A Little Bit off the Main Road

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"I remember this well," I said as the tires made a crunching sound on the gravel of the rural road. We were driving in the piedmont area of South Carolina.  My family has lived there since the early 1700's, and I guess I still have roots there. On this day we had visited another family cemetery searching for information for Claudette's never ending quest for knowledge about our ancestors. The road was in deep shadow from the tall pines and assorted hardwoods. In early summer the weather was warm, and I could smell the scent of the pines through the open sunroof. The road seemed to be relatively untraveled.  I remembered a time when the tall pines were once fields of corn, oats, and some cotton. That seemed to have been a lifetime ago.

"Hey, let's stop!" I said somewhat excitedly as we passed a dilapidated country store, adding, "I remember this place."

"Doesn't look like much to me, " Claudette said.

"This was Papa J's* place," I answered with a fondness in my voice, "I spent a lot of time here."

"At a country store?"

"Yeah, but it was more than that."

"Oh, yeah?"she asked.

"Get  out. I'll show you around."

"It looks abandoned," she said with some reservation in her voice.

"I'm sure it is. Mama told me that old Joe Carter  died several years ago.  He didn't have any children.  He didn't even have a wife.  Some said he was too mean for any woman to put up with him. But he didn't seem that bad to me," I told her as I got out of the car.  "Bought many a dollar's worth of gas from that pump," I said motioning to the old gas pump near the "Pure" sign. "Do remember Pure Oil gas stations?"

"No, I don't think we had those in California," she said following me to the building.

It was a small cinder block building about thirty feet wide and maybe forty feet deep. The screen door advertising Colonial Bread hung on one hinge. I pulled back the screen and pushed on the wooden door. It made a screeching sound as it opened.

"I don't think we should be here," she said with a bit of trepidation adding, "It's trespassing!"

"Did you see a "No Trespassing" sign?" I asked.

'No...but..."

"Aw c'mon.  Where's you sense of adventure," (a bit of verbal prodding on my part).

"Okay, I'm right behind you," she said in resignation.

The room was full of dust and trash. Spider webs were everywhere, and I'm sure I heard a small rodent scurry away. There was enough light from the broken windows to make out the interior. To our right was the battered and rusty form of a Coca-Cola drink box, the kind they once had that you could serve yourself from. The pot belly stove was in the corner, but the stove pipe to the ceiling was missing. There were the remains of straight-backed chairs with ratty cane bottoms. This was the corner where the old-timers would while away their days smoking their pipes and playing checkers. There was a counter in front of the back wall extending almost the complete width of the room.  Behind it were some shelves that once held cans of pork 'n' beans, sardines, potted meat, and crackers. Fishermen would stop by and buy the these on their way to the lake.  I remembered that there was another drink box behind the counter where Papa J kept the cold beer, the coldest PBR's in the county, and under that counter he kept a sawed-off twelve gauge shotgun loaded with double ought buckshot.

"What a mess," Claudette said.

"I know.  Nobody's been in here in years," I added. "Now, let me show you this. Follow me."
I took her hand and led her through the door in the corner of the back wall into another room.
It was a lot like I remembered.  In the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling on a fabric covered electric cord, was a brass socket with a clear incandescent bulb. In the corner and against the wall were a few tables with straight-backed chairs. One of the tables was made of those huge wooden spools utility companies get underground cable on.  There was a Miller High Life neon sign on the wall near the back door. Opposite the Miller sign on the other side of the door was the jukebox.

"What a dump!" She said.

"It may be, but once upon a time on Friday and Saturday nights it rocked."

"You would hang out here?" she asked.

"Yeah.  I worked in the mill down the road. It's closed now but in those days two hudred people worked there.  After I worked second shift, that's four to twelve, I'd come by here to unwind on the way home."

"You must have been bad off."

I chose to ignore this comment.  "You gotta quarter?" I asked.

"What for?"

"I want to see if that old jukebox works," I said.

"Are you crazy?  That thing hasn't played in years.  But, if it will help get us back on the road, I'll give you a quarter," she said with resignation in her voice, a tone I rarely heard.

She put the quarter in my hand and I moved to the ancient jukebox. It was a Seeburg with chrome glass tubes on the front and mirrors inside. It had the buttons on the front and held a hundred songs. It was great and had provided most of the illumination in the room.  There was dust and spider webs all over it, and one of the glass tubes in the from was broken. But I could still read the names of the songs, though most were yellowed with age.  There was Runaway, Twist and Shout, My Girl, Ring of Fire, Louie Louie, Crazy, Only The Lonely, Runaround Sue, I Fall to Pieces, and many more.  "What do you want to hear?" I asked.

"Anything. Let's just get out of here.  I still think we're trespassing."

I dropped the quarter in the slot and banged on the side of the jukebox until I heard the quarter fall, then made my choices. As if by magic the old machine came to life. I watched in amazement as the mechanical arm selected the record and placed it on the turntable before the tone arm dropped on it, and it began to play. I turned to Claudette and said, "Let's dance."

She came into my arms as the Platters began to sing, "Heavenly shades of night are falling, it's twilight time...." I held her close and closed my eyes as we began to move with the music, "Out of the mist a voice is calling, it's twilight time..." In my mind's eye I could see the place as it once was. Over next to the juke box was that  woman in her late forties all painted up.  She only looked good at closing time. I don't even remember her name.  In the corner was Frankie Willingham and Sonny Pratt with their girl friends.  They were arguing as usual about who had the fastest car.  Before the night was over they'd decide who was faster on that straight stretch of Highway 11 called Fairlane Flats.  No doubt money would exchange hands.

Sitting alone was Virginia Grimesley, the building contractor's wife. She was once a high school beauty queen, and some twenty years later she still turned heads. Her husband Billy spent a lot of time out of town working. Everybody knew that Deputy Armstrong kept her company in her husband's absence.

That was Freddie Fisher by himself.  He was a pretty big guy with a beer gut, but there was a lot of muscle there too. He wore his hair long and combed back in a duck tail. With pointed nose and black rimmed glasses he usually had a sour look on his face.  Freddie was known to carry a pistol, a snub-nosed thirty-eight. I never saw him use it and didn't want to.

There were a few more folks there too, mostly men and women who'd just finished their shift at the mill and had a little lint stuck to their clothes. It was going to be a good night at Papa J's, I could tell. But then..."Together at last a twilight time." the record was over.  I opened my eyes.

I followed the lead of my best girl out the door.

Twenty minutes later we were going through a small town.  "Think we could stop at a 7 Eleven for a Pabst Blue Ribbon?"

She did not answer.

*The characters in this post are real but their names have been changed.