by Jack Riggs
Peck
WEDNESDAY DAWNS SLOW and easy along the strand. People who have come down for vacations have by now exhausted themselves. They arrived on Saturday or Sunday and immediately started trying to kill themselves, drinking on the beach, drinking and burning their skin, drinking and swimming in the ocean, drinking and driving to seafood restaurants in Murrells Inlet and north up to Calabash.
This occurs like a habit every week, the exhaustion taking over like someone set an alarm to go off inside their bodies. By Wednesday, they're moving slow and only far enough to eat breakfast at a pancake house or get donuts and coffee at a Krispy Kreme. They stay inside nursing hangovers and blistered sunburns or head into one of the arcades to play Skee- Ball. They fill up putt-putt courses in the late afternoon or take in a movie, making it easy on the rest of us, the people who live here year- round.
We call it Hump Day the best day of the week, and I am happy to be sitting in a rocking chair outside the station with my first cup of coffee from a fresh pot Lori made as soon as she got in this morning.
“Hump Day,” she says when she brings me my three packets of sugar.
“Yep,” I say, smiling, “best damn day of the week.”
“You got that right,” Partee says. He pulls up a chair to sit next to me, takes one of my sugars before I can dump them all in my cup, but that's okay.
All season we plan our routine chores around Hump Day. Any errands that need to be done are scheduled then. The traffic's easy and the stores less crowded up and down the strand. We go light on crews some Wednesdays. If it rains or is even overcast, we know the chances of a fire or accident drop dramatically, so we let some of the boys take a day's vacation if they need it. We always look forward to Wednesday, and this one feels good this morning, the air a bit less humid, a breeze in the shade if you sit still and feel for it. This week's hump has a little something more to it. Everyone has come in early or stayed on duty because someone decided it's the perfect day to throw me a birthday party.
I have tried to persuade them not to, but they won't listen. Surfside has okayed taking us off- line for the day barring any major disaster, and Lori has taken on the job of organizing everything. She seems to be leading the charge. I know she's thinking about Cassie not being here. She told me the other day that it wasn't right for someone to spend their birthday alone. “It's the day you came to this world,” she said. “You always have to celebrate that with someone.”
I won't stop them if they want to do it. Matter of fact, it makes me feel better. I was at home the other day and the place seemed so empty that I got up and left, came back down to the station. Cassie hasn't called yet, and it's got me thinking that she might really be gone for good. It hurts like hell to think about it. I nearly called up to Meemaw's yesterday to see what was going on, but I didn't. I wasn't even sure she'd be there.
Partee comes into the station with grocery bags under each arm. He's in charge of food. I tell him he's always in charge of food. That's the law in this firehouse. Partee Mathis will cook for God when he dies. He's that good. I'd never say this out loud, but I try to schedule Partee to be on duty when I'm here. I don't want to miss his meals, good meals that he cooks from scratch and with everything that's grown fresh in the season.
I've given him venison roasts that he's performed miracles on. He has a fresh mustard sauce that could bring about world peace if everyone would just sit down and eat it. Lamb kabobs, barbecued chicken, and smoked pork loin are specialties we all look forward to at the station. Mud pie and his ambrosia around the holidays keep the crew happy and on time. All the boys need to smell is his scrambled- egg casserole smothered in salsa and they are up and ready to roll, as long as the fire bell holds off until the meal is done. I hate to say it, but Partee puts Cassie's cooking to shame, though I would never tell her that. I'm not stupid.
He's ordered the boys from Surfside to cook up the low country boil, told them where to go to get the best sausage, the vegetable stands where they would find the corn, onions, and red potatoes. Teddy promises imported beer but Partee tells him Pabst will be better for the boil. He's got lists for everyone with directions on how to start it all up until he gets back from the marsh. And then he grabs me and says, “Let's go, birthday boy.”
“Where to?” I ask.
“If you going to eat it, you going to help get it,” he says, a big old grin breaking out across his face. The gap between his front teeth makes it look like one's missing, big enough he can stick a straw through to sip on a milkshake from down at Sam's. We get up and head out the back side of the station, Partee's Mustang GT convertible waiting to take us for a ride.
“Mustang Sally, better slow your mustang down,” I sing, the pitch less than perfect. I do a little bit of the twist there in the parking lot, grinding gravel into the sole of my boot. Partee winces like he's just put something bad in his mouth.
“You better stop doing that,” he says, “if you want me to cook for you.” We both laugh, get into the Mustang, and Partee kicks up dust leaving the parking lot.
He just got this killer car, 1965 convertible, Rangoon red inside and out. It's loaded, with a 289 V8, four- barrel carb and power steering and power brakes. A center console separates bucket seats up front. It's got an AM radio and eight- track tape player, factory air- conditioning that he turns on even with the top down.
He talked about this car all last year. Even had the used- car dealer up in Florence hold it back on layaway, until he could get all the money together. He bought it back in the winter for a good chunk of change, put it up on blocks and spent more when he ordered a new top and a factory rally pack—a clock on the right and a six- thousand rpm tach on the left of the steering column. A guy at the Aynor station helped him install it all so he would be ready to ride by summer. Now it's June, and we're cruising in a car that has shit- kicking speed and Partee's ready to open it up for the very first time. “It's my last child,” he says over dual exhausts that vibrate us in our seats. “I ain't having no more.”
We're headed over the Intracoastal Waterway, past Conway to a place outside Aynor near where Partee lives, to pick up ribs. “After we get this,” he says, “we're going down to your place, got to go get them clams out of the creek.” That's why he's got me here, I realize. He needs my boat and my hands.
“I wasn't planning to spend my morning in the mud,” I tell him, but Partee just smiles and downshifts, turning onto a small sandy road that takes us up past tobacco fields, the rows of young plants flickering past as he fishtails side to side.
A half mile in, he pulls up under a grove of pines, brown nearly to the top of every tree. Needles blanket the sand below us, the air still, hot as a furnace. Out in the fields, the tobacco is wilting and will die if it doesn't rain soon.
Behind a small house, a man is boiling water in a large pot that sits on an open fire. Several large buckets of water are positioned around it to dowse any errant spark or ash that might find its way from under the pot. I look at Partee and shake my head. “That's against the law right now,” I say.
He holds up his hand to stop me there, the palm gray to the deep rich blackness of its back side. “He's been slaughtering hog like that for years,” he says. “It won't be Pacman who starts the big one. He ain't that stupid.”
Walking back, I look around the pot and see small black burn spots where Pacman's been putting out loose hot ash. I worry when I see something like this, but I know this old guy isn't the only local working with fire every day inland of the beaches, so I keep my mouth shut, let Partee do the talking.
If my partner is black, then Pacman is a piece of midnight cut out and thrown into the light of day. He is black as tar, deep sunburned black, his skin leathery thick. Behind the pot, a dead pig hangs by its hindquarters to bleed out. Its eyes are waxed and dead, the tongue loose and thick in its opened mouth. It's been gutted and some woman is washing out the inner cavity. I can't look at it long. The smell back here is musty and raw, blood in the air, the
innards of the hog in a bucket, the intestines saved so the skins can be used to stuff sausage.
A stout black girl is sharpening knives, razor- sharp edges glinting in the sunlight. She lays them down on a clean white cloth like she's preparing an operating table. It's the wrong time of year to be slaughtering hogs. Pops used to help Colin Murphy kill hogs in late October or November after the heat broke. He was a black man Pops worked with over in Georgetown at the mill. They'd drive over to Colin's farm outside Litchfield and kill two, split the meat up between the families.
Pork was plentiful for the better part of the winter if you had a good freezer. Pops would give away whole roasts and chops to families he knew needed them for the holidays, but for the most part we ate everything he cut up. This time of the year, the meat will spoil fast, so the work has to be done without hesitation, the meat cut and stored in a cooler before it can turn. Out here there are no butcher stores, and if there was one, it would still be for whites. It might be 1970, but in some places in the low country, it's not even 1950 yet.
I watch Partee talk to Pacman, tell him what he wants in the way of pork ribs and how many. The man smiles over at me, waves his hand and says, “Happy Birthday, Mista Peck.”
I smile and wave back. “Appreciate the meat,” I say.
“Pork,” Pacman says, and that gets a laugh out of the woman sharpening the knives.
The man whistles up a young boy from the house, who walks out like he's molasses poured from a bottle. He's barefoot, dressed only in cutoff jeans, his skin deep black like his daddy's. He takes Partee's order and then scuffs off with indifference into a small garage that's painted pink. Partee looks back at Pacman, raises an eyebrow.
“His dog got kilt yesterday,” the man says, shaking his head. “Stray bitch in heat took him right across the road out yonder. They's a whole pack chasing that thing around. Should have been the bitch to get kilt the way it's been treating all the dogs around here.” He raises his head, nods toward the door, a black empty rectangle where the boy entered. “I'm letting him heal a little for it,” he says like it's an apology for the boy's behavior.
“Bad when a boy loses his dog,” Partee says. He looks at me and I nod in agreement.
“Part of growing up, I reckon,” Pacman says, then clicks his tongue like it's a real shame.
The boy comes out carrying a large package of white butcher-block paper. It steams in the heat, ten racks of pork ribs just pulled from a cooler. “I can get this, Partee,” I say. I pull out my money, but Partee will have none of it, puts his hand on my chest— something he's never done before. He cuts a look down at me like he's my father, sweat pouring off his face. He never wears the county- issued T- shirt that would make it a lot cooler on him. Par-tee's always got on his long- sleeve shirt buttoned at his collar and cuffs, the T- shirt underneath. “I never heard of a man paying for his own birthday party,” he says, “so let it go, Chief. We took up money. It ain't no skin off my back.”
He turns and finishes paying off Pacman, then as if an afterthought strikes, he looks at me again, his hand pushing his wallet back into his hip pocket. “But if I wanted to go buy these ribs for you, I could, no doubt about it. You'd get these ribs for your party no matter what.” I can't tell if he's saying this to prove something or just wanting to say I deserve fresh pork ribs barbecued like no other in the world.
“It just seems like a bit too much,” I say, “all this about my birthday.”
Everyone in the yard laughs, heads shaking like I'm crazy to say such a thing. When we say good- bye, I look back, give a wave. “Ya'll drop on by, if you can,” I say.
“Love to, Chief,” Pacman says, “but this here pig won't last that long, so we'll have to take a rain check. Next year.” His laugh is big, deep like he really means it. Partee puts his arm over my shoulder, another first, and says, “Come on, Chief, before you invite the whole county.”
He puts the pork in his trunk, packs it in coolers for the wait while we head toward the marsh where the tide's going down and we'll walk in knee-deep mud to pull out clams as big as our fists.
We're back in the Mustang cruising, the road flat and straight in front of us. Partee's winding it out, showing me what the car can do. We're in backcountry deep in Horry County, so I don't much worry about highway patrol or a Sheriff's deputy busting us. Out my window I watch the countryside fly past, look for signs of smoke, remembering Goose Hetzel back at Barker's in Conway. I can't help but look because I can smell it in the air. It's hot and dry, and it's not right people are using fire back inland like Pacman. Someone's going to get careless, it's human nature.
Partee's not worrying like me. He's got the eight- track cranked up with the Temptations. I know you wanna leave me, but I refuse to let you go. The top's down, the land blurring past us. The sun's moving quick up the sky, heat melting the air, rolling it in oily waves on top of the hot road in front of us. A ways ahead, we both see a car come up to the road from a dirt driveway, a Plymouth Roadrunner pushing dust up into the air when it brakes. I can see it wants to turn right in front of us. I glance at Partee. “Be careful,” I say.
“No problem,” Partee says, letting off the accelerator to pull the Mustang back, but it won't slow enough to help. He flashes his lights to let the driver know he's on him, to stay put, but that doesn't seem to do any good. The Roadrunner spins dirt and pulls on out. Partee sees it, this bright orange body with a spoiler on the back, knows he's got to keep going, that he's too fast to stop. He checks the oncoming lane, downshifts, then hits the accelerator, lays on the horn as he comes up on the car, its back window filled with a Confederate flag. He weaves the Mustang into the empty lane, passes the Roadrunner, startling the driver so much he runs off the road, a tornado of dirt kicking up behind them.
I turn and look, can tell this isn't going to be over just yet. It's obvious the boys in the Roadrunner don't like what just happened. There's more dust when they spin tires getting back onto the road. They come up fast, redneck boys from out this way who aren't going to take a pass like that without doing something about it. “Shit,” I say. “Now what?”
“Nothing,” Partee tells me. I see him look into the rearview mirror, can tell he's a little bothered by this. We're both in our uniforms, but I'm betting these two could give a rat's ass about firemen out for a ride to get ribs and clams for a birthday party. They pull up behind us, tailgating so close if Partee lets off the gas they'll ride right up the trunk of the Mustang. “That's too close,” Partee says when he gives the car more gas.
We separate for a minute, but then the orange Roadrunner is right back up our ass. I look at the speedometer. Partee is doing eighty- five. The road remains straight, nothing coming up in front of us until we find a long arching curve, tall pines on either side trying to cool the air around us. It's at the end of the curve I see the truck, a logger pulling out from the sand road leading back into paper- mill land. It's long and heavy, slow to pull up onto the pavement with its full load. The Roadrunner pulls out into the oncoming lane, accelerates to hold up next to us, trap us from getting out of the way of the truck.
Its windows are down, the boys in the front with white T- shirt sleeves rolled up to their shoulders, hair cropped close to the scalp. There's a girl in the back, but she just looks scared, like she doesn't want any part of what's going on. The driver looks over, screams something about learning how to drive, and calls Partee a coon. The boy on the passenger side looks directly at me and says, “Niggers ought not have cars like that.” Then he spits out the window, the force of air taking it past us so it misses the car.
All the while, we are quiet. Partee's trying to slow down to stop the fast approach of the logging truck. It's picking up speed, but we don't have the room to stop unless Partee hits the brakes hard and that's exactly what he does. “Hang on,” he says, then slams on the brakes, catapulting the Roadrunner on down the road, where it disappears amid whoops and hollers, white hands hanging out of the windows shooting us the finger.
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br /> The back end of the logging truck comes up quick. A piece of red cloth is sticking out of the tree trunks like it's trying to wave itself silly so we'll see it and stop. Blue smoke from skidding tires fills the air behind us. We slide hard, Partee able to control the Mustang until the last second when the front wheels slip off onto the shoulder grinding at the sand and shell, the whole thing rattling to a stop in a storm of white dust. We don't hit the truck, which is a miracle in itself, the Mustang unharmed, just inches from going down an embankment and into swamp. Out in front, the Roadrunner has disappeared, the truck moving on, never even a clue as to what just happened.
We sit there for a minute, the heavy bass and screaming guitar of the Temptations pushing air around the car. The high voice of the singer pulls us back to the side of the road, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth….
“Shit, did they do that on purpose?” I ask.
“I don't know,” Partee says. He turns off the eight- track, his head against the steering wheel, the silence suffocating.
“Goddamn,” I say. “They weren't going to let us out of there.”
“That ain't the first time,” Partee says. He lifts his head, looks at me. “I seen those boys, that car at least. They like that all the time.”
“We'll wipe them up off the road one day I'll guarantee you that. You okay?”
“Yeah,” Partee says. He waits another second watching the road like he's afraid those boys will be back. “We got shit like that out this way, Chief,” he says finally. “Wouldn't mind living closer in, but can't afford it.”
I can see in Partee's eyes that he's telling me this for more than information. I nod, tell him that I'll see what I can do. “Hell, you can come live with me now,” I say.
Partee shakes his head, smiles when he starts the engine again. “Cassie won't like that when she comes back,” he says like he knows that's going to happen no matter what I'm thinking.
I smile, pat Partee on the shoulder, my nerves finally catching up to what almost happened. “Drive the speed limit, how about it,” I say, and then laugh out loud, too loud.