Cherokee Purple

by Rob Hunter

part 4 of 9

Postwar USA and, after years of gas rationing, America was finding its wheels. And so were Harley Pigeon and Ed Seitz, and we headed south. I had my first set of new tires in four years; no bald, tweedy recaps with a telltale pink bubble of ancient inner tube poking out through the weave. Real tires, real rubber, no rayon, not the Akron recaps that peeled off in a couple of months.

Staying in the office, Ed and I lost money. On the road we made money. Milwaukee, Chicago, Vincennes, Evansville, through the Chattahoochee National Forest, Macon, Georgia to the Florida line. At Valdosta the sheriff’s brother-in-law operated an axle-popping mudhole at the county line and he had the only tow truck in the county. The state police looked the other way. Our alternate route was to scuttle over to pick up U.S. 1 at Waycross to miss the Valdosta mudhole and the chance of a sleepover in the lockup.

The Route 1 swing took us into Gainesville and Ocala — the beef and citrus belt of central Florida — where we had one account, an alligator tannery.

Factory Findings met our suppliers’ bottom lines and the rest was gravy. We charged what the traffic would bear. Our maguffin was that we guaranteed delivery or we paid. While the trains could take weeks, we knew the roads, the mud holes and speed traps of the South. We rented a truck, and hauled our own freight. We ran at a loss for the first year. Then came Dixie Duck and their contract for mothballing the U.S. Navy.

We liked Piedmont, South Carolina. Ed Seitz and I parked the Buick along with our own weary flesh at the General Longstreet tourist cabins. The price was right — cheap — and, with the White Street Billiards and Snooker, we made it our base of operations. With no tourists to speak of, down-at-the-heels business travelers like us generally, times were slim for Deep South tourist courts in the days before air conditioning.

Charley Hoskins was a high hoper, though. In Charley’s view General Longstreet was a hero of the Confederacy, never mind the Widows of the Confederate War Veterans blamed him personally for Marse Robert’s defeat at Gettysburg. Rob’t. E. Lee insisted meeting the Yankees head-on was the gentlemanly way to carry on a war. Longstreet wanted to sneak up behind the Unions and split their forces. Gen. Lee overruled Longstreet and killed enough men to populate a sizeable shire.

Clearly, Lee was a boob. But Longstreet had posited a sneaky thing, ungentlemanly conduct for a true son of the South. The name Longstreet became anathema — after four generations even high school juniors did not deign to whisk their prom dates to Charley’s motor court cabins.

“Careful with the light. Use the light switch, not the pull chain.” Charley handed us our keys; he was being helpful.

From a habit of fleabag hotels, I shouldered the door open and reached for the chain anyway. I could see it hanging from the bare bulb ceiling fixture in the flashing light from the Flying Red Horse out front.

“Oh, dammit to hell!” But it was too late. I had grabbed an extended roll of flypaper. Some late arrivals were still buzzing.

One of the great inventions of the Twentieth Century, flypaper comes ten tubes for a dollar, fifteen cents for one. Makes sense to buy ’em by the box. You ever see the flypaper in the hardware store or down by the Ben Franklin? It comes with one open end from which protrudes a loop of string with a thumbtack. I flapped and flopped and danced around trying to shake loose from the adhesive while filling the basin left-handed from a blue enamelware pitcher.

Flypaper foretells the end of time for flies and stops there. No deeper meanings. Flypaper has not been reported to talk with human beings and warn them off some potentially disastrous course. It’s sticky and that’s about all.

The glue wouldn’t wash off. I grumped out to the pumps and cranked some gas over my hands. There was a chamber pot in the commode. When I went to dump it out in the privy the next morning, I checked for flypaper before I went in. Charley bought flypaper by the carton, a smart shopper.

Proceed to part 5...