“Oh, listen,” Clarissa said, turning her attention back to Miss Lossie, “did you know those boys are drinking?”
Miss Lossie’s eyes flashed. She snapped her head toward the door. “They’re doing what! I warned them about that!” She marched over to the back wall, grabbed a broom that was tilted against a nonworking jukebox, and headed outside.
“Be careful, Miss Lossie. They’re kinda mean and have been drinking a lot, and I made them mad.”
“I’ll show them mad,” the little woman said as she stormed into the heat.
Clarissa started to follow her, but in a thick, north Florida drawl, the near naked fisherman said, “She can handle it. You’ll just get in the way.”
“But—”
“No but,” he interrupted. “They will not mess with her.” He held a lure up to the sun-filtered shadows and studied it. “You, on the other hand…”
Clarissa rolled her eyes, bit her tongue. Arrogant oaf, she thought. Know-it-all man. She sidled up to the door but for some reason heeded his words. From within the store’s confines, she listened to the goings-on in the parking lot, fully prepared to run out and help if assistance was needed. Miss Lossie was so loud, Clarissa heard her every word.
“Jason! Bobbie! Eric Lee! Tommy Lee! Clean this mess up this very minute and do not come back here. If you do, I’m calling the sheriff and then I’m calling your daddies! But first I’m gonna beat you with this broom. Now get!”
The boys responded sheepishly in a jumbled chorus: “Sorry…” Surprised at their sudden compliance, Clarissa wondered why she had commanded such little respect from the two-pint punks.
Miss Lossie marched back in, wielding the broom. “Little devils. They think they’re so tough, but you blow on them hard and they near about start crying.” She tilted the broom back against the jukebox. “Good God, it’s hot out there!”
“Sure is.” Clarissa, feeling herself settling in, took a seat at the counter. “They say it’s a record setter.”
Miss Lossie nodded toward the window on the east wall. “One oh four according to the gauge. That’s heatstroke weather.”
“What did they do before air-conditioning?”
“Nobody complained because there wasn’t anything we could do.” She shrugged. “See, luxury makes us weak.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Clarissa said. “But I’m still grateful for it.”
“You and me both.” Miss Lossie moved a thick book—Florida Land Statutes—from beside the TV to a desk under the east-facing window.
Clarissa’s stomach growled.
“Sounds like you need to eat.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She watched as Miss Lossie slipped a bookmark on a page that had been dog-eared. “Any smoked mullet today?”
“For you, I sure do. Chester, you okay up there while I go get her a plate?”
“Take your time.”
Miss Lossie disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen. Clarissa helped herself to an RC out of the cooler and a bag of boiled peanuts. She was starving. She popped open three peanuts, sucked down their salty juice, and watched a commercial about a topical cream that could help ameliorate the ravages of feminine itch. Clarissa was mortified; she stole a look at the fisherman at the front of the store. Nope, he was immersed in lures. Thank God the sound was off.
Miss Lossie returned with a paper plate stacked high with smoked mullet. “Here you go, honey. And I put some coleslaw on there for you, too.”
“Thank you so much. This looks fabulous.” She pulled mullet meat off the bone with her fingers. “Mmmm, yummy.” Strong notes of salt, hickory, and cayenne blossomed on her tongue. She reached for her drink. “Do you smoke the fish yourself?”
“Goodness, no. Mr. Strawder does it. He loves smoked anything. The man would smoke his britches if I’d let him.” She retrieved a plastic pitcher from the end of the counter and poured herself a glass of iced tea. Clarissa was charmed by the fact that Miss Lossie always referred to her husband as Mr. Strawder, and she wondered if she called him that always, even in private, even when they were young lovers.
As Clarissa ate, her eyes drifted over the store’s ephemera. She didn’t have use for any of this stuff: moleskins, washboards, Jell-O molds. She remembered the “aspic” her mother made—red Jell-O with peas and carrots suspended like spiders in amber. She shivered; her mother had been a god-awful cook (mac and cheese baked in grapefruit juice) with the exception of her blackberry cobbler. It was Clarissa’s favorite dish bar none. She’d spent her childhood wishing it were the only thing her mother cooked and her adulthood unsuccessfully re-creating it.
“What’s that?” Clarissa pointed above the door leading to the kitchen, where what she surmised to be a four-foot-long length of wood hung in the curved grip of two rings, one end whittled to such a fine point that it reminded Clarissa of a vampire stake.
Miss Lossie followed the line of Clarissa’s finger. “That old thing? That, my dear, is a worm-gruntin’ stob.”
“A what?”
“You know,” Miss Lossie said, a hint of impatience creeping into her voice, “for gruntin’ worms.”
“Worm grunting?” Clarissa wanted to laugh, but Miss Lossie’s brown eyes had turned a shade deeper, indicating this was serious business. “Is that anything like snake charming?” Bubba’s owner’s defiant little face gathered in her mind’s eye.
The fisherman, still rifling through lures, his shorts still riding perilously low on his hips, snorted.
“Actually, it’s close,” Miss Lossie said. She moved aside a stack of random papers, cocked her head, looked at Clarissa as if she were sizing up whether the mullet eater sitting before her could possibly understand the intricacies involved in an activity as nuanced as worm grunting.
“Okay.” Clarissa wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “The stob. What do you do with it?”
“Pound it into the ground,” Miss Lossie said as if that were the stupidest question she’d ever heard, and then she demonstrated the proper movement, “so the worms wiggle up. But the stob has to be from a dependable tree. Black gum, tupelo. Like that.” She held up her arms as if she were reaching for something. “It’s got to feel good in the hand. That’s primary. And it can’t break on you, because you get hold of your iron—not the kind you use on clothes, but the kind that you can get a decent grip on—and you take that hunk of metal and you pound the stob into the ground.” Bent at the waist, she made a pounding motion. “You follow? And then you glide that iron across the stob just as if it were a fine-haired bow and the stob were the sweetest fiddle.”
Clarissa paused from shelling a peanut. “It makes music?”
“Prettiest music you ever did hear,” the fisherman offered.
“No, not really,” Miss Lossie said, batting down his comment. “It does make a pretty, low-seated grunt that falls just short of a moan. But the worms can’t hear, so that’s not what gets them.”
Clarissa brought the peanut and its shell, brimming with brine, to her lips. “What does?”
“The vibrations radiating underground,” the fisherman said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Really!”
Miss Lossie looked around. “I had an iron around here somewhere. Mr. Strawder must have taken it. You bang the stob into the ground and then you start playing it, as I said, like the sweetest fiddle—actually it sounds like an old, gassy donkey named Sarah Mr. Strawder and I once had—and next thing you know, up they come—hundreds, if you’re living right—of the fattest earthworms you ever did see.”
“Ew!” Clarissa pushed back her plate.
From the lure section, the fisherman said, “There ain’t no ‘ew’ about it.”
“That’s right,” Miss Lossie said.
The man walked down the canned goods aisle toward the counter, apparently at ease with the state of his shorts, three freshwater lures dangling from his thick fingers. Clarissa was dying to ask why he was buying fake lures when there were probably free earthwo
rms right outside the door, but she didn’t want to sidetrack the conversation. His face was sunburned everywhere but around his eyes—a cracker tan, some people called it, acquired by wearing sunglasses and little else. Clarissa had to gulp down a giggle. She saw him as her superhero’s partner: Cracker Bandit!
He looked at Clarissa with the same skepticism exhibited by Miss Lossie. His left eye was milky white, the right cornflower blue. So, she mused, he’s a one-eyed Cracker Bandit. Even better. “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
Taken aback, unappreciative of his rude manners, Clarissa said, “Well, no, I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”
“Not us!” he said, adding several vowels to each word. His blue eye sparkled. His white one just sat there.
“Chester Maines, don’t tell her all that,” Miss Lossie said.
“I certainly will,” Cracker Bandit said. “Take a look over there”—he pointed to the far wall—“at that photograph.”
Clarissa eased off the stool, almost knocked over a life-size cutout of a racecar driver holding a can of Skoal, and examined the black-and-white image. “Oh, my gosh!” she moved in closer. “Is that you, Miss Lossie?”
“I’m afraid so.” She sighed and shut her eyes as if she simply couldn’t bear the weight of the past.
“What year?”
“Nineteen sixty-nine,” Cracker Bandit said with such surety that it led Clarissa to believe that he had memorized all sorts of Miss Lossie trivia. “I give you Lossie Strawder, the 1969 Worm Grunting Queen.”
“With a sash and flowers and everything,” Clarissa said, studying the photo, lingering over the details: the old porch of a wood-frame shotgun house and Miss Lossie, who was wearing a pretty floral dress, sitting in a regal bent-willow rocking chair, her tiara askew. “Where’s the king?”
“No king—although if there had been one, it would have to have been Mr. Strawder, but he is not the kind to go in for such foolishness. And the only reason it was me—”
“Six years in a row!” Cracker Bandit crowed.
“—is because no one else would do it.”
“ ‘Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin’ Queen,’ ” Clarissa read the banner in the photo. “Sopchoppy?”
Cracker Bandit held his free hand to his forehead. His shorts slipped a hair lower. Dear God, no, thought Clarissa.
“You don’t know Sopchoppy?”
Miss Lossie said, “She’s from south Florida.”
“Where at?”
“Don’t know. One of those little orange grove towns, I think.”
“Clewiston? I did some bass fishing down there last year.”
“I don’t think it was that far south.”
“Hmpf,” he said. He had a handsome face: chiseled, strong, and full of interesting lines. Clarissa wondered why they were speaking as if she weren’t present.
“Sopchoppy,” Cracker Bandit said, returning to the topic and adopting a professorial air, which was impressive given the state of his dress and sunburn, “is”—he drew an imaginary circle on the counter and tapped its equatorial midpoint—“the center of the universe.”
“The worm-gruntin’ universe,” Miss Lossie said with a little giggle, her eyes merry.
“It used to be a doggone honorable profession. That is until that TV man…” Cracker Bandit snapped his fingers, apparently searching for the name.
“Kuralt.” Miss Lossie spit the word.
“That’s right. Charlie Kuralt. Well, everybody down there in Sopchoppy—”
Miss Lossie interrupted. “It’s thirty-five miles southwest of Tallahassee on the Sopchoppy River in the middle of the prettiest forest you ever did see, except for the parts the paper company timbers.”
“Her people are from there,” Cracker Bandit said, helping himself to some of Clarissa’s boiled peanuts.
“Actually, my distant people are from around here. After Emancipation, my great-grandparents slinked off into the woods over there a ways in Sopchoppy.”
“Anyway,” Cracker Bandit said, tossing back some peanuts, “at one time, all of Sopchoppy’s finest people were worm grunters. Black, white, Choctaw.” He stared into the distance, his jaw hard set, a peanut shell lodged between his teeth, as if he were remembering. The way he said “worm grunter” reminded Clarissa of the way an East Indian woman she’d gone to graduate school with said “fire-eater” and “rat temple keeper,” as if they were sacred vocations.
“Okay,” Clarissa said, trying to steer the discussion back three feet, “but what about Kuralt?”
Miss Lossie threw up her hands in disgust. “Oh, that man!”
“Ah, Kuralt! Well, he blows into town with his cameras and all and does this little piece for television about the worm grunters, about how you can walk to the ends of the universe and never find another community of them—how it’s rare and honest work and all that.” Cracker Bandit picked a wet shell out from between his teeth. “Well, hell, next thing you know, the poor, honest salt of their grandmamas’ earth, never-bothered-nobody worm grunters had the tax man pounding on their doors.”
“And those state regulators.” Miss Lossie worked her lips back and forth. “Awful! They put us out of business. Like we were nothing but you know what on the bottom of their shoes. Sure, you can still make a dime here and there on your worms, but the government is going to take nine cents of it. And by the time you fill out all their paperwork, you’re best off keeping your fanny on the couch.”
Cracker Bandit shook his head as if it were a crying shame. “One cent outta ten. It ain’t worth it.” He shot Clarissa a dead-eyed stare. “You think?”
“No, no, doesn’t sound worth it at all,” Clarissa said, the writer in her wishing she had a tape recorder, but as it was she was simply going to have to rely on memory, clinging to every single last morsel of this conversation as if she were a starving woman and words were manna. “But I still don’t understand,” she said, picking on the mullet’s backbone. “What’s the big deal about these worms?”
“The big deal!” Cracker Bandit appeared stunned, his mouth agape, and Clarissa felt herself bristle at what she took to be his physical inference that she was ignorant. She really wished he would pull up his pants.
“Now, Chester, you can’t expect everybody to know. She hasn’t lived here a year yet.” She turned to Clarissa. “Have you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, let me tell you.” She pulled the pencil from behind her ear and pointed it at Clarissa. “The big deal is the Sopchoppy worms are like no other in the world. Are they?” She looked at Cracker Bandit.
“Ma’am…” He gestured at Clarissa as if he were about to try to reason with her. “May I call you ma’am?”
Clarissa dead-eyed him back. She was beginning to want the scoop without the nuts.
Cracker Bandit spoke slowly, to add gravity to his knowledge, Clarissa supposed. “Them Diplocardia mississippiensis earthworms, otherwise known as Sopchoppy wigglers, are the finest worms on God’s green earth.” He blinked for emphasis, and this time his milky eye wobbled as if it were focusing on worlds only he could see.
“Because, among other things,” Miss Lossie said, tossing aside the pencil—Clarissa heard it roll—“they have twelve hearts. Count them. Not nine. Not ten. But twelve.” She leaned across the knotted pine counter and whispered, her eyes twinkling with the knowledge of saints, “Twelve hearts so small only an angel can dance upon them.”
“Twelve hearts?” Clarissa felt a twinge of wonder.
“Twelve tiny hearts, all just a-beating like crazy.”
Miss Lossie’s eyes filmed over with twin tears. Clarissa felt her own eyes do likewise. She had no idea why she found the notion of an earthworm with twelve hearts so moving, and if she’d been clairvoyant, she would have known that Miss Lossie didn’t understand it, either.
Tossing the lures on the counter, Cracker Bandit said, clearly thrilled to have such a receptive audience, “You cannot buy a better worm.”
“’Cause God
don’t grow no better worm,” Miss Lossie said. “I don’t have my glasses on. Are those the lures on sale?”
“One is, two ain’t.”
She twisted her lips as she thought. “Oh, heck, just give me six dollars.”
“They’re fat,” he said, aiming his good eye at Clarissa. “The worms, that is.”
Clarissa knew from the beatific look on his face that he was imagining one right then and there.
“Ruler long and finger fat,” said Miss Lossie. “Gotta be with all them hearts.”
“I’m telling you,” Cracker Bandit said, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket, which helped ease the falling shorts situation, “they are the sumo wrestlers of the worm world. Biggest suckers, pardon my language, ma’am, that you will ever see.”
He moved closer to Clarissa, apparently oblivious to how badly she stank, and winked his blue eye, which caused Clarissa both delight and alarm; she’d never been winked at by so many men in one day in all her life, and never by a one-eyed man. His voice turned warm, steamy, his words inflating with vowels that curled and plumped. “They’ve got themselves one hardy constitution.”
“You got that right.” Miss Lossie sounded like a backup chorus.
“The sun don’t faze them.”
“The heat don’t faze them.”
“Drought barely fazes them.”
“This man knows what he’s talking about!”
“They behave,” Cracker Bandit said, his face gleaming like a slick cherry, “the way you want a worm to behave in the water.” He nodded in agreement with himself.
Clarissa looked at Miss Lossie, who was nodding, too, and then back at Cracker Bandit.
The only thing Clarissa hated more than feeling stupid was looking stupid. But by now she was invested in these worms. “And how is that?”
Miss Lossie gasped. Evidently, even she was finally startled at Clarissa’s low worm IQ. Giving each word equal weight, she intoned, “As if they have some pep.”
“Yes!” Cracker Bandit said. “Thank you! Thank you! That’s exactly it!” He slapped the counter.
Miss Lossie looked from Cracker Bandit to Clarissa and rubbed her eyes with arthritic fingers. “I have no idea why more people don’t know about them.”
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 13