The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) Read Online Free
Author: Iza Moreau
point oh the recipe station, is a whole side of Mick, Keith, and the boys doing their version of the album they call Goat’s Head Soup. Get your five-thirty a.m. asses out of bed and dig it.”
I jerked my head up involuntarily. Goat?
There was a dead goat at Meekins’ market. Coincidence? Maybe. Probably. Certainly. But Gamma—and most of the other nattering deejays at the pirate station—sometimes gave me the heebie jeebies. Maybe that’s why I tuned in. Five-thirty? Check out a goat in a dumpster at the edge of town?
I didn’t have anything better to do.
~ ~ ~
A dozen Styrofoam coffee containers were hip-hopping along my floorboards as I sped along the rutted dirt road. A dry few weeks had turned the road into a long washboard. When I first moved back to Pine Oak I had gotten mad at the young bucks for speeding down the rough road at double the posted limit; later I learned that the faster you went, the less you bounced. Tonight, my old Toyota pickup sailed over the ruts with just a little shimmy. The few houses out this way were still dark and my headlights showed the way clearly. No dust meant that no one was up and about yet. When I turned onto the highway I switched on the radio. The Stones were still playing. I like them okay, but I’d never heard of Goat’s Head Soup. It was all right, I guess, something to get through the couple of miles I had to drive. But I made a mental note to check on whether the Stones had ever actually made a record with that name.
I had been shopping at Meekins’ Market pretty much all my life. Situated on the very edge of town, it was the last place to get groceries for most of the folks living in the rural areas—like me—and the first for people driving in from Forester. And its unusual two-part structure made it one of the strangest places in this part of the country. The front building was just a rectangular stall paralleling the highway, thrown together with two-by-fours and chicken wire. But as you entered, the walls gradually conformed themselves to fit into a Quonset hut that old man Meekins had bought off the Army for twenty-three cans of shoe polish right after World War II. I had gone to high school with the current Meekins—Clarence—who had been a talented athlete but turned down a football scholarship at Wabash College to run the family business. Hadn’t made many improvements in those sixteen years—the chicken wire was probably from the same roll that his granddad fished out of an abandoned construction site back in the forties; nevertheless, it had become the best place in Jasper County for pretty much whatever it carried on a given day. No one knew how Clarence was able to get the jump on the Piggly Wiggly, but the produce boxes crammed onto the old wooden shelves held the freshest fruit and vegetables in the area. Customers could also find various kinds of nuts, herbs, seeds, locally produced honey, even sugar cane in season. You could also buy azalea and boxwood plants for your front yard and a straw hat with a green sun visor to wear while you tucked them into the soil. Then there were the more unusual items: boxes of used harmonicas, containers of glass spools that formerly sat atop telephone poles, rows of vintage postcards, and issues of Look Magazine and TV Guide from the 1950s. People liked to browse the crowded aisles back in the darkened Quonset hut—it would be rare to find something you were actually looking for, but almost impossible to come out empty-handed.
But if Clarence’s purchasing wizardry was a mystery, so was his strange habit of closing up shop for weeks at a time without a word. Anyone looking through the chicken wire would see every shelf completely empty. Yet when he opened back up—a week or a month later—everything would be as fresh and exotic as before, although maybe switched around some location wise. And somewhere in the burgeoning aisles
I jerked my head up involuntarily. Goat?
There was a dead goat at Meekins’ market. Coincidence? Maybe. Probably. Certainly. But Gamma—and most of the other nattering deejays at the pirate station—sometimes gave me the heebie jeebies. Maybe that’s why I tuned in. Five-thirty? Check out a goat in a dumpster at the edge of town?
I didn’t have anything better to do.
~ ~ ~
A dozen Styrofoam coffee containers were hip-hopping along my floorboards as I sped along the rutted dirt road. A dry few weeks had turned the road into a long washboard. When I first moved back to Pine Oak I had gotten mad at the young bucks for speeding down the rough road at double the posted limit; later I learned that the faster you went, the less you bounced. Tonight, my old Toyota pickup sailed over the ruts with just a little shimmy. The few houses out this way were still dark and my headlights showed the way clearly. No dust meant that no one was up and about yet. When I turned onto the highway I switched on the radio. The Stones were still playing. I like them okay, but I’d never heard of Goat’s Head Soup. It was all right, I guess, something to get through the couple of miles I had to drive. But I made a mental note to check on whether the Stones had ever actually made a record with that name.
I had been shopping at Meekins’ Market pretty much all my life. Situated on the very edge of town, it was the last place to get groceries for most of the folks living in the rural areas—like me—and the first for people driving in from Forester. And its unusual two-part structure made it one of the strangest places in this part of the country. The front building was just a rectangular stall paralleling the highway, thrown together with two-by-fours and chicken wire. But as you entered, the walls gradually conformed themselves to fit into a Quonset hut that old man Meekins had bought off the Army for twenty-three cans of shoe polish right after World War II. I had gone to high school with the current Meekins—Clarence—who had been a talented athlete but turned down a football scholarship at Wabash College to run the family business. Hadn’t made many improvements in those sixteen years—the chicken wire was probably from the same roll that his granddad fished out of an abandoned construction site back in the forties; nevertheless, it had become the best place in Jasper County for pretty much whatever it carried on a given day. No one knew how Clarence was able to get the jump on the Piggly Wiggly, but the produce boxes crammed onto the old wooden shelves held the freshest fruit and vegetables in the area. Customers could also find various kinds of nuts, herbs, seeds, locally produced honey, even sugar cane in season. You could also buy azalea and boxwood plants for your front yard and a straw hat with a green sun visor to wear while you tucked them into the soil. Then there were the more unusual items: boxes of used harmonicas, containers of glass spools that formerly sat atop telephone poles, rows of vintage postcards, and issues of Look Magazine and TV Guide from the 1950s. People liked to browse the crowded aisles back in the darkened Quonset hut—it would be rare to find something you were actually looking for, but almost impossible to come out empty-handed.
But if Clarence’s purchasing wizardry was a mystery, so was his strange habit of closing up shop for weeks at a time without a word. Anyone looking through the chicken wire would see every shelf completely empty. Yet when he opened back up—a week or a month later—everything would be as fresh and exotic as before, although maybe switched around some location wise. And somewhere in the burgeoning aisles
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