His uncle, old Spencer Van Hart, had come back from Vietnam with a Master Sergeant’s stripes and two fingers missing from his left hand, and though the army gratuities didn’t pay so well in those days he walked away with a pension and a two thousand dollar disability benefit. For a time he wondered about investing in a plantation or buying some real estate out near Lafayette, but it turned out that tobacco growing was in slump and Spencer didn’t like the look of the Nashville lawyers who ran the real estate business, so he put the money into the café at Brownsville Junction. The previous owner had only been gone six months, but Spencer fixed on doing the thing properly. He put ads in the Cook County Sentinel, fitted in chromium-plated soda dispensers along the rickety bar, and because he was a Louisiana boy who had gone through most of South East Asia with a stars and bars insignia in his forage cap there was a neon sign that read ‘The Rebel Den’.
Even at the grand opening, when they had a couple of country bands playing on the open forecourt and Spencer’s buddies from the National Guard sat on the porch drinking root beer, the omens didn’t look good. Brownsville Junction lay on the western side of Choctaw Ridge at the point where the pine forest ended and the railway lines came snaking in from Nashville and the Gulf: a dusty main street and a strew of log cabins that led on to the trainsheds and the abandoned freight yards. For a while the old timers who remembered Spencer’s father came out at the weekends to stand in the asphalt car park trading reminiscences, but then in the mid-Seventies they cut back the railway service and Spencer found himself serving to a handful of local farmers and the odd hobo who’d fetched up in Choctaw forest. But he stuck it out. ‘Taking a dip in Van Hart’s trashcan,’ Barrett the journalist used to say when the talk turned to some conspicuously underfunded local amenity. Towards the end he turned into one of those ramrod-straight middle-aged men who live off their pride and no-one would dare offer a hand to, so it wasn’t until he was off in hospital at Johnson City and there was a FOR SALE sign up over the door of The Rebel Den that people started saying that it was a shame and what did Spencer’s folks reckon they were doing anyway?
There was no close family. Spencer’s parents were both dead and his brother had left home years back, but a couple of nephews showed up at the funeral. They were fruit farmers away in Kentucky, people said, and neither of them had set eyes on Spencer since the day he left for the training camp at Fort Sumner. There was a third nephew called Ron who worked as a film stunt man out West and whose name sometimes appeared in the credits of Al Pacino films, but he hadn’t been seen in Cook County for twenty years and it was left to the fruit farmers to smoke dollar cigars on the church porch and talk to Spencer’s lawyer about legacy duty and probate.
I was working down near Choctaw that week on a photography project for the State Forestry Board, so I didn’t get to see Spencer’s funeral, but Barrett stopped over one night on his way from a track-club meet at La Grange to fill me in. ‘You didn’t miss anything my man. Two Kentucky strawsuckers in K-Mart sneakers and pantsuits, looking like they couldn’t wait to collect. Reverend Daniels hadn’t hardly finished his oration before they were off to get the will read. You never saw anything like it.’
I said it seemed like a lot of trouble to take over a rundown café that nobody wanted to buy. Barrett smiled that lazy, ornate smile that made him look like a Southern gentleman in an ante-bellum TV drama. ‘You got it my man. Leastways, those two bullet-heads walked out of the attorney’s office with a couple of unpaid electricity bills and Spencer’s collection of army cap badges. Last thing I heard, they were still arguing about who was paying for the train fare.’
As it happened, Spencer’s nephews turned up two or three times in the next month or so. They ate prawn platter lunches with the real estate salesmen at Brackus’s bar and diner or had themselves driven out to the Junction where they stood inspecting the plywood shutters that had been put up after old Spencer got taken to hospital. ‘Kind of desperate,’ people said. They put ads three weeks running in the Cook County Sentinel real estate page offering the café at the same price Spencer had paid for it in 1972, but there weren’t any takers. Summer stretched on into September. The brothers went back to the farm twenty miles outside of Lexington, the grass curled up under The Rebel Den’s boarded-up windows and Joe Brackus cracked his old joke about the Kentucky dirt farmer who tried to reach his dog to write but then stopped when he found out the dog was smarter than he was.
It was a wet fall that year. The rain blew in early from the Gulf and covered the back roads with a four-inch coating of mud, and the river burst its banks over by Degville Gap. Working down in the pine woods, taking shots of the felled timber or following the environmental department guy around to snap pollution damage, I got used to sheltering behind the big trees waiting for the wind to drop, or staring out over the canvas roof of the foresters’ pick-up at the angry sky. Then on a particularly bad day, when it had rained for four hours clear and ruined two waterproof Nikon cameras, Barrett turned up in a borrowed convertible, wearing the three-button Fox Brothers suit the paper made him put on when he had to interview a state congressman or an assistant secretary from the DA’s office. There was no-one around – the forestry board manager was vacationing in Florida and the two girl assistants had taken the day off – so I figured on showing Barrett round the site, but he wasn’t interested.
‘Forget it my man. I seen enough trees to last me a lifetime.’ He looked shrewd for a moment. ‘Lee-Ann around here any place?’
Lee-Ann was the younger of the two girl assistants, a forestry graduate from Tennessee State University and way out of Barrett’s league.
‘Gone to visit her daddy over in Marin County. You want to leave a message?’
Barrett shrugged. ‘Can wait. Hey, guess who turned up in town the other day?’
I suggested the ex-county Treasurer, who’d gone down under an embezzlement charge six months back, but Barrett smirked and pressed the tips of his fingers together in that way he had. ‘His parole don’t come up for a fortnight. No, Ron Van Hart showed up.’
‘Spencer’s nephew?’
Barrett flicked me an impenetrable look in which awe and derision grimly contended. ‘He’s a big star my man. Maybe you don’t get to see his name at the top of the credits, but he’s up there with Pacino and Hackman. You ever see that inferno scene in Escape from Alcatraz, the one where the guy leaps out of the burning building on a pulley rope? Well, take it from me, it sure as hell wasn’t Clint Eastwood.’
It was a characteristic of Barrett’s that he never explained how he came by his information. I watched as the convertible jerked away towards the low line of trees, their tips blown back and wavering in the wind. After this Ron Van Hart turned up a lot, a burly conspicuous figure in the gathering October gloom. He stood at the bar of Brackus’s blowing froth off his moustaches and buying drinks for grey-haired fifty-year-olds who claimed they remembered him from way back. Barrett wrote him up for the Sentinel, a lavish photo spread that featured Ron shaking hands with Richard Dreyfuss and doubling as Luke Skywalker on the set of Star Wars, and gradually people woke up to the fact that they had a celebrity in their midst. There was a two-year waiting list at the Stonewall, the gentleman’s club where the tobacco planters gathered on Saturday nights to play stud poker and drink juleps, but he had dinner there on his second evening and people started saying that Ron Van Hart was all right, not like some of your Hollywood actors that wouldn’t give the time of day to the folks they were brought up with. Meanwhile the FOR SALE board stayed up over the shutters of The Rebel Den.
As usual Barrett put his own gloss on the local gossip. ‘Of course, my man, wasn’t always this way. Let me tell you, twenty years back they nearly ran Ron Van Hart out of the county. Car stealing, mostly. Folks who came into town on a Saturday night used to leave their doors unlocked in those days and Ron, well, he just used to help himself. Not that that would have got him run out of the county, but the guy had a mean streak. Wouldn’t think it to look at him maybe, but he busted a girl’s head open with a bottle back in ’68.’
‘Why would he want to do a thing like that?’
It was a simpleton’s question, but Barrett only grinned. ‘Who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t come across. Maybe she made too many jokes about pig-shit. He worked on his daddy’s farm, you see, and people used to piss themselves about it. Anyway, Ron laid her out cold. If his daddy hadn’t played in a poker school with the DA’s brother-in-law he’d have been lucky to keep out of jail.’
Whatever the truth of these allegations, no trace of them remained in Ron’s current behaviour. Kind of weird, people reckoned – he had a habit of staring at you and not quite listening to what you said – but pleasant with it. You saw him doing the rounds of the roadside diners and barbers’ shops, shaking hands with folks who’d known Spencer. Come late October he disappeared – out West, people said, doing a movie with Dustin Hoffman – but then a fortnight later he was back again and a contractor’s firm from Jackson came and took down the shutters from The Rebel Den and started re-laying the split pinewood floor.
November dragged on and the light faded away into mid-afternoon shadow. The wind started bringing down trees over by Choctaw Ridge and there were a couple of hurricane warnings. The ex-County Treasurer emerged from the state gaol at Dyersburg and announced that he was suing the DA for malversion. I was busy around that time, checking through slides with some field biologists over in the forestry department at Johnson City, so I didn’t get to see what was happening out at The Rebel Den, but Barrett kept me informed. Around Thanksgiving his voice came crackling down the portable telephone we used out in the camp at Choctaw. ‘Seems as if Ron’s opening up the Den again my man. Grand re-opening party, transport laid on and a zydeco band from New Orleans, you name it.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Beats me my man. Just pouring dollars into the swamp is the way I look at it. Said something about respect for his uncle, but you want my opinion he’s out to spite those two strawchewers from Lexington…’
There was a pause as the wind whistled over the wire.
‘Jesus,’ Barrett went on. ‘You hear the news? Hurricane Tony’s due in from Tampa Bay in seventy-two hours, they reckon. Lee-Ann about these days?’
‘Off sick.’
‘Ain’t none of my business,’ said Barrett. ‘But if I were you I’d check up on that girl one of these times.’
I was driving out near the Junction the next day, as it turned out, so it wasn’t hard to check out Barrett’s account. In late autumn the place had a dreary, downcast look. Only a dozen or so of the cabins were occupied now, the smoke drifted up out of the tumbledown chimneys and the main street was a lake of dirty water. At The Rebel Den there were a couple of glaziers putting in a new plate glass window and a roller flattening the bumpy forecourt. Ron stood in the doorway clawing at his chin with quick, uneasy movements, but when he saw me he grinned and beckoned me over.
‘Hey. Photographer, ain’t you?’
When I nodded he went on: ‘Could use you in a couple of nights’ time, if’n you’re agreeable. Take some pictures of my party.’ He pronounced it ‘partay’. There’s some big stars coming in you know. Maybe you could sell to the newspapers afterwards.’
I smiled, although it struck me that he was just looking through me, that he saw something else way back twenty yards from where I was standing. Then I headed off, only stopping to confirm what I’d suspected as I drove in: that the pink Chevy parked by Van Hart’s forecourt was Lee-Ann’s.
Lee-Ann turned up at the site two days later with a bruise on her arm that everyone tried to avoid noticing all through the grey, windy morning. That night Hurricane Tony blew in, bringing three larch trees and a power cable down across the foresters’ cabin, so I missed the re-opening. Barrett, who struggled in through the gale and had his windscreen busted by a falling branch, reported that it was a weird party. ‘No-one you ever saw my man, and if Pacino was there it was a grade-A disguise. And Ron, Ron kind of flipped. Just sat there and talked about the guys he knew in Hollywood and how he once got to use Stallone’s Jacuzzi.’ The wind gusted on through the night. Next morning a squad car called at the Rebel Den, but Ron had already disappeared and the storm had taken the roof right of and laid it over the newly flattened forecourt. Later Barrett filled me on the details, about how Ron hadn’t worked in Hollywood for five years and was wanted for a string of unpaid hotel bills and a couple of assault charges.
They found the body a week later, sprawled over the disused railway line. There was an old photo of Gene Hackman in the pants pocket and a putdown letter from an agent dated four years back. ‘Taking a dip in Van Hart’s trashcan,’ Barrett said jauntily when I bumped into him at Brackus’s that night. Lee-Ann was sitting at right angles from us so she missed the wink that Barrett gave me. Ron’s two brothers had a bulldozer come and clear the site – they had plans to sell it to the county amenities department now – and I stood in the clearing where the line of log cabins met the trees, turning my head against the force of the wind, and thinking that it was nothing you could complain about, that all of this – Spencer, Ron, The Rebel Den and the picture of Gene Hackman – just wasn’t something you could expect a fruit farmer from Kentucky to understand.
—1991