A Lonely Way To Die - Art Bourgeau

by Art Bourgeau

  A Lonely Way To Die

  Art Bourgeau

  1980

  To Sandy and Hoover:

  This one's for you for putting up with all the bad nights,

  bad tempers, bad copy, and bad hangovers.

  Chapter 1

  Truckers are not supposed to pick up hitch-hikers, but since we were in uniform, he had made

  an exception. He'd been a nice guy and had even gone a few miles out of his way to drop us off at our destination, Cannibal Springs.

  The homing instinct has kept pigeons in business for centuries. Man also has that instinct. It may not be as strong as the need for food, shelter, or sex, but it is still a strong instinct. Every man and woman is from someplace, and periodically, they need to return to that someplace. For me, that someplace was Cannibal Springs.

  Cannibal Springs is in Tennessee about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga on Highway K 41-A. The approach to the town from the west is down a long mountain grade. On a clear day, if you look down from the top of the mountain, the town looks like it's resting in the bowl of a spoon made by the surrounding hills and the handle made by the highway. Sometimes, on those same clear days, atop that same mountain, you can see the light hit Cannibal Springs just right, and it shines copper gold against a sea of green trees surrounding it on all four sides.

  On closer inspection, it's a small town, a pissant town whose population has never been more than a thousand. A flyspeck on a map, if it's a good map, otherwise not even that. Go fifty miles in any direction, and no one has ever heard of it.

  The entire business district consists of five businesses, an empty lot, and a traffic light. There's a bait & tackle shop, a barber shop, a drug store, a saloon, and Lou Young's grocery. All five businesses are built on one side of the highway. Railroad tracks parallel the other side. There was a depot once, but it was torn down long before my time. About a mile east of town is a gas station and truck stop. A mile west of town is the beauty parlor, the bank, and a small subdivision full of tract houses.

  It's a dying town, now filled with more old than young, more ugly than pretty, more stupid than smart. But like I said, I call it home.

  It was midmorning when the tractor-trailer pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the road and

  stopped just long enough to let F .T. Zevich and me out. We had been driving east since sunrise, and even with sunglasses, my eyes felt red and raw from the glare. F.T. also looked a little the worse for wear.

  We had been out of the marines exactly ten days. They were the ten days it had taken us to hitchhike from California. I suppose we could have made it sooner, but there were some places we wanted to see and some hell we wanted to raise in between.

  After all, four years with the marines is a long time. An old man once told me that all marines go to heaven when they die. I asked why. He said it was because they had had their hell here on earth. I don't know about the first part, but he was right about the last.

  My friend, F.T. Zevich, had been a corporal. I had never made it quite that high. He had gone to Vietnam and had come back with a fistful of medals and enough shrapnel in him to set off an airport metal detector. The only part of him that had not been surgically repaired was his sense of humor.

  War had not been kind to him. His body was covered with scars that looked like long red zippers. I once asked him what he thought of war now that he had been through it. He said that it was just hand-jobs and blowjobs, and the only difference between the winners and the losers was that one side was giving them and the other was getting them. I asked him which was which. He said that he wasn't sure.

  Physically, we are both well over six feet and over two hundred pounds, but F. T. is the heavier of us. He has a face that looks like a happy bulldog with a mustache. Women always like him. They feel protected around him.

  It was a fine late summer morning. The sun was bright, and the white concrete of the highway looked like it was already hot enough to fry an egg. The air was still, but there was no humidity. Everything smelled fresh and green without any of that magnolia-and-honeysuckle bullshit. We shouldered our sea bags and walked across the street to Lou Young's store.

  Lou Young owned the only grocery in Cannibal Springs. The store was a compact four-aisle wonder whose shelves bulged with everything from shotgun shells to tampons. There were sardines packed in oil, hot peppers, dried beans, and black-eyed peas. There were pickles and olives, Oreo cookies, pots and pans, and ten-penny nails. Everything you would expect to find in a country store. In the rear was the meat counter. Lou Young's butcher was a part-time gospel singer named Hulan. Hulan had enough power in his voice to knock your socks off`.

  Lou was behind the counter when we entered. He was a fifty-year-old, who wore bifocals and long aprons and took Maalox for his ulcer. By his left elbow was a glass case filled with Baby Ben pocket watches and imitation bone-handled pocket knives. He said hello, but he didn't recognize me until I took off my sunglasses. That didn't bother me. No one looks the same after the marines have finished with them. I introduced F.T.

  "Pleased to meet you. Get yourselves a cold beer," he said as he shook F.T.'s outstretched

  hand.

  I opened the lid of the cooler, fished out two ice-cold cans of Old Blue, and handed one to F.T.

  "Lou, how about you?" I said.

  "It's a little bit early for me."

  "Bullshit. This is a celebration," I said. I fished out a third can and handed it to him.

  We popped the tops and clicked the cans together in a welcome-home toast. The beer was cold and tingled my throat with its clean, bitter taste.

  "Goddam, that is good. There is nothing like a cold beer after a long trip," said F .T. I agreed with him.

  Lou Young was about half through his can when F.T. and I threw our empties in the trash and

  opened a second round.

  "F.T., how did y'all happen to team up?" Lou asked.

  "We wound up on the same bus together; You see, Snake had a real prick for a sergeant. He was one of those little bastards who liked to throw his weight around, and didn't like Snake. Of course, I can't blame him for that. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger fuckup than old Snake,.

  "On the day we were supposed to leave, his sergeant decided to play little games with him so he told Snake there was a last-minute foul-up in his paper work, and while they were straightening it out, he sent Snake out on a work detail. The work detail took longer than the sergeant thought, and Snake just missed the last bus. The old sarge was really pissed. His whole scheme had backfired, and he was the one who was going to look bad if Snake missed that last bus. So they got in his car, and he drove like a bat out of hell. They caught the bus before it got to the gate, but crazy as he was, the sergeant didn't try to flag the bus down. He just cut in front of it and ran it off the road."

  A customer interrupted F.T.'s story. I used the interruption to open another round of Old Blue

  and a cellophane bag of pork rinds.

  Lou Young wanted to hear more.

  F.T. continued, "I was just sitting there on the bus, minding my own damn business, thankful I was finally a civilian again, and the next thing I knew, we had been run off the road by this damn fool sergeant in an old piss-yellow Volkswagen. That pissed me right the fuck off. Here I am with my discharge papers, and this asshole sergeant in a piss-yellow little car almost gets me killed as I'm headed for the gate.

  "I'd about decided to get up and thrash that little sumbitch to death when I looked out and saw old Snake in that piss-yellow contraption. When that sergeant came around and opened Snake's door, tears welled up in my eyes. You could see Snake was in pain. He looked like an old Hindu who had gotte
n himself into one of those complicated yoga positions and then sneezed. First, he tried to get his leg out, but it was jammed into the space under the dash by the door frame and wouldn't budge. Then he tried to twist his upper body around, but that didn't work either, because of the unnatural way his other leg was bent. Finally, he managed to get one arm out, and the sergeant pulled him out of the car."

  "That sounds like a hell of a wreck. The car must have been totaled," Lou said. .

  "Wreck? There wasn't any wreck," said F.T.

  "I'm talking about watching Snake trying to get out of that piss-yellow Volkswagen after it ran us off the road. You just can't imagine the sheer agony it puts a man through to have to sit all cramped up in one of those infernal little bread boxes, and this one piss yellow to boot. It's torture, that's what it is. In fact, the CIA used to use those little pissboxes in 'Nam. They had a couple of old ones up on blocks, and they would make captured Viet Cong prisoners sit in the back seat for hours at a time. Oh God, their screams would turn a grown man's stomach. By sundown of the first day, the toughest of them would sell out his mother."

  "My wife has one, but I didn't think it was that bad," said Lou.

  "Did you ever ride in the back seat?" asked F.T.

  "No, I don't think so."

  "Try it sometime, you'll see what I mean. It starts to get you in the knees first, then the pain moves up to your ass while your feet go to sleep at the same time. And all the time, your knees feel like someone is driving carpet tacks in them with a ball peen hammer. Then you start to sweat, and then you get double vision, and all the while, those knees feel like you were being attacked by a nest of hornets with number five roto-rooters for stingers. Inhuman, downright inhuman, that's what it is.

  "When I saw that sergeant pull Snake out of that little yellow shitcan, my heart went out to him. So when he staggered on the bus, I helped him get settled in the seat next to me and brought him around with a good stiff shot from a bottle I had with me. We've been together ever since."

  "Now that you're here, do you have any idea of what you're going to do?" Lou wanted to know. I didn't. All F.T. and I knew was where we had been, not where we were going. We were footloose and fancy-free, as the saying goes. All we wanted to do was to drink beer and enjoy our fishing trip.

  Chapter 2

  We left our seabags at the grocery and set out on foot. The sidewalk ended at the barber shop, which was still closed. A cardboard clock face hung inside the door. It indicated the owner would return at ten-thirty. I guess long hair had been bad for business.

  I wanted to have a look at my house. This was the first time I had been home since it had been sold for taxes, and I was curious.

  The asbestos shingles were about the only part of the little house that had not been changed. Someone had painted the iron picket fence which enclosed the front yard. Traces of white paint could still be seen on the grass growing between the pickets.

  The edge of the front porch was lined with clay pots full of bright-red blooming flowers. My old swing still hung from chains bolted to the porch ceiling. It had been painted a bright pink that looked like Pepto Bismol.

  The garage behind the house had a new roof. It was black with white letters that spelled out "See Rock City." There were small bird houses with the same roof, hung in the maples in the front yard. The front yard was filled with a concrete menagerie. There was a family of plaster ducks, a concrete birdbath on a pedestal, a Dutch windmill, and a small black jockey in green-and-red riding silks. He looked like an embarrassed ringmaster waiting for a concrete duck to jump through the ring in his hand. The only thing missing was a sign advertising bedspreads for sale.

  We climbed the front steps and knocked on the screen door. Inside the house I heard a voice say, "Come on in. It's open."

  The voice had come from the kitchen, which was in the rear of the house. I tried not to look at any of the rooms as we walked through. I didn't want to lose the beer I had already drunk.

  Buck Hill, the town constable, was sitting at the kitchen table. He was a large, red-faced man who was going bald. His uniform had so much starch in it that it looked like it might break. His Sam Browne belt hung over the back of his chair just like in the westerns.

  A dried-up little woman in an old quilted bathrobe was washing the breakfast dishes. Somehow I couldn't associate all the color of the front yard with the drab woman at the sink. She paused to pour us each a cup of coffee.

  Cannibal Springs has never had any need for a police department. The constable has always been able to handle whatever came up. Buck Hill took over the job when his cousin, Jim Henry, had been elected mayor. For nearly ten years they had earned a comfortable living from the town speed trap. Buck Hill stopped them, and Jim Henry fined them. It was a sweet racket.

  I have never had much use for police in general, and Buck Hill in particular. Like most cops, he was never around when you needed him, but if you stepped out of line for a second, he was right there trying to figure a new way to shove a nightstick up your ass.

  Visiting the old place had been a mistake. Like the man said—you can't go home again. When you try you are bound to be disappointed. Things are never the same when you go away and come back. It does not matter if it is a hometown, an old lover, or a bottle of whiskey you forgot to put the top on. Somehow that certain something you liked is gone, and what you are left with looks the same, but it isn't.

  Buck Hill walked us to the door, and we started back toward the center of town.

  "Now what is on the agenda?" said F.T.

  "I thought we'd do something that is sometimes the same, sometimes different, but always fun."

  "We're going to get laid."

  "Close but wrong. We're going to drink some beer," I said.

  Chapter 3

  In Cannibal Springs the churches outnumbered the saloons five to one. There were five churches and one saloon. Three Baptist, a Church of Christ, a Methodist, and Virgil's First National Bar & Grill.

  Divided like that, religion did not stand much chance. Especially when it was pitted against a formidable competitor like Virgil. Sinning wears some people down and makes them sick at heart. Sick at their own weakness. But not Virgil. Virgil was an opportunist. There was easy money to be made trafficking in man's weakness. And Virgil had cornered the market in Cannibal Springs.

  Like all the other businesses in Cannibal Springs, the First National Bar & Grill faced the highway. Virgil chose the name because the building had housed the Bank of Cannibal Springs until the fire. The fire did little damage to the building, but the bank was forced to move into a Cherokee mobile home while the repair work was being completed. Before the repairs were finished, Virgil offered to buy the building. The bank refused. Then came the second fire, and soon Old Blue signs were flashing in the windows, and the heavy aroma of bar-b-que hung in the air. Virgil was open for business, and everyone was glad. Especially the five churches. The devil had risen from the flames. It was sin in its purest form, the sins of the flesh. There was Old Blue, and bar-b-que, and pinball, and jukebox, and wanton women. All in semi-darkness.

  When we entered, Virgil was behind the bar. He was a short, stocky man wearing a white apron from a Chattanooga linen service.

  When he saw me he smiled and said, "Welcome home, Snake. Who's your friend there?"

  "Virgil, this is F.T. Zevich."

  "Howdy, Mr. Zevich," said Virgil, extending his hand.

  "Call me F.T." he said.

  "When a man is your size, you're a damn sight better off calling him mister," said Virgil.

  F .T. weighs a little over two-fifty and is built like a concrete fallout shelter left over from the Eisenhower administration.

  Virgil told me how sorry he was about the sale of my house. Somehow that made me feel a little better. A good saloonkeeper is worth ten preachers any day. He always seems to know what to do and what to say; when to talk and when to leave you alone.

  We ordered a round of Old Blue and a couple of bar-
b-que's with all the trimmings. Virgil makes his own bar-b-que from scratch by slow cooking whole pork shoulders over a hickory fire in an open pit behind the building.

  While we waited, I went over to the pay phone and made a call. The waitress was bringing out our food as I returned to the bar.

  She was a dishwater blonde in a waitress's uniform with a very short skirt which showed her legs to be her best feature. She was of medium height and build with breasts that were on the small side. Her face was pretty, but beginning to age. She looked like a former high school cheerleader slowly going to seed.

  "Hello, Flo, how have you been?" I said.

  She stopped and looked at me for a moment, but she did not recognize me until I took off my sunglasses. Sunglasses can do that for you.

  "Snake, you're home!" she exclaimed as she hugged me.

  F.T. turned to Virgil and said, "Now that's my kind of homecoming."

  Still squeezing my hand, she asked, "When did you get back?"

  "This morning. We got in a couple of hours ago."

  "Does Truman know you're home?" she asked.

  "Yeah, I just called him. He'll be down in a little while. Flo, I want you to meet F.T. Zevich," I said.

  "Hi, F.T.," she said as she sat down on the stool next to me while Virgil opened another round of Old Blue.

  "All right, Virgil, we're all set. Bring us up to date on the news I missed while I was gone. Tell me all the dirt," I said.

  "There's not much to tell. Things are pretty much the same as when you left. The only thing I can think of is the election," he said.

  "What about the election?"

  "We've got a woman running for mayor," he said.

  "Who is it?" I asked. Sometimes getting a whole story from Virgil is like pulling teeth.

  "Jessie, the woman who owns the beauty parlor," he said.

  "That's a lost cause. She'll never stand a chance against Henry and Buster," I said.

  "Now just hold it," said Flo. "Don't you start running her down. She's going to win, and she'll

  make a fine mayor."