(A note from the real author: Good news! I had so much written in Chapter 5 that I had to split it, so I have half of Chapter 6 written. I have a request for a poem from a dedicated reader that I am going to need to honor before I complete Chapter 6, but I will get back to it quicker than what I thought I would now that I am back to work at my real job. The picture for today is from the steps down to the spring at Greer Spring.)
Chapter 5: Gas Station Bathrooms and Errol Flynn as Robin Hood
I have no idea what town or community Eddie the Snake’s Grandma lived near, but, barely ten minutes after leaving her house in the brown S10 with three duffle bags of substances unknown to me and five stolen boxes of office furniture in the back of it, Eddie, Joey Bob, and I were on I-55 North headed toward St. Louis. When we got to Sikeston, MO, we exited onto I-57 North to Chicago and then got off the interstate on a U.S. highway that took us to the double bridges across the Mississippi and Ohio rivers at Cairo, Illinois. I’m pretty sure when you cross the Mississippi river from Missouri, you are in Illinois, and when you cross the Ohio, you’re in Kentucky, so our destination must of ended up being in Kentucky, but I do not know that for a fact. Besides that, where we were doesn’t matter. What we did do matters. Whatcha gonna do?
The biscuits and sausage gravy that Eddie the Snake’s Grandma had made us during our short visit at her house was some damned good vittles, and we all kept eating as she dished food onto our plates until we could eat no more. Thus, shortly after we bounced across both the river bridges, my belly began making noises indicating that I would be needing to find a “sit-down” bathroom sometime soon. I’ve always been that way. To this day, a timer can be set for forty-five minutes after I’ve eaten a decent-sized meal, and, if I’m missing, you’ll find me in the nearest, quietest bathroom. I’ve always been regular in the bowel-way if no other way, and regularity’s a good thing, right?
Anyhow, I announced my special bathroom needs to Eddie the Snake as soon as they arose, and we started looking for a convenience store or a gas station that could provide the necessary services. Well, we found one only a few miles and a few minutes after my pronouncement, and it seemed a good place to stop. The service station was an old concrete block Sinclair HC Gasoline stop with a garage stall on the left side of the building for light mechanic work and oil changes and a glassed-in waiting area with a cash register counter on the other half of the front. The whole backside of the building was almost submerged into a bank of wild vines and live brush, some of it growing up and over the roof and down the sides. The door to the bathroom was on the outside of the building behind the glassed-in right side. It too was almost completely engulfed by the vines. Nobody inside the building could possibly see somebody going in and out of the bathroom door, and that was a good thing for us, but probably not so good for the quality of the facilities. Eddie the Snake turned into the gravel parking lot that was heavily dotted with weed clumps, some as high as the hood of the truck, and I directed him to pull the truck between the glass of the waiting room/cash register part and the bathroom door. This would provide another method of blocking the view so that none of us were seen by folks in this part of the country. I asked.
“How far are we from the deal?”
“Not far.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Maybe less.”
“I’m gonna get my guns and shit ready while we’re here. Anybody else need the bathroom for anything?”
They both said no they didn’t. Neither of those boys seemed to have an ounce of regularity in them regarding anything.
Before I even got out of the S10, I could see the bathroom door was cracked open just a little bit, and this was another advantage of this place because I didn’t have to get a key from someone inside the station or have someone come and unlock it. It mighta been a deal breaker if I had had to. We all got out, stretching our legs. Joey Bob and Eddie the Snake both lit cigarettes and leaned on the back sideboards of the S10 while I bent the truck seat forward and grabbed my coat and accoutrements from behind it and carried them with me into the bathroom. I cannot possibly see what good it would do this tale to regale you with a description of the bathroom or of my activities inside that bathroom. It was a gas station/mechanic garage-type bathroom that the owner and manager didn’t even feel the desire to lock up, so you can use your imagination to think of what it was like, and that was what it was like. Frankly, I do not remember. Sadly, in my life, I have made too many stops in service station bathrooms, and there’s been a fairly equal spread of unpleasant, pleasant enough, and downright clean and hygienic, none of them particularly memorable. I suspect this one fell into the “unpleasant” category, but I am almost positive that the bathroom had the one most important thing, toilet paper. Wouldn’t I remember if I had been stuck in the bathroom after dropping a load and without any toilet paper? I think I would. Especially considering how so many other things had gone wrong on this misadventure already? Yeah, I think so. I would remember not having toilet paper, for sure.
Anyway, after I took care of the urgent business-of-the-bottom, I washed up in a cracked white porcelain sink, dried my hands on the legs of my jeans, and took my holster out of the rolled up long coat. I put it on and adjusted it to the way I like it with the left side down lower because I prefer to shoot right-handed, and though I don’t even recall what guns I was carrying that day, I guarantee that I took them out one at a time and checked that the clips were full, a bullet was in the chamber ready to go. It was business-time, the time for what I was paid to do, and I always switched into “careful” mode when it was that time.
Careful time was also show time, and I got a comb outta one of the pockets inside my coat and a rubber band. I couldn’t get my head in the sink and under the faucet, so I splashed water with my hands into my hair until it was good and wet, combed it back tight and slick, and put it in a ponytail. I always felt that having my hair pulled back tight made me look tougher than just leaving a wild mane of shoulder-length hair framing my face, and I was gonna look as tough and rough as I could. You know, that whole idea seems kinda stupid now, considering I can’t think of any tough guys who wore their hair in tight ponytails. And don’t throw no damned Steven Seagal at me with his little slappy hand-BS fighting. The movies he was in weren’t bad, some of them, but do you really think he could whip anybody, say like Jean Claude? C’mon, man! I just thought of something though. Did Rambo have a ponytail? It seems like he might have in the second movie.
Moving on. I put my Navy long coat on, pull it tight around me without buttoning it, and walk out the door. First thing I note is that I don’t see Joey Bob and Eddie the Snake. Where the hell could they be? I peer around the corner where the block wall meets the glass and see them both standing at the counter a talking with a cashier who looks to be a man in his mid-fifties. He’s wearing a grease-covered baseball hat and an equally greasy blue uniform shirt with a name tag sewn on the breast pocket. He is facing away from me and watching closely as Joey Bob fishes for change in his jean’s pocket. For some reason or the other the guy starts to turn toward me like he sensed me a looking in, and I have to jump back out of sight, so I don’t know anything else of what goes inside. When those two nimrods come back out and get in the truck and we’re back out on the highway, I give them some grief over their stupidity.
“Can you possibly explain to me what the hell you two are doin’ goin’ into a gas station and visitin’ with the help?”
“What do you mean? We were just buyin’ a Coke and some candy bars. It may be a long time till lunch.”
“Do either one of you know how good gas station attendants are at identifyin’ people by sight?”
“No, but I suppose you’ll tell us,” Joey Bob moans.
“They are damned good. Trust me. Gas stations get robbed quite a bit. But even if nothing happens with us that he would be asked to identify two strangers who stopped in his station, you have just become the most important happenin’ in that guy’s day. He’s gonna describe you to the next Tom, Dick, or Harry that walks into the station, and, by the end of the day, you’re buyin’ a Coke and candy bars will be headline news in this hick town.”
“Shit, Bugler. Nobody’s ever gonna care about us buyin’ road snacks in a gas station in Podunk, Kentucky.”
“You’d better hope not.”
Both of them shut up then, and I didn’t go on with a come-to-Jesus lecture about stealth on a drug-dealing mission for two reasons. One, neither one of the dunderheads would have remembered what I said anyway after the next joint they smoked. Two, I was sure that the gas station attendant had not seen me. He might of seen me from the back as we drove away, but no way he could of gotten a look at my face. Plus, Joey Bob got a Zero bar for me, and, back then, I loved me a Zero bar. Whatcha gonna do? He could be a thoughtful guy like that sometimes.
Anyhow, it’s probably somewheres between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m.-- I still have no good sense of time about that day or where the sun was in the sky when the various actions took place--when we pull into a deeply rutted, long, and muddy driveway off a county road that ends at a small, shingle-sided shotgun shack that coulda been built in the 1920’s. The rusty sheet metal roof slopes front-to-back instead of side-to-side and covers the front porch which pokes into and is partially covered with the black dirt of the grassy yard. The short-cropped, finely manicured yard slopes sharply down the sides of the house, and the back of the house sits up on thin concrete block piers with distinct watermarks at two or three different heights. Apparently, a nearby river or slough gets up high enough to threaten to flood the house pretty regular. The house has no underpinning, so you can see all up underneath it, piping, wires, and assorted junk. Behind the house a hundred feet or so is a lean-to shed with the same gray shingle wrap as the house and the same rusty roofing tin. The flood marks on it are all the way at the top. A guy in overalls and a backwards baseball hat is in the lean-to a bending over a riding tractor mower like he’s working on it. When he notices us, he puts his tools down on the tractor seat, wipes his hands on the leg of his blue overalls, and starts walking toward the front of the house. Two men come out a screen door under the porch eave, one average-sized feller with a Joe Dirt mullet and the other a little skinny feller with a sharp face.
Eddie the Snake pulls the S10 in between two other vehicles parked in the yard. I don’t recall what make, model, or color they were, but .one was a pickup truck. I don’t rightly recollect what the other was, but I think it was a small car. Eddie gets out and walks toward the two men coming from the porch. Joey Bob and I get out the passenger side and step toward the back of the truck, watching over the duffle bags and boxes of stolen office furniture. Overall-guy is now leaning on the hood of the pickup truck to my right and partially blocked from my view by the truck cab.
“You, Eddie?” the little skinny feller with the sharp face hollers out, “I’m Marcus. People call me ‘Cuss’.”
To this day, I don’t know what that little man called Cuss really looked like. I only saw him for a minute or two in the front yard, and a few seconds lying on a linoleum floor with a big bloody hole in the side of his face. In my mind, he resembles pictures that I had seen of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood except this guy was short and couldn’t a weighed more than 100 pounds soaking wet. Other than that, if you google Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, you will see the vision of him that is stuck in my mind, the goatee, the mustache, the page boy hair cut-But minus the little green hat with the feather in it. Yeah, I made the mistake of googling “Errol Flynn as Robin Hood,” damn it, and now that’s all I can see. I can’t write anything different about him.
Anyway, Mullet Man was average size. He had on a Van Halen 1984 t-shirt with the picture of a baby angel smoking a cigarette on the front. The baby angel is supposed to be Eddie Van Halen, I think. The t-shirt had been cut down the sides like it was supposed to be made into a muscle-shirt, but I could see pink rolls of flab on the side of this guy’s belly. He wasn’t no muscle man. He was pale, pink, and soft. He had a streak of freckles across his cheeks and nose. He had squinty, green bloodshot eyes, and they were crazy. He couldn’t look at anybody or keep his focus on one thing for more than a second. His eyes were always moving from one thing to another in a rapid succession like a rabbit’s will do when it’s spooked. I suspected he was tweaking on something, and there’s a pretty good chance that he was considering what happened a few minutes later.
Overall-guy, still leaning on the truck hood, was wearing dark blue overalls over a t-shirt. That’s all I recall. Couldn’t even tell you the color of the t-shirt. The baseball hat that he wore backwards was blue and white and had a red oval on the front that said “Farmall” in the center. I tell you how I remember that detail so well in just a minute or two.
So, the six of us are gathered up in the yard around the vehicles. Eddie has introduced himself to Errol Flynn, AKA Cuss, and acts like he’s gonna introduce everybody as if we’re about to all go out on a date at the Olive Garden or something.
“We can skip the introductions, Eddie,” I say as he’s about to blurt out my name, “These gentlemen probably will understand that we don’t need to know names if the quality of the product is sufficient.”
Robin Hood gives me a stare down because he sees my holsters under my coat. I haven’t been flashing them, but I haven’t been hiding them neither. Remember most of my job is about showing strength of arms to quell the potential for any use of them. He’s still a looking at me and pulling on his pointy chin hairs like he’s thinking real deep and hard.
“I reckon if we’re bein’ honest…I’ll just say, --if it’s all about the quality of the product and nobody takes things personally-- I don’t want no guns inside my house. My wife’s in there, and she is awful ‘fraid of guns, and of the type of people who carry’em. She don’t want’em around, so I don’t want’em around. You wanna do some dealin’’? You’re gonna have ta lose the guns.”
This was gonna be a problem. I wave Eddie and Joey Bob over to me, and as we pull together for a confab, the other three get together in a group huddle as well.
“Stainy hired us to guard his investment, whatever’s in those duffle bags—and you. I’m not takin’ my guns off,” I say with no hint that I’ll waver.
“What if you wait outside and Joey Bob goes in with me?”
This idea thrilled Joey Bob, and he started nodding his head and slobbering like a puppy being offered a peanut butter bone.
“No, I don’t think so. They could have guns hidden anywhere in that house, and then I’m outside and the two of you are hostages to trade. I didn’t ride along to provide these gomers an opportunity to steal Stainy’s dope and threaten or kill his employees. No, it won’t work.”
“Well, I didn’t drive all this way to not do this deal. They’re a bunch of kids. They’re amateurs. They’ll be happy to have this marijuana for a bag of cash and a handful of OxyContin they’ve collected or stolen. Don’t fuck this deal up, Bugler. I’m tellin’ you that you can wait out here, and Joe and I will go inside. Complain to Stainy when we get back if that’s what you gotta do, but I’m doin’ this, and you know you won’t stop me without you wanna shoot me.”
I didn’t want to shoot him that was for sure though I felt like doing just that very strongly in the moment. So, Eddie the Snake and Joey Bob were going to go inside the house to complete the deal while I waited outside. As foolish a move as it was, I did not argue. I can’t imagine that my opposition would have changed anyone’s mind, and nobody has ever blamed me for what happened next even though, I will admit, this is the first and only time anybody has ever been told the full and exact truth.
Speaking of exact truth or maybe, more correctly, lies I keep telling accidentally, I told you readers that I would get to the action in this chapter, but it seems that I’m down near the bottom of page 6 again. I don’t know how it keeps happening, but, if I write more in this chapter, two of my readers may quit me. I don’t know that I have more than a dozen readers, so I better stop now and come back with some action in Chapter 6. I’m not gonna promise anything though given recent developments. Whatcha gonna do?
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