El Camino

El Camino

I don’t recall Gene leaving Pembroke, excepting the occasional drive out to Butlers for a bottle.  He didn’t hang around to drink.  Not a social drinker, he would get a bottle in a paper sack and come back to the house. Nor did he drink all the time, or even every night. He was a weekend drinker, Saturday night after the store closed, he drank sitting on the edge of his bed in socks and underwear, swallow of whisky, chase it with Coke, and sit there till he fell back asleep.

Gene was my mother’s brother and the butcher at Humphrey’s Supermarket, one of two grocery stores in town.  He had worked at Humphrey’s since he left high school.  People said he was a good butcher.  He did bring home good bone-in bacon for breakfast and thick slices of ham for dinner.  A quiet man, he would come in after work at six or so, clean up, change clothes, eat dinner with my grandmother in the dining room.  Then he would watch Gun Smoke or Bat Masterson, which he referred to as Matt Basterson.  He considered this a joke.  Sometimes Gene would go out on the porch and sit in a rocker.  More often he just watched a little TV, go into his room, fall back on his bed and sleep. 

Gene was in his 50s when I lived in the house with he and my grandmother.  He looked like a man who had been in his 50s all his life though he had been young once, married a woman above his means, certainly beyond his aspirations.  They had two children.  She left after their second child, a son, was born.  She saw a better life beyond Pembroke, he couldn’t imagine anything more.  Their first child, a daughter, trained as an opera singer and on her infrequent visits would sing, thrilling Gene. While he may not have cared for opera he loved of his daughter and was proud that she sang so beautifully.  Perhaps she was the single shinning accomplishment of Gene’s life.  He put aside the drinking during her brief visits.

Gene’s son died as a teenager.  His mother let him come to Pembroke in summers, staying with Gene or with an uncle, Lint Stephens.  Stanley loved Pembroke and the quiet, familiar rhythms of a small town.  At the end of one summer his mother wanted him to come back home to where she then lived with her new husband.  She was insistent that Stanley return.  He didn’t want to go, and he didn’t.  He is buried out at Northside in the plot beside his Uncle Lint, forever sixteen.  My cousin Spencer was in the house when it happened.  There had been no warning, nothing dramatic until a single, loud gunshot after Stanley went back to his bedroom and closed the door.  Gene never talked about this, of course.  Nor did anyone else.  Families do not often talk about suicides.  What is there to say? 

There may be a little color even in the life of a quiet man.  In Gene’s case it was a cherry red 1959 Chevrolet El Camino.  The only thing cherry red about Gene was that car. He washed it every Sunday afternoon in the driveway.  Then he would towel it dry and drive around town, windows down, from the Ice House in the west, back to Warnell Street to the east, down Ash Branch Road and out to the cemetery where his son was buried, then past the high school, the Methodist Church, and back through town.  City limit to city limit.  If the weather was pleasant, he might drive down Highway 280 to the Canoochee River Bridge.  That was about it, enough for a Sunday, particularly if you drive slow.  Then back to the house, park the car, come up to the porch to unlace his shoes and wait for dinner.  Sunday after Sunday, weeks into years driving by. 

I’ve no idea what he thought about on those drives around town, or what he thought about sitting on the porch.  Maybe he had no interior life to talk about.  He had the butcher counter and the easy familiarity of routine.  Keep it simple.  Cutting meat for customers provided conversation, the customers themselves as familiar as cutting their pork chops and bacon.  The conversations were easy and brief.  ‘Yes ma’am, leave some bone and slice it thick.  About a pound and a half.  Mama’s doing well, thank you.  I’ll tell her you asked.’

Gene didn’t socialize very much beyond the daily conversations at the meat counter, conversations that would have sampled a good cross section of the town, so perhaps he kept up with the local news and gossip as well as anyone outside a barber shop.  Aside from the westerns on TV his only interest, so far as I could see, was reading pulp paperback crime novels he bought from a rack at the drug store. These he would sometimes discuss with Mr. Porterfield, my grandmother’s next-door neighbor.  Porterfield had for several years served as the Pembroke police chief and Gene considered him to be an expert source. 

Gene was still there when his mother died in 1964 and remained there after her death.  I left in the spring of ’64 but came back to Pembroke often, to visit my grandmother, sit on the porch, wave at the cars driving by, smell the rain on the street out front during afternoon summer storms.  She died that fall.  Gene continued to live in the house and shortly after my grandmother died he married.  Who knew?  Married a woman who, conveniently, lived right across the street.  Or maybe they got married.  Maybe they just moved in together.  Who now would know?  Betty Coley with flaming red hair, another El Camino Gene said of her.  The mother of four grown children she just moved across the street with Gene.  He still took his drives around town on Sunday, no longer alone.  They watched the westerns on TV and sat out on the porch in the evenings.  I don’t know if he still drank his whiskey and Coke.

Surprisingly, at least to me, Gene could dance, if rusty from lack of practice.  So said Betty.  In those last years of life on Saturday nights he and Betty would dance in the living room.  She said that Gene hadn’t danced since his wife left but that he could still do the steps, if a little stiffly, hand in the small of her back, stepping her around the room.  A long wait to pick up dancing again. 

In the year after my grandmother died, I was living in Savannah, working as a DJ and ignoring college.  Generally broke and low on gas I was in Pembroke one night and needed to get back to Savannah.  I didn’t have enough gas, didn’t have enough money to buy enough gas, even at .35 cents a gallon, so I decided to siphon some out of Gene’s car.  I could have asked him for $5 but that didn’t appeal to the mind of an 18-year-old, so I opted for petty theft, thinking better family than a stranger.  I got enough to get back to Savannah and thought I’d done so undetected, and continued to think so until my 50^th High School Reunion when a classmate who had worked part time at with Gene at the supermarket asked me if I remembered siphoning gas out of Gene’s car.  How did he know?  ‘Gene told me the next day,’ he said.  He’d been sitting on the porch in a rocker, hidden by a column covered with Confederate Jasmine, out of sight in the dark.  Said he just laughed about it.

Did Gene have a good life? He had good breakfasts of ham and biscuit, slow drives around town, a few minutes on the porch after dinner, westerns on TV, paperback detective stories, and the satisfaction of a daughter who had grown into a successful life.  He also bore the burden of a son lost to an early death.  And then, just in time, a little dancing.  He lived for about two years after he and Betty got together and then died of a heart attack.  He is buried out at Northside.  I’ve no idea what happened to Betty after his death.  She moved out, moved somewhere.  The house was empty for the first time in sixty-five years.