Delta Fourth of July

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness. 

~Robert Frost

I get a message from Tommy before noon and in his Delta gourmet language tells me  he's put on a shitload of ribs, come over & have some.  Coming back from Kroger, I see him at his shop where he makes security doors & he tells me Carme’s gonna do the baked beans with black molasses, coleslaw, and something with cool whip for dessert.  Since the wife left, I might as well.

Aggie's too damn old & nervous to ride shotgun anymore, plus I hate having to lift him up in the back of the Trooper.   I can feel him whimpering with, well, pain, gratitude, what I guess would be embarrassment (if they can get embarrassed), not being able to do the things he used to.  Like jump in the truck.  Or fetch. Or have sex.  I know what he means.  I used to do all those things too.  But that was before she left.  So I rubbed him on his black head and scratched his behind his years like he likes it, he looked up and understood.  Left him and went west with a 6 pack of Busch fence posts and a quart of the homemade figs Wilson & I put together.  It's hot, blue sky, and the fat clouds sit still.

The buildings got smaller, the pavement changed from four lanes to two to gravel.  The rows of cotton and beans on both sides looked like running spiders trying to keep up with me.  Maybe running squid or whatever the plural of running octopus is.  Met up with Tommy out at Mound City where he lives on Dick Shelby’s land.   Greeted by a bunch of bastard dogs.  Barking and biting each other’s ears.  The sweet hickory smoke makes a grey haze in the still air.  Go to the source round back by the shed.  Tommy’s got his boots and an XXL shirt to cover his whiskey gut.  Hat with some chemical company’s label on it.  Gray hair sticking out over his ears.  White Styrofoam cup of Segram’s 7 and Coke, double cupped with crushed ice like the kind you get from the Sonic.  Tommy’s just eased back in his broke down Dodge, door open, listening to The Band and watching the ribs.  As if that’s going to make a difference.  One leg out on the ground.  Resting the cup on his belly. 
     

“Where you ‘won go?” 

“Hell man, I don’t care.  Head west I guess.”

“Hold on, lemme make sure my drink’s too strong.  Ah.”  And smacked his fat lips. 

 “Yep, let’s go.”

The levee is highest point in the Delta where you can still drive, and when you are ridin’ proper on a state or federal holiday, or just a weekend, that’s where you go.  Just winding around the oxbows, cows, and fishing shacks.  Watching the boats on the water when the woods broke.  Slops down about a hundred feet on your right with more cotton fields, rice, and beans.  An occasional sharecropper shack with a sodium light and broke down cars in the yard.  Rusty old farm equipment.  Tractor parts.  Yell at the cows.  Laugh when you see them shit.  Dust swirling behind us, coming around the side of the truck and making the sides of my mouth gritty.  Don’t have to say a thing.  Just ride.  Just ride.  Turn up a good song when it comes on.  Give a two finger wave and a smile to the people you pass.  Keep your speed low.  Keep your drink low.  Aviators on.  Watch your left arm turn red.  Hit a washboard and Tommy got beer crack.  Whiskey crack.  Cussin and spittin.  Not that he was wet.  Lost some of his drink.

Big Ford pickup full of black folk pass us fast hauling a boat.  About a hundred yards ahead, the trailer throws a wheel and one of them is running down the levee chasing it.  They forgot to grease the bearings, the axel is shot.  We stop.  Can't help.  They were just looking for a place to put in.  Wanted to boat on the lake with the rednecks.  They were laughing & drinking.

We ride on back to Tommy’s shack at Mound City.  Backroads all the way home.  Swing through Gunnison, Malvina, back out toward the Bogue Philia.  Sit out by his metal barn under the shade tree with the shop fan rattling keeping the bugs off.  Mosquito spray sweats down my eyes and burns.  Later the kids come in from the lake, sunburnt, barefoot and happy. We eat, tell lies.  Talk about women we used to know.  Watch the kids run around.  Drink some more.  Hours pass.  Clouds still not moving.  They pack me up a bunch of food when I'm ready to go, including a shitload of ribs. 

At 10 pm the scanner kicks on, EOC calling for members, a boat is stranded on the river.  Some country boy with a belly full of Bud I'm sure.  Bought beer.  Forgot gas.  They have to put in at Log Loader in Rosedale instead of Terrene Landing because the river is so low, go up the chute and out towards the White River inlet, just north of Terrene & across on the Arkansas side.  I had canoed the White further upriver where the Buffalo River comes into it years ago, when I was a younger man.  I mix the last one of the day, and sip it slowly with Aggie at my feet in the backyard.  Just us.  Sittin in the dark.

Scanner kicks in again:  A mobile home is on fire south of Rosedale on Hwy 1. 

Riverrat

The only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world go quietly up and down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, seeking no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not.

-Mark Twain in a letter to Will Bowen, 8/25/1866

The other side of the levee.  The land the law forgot, or perhaps felt just wasn’t worth noticing.  Thousands of acres of subtropical forest and rich ebony soil, filling the gap between the Great River and the Depression-era levee protecting us from it.  Stretching from the bluffs of Memphis to the gates of Vicksburg, the other side is fit only to sustain the likes of reptiles, insects, and riverrats.  Once inhabited by Choctaws, glorified by Finn, mystified by Johnson, always plagued with the likes of Rafer Haydock.

The 80’s model Ford pickup rattled to a halt under the camouflage of a water oak enveloped in a cloud of kudzu, and all was still.  Heat like he remembered in ‘Nam.  Crickets. Blue smoke curled its way back into the open window of the cab.  Always made him dizzy.  Rafer put in a dip to steady himself, the stray grains swirling past his molars and sliding down his throat as the rush of new salvia welcomed the tobacco.  Fresh Cope always satisfies.  The truck door painfully creaked as it was opened, piercing the humidity that is a Mississippi Delta July.  He lifted it slightly in closing, resting the door on the frame of the truck after he stealthily slid out.  The required slam would have blown his cover.  Other riverrats are always about.

            Rafer walked to his crop, again taking a different path as to not trample the same johnson grass.  Daytime mosquitoes buzzed around his head.  He spat.  The juice ran down into his beard, mixing with black grime that ringed his neck like the stump of a cut tree.  Or a coon.

            It would be a good crop this year if the goddamn armadillos would quit cutting through the root bases digging their goddamn tunnels, he thought.  The recent rains and the natural greenhouse of the thick forest had put the plants above his head.  Rafer snapped off the top of a stalk and inhaled deeply.  Its sticky sweet incense gloriously filled his hairy gray nostrils.  He sucked on the stem for a moment, and spat again.  With the fluidity and coordination that only a sharecropper’s son can have, his hands quickly plucked the largest and most richly colored leaves from the dozen or so plants and stuffed them in his threadbare overalls. The green ends poked out like money.  Another padded path on his return.  He took the picked pieces from his pockets and fanned them out in the bottom of the ever-present Johnson boat in the bed of the truck, the already scorching aluminum surface a natural oven to dry the leaves.  They could be touched but not touching.  These deliveries alone will make $50.  Money to pay back his wife.  Or money to go to Tunica.  Definitely Tunica.  Hell, it was more fun than her anyway.  The billboards say they have the loosest slots around.

            A plane roared low overhead.  Shit.  He instinctively disappeared into the kudzu cloud, a spotlighted coyote dashing after the first rifle shot.  There weren’t cropdusters this side of the levee, and a mosquito sprayer would be a waste of time.  Maybe this one didn’t have the technology on board.  Maybe it did not see the heat of his farm.  Or the heat of him.  Maybe he didn’t care any more.

            The drone died, and Rafer cast his cane pole for awhile.  Just on the edge of the bank, the sweet gumbo mud warm between his toes.  Pants rolled up knee-high.  Watching the orange jig bounce in the coffee-colored water, his mind wandered to the farm his father left him in Washington County.  Maybe he should build a shack out there.  On stilts in case the Bogue Philia flooded.  Yeah, with a wrap around porch.  He could swap some carp for some of that tin that old field black Roosevelt had. Call it the Love Shack.  He jerked his line up, and skillfully tossed it over in a bubbling section where the something was spawning.  Pulled up one, two, three, four.  He was running out of bologna.  Maybe check the nets in the Blue Hole later.  Keep the spoonbill.  Throw out the gar and the soft shell turtles.  Those don’t sell well at Po’Monkeys. 

As the sun died down and the woods got louder, Rafter went back to the boat to gather his harvest although it was still not dry.  He stuffed equal amounts in envelopes, addressed them to the special houses on his route, and the truck coughed to life on the third try.  Rising from the steam of the fragrant swamplands, the pickup ambled its way along the gravel path to the top of the levee.  Take a right to run the route in Rosedale.  He put his left arm on the windowsill, which was of course much tanner than the right, and placed the yellow blinking light on the hood of the vehicle.  Strapping on his navy hat and stuffing his newly-made letters into the mail bag riding shotgun, he drove on to his day job, the Delta sun blurring his vision as it radiated up from the road.