Flea Market

Pleasant Sunday here in the country. Quiet as usual. In the morning I drove up to the Oak Hill flea market even though past visits have never turned up a good buy. I call it a half-blown business with few stalls and few customers and nothing like most flea markets. I can browse in a well-stocked flea market for a couple of hours, but this local one can be covered in fifteen minutes. I bought a few things this time, mostly fresh tomatoes, yellow squash, limes and carrots. Found a pair of binoculars for $5, something I can use to see birds around the place better. Got an old kitchen crock pot for 25 cents. I put that stuff in the truck and went to the café in front of the flea market and ordered the makings of Clyde mix, what I call the breakfast concoction my old daddy used to stir up on most mornings: two eggs fried over easy, grits and patty sausage with a side of biscuits. Cut the sausage up, cut the eggs up and mix both with the grits, all on the one plate. Eat it up with a sopping-biscuit in one hand.

When I let Farina out this morning there were three squirrels dangling from the bird feeder. Farina went tearing out and leaping up at them but they scattered up the tree in the nick of time. I went out and peppered them with the Red Ryder, scaring them off. You can shoot a squirrel ten times with a BB gun and it’ll still laugh at you. They come back five minutes later. I’ve knocked them off of limbs, put hot BBs on their butts, shoulders, heads and legs and they scamper off with a smirk. Sympathy? Oh, aren’t they cute? Aw, poor things. Don't hurt them. Living out here it doesn’t take long to see the bad side of what are nothing more than rats with bushy tails that carry disease and come in the house if they can find a way.

Hard to understand my neighbors Randy and Jean jumping all over Lamar for fattening a wild hog in his pen down the road. They badgered him so much he finally let the hog go. They tell him it’s cruel to pen an animal up for fattening and eventual death on the chopping block. Wild hogs are popular with hunters in these parts, a delicious meat for the table which is what it’s all about for Lamar living on his small government pension, barely enough to get by on. Jean misses the point and tell him if he wants to eat roast pork he should go to the supermarket and buy it. Last year they sent Jimmy down to Lamar’s place when he was gone and he let loose another wild pig Lamar was fattening. Jean is a forceful kind of animal lover, but she’s given up on me and the pesky critters. I told her she better make sure those not so cuddly armadillos stay on the west side of the fence because I’ll blast them to smithereens without blinking an eye and go off hunting more of them.

Lamar didn’t go so far in school and has trouble reading more than a sentence or two. He brought his insurance guidebook needing help finding an eye doctor from the list of approved doctors. I looked at the book for ten minutes and told him I couldn’t find any eye doctors. Full of dentists, orthodontists and periodontists, without an eye doctor in the bunch. So he took the book on next door to have Jean study it. She’s a former blood technician and helps Lamar out with medical questions. Last time she drove him to the doctor, the man was head down over Lamar’s lab report when Jean snatched it out of his hand to get a look at it herself. When they were leaving, the doctor pulled Lamar aside and told him not to bring that woman back again. 

The county tractor came out Saturday to mow the knee high weeds on both sides of our road. Farina had a conniption fit, running up and down the fence line barking her fool head off. We’ve needed those weeds chopped down for a while now. The last time they sent a guy out here who’d never done it before and he drove his big tractor halfway down into the canal and almost got snake bit before he got out. After her spell of barking and running after the tractor Farina came inside and stretched out for a nap.

Baby Turtles & Southern Comfort

Five weeks after Farina’s coming to this patch of Old Dixie Lane her weight had doubled. From day one she was the perfect addition to this big piece of land under oak trees, home to squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, giant gopher turtles, snakes and the occasional alligator. She spent her early days here dashing from one end to the other, running giant circles around the house at a speed fast enough for the greyhound races. In between that she chowed down on big bowls of food. Other than running and chasing either squirrels or rabbits, the biggest fascination was with the two horses living next door, one a full grown dwarf standing at most three and a half feet from hooves to ears. She did a lot of barking at those horses over the fence, and on walks to the mailbox pulled on the leash when we passed the horse gate. At one stop the dwarf galloped up to the gate tossing his head in a sort of “who the hell are you?” fierceness and Farina almost wet herself.   

Another part of the young dog thing is getting used to holes in the yard, lots of holes. Not many times that Farina out romping around doesn’t miss the chance to dig a new hole or two. I wouldn’t mind a scatter of holes dug way at the back of the yard, and there are a few of those, but the two favorite digging spots are in the driveway and along the fence line. I don’t want her digging under the fence and a driveway that looks like a prairie dog village makes for a bumpy coming and going in the truck. The dog books offer up a cure but there are a lot of holes and the ingredients for the cure take time to collect. “Deposit a pile of the dog’s poop in the dug hole and cover it up. That will put the dog off and prevent digging in that spot again.” Problem is, the book doesn’t say anything about all the available places the dog hasn’t dug up before.

The other day Farina was barking at something out by one of the sheds, her eyes focused on something under a bush. I walked over to see what she was riled up about and there was a baby turtle. It looked like one not long hatched from a buried egg and right off the bat was being tormented by a noisy puppy. But to find the hatchling of a gopher turtle was no surprise. The big ones sometimes wander around the backyard nibbling grass and once before I found a baby crawling out of an old fencepost hole. The one Farina had found I washed off with the hose and took a picture. The babies are more beautiful than the full grown turtles, which are a dull and smelly greenish brown. Maybe the yellow spots fade as they grow and the black turns dark green. 

Lamar and Jimmy were barbecuing Mexican sausages across the fence just before sunset yesterday. Up against the woods where Jimmy’s trailer is set up at the back of Randy and Jean’s yard, mosquitos are pretty bad late in the day. Must have been an uncomfortable picnic with all the mosquitos. Jimmy is Jean’s brother and she told him to get outta the house for a few days because she had company coming, told him he could buy a trailer to park out in the backyard. And he did. Then she upped his rent from $400 to $500 a month. Her own brother. Since he had that quintuple bypass surgery last summer, and with an assumed prognosis of little time left, he’s busy drinking himself to death, trying to spend the $50,000 in savings he’s got left. Jimmy is a Vietnam vet living off his pension, which seems to do him okay. Thin as a rail, somewhere in his middle 60s, I guess. Back in the day he got shot up along those jungle trails and came home with a Purple Heart. Now he smokes funny cigarettes and drinks all day long every day. I don’t see much of Jimmy but sometimes hear his 1970s Jefferson Airplane songs booming out of the trailer. Lamar says he plays it so loud they can’t hear each other talk, have to go outside and sit in the mosquitos.

Looking down Old Dixie Lane toward the river

Speaking of Jean, about a week ago I walked over with Farina to say hello around 4:30 and stayed until 7:00 sipping on Randy’s nasty Canadian whiskey and ginger ale. Jean sat across from us throwing back Southern Comfort on the rocks. At one point Lamar came tooling down the road on his lawn mower pulling a baggage cart, come to pick up some laundry Jean had done for him, a bedcover she said later hadn’t been washed in eleven years. He swerved into the driveway, hit a big root sticking up out of the ground and drove his mower and cart bang into Jean’s new Ford compact, a broadside to the passenger door. In her state of Southern Comfort, Jean didn’t give a damn but Lamar was all discombobulated. Conversation came around to pests out in our area and Jean announced she wouldn’t harm a single pink hair on an armadillo’s belly and even enjoyed watching two baby ones play out in her yard. Two seconds later she told us if she ever got her hands on one of those guys who raise fighting dogs she wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet through his medulla oblongata and walk away like she’d just swatted a fly. Me and the dawg didn’t get home until after dark, treading carefully along the dirt road, eye out for things that bite.

Crime Under Cover of Loretta Lynn

Scene of the Crime

Up at 7:30, I was pulled outside ten minutes later by Farina’s non-stop barking. Barking and snarling at something I couldn’t see and ignoring my shouts to knock it off. Looked normal enough from my perspective, no squirrels, birds, armadillos or passing cars to spark her excitement but she paced back and forth at the fence, on about something she couldn’t see on the other side. 

Around 10 o’clock, the quiet restored and Farina sitting vigil on the backyard picnic table, neighbor Randy came over wondering if I’d seen or heard anything out of the ordinary around 7:30, said he had gotten up to go fishing at 6:30 leaving his wife and brother-in-law asleep in the house. Sitting in his boat out on the water he got a call on his mobile from wife Jean telling him to skedaddle home, the police were on their way, her car stolen, gone in 60 seconds and Jimmy’s truck tossed for valuables. Apparently, the thief walked through the wide open gate in broad daylight, rummaged through Jimmy's truck, then saw Jean's car unlocked with keys on the driver's side floor. Jean looked out the window in time to see the thief speeding out the gate in her Ford compact. 

And there the source of Farina’s barking was revealed. Unfamiliar smell in the yard next door and she stood at the fence sounding an alarm the whole time.

My other neighbor at the end of the road is a good guy with a gap in his front teeth, always willing to help out, full of humorous backwoods tales and with a dentist who works out of the trunk of his Buick LeSabre. Plunks his patient on a folding chair and turns on the laughing gas. Chatting at the gate the other day, Lamar told me, “Hell, I'll shoot the son of a bitch. What do I care? I ain’t got long to live anyways.” He was talking about the folks over the way, the ones with their giant killer dogs, muscle cars, all night Loretta Lynn parties, and Sunday afternoon re-enactments of the war in Iraq. Truth is, the past couple of months the killer dogs are rarely seen, the Loretta Lynn parties on hold and the big gun shoot-outs too. Seems most of what they do over there these days is run heavy duty equipment like road graders and other Caterpillar giants. Hard to tell what it is they’re aiming at with all that big yellow machinery, but what used to be invisible behind a screen of trees is now a house uncovered by the uprooting of trees and brush. With a little imagination you’d think they’re preparing a command post in a palmetto hot zone, 500 feet on all four sides of the house denuded of everything—nothing but flat grassless dirt between them and an encroaching enemy. Farina slipped out the gate one morning and hightailed it for their hot zone. I ran after her and stepping through the open gate was met by a former Marine gunnery sergeant who warned me he was going to shoot Farina dead if she got into his chicken house. Good neighbors aren’t always on the nearest vine.

One-Eyed Jack

In a ‘Once upon a time…’ spirit of remembering, my old childhood neighborhood was a place of familiar faces where boys on bicycles meandered up and down quiet streets lined with old trees and cracked sidewalks and where on most days you could count on Mrs Robert’s bulldog Gruffy dashing from the front porch to run barking alongside the boys on their bikes. Most families had a car, some even an extra one for the son or daughter in college. Back then, cars were big boxy affairs sporting large chromed bumpers and humped fenders that seemed to roll down the streets at a stately pace. In most neighborhoods high school boys at the time had not yet discovered the thrill of frightening the dogs and the elderly with their customized old Chevies and loud mufflers, squealing out from stop signs to leave a signature of black tire marks on the street. It was a different time.

As a boy in that 1950s sample of Americana I had a small brown dog named Jack, one of eleven puppies from Aunt Tilly’s nasty old bitch dog, Nelly. They lived down at the end of the street and I remember the day my aunt came over to say I could pick one of the puppies to bring home. Nelly almost bit a finger off when I reached down to pick up the puppy I had an eye on. Jack grew up to be a good and faithful dog but somehow had bad luck with cars. One day he failed to dodge one of those slow moving boxy cars with big bumpers and crawled out from under with his left eye dangling out of its socket. From that day on he was one-eyed Jack until he met another not so slow moving car and lost the challenge completely. Later on I got another dog, a boxer I named Sabre who lived on for some years after I left home. 

I lived without a dog for many years, figuring my location and particular lifestyle weren’t the best conditions for raising and keeping a dog. The dogs in that old childhood neighborhood of the 50s where I grew up were animals that ran free, going out, coming in as they liked. I don’t think we knew what a leash was. That kind of dog was impossible in a big city apartment. So I put aside the idea of a having dog. Until I changed my mind and came home with a pup I saw making eyes at me from a pet shop window. He grew up to be huge and chewed up most things he could get his mouth around. Took a while but I eventually caught on that Butch was not the dog for a small New York City apartment. I ended up giving him to friends who lived in the country. In his new home he became a happier dog, calm and with less inclination to chew toilet seats and sofa cushions. 

A passage of years and much older, one day I found myself living out in the country on narrow dirt lane with two acres of fenced land that looked like the setting of Tobacco Road and maybe the best place in the world to raise a dog.

Not long after getting settled in the cottage tucked among towering oaks and a bounty of wildlife, I went to a canine orphanage to find and adopt what these days is called a rescue dog. And there I met a cheerful mixed breed pup, a runaway they were calling Kelly. Four months old and clearly stressed from living behind bars in a constant din of barking dogs, her cheerful personality was a bit subdued but after a few minutes together I knew she was the one. Filling out forms enough to get me into North Korea or maybe Fort Knox, I took the dog home to the dusty hideaway I had begun to call Chez Dixie. Kelly would never do and so I renamed her Farina because of a honey coat that looks almost like that old-timey cereal of the same name, and also because it was the moniker of my favorite character in the old comedy shorts, Our Gang.

The day Farina came to Old Dixie Lane marked the beginning of another story, one that has redesigned my days and nights in ways never imagined.