Grass Roots- Instalment 5

Chapter 10

            As he munched the sandwich, a huge slab of cold ketchup-slathered meatloaf on half a baguette of fresh sour dough, and sipped the enormous water glass of icy lemonade in Widow Greene’s spacious Florida room, Jenks tried to keep up his side of a conversation by shouting over the running shower through the bathroom door. He could hear her, but of course, she could not hear him. Fortunately, in a conversation with Glenda Alice, this was not usually a problem.

            “We gonna have any trouble with this hurricane, Sheriff?” she queried rhetorically. “Looks to me like it’s gonna hit Ft. Walton or Mary Estha.”

            “Doin’ everything poss—,” came his reply, truncated by her next remark.

            “Talked to the Chaahman yesterday,” she drawled through the door, “he’s worried.”

            “That’s his job . . .”

            “Not about Quentin,” she interrupted, inadvertently responding to his unheard and unfinished statement. “He’s very worried about the election.”

            Indeed, Jenks had worried some about that as well. Prior to his first desultory run for county sheriff, Jenks was as apolitical as it was possible for a big-city lawyer to be. He had become active in Republican Party politics, at first, because it was necessary to attain and then retain his present position. Now, it had become an addictive hobby.

Secretly, he disagreed with most of current Republican thinking. He did not believe that Christian Right or any other religious belief structure had a place in what had, until recently, been a very secular government system. He disagreed down the line with the party on abortion, stem cell research, right to life, intelligent design as a reasonable scientific alternative to evolution, gay marriage, and the death penalty.

He believed that President Bush had co-opted 9/11 for his own agenda of jingoistic imperialism in the Middle East and war-and-hysteria-fueled civil rights grabbing at home. He believed the party had sold out completely to the Big business lobby. Although a registered Republican, in the privacy of the booth, Jenks often voted—except for local elections—straight Libertarian. Twenty-first century politics, he knew, was not about furthering idealistic moral positions. It was about getting elected and grabbing the power—and the money.

Although officially still a swing state after the 2000 election, Florida was so red these days that a vote in the national general election for either major party was pointless. Everything, at least in Northwest Florida, had already been decided in the Republican primary. Every protest vote for a third party, on the other hand, helped it get more federal matching funds.

Yet, practical considerations aside, Jenks could not bring himself to vote for a Democrat. Doodle had aptly stated it—“They just make me want to puke.” Political correctness, harebrained social policies, gun control, and their historical assault on individual rights “for the greater good” and faith—against all historical evidence to the contrary—in big federal government and Clintonesque hypocrisy had forever tainted the Democratic Party in the mind of Jenks McCracken. Unfortunately, the party of Lincoln had become, in many ways, far worse.

“We’ve nevah had a category 3 hurricane and a general election on the same day,” Glenda Alice informed as she cut off the shower and flicked on her hair dryer. “For once,” she continued, “we might have been outsmarted. ‘They’ been bussing ’em in from all ovah Northwest Florida to vote early evah since Quentin got north of Miami.” They, Jenks knew, meant the local Democratic Party.

            The dryer stopped, and in a few minutes, Glenda Alice stepped out of the private dressing chamber that connected to the Florida room. She wore a new pair of Seven Jeans, red-and-white checked shirt from Wal-Mart, lightly starched and tied at the midriff, high-heeled Jimmy Choo “fuck me” sandals, and a black Panhandle Winery baseball cap over her long damp auburn hair. She had drawn it up into a very loose ponytail—a perfect synthesis, thought Jenks subliminally, of the Mary Ann she had once been and the Ginger that she now favored with just a dash of the Mrs. Howell that she might easily become a few decades hence.

            “Sheriff,” she stated matter-of-factly as she walked past him to the door, “I gotta go open my stoah. Make yo’ self at home. Put the plate and glass in the sink”—she gestured to the wet bar overlooking the pool deck—“when you’re through.”

            “Thanks again, ah, Glenda Alice,” Jenks stated through the last bite of the sandwich as he washed it down with the remains of the lemonade. He felt uncomfortable with the intimacy of being left alone in her house. “I’m just leaving now. I’ll walk you.”

            As they approached the separation point between his truck and the porch steps, Glenda Alice turned to him, tugged lightly on his untucked shirttail, and said, “Sheriff, after New Year’s, ah’m ’bout to call it good on this mournin’ thing. Nine month’s plenty for a bastahd like Jubal Greene. Snortin’ cocaine or whatevah with college girls on the Red Neck Rivera at his age. Good riddance ah sez. Call me. No big thing. Ah’ll buy you an O’Doul’s down at the Landin’. If that’s too close to home, maybe we could slip down to Bud and Alley’s and watch the sunset over the Gulf from the Tarpon Room. Meantime . . . don’t be a strangah.”

            She smiled, fluttered her long lashes, and swivel-hipped up the steps to unlock the door to the winery. This relieved him from the burden of responding. She opened the door, gave him an intimate finger wave, smiled, fluttered again, and closed it behind her.

            No wonder she scares Doodle, said Jenks to himself as he fired up the Silverado, she kinda scares me . . . a little.

 Chapter 11

            Loretta opened the closet door and, standing on her tiptoes, felt around on the top shelf. She wasn’t tall enough so she tried balancing on a plastic shoe box. Of course, it immediately caved under her weight. She fell off, nearly twisting her knee and ankle in the bargain. “Moron,” she said to herself—another thinking word that she had eliminated from her speaking vocabulary along with idiot, lunatic, simpleton, cripple . . . and, well, a host of others that, although accurate and very satisfying, were no longer PC.

            She finally dragged over the aluminum folding bench that had come with her electronic keyboard. She rummaged further into the recesses of the shelf, successfully dodging the falling plastic menorah that she always placed in her front window along with a wreath and a brightly colored print of African women wearing the traditional uwole and bearing baskets of exotic-looking fruit. She also had an ancient Qur’an, which she acquired to display on Laylat al-Qadr, but she had quit the practice. She felt hypocritical in that she was agnostic and couldn’t read the Arabic, and anyway, it was very difficult to keep track of Ramadan. It jumped around on the calendar too much.

            Her atheist friends chided her for honoring any religious holidays at all; and her Buddhist, Taoist, omniversal, and existential acquaintances applauded her insight because she always left one window empty, they assumed, to signify the concept that everything flowed from nothing and vice versa. The truth was, however, that she just had an extra window.

            She had, recently, decided to discontinue the multicultural holiday customs altogether and just go back to a small tastefully decorated tree. It was all too confusing, and in addition, one of her swishy (another perfectly graphic thinking word she refused to abandon altogether) gallery-owner friends had asked her, last Christmas, where she had put the Festivus pole. It took her nearly an hour on Google to realize she had been punk’d. (She learned about that on Google as well.)

            After five minutes of searching the back shelf of the closet, she found what she looked for: an old wooden cigar box from Cuba with one broken hinge.

 Chapter 12

            As he headed southeast to his midafternoon coffee break and debriefing with Doodle and Crystal, Jenks contemplated the personalities that made up the power structure of Panhandle County. They had been lovingly referred to since Jenks’s second term as the Panhandle Mafia.

            Doodle—an earnest young Republican, a true believer, and a regular attendee at the First Baptist—had a lifelong goal of, someday soon, becoming governor of the great state of Florida. Jenks had all but promised that he would retire after the next term, run for circuit court judge, and support Doodle as his replacement. A stint as county sheriff, a couple of terms as state senator, and he would be set up to run for the U.S. House of Representatives and then governor. Florida was, perhaps, the only state where a name like Doodle was a political asset.

            Mavis Crystal practiced politics as naturally as she breathed. It was just a logical extension of her perpetual coffee-klatch existence. In a given week, everyone in Panhandle County stopped by to shoot the shit with Mavis and her regulars. She gathered and disbursed information, dispelled rumors, set the record straight on issues, and formed public opinion on subjects as widely varied as the pros and cons of fluoridating public water supplies to whether or not the new airport in West Bay would ruin Panhandle County’s bucolic ambience.

            Jenks and Doodle used her as a regular source of law enforcement intelligence and advice. She had been, for example, the progenitrix of the famous marijuana tax that highlighted Jenks’s first term as sheriff.

            The only serious crime in Panhandle County, aside from sporadic drunken dueling with Magnum pistols between neighboring double-wides, was the thriving pot farms that nestled among the sand pines and palmettos up and down Choctawhatchee Bayou. Jenks’s predecessor, Sheriff Lee, had been a silent partner in the business.

            When he took office, Jenks confronted the problem, with the advice and consent of Mavis, head on. He called the farmers together, after-hours, in the back room of Crystal’s for a summit conference.

            “Boys, there’s a new sheriff in town,” he began with a line that he had been dying to use for a month. This got a few chuckles and broke the ice.

            “Look,” he continued, “I know what you are doing down those red roads. I don’t have the time, manpower, or energy to crack down. I do, however, have the ability to fuck up your profit margin, so here’s the new rules.” He looked around to see if everyone was paying attention. “One, I want each of you to pick a local problem and ‘donate’ Sheriff Lee’s share to it. Short me, and I’ll know. I may be a drunk, but I’m smarter than all of you combined. Comprende? I’m talking to you there, Jethro.” He gestured toward a huge bearded and tattooed local wearing a camouflaged baseball cap that proclaimed, “Beer is the only reason I get up every afternoon.”

            “Jethro” looked around nervously at being singled out, gave Jenks the “who me” gesture, and responded, “Cletus . . . Name’s Cletus Brazzel.”

            “Whatever. Cletus, who are you going to donate to and how much?” Jenks pressed the question. Cletus looked around again, clearly uncomfortable at being called on to speak in front of the others.

 “Ah . . . Five hunnert a month to ah . . . the new YMCA upta Palmetto?”

            “Y’s fine,” said Jenks, consulting a dog-eared pocket notebook he had found behind a loose piece of sheetrock in the sheriff’s private office, “but the amount’s twenty-five hundred.”

            Cletus’s sheepish downward glance, at being caught attempting to so grossly shortchange the sheriff, signified consent. Jenks methodically went around the room extracting commitments and, occasionally, consulting Sheriff Lee’s notebook for conformation. Once or twice, he “suggested” a good cause that had been underpledged or neglected to be sure the largesse got the widest possible distribution.

            “Rule 2,” he continued after the financial arrangements had been concluded. “Don’t sell any of your crap in this or any surrounding county. Take it down to Panama City or Destin. Up to Tallahassee maybe. Market’s better there anyway.” He looked around the room, forcing agreement by individual eye contact.

            “Rule 3, if you must settle your differences with violence, take it up north of I-10 to Leon County or, better yet, across the state line. Someplace where Doodle, Doc Johnston, and I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to process your shit-ass bodies and fill out a bunch of forms.” He glanced at his new chief deputy who, clearly, was not copasetic with any of these arrangements.

            “Finally, rules 4 and 5,” he concluded. “Shoot a civilian or one of my deputies and I’ll personally hunt you down. In the unlikely event you survive apprehension and your stay in county lockup, I’ll see to it that Judge Periwinkle sends you to Old Sparky.” He paused to emphasize this important point and then continued. “Last but not least,” Jenks concluded, “these rules are subject to change any time I say. Got it? Oh, one more thing—I’m gonna burn a field now and then just to make it look good. I’ll pick one that belongs to whoever has pissed me off the most. We all on the same page in the hymnal? Good. Now, beat it before I arrest the sorry lot of you. Oh, and one more thing—no meth labs. I find any of you operating a meth lab, and the whole deal is off. Got it there, Jethro?”

            Clearly relieved to be dismissed, the group, all muttering terse affirmative responses, shuffled out to a gravel parking lot filled with disreputable, red dirt–covered off-road vehicles of various makes and models and disappeared in all directions into the dark night.

            Contrary to Doodle’s initial trepidations, drug-related crime virtually disappeared in Panhandle County. The Y got a new building complete with an indoor Olympic swimming pool and a full-sized hardwood basketball court. The clinic in Choctaw Landing got a new annex and open MRI. The county animal shelter added facilities for a hundred strays, and the hospital in Palmetto got a surgical center. The high school was able to start a foreign-exchange program, and ironically, a student-run “Just Say No!” campaign.

The only gun crime in the county during Jenks’s first term occurred when Bitsy Boone caught her husband and second cousin, Scud Boone, in bed with two strippers from Sammy’s. She shot him in the groin three times with the .25-caliber Beretta Woodchuck. It had been a gift from Scud on Mother’s Day. Locals who knew them conjectured that Scud, anticipating that it might someday be used for such a purpose, had chosen the diminutive caliber for its lack of knockdown power. Scud recovered without permanent disability, declaring that the experience had caused him to take Jesus as his personal savior, and refused to press charges.

            Jazzbo Jackson, of course, was a registered Democrat. However, privately, he acknowledged that the black communities of Gideon and Titus would have no political power at all in this strongest and whitest of white Republican strongholds without some sort of alliance. Consequently, he acted as a liaison between the black minority and the white community.

As a lifelong member of both the Sons of Ham and the Church of the All-seeing Eye, Jazzbo knew every black family in the county. As a graduate of Palmetto High School and Panhandle Community College, where he set state records for the 100-meter dash and yards receiving before he finished his career at Florida State, Jazzbo felt at home among white folks and was invited into their homes as, more or less, an equal.

            Jazzbo’s politically incorrect handle had actually been given to him by his mother. Only she knew that he had been named after an obscure blues player from Biloxi with whom she had cavorted, briefly and happily, as a young girl.

            At Sheriff McCracken’s insistence, out of the marijuana tax, Titus and Gideon each got a new rec center with barbeque facilities, outdoor basketball courts, and horseshoe pits. The All-seeing Eye got new vinyl siding. The Sons of Ham got a new HVAC system, a refrigerator, and a wet bar.

            Jenks also made Jazzbo his second assistant deputy. He looked sharp, tall, and lean in his new red-and-blue-trimmed grays with the gold lieutenant’s bars on the collar. In it, he strutted around the female population of Gideon as the only black guy named Jazzbo could strut.

            Jim Nickels was born with the talent to run a high-powered newsroom in Atlanta, Dallas, or Miami. He had the Pulitzer to prove it. Unlike Jenks, however, after success had graced him, he allowed his dipsomania to get the better of him. Fired from his last-chance job, as a beat reporter, for a rag in Tallahassee, Nickels purchased and ran the Palmetto Leaf with the modest proceeds from sales of pulp fiction authored under various nom de plume and a small inheritance from his mother.

Like most real journalists, Jim was completely jaded and disdained all politics and politicians. In the land of the small-town newspaper, however, this was not a viable option. Jim depended upon the goodwill of his neighbors to buy, advertise in, and even fill the pages of his modest daily. He published, for example, a regular column written by Bruce and Diego, coproprietors of the Palmetto Garden Centre, and an occasional article by Widow Greene on wine. The local theatre group, the Palmetto Players, provided pages of free photos and copy. Doodle submitted a regular weekly column, “County Crime Stoppers,” and Mavis published her menu specials.

Since he had no choice, Jim followed the line of least resistance, and the Leaf supported local candidates who Jim deemed most likely to win—usually a self-fulfilling prophecy—and generally favored the position adopted by popular consensus. This usually put him squarely behind Jenks and Mavis on most issues.

Bubba Clark was sort of a wild card. He—along with his band, Bubba and the Bubbettes—had enjoyed regional success as a country and western favorite with crossover capabilities. His biggest hit, “Lap Dance Love,” had made it to number 2 on the top forty in both country and rock ’n’ roll.

Touring the Gulf Coast and playing until all hours in joints like the Wonder Bar in Mexico Beach, Area 51 in Navarre, and of course, the Flora-Bama had eventually wearied Bubba. In his early forties, he sold the bus, paid off the Bubbettes in tax-free hundreds, hung the old Strat on the wall, and bought the pissant fifty-thousand-watt local station WVLA: The Voice of Lower Alabama—89.7 on the AM dial of Palmetto, Florida.

Bubba switched the format from local farm reports, football games, and evangelists to old-time rock to accommodate the increasingly younger, hipper baby boomer demographic of the area. He handled the five to eleven am drive time slot himself and stayed in perpetual hot water with the FCC and the ladies at the First Baptist for his profane, off-the-cuff remarks on issues of both local and regional interest.

He had, for example, once suggested that Governor Bush solve every problem he faced by simply declaring the unstoppable cannabis, kudzu, and dollar weed to be the official state plants of Florida and disbanding the Florida Public School System entirely.

If everyone had their yard choked with these ubiquitous pests, he declared, it wouldn’t be socially necessary to continuously spray them with noxious chemicals and spend thousands on lawn-care professionals in a vain effort to kill them out. This would have the combined benefit of improving the rapidly declining environment, decreasing the state’s dependency on Mexican labor, and putting dope dealers out of business because pot would grow free on every street corner.

His reasoning behind doing away with public schools was equally sound—the economy of the state of Florida increasingly depended on an influx of northern retirees. They paid more taxes, spent more money, used the roads less, and were virtually no burden on the criminal justice system. They had already spent a butt load educating their own children and resented the shit out of school taxes. Florida public schools weren’t really educating anyone anyway. They just babysat riffraff until it was time for them to graduate to welfare. Anybody, he reasoned, too poor to put their kids in a private school could just goddamn move to Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi. A few more illiterate black and white trash urchins there wouldn’t even be noticed, he opined. That one cost him $10,000 and a week off the air, mostly, for the goddamn.

            Bubba generally took whatever position on local issues that amused him at the time. Consequently, Bubba came into the fold of the Panhandle County Mafia as sort of a reverse endorser. He needed to be told not who to support but, rather, who not to. The best favor Bubba could do for a candidate was to talk about the other guy.

He almost single-handedly set prissy old circuit judge Lucian Periwinkle to a long-overdue retirement of growing hot-house roses by harping on his irritating affectation of riding an antique Schwinn cruiser to court every morning against traffic on 79, wearing a silk bowtie, a straw panama hat, and a sear sucker suit.

Another time, all but one of the county commissioners were indicted and convicted of a vast conspiracy of corruption. The constituency of the lone honest survivor was convinced by Bubba to turn him out in the next election because he was so oblivious and ineffectual that it wasn’t even necessary for the crooks to bribe him to get his vote. He was, as Bubba summed it up, unfit for public office because he was “too stupid to steal.”

Along with himself and, now, Widow Greene in the place of her late husband, this unlikely cabal of disparate personalities held sway over the voting patterns of Panhandle County and Northwest Florida. Politics, mused Jenks, in addition to being the last refuge of scoundrels, also made for strange bedfellows.

Chapter 13

            The box had been refitted with a nail in place of the broken hinge pin and a latch jury-rigged from two small upholstery tacks and a piece of kite string. Loretta fingered the inlaid lettering on the lid of the box for a moment before she opened it. The box had been given to her by her father when she was just a little girl. After lighting up the last cigar from the box, he had taken her upon his lap and solemnly handed it to her.

            “Lori,” he told her, “keep everything that means something to you in this box. When it doesn’t any more, throw it away. Then you’ll always be able to remind yourself of what’s important and what’s not.” She had made the repairs herself—the broken hinge when she was in college and the latch when she was twelve.

            As she unwound the kite string and slowly opened the box, she felt gratified to note that it still smelled faintly of cigars. She stopped for a second to savor the aroma that always reminded her of her father.

            The box had contained many and various items in the fifty-five years she had possessed it. Lord, she thought, how could it be that long? At five, she put nothing in the box but statues of horses. At ten, it was a rubber ball and a set of jacks with one missing. In the seventh grade, she had thrown out everything. She replaced it with stories on mimeograph from the school paper about the exploits of junior-high sports star Tom Somebody (she couldn’t remember his last name) and a Peewee Reese trading card that he had dropped in her presence in the hall at school.

            Now, the box contained only six items—a faded and deteriorating Crown Royal bag, a small packet of letters bound together with the tassel from a graduation mortar, a larger packet wrapped in brown paper and twine, two photographs, and a size-8 class ring: Centralia High School, 1964. The ring had been wrapped with green yarn so that it would fit her size-6 finger.