Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  As the evening fell, the wind died earlier than expected. We were without engine power, so it was dark as we drifted home on the tide in a calm interrupted only by a zillion insects, a million frogs and the occasional splash of something more sinister deep in the reeds. A monstrous yellow moon rose through the live oaks, giving the Spanish moss an ethereal look, but it was not yet high enough to illuminate the dock as Joe asked Roz to hop ashore with a line.

  ‘What if there’s an alligator drying his feet on the woodwork?’ she asked.

  ‘Take the spinnaker pole with you,’ he advised, referring to a 6-foot length of aluminium extrusion. ‘If you see any shadows, give them a shove around about midships with the business end. They thrash around a bit, but generally they slither off. Works most times.’

  ‘What happens when it doesn’t?’

  ‘Often wondered that myself. You stay put, Ma’am, and I’ll step off.’

  Like a knight of old, Joe picked up the gleaming lance and, as I steered the boat, he hopped nimbly on to the darkened jetty. A few seconds later we were secure with nothing heavier on the dock than a king-size cockroach taking a late evening paseo.

  We locked up the bikes and drove to the house of Joe’s girlfriend, Gwynne, in an ancient Cadillac hearse which Joe and his mates used to trail their boats to regattas. At the top of the windshield, where a less imaginative owner might have inscribed his name and that of his loved one – ‘Sid and Joline’ – Joe had contrived the legend, ‘Stiff Competition’. I doubted whether many of his rivals had seen the joke.

  Gwynne’s house was a wooden antebellum classic in a shady square. Joe and Gwynne were half-way through the restoration, but they had begun as lovers should, with the front bedroom. Selflessly, they gave this treasure up to us and slept goodness knows where.

  ‘How do you come to be in the US, Joe?’ asked Roz over a barbecue dinner.

  ‘I’m an American, that’s how!’ he answered without cracking a smile.

  ‘I thought Tom said you were originally from Latvia or one of those Baltic States.’

  ‘Lithuania was my home.’

  ‘Were your family economic migrants?’

  Joe smiled. ‘I don’t think you’d quite put it like that,’ he said slowly. ‘I came out of there in circumstances you might call awkward. It was in the early sixties and after I’d seen my uncle and cousins shot by the Communists for not toeing the political line, I decided that I had to get back at them somehow. So I escaped and came to the Land of the Free.

  ‘I signed up for Vietnam as soon as I could. There were plenty of folks over here didn’t like that war, but I had a different perspective. I knew what we were fighting for. I’d seen it and I’d felt it. They hadn’t.

  ‘I did OK out there, and when it was all over I found myself on a civilian plane back to California looking after a young officer in a wheelchair who’d gotten himself shot full of holes. We’re in the immigration line with our uniforms and campaign medals and all, and I need to take a leak. So I leave him and go off. When I come back five minutes later, there’s all these draft-dodging bastards slapping the poor guy around, calling him a ‘baby-burner’ and a ‘rapist’. I couldn’t take that. The boy had bled for his country, right or wrong, and these people weren’t fit to wipe his nose, so I laid into them.’

  ‘How many were there?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe four or five, but I was combat-hardened. I’d been at war for years. I don’t know where they’d been. I had three of them on the floor when the cops dragged me off and the next thing you know I’m in the cooler.’

  ‘I can’t believe that didn’t put you off America,’ said Roz. ‘No, Ma’am. It didn’t put me off. Every country’s going to have bad apples, and I knew how little almost everyone understood about the Commie business. Anyhow, I left the military then and became a civilian. Land was cheap over here and I bought my place and set up my little business. It ain’t flash but, Jesus, Georgia’s a great place to settle. Low bullshit factor hereabouts.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll show you tomorrow night at the restaurant.’

  Far down by the deepest swamp in town was a rickety shack that had survived the storm against all the odds. Outside stretched the night-time marshes where the mysteries of life and death were unfolding in secret. Inside, it was heaving with people.

  ‘Hiya, Joe! Howyah doin’?’ the barman greeted our host, hustling us to a prime site from where Joe could hold court to as many fellow diners as possible.

  ‘I like this place,’ he said as we scrabbled our chairs up to the rough wooden table, ‘but it ain’t what it used to be.’

  ‘Nowhere ever is,’ said Gwynne, an interior designer, ‘but anything would have been an improvement.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the decor,’ said Joe. ‘The food’s so good nobody cares about that anyway. What I’m saying is that folks miss the animals they used to have in cages round the outsides. They had lions and tigers and all sorts. The big ones could stare in at the people eatin’. There was a hairy gorilla too, but he escaped.’

  ‘What, at dinnertime?’ I blurted.

  ‘It was getting on to closing-up time,’ replied Joe in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘The boss said he just smashed his way out of his cage, took one look at the menu and marched clear out into the woods. Nobody ever saw him again. But that was nothing to the pair of chimps they had. Used to dress ’em up in dinner jacket and black tie and sit ’em down at table in the corner. Regular customers used to buy them drinks.’

  ‘I just don’t believe half the stuff you come out with,’ said Gwynne, ‘but you did get it right when you told that journalist our ex-sheriff wasn’t so bad as some folks made out.’

  ‘That made me sick, the way they was missing the point,’ Joe was saying as the waitress came to take our order. No endless list of ‘specials’ here. Just the best seafood money could buy, beer, water, and a short wine list for those of the avant-garde who really wanted it. We ordered oysters, flounder and Becks.

  ‘What was it with the sheriff?’ I asked, curious that Joe should side with law and order after his experience in San Francisco.

  ‘Somebody wrote a book that concerned him,’ interrupted a beefy, red-faced character on the next table. There was no protocol here about privacy of conversation, and Joe did have a rather loud voice. ‘It was one of those modern piles of rubbish. Said he was a nigger-hater, and so on. I don’t know about who he hated and who he didn’t, but he sure kept order round here.’

  ‘He was some mean-lookin’ man, Chip,’ began Joe, but he had met his match in our neighbour.

  ‘Tall as a stick, he was, and twice as thin,’ continued Chip, now holding centre stage. ‘But he was a wiry sonofabitch. Nobody messed with him more ’n once. You remember that hole he had in his ear, Joe?’

  ‘Guess he was more hole than ear on that side,’ put in Mrs Chip.

  ‘How’d he get that?’ asked Gwynne.

  ‘I tell you,’ said Chip, almost choking on a giant shrimp in his excitement, ‘that was some front-off. The sheriff was face to face with this massive Negro with a .38 special who was threatening to blow his brains round the bar-room. I don’t know what the sheriff ever did to this guy but his face is all screwed up with hate and his eyes are standin’ out. Sheriff tries to stare him down – he can’t pull his own iron in case the guy really does spread him all over the sight glasses. They stay there like that for, God knows, it seemed like minutes but I guess it was mebbe ten seconds, then the sheriff says, “Go on then, let me have it if you’re goin’ to do it.” ’Course, nobody expected him to fire, but that’s what he did. The guy shot the sheriff, but his hand was shaking so much he almost missed. Didn’t put a hole in his head, he blew his ear off it instead.’

  ‘Why didn’t he finish the job?’ asked Gwynne. Roz and I were sitting open-mouthed at this tale, which was clearly true or, if apocryphal, at least generally accepted, because the folks on the other neighbouring tables were all turn
ing around nodding, waving beer glasses and generally making ‘I-was-there-too’ noises.

  ‘I think he was so shocked, he ran out of nerve,’ Chip replied, ‘but the sheriff didn’t falter. There’s blood pouring out, but his eyes never left that black guy’s face. He walks up to him, he holds out his hand for the gun and the guy passes it to him.’

  ‘An’ that wasn’t the end of it,’ put in a middle-aged woman who had mooched over from the bar and was leaning on our table. ‘After that, the blacks all thought he was a zombie and they was scared out of their lives every time he showed up. I guess the doc sewed up what was left of his ear,’ she added, ‘’cause after a year or so it wasn’t too awful. Always looked ugly to the end, but you didn’t mind that, cause of how he was. A real man.’

  ‘He ran this town for nearly fifty years,’ said Joe, finally squeezing in a word to finish his own story. ‘I guess people stood against him sometimes, but he always got re-elected. And when he finally died, 380 cars followed his funeral procession.’

  ‘Good thing for you he wasn’t here that night you showed up with the ’gator in your station wagon!’ said the lady, anxious to keep a lively conversation going. I gulped down an iced oyster and asked myself what under heaven was coming next.

  Joe hadn’t touched his flounder, but he was having an even better time remembering grand old days. Gwynne looked at him with a mixture of despair and motherly love, which struck me as philosophical. She must have been a full twenty years his junior.

  ‘I think folks imagined I was out to make mischief that night,’ Joe said with a low chuckle. ‘But the truth was that I ran over that alligator just down the track. He was lying across it right on the bend by the pond and I was going too fast to stop. I got down to see how things stood and the guy with me says, “He’s good and dead, Joe. If we sling him inside, mebbe we can sell him for skin, or steaks, or something.” We’d had a beer or two and that sounded fine to me, so we heave him up through the tailgate and drive on here. We have a beer or two, then we go out to the car. I’m backin’ out and suddenly there’s this noise like wet sandpaper. Then there’s snapping and gnashing teeth, so I look over my shoulder. It’s pretty dark, but I can see the sonofabitch grinning at me from the rear seat. He’s no more dead than you or me.

  ‘We were out of that wagon fast, I can tell you, because I hadn’t got my gun and the only safe action was to shoot that sucker. So we shut him in and hightailed it for the bar for some sort of heavy firearm. Peashooter wouldn’t be any use, ’cause this was a full-grown beast.’

  ‘I recall that night,’ put in the barman. ‘You come in here looking like you’d seen Blackbeard himself, shouting about needing a weapon. Not many folks had brought theirs with them into the restaurant and I was keeping mine where it stays, but there was this girl…’

  ‘I’ll never forget her,’ cried Chip, clambering back into the action. ‘She had blonde hair and a figure like Mae West. We never saw her before or since. Cool as you like, she opens up her pocketbook and pulls out this machine pistol. “Will this do?” she says, and Joe grabs it like it’s a rope for a drowning sailor. Then you was out the bar. I’ll never forget it. The ’gator’s going berserk inside your car, but every time you open the door for him to step out and get shot, he goes quiet. Not stupid, I thought.

  ‘In the end, he comes flopping out all of a sudden, crashes into you and you drop the gun. He takes a snap at you and you jump up on the roof of some fancy convertible and it caves in. The other guy grabs the gun and unloads it into the alligator. I guess everyone was satisfied ’cept the poor ol’ beast and the owner of that convertible…’

  Some hours after this riotous interchange, Joe and I were drinking a nightcap in the other restored room in Gwynne’s house, the front parlour. The ladies had retired at least two whiskeys earlier, when Joe’s black-and-white cat Hebe, the feline equivalent of the late sheriff, padded around the finely panelled door and hopped up on to his lap.

  Quietly, Joe began to sing ‘Old Man River’ in a rich baritone. For a while, the tomcat sat purring peacefully, then, as Joe reached the climax of ‘You and me, we sweat and strain…’ Hebe began to make a strange sound in his throat. When we arrived at ‘some plant ’taters and some plants cotton, and them that plants ’em is soon forgotten…’ Hebe was crooning in tune and singing along with Joe. I couldn’t take any more. The swamplands of Georgia were a world where it seemed absolutely anything was possible. As man and cat rounded into their final cadence of ‘Ol’ Man River, he jus’ keeps rolling along,’ I slugged back my Jack Daniel’s, shook Joe’s hand and staggered off to the sanity of dreamland.

  Leaving Joe, Gwynne, Chip and the ghost of the sheriff to manage as best they could without us, the road to journey’s end from Georgia carried an ever-increasing sense of return to civilisation as we knew it. The riding posed little problem except for the rising density of the traffic. I watched with satisfaction how Roz and Betty Boop were now loping through it.

  In a sense, whether Roz was enjoying the bike or not didn’t matter any more. Short of some bad accident, we were going to make it and she’d have achieved what she set herself. Ironically, something had triggered a latent biker instinct back there in the deserts, because she was at last revelling in the power of the Harley. Betty had done her stuff and so had her rider, despite all the doubts from others about the bike and from Roz about herself. Nobody ever queried Black Madonna. She had been born to the task, but I too was drawing a good deal of job satisfaction out of the eastern air as the love bugs thinned towards Charleston. They finally disappeared at Shem Creek, sometime home of the Hungry Neck Yacht Club, where Ambrosio had given me the Ozarks’ music tape and Ricky once lived in his pink Cadillac.

  As we crossed the bridge we remembered so well, I noted with relief that the storm seemed to have passed Charleston well offshore. We rode through the familiar streets of pretty clapboard homes and even recognised the mailbox through whose rusty lid I had kept my parents informed of a filtered version of our affairs before email or fax were thought of. It was only when we swung down alongside what had once been the old boatyard that I realised things had changed. The sheds were gone, and so were the boat hoist and the slow-moving, happy-go-lucky black workforce. There were no shrimp-boats and instead of the pilings where the smart yachts had once rubbed shoulders with us and the no-hopers, we found smart lawns and a block of condominiums with a carved wooden sign picked out in gold, ‘The Boatyard’.

  We hadn’t really expected things to remain as they were, assuming, probably correctly, that old Charlie the owner finally took a developer’s offer for his prime chunk of waterfront property and retired. I allowed myself a laugh at the fantasy of Suzie acting for him, then tried to imagine where all the bums and the longshoremen and the hobos had gone when the construction gangs moved in to clean the place up. The yachts would have been OK. They’d have found a newer, slicker deal at the municipal marina over in Charleston. Perhaps a few of their owners missed the smell of the boiling shrimp and the ringing sound of the caulker’s hammer, but most of them probably didn’t. The hippies, the fishermen, the Robin Hoods and the itinerant engineers had been blown to the four winds by the marching armies of progress.

  We didn’t linger. Nothing lasts forever, and very little that man has touched stays the same for more than a few years, especially in the youthful land of America. After so long in the heat of the central continent, Charleston reminded us that we were starved of the sea, so although Annapolis still lay two days ahead, we booted the bikes into gear and opted to take a minor diversion from the osprey’s flight, following the coast instead. We hugged as close as we could to the great Waccamaw River with its untouched cypress swamps running parallel with the ocean, then we skirted the shoreline to pass close to the big Capes of North Carolina; Cape Fear, Lookout and Hatteras. The last of these is the most famous. Mother of shoal waters, breeding ground for depressions and bowstring of the vicious summer fronts that sweep up the shoreline with 60-knot squ
all lines, Hatteras floats at the top right-hand corner of the string of sandy islands known as the Outer Banks. Soon, we would take the ferry to the first of these with a usable road, but before we got there, we were obliged to pass inside Cape Fear with its ocean inlet, and the city of Wilmington.

  Wilmington had taken the full hit of the hurricane that had bounced off Darien. It is also the home base of the American family who adopted Roz and I when we landed in 1976, two bronzed young kids three weeks out from the Virgin Islands. The boat was tired and so were we. Our engine had been defunct for twelve months and I had broken two ribs in a squall north of Cuba. We had almost no money when John and Thérèse Roberts took us under their wing. They scooped us up in their truck and gave us a five-day holiday into the Appalachians for no other reason than to share their country with us.

  At that time, we were, in a sense, living their dream. Not wealthy people, they had bought a small boat to experiment with living aboard. John had made up his mind to retire early from his engineering job so that he and Thérèse could spend their late fifties cruising the Bahamas. It took some time, but one day they sold the home that had seen four children raised, and sailed away. It might seem odd to some that a couple from upstate North Carolina should want to go to sea, but John was the first to explain to me that America is a travelling nation. Times had been tight as they brought up their family. No fancy RV for them, but he was burning to see the West, so he’d built a wooden house on the back of his pick-up and fitted it out so they could all find shelter.

  ‘OK, kids, let’s go!’ he roused the children one summer’s morning, and away they went, christening the vehicle ‘Lesgo’ before they had reached the town limit.