky. At least, my perceptions of it were.
Next thing I have even a fuzzy memory of, Eddie the Snake, Joey Bob, and I are headed north on Highway 67/167, somewhere between Beebe and Searcy, Arkansas. Eddie’s driving as he was supposed to, Joey Bob’s straddling the shift stick in the center, and I’m sitting with my head against the cold glass of the passenger side window, holding an empty pint bottle between my legs. They are both singing loudly to an Eagle’s song on the radio, one of the slower ones like Take It to the Limits or Lyin’ Eyes. I’m pretty impressed with how they can harmonize with one another and the Eagles’ singer, and I figure I’ll join in, but after croaking out a couple of seriously out-of-tune lines and forgetting the words to the song, I realize that I feel like a big, ol’ sack of shit, so I put my swirling head back against the cold glass, and experience blackness…not a good restful dark, but a spinning blank in time, lost to forever.
I jerk awake the next time to the strong, skunky-sweet smell of some high dollar grass buds, pure buds, no shake in this at all. The two guys are sharing the joint, and they are right at the end of it, holding the roach with the fingernails between their pointers and thumbs. I hadn’t touched the joint myself, but my drunk headache appeared to be gone, so I’d had a good secondhand cure to my hangover without even asking for it. My eyes burn and itch some, and I can’t open them wide enough to see anything, but I feel good, kind of floaty and fuzzy. They’ve turned the radio to a country music station, and George Strait is bemoaning the state of his exes.
“Where are we?”
“Just outside a Kennett, Missouri. Joe and I decided we’d take a detour to my Grandma’s and get her to make us some biscuits and gravy.”
The word “detour” did not compute in my head, but biscuits and gravy sounded like it was the perfect solution to all my problems at that particular moment. All but one of them.
“Who’s Joe?” I mumbled still not able to lift my eyelids enough to see Joey Bob a sitting beside me.
“Me.” Joey Bob laughed with a cough.
“Nobody has ever called you Joe.”
“Eddie does. He just started. He didn’t know any different.”
“Why they call you Eddie the Snake? You don’t look like a snake.”
“I’ve got two big boa constrictors let loose in my house.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s cool.”
“Remind me to never go to your house.”
“Okay.”
You get the idea how the conversation went for the next thirty minutes until we pulled into a long chat driveway that ran between two fields of stubble that had been burnt and plowed recently. A hint of the acrid smoke from the crop burning hung in the dense early morning air. Up ahead on a rise above the fields, I could see the shadow of a house in the dim and foggy arc of a power pole night lamp. A porch light was on above the front door and another light from a window, I assumed, cast a glow on the grass on the right side of the structure. I had no idea what the time was, but it seemed too dark and too early for anyone to be up and around in the house.
Eddie drove the truck to within five feet of the front porch steps, stopped, and we all unfolded out of the small truck, catching our balance by placing our hands on the sides or hood of the S10. I was so groggy I felt like I might have been dreaming this.
“Your grandma gonna be up this time a night?”
“Hell, Grandpa’s already on a tractor somewhere. I guarantee it.”
Joey Bob and I followed Eddie the Snake up the steps and in through the heavy wooden front door that he opened without a knocking or a calling out. We stepped into a short foyer lined with work boots, rubber boots, and slip-on shoes on the right side and proceeded around a corner to the left into a room that was a blended kitchen/dining area. A plump woman in a knee length dress with a flower pattern on it stood in front of a sink wiping dishes with a ragged white towel. She was a looking out the window and didn’t turn to us though she surely had heard us clomping in.
“What’d you forget, Sam?”
“It’s me, Grandma.”
The woman turned and let loose a squeal of laughter. She stuck the dishrag in a big pocket on the front of a white apron tied loosely around her neck and waist, then reached out, grabbed Eddie the Snake by both shoulders, and pulled him into her ample bosom, squeezing him tightly in a grandma hug. Her smiling eyes looked up at me and Joey Bob.
“Who’re your friends, Eddie?”
“This is Joe and Bugler,” he pointed as he named us.
“You know Amos Bugler over at Corning?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t believe I do.”
“His name might be Butler not Bugler.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I know anybody from Corning.”
She wrinkled her nose and gave me a suspicious eye that I don’t feel like I deserved, but it went away quickly and a twinkle came back into them.
“Y’all want some biscuits?”
“And some gravy too if you don’t mind.”
“Y’all go wash up. I do declare every one of you smells of a skunk. Did you hit one on the highway?”
“We did down near the crossroads at Risco.”
“Well, the cigarette smoke doesn’t help either. You shouldn’t smoke, Eddie. It was the smokin’ that killed Uncle Herman, you know. He got the cancer from smokin’ and barely lasted a year after it took hold.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know.”
“Go. Wash up. I’ll make some coffee for you and then whip up some breakfast. You might want ta go tell your grandpa you’re here. He’s down in the field near Buck creek.”
“We’re all kinda tired of ridin’, Grandma, so if you could just make us some breakfast. We’ll wait here.”
Twenty minutes later, the best smell that ever graced a kitchen was emanating all around the three of us as we sat at the table drinking cups of coffee black. I don’t know how to describe the scent of buttery biscuits baking, but I have to imagine that heaven itself could very well smell like biscuits in the oven, and people would know that’s where God lives. I don’t reckon they’d ever know the difference anyway. But, it makes me wonder. Could you ever get so used to the aroma of baking biscuits that the odor was no longer appealing? And what if hell smells like pitch and sulfur? Wouldn’t you get used to it, so that it would be like nothing? Like when you start catching a chicken house out, all you smell is chicken shit, but, after thirty minutes, you don’t notice it anymore. No need such philosophical rambling on, I guess.
So, Joey Bob, Eddie the Snake, and I made a detour to his Grandma’s house so that we could get some biscuits and gravy and, on the way, passed through the town, Kennett, Missouri, where that hot singer Sheryl Crow was from. Did you know that? I’m at the bottom of page six, and I still didn’t get to the action of the story. Ardell, I made the font bigger, so six pages is still not too much to read in one sitting though it may be a three cupper. Everybody else reading this, I’m sorry. I think that what comes later will be easier to explain if you know all the details. I hope so anyway. Later.
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