Written in Iowa City, 1993
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[Click here for Table of Contents]
“Jack, I don’t know about this,” Ramona said as they crossed the tiny bridge at East Bridge Street and pulled into Saugerties. Night had descended, the air had chilled and there to greet them as they turned onto the first business block were two flaming trash barrels. An assortment of shadowy figures with flickering orange faces stood around them warming their hands.
“What the fuck…” Jack said, his voice trailing off into a whisper.
They passed boarded-up building after boarded-up building as they drove up Partition Street hill. Two blocks and not a single soul, then a solitary swath of light revealed three or four men on line outside a lone, thin storefront which remained un-boarded, but whose windows were caged with industrial strength chicken wire.
“What’s that?” Ramona said.
“Liquor store, looks like.”
“It’s eerie.”
“It’s depressing.”
They rounded the corner onto Main Street and then to Market and there beneath the inner-city glow of a high-intensity street lamp was la Bouche Creole.
“Guess we better lock’em up,” Jack said, cutting the engine in a space right in front. As he got out of the car he noticed someone heading towards them from across the street. Instinctively he went around to Ramona’s side and shepherded her towards the restaurant. The man reached them just as Jack was reaching for the door.
“Spare change?”
The restaurant door opened just then and a woman with a lot of lipstick came out and bulldozed the man with a voice like a sailor’s, “I told you not to come around here.” She ushered Jack and Ramona inside.
Jack assumed the woman to be “Margo” although she didn’t formally introduce herself. “Sorry about that. You folks up from the city?” They said that they were. “Then you must be used to that. I came up here four years ago myself and stayed. I think the panhandlers followed me.”
The place was dimly lit by an odd assortment of lamps, any one of which might have come straight out of Lucy and Ricky’s living room. On the walls were a mounted kingfish, an ad for a cola Jack had never heard of, a tarnished trombone with a dent in it, a washtub and various other washed-out items. She seated them at adjacent sides of a table for four and drew their attention to a chalk board on which the menu was scrawled. Jack and Ramona squinted to see what was available.
“We make a cajun martini here,” Margo said.
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“Straight shot of Tanqueray, except we leave about a dozen jalapeños soaking in it for a month before we serve it at the bar.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Ramona hazarded to try one also and Margo said she’d be back to take their order.
The place had maybe fifteen tables, five of them filled altogether, all by New Yorkers up for the weekend it seemed. A hundred miles from urbana, a thousand more from the nearest bayou, they had all convened in burnt-out Saugerties for a little cajun cooking.
“Seems like tonight’s the night we should all be huddled around one big table,” Ramona said.
“You want to eat dinner with these people?”
On a second glance, there was something pretentious about most of them.
“I guess not…what are you having?”
“Something with a lot of Tabasco Sauce.”
They decided to split the crawfish etouffee, a spinach salad and a basket of hush puppies. When it came, their food was piled ridiculously high on their plates as Rita had promised.
“It’s weird,” Ramona said, picking at her rice, “how many people ask you for money in New York and you just don’t see them anymore, but that one guy out there tonight…”
“He seemed out of place, didn’t he.”
“Has this town always been like this?”
“Not as far as I can remember, I don’t exactly understand what’s going on around here.”
Ramona took a few more listless bits then laid her fork down and sat back in her chair. Jack found it hard to eat with any gusto when Ramona wasn’t. They managed to finish the hush puppies, they were just to easy to keep popping in your mouth, but the spinach salad soon turned soggy, and four of the six inches of crawfish-laden rice found its way into a doggie bag.
On the way back to Kingston Jack noticed the lack of reflecting headlights on his left side.
“I think someone stole our side-view mirror,” he said.
“Is that our problem of the rent-a-car company’s?”
“We probably should’ve paid for that insurance option…”
# # #
“It’s getting cold early this year,” Ramona said, stretching her sweater sleeves to cover her hands. They’d ducked back into Rita’s for an extra layer of clothes and to stick the leftover etouffee in the fridge.
“What color were the leaves on the way up here,” Jack said, “were they golden yet or were they still green?”
“They were still green or…they must have been green or I would have noticed. How could I not have noticed?”
“I didn’t notice either.”
They looked at the trees as they walked along but saw only dark, leafy forms quivering in the wind.
“You know, you may have picked it right,” Jack said, “this could be the big fall foliage weekend, the trees up here can change overnight.”
“If the leaves came down this weekend I’d ask Rita if I could rake them, I love the way they smell.”
“Well, I wouldn’t count on them falling this weekend but…shit,” he said, pausing before a brick federal-style, “they got Tom Hecht’s house too.”
“Haven’t you seen the signs, Jack, most of the houses along here are B&Bs, a lot of them anyway.”
They resumed walking
“And this one was Ebel Knebel’s old house.”
“Who?”
“Ebel Knebel, I forgot about that guy. Remember Evil Knievel, they guy who jumped over the Snake River Canyon?”
“I think my brother had a toy motorcycle called that.”
“Mine did too, he jumped him out of our attic window and onto Mrs. Amery’s roof and we never got him back. Anyway, this is where Kevin Knebel used to live, we used to call him Ebel Knebel.”
“That’s kind of cute.”
“It was kinda cruel, actually, Kevin had a speech impediment. He pronounced his Vs like Bs. Before Evil Knievel came along we used to call him Kebin.”
Every house, now that Jack thought about it, had some memory or memories attached to it, if only as a type of landmark, a place where someone had given him a dirty look one time, a porch where an old man had sat in the afternoons, a yard that always had a chained-up dog barking his head off.
It was funny how he remembered not only the houses but even the cracks in the sidewalk. In New York, the sidewalks were all the same, but here in Kingston even the bluestone was part of the topographical map of his childhood, a blueprint to memories logged long ago, now re-emerging without prompting.
When they reached the uptown business district, four blocks from Jack’s boyhood home, the memories stopped. They had come up against a wall.
It was made of logs the height of phone poles, tied side-by-side like perfect teeth in a Hollywood smile. Each log was filed to a point on top, and there were smaller pointed logs tied up there too, set at odd angles so that they jutted like barbed wire, promising impalement to would-be invaders.
“I guess this is the Stockade,” Ramona said, stating the obvious somewhat jokingly to offset her amazement at its expanse. Jack was so dumbfounded he couldn’t come up with a clever response. “It’s strange,” she continued, “it’s so out of date that you wouldn’t think it would be so scary looking, but it is, it’s very ominous looking.”
“What have they done to my fucking town?” Jack said.
“There’s something exciting about it, don’t you think?”
“No.”
There was a closed entryway and a sentry standing before it holding a musket at his side. “What if we want to keep walking,” Jack said to him, “how do we get around this thing?”
“The Stockade opens at ten a.m. tomorrow, sir,” he said. He couldn’t have been more than 18 years old but he took his job very seriously, like a stone-face guard at Buckingham Palace.
“How can you barricade a public street?” Jack demanded, but the boy maintained his stance and said nothing.
“I’m getting cold, Jack, let’s go back,” Ramona said, “we can come back tomorrow.”
When they climbed under the down comforter sometime later, Ramona could tell that Jack was still disturbed by this Stockade business. She snuggled up to him as he lay there with his hands behind his head staring up at the ceiling fan. She gave him a squeeze, he didn’t respond. She gave him a little pinch on the thigh, he didn’t respond. She started to tickle his ear with her tongue and he brushed her away.
“I thought you wanted to see what it was like to get laid in Heather Hochstetler’s room?”
“I’m not in the mood anymore.”
“Be that way,” she said.
The antique bed creaked loudly throughout the house as she rolled over and left him to fume in the darkness.
Note, when I wrote this in 93, I didn’t actually believe this would happen to Saugerties, I was just creating a comparison for what comes later in the story…
I was half-expecting Jack to jump over the sharp poles of the stockade on a motorcycle. Alas, instead of acting like Steve, he's now pulling a Willard under the ceiling fan. Poor Ramona.