Good Vibrations (33 page)

‘Guess he was more hole than ear on that side,' put in Mrs Chip.

‘How'd he get that?' asked Gwynne.

‘I tell you,' said Chip, almost choking on a giant shrimp in his excitement, ‘that was some front-off. The sheriff was face to face with this massive Negro with a .38 special who was threatening to blow his brains round the bar-room. I don't know what the sheriff ever did to this guy but his face is all screwed up with hate and his eyes are standin' out. Sheriff tries to stare him down – he can't pull his own iron in case the guy really does spread him all over the sight glasses. They stay there like that for, God knows, it seemed like minutes but I guess it was mebbe ten seconds, then the sheriff says, “Go on then, let me have it if you're goin' to do it.” 'Course, nobody expected him to fire, but that's what he did. The guy shot the sheriff, but his hand was shaking so much he almost missed. Didn't put a hole in his head, he blew his ear off it instead.'

‘Why didn't he finish the job?' asked Gwynne. Roz and I were sitting open-mouthed at this tale, which was clearly true or, if apocryphal, at least generally accepted, because the folks on the other neighbouring tables were all turning around nodding, waving beer glasses and generally making ‘I-was-there-too' noises.

‘I think he was so shocked, he ran out of nerve,' Chip replied, ‘but the sheriff didn't falter. There's blood pouring out, but his eyes never left that black guy's face. He walks up to him, he holds out his hand for the gun and the guy passes it to him.'

‘An' that wasn't the end of it,' put in a middle-aged woman who had mooched over from the bar and was leaning on our table. ‘After that, the blacks all thought he was a zombie and they was scared out of their lives every time he showed up. I guess the doc sewed up what was left of his ear,' she added, ‘'cause after a year or so it wasn't too awful. Always looked ugly to the end, but you didn't mind that, cause of how he was. A real man.'

‘He ran this town for nearly fifty years,' said Joe, finally squeezing in a word to finish his own story. ‘I guess people stood against him sometimes, but he always got re-elected. And when he finally died, 380 cars followed his funeral procession.'

‘Good thing for you he wasn't here that night you showed up with the 'gator in your station wagon!' said the lady, anxious to keep a lively conversation going. I gulped down an iced oyster and asked myself what under heaven was coming next.

Joe hadn't touched his flounder, but he was having an even better time remembering grand old days. Gwynne looked at him with a mixture of despair and motherly love, which struck me as philosophical. She must have been a full twenty years his junior.

‘I think folks imagined I was out to make mischief that night,' Joe said with a low chuckle. ‘But the truth was that I ran over that alligator just down the track. He was lying across it right on the bend by the pond and I was going too fast to stop. I got down to see how things stood and the guy with me says, “He's good and dead, Joe. If we sling him inside, mebbe we can sell him for skin, or steaks, or something.” We'd had a beer or two and that sounded fine to me, so we heave him up through the tailgate and drive on here. We have a beer or two, then we go out to the car. I'm backin' out and suddenly there's this noise like wet sandpaper. Then there's snapping and gnashing teeth, so I look over my shoulder. It's pretty dark, but I can see the sonofabitch grinning at me from the rear seat. He's no more dead than you or me.

‘We were out of that wagon fast, I can tell you, because I hadn't got my gun and the only safe action was to shoot that sucker. So we shut him in and hightailed it for the bar for some sort of heavy firearm. Peashooter wouldn't be any use, 'cause this was a full-grown beast.'

‘I recall that night,' put in the barman. ‘You come in here looking like you'd seen Blackbeard himself, shouting about needing a weapon. Not many folks had brought theirs with them into the restaurant and I was keeping mine where it stays, but there was this girl…'

‘I'll never forget her,' cried Chip, clambering back into the action. ‘She had blonde hair and a figure like Mae West. We never saw her before or since. Cool as you like, she opens up her pocketbook and pulls out this machine pistol. “Will this do?” she says, and Joe grabs it like it's a rope for a drowning sailor. Then you was out the bar. I'll never forget it. The 'gator's going berserk inside your car, but every time you open the door for him to step out and get shot, he goes quiet. Not stupid, I thought.

‘In the end, he comes flopping out all of a sudden, crashes into you and you drop the gun. He takes a snap at you and you jump up on the roof of some fancy convertible and it caves in. The other guy grabs the gun and unloads it into the alligator. I guess everyone was satisfied 'cept the poor ol' beast and the owner of that convertible…'

Some hours after this riotous interchange, Joe and I were drinking a nightcap in the other restored room in Gwynne's house, the front parlour. The ladies had retired at least two whiskeys earlier, when Joe's black-and-white cat Hebe, the feline equivalent of the late sheriff, padded around the finely panelled door and hopped up on to his lap.

Quietly, Joe began to sing ‘Old Man River' in a rich baritone. For a while, the tomcat sat purring peacefully, then, as Joe reached the climax of ‘You and me, we sweat and strain…' Hebe began to make a strange sound in his throat. When we arrived at ‘some plant 'taters and some plants cotton, and them that plants 'em is soon forgotten…' Hebe was crooning in tune and singing along with Joe. I couldn't take any more. The swamplands of Georgia were a world where it seemed absolutely anything was possible. As man and cat rounded into their final cadence of ‘Ol' Man River, he jus' keeps rolling along,' I slugged back my Jack Daniel's, shook Joe's hand and staggered off to the sanity of dreamland.

Leaving Joe, Gwynne, Chip and the ghost of the sheriff to manage as best they could without us, the road to journey's end from Georgia carried an ever-increasing sense of return to civilisation as we knew it. The riding posed little problem except for the rising density of the traffic. I watched with satisfaction how Roz and Betty Boop were now loping through it.

In a sense, whether Roz was enjoying the bike or not didn't matter any more. Short of some bad accident, we were going to make it and she'd have achieved what she set herself. Ironically, something had triggered a latent biker instinct back there in the deserts, because she was at last revelling in the power of the Harley. Betty had done her stuff and so had her rider, despite all the doubts from others about the bike and from Roz about herself. Nobody ever queried Black Madonna. She had been born to the task, but I too was drawing a good deal of job satisfaction out of the eastern air as the love bugs thinned towards Charleston. They finally disappeared at Shem Creek, sometime home of the Hungry Neck Yacht Club, where Ambrosio had given me the Ozarks' music tape and Ricky once lived in his pink Cadillac.

As we crossed the bridge we remembered so well, I noted with relief that the storm seemed to have passed Charleston well offshore. We rode through the familiar streets of pretty clapboard homes and even recognised the mailbox through whose rusty lid I had kept my parents informed of a filtered version of our affairs before email or fax were thought of. It was only when we swung down alongside what had once been the old boatyard that I realised things had changed. The sheds were gone, and so were the boat hoist and the slow-moving, happy-go-lucky black workforce. There were no shrimp-boats and instead of the pilings where the smart yachts had once rubbed shoulders with us and the no-hopers, we found smart lawns and a block of condominiums with a carved wooden sign picked out in gold, ‘The Boatyard'.

We hadn't really expected things to remain as they were, assuming, probably correctly, that old Charlie the owner finally took a developer's offer for his prime chunk of waterfront property and retired. I allowed myself a laugh at the fantasy of Suzie acting for him, then tried to imagine where all the bums and the longshoremen and the hobos had gone when the construction gangs moved in to clean the place up. The yachts would have been OK. They'd have found a newer, slicker deal at the municipal marina over in Charleston. Perhaps a few of their owners missed the smell of the boiling shrimp and the ringing sound of the caulker's hammer, but most of them probably didn't. The hippies, the fishermen, the Robin Hoods and the itinerant engineers had been blown to the four winds by the marching armies of progress.

We didn't linger. Nothing lasts forever, and very little that man has touched stays the same for more than a few years, especially in the youthful land of America. After so long in the heat of the central continent, Charleston reminded us that we were starved of the sea, so although Annapolis still lay two days ahead, we booted the bikes into gear and opted to take a minor diversion from the osprey's flight, following the coast instead. We hugged as close as we could to the great Waccamaw River with its untouched cypress swamps running parallel with the ocean, then we skirted the shoreline to pass close to the big Capes of North Carolina; Cape Fear, Lookout and Hatteras. The last of these is the most famous. Mother of shoal waters, breeding ground for depressions and bowstring of the vicious summer fronts that sweep up the shoreline with 60-knot squall lines, Hatteras floats at the top right-hand corner of the string of sandy islands known as the Outer Banks. Soon, we would take the ferry to the first of these with a usable road, but before we got there, we were obliged to pass inside Cape Fear with its ocean inlet, and the city of Wilmington.

Wilmington had taken the full hit of the hurricane that had bounced off Darien. It is also the home base of the American family who adopted Roz and I when we landed in 1976, two bronzed young kids three weeks out from the Virgin Islands. The boat was tired and so were we. Our engine had been defunct for twelve months and I had broken two ribs in a squall north of Cuba. We had almost no money when John and Thérèse Roberts took us under their wing. They scooped us up in their truck and gave us a five-day holiday into the Appalachians for no other reason than to share their country with us.

At that time, we were, in a sense, living their dream. Not wealthy people, they had bought a small boat to experiment with living aboard. John had made up his mind to retire early from his engineering job so that he and Thérèse could spend their late fifties cruising the Bahamas. It took some time, but one day they sold the home that had seen four children raised, and sailed away. It might seem odd to some that a couple from upstate North Carolina should want to go to sea, but John was the first to explain to me that America is a travelling nation. Times had been tight as they brought up their family. No fancy RV for them, but he was burning to see the West, so he'd built a wooden house on the back of his pick-up and fitted it out so they could all find shelter.

‘OK, kids, let's go!' he roused the children one summer's morning, and away they went, christening the vehicle ‘Lesgo' before they had reached the town limit.

Lesgo made many land voyages and John remembers them all. His boats have been called by the same name and when his sailing days were done and his boat money reinvested in a full-blown modern RV, that too sported the familiar ‘handle'. John and Thérèse now live on the highways of the United States, but they can always be reached through their children. Stopping by a roadside payphone, I called up their elder daughter on the off-chance that the telephone lines were up again.

‘Tom, you're in luck,' the Southern Belle voice came clear down the handset. ‘John and Thérèse are right here in town. They're seeing to old friends who live out on the beach. Their home got flattened.'

‘How about yourselves?'

‘We've been lucky. Just lost a tree and a few shingles. Get yourselves down there and find the folks. Pop'll kill you if you don't. They got plenty of space for you to sleep.' I scratched directions on the back of an old parking ticket and we altered course for Devastation Alley.

Passing through storm-shattered Wilmington to find the RV parked up behind a ravaged cinema complex, it was impossible not to contrast the Roberts family with some of the crazy characters a few hundred miles down the coast. Full of wry humour, intelligently aware of the world situation, the Roberts tribe tend to take mid-line careers, yet they would not know how to be boring. Politically far removed from the often alarming ‘my country right-or-wrong' position so common in the US, they nevertheless represent the real strength of America.

After a loud reunion and the best sleep of the trip, Roz and Thérèse updated recent family history while John and I walked down to look at the beaches.

It seemed we had followed the hurricane up the coast and, just as in Georgia, it was ten days since it ran over the town. While trees were still down across roads, the emergency services had made good most of the utilities essential to life on US earth. Linemen were hanging off poles re-rigging power and phone systems, while the fire brigade were on overtime pumping out cellars. The general impression was one of returning order. It was only as we approached the ocean edge that we saw what a hurricane can really do.

East Coast beach villages are built on or immediately behind the first line of sand dunes. The dunes are often only a few feet high and the buildings are fearfully vulnerable, yet such is the optimism or, some might say, stupidity, of those who choose to live there, that hurricane statistics are essentially ignored from the Carolinas down to southern Florida.

The communities are largely leisure oriented, with second homes, gift shops, restaurants and all the paraphernalia of seaside vacations. To someone who has never visited an active war zone, the sight that presented itself as we drove into this neighbourhood was mind-bending. All the streets were choked with sand. Many were impassable. Police cordons were everywhere, but we managed to approach the front line. Here on the ocean, every house had been either flattened or appeared to have suffered the effects of some distant nuclear explosion. Windows had become ancient history. Whole roofs had simply disappeared. Others were draped over the ruins of homes or businesses across the street. Looking into the rubble, any still usable furniture or appliances had been removed already to frustrate looters. Cars were up-ended or lay with doors open, half-filled with sand.