Slocomb
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 22 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:
Slocomb, Alabama. February 22, 1989.
“You livin’ in this ve-hicle, are ya, Mistuh Lea-vitt?”
James Tew, assistant police chief of Slocomb, is reaching a conclusion that other people have a hard time accepting, too.
“Well, actually, I’m just sort of traveling through,” I tell him. “I’m a retired newspaper editor, and I’m . . . well, seeing the country.”
It isn’t a lie as much as it is a convenient synthesis of truths. I did that work for a couple of years when I couldn’t think of anything better to do, and my employer decided I shouldn’t do even that any more, and that is like being retired. And while I have been moving the truck only enough each day to stay out of trouble, I have been seeing the country in the process. I don’t want to have to tell Assistant Police Chief Tew that I am an unemployed itinerant because people in small towns have another word for that: bum.
He sits in his cruiser with the rear of my truck in his headlights, and he is trying to make out the lettering across the back of the truck in the glare cast back by the white fiberglass truck body and the mylar-and-velcro skirting I have put around it for the night. He remarks about my television antenna, an airfoil V of aluminum that cranks up and down and rotates by hand from the inside, a pretty impressive device for $125 and you-install-it.
“When I saw you parked here by the tower, I thought maybe you were working on it,” he says, stressing the last word so it sounds like “ee-it.”
“No, I just pulled up here because it was off the main road and there wasn’t anybody around,” I say.
He asks me for “some documents I could look at,” and I have to go into the truck for them. My cat, Bonzo, is standing with his front paws on the back of the couch, peeking through a curtain at the blinding light outside.
When I return to the cruiser, Assistant Police Chief Tew still hasn’t gotten out. He reaches over and unlocks the passenger door to the front seat.
“You wanna sit in here for a minute, Sidney,” he says. I wince. Nobody has called me Sidney since I was in elementary school 40 years ago, but that’s what my driver’s license says, and I’m not going to argue with an armed, heavy-set law enforcement officer on a rural road in a small town in Alabama in the middle of the night.
He lights a cigarette, and I can see that his reddish wavy hair is streaked with white across the right temple. The police radio blares. I guess he already has called in my registration plate numbers. Wind in the high wiregrass is making waves that spread away from the road through a chainlink fence and, about a hundred yards beyond, lap against the base of a tall metal tower that holds several satellite receiver dishes to the sky.
Does Assistant Police Chief Tew figure me for a foreign agent who is planning to sabotage the tower – a single incendiary device at the base of one of the legs would do the job – and thus deprive a significant section of southeastern Alabama of its cable TV service?
“What kinda power you use in that rig?” he asks. I tell him 12-volt batteries. Do I have an isolator between the engine and cabin batteries, he asks. I do, I say.
I’ll be damned, he wants to talk batteries. Besides being Slocomb’s second most prominent police officer, James Tew also is a knowledgeable hobbyist in radio and electronics, and he wants to tell me how I can install a second auxiliary battery with a toggle switch that will allow me to take cabin power from either source.
Ten minutes later, he lets me out of the cruiser.
“Nice talkin’ to ya, Sidney. Now if somebody else notices you out here, I’ll be able to tell ‘em who y’are.”
It is comforting to know that even if the Russians knock out all our satellites, the oldest network in the world – the good old boys – is still working fine in Slocomb, Alabama.
With his thumb and forefinger, he flips the cigarette out into the wiregrass and points to the truck.
“That’s what I wanna do someday,” he says and drives off.
I search the grass for a long time in the area where I last saw the red glow of that cigarette. I never do find it, but there is no fire.
– Sid Leavitt
Posted in Uncategorized |