by Bill Geist
“She wraps a red shawl round her shoulders, raises her chin, and walks slowly down the steps like a queen. She takes my hand to pull herself up onto the wagon seat, her royal coach.
“She looks down at the fella in the dirty clothes, sayin’, ‘Could you do us the kindness of waitin’ ’til we’re over the rise before doin’ what you come to do?’
“‘Yes ma’am,’ he replies, tippin’ his cap.
“‘Let’s get a-goin’,’ she says, and I snap the reins. Tears come to my eyes and I ain’t ashamed to say it.
“‘Be a man now, boy,’ Grandma snaps. ‘Don’t look back.’
“I think the fella in the dirty clothes probably didn’t have to do much, just spread hot coals from the fireplace on the wood floors. Probably all that was needed.”
Chapter Sixteen
The Ozark Outback
Turning off US 54 onto State Road 42, the scenery changed suddenly and dramatically, from a thin veneer of roadside tourist claptrap to real, raw, hillbilly country. They didn’t call it Lake of the Ozarks for nothing.
I always thought the name kind of held it back: a scenic lake 129 miles long back then with 1,375 miles of shoreline, more than the coastline of California, yet few outside the state had ever heard of it.
Road signs were riddled with holes from shotgun blasts, sending a message to outsiders that local folk did not respect the authority of whoever it was that put up those signs, and that somebody else was in charge here. Or nobody. And that’s the way they liked it.
There was no law enforcement. Lake Ozark wasn’t even a town until 1965.
Used to be you could shoot somebody and if you beat the police to the state line, well, case closed. By the early sixties, not all that much had really changed in that regard.
Jesse James and his gang used to call rural Missouri home. The civic-minded complained that his robbing and killing gave the entire state a bad reputation and kept businesses from coming here. It didn’t help that Hollywood kept reminding the world by making one Jesse James film after another
Darryl Zanuck’s 1939 blockbuster film Jesse James starring Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, and Randolph Scott was shot here. The film crew stayed at Arrowhead Lodge. In a famous scene, Jesse and his brother, Frank, jumped of a cliff into the lake on horseback. One horse died. It was then that Hollywood added this pledge to filmgoers: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.”
These days, locals liked to tell the story of a dead body being found in a large-load dryer at the laundromat. Nobody seemed in much of a hurry to find the perpetrator. “Prob’ly had it a-comin’,” some said.
Two state police officers were not so much dispatched as moseyed down from Jeff City. Somebody had to remove the body. There just weren’t enough dryers for people to use as it was, let alone tying one up for a homicide investigation. They didn’t wrap the crime scene in that yellow police tape they have now because they didn’t have it back then. No DNA evidence yet either. No forensic crime units. No CSI, no CSI: Las Vegas, no CSI: New York, no CSI: Miami, no CSI: Cyber. Nothing.
Police didn’t really launch an investigation; they just took a gander at the situation and called it quits. After a couple of days, with no leads, they ruled the matter a probable suicide, leaving open the question, if anyone had bothered to ask, of just how the victim managed to keep feeding quarters into the slot as he tumbled inside the dryer.
Family members of the dearly departed said not to worry about the jurisprudence aspect, they’d handle it. Local justice was faster and probably more on target than that dispensed up at the courthouses in Tuscumbia or Versailles.
The area had a long history of locals taking law enforcement into their own hands. In the 1800s unsavory characters fled the law in populated areas, coming here to the boondocks to steal from the settlers, especially horses, cattle, and hogs. They also became adept at counterfeiting, producing bills so true to the real things that huge amounts were accepted for large tracts of land.
The settlers formed vigilante groups known as “slickers” from their unique way of dealing with criminals, who they tied to trees and “slicked”—whipped with hickory branches until they vowed to leave the area. As can happen with vigilantes, the slickers got carried away and an “anti-slickers” group was formed to combat their excesses.
* * *
In the 1960s, traveling inland on the country roads, away from the lake, you saw old, dead refrigerators out on rotting front porches, alongside couches and chairs that were meant to be indoors but were out there in the elements hemorrhaging white stuffing. (In an effort to polish its image, one North Carolina town I visited for CBS had banned “illegal porch furniture,” i.e., indoor furniture on front porches. Tacky.)
Continuing down Route 42 you saw a few scrawny chickens—“racing chickens”—strutting through weedy front yards adorned with one to five rusting hulls of long since immobile automobiles. Old, graying unpainted barns leaned leeward. Trees were blanketed with heavy gray webs woven by some sort of industrious pest that was out to kill them.
The first town you came to was Brumley (population: 87). There were tarpaper shacks that had collapsed, some replaced with mobile homes a few feet away. There was a bar across from a stucco Baptist church. Nearby was a New England–style white frame Christian church with a green plywood addition. It was decorated with fake stained-glass windows, plastic stuff you buy in rolls. The Honey Springs Baptist Church was in a double-wide trailer. These towns seem to have plenty of churches and beauty salons like Pat’s Beauty Charm and Ruth’s Beauty Shop, if little else.
You saw signs announcing the Brumley Lions Club shooting match and ham and bean dinner in September. The Shell Station screen door had a Holsum Bread screen guard and a sign reading “It’s Kool Inside.” There were decals on the windows advertising Pioneer chainsaws, Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco, bait and tackle. The landscaping featured old tires painted red, white, and blue planted with roses.
I was on an off-the-beaten-path Voyage of Discovery with Danny, my tour guide, the twenty-something son of Puggy, the desk clerk, and Noble the Jack of all trades who kept the lodge running. Noble liked to egg you into saying things disparaging of local folk. “You could have went and gone to Harvard U-ni-ver-si-ty and it don’t mean you’re smarter than me. Better than me. Throw you in them woods and you’d starve to death.”
“Probably,” I’d answer.
Danny generously offered to take me on a field trip to a local backwoods bar. Local in terms of distance, but very far from the world as I knew it.
As he drove, he thought it a good idea to lay down a few ground rules, “to be safe.” Probably more instruction and preparation than I received before going on patrols in Vietnam.
“Don’t talk politics,” he said, “which you may not even think of as politics but could be taken that-a-way. These folks aren’t real fond of politicians of any stripe. Fact is, they probably couldn’t name any.
“Sports are tricky,” Danny said. “Pretty safe with the Cardinals.” (No Royals yet.)
“Religion’s worse.” Danny drove in silence for a bit, before adding: “Prob’ly best if you just don’t say much of anything…
“…to anybody.
“And don’t order any pussy drinks,” he continued.
“Like what?” I asked.
“No gin and tonics,” Danny explained.
“Stick to beer. Falstaff. Or a Stag. You like Stag?”
“Probably,” I said. They were all the same to me. Except for Coors. People would drive from the Midwest to Colorado and back to buy cases of Coors.
We pulled up to a little, almost shedlike building with two small unlit signs reading “Bar” and “Beer.” There was a sheet of plywood where the front window was supposed to be.
Before we went in, Danny passed along a few more tips for the health and well-being of strangers in rural taverns:
“Don’t look at the women, if there are any. Probably shouldn’t look at the men either. Just
look down into your beer.
“And don’t play the jukebox. Good way to start a fight.”
“Really?” I replied as we walked inside.
“Really,” Danny said.
“How ya doin’?” Danny said to the bartender as we walked in. “What happened to yer winda?”
The bartender said a guy played something nobody else liked on the jukebox and was thrown through the window.
“Must have been a pretty bad song,” Danny said.
“‘Red Sails in the Sunset,’” the bartender said.
“Wasn’t that by…” Danny started to say.
“Pat Boone,” the bartender said, finishing Danny’s sentence.
“Got what he deserved,” I wanted to say.
“It was late and the guys got a little frisky,” the bartender explained.
“Wow!” I said. “That must have hurt.”
“Not as bad as bein’ thrown through plywood,” the bartender said with a chuckle.
Danny and I took seats at the bar next to a big jar of what? Body parts? Hooves? Toes? The bartender could tell I was baffled and said “pickled pigs’ feet.” Never had the pleasure. I suppose I should have had one, the way you’re supposed to eat sparrows on a stick in Chinatown. To honor their culture. But I was concerned about regurgitation.
Small crowd. Danny knew a few people. They avoided talking religion and politics—which I frankly didn’t think any of them were prepared to do. They talked about their dogs. I stared in silence at my beer bottle. I didn’t talk. I had cats. Pussycats.
One guy’s name was Wayne. “So, what are you doin’ here?” he asked in a somewhat threatening tone, made all the more so by his drunken slurring. But I don’t think he meant it that way. It was just that outsiders rarely came here. Fair question. Who would come to this shithole?
“You on vacation?” he asked, eyeing my polo shirt and Weejuns as I eyed his scuffed cowboy boots and the once white T-shirt he’d altered by tearing off the sleeves.
“Naw,” I said trying to pick up the vernacular. “Workin’ over at the lake washin’ dishes.”
Should have said “warshin’,” but I seemed to have defused the situation, holding a job even those in his social stratum wouldn’t really want.
I met a nice taxidermist. He specialized in small furry animals: chipmunks, skunks, rabbits, and the like. “I won a contest with one of ’em,” he bragged, pulling out his wallet to show me a photograph of a prairie dog standing on his hind legs wearing a straw hat and a bandana.
Another feller was tellin’ about goin’ fishin’. Did he say somethin’ about dynamite? Yes he did. “Dynamite fishin’. Never heard of it?” he asked
“Don’t reckon I have,” I replied.
“Where you from?” he asked, trying to get to the root cause of my ignorance. “The big city?
“Simple,” he said. “Toss a stick of dynamite into a pool or stream where you think fish are at, it stuns ’em, they float up, and you scoop ’em with your net. Sometimes you’ll blow ’em to bits and you can’t eat ’em.”
I almost said, “Maybe on little crackers” but I didn’t.
The bartender’s friend, Tiny, who was about three hundred pounds, came over. “Shoot some pool?” he said. I wasn’t sure if this was a question or a command. I was pretty good at pool back then and Tiny was drunk so it seemed like a good idea…until l reconsidered my being good at pool and my opponent being drunk and weighing three hundred pounds.
He handed me a cue that was broken in half, probably over some unfortunate’s skull, and stuck back together with black electrician’s tape. It didn’t hold together for long and I played most of the game with a two-foot cue.
Tiny beat me and settled our bet on the game for “a six-pack plus one.”
“One what?” I asked.
“One more six-pack,” he guffawed.
Plus, a couple shots of moonshine, white lightnin’, homemade hooch distilled just out the back door. He found it in his heart to share a couple of fingers with us. The ultimate sign of hillbilly hospitality. “This is the good stuff,” Tiny was proud to say.
Ugh! Nasty! Tasted like something you might use to clean the oven and burned like the broiler.
I choked and whinnied like a horse. Danny and Tiny laughed at my rookie reaction. They’d hoped for the best and got it.
“’Nother?” Tiny asked graciously.
“I’m good,” I coughed. “Thanks.”
“No, here, take it,” Tiny said.
“Very hospitable folks in this neck of the woods,” I said. I downed it in a single gulp and shook my head violently from side to side as though hooked to a car battery.
I stumbled back to the car. My Voyage of Discovery was over.
* * *
A few summers later I had my second tangle with moonshine, also in Missouri, at a trailer park soiree outside Columbia. Our host was similar in stature to Tiny, large enough that when he walked over to greet folks at the front door, the trailer listed.
Upon opening the door, he looked shocked by my long curly red hair. He had a big, nearly bald head with a small patch of Butch Waxed short hair on top. In those days that put us in opposing cultural camps.
If you had short hair, the long-haired adjudged you to be dumb as a rock. If you had long hair, the short-haired adjudged you to be a flaming communistic homo looking to get your ass kicked.
Our host allowed us in, but only after his wife told him he had to because she worked with my wife, Jody, and had invited her.
White lightnin’ and grape juice was served. Purple Jesus. About an hour into the festivities, the projectile vomiting commenced, inside and outside the trailer. Three women in the bathroom were doing synchronized upchucking in anything porcelain: sink, toilet, tub.
Just as I did after my first experience, I staggered to the car. But this time I was driving. Jody couldn’t. She was opening the passenger side door and barfing—every quarter mile or so. I worried that someone would toss a cigarette butt out a car window causing the entire highway to burst into flames.
I was experiencing tunnel vision, a descriptive term for this white-lightnin’ symptom that causes your field of vision to shrink to that of a soda straw. To see if there was any oncoming traffic I had to steer toward the left lane and hope there was not—although in my condition I really didn’t care.
Chapter Seventeen
Getting to the Point
Some nights the staff pool parties crossed the highway and slid downhill to the lakeside.
Revelers moved slowly, single file, toting beer and other necessities, safari-style, trailblazing over stumbly-stones, through briars and brambles and bushes, to a rock outcropping that jutted out over the lake, perfect for diving. A bit higher than perfect if you were sober, which applied to but a few. This was the Point.
Two in the party had flashlights on this dark night, the others rammed into the person ahead whenever the expedition halted unexpectedly
Obviously, we took parties seriously. This was way more of an outdoor survivalist adventure than anything I’d experienced in the Boy Scouts. As remote as it seemed, there were signs of human presence. Marilyn walked right past a naked couple “wrestling” in the bushes that didn’t so much as pause in their grappling.
A few waitresses had started this parties-at-the-Point custom years before, in the late fifties. They collected fried chicken from trays returning to the kitchen with the explanation that they were going to have a “picnic.”
They didn’t want to divulge the real purpose of their venture: skinny-dipping, potentially a real crowd pleaser, for cable or the Olympics. If word got out of naked young women swimming, young men were sure to follow.
I should know, I was the first. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time.
I’d broken their code when I heard two laughing over not needing to worry about bathing suits. I trailed them at a safe distance and took up a vantage point behind some bushes.
But were they really going to d
o this? Right before my very eyes?
Here goes! After chugging a few beers they began stripping off their outer layers.
But how far would they really take this?
Suddenly I saw legs and breasts and backs and necks—better than any bucket of chicken.
And for those of us without sisters, what would real girls look like? Anything like the airbrushed goddesses in Playboy? Or would they more closely resemble that aging beauty in the tent at the county fair? You remember, the one with the large appendix scar across her bulging belly? Paid fifty cents (student rate) and that seemed high.
Suddenly, two of the girls stripped completely naked, dashed to the rock, and dove in.
Wow! I had never seen real girls…girls that you know, you know? In the flesh.
There was a bit of nervous laughter, I think just because they were actually doing this. They didn’t seem particularly self-conscious at all.
What was going on? Were they exhibitionists, sinners, art aficionados, teasers? I could never figure girls out.
It seemed as natural as little sisters taking a bath together. As I watched them diving from the rock, swimming, laughing, it occurred to me they were doing it for fun.
Boys would not do this for…fun. Boys would be overwhelmed by their surging hormones and chase after them. I took a deep breath. “They’re naked,” I told myself. “Get over it.” Like paintings and sculptures at an art museum. You don’t see art aficionados with bulges in their pants and drool on their chins as they contemplate Gauguin’s bare-breasted Tahitian girls.
Yet, this was different. There was Renoir’s Young Girl Bathing, all canvas and paint. But here was Sadie, the real thing, in the flesh, cavorting. Alluring and alive. But, alas, no more accessible.
Transfixed, I wasn’t paying proper attention to my precarious position. Loose rocks underfoot gave way and I slid from behind the bushes.
