“Excuse me sir. Do you know where I can find a Mr. Calvin Wilkins? I heard at the courthouse that he might be here and I heard he is an authority on this area.”
The bartender looked up from his methodical task of glass washing; to him it seemed a never-ending chore, into a pair of very violet colored eyes. The blonde standing on the other side of the counter was a definite keeper. On a scale of one to ten she, in his opinion rated a fourteen. Slightly tongue tied for a moment he gradually regained his composure and replied in a, what he thought, was a very sexy voice.
“Yes ma’am. I know where you can kind Mr. Falvin Wilkins. I er mean I know where you can find Mr. Calvin Wilkins. He’s sitting in the last booth over there. The old man with his head down. By the way, everyone around here calls him Pops, Pops Wilkins. Oh, if you want to talk to him, which I imagine is why you’re here. I would suggest bringing him a ginger and rye. That’ll lubricate his vocal chords real well.”
“Thank you very much Mr. Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t catch your name.”
“It’s Stanley T. Brown, proprietor of this modern sanctuary of spirits, the “Brown Spot.” Supplier of the finest wines and liqueurs in this part of the south. Your business is my pleasure.”
“Well, Mr. Brown thank you again. I’d like to purchase a drink for Mr. Wilkins and a very dry vodka martini for myself.”
“That’s great. I’ll bring them over to the table for you so, you can go ahead and visit with Pops. I’ll be just a minute.”
The three men seated at the bar and Stanley T. Brown watched the blonde as she walked toward the table. Not until she had leaned over and shook Calvin Wilkins shoulder, spoke softly in his ear and seated herself across the table from him, did the four pairs of eyes return to their original forward positions and resume their interrupted conversation.
“Mr. Wilkins. I’m Marcia Meadows of channel ten. Perhaps you’ve seen me on TV.
I do special interest stories on Monday nights right after the six o’clock newscast.”
“Well, can’t say if I’ve ever seen you Miss Meadows. I don’t get on watching the boob tube much except that fishing show on Satiddy. Me and Butch McCoy and Samuel Booker all gather around that high fluent’in big screen old Mac installed in his sundry store and get a big kick out of watchin them city folk try to catch’em a big ol largemouth. Now that’s some fun seein those idiots with their high-priced gadgets keep missin what we’ve been catchin on crickets and night grubs for years.”
“I guess that would be very entertaining Mr. Wilkes but, what I would like to find out from you is the local color around here for the past forty years or so. I have heard that if anyone knows what goes on in Forest Glenn it’s Mr. Wilkins, the local historian. The reason I want to know more about the area is because I’m doing a feature on the grand opening of the new resort and I’d like to know what kind of impact it will have on the surrounding area and its inhabitants. Also what the local people feel about taking over cow country and citrus groves in a nice rural setting and transforming it into a tourist attraction almost overnight.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be able to help you out Miss Meadows, but please call me Pops.”
“Okay Pops, but please call me Marcia and you will be quite reimbursed for your help.”
“Shoot Marcia, an old man like me can’t keep his mouth shut and gettin paid for it whoee! Now, where do you want to start?”
The bar began filling up with the Thursday night crowd that began arriving at about four thirty and lasted till a little after two a.m. There was a large mixture of people, from factory workers to yuppie stockbrokers. Stan Brown treated them all the same. They had money to spend. They spent it. They left. Simple as that. Now though, there was another factor involved. A gorgeous blonde that Stanley T. Brown just had to have. But, how was the question. In the meantime the gorgeous blonde was still interviewing Calvin, the Pops, Wilkins.
“Ok Pops, why don’t you start when you were a kid growing up in the small community of Forest Glenn. What were your dreams and hopes and what do you think of someone building a tourist trap where you used to run and play as a kid.”
“I guess I’ll start at the beginning and we’ll see how interested you really are after I tell you about my childhood. I grew up in these here parts but they weren’t known as Forest Glenn back in those days. This whole area was known as Walker’s Prairie, after the Walker family. They settled in this area in the late eighteen hundreds from some place up north. Old Tim Walker was a real smart businessman from what I heard and he had thousands of acres of cattle land and thousands of cattle to go on them. He cleared out many of the woods in the area and put in a very large citrus crop. He was still very prosperous when I was a kid but then the great depression hit. He had his hand in too many pots from what I heard and everything came crashing down on him. There wasn’t no big tall buildings to jump out of like they did up north so he hanged himself from a water oak down by the old creek bed. Well, I was still in short breeches at the time but that put one hell of a damper on this town. He was holdin the mortgage on damn near every farm in the area and when he bit the big one, everyone was shakin in their boots cause they figgered some big bank would take over the papers and everybody would have to skedaddle when it foreclosed on them. Well, lo and behold. his widder Sarah Jane turned out to be a Godsend. She called a town meeting and told all the local folk that everyone was safe in their homes and she would be holdin the papers and to pay her whenever they could. The townspeople were so happy that a nice lady like Sarah Jane would help them save their lives they decided to make the town a legal place and for a name they decided they would reward the nice widder by naming it partially after her first born Glenn David. That’s how we got the name Forest Glenn and by God, everybody thought it was a real pretty name so it just stuck being legalized and all.”
Pops Wilkins picked up his glass and drained the rest of the rye and ginger the bartender had brought over and wiped the back of his sleeve on his mouth.
“Well Miss Marcia, I’m kinda runnin at the mouth ain’t I.”
“Don’t be silly Pops, You’re doing just fine. I think, you are a very interesting individual and I’m enjoying your story very much so, please continue.”
Marsha Meadows held up two fingers to the bartender and he shook an enthusiastic ok not unlike the head of a plastic dog in the rear window of a fifties automobile.
“Well, where was I? Oh yeah, the town recovered and after WWII families started moving in the area. The builders back in those days could throw up a house in no time and the land was really cheap back then. Well, the Walker widder moved to New Jersey to be with her son and his family and the citrus groves and cattle lands just kinda died off over the years. Then this Jap fellow came in the picture and secretly bought all the old Walker property before anybody really knew what was happenin. When he announced his plans to build this big resort and put in an artificial lake I thought the town was going to blow its top off. You never heard such bitchin in your life. The townsfolk said it would ruin their nice little hometown atmosphere and people would be traipsing back and forth and ruinin whatever peace and quiet there was. It didn’t matter much to me cause I had already growned up by then and my huntin days in the area where he was plannin to build was long over. I guess I was a little saddened by the thought of all those beautiful woods being torn down but, he assured everyone that he was only building and puttin in the lake where there was cow fields and old orange trees. The funny thing is though right where he built that enormous motel-lodge or whatever, was the biggest cave I ever yet to see. I discovered it one day when a fox I wounded with my twenty gauge Ithaca shotgun was running across an old cattle field loaded with limestone rocks when it suddenly disappeared right before my eyes. I knew that fox was soon for fox heaven but I didn’t think that God just up and grabbed them like that. Well, I walked over to where I knew that fox was last at and there right in front of my eyes was a hole about the size of a manhole right in the middle of this field. I looked down but couldn’t see nothin but black. I went back into town looking for my best friend Izzy. He’s been dead nigh onto ten years now, liver disease they said. From all that drinkin I imagine. Well anyhow, we went back to that hole with a couple of lanterns and a heavy-duty rope and decided to see what was up. Well, we tied that rope around one of those big old rocks and started shimming down that rope into that big black hole like a couple of monkeys. I was kinda scared but I didn’t let ol Izzy know that, even though he was probably pissin his pants about then. We went down, I would guess a little more than fifty feet and reached solid rock. Right in front of our eyes was that fox, deader than a goose, layin at our feet. We walked around some and it looked like a subway tunnel down there. I wasn’t much for exploring that far down in the ground so we didn’t stay very long but, we did see somethin mighty interesting before we climbed back up. Well, we heard it to. About ten feet from where we had set our feet down there was a stream runnin pretty fast in that cave. Stream hell, it was more like a miniature river. We decided that underground life wasn’t for us so; we got out of there. I didn’t think much about that hole again but, one evenin, right at dusk, I was walkin on the edge of that pasture. Hurrying home before it got totally dark when, I saw a big black cloud coming out of the ground about where that hole was. I didn’t know what it was at first and then I figured out it was bats, thousands of them, coming out of their roost in that cave. That’s the last time I ever thought of that hole again until now, and that dumb foreigner built a building right on top of it. I know I got off the original story again. Anyway, the Jap must have put some money in the right pockets because the next thing you know is, the resort is built and the town doesn’t say much about it any more.”