Long Time Leaving (51 page)

My order is always the same. You have to stick with what gets you centered. I carry my order to the room where CNN or ESPN is playing. (Personal preference over the room where Fox News is playing.) I distribute about two-thirds of the chopped onions (there are always more than enough) carefully so that they cling to the chili and therefore to the dog
as a whole. That way my every bite of chili dog will partake of all of its elements.

I take the first bite. Yes. I did grow up in this area. My youth was not a dream.

Later, I am standing out in front of the Varsity with Nancy. There is nothing stuck-up about her. She works in a cubbyhole on the premises whose door is marked “Janitor's Closet.” Emerges frequently to make sure the Varsity is still being itself. She is slender. She eats lunch at the Varsity every day.

“What is that huge pointy building over there looking down on us?” I ask.

“C and S Bank Tower,” she says. “Or Nation's Bank, or whatever it is these days. Banks! I can't keep track of banks.”

But the Varsity can keep track of me. “I want to leave this place right here,” Nancy said once when an interstate expansion threatened it. “I want it to be the one thing in Atlanta where, when people see it, they know they are home.”

Y
'all's mascot is a mullet?” the extremely young waitress at Angelo's asks us, with—as Dan will put it later—“a mixture of pity and disbelief.”

Yes, we tell that sweet young person. There are no Alligator Point Fighting Mullets in your generation, we tell her, because Alligator Point High School was blown out to sea by a hurricane long ago, but we remember; and we, old Fighting Mullets one and all, are back for a reunion.

The reunion part is true. Every year since 1980 we have convened at Alligator Point—which is in the Florida panhandle, on the Gulf, near Sopchoppy, Medart, and Panacea—to fish, eat, drink, swim alligator-infested waters, tell stories, and argue.

The school and the Fighting Mullets are figments of the annual T-shirt. This is Gerald's year to bring commemorative T-shirts for everybody, and his shirt has a mean-looking fish in a boxing stance on the front, and on the back the following:

That's us. Vereen teaches English and writes critical works, Gerald is a college dean and writes novels, Bobby is (to oversimplify drastically) a roofer, Dan is in the floor-covering business, Cliff runs a communications-consultancy firm from his country house, and Jim teaches creative writing and writes poetry. We live in six different towns, but we are all Southern and overeducated, and we have known each other for close to thirty years. Vereen's mother and stepfather, Flonnie and Bill Long, own a house on the beach at Alligator Point, where we get together for a week every June to disagree with one another. This year we argued about what should be the Fighting Mullets’ fight song:

“Float like a dead mullet, sting like a—”

“No. Sting like a bullet, cackle like a pullet: mullet, mullet, mullet—”

“No. Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, / Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd.’ ”

“Keats. ‘Lamia.’ What does that have to do with mullet?”

Keats's poem “Lamia” has to do, in fact, with a woman who turns out to be a multifariously patterned serpent, which is not to suggest that our annual outing is gender-biased; it is just an experiment in same-sex cohabitation.

Vereen and Jim get the main bedroom with the large beds and keep it very neat; Gerald and I get the other bedroom with the single beds and keep it messy; the others sleep on the porch and leave vitamins lying around. Jim and Vereen, the rest of us concede (because it is not important to us), are more serious sportsmen than we are. Whether that confers upon them anywhere near as much authority as they seem to think it does is one of many bones of contention.

Some of us (or at least one: Cliff) maintain that the best T-shirt is Cliff's from 1980. It says, “See You Later, Alligator. Harvey-Young Funeral Home, Crawfordsville, Fla.” That comes from a joke played on Gerald the year before. We told him that the funeral home on the road to
Tallahassee was giving out T-shirts, so he went in and asked the lady-of-hushed-tones at the desk if he could have one. She looked at him as if that were the most morbid thing she had ever heard in her life.

Others of us (anyway, Dan) favor Dan's T-shirt, which brings out our common background as English majors. (Bobby went to MIT so I guess he majored in something else, but he is the author
of Roofing,
the definitive text.) Dan's T-shirt has a leaping fish on the front with the legend “but at my back I always hear” and, on the back, what may be the only visual rendering anyone has ever seen of time's winged chariot (which in Marvell's poem is “hurrying near”) with someone fishing from it.

Jim's favorite T-shirt may well be his, which simply bears a map of Alligator Point. Jim has a certain austerity. His wife is a scientist. (Which does not mean, as one of us pointed out heatedly this year in an argument about synapses, that he is a scientist.)

I personally admire the economy of my T-shirt, on the front of which Albert, the alligator in
Pogo,
is pointing. I have a certain austerity, too, which has led others of us to accuse me of being afraid of sharks when, in fact, I am afraid only of sharks that are bigger than the boat.

Next year Bobby is in charge of T-shirts. There is no telling what Bobby, who is a member of the Roofers’ Hall of Fame, will come up with. At the banquet following his induction into the hall, he danced, for some reason lost in the mists of roofing social history, with Chubby Checker.

Vereen hasn't done a T-shirt yet. My hope is that when he does, it will depict what happened when he came to Panacea as a boy and left two rods and reels with baited hooks outside overnight. In the wee hours, he was awakened by a terrible uproar. Free-range hogs had come along and swallowed the bait and were running around dragging the tackle. Free-range hogs used to be common in the area, which is still pretty interesting. There is a big realty-company billboard up the highway that says
SELLING
F
LORIDA'S LAST FRONTIER.
Panacea, incidentally, is where Angelo's is. Probably the best right-off-the-boat grouper restaurant in the world.

But what you are wondering is, do we catch any fish?

Well hell yes we do. Stingrays (Vereen cooked one once and ate it) and catfish and squirrelfish and snakefish and toadfish, but we also catch good fish. For instance, in June of ’85:

That is a direct quote from Jim's chart: a maritime map of the area around Alligator Point. Vereen has for some years maintained a spiral notebook of observations, on the cover of which someone has written “Vereen's Petty Little Alternative to Jim's Chart Which He Thinks Is So Great,” but everyone except maybe Vereen knows that Jim's chart is the official record. For we have covered this chart with historical notes in various hands—sometimes several different hands within a single entry. Here (with my own parts italicized to give you some idea of the truth of the matter) is the composite account of the time a shark got on Gerald's hook and then a bigger shark started chasing it, and I started yelling, “CUT IT LOOSE”:

In fact, we cut it loose, finally. The big one was bigger than the boat. Here are some other entries:

Mr. Brent is one of the several guides who have taken us out on the flats for sea trout and redfish, or thirty miles into the Gulf for grouper and mackerel and cobia. Fishing is, of course, a guide's medium, as football is a coach's and TV a marketer's. Our guides sometimes tell us things like “You've come on a $500 fishing trip with three-dollar tackle” and grow irate when we don't snatch grouper quick enough to keep them from scooting under rocks and cutting our lines, but we try not to let them get us down.

Hubert, who never changed the name of Bud's Marina after taking it over from Bud many years ago, is an inspiring fisherman. A power line burnt off both limbs on his right side. To fish, he straps on an appliance that a rod handle fits into. He closed the marina last year, but he took us out fishing this year and put us on to some reds that were so heavy they broke our lines. He also told us that when a terrible screech arises from the marshes in the night and a child asks him what it is, he says, “That's one 'em nine-foot jumpers.”

“Will they bother you?” the child will ask.

“Eat you up. Seems like they get worse every year. I've never seen 'em so bad as they are this year.”

Hubert also said he drank so many beers the other afternoon that he woke up in the night craving a glass of water. “That water was the best I ever tasted. Tasted so good I woke my wife and got her to try some. She didn't appreciate it.”

The chihuahua reference is to a discussion we had with Lib, Hubert's wife, about her chihuahua, of the semihairy variety. She told us that having a chihuahua around will cure your asthma, that wild chihuahuas roam Mexico in packs, and that you don't see many chihuahuas in this country anymore. She repelled an intruder with a.22 once. We all admire Hubert and Lib. Jim worries, not without reason, that some of us give them the impression that we aren't serious enough about fishing.

Buck's house is next door to Flonnie and Bill's. Buck used to play minor-league ball. Stuart and John Kirven are Gerald's and my sons. We have stopped inviting sons because when they come we fathers spend all our time wrangling over getting the sons into the best boat with the best guide and the best bait. We have never invited wives. We talk to wives regularly on the phone, though. Here is an entry from the chart (which no one can explain today, but that's Bobby), in reference to a call from Cliff's wife:

We talk about the differences between men and women. This year one of us brought up something he had read somewhere, a woman writer's complaint: that whenever women want to talk to men about feelings, men think they are trying to start an argument. Discussion followed, which actually produced a rough consensus: that whenever a woman wants to talk with a man about feelings, it does—whatever the man says-start an argument. However, one of us refused to endorse the consensus, so that, in case it got back to the women that we had reached such a conclusion, we could each claim to be the dissenter.

Once Vereen said a conceivably profound, if rather uxorious, thing:
that the reason men find women so difficult to understand is that women are the only people men ever really get to know.

“The mackerel-crowded sea,” one of us said on our last day this year, and another of us responded, “Yeats.” We were bouncing along over choppy water in a haze of sunblock, fish scales, beanie-weenie juice, beer, and long familiarity, returning from way out in the Gulf in Coach Metcalf's charter boat. He is a good guide, though he tends to treat us as if we were on one of his high-school teams. He is proud that his son, who is white, went to a predominantly black college because he could play football there.