“This is Cammie at the front desk.”
I said, “Yeah.”
“You sure you don’t need anything? It’s free. Soap, towels, a big old bucket of ice.” She paused and lowered her voice. “You know. Anything you want.”
It’s hard to be a man and admit that I didn’t recognize nuance at the age of eighteen. I said, “I wouldn’t mind a beer, I guess, but y’all don’t sell them in the Coke machine and the only store I’ve seen out this way won’t open until morning.” I took all of Brother Macon’s carved cue chalks out of my pants pockets and lined them up around the rotary telephone. One of them looked exactly like Cammie—at least how I remembered her, all slack-jawed and blank-faced at check-in time. It might not have been carved at all, I thought. Or maybe Brother Macon had carved a Night of the Living Dead character, I don’t know.
Cammie said in a drawl that could come only out of a southern, southern woman with a mouth full of honey, “Beer. Well, at least that’s a start,” and hung up.
The television received two channels. One showed the local news. Before I finished watching a piece with Claxton’s mayor explaining why the jail needed two more cells added on, Cammie let herself in with a passkey. She carried two quart bottles of Schlitz under one arm, and held an ice bucket. I said, “Okay. All right. Come on in. Make yourself at home and tell me all about your lovely hometown.”
She set everything down on a chair. “So word is you’re the famous man come down here to write about all us. Call me patriotic, but I want you to know what a friendly place we got.” She took out a church key and opened one bottle. “Don’t think we’re only fruitcakes here. They’s much more to offer for fun.”
I got off the bed and found two wax-paper-wrapped drinking glasses from the bathroom. I called out, “Oh, I know that. I’m only supposed to find places like this that’re misunderstood.”
I don’t want to come across as crude or insensitive—and I need to make a point that I didn’t instigate what occurred soon thereafter. The only other thing I remember Cammie telling me was, “We have field days all the time down at the rec center. It’s a great place to raise children. I won the sack race one time. Back then I still went by my given name, Camellia. My momma let me change it when I turned old enough.”
I’m pretty sure that’s what she announced. I wanted to call up my father and tell him what I went through on my first real job. I wanted to say a bunch of things concerning the life of an artiste.
I focused on the television, though. The local weather-man said it would be another hot and humid day.
MAYBE 1976 CLAXTON ran similarly to those backwards southern TV-sitcom towns where everyone eavesdrops on party lines, I don’t know. But on my second day of full-time work I drove into town and hadn’t gotten even close to the chamber of commerce office before I was stopped by people from all walks of life eager to exaggerate their hometown’s worth and/or drawbacks. I couldn’t figure it out, unless when Cammie left my motel room by midnight she’d called her best friend or mother and had her information stolen by half of the population. A woman at the drugstore, where I went to buy batteries for the tape recorder and headache powders for my hangover, said, “I can tell you that we have the clearest water between the Mississippi River and Richmond, Virginia, at least.”
Out on the sidewalk, a Lion’s Club member selling straw brooms said, “I’ve lived all over the place: Savannah, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Talladega. Not one of my neighbors in any of those cities ever asked me and the wife over for a barbecue supper. Here in Claxton, it happens almost every night. You got any children, son?”
I smiled and shook hands with complete strangers and nodded. A woman from Claxton Flowers ran out of her shop and gave me a boutonniere. A man from Claxton Gulf went out of his way to offer a free oil change and tire rotation. A cop came out of nowhere and handed me two complimentary tickets to the Claxton Policeman’s Ball, which turned out to be a square dance held at the VFW.
I got stopped by a man and woman in front of what appeared to be a vacant theater of sorts. Both of them wore Bobby Jones alpaca golf sweaters, and they shifted their weights from leg to leg. I slowed down. “We want you to know that people have come out of here and done good for themselves,” the woman said.
“Grainger Koon’s in the movies. He’s got a list of credits longer than our telephone directory. He played Crazy Customer in one movie,” the woman said. “He’s played Man at Bar, Man on Bench, Man without Glasses, and Man with Goat—all in the same year. I forget what movies, though. What were some of the titles, LaFoy?”
“I don’t recall either,” LaFoy said to me. “But you’d know him if you saw him. He’s got a good face. He played Man Who Falls off Dock in one of those teen movies. Me and Peggy here, we both taught him singing and dancing lessons. At the rec center. Grainger was in a Munsters episode, too.”
“It’s a good place to raise children,” Peggy said.
“That’s what I understand,” I said, but didn’t go into my theory about people who make such claims.
I walked and waved like a returning hero, or at least like a celebrity who had returned home after appearing as Scary Man in Park. I picked litter off of the sidewalk and carried it down Main Street until I found a receptacle. The hardware-store man came outside and handed me two complimentary yardsticks, and a beautician offered me a haircut. I could only wonder what these people would do should a rock star or visiting dignitary happen by. I kind of stood in front of the local bank, waiting for a teller to come out with a bag of unmarked currency.
And it was in front of the bank that a woman pulled her 1976 Pinto into a parking space and wiggled her finger for me to heed. I leaned down to the closed passenger window and heard her say, “Get in.”
I did, what the hell.
Her name was Lulinda. She worked at the fruitcake factory, but her husband drove an eighteen-wheeler coast-to-coast. “I heard that you were in town, and I thought you might want to know what most people down here won’t offer up.”
I said, “Okay. I appreciate that.” What could I say? She wore a polka-dotted cotton dress, the hem of which might’ve come down to her knees had she not hiked it up past midthigh.
She introduced herself and drove in the direction of my motel room. That’s where I figured we were going. I kind of wished that I had more than one old high-school friend to tell all of these stories about Claxton women.
“We won’t keep you long, but we wanted to make sure you knew why no one should visit here, among other things.”
I caught the “we.” I tried to remember if, in the movies, hostages opened a moving vehicle’s passenger door and tried to run, or if they covered their heads and rolled like crazy. I said, “I can’t be gone too long. The mayor’s expecting me. And the police chief,” which wasn’t true. I wondered what I should do with the yardsticks I had leaned against my right side. I glanced over at Lulinda’s panties more than once.
We passed the Fall Inn and ended up at Rack Me. The parking lot was full. Lulinda said, “They ain’t nothing to worry about. You ain’t gone get hurt none,” and smiled. She parked a distance from any of the pickup trucks and said, “I don’t want anyone backing up into my car and exploding it.”
I carried the yardsticks inside but left the boutonniere on Lulinda’s cracked dashboard. I went over kung-fu moves in my mind, how to deflect pool cues with my own two weapons. At the door of Rack Me the only thing I thought about was how difficult it would be to keep my Claxton, Georgia—Fruitcake Capital of the World—essay down to a thousand words.
Brother Macon stood at the bar, across from the barmaid I’d met the night before. The same two pool players were there, too, along with a group of a half-dozen men wearing blue jean jackets. Brother Macon tossed me a cue-stick chalk and said, “This is for you, son. It’s Marco Polo. He traveled around writing about places, too.”
“It ain’t too early for you to join us in a beer, is it?” one man said. He reached over the counter and pulled a c
an of PBR from the cooler. “My name’s Gerald. Just like our president.”
I said, “No sir.”
Lulinda went back to the door and locked it. I could feel my knees shaking, just like any other normal cartoon character. My palms sweat so badly I went ahead and leaned the yardsticks against a barstool.
“You can’t write no story about us, saying how Claxton would be a perfect place to bring the family on summertime vacations,” another man said. He took the can of beer, opened the pop-top, and handed it to me. “We’d rather not go into detail, so let’s just leave it at that.”
Lulinda said, “It has to do with things changing, and things staying the same, and things changing. And then staying the same.”
I put Marco Polo in my shirt pocket. Brother Macon said, “To be honest, I want people showing up to buy my carved works of God. But these old boys talked me into it, too. I got to go with the flow, you know. It’s a democracy.”
“Here.” Gerald reached back into the cooler and pulled out a grocery bag. “You take this as a gift from us, and go off to somewhere else and forget that you ever come here.” Gerald’s hair stood up two perfect inches. One of his eyes seemed misplaced.
“Oh, you’ll forget,” someone said, and everyone started laughing.
I opened the top of the bag to find a good four or five pounds of thick buds I’d only seen on the national news. Brother Macon, already carving another piece of blue chalk, said, “They’s certain parks and public properties we don’t need people discovering, or trampling all over, you know what I mean. The way things are now, we ain’t got nobody bothering us. Everybody thinks we just simple fruitcake-baking peoples. And they can keep that thought.”
“It’s not easy paying bills on what the fruitcake company pays out. All of us had to find other measures,” Gerald said. “Now, if you’d prefer not to drive around with an illegal substance in your Jeep, Lulinda here has permission from her husband to buy it all back. We normally get thirty dollars an ounce for this stuff. Shit, it’s so good we got people down in Mexico and South America buying from us.”
I’d never heard of marijuana going for more than five dollars a nickel bag. This was a time before sinsemilla, or whatever cross-pollinations got developed out in northern California. I said, “Well. Hmm. Is there any way I could maybe keep a couple ounces, you know, and sell some of this back to y’all?”
The barmaid—wearing a bowling shirt this morning, but I doubted that her name was Cecil—said, “Let me tell him about the fingers, let me tell him about the fingers.”
Gerald said, “I’m figuring there’s two grand in that bag. You keep you a handful, and we’ll still give you two grand. And then you leave us alone. Leave us out of the book. We’ll run you down and find you, otherwise.” He got off his barstool, pulled out his thick wallet, and extracted twenty hundred-dollar bills.
“Hey,” Cecil yelled from her spot behind the bar. “Some-where in America they’s fruitcakes on the shelf with human fingers stuck inside from when LeRoy McDowell had his accident.”
“There’s worse than fingers,” someone else said. “Don’t forget about when Lulinda’s brother’s sister-in-law took that knife to her sleeping husband. Oh, she went into work that next morning and they never did find that old boy’s manhood.”
The jukebox came on without anyone that I saw putting in a quarter. Merle Haggard sang. I yelled out the only thing that seemed proper at the time, namely, “Drinks on me!” like a pardoned fool.
TO BE HONEST, I don’t remember my return to the Fall Inn. I awoke in darkness, though, because Cammie banged on my door. I looked through the peephole to see her sporting a tiara and sash that read LITTLE MISS FRUIT-CAKE 1970. She was holding a baton.
I opened the door and said, “Hey,” wondering if she could smell what pot still hung in my clothes.
“It’s your lucky day!” she singsonged out in a drawl. “You’re officially our only lodger left. Are you hungry?”
I stepped back to let her in. “It looks like I won’t be staying here much longer, either. I might be leaving in the morning.”
Cammie didn’t enter. She looked to the side, waved her arm, and the same woman who had offered me a free haircut pushed a hand truck of boxed fruitcakes my way. “Mendal’s cool,” Cammie said.
The beautician said, “I still owe you the haircut if you want one and got the time. Or a full-body massage.”
I had put my hush money in every single page of Revelation in the Gideon Bible. I remembered that much. Cammie said, “Open up your fruitcakes, open up your fruitcakes. My talent’s baton twirling, but I can’t do much with a low ceiling.”
I said, “Oh, your talent might be something else,” all wink-wink, as if the beautician weren’t present.
“I’m Frankie,” said the other woman. “Like in the song.”
“Hey, Frankie,” I said. “I remember you.”
“Open the fruitcake like Cammie said.” Cammie walked toward the sink and shimmied up on it. “It’s from the Small Business Owners Association. I’m part of them.”
I had no option but to believe in a God who looked down upon and cared about me. I pulled open the first box to find a fifty-dollar bill sitting atop the fruitcake. Subsequent boxes held twenties, tens, more fifties, and a roll of silver dollars. “What’re you people doing?” I asked. This was a half-town of people willing to bribe me to leave them alone and another half-town bribing me to exaggerate their wonderful environs.
“You the money man,” Frankie said. “The Christmas dessert and money man.” She walked past me and stretched out on the bed. “I wish they was a good movie on tonight. Anyway, the association only asks that you let the world know how great Claxton is. Then people will indeed come visit. And it’ll be nothing but an economic boom for the community as a whole.”
All told, I got forty-eight free fruitcakes and another thousand-plus dollars. “Well y’all might win Friendliest Town in the South,” I said. I foresaw a fine life of driving from one small forgotten place to the next garnering illicit payoffs, each town’s populace evenly divided between hopeful do-gooders and ne’er-do-well outlaws. I said, “Do y’all want any of this money from the shopkeepers? I mean, did y’all come here to trade off some work, or what?”
Cammie said, “I got to get back to the front desk.”
Frankie got up off the bed, looked at herself in the mirror, and fingered her hair upwards. She squeegeed her teeth and popped gum I’d not noticed before. “I hope you’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about, as cool as you are or not. Anyway. If the mayor or anybody comes by and asks tomorrow, don’t forget to tell them we brought over the gifts.”
That night I didn’t call Marcel Parsell to tell him I’d be mailing Claxton in presently before moving on to Egypt, or Canoochee, or Kibbee, or Emmalane. I didn’t call my father to say how I’d succeeded in finding a satisfying job, regardless of what I might go on to study. I thought about calling Shirley Ebo, my imaginary black girlfriend who worked the summer as a counselor at a camp for children with missing extremities. Shirley taught knitting, somehow.
I didn’t telephone my lost and wayward mother in St. Louis, Nashville, New Orleans, or Las Vegas. Compton Lane—my best friend since birth—didn’t get a call.
I had three thousand dollars in my room, in a town of a thousand people, during an economic recession.
I took my leftover marijuana and pressed it in the Bible, like an autumn leaf. Don’t think I left money in there stupidly so the chambermaid could change her station in life. Then I called Rack Me. When Cecil answered I announced myself and asked if anyone was playing pool, then told her I’d come bring tip money in the morning if she would direct the receiver toward the pool table. I said something about how I’d unexpectedly needed to hear the crack of one sphere hitting the other, that I needed to prove to myself that at least one law of physics was working somewhere. She covered the mouthpiece, but I heard her laugh right before she hung up altogether.
/> I packed and made a point to fold my sparse collection of clean clothes neatly. It seemed important to place my money everywhere possible—in my shoes, in the glove compartment, between two opened fruitcakes shoved together. It would take another twenty years for me to understand what little value all of these bribes had, and how fortunate I was to—even if it was only a joke at the time—stick a carved cue chalk of either Henry Ford or William Tecumseh Sherman on my dashboard as I left for another hopeless group of citizens two hours away. My remaining collection of Brother Macon miniatures vibrated atop the passenger seat in an awkward and mysterious historical orgy, the participants of which would one day attract both friends and strangers to my door. Everyone in my later life would remark how great it was that I could line up these chalk busts and offer little lectures at tiny libraries to kids wishing for a place worthy of their rearing.
BETTER FIRE HYDRANTS, SHORTER TREES, MORE HOLES TO DIG
My deceased father’s ex-stray cur Scarface dug another perfect six-by-six-by-three-foot-deep hole in the backyard I’d inherited along with him. I figured he’d been taught such a trick, so I moved—board by board—the pallets of heart-pine lumber that covered areas where Scarface needed to dig. I’m talking I cleared the land and reset all that salvaged lumber in the front of the house, for I knew that the dog had been helping my father by doing my old job since I left Forty-Five for college.
I stacked thousands of feet properly, then got out the shovel and pickax and metal detector and, starting at the back edge of my new acreage, uncovered caches of old, stolen, tin service-station signs: Gulf, Sinclair, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, all wrapped in newspaper and bed sheets. They were laid out horizontally, and in better than fair condition.
It proved to me that indeed my own father hadn’t died unexpectedly without preparing some kind of last will and testament, that he had gone to his own odd lengths to take care of his only son. I went back inside the cement-block house of my youth to tell my confused, skeptical wife, Lyla, my theory—now confirmed—of how my father had spent most of his life.
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