Then, occasionally, a modest main street of sorts. Meme’s Diner; the Boon Docks restaurant with cattle skull on the roof; Tumbleweed’s Smoke House with no explanation for the apostrophe; a pizza place boasting the “best service in town” with no explanation for the quote marks; Mayo Good Home Cookin Café; Daddy’s Place Bar-B-Q with a mural of Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, peacefully existing next to a mechanic’s garage with no customers and large, motionless white men in overalls leaning back in the humid shade as if they’d been asked to pose for Life magazine in 1965.
A vintage sports car zoomed across the Aucilla River, down into the elbow of the Panhandle between Goose Creek Bay and Hog Island Sound. Coleman sat up after firing a fattie. “I know I ask this question a lot, but this time I really mean it: Where in the heck are we going?”
Serge made a skidding right at a wooded fork. “To possibly the most isolated oasis of funk in all the state—and the first stop on my Route 66 tour of Florida.”
“What’s its name?”
“Sopchoppy.”
“You mean like that biker at the No Name Pub?”
“It’s Creek Indian for ‘long and twisted.’”
Coleman took a deep hit. “Works for me.”
“The place is so remote and tiny, yet has all kinds of bonus features as both the self-proclaimed ‘music capital of North Florida’ and ‘earthworm-harvesting capital’ of the whole state. That is a bold range of culture.”
“Worms and tunes.” Coleman popped a Bud. “Dig it.”
Serge turned onto Rose Street. “There’s the town’s recording studio, converted from a clapboard rooming house, and over here on Yellow Jacket Avenue is the historic old high school gymnasium, which hosts monthly performances of the Sopchoppy Opry.”
“That’s a high school gymnasium?” said Coleman. “Looks like the Alamo.”
“Good analogy,” said Serge. “It alone is worth the visit: hands down the state’s coolest gymnasium, or anything in the scientific family of gymnasiums. Constructed in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration, it’s a Spanish-mission-style fortress of cemented-together limestones. Not bricks, the actual stones, forming an arched facade where the basketball hoops are mounted inside.” Serge grabbed a lockpick set and a ball from the backseat. “I must shoot a basket.”
Coleman sipped his beer in the convertible and listened to quietness. Serge ran back out.
“That was fast.”
Serge vaulted over the driver’s door. “Strike that from the list.” He drove off, making a series of turns with his eyes in the sky. “The cool thing about small towns like this is you can navigate with just the water tower.”
“I see it. And there’s an old train depot . . .”
“. . . Now a museum.” Serge pulled up to the curb in the busiest section of town, a total of three buildings long. Sopchoppy Grocery was made of red bricks with a tin awning and a sign that hung over the sidewalk with 1950s artwork of a pile of vegetables next to a slice of raw meat. Smaller signs in the windows advertised Coca-Cola and Cracker Jack, then homemade notices for septic repair, a lost dog, canoe rentals, a carpet service called Dirt Doctors, and an announcement that “local squash” was now in stock.
“You need food?” asked Coleman.
“No, a job.” Serge hopped out. “Our Route 66 pilgrimage requires that we secure new employment each week in a different town. That’s why I picked Sopchoppy for episode one. We can’t miss!”
“But how can you be so sure the grocery store will hire us?”
“They won’t,” said Serge. “We’re starting our own business.”
“What kind of business?”
Serge pointed at another sign in the window that said $2.50 a Cup next to a crayon drawing of a smiling earthworm. “Each year, people from all over descend on the tiny hamlet for the annual worm-grunting festival.”
“Grunting?”
“It’s what they call their patented technique for harvesting worms.” Serge entered the store and walked past a produce case with an eclectic decorative display on top of antique cash registers, lanterns and tennis rackets. “It seems hard to believe now, but back in the day this was a gold-rush town of pioneers supplying the region with earthworms and making fortunes, until people started calculating fortunes differently.”
“Far out.”
At the other end of the vegetable case was a dignified woman in a straw hat trying to reach a zucchini decision.
“Excuse me,” said Serge. “I know this place has seen better times, but thankfully all hardship is in the rearview mirror now that we’ve arrived. The new Route 66, episode one.”
“Do I know you?”
“Not yet, but soon everyone in town will. Extreme worm-grunting.”
“Oh, the worm festival,” she said with a laugh. “You just missed the last one by a week. The kids loved it.”
“I’m sure the little tykes were joyfully spitting up ice cream and cotton candy all the way home,” said Serge. “But we’re deadly serious. I believe I can trust you: There could soon be an employment boom around here, except we only have a week. Shooting schedule for the next episode. Sorry, but the suits make the rules.”
“What are you talking about?” The female customer was possibly late thirties. Appeared slightly older from the light sun wrinkles of an outdoor life, and acted younger because of the experience.
Serge glanced around for eavesdroppers, then leaned closer. “I can get you in on the ground floor. Just point us toward the worm fields, and the highway will soon be so full of semi trucks that they’ll have to reinforce the bridges.”
“Do you actually know anything about worm-grunting?”
“Everything,” said Serge. “Do I look like some kind of amateur? You fashion a foot-and-a-half wooden stake made of persimmon or oak that’s called a ‘stob’ and pound it into nutrient-rich soil. Next you take an equal length of metal known as a ‘rooping iron’ that’s often a leaf spring salvaged from the suspension of an abandoned truck. Then you rub the iron over the top of the stob to mimic the frequency of the earthworm’s mortal nemesis, digging moles. Consequently, your quarry flees to the surface, and before you know it”—he snapped his fingers—“you’re tits-high in earthworms. Lower property taxes for everyone!”
The woman stared a moment. “Where’d you learn all that?”
“Books, Internet.”
“But have you actually done it?”
“Knowledge trumps experience,” said Serge. “Einstein never built an A-bomb, but ask a certain country how that turned out.”
“No, I mean it’s a dead art,” said the woman. “Only a few old-timers out in the forest still practice it. Really hard work for horrible pay, maybe twenty bucks a pail if you’re lucky. And I mean big pails.”
“Never thought of pails!” said Serge. “See? I knew you’d be helpful . . . Coleman, make a note. Pails, ten. Make it an even dozen.” He turned back to the woman. “Any other wisdom you can impart? You mentioned a forest?”
“The Apalachicola, but . . . don’t take this wrong . . .” She eyed Serge up and down. “. . . You look a bit too city for this line of work. I’m not joking about how hard it is.”