Author's Note: Kellie took this picture on one of our daily walks.
Chapter 7: Open-faced Roast Beefs and a Piece of Pie
I reckon afore I go on any further and finish this tale about how it was I came to be arrested and sent to prison for something I didn’t do, I need to apologize to the fine folks still reading this grim and dreary part of my life story. I ended the last chapter abruptly and without much fanfare. It wasn’t intended to be a cliffhanger. I simply had to stop, and I didn’t have any idea what to say. I am going to be honest; it hurt me. It hurt me bad because I never expected to be assaulted by the pain of memories I thought I had buried deep, deep within me a long time ago, but I was…and...well…mmm…part of my apology is explaining how that could be.
You see, way back in the beginning of this summer of twenty and twenty-two, I wrote you a short commentary about why I am telling my tales now. It was titled something like Why I Am Telling My Tales Now, and, in this commentary, I explained how I feel I am losing my mind. Literally, my mind is going away like the wind is blowing sand out of my head, and it will continue to make the sand of my brain disappear until it is all gone and then there will be nothing more—no memories, no past, no me. I’ve lived a life too full of chaos--and learning--for there not to be anything worthwhile in it, so I have got to get my whole life down before that last grain of sand whisks off into the endless expanse of nothingness.
But, the problem is that my mind IS going away. Truthfully, I can only be relatively certain about six or seven details in this entire account about my arrest and incidents that really did happen in the forty-eight-hour period before the Arkansas State Troopers carried me off to jail and back and forth to court, and, ultimately, away to prison. The first particular I am sure about is that Joey Bob and I picked up Eddie the Snake where he worked. Two, somebody put some furniture from the warehouse where Eddie worked in the back of the truck we were driving that night. Three, we ate breakfast at somebody’s house who was related to Eddie the Snake. Four, I watched Joey Bob die with blood pumping steadily from holes on each side of his neck. Five, I held a pregnant girl-child’s foot in my hand while I injected heroin into her feet so that she would die. Six, I dumped the truck into the Mississippi River at a boat landing. Seven, I called Stainy from a truck stop, he picked me up, and he was driving his black and gold Trans Am at a high rate of speed when an Arkansas State trooper stopped us on I-55 South outside of Blytheville, Arkansas. All other aspects of this narrative, I’m just a making up from a mishmash and from a fog of memories and fantasies that feel a lot like they could be real. Whatcha gonna do?
Honestly, I don’t know that Eddie, Joey Bob, and I crossed the rivers at Cairo, Illinois that morning. That could have been some other job, some other time. I’ve ridden shot gun on a thousand jobs similar to that one when nothing ever happened. Drive somewhere, stand around menacingly while people trade drugs or money, drive back home. We might of stopped at a Sinclair gas station that morning, but it is just as likely that we didn’t. A memory about that gas station is stuck in my head somehow, and I used that memory here in this story. Errol Flynn AKA Cuss could possibly have been shot in the head that morning, but he could have died in some other deal gone wrong on some other bad day. There have been more than a few things go wrong on more than a few bad days in my life. You see what I mean? At some distinct point in my past, I believe that I shot somebody in the head between an “r” and an “m” in the word “Farmall” on a red patch on the front of a backwards baseball hat, but who knows if it was that day and that deal? I certainly don’t.
I am trying to think of that day as I’m a writing about it because I know that to best hold your interest I need to show what it was like to be me, to be in my shoes, and to see the things that I saw, but, even as I pull those thoughts up into my head, the specifics blur and warp and slip away like black shadows into a dark night. They feel like a dream that I forgot as soon as I woke up. I knew what the dream was only a few minutes ago, but, now, I can’t remember a few minutes ago, so where can I go to get that dream back? I simply don’t remember. I don’t. I don’t remember my good friend Joey Bob Mitchum, and he died that day, begging me to save him, when I couldn’t, and he knew that I couldn’t, and I injected heroin into a pregnant girl-child to kill her, and I did that on purpose like a stone cold assassin. I really did that. That was me in the flesh and blood, the same flesh and blood as I am today. And I have nightmares about those horrible events because they really happened, and then I have even worse nightmares because I convince myself that maybe none of it happened. I think maybe I made up Joey Bob’s death and his life, and I just created the murder of the pregnant girl-child with the ratty Hulk Hogan shirt on like I’ve made up everything else from cross-wired and confused memories, but I see the color of the blood pumping from Joey Bob’s neck. It’s too real not to be true. I feel the weight of the girl-child’s foot in my hand, and it is too real not to be true. I know that was me. I know it was. And I also know that I will not escape judgement just because my mind no longer remembers exactly what evil I have done.
Anyway, I took out of the long muddy driveway and back onto the county road like I was being chased even though I wasn’t being pursued by anybody or shot at by anybody because everybody behind me was dead. After jamming through the gears of the truck and speeding up to around 85 or 90 mph on a narrow lane that switched back and forth between pavement and chat, the cool wind through the rolled-down window cleared my head of the adrenaline fog, and I slowed down to a law-abiding speed so that no local yokel would have a reason to pull me over. At that age and time, I had no idea where I might find a bridge that crossed the Mississippi River back into Missouri or Arkansas, so I stayed on side roads and back roads that headed in a general south direction and went west whenever I thought there might be a bridge across the river. I ran into several dead ends doing that near places like Hickman, Kentucky and Tiptonville, Tennessee. Finally, I came to the Caruthersville bridge just outside of Ridgley, Tennessee, and I knew that bridge was the gateway back to my home. First though, I had to get rid of the brown S10 truck and along with it the leather insulin pouch with the empty syringes, my shoulder holster and gun since I couldn’t fit them in the duffle, Joey Bob’s gun, and the furniture stolen from the warehouse in Conway. The insulin pouch with the syringes in it is a detail of memory that I am also certain comes from that particular day and no other time. Trust me on that. Getting rid of guns and other arms…well, who knows how many times I’ve done that.
Anyway, I don’t recall if I went north or south of Highway 412, which is the number of the road that crosses the Caruthersville bridge, but somewheres along either the Levee Road or Everett Lake Road, I found a state-maintained concrete boat ramp that was kind of secluded with some trees on one side and a blind bend of the broad Mississippi in the other direction. The ramp was steep enough that I could simply knock the truck out of gear, and it would roll into the river without hitting anything or potentially stopping before going into the water. I propped up against the hood of the truck for a long time with the Indiana State Sycamores duffle bag of money sitting on the hood behind me while I watched for boat traffic on the river. I don’t think there was any boats on the water, not that I could see anyway, and, as my grandpa once told me, if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. Finally, pretty sure that I was the only living soul within miles, I made the decision that it was time to part ways with the truck and the evidence. I took off my long Navy coat, unzipped the money bag, and tucked the coat around all the money so that it looked like the duffle was full of clothes. Then, I took off my shoulder rigging, tucked it up under the windshield wipers—so it wouldn’t slide off the hood-- with my handgun still in it, took Joey Bob’s revolver from the back of my pants, and stuck it in the empty holster. Then, I draped the duffle bag strap over my shoulder, walked to the door of the truck, leaned in, grabbed the gear shift and pulled her into neutral with a hard jerk. The truck started rolling without a shove. I stood there in the cool breeze and sunshine and watched as it hit the water and eased slowly into the muddy brown, swirling surface, bobbing a little bit like a fishing bobber before it shot a white spray up into the air and tilted on down into a headfirst dive. The current of the mighty Mississippi pulled it sideways faster than it sank, and, while the back end was perched up in the air, the S10 rolled onto its side, dumping the boxes of office furniture out. At first, I thought they were just gonna float over to the weedy shoreline, and I might have to wade into the shallows and tear the boxes open to sink them, but I suppose as the cardboard got wet and the boxes filled with water, they went ahead and sank shortly after the truck was full under. Within a matter of seconds, truck and all was gone never to be seen again by anyone, and I was standing there looking at the brown wavy water.
Oh, I just remembered a detail from that day. As the truck rolled down the ramp under its own power, I noticed on the back bumper that the tags were expired and they were Texas license plates. All the night before and this morning, I had been exposed to the whims of lawmen in every town and community I had been through in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Local police and state troopers in any state love to get out-of-towners on small bullshit fines like expired tags because travelers aren’t likely to return to a different state to attend court for such petty offenses. They just pay the fines. Somehow and for some reason in all the hundreds of miles I had travelled and all the small towns and communities I had passed through, either no policemen had seen the expired license plate or they had decided it was a good day to let it go. In a strange twist of fate, quite possibly, a police officer could have stopped the carnage that had occurred that morning by catching us with stolen office furniture, and I might have less weighing on my conscience to this day. Too bad for all of us, especially the dead ones.
Anyway, I took off walking down Everett Lake road back toward U.S. 412 with the tote over my shoulder, I didn’t have to walk down the road too far before I hitched a ride with an old timer in a half-rusted blue Ford pick-up truck. He was a towing a sixteen-foot flat bottom boat with a trolling motor mounted it on behind him. He said that he had been out since 4 AM running some trot lines in the sloughs and swamps off the Mississippi. That’s what he told me anyhow. I didn’t ask. He didn’t ask neither, but I told him that I was hitchhiking from Georgia to Texas. Thought I might try my hand at being a cowboy. He said that I sounded more like I was from Arkansas or southern Missouri than Southeastern parts, and I said that I was born and raised in Arkansas, but my family moved to Georgia a few years ago. I didn’t know that I had hitched a ride with a gawddamned linguist.
Turns out, he was from Hayti, Missouri, and he said that we would drive right by a big truck stop there on I55 on the way to his house. He suggested that I might could pick up a ride at the station that could run me all the way into Texas if I found the right truck driver, but to be careful because some of those men were known to have poor moral character. I thanked him for the good advice and told him that was my plan all along, and I’d had a few negative experiences with drivers on my trek, so I knew what to watch out for. If he asked any more questions or gave any more advice, I don’t remember. Being southern men, I’m sure we engaged in polite talk about the weather and the crops and such, but nothing important for me to tell you. When I got out of his truck, I told him “Thank you,” grabbed the duffle out of the back, and bumped the truck bed with the side of my fist to signal I had my stuff. He waved, and I waved back, and he drove off. I don’t reckon I’ve ever seen that man again.
Right off the bat, I spotted the payphone next to the newspaper rack and the propane bottle rentals. I walked over to it to make sure that the line wasn’t cut and that the phone worked properly. I put the receiver to my ear, and, sure enough, heard the consistent buzz of a good line, but I didn’t have any change, which meant I would have to go inside. I didn’t really want to do that, but I had no other choice.
The door nearest me went into the café part of the establishment, and as I walked in through some small round tables with upside down white coffee cups setting on napkins, I noticed the man behind the cash register given me the skunk-smell look. He was a big man, fat but tall and broad. He was wearing a red, snap button western shirt and brown leather vest with tassels attached by shiny silver and turquoise badges and a ten-gallon cowboy hat. I’m not sure what I looked like: blue jeans, t-shirt, cowboy boots, hair pulled back in a ponytail, duffle bag over my shoulder. I know that I wasn’t dirty. Anyhow, his nose wrinkled and his eyes squinted as he gruffly warned me.
“No vagrants allowed in here. Better get on fore I call the law.”
“I’m no vagrant. I’ve got money. I had some car trouble up the road a ways, and I need to call a buddy.”
I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and made sure that Cowboy saw the sheaf of money it. Some of the ten or so bills in my wallet were hundreds. Maybe he saw that or he didn’t, but he got a lot friendlier.
“I need some change for the payphone if you don’t mind.”
I put a twenty on the counter. He grabbed it and rang open the register.
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Naw, I’ll just call somebody and wait outside until they get here.”
“Gotta blue plate special today of open-face roast beef. You’ll not find better cookin’ in these parts than Flo’s.”
He pointed his thumb at a woman wearing a hair net that I could barely see through a narrow window into the kitchen. The glassless opening had one of those spinning ticket holders in the center of it. There wasn’t a piece of paper hanging on it.
“I might just try it.”
He had placed about five dollars of quarters onto the Formica-topped counter, and I slid them with my right hand into the scoop of my left hand. He stuck three bills out toward me as the other change he’d made, and I waved him off.
“How about you get Flo to make me one of those open-faced roast beefs, and, maybe after that, I’ll have a piece a pie or something? Right now, I sure could use a hot cup a coffee. You keep the change.”
I had made a friend for life though I would never see that man again after that day to my knowledge. I suppose that I should have called him as a witness in my trial, for after calling Stainy and getting him on the way there from Conway, Arkansas, I went back into the restaurant and had me an open-faced roast beef with all the fixings: mashed potatoes, brown gravy, green beans, Texas toast, so on and so on. Cowboy witnessed that I sat in the restaurant eating and drinking coffee the whole time until my ride got there. He could probably tell you what kind of pie slices I had because I had two pieces, and I was the only feller in the café part. He would surely swear that I had no dealings of any kind with anybody in the front parking lot or out back where the trucks line up in a row while the drivers slept. He could probably name the table where I sat the whole time because he was there behind the counter the whole time I was there, and, after the phone call, I never left the building until Stainy pulled up in his Trans Am. Cowboy might of seen me walk straight out of that café and get into Stainy’s car. I don’t know about that, but he seemed a feller who would have been honest if somebody had asked, and he had seen me. I like to think that anyway. Whatcha gonna do?
Well, what I am a gonna do is end this here chapter. There’s not but one more telling to go in this part of the story. At the end of the next chapter, I’ll be sitting in a jail cell. Who knows where we will all go from that point. Hopefully, we’ll decide that together. Y’all take care now. Ya hear?