A Tale of the Roaring Presses
Part I
Possumhaw, Randolph County
The Big Glup
1
An improvised hymn and the jingling of change and the rattling of the front door and another Sunday night at Cap’s Big Glup was finally over.
“There go the Baptists.” Erlene watched the last of a string of American cars wind its way out of the gravel parking lot and onto the two-lane highway, crunching a benediction to the weekend as it went. The moon smiled wanly. Erlene returned the favor and hung up the “Closed” sign, locked up and flipped the switch that turned off the neon lights outside that only cost them half price, thanks to the fact that the Miler Sgin Compny couldn’t spell worth a darn.
Back at the table where she had spent a good part of the last forty-five minutes pouring decaf and listening to some very old jokes, she scooped the change into her apron pockets and deftly loaded her tray with pie plates and coffee cups and started for the kitchen.
The sizzle of the grill dampened her spirits even further. “Capper,” she warned the grizzled man in the grizzled baseball hat. “Told you I wanted something different.”
Cap’s gray whiskers parted in a gold-toothed grin. “Capburger. Ala mode.”
She quit again.
2
Munching her third Capburger a la mode, the waitress changed her mind.
“You can cook anything,” she told the grizzled fry cook, now scouring the grill. Cap beamed. He always beamed. Even coming back from the war, he beamed. At Paw’s funeral, he beamed. When Mama became forgetful and Randy went to prison, he just kept on beaming. And kept on frying those Capburgers for his customers and for Mama and his sister.
“Just like Mama,” Erlene added between chews. She sipped a strawberry soda, gurgling with her straw. Cap’s beam grew wider. “She asleep?”
Cap nodded. The fluorescent light gleamed from his gold tooth. “Never seen her so happy,” he said, wiping the grill clean with a yellowed dishcloth. “Shame not to enter her mincemeat this year.” His beam widened. “Last chance, maybe.”
Erlene pushed her plate away. “We only got one left,” she said. She quickly gurgled the last of the soda and pushed the glass and straw away as well. “Inna freezer.”
Cap took a wet sponge out of his bucket and ran it over the grill. He dried it with another dishcloth. Almost clean. “Never seen the recipe,” he said. “All in her head.”
He beamed.
3
The end stool at Monday’s lunch counter sagged under the formidable weight of Big Bill.
“A couple of days early, aren’t you?” asked Sheriff McCallister, from the crowd on the far side of the diner. The mayor and three chamber of commerce members grunted in nervous agreement. The citizens of Possumhaw always gave Big Bill a wide berth. The smell always ruined their appetites.
The visitor shoved his fourth piece of blackberry cobbler into his unkempt mustache with one paw and raised his fifth jumbo glass of lemonade with the other. “Mug gumma hebba fwbee,” he retorted, spitting crumbs and drool all over his dirty Hawaiian shirt and press badge. Lemonade dribbled from his five unshaven chins as he downed it in one big glup. The crowd of regulars watched in horrified fascination as he slammed his glass on the sodden countertop and bellowed for the waitress.
Erlene appeared reluctantly, bearing more cobbler. “I always know when you’re back this way,” she said with a smile usually reserved for the last five minutes of Sunday night with the Baptists. “It’s the aftershave.”
The regulars laughed, a little too heartily.
Big Bill beamed. “Let’s,” he said, seizing the cobbler, “talk dessert.”
4
“I heard,” Big Bill said between open-mouthed chews, “you’re entering your Mama’s famous pie this year.”
Cap beamed. “It won’t win,” he said, wiping up the spills.
The huge man swallowed his cud and downed yet another lemonade. “That’s,” he said, “for me to judge.”
He began to chuckle, then chortle, then guffaw, then choke on the lunch that would have easily fed an entire platoon of overstuffed journalists.
“That true?” Sheriff McCallister, from the far end of the counter, was already on the case. “I thought we’d seen the last of that.”
Cap beamed. “Don’t look so worried, Jimbo,” he said with a gold-toothed grin. “We got one left in the freezer.”
A couple of spoons clattered against the counter.
“When I think of that pie…” The mayor’s voice trailed off blissfully.
“Put this place on the map, didn’t it? When your Paw was in charge of things?” One chamber member was already halfway down the trail of golden memory. The others just sat and drooled and smiled.
“Can’t still be any good, can it?” McCallister scowled thoughtfully. “Not after all this time.”
Big Bill tore into a dinner roll. “I’d,” he said, spitting crumbs, eyes gleaming, “eat it.”
5
Cap set the tray on the little table in front of the TV.
“Snacks, Mama,” he said, beaming proudly at the chunk of blackberry cobbler and the mug of warm cocoa he’d fixed before shutting down the diner for the night.
The wizened figure in the overstuffed chair ignored him. Conan O’Brien was on, again. Whatever attraction this hip, relatively young comic had on his aged mother was far beyond Cap’s ability to reason clearly this time of night. Maybe she thought he was Pinky Lee. Maybe she thought Cap was Pinky Lee.
One thing for sure, Cap needed sleep.
“Erlene’ll be in later to tuck you in, Mama,” the cook said with a good-natured beam.
“Hush,” said Mama. “I’m watchin’ my stories.”
Later, during a fevered dream in which Mama was running off to elope with Conan’s fat trombone player, Cap was suddenly brought back to consciousness by a loud crash from the basement, followed by a blood-curdling scream from Erlene and diabolical laughter.
“W-what now…” he mumbled, switching on the table light and struggling into a sitting position. He blinked a couple of times, reached for his bathrobe and stumbled, fuzzy-brained, in the general direction of the commotion.
6
“He’s daaaaaiiiiiiid!” shrieked Erlene as the bleary-eyed cook, numb from horror and the overpowering scents of fresh blood and bad aftershave, leaned a little too close to the edge of the splintered railing of the basement steps for a better look.
Mama, close beside him, broomstick in hand, yanked him back by his beard. “I said, ‘Careful!” she barked. “Children shouldn’t play with dead things.”
Cap, eyes watering uncontrollably now, mumbled a gentle “Thank you, Mama,” and quickly but very gently extricated himself and ran down the steps.
“It’s Big Bill, he’s broke his neck,” Erlene said, blowing her nose.
Cap knelt by the mountainous corpse and checked his vital signs, just like in the war. He beamed wistfully. “I’ll say,” he said, fighting nausea. Decomposition had already set in. Naw, Big Bill always smelled this way. Like he always stepped in something. “Why’s he here?”
Erlene blew her nose tearfully.
“Fetch the sheriff,” Cap said quietly. “And get Mama outa here. Don’t wanna upset her.” Mama grinned up from her sweeping and emptied the dustpan down the drain as Erlene offered her arm.
“Come on, Mama,” the waitress said. Mama purred.
Cap wept freely now. “And open some windows.”
7
“He’s daaaaiiiid,” observed Chief Deputy Jerry Lee McCallister, taking charge of the scene till his older brother, Sheriff Jimbo McCallister, got back from Sparta with the coroner and the squad car. His mustache leered at Erlene. She handed him a mug of coffee and smiled her waitress smile and admired her reflection in the potbellied goon’s mirrored sunglasses.
“Time of death,” observed Deputy Grover McCallister, notebook and black pen in hand, mustache nearly grown and sunglasses left safely at the station where Pa and the jailer and anybody else with a lick of sense would leave them in the middle of the night, “between eleven forty-five – time for Conan O’Brien – and one fifteen, just enough time after lights out to fall asleep, am I right?”
Erlene’s smile was genuine now, and though she was definitely old enough to be Grover’s Mama, she could risk raising a little scandal. “Conan comes on earlier now,” she said. “There’s cake upstairs.”
Jerry Lee’s mustache broadened. “Grover’s gotta work,” he said. “Let’s go. Got a question for ya.”
“Shoot,” Erlene said, gazing sadly at Grover. Shoot me now, she thought to herself, walking slowly upstairs, followed quickly by that middle-aged clown with the shades.
8
“He’s dead,” stated the coroner, a grim little man with a grim gray little beard. He checked his scrawlings. “Time of death, between eleven forty-five – time for Conan O’Brien – and one fifteen, just enough time after lights out to fall asleep.”
Shoot, Sheriff McCallister swore silently, impatiently. Shoot me now. He glared at his brother, gooey with cake. Naw, just shoot the rest. His fingers grazed his gun handle. Maybe, he thought with a sudden gleam in his baggy eye, maybe I’ll just shoot Jerry Lee.
His white mustache smiled.
“From what I saw, Paw,” Grover added, reading his neatly written notes, “someone stuck a huge wad of bubble gum into the door jamb back there.” His head jerked to the right. His Paw nodded grimly. “Rained this afternoon,” the deputy continued. “Not only are there huge mud tracks down the outside stairs leading here, but there are also footprints too deep for anyone around here to make, unless they were six feet five and weighed four hundred forty-two pounds.”
Jerry Lee wiped his mustache on his dirty sleeve and leered desperately at Erlene, who studied Grover. “Sister Missy Sue weighs more,” he offered desperately. “She broke the choir loft…”
9
“I told you,” Erlene said for the fiftieth time since two a.m., “I didn’t know he was down here until after he was daaaiiid. I was having a dream and I heard the crash and ran downstairs to see.” She blew her nose again.
Jerry Lee offered her his soiled handkerchief. “I believe you,” he said, mustache forming a straight-lined grin. “I was in your dream, of course.”
It was the clown dream, followed by the falling one, Erlene remembered smugly, and Chief Deputy Jerry Lee had been jammed inside an overcrowded clown car and spirited away forever by angry terrorists with rubber noses and seltzer bottles. “You sure were,” she said, topping off his coffee for the fiftieth time since two a.m. He leered back.
Muffled swearing from the direction of the freezer broke the spell. Cap emerged, frost in his gray whiskers, thunderstruck beyond reason.
“G-g-gone,” he finally muttered, after they all had helped him to the landing.
“Yes, he’s dead,” Sheriff MacAllister said gently. Cap was a good soul. “You hated the guy.”
Cap shook his head until his dentures rattled. “Yes, I know,” he finally said, eyes soggy. “I’m talking about Mama’s mincemeat pie. Her last!”
10
“From what I can nearly figure,” Jerry Lee said, scratching his balding scalp as Happy Dailey and Son and the sheriff and Grover and Erlene and Cap and even Mama lugged the stretcher containing Big Bill’s lifeless remains up the outside cellar stairs and to the waiting limousine for his final journey, that Yuppie funeral home two-and-a-half counties north, “Big Bill just got hungry…”
“Somehow,” added the coroner helpfully, scrawling this all down.
“Somehow,” Jerry Lee continued. “Did what any normal person would do. Raided the refrigerator. First thing he found was that pie.”
“In the back of the freezer!” Cap’s beam, from under four hundred forty-two pounds dead weight, grew happier.
“Shut up and help us, you dipstick!” ordered the sheriff.
“…He found that pie,” Jerry Lee continued, oblivious. “And he was just going up the stairs to pay for it when he lost his balance and fell and broke his neck. All those pie crumbs and that bent pie tin down the drain tells us that.”
“Duhhhh!” grunted Happy Dailey, feeling his disk slip.
The sheriff swore.
“Makes sense,” the coroner said, pocketing his pen and closing his notebook. “With him gone, who’s gonna write about the fair?”