Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [25]
On down the street, the drugstore. A modern low brick-and-glass building, out of place among the Victorian mansions and nineteenth-century storefronts. Up near the front window, paperbacks in two spinning wire racks, comic books and magazines fanned on shallow shelves to display a teasing strip of their bright covers. A quick flip through Hot Rod, and then Stag. Each world no more or less fictive than the other. At the counter, Stubblefield bought an envelope of Stanback powders and a Jacksonville Times-Union. Walked out with the powders in his raincoat pocket, the newspaper folded under his arm as if it were the Times of Los Angeles or London or New York.
He strolled on in the rain to the monumental post office with the WPA mural on the lobby wall depicting conquistadores in crested helmets and Seminoles and palm trees. At the wall of little brass-doored cubbyholes, he twisted the knobs in the correct combination and pulled out his mail. Then down to the dock, the boats in for the day. Widely spaced raindrops pocked the stretch of intercoastal that separated the island from the mainland. Stubblefield bought a pound of shrimp, paying right across the gunwale of the boat. He held three sheets of classifieds out to the crewman, who scooped heaping double handfuls onto the paper and said, That look about like a pound to you?
—At the very least, Stubblefield said.
Some of the shrimp were still tail-kicking, antennae twitching, the little black eyes fading. Cockroaches of the sea, but nevertheless tasty. Later he would boil them with Old Bay and peel them and dip them in ketchup with enough lemon and horseradish to bring tears to the eyes and an expanding ache to the sinus. He folded the paper around the dying things, tucking the ends into a neat bundle, the paper already turning wet and grey when he stuffed the package down in his raincoat pocket and felt the shrimp move against his hip.
He checked the front page banner to be sure of the day—Tuesday—and stopped in for one quiet vodka tonic in the brown light of the bar near the docks. His deal was simple. Sunday and Monday, nothing. Friday and Saturday, three or four or so. But Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, only one while he read the paper and opened his mail. Afterward, no dawdling. Pay up and leave.
Stubblefield sipped his drink and tore the envelopes open. Bills, mostly. Including one for a telephone pole he’d knocked down somewhere on the Mississippi coast last year, totaling a lovely green Austin-Healey in the process. Four dollars a month to the phone company nearly forever. Then, a letter from a lawyer up in the mountains expressing condolences for the death of his grandfather and informing him of his inheritance. Various parcels of land, plus the farmhouse and outbuildings, the Wayah Lodge, and the historic tavern, remnant from stagecoach days.
All in sad neglect and disrepair. Those were the lawyer’s exact words.
Stubblefield imagined the corncrib he had played in as a boy melting into the dirt, the springhouse caving in, kudzu overwhelming the garden.
Farther down the page, and more positive, a mention of monthly rental income plus a percentage of net from the historic tavern. Now called the Roadhouse, according to the lawyer, and mainly a late-night sort of place featuring live music. But a potential liability despite its being the only profitable piece of the inheritance.
What Stubblefield read into the euphemisms was that the tavern, bought by his grandfather as a folly, like collecting eighteenth-century china or old black-powder firearms, had become an illegal bar in a dry county. Which made a fitting inheritance, since his grandfather never was the kind of hard-shelled man to deny himself or another the simple joy of a drink at the end of day.
From toddlerhood until he was eighteen, Stubblefield had spent every