Small Town Trouble

by Jean Erhardt

  Shirley was Nancy’s big-time confidante. Shirley knew everything from ancient Nancy Merit history to every dirty detail of the here and now. This was a rather daunting notion which I tried not to dwell on. The best thing about Shirley was that she despised Dickhead only a hair less than I did.

  “What comes after home?” I asked, although it was none of my business.

  “You’re gonna love this,” she said sarcastically. “Nancy and Dickhead are having dinner with none other than Dan and Patsy Dandrich.”

  Dan Dandrich was a big time Tennessee Republican politician. He wore a lot of L.L.Bean.

  “Maybe Dandrich is gonna ask Nancy to be his running mate when his time comes.” Shirley giggled.

  “Let’s pray it never does. And that’s not even funny.”

  “You’re right, it ain’t.”

  “Why is Nancy hanging out with these geeks?”

  “You referring to Dickhead or Dandrich?”

  “Well, both, now that you mention it.”

  Shirley laughed like she meant it. “Guess where they’re headed for dinner?”

  “Don’t even say it.”

  “The ever fabulous Little Pigeon.”

  Of all the places in town, why my place? “Shirley, make the world go away.”

  She laughed again and I heard another line buzz. “Gotta run. You take care now.”

  I thought back on the first time I met Nancy Merit. She came to the restaurant with a TV crew to do a spot on Gatlinburg’s female entrepreneurs. She wanted to do a feature on Little Pigeon, which was a great story.

  When my Grandma Betty Claxton (also known as Gram) died, I inherited her double-wide trailer and bakery. After I got the news, my first thought was to sell everything. Surely someone in east Tennessee needed a mobile home, if not a bakery, too.

  But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Gram had worked hard all of her life and she’d built a nice little business over the years. You’d have been hard pressed to find a fellow Gatlinburger who hadn’t enjoyed a slice of her caramel iced blackberry cake. Maybe it was genetics, but the notion of double-wide living had started to grow on me.

  Because Gram was one the finest people on earth, her exit blew a large, sucking hole in my world and I realized it was high time to figure out what to do with the part of it that was left.

  I was in Portland, Oregon, at the time, slogging through the years in corporate security for an upscale department store. I’d lost any real interest in said occupation about year one which coincided with my promotion from a plainclothes store detective to management. It was a lot more fun popping rich, neurotic housewife shoplifters than crunching budget numbers.

  But one thing leads to another. Then came a bigger manager’s job, then a multi-regional position. Not that I was having fun or getting rich, but I kept marching up the ladder because I hadn’t come up with any better ideas.

  Before my illustrious retail security career, I’d been a PE teacher back at good old Fogerty Junior High, but this had been a short run. It wasn’t the kids. They were exploding packages of hot, confused energy, not unlike myself, so we got along swell. It was all the rest of it that was dispiriting. And there is something plain eerie, not to mention depressing, about passing by your old locker every day.

  I retired my grade book and whistle when I met a nice girl who actually turned out to be not such a nice girl. But before I discovered this, I’d already caught a one-way ride with her to the west coast, where I proceeded to spend a few years of hell finding out just how nice she wasn’t. But I digress.

  When I had to make the decision whether or not to sell the trailer and bakery, I knew what had to come next–a chat with Mad Ted Weber.

  Mad Ted was probably my best friend in the world, which is a somewhat frightening admission. Ted was from Groesbeck, on the west side of Cincinnati, which may as well have been Hong Kong to most Fogertians. Fogerty was twenty-five miles and one hundred years east of the Queen City, much closer in nature to Bumfunk, Kentucky, than any slightly major city.

  Our paths would no doubt have never crossed if it hadn’t been for the stint at Camp Shawnee where we were camp cooks for the summer. I’d actually been hired as a lifeguard, but the camp director, a weirdnik Campfire lifer named Zippy, decided that the pool staff didn’t have enough to do.

  Ted and I got along right off the bat. Ted had amazing skills. Not only could he knock off camper staples like spaghetti and meatballs for seventy-five, he created fabulous handmade sausages, incredible desserts and, maybe best of all, he could make green Jell-O come out his nose. At least in the kitchen, Ted was the mother I never had.

  That summer we learned that we had a lot in common. We both loved tapioca and Racquel Welch. We both hated any song by Steve Winwood. But the glaring commonality was that we were both trying to nail a very cute, type-A counselor named Casey who looked great in her rolled-up hiking shorts, not to mention her hot pink bikini that replaced the Speedo on her days off.

  As it turned out, neither of us scored with Casey, although, for the record, I did handily round third base with her one night after the canoe races. This factoid still got Ted’s goat.

  At the pivotal point in time, Ted was living in Los Angeles, working as a chef for a chrome and fern-flecked hotel. Of course, this was in the eighties when everybody worked for a chrome and fern-flecked company. To my surprise, not only did Ted think it was a great idea to keep the bakery, he thought we should both quit our soulless jobs, take our profit sharing and become business partners.

  The conversation had gone something like this:

  “Ted, are you crazy?”

  “Come on, we’re a great team. It’ll be just like the good old days.”

  “You’re referring to Camp Shawnee?”

  “We’ll expand the bakery into a nice, little goldmine of a restaurant.”

  “What do I know about the restaurant business?”

  “Nothing. But you have the real estate. And now you have me.”

  “I’m not sharing the double-wide.”

  “Fine. Be that way.”

  “I don’t know, Ted.”

  “Get real. Look at us, both working jobs we hate, dating sub-standard women. We’re pathetic.”

  “I’m not even dating her anymore.”

  “Come on then. Let’s get off the fucking west coast. Let’s go be hillbilly entrepreneurs.”

  “Somehow, it does sound right.”

  The rest is history.

  A few years back, when Nancy Merit had first walked into the restaurant, I couldn’t believe how attractive she was in person, not that she didn’t look just fine on television. Her producer gave us a few instructions and we all went back to the kitchen where the camera rolled and Nancy asked a raftload of questions. I tried to make up intelligent sounding answers while Ted pan-fried some beautiful trout a local fisherman had just brought in.

  I’d heard rumors that Nancy Merit was a lesbian at heart and after the taping, as I studied her and her charismatic act over glasses of wine and those sizzling trout at our best creekside table, I thought that someday I’d like to find out for myself.

  “Now where was I?” I said to Bunky. But my mother’s dog just kept on snoring. He’d edged his way onto my pillow and I noted with disgust that he was drooling on it.

  I reached for the phone again and called Nancy’s home number. She picked up the phone on the first ring. For the record, she sounded great.

  “Kitten?” I purred.

  There was a pause, then, in a low, secretive voice she said, “Are you fucking nuts? Don’t call me here.”

  “Then meet me at Sparkie’s Lounge in fifteen minutes, the dark table in the corner. And wear your Victoria’s Secrets.”

  “Where the hell is Sparkie’s Lounge?”

  “About three hundred and twenty five miles north of you.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Come on, Nancy. You’ll love Sparkie’s. He makes a fantastic Tequila Sunrise. And no one
makes a fantastic Tequila Sunrise anymore. There’s a neat buffalo head over the bar. Bring Dickhead along, and Dan and Patsy. We’ll feed them to the buffalo.”

  She sighed. “You’re incorrigible. Bye.”

  “Call me?”

  Click.

  Chapter 7

  All that talk about Sparkie’s Lounge had gotten me in the mood for Sparkie’s Lounge. I hadn’t been to Sparkie’s lately. In fact, it had been at least a decade since my last visit. Sometimes you just have to be in the right mood for a place. While I couldn’t exactly name the mood I was in, a moldy, old buffalo head sounded like the perfect company. I certainly knew I wasn’t up for line dancing with Evelyn at the VFW, and another night in front of the TV with a bowl of yogurt and Bunky might send me to a very dark place. Besides, with any luck at all, Sparkie still made the greatest meatball hoagie sandwich around.

  Things at Sparkie’s Lounge weren’t exactly as I had remembered them. For starters, Sparkie had apparently gone to the Big Lounge in the Sky about ten years back, and he must have taken the meatball hoagies with him, because they were nowhere to be found on the menu. The waitress didn’t even know what a hoagie was.

  Even more disappointing, the buffalo had been replaced by a TV which was tuned to a rehash of a rehash of the O. J. Simpson saga. In fact, the only original touch left was the ashtrays fashioned after toilet seats which read, “Put Your Butt Here.”

  “I’ll have a Tequila Sunrise.”

  “Excuse me?” the waitress said.

  I didn’t like her tone of voice. It fell somewhere between annoyed and really annoyed.

  “Forget it.” I ordered a double cheeseburger with everything, fries and a Little Kings Ale and tried not to feel too sorry for myself.

  After dinner, I took a drive. It was a beautiful summer evening so I opted for a spin past all my old haunts. Fogerty High School, the Rite Now Beer Drive-Thru, the Gold Star Chili Parlor, the town dump. Then I hit the back roads.

  Cruising down memory lane was pleasing enough in a distracting sort of way, but I knew what would make it more pleasant–a Nat Sherman Hobart. I fished one out of the glove compartment.

  I’d taken to smoking cigars lately, Nat Sherman Hobarts, to be specific. Maybe it was the fad. Maybe it was that Mad Ted, an avid cigar man, had finally managed to turn me on to the right cigar. Frankly, I don’t know what took me so long.

  Over the years Ted had taken me down some ugly paths, but he’d rarely steered me wrong in the area of life’s worthwhile pursuits. Thanks to him, I’d found the world of fine wine, discovered Charles Portis novels and rediscovered the joy of Batman reruns.

  I bit the end off the Nat Sherman and lit it with a wooden match. I thought about Ted and what a sport he was to take over the restaurant while I made the trip to Fogerty. I was fortunate to have a partner like Ted Weber who not only had a decent head for business, but was a gracious host when pressed and one of the best cooks around. Mad Ted was also one of the few people in my life who’d never let me down and that counted for a lot in my book.

  It was hard to believe that Ted could be all of this and still be an utter whack job. Case in point: recently, Ted and his now ex-girlfriend had a fight and did some nasty name-calling as they left the restaurant. She locked Ted out of her Camaro and Ted didn’t take rejection all that well. Hell, who did? Ted jumped on the front of her car, clung to the hood rim and succeeded in staying on board from Gatlinburg to Pigeon Forge, a winding eight-mile trip. She only managed to dump him by nearly flipping her car in the lot at Food City.

  I was sorry I hadn’t seen it firsthand. The clerks at Food City were still talking about it.

  In the twilight, the fragrant, woodsy shadows of rural Fogerty ambled past me like sleepy buffalo. I was hoping that Sparkie’s buffalo was out there somewhere with them, grazing peacefully under the half-moon.

  I puffed my cigar and pondered the thought that, although it wouldn’t be great for business, it would be fun to watch Ted do his Jell-O trick for Dan and Patsy Dandrich.

  Lately, no matter what the rock tumbler of my mind was tossing around, it always seemed to come back to the same place. Nancy Merit—and that evening, as I cruised the dusky highways and byways of Fogerty, was no exception.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t replaying the recent goodtime romps at my place with movies, beer and popcorn and bedtime. At the present Nancy was still amused and charmed at the large irony of a double-wide romance. But she made jokes that, frankly, I didn’t think were all that funny. I’d grown attached to the trailer. I told Nancy she ought to consider doing a book on double-wide decor.

  I suspected there was a distinct possibility that the irony appeal might wane over time. I wondered if this would happen before I got sick of Nancy’s movie choices. A Room with a View almost killed me. It’s her all-time favorite.

  But I told myself I’d have to ponder all this some time later because right now it was time to wrangle with the Ugly Questions. They’d come rap, rap, rapping, and God knows why, but I’d cracked the door and let them come slithering in.

  The most pressing question mark was also the most obvious one. To what good end could this relationship with Nancy Merit come? After all, Nancy was ten years my senior, married, obsessive-compulsive, a media personality hell-bent on building one mighty Nancy Merit empire. It wasn’t hard to see that none of this had much to do with me.

  Certainly this had its advantages. I’d been fairly content as the happy-go-lucky semi-loner for quite a while now. I’d dated off and on, here and there, Democrats and Republicans, but nothing serious. At this stage of the game I was beginning to wonder if serious was even in my vocabulary anymore where relationships were concerned.

  Now, along with a bunch of other feelings that I wasn’t crazy about, I was uneasy because I certainly didn’t want this frolicking with Nancy Merit to lead to a place where it’s no fun to be alone and in love.

  Chapter 8

  Evelyn beat me home from my highway wanderings. I found her having a bowl of cereal with Bunky in front of the TV which was kind of heart-warming in a bent sort of way. They were watching an old episode of Hart to Hart.

  “They made such a cute couple, don’t you think?” my mother said, working through her Cheerios. “I need a Robert Wagner.”

  “No Robert Wagners at the VFW tonight?”

  Evelyn snorted. “Porter Waggoners maybe.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll have better luck next week,” I said, stifling another yawn. “Guess I’ll turn in.” Fogerty nightlife was killing me.

  “Oh,” Evelyn said, setting her cereal bowl on the coffee table just out of Bunky range. “A woman called for you. I wrote it down here somewhere.”

  Instantly, I felt cheerier. Nancy had been thinking of me. She’d called while I was out driving around, absorbed with things existential.

  “Here,” said Evelyn, handing me the note.

  But I was wrong. Nancy hadn’t called. I didn’t recognize the phone number on the slip of paper, but I knew the name.

  Amy Delozier.

  Hearing Amy Delozier’s voice after all these years was strange. She sounded like a vaguely familiar ghost on the other end of the line.

  “Rick Rod said he bumped into you,” she said.

  That was one way to put it. He’d probably left out a few of the details, like his drunken forward roll over the hood of my car, but hey, at least he’d remembered my name.

  “Thought I’d track you down,” Amy said.

  “Excellent tracking.”

  We both giggled awkwardly. I felt about thirteen years old. Then, more grown up, say maybe fourteen, I said, “I’m really glad you called, Amy.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

  “You wanna get together?” she said.

  “Love to.” Very casual, very cool. “When and where?”

  “Do you remember Sparkie’s Lounge?”

  Hell, it had only been three hours. “Sure I do, fine.”

  “Tomorrow night,
seven?”

  “Absolutely perfect.”

  Bunky would just have to watch TV without me.

  Before we hung up Amy told me something I didn’t need to be told. “Kim,” she said, sounding a bit morose, “Sparkie’s buffalo head is gone.”

  We shared a rather intimate silent moment of respect.

  “Thanks for telling me, Amy.”

  “Good night,” she said gently, and hung up.

  The phone rang right in my hand. Ah, could this be the beautiful, but overbooked Nancy Merit at long last? I was feeling a little smug having just gotten off the phone with an old flame, even if Amy didn’t remember being one.

  But again, it wasn’t Nancy. It was Bud Upton.

  “Hope I’m not calling too late,” Bud Upton said, “but I’d like to meet with you and your mother first thing tomorrow. There’s something we need to, well, bat around.”

  The tone of Bud’s voice bordered on ugly. Hell, I didn’t want to bat anything around with him. I simply wanted Evelyn to get her big, fat check so we could all get back to whatever we’d been doing. Although I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know, I asked anyway.

  “Is there a problem, Bud?”

  He hesitated. “Why don’t we just talk in the morning? My office, nine o’clock?”

  I had a feeling this get-together with Bud Upton wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as the one later with Amy Delozier.

  There was no use worrying about what hadn’t monsooned on my parade yet, so I put Bud Upton and our morning meeting on my mind’s back burner and trudged downstairs to A.C.‘s bar and poured a nightcap. Then I picked up the horn and called Mad Ted.

  Ted confirmed what Shirley had already told me about the Nancy Merit party of four. And, as always, he gave me much, much more.

  I listened to a long and not very interesting story about Ted’s latest lust interest, Katrina, a cocktail waitress at the Gatlinburg ski resort who aspired to be a cocktail waitress at the Hilton.