Tom Simpson - Sink

“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.”

“Pops, I think that was a fantastic story and I’m sure I’ll be able to use quite a bit of it in my program Monday night. As I said, you will be rewarded greatly for your contribution and I wish you the best of luck in the future. I am going out to the resort Saturday and I’ll definitely look at that place with a whole different frame of mind. Thank you again.”

Marcia Meadows got up from the table and walked out the front door of the bar. Stanley T. Brown, overhearing the last part of her conversation, watched her go out and thought to himself, if she is going to be at the resort Saturday then that is where I’m going to be. I can’t let that get out of my life.

Emerging into the bright morning sunshine like a slippery newborn colt out of her mother’s womb, the mint green nose of the Chrysler minivan slid slowly out of the fog bank onto the moist black asphalt