Carolina Booty

by T. Lynn Ocean

  Bull refused to take any money for the sandwich, saying she would see lots more of me, and Pop offered the use of a room in his house for free, as long as I’d cook an occasional meal for him. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t cook. I was just happy to have a bed without cats. I’d fake the cooking part.

  Before I followed Pop to his house, I used Chat ‘N Chew’s phone to call Mad Millie. I was very much looking forward to meeting her, I said, but I wouldn’t be staying at her house since Pop had offered a room in his house.

  “What?” she said. “You’re staying with Pompous Pop? That man is an oddball, living in such a big house all by himself, all snooty-like. Why, he doesn’t even have a cat!”

  Chapter 3

  I awoke to see a furry, masked animal staring at me. Four or five inches from my face, it studied me with a cocked head. My first instinct was to scream and knock it off my bed, but I figured I was still asleep and dreaming. As I blinked hard and tried to remember where I was, the animal disappeared. It was definitely a dream.

  Delicious cooking smells of sausage and biscuits brought me upright. Surveying the unfamiliar surroundings, I realized where I was and, breathing deep, decided that Pop didn’t need help with the cooking, after all. I even detected the aroma of coffee brewing. I dug through my luggage, pulled on some shorts and a tee shirt and followed my nose to the kitchen. At the stove, Pop skillfully removed sausage patties from a skillet.

  “Morning, Lass,” he said. “You city people always sleep so late?”

  I smiled. It was not yet seven ‘o clock. “Only on weekends.”

  “There’s a pitcher of orange juice in the refrigerator,” he said.

  Not feeling as odd as I thought I would about waking up in a complete stranger’s home in the middle of nowhere, I poured myself a glassful and sat at the table.

  “I don’t think I’ve slept that soundly in a long time,” I admitted, gulping the juice. Fresh squeezed, it had just the right amount of pulp.

  “The absence of noise,” he said, “makes for peaceful night’s sleep. That, and the salt air. Ocean’s a bit away, I’ll agree, but the breeze makes its way here.”

  Pop put two plates of food on the table and my stomach growled in response. Not only had he cooked sausage and biscuits, but also scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. I rarely ate a big breakfast, but suddenly had a ravenous appetite.

  I started to dig in when loud, squeaky purring noises caught my attention. On the table, sitting up on its haunches, a fat raccoon snatched a potato wedge from my plate, and munched away.

  “It wasn’t a dream!”

  “Her name is Bandit,” Pop said, “and she’ll steal from you in a heartbeat. Food off your plate, a shiny penny from the dresser, any bauble that catches her eye. She once pulled a watch from my arm while I napped on the sofa.”

  I told Pop that Bandit was on my bed earlier, and asked how she got in. I felt sure I’d closed the bedroom door. Laughing, he admitted that Bandit had the run of his house. She could open doors, cabinets and drawers, and even turn on lights.

  “Is she housebroken?” Maybe Pop was more insane than Mad Millie, letting a wild animal live inside. Cats were meant to live with people. As far as I knew, raccoons weren’t.

  “Aye,” he said. “She’s cleaner than a cat, as smart as my dog and she does her business outside. She lets herself in and out as it suits her.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of rabies or something?”

  “She goes to the vet in Georgetown, same as my dog. Course, Roy likes to give me a hard time. Always asks to see my permit, which I always tell him I don’t have.”

  I drank some orange juice, savoring the freshness. “Permit?”

  “Not supposed to keep a wild animal without a permit. But like I tell Roy, I don’t keep Bandit. She just hangs ‘round.”

  “Huh,” I said, sounding just like the locals I’d met so far.

  Pop gave Bandit a nibble of sausage. She dunked it in his glass of water and ate it.

  “She washes some things before she eats them. A raccoon will do that, so watch your drinks ‘round her. Last night I gave her one of Flush’s biscuits and she dunked it in my whiskey.”

  “Who’s Flush?”

  “That’s my dog. I won him in a poker game with naught but a pair of threes.”

  “If your winning hand was just a pair, why did you name the dog Flush?” I asked.

  Pop winked. “Because the boys thought I had a flush. That’s why all four of them folded good hands. Perceptions are oft’ more powerful than reality.”

  He had a point. Perception was everything, at least when it came to advertising.

  As we ate, I asked Pop about his house, a rambling place that looked as though it had been enlarged several times. The original building, he explained, was one room and a kitchen, built in the early seventeen hundreds. A summer home for an indigo, cotton, and tobacco grower, it originally belonged to Pop’s ancestor. Back then, he told me, inland plantation owners sometimes built a small place on the ocean to escape the sweltering summer heat and take advantage of a cool ocean breeze. A slave would keep it up for them, and the plantation owner would visit periodically, especially during summer months. The two homes might only be thirty miles apart, he said, but in that time period, it took an entire day to travel by horse and carriage.

  The Rumton summer house had been handed down from generation to generation, and the resulting home was a product of numerous renovations and additions. Pop’s grandfather bequeathed it to him and his sister. She couldn’t wait to leave town, though, and gave up her half of the house. But the area and its laid-back lifestyle suited Pop just fine, he told me. He was a sailor at heart and would never stray far from the Atlantic Ocean. As a boy, he’d practically lived on a boat. But the boating trips got to be less and less by the time he’d become a teenager, he said. Rumton’s inlet closed up.

  He got up to serve more eggs and, stunned, I looked at my near-empty plate. I couldn’t believe I’d eaten so much. I’d have to remember to buy some groceries, especially since he wasn’t charging me rent.

  “So then, there used to be an inlet deep enough to get a boat through the marsh and out to the ocean? That would explain how the town of Rumton first got started, since many older towns originated around water, like a river.”

  “Right. In the past, Rumton was a water town. Seventy, eighty years back, we were a popular shrimping community. But o’er time, our inlet slowly filled in. Got to the point where a boat couldn’t get through, even at high tide. By the time my grandpappy taught me to sail, he had to keep his boat in the next town. We’d pile everything in his old Ford truck, and take off for the day. Sometimes two.” He paused, reminiscing, drank some juice. “A fine man, he was. Died before I was barely a man. Fourteen or fifteen, maybe.”

  “Did your parents sail, too?”

  “Don’t know. All we had growing up was my grandpappy.”

  I wondered why Pop never moved out of Rumton. It was easy to envision him as a misplaced boat captain. He fit the role of a man well-suited for the high seas. “How does an inlet just close up? I don’t understand.”

  He offered Bandit another nibble of sausage. “Motion of the sea always moves the sand, Lass. The coastline is in a constant state of change.”

  I’d never thought about it that way. “So old inlets can just close up and new ones pop open?”

  He nodded. “The ocean is like a beautiful, strong woman. She can be loving and nurturing…; or wickedly evil.” He gave me a wink. “But she’s always captivating.”

  Smiling at the comparison, I chewed some eggs. “What about the Intracoastal Waterway? It borders the north end of Rumton, right? And from the waterway, you can get to the ocean at various points. I studied a maritime chart last week.”

  “True, a stretch of Rumton borders the waterway. But it’s marshy with a lot of wetlands, just like the land between us and the ocean. The town owns the property by the waterway, but we can’t do much with it. We were going t
o put in a boat ramp, but there isn’t even an area suitable for a road.”

  “So Rumton sits right next to the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Intracoastal Waterway to the north, but you can’t get to either one from here?”

  “Right, unless you drive to the next town.”

  “Do you have a boat?”

  “I sold the sailboat because she got to be too much for me, but still keep a motorboat docked outside of town. She’s a Cape Dory.” He stopped eating and got a faraway expression. “But of late, I don’t take her out much. I don’t like the road traffic to get there.”

  If he had trouble with the small amount of traffic between Rumton and the next town, he’d have a coronary driving in Atlanta. I changed the subject.

  “So what else can you tell me about Rumton?”

  He drank some juice, sighed. “It’s ‘bout the same now as always. Except less people. Few youngsters. Used to be a big farming community, but that’s gone by the wayside. And, ‘o course, the shrimpers went out ‘o business a long time ago. Folk couldn’t earn a good living, so they left. And, nobody new has moved to town for years and years.”

  Bandit zeroed in on my last potato wedge but I stabbed it with my fork before she could get to it. “Is Pop your real name?”

  “You’re chockfull of questions.”

  “Well, I’m curious. I need to learn as much as I can, as quickly as I can. Besides, the name Pop is unique. So why do people call you Pop?”

  He gave Bandit a nibble of biscuit. She ate it without washing it first, and clapped her little paws together in thanks. “I taught shop classes in the schoolhouse. We ne’er had any of our own, but all the youngsters hung ‘round our house after their schooling. They came for Suzie’s cookies and my stories. Somewhere along the way, they took to calling me Pop.”

  I scooped up the last bite of eggs and chewed. “Suzie was your wife?”

  “A beauty, she was. Cancer took her. Now quit yabberin’ and finish your breakfast.”

  We looked at my plate and burst out laughing. Except for a few biscuit crumbs, it was already empty.

  “You city people always eat so much?” he teased, eyes twinkling. I noticed that one of them was dark brown and the other was light gemstone green. The effect was startling.

  “Only on weekends,” I said.

  * * *

  After breakfast, I got online and sent my daily update to Aaron. I didn’t yet have much to report, except that allergies had forced me away from his aunt Millie’s and in with Pop and a kleptomaniac raccoon.

  I emailed the interns with their first Rumton assignments. I needed some topography reports, from the present and back as far as early 1700. I wanted whatever they could dig up on the farming plantations that thrived in the area in same century, even though I wasn’t sure exactly how the information would help. And I wanted a set of detailed navigation charts that covered the waterways of the entire South Carolina coast.

  Before I set out to do some more exploring and interview some of the townspeople, I dialed Sheila’s extension.

  “How’s the backwoods expedition going?” she asked. “You tapping your toes to the tune of ‘Dueling Banjos’ yet?”

  I grinned into the phone. “I’m barefoot and mosquito-bitten, staying in a three-hundred year-old house that’s owned by an old man who calls me Lass. And Chat ‘N Chew, the only restaurant in town, doesn’t have menus or dry martinis. Any other questions?”

  Chapter 4

  Other than a few pesky mosquitoes, the day was wonderful. It was the end of August, and although the temperature remained summer-hot, a steady breeze kept me comfortable as I explored Rumton’s streets on foot.

  The air carried a unique mixture of salt, sand, and marsh, and the smell reminded me of vacationing in the Florida Keys. Had there been a shady cabana, I might have even imagined I was on vacation. But Rumton was in a time warp and the last place on earth I’d choose to stay, despite the fact that Pop was being so nice to me.

  Only evidence of a once-thriving downtown area remained – boarded

  up storefronts and abandoned warehouses, an out-of-business bank, unruly shrubbery, and sun-faded wooden benches spread along uneven sidewalks. I counted nine churches, which seemed unusual, even for the South. A colorful water tower rose from the center of a small park and, in an explosion of red, white, and blue, told me to have a happy Fourth of July. As I stood staring at the outdated message, a passerby explained that high-schoolers and those “young at heart” decorated the tower before each holiday. It was a tradition, and all the townspeople gathered to watch. But since they’d run out of white paint, the tower would most likely retain its Independence Day message until Halloween, when it would become a giant orange jack-o’-lantern.

  An even bigger oddity was the single screen movie theater that doubled as a police department, one-truck fire and E.M.S. department, town hall, and meeting place for the Rumton Roses ladies’ auxiliary group.

  Feeling like I’d fallen asleep and awakened in a bad episode of the “Andy Griffith Show”, I entered the theater. The police chief’s assistant, Amy, occupied the ticket window and was kind enough to leave her glass-walled cubicle to introduce me to everyone else in the building. Volunteer firefighters, mostly in their seventies, hung out at the concession counter playing Scrabble and watching TV. A town maintenance worker napped on a sofa. And the man in charge of enforcing law in Rumton sat at a desk in the middle of the lobby, right next to a quad of pinball machines.

  Beside the restrooms, a wall-mounted chalkboard listed the week’s events. Just one movie was scheduled, and it only ran once each Friday night. A comedy, the current flick had been out on DVD for a year.

  “You look a right bit thirsty, Jaxie,” a firefighter drawled when I’d finished my tour. “Do you have a hankerin’ for a Pepsi or a Mountain Dew? Either way, your dollar goes to the department.”

  Nervousness about being an out-of-place city-dweller made my left eyelid vibrate. I didn’t even know what the word ‘hankering’ meant, although I got the gist of his question. “Uh, Pepsi would be great,” I said, and asked about the big rubber boot sitting on the counter. It was for tips, he told me, which were really donations. I handed him a five. He put it in the boot without asking if I needed change.

  “So then, you guys sell popcorn and candy on movie nights?”

  “Sure, every Friday.” He passed over a drink and a paper-wrapped straw. “Truth tell, we’re open for business anytime, since this is our volunteer headquarters and a firefighter or two is always here, least during the day. Lots of time, when they’re out for a walk, folk just stop by for a cold drink. That, and they want to catch up on the latest gossip. Personally, I don’t spill anything I heard coming outta the chief’s office, until they drop some money in the boot, and coins don’t count for the latest-breaking news. We’re saving for a new portable AED. That’s an automatic electronic defibrillator.”

  I stuck another five in the rubber till. After all, there were a lot of old people in Rumton and an AED could come in handy. Imagining it to be a gin and tonic, I downed the Pepsi and dropped the cup into a trashcan on my way out of the theater. Perched in the ticket window, Amy waved goodbye and told me to have a nice afternoon through the intercom system.

  In a residential section just five blocks later, outdated houses displayed an eclectic assortment of lawn decoration, like an old bathroom pedestal sink reincarnated as a planter. In no hurry to get anywhere, dogs roamed freely, tongues hanging out and tails wagging. People rested on their front porches doing absolutely nothing, unless rocking in a rocking chair qualified as a hobby. And something I’d never seen in Atlanta – as though participating in a perpetual, multifamily garage sale, Rumton residents put up signs in front of their houses to let passersby know what they were willing to part with. Handwritten signs tacked to trees and fence posts advertised blue tick hound puppies, a dinette set and a Martin guitar (that needed strings). One family sought patrons who wanted to trade homegrown zucch
ini, squash or collard greens for assorted wigs.

  Half an hour into my walk, I stumbled upon two wooden sentries that stood guard at the front walkway to a house, and immediately recognized the carving style. Following the sound of whistling, I found a man in a carport behind the house, carving a duck’s head into the handle of a walking cane. Sun-weathered black skin covered a tall, lanky frame, and the small knife in his hand seemed to move with a will of its own.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  Not startled to see a stranger standing in his driveway, he nodded without skipping a beat.

  “You made the pelican in Chat ‘N Chew, right? It’s really good.”

  He smiled and waved a hand in the direction of an upside down wooden barrel, offering me a seat.

  “I’m Jaxie,” I told him, sitting down, “from Atlanta.”

  He ran a large hand over the cane, checking its smoothness. “Elwood.”

  Sensing a visitor, a woman appeared with a tray of lemonade to welcome me. “You must be the one from Atlanta, here to save our town,” she said warmly. Her smile was genuine and put me at ease. “I’m Gladys, Elwood’s devoted wife, or Miss Gladys to all the patients I’ve seen in my practice over the years.”

  “You were the doctor, then? My boss, Aaron, mentioned that Rumton only has one doctor, now retired.”

  “Got to the point where I just couldn’t do it fulltime anymore. We tried to recruit a new family physician, but it seems like all the young kids coming out of medical school want to go to the big cities.” She shrugged. “But I still help out in an emergency, and write a prescription if I need to. Keep my license active, to be legal. We’re still looking for a doctor, though.”

  I thought about that, and wondered what would entice a medical professional to live in Rumton. It wouldn’t be for the excitement, and they certainly wouldn’t get rich. “Maybe it would help if the town could offer free housing as an incentive, or maybe provide the facility at no charge.” After all, lots of med school graduates had some serious student loans to pay off.