Six-sentence Stories and Artwork by Mike Handley

Road Tripswith Cecil

DedicationThis collection of nonfiction is dedicated to Rob McEvily, founder of the Six Sentences (6S) flash fiction and social networking sites for writers, as well as to Cecil Reddick of Rayville, La., my best friend and personal tour guide through an enchanted land. Rob’s website introduced me to micro writing, and Cecil knows how to feed my creativity.

Mike Handley

Swimmin’ with the FishesBobby Petrus, blue eyes grinning like he’d just painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa, was barely able to speak around a mouthful of adrenaline.

“Dang, boys, I’m still shaking,” he finally managed, offering up his wobbly skinned-up wrist as proof he’d snatched the Holy Grail of catfish. “I knew it was a big one right off, because as soon as I put my legs in there, it grabbed hold of my foot and started shaking it like a puppy dog!”

He and five other guys (including Cecil and me) were sharing the boat with a 50-pound flathead on Louisiana’s D’Arbonne Lake, all flapping their jaws -- though the catfish’s emitted only wet pops. Three of the men were wearing scuba gear and taking turns warning the other two not to pee in the water until AFTER they’d returned to the surface, hopefully with a fish on a rope.

The sport of wrestling the whiskered denizens out of sunken water heater cores isn’t for the faint of heart, as the “No Mamby Pambies Allowed”sign hanging above Bobby’s skinning shed warns.

A Woman Scorned (presented in three sixes)“Where do you want me to pull over?” Cecil asked, knowing full well that if he didn’t, I’d have grabbed the steering wheel. The gauge showing almost empty, we’d just veered off the blacktop and driven over the levee, hoping the flyspeck of Deer Park, La., would have a gas station closer than the one we knew was seven miles in front of us.

We’d barely entered the flood-prone settlement in Concordia Parish when our conversation died in my open mouth. Right there in the middle of nowhere -- on dry ground -- stood the rusting hulk of a steamboat, a ghost of good times past moored by rope to a nearby tree.

A Woman Scored (continued)

One of her twin stacks was prostrate, the other askew. The jagged panes in the many windows looked like teeth smashed in a bar fight, and I got the distinct impression I was looking at a poor kid’s version of the colorful plastic playgrounds outside fast-food joints.

***

I was out of the car before Cecil pulled the key from the ignition.

Circling the once-grand lady with my camera, my thoughts were of the painting that might result from the treasure we’d found. I’d breathe new life into the steamboat, moor it on the banks of the Mississippi, add a moss-draped live oak, or maybe a couple of boys on a raft, Sawyer and Finn, at night, perhaps by lantern light ...

While I was fantasizing about Mark Twain’s river rats, Cecil knocked on the door of the closest house. The man living there told him someone had bought the paddle-wheeler many years ago, floated it down the Mississippi and into the oxbow, and then paid handsomely (in advance) for a local guy to fix ’er up like new.

Before the hired man had time to do anything, he fell in love with a woman who saw his newly fattened bank account as a means to trade mosquitoes and bare bulbs for big-city lights.

***

A Woman Scored (continued)

The Twainscape hasn’t yet made it to canvas, though the “study” appears where this story opens. When my muse began whispering recently, I scheduled a Saturday night date with Google.

Imagine my delight when I connected the dots -- steamboat to Deer Park -- and learned not only her name (the Mamie S. Barrett), but also her long history. One hundred-forty-six feet long and 30 wide, she was built in 1921. Over the next 76 years, her home port included seven states, her name changed twice, and she served separately as a towboat, inspection boat, clubhouse, restaurant and showboat with a 120-seat theater on the main deck.

The flood of 1993 took her from Vicksburg, Miss., to a cut-off below Natchez, and she was later moored across the river in Vidalia, La., until another rain-swollen current swept her to Deer Park.

... and the Lord Take It (presented in three sixes)There are no flowers, real or faded plastic, within the small untended graveyard off Louisiana's Hwy. 135 between Rayville and Alto. No sign marks the turnoff onto the shotgun lot, and no fence encircles the few hand-chiseled headstones.

The graves occupy one corner of the property where the Poplar Chapel A.M.E. Church stood for more than 100 years. The old building's spine snapped about two weeks after I photographed it, and the heart pine and cypress bones have since been scavenged.

... and the Lord Take It (continued)

One of the graves belongs to the Rev. W.L. Landum -- born Dec. 16, 1852; died July 5, 1907. Below his particulars is this message, which some might argue is as appropriate now as it was a century ago:

THE LORD GIVE ITAND THE LORD

TAKE IT. BLESSITBE THE NAME OF

THE LORD

***And Then There was One

If there is a written history of the church, it's probably recorded on jaundiced pages inside a Bible, tattered by now and very likely not in Louisiana.

Though hardly ornate by today's standards, houses of worship built by black sharecroppers were like palaces compared to their homes. Many of the structures fell to ruin when machinery devoured the 50-cent-a-week jobs as efficiently as it ate cotton, soybeans and corn.

The congregations simply moved north, where steel-making required strong backs and sweat.

Most churches that survived were eventually bricked over or knocked down and replaced. Prior to its demise, Poplar Chapel was one of only two Pre-World War I rural black churches standing in Louisiana.

***

... and the Lord Take It (continued)

Remembrance

My friend, Cecil, knew I'd burn at least one roll of film when he showed me the swaybacked church not far from his home. As there hadn't been a sign during the many years he'd lived nearby, he couldn't tell me its name.

I went digging tonight.

I found a couple of deeply buried photographs and a reference to the "Popular" Chapel Church's being added to the National Register of Historical Places in 1989, when it was 86 years old. One account claims the entire building was turned to face the new blacktop when it was laid in 1926.

Whoever built it followed no blueprint; it was patched together like a quilt, or Johnny Cash's pilfered Cadillac -- one piece at a time, using elements of many architectural styles.

The Cadillac of Steaks!Cecil steered his little Ranger pickup, in which I’ve no doubt Jimmy Hoffa’s body is hidden, into the Four Forks Grocery parking lot.

Our grumbling stomachs reminded us it was midmorning, and we’d been up and sharing a deer stand since well before dawn. Driving down Hwy. 135 to Mangham, La., was the quickest route to full bellies.

More convenience than grocery store, the chief difference being that bare feet and man-chests were acceptable attire, he and I snagged the last sausage biscuits from the heated glass box on the countertop, fought over who would pay for them, and then sat at one of the several tables between aisles of groceries and a wall of fishing tackle.

As I noticed the containers of (live) red worms, crappie jigs and white shrimpers’ boots within arm’s reach, my friend told me we’d be coming back that night for Louisiana’s finest ribeye steaks.

Tip for TipsLong before my sternum was sawed open and my heart replumbed, Cecil and I collected his brother, Mitchell, one night and drove the half-hour to River West, a mile-long, all-you-can-eat, mostly seafood buffet in West Monroe, La.

Mitchell was on his fourth or fifth plate, I on my second, and Cecil was still working on his first when the conversation turned to tanning animal hides.

The brothers Reddick were wondering if their memories of a nearby tannery -- obviously long closed -- were flawed, when the Coppertone model of a waitress plopped down in a chair at our table and cheerily resolved the matter.

“There’s a tannery near where I live,” she chirped, “in the back of Charlene’s Beauty Salon.”

Mitchell’s the only man I’ve ever known who could laugh with a straight mouth, and it wasn’t because it was full of fried shrimp. Peals leaked silently from his eyes, while Cecil closed his and I had to bite my hand.

Squealing Over “Squealers”We’d spent the entire day measuring deer antlers at Simmons’ Sporting Goods, the two of us putting tapes to about 45 racks in eight hours. By quittin’ time, Cecil and I were ravenous, the cheeseburgers we’d wolfed down at 11:00 -- when someone took pity on us and practically pressed them into our hands -- were distant memories.

When we stepped outside for me to indulge my nicotine craving, the familiar smell of grease and corn meal slid past the Pall Mall tendrils, into my nostrils and coiled around my brain like an anaconda. Fifteen minutes later, we crossed the street and entered the Old Fish House No. 2.

I’m sure Cecil wondered if Jesus was in Bastrop, La., that day, laying hands on the never-ending piles of fried baby catfish (squealers) I piled onto my plates. Meg Ryan groans roiled from my mouth, and I hadn’t even tasted the homemade cinnamon rolls.

Oh, to Drive Miss Lauren (Hutton) presented in two sixes

Even with her gap-toothed, tobacco-stained smile, the old pop-eyed Buick Limited made my heart swoon. Although time and the elements had not been kind to the former queen of General Motors’ “affordable” eight-passenger coaches (meaning $2,360, which was about 50 cents a pound), I was smitten.

There might have been prettier and faster cars in 1941, certainly more expensive ones, but this rusting belle had more character than anything on the road in 2001, the year Cecil showed her to me. I would’ve scorned and traded my own ’94 Lincoln Town Car for her in a heartbeat.

When we pulled up next to the dilapidated shed in rural Louisiana, it was as if my friend had lifted the tent flap, introducing my virtuous Billy-Joe-McAllister eyes to a burlesque show. Rarely at a loss for words, I was struck mute with adjective overload.

***

Oh, to Drive Miss Lauren (continued)

Should I be found dead alongside a rural blacktop, reduced to braciole amongst the twisted wreckage, look for the abandoned and forgotten nearby. The cause of my demise is likely to be the old gabled house with a porch, gray as advancing storm clouds, or the rusting hulk of a vintage car or truck.

Like sirens, they whisper to me. I want to hear their stories, to photograph or to paint them.

It’s entirely possible that the old Buick’s owners heard the news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor while riding in that car, listening to WWL out of New Orleans or to nearby Monroe’s KNOE, the latter radio station owned by former Gov. James Noe, who was at Louisiana’s helm for a whole three and a half months.

If they missed that broadcast, they might’ve heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt describe Dec. 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy” while addressing Congress the following afternoon, an hour before the United States officially entered World War II.