Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#2)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Lottie Jane Miller was tired of walking. She knew what her momma had said about taking rides from strangers, but if she kept turning down rides she was never going to get anywhere. The sun hung flaming in the Florida sky, while both ends of the flat, empty highway disappeared into the shimmering September haze. She shaded her eyes with a hand that was at once delicately boned and roughly used. Her nails were broken and dirty, and calluses marred her palms. She dreaded another night out in the mosquito-ridden woods of Florida’s Big Bend, where the west coast takes a turn to the south. Last night she’d felt like a plate of ribs at Hank’s Barbecue back in Wewahitchka, where she’d run off from the other day, the damn bugs were that bad. “Wewa” was outside of Panama City, and she had considered going there; the air station at Panama made the place a real town. But for sure her daddy, the no-good bastard, would find her in Panama City. He was probably there right now, looking for her. She hoped he got run over by one of those busses that brought new draftees to the base, until she remembered the war was over and not so many recruits came there anymore. Well, as her mother would say if she wasn’t dead, one could always hope for the best. Maybe a farm tractor would do the job instead. The thought of Daddy mashed under big black tractor tires made her feel a little better. There would be a lot of blood. Maybe he would scream. She smiled, seeing it in her imagination. She peered north up the highway, where there seemed to be a shimmer in the haze. Was that a car?
    She only had to think for a second about another night at home, what with Daddy or her brothers or all three of them coming to her room after dark, and she knew she had done the right thing. A few mosquitos wouldn’t kill her. She had decided to head south, maybe go to Miami. She wasn’t bad-looking, with dark hair cut kind of short and round, wide hips and something she knew men liked: big tits. She could cook and sew and keep a house and chop wood and she reckoned, after a few times when she couldn’t fight off Daddy and her brothers, she could do anything else a man wanted, too.
    Lottie Jane had heard about Miami all her life, and it sounded like another world. Maybe in Miami she would find a man who would love her and not beat her too much and not drink up all the money and maybe she would want to do it with him. Maybe get married and have some babies. She would like that. Maybe have some real food instead of gator and raccoon and cornpone and swamp cabbage. Eat pork, beef, and steak and lobster, fresh corn on the cob, and potatoes and store-bought bread. Drink beer, or maybe a glass of wine. Lottie Jane had never seen wine, let alone tasted it. She spat onto the baking tarmac, then watched it sizzle to nothing in less than a minute. Damn, she was thirsty. She looked north again. Son of a bitch. It was a car.

Well, I was fifteen years old at the time this all happened, and I never will forget how she looked when we pulled up to her in that beat-up ’37 Ford four-door. She was somehow both elegant and strong, like a figurine you believe is hollow ceramic until you discover it is carved from stone. She was beautiful, with the full figure that featured so prominently, so to speak, in my juvenile dreams. She wasn’t really hitching, just kind of standing there staring at us and the car as if she couldn’t decide if we were worth her time. Blackie was driving and he just looked right back. He was like that, he wasn’t scared of girls. She seemed to come to a decision and picked up her ragged little bag and tossed it in beside me in the back seat. “Hi,” she said. “You fellas going south? I’m tryin’ ta get to Miami.”
    My name is Jackson Lee Davis, although I could not have told you so at the time. My mouth was hanging open so far flies were getting in. I had never been that close to any woman but my mother and Bonnie Durling in my whole life, and Bonnie chewed tabacca and had hair on her arms. It is a joke, sort of, about the leaders of the Confederacy. My name, I mean. Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. The two great generals and the president. I know, it was 1946. We should have forgot by then. It had been eighty-one years since the end of the War of Northern Aggression. Yep, that’s what we still called it then. We forget hard down here in the South.
    Blackie turned his eyes to Joe Hook, sitting up front with him. Hook was an odd little duck, taken to wearing women’s clothes at times, although he seemed normal otherwise. Never tried anything with me, anyways. Hook just rolled his eyes back and Blackie engaged the clutch and we took off, nice and easy. Blackie, well, he wasn’t really Blackie, I was the only one called him that back then, and he didn’t even like it. I thought he looked a lot like Clark Gable, only shorter, stockier, maybe like Ernest Hemingway. I wasn’t sure what Hemingway looked like, but Blackie certainly styled himself an outdoorsman, like a character in Hemingway’s stories, all khaki and campfire efficiency. Anyway, he always drove like that. Nice and smooth, I mean. Despacio, he called it. It was Spanish for “slowly.” I suppose it still is. He seemed fascinated with the Spanish peoples and their language. Like Hemingway. He said it saved gas, driving like that. Despacio, I mean.
    Blackie said my Southern classical education was a load of bullshit. At least the part of it I’d gotten before I saw the light and ran for the hills , just a few short months before.
    He was plain-spoken, that Blackie. He called me a “cornpone Cassanova,” and thought my mixture of “culture and coon-dog” was an absolute scream. Yet I knew he read a lot, Hemingway, Poe, anything about Sherlock Holmes, even stuff by H. G. Wells. Not the crap popular at that time, the stuff my friends and I read then. The Shadow. Doc Savage. The Avenger. What a load of bullshit, he said. Only boneheads read that junk. He was always very cynical, but I had the idea it was what had happened to him that had made him so skeptical of life and love. When we got hold of some cane liquor he might talk about his life in the North. He’d been rich, loved a beautiful woman, and had it all, including the woman, taken from him by a rival. Now he bummed around like the rest of us, but he was always different. Cleaner. More capable. He had plans; he knew what to do.
    That night it rained, and we slept in a reeking, half-full tabacca barn in Bartow, which if there was any town at all there I never saw it. Blackie walked right up to the house and gave the man two dollars and about a quarter-bottle of good whiskey and asked if we could have a fire. Of course the man said no, are you nuts, you’ll burn my tabacca barn down for sure, but he said he would arrange for the wife to bring down a pot of something hot and it turned out to be right good, if not anything I recognized, and I told myself it was rabbit, and it probably was. I had a friend at school named Roger, from Indiana, who said if you sell a rabbit there you have to leave a foot unskinned so folks know it isn’t a cat. They look and taste the same, he swore, with a double-cross of his heart. No foot was left on this occasion, Roger was safely back in the arms of his family, and unlike myself had a sure future in Law, where there would never be a question about what it was on the table. I ate every bit of mine and any I could get from the others. I was young, growing, and so hungry I could have eaten a horse between two mattresses. I swore to them all I would eat a Grizzly bear raw without cutting out the asshole, at which Blackie fell down laughing so hard he hurt his ribs. After the farmer went to bed, Blackie did something odd for him. He broke his word to the farmer and had a little fire anyway. He made it from the discarded stems laying on the floor, and the pungent smoke mixed with the heavy, resin scent of fresh tabacca leaves not yet ignited.
    The bundles of wide, tan, pointed leaves hung upside down from poles, drying, all around us. They nearly crackled in the heat. They scared me senseless, but then again I had seen tabacca barns burn like a damn gasoline can, and pity the poor bastard caught inside. I watched three of them go like fireworks on a hot Virginia day and ruin my daddy’s cousin in one afternoon. I am almost sure Daddy profited by that, but what that means I am not smart enough to figure out yet. Daddy grew tabacca too, you know. I couldn’t go to sleep until I got up later and saw for myself the ashes were out.
    We passed by signs to Tampa in the morning. All day we drove past fields of soybeans and alfalfa and endless rows of orange trees. They stretched across tiny hills some wag had named the “Florida Alps.” I doubt if a single one of them is three hundred feet above sea level. As my daddy would say, my ass is higher when I’m sitting on the throne. Later that day we stopped at a place called Estero. Blackie said off to the west a few miles was Punta Gorda, which means “fat point” in Spanish. I learned to hablo that lingo because of Blackie and all. Punta Gorda was where the ranchers drove rounded-up range cows, he said, and sent them off by the thousands to Cuba. Estero was Cubano for steer, and was their staging point, back in the woods from the coast. The swampy pine breaks held the cattle until they could be driven out the spit of sand they called Fat Point and loaded onto the fillibusters, the boats that ran the blockades. Many of the cattle went farther south, to Argentina and places like that. Wisdom at the time said South American beef was no good. Tough. I have since learned that is nothing but a load of bullshit, but that there’s another story entirely. Mexicans wanted that trade at the time and resented the intrusion of Cubans into the cattle business, because they had connections all over South America the Mexicans lacked. Unlike the Cubans, the Mexicans called a steer “buey.” It just proves how different they are. Let me tell you right now, just because someone speaks what they call Spanish, doesn’t mean it’s the same language or that the speakers don’t hate each other. Cubanos hate Mexicanos, Mexicanos hate Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans hate Mexicanos like the plague and they hate Cubans like lepers. Colombianos are often the guys with the money and the stores in many of these countries, and everyone hates them for taking their jobs even though they won’t do them and the Colombianos hate them right back as the no-good low-class trash they are, si mui claro. At least, that’s what the Colombianos say.
    We ate fried chicken, collard greens, and cornbread at an old negra woman’s house right off the road, damned good and at a damned good price I recall, although I disremember now just how much it was. Less than a dollar, for sure. She had a little sign out on the road I wouldn’t have paid any mind to, but Blackie, as usual, knew the ropes. Blackie asked Lottie, that was her name, Lottie, I mean, if she’d had anything to eat, and she said no. Earlier that day I’d given her a piece of soda biscuit I’d stashed in my pocket that wouldn’t have kept a mouse alive for long. Did she have any money? No. We all had a bit of cash from where we’d been logging up in Taylor County Florida, the Pulpwood Capital of the South, and so we ponied up a little each and got her a plate. Blackie dug up some more money somewhere and as the sun shaded the west to red, he followed it down the dirt lane between the pine trees to the negra’s cousin’s shack where the old woman said he could get a bottle of cane. Blackie was like that, conjuring money from nowhere. The old negra stood watching him go, shaking her head at the shadow of his back against the scarlet sky. She was clearly of the opinion that mixing men and liquor meant trouble. To this day I can’t say she was wrong.
    That night we camped down the highway, back in the pines, far from any houses or farms, next to a cleared area. We built a big fire with all the splintered pine from where the loggers had cut the lot west of us. We’d done that work up Taylor County way, and we were all agreed it was more hardship than the money was worth. At fifteen years, I weighed in at 165 pounds, would have weighed more if I’d eaten better, and except for Joe Hook I was by far the smallest man on the crew. It like to have killed me, working there just one week. Joe Hook, now, the scrawny little shit, you wouldn’t have believed it but he pulled twice the weight of any man there.
    With a good meal in our bellies, we sat around that fire and commenced to working on that cane liquor. It wasn’t long before my eyes began to see funny, and we were all drooling drunk. We were laughing and falling about the place. It’s a wonder we didn’t fall in the fire. Then after a while, it seemed like I woke up and Blackie was doing it to Lottie, right there by the fire on her ragged little blanket. I never saw such a thing in my whole life. But let me tell you my pecker stood right to attention, and quick as Blackie was done I took right to it myself, and she wasn’t fighting me or anything. First time I’d ever done it with a woman I’d care to be seen with; Bonnie Durling didn’t count, the way I figured. Lottie was making all kind of noises, but it wasn’t like she was trying to get away. Even Joe Hook took a turn, and I wasn’t even sure he liked girls. I guess, drunk as we all were, we put it in her about every way a man can, and about as many times as he can, and her laying there taking it, not even seeming to mind.
    Well, I reckon we figured she’d be gone in the morning, what with things sort of getting out of hand that night and all, but as dawn split our aching heads we smelled coffee over the fire, and there she was, heating up some leftover cornbread for breakfast. And she was smiling, cool as a cucumber. “You boys have a rough night?”
    I was in love. Blackie acted like it was natural as daylight. Joe Hook never said anything anyway, so I never did know what he thought. Later on it didn’t go like that much, maybe a time or two when we all got good and drunk, but we knew it was Blackie she really wanted. She rode up front with him now, leaving me and Joe Hook in the back. She went with him every night in those days. And was she ever embarrassed? Not on your life! If anybody was awkward and tongue-tied, it was me. Blackie didn’t give a damn.

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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]

Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens