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Redneck
Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream by
Dennis Covington Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Scammed People
really did buy parcels of swampland in When I later asked Alan
Ingram, the incoming president, about the Hunt Club’s armed guards, he said the club didn’t have any. But on a day in
the middle of the general gun season, my photographer friend Jim Neel and I walked into the gatehouse right after Bubba
Fletcher, a local rancher, had called to say he’d been shot at. The Hunt Club
sent two of its men to investigate. Both wore revolvers in holsters strapped
to their waists, like characters in a spaghetti western. “I’d just love to shoot
somebody today!” one of the men said before he flung open the screen door and
jumped into an idling truck that disappeared in a pall of exhaust. I didn’t recognize the
woman behind the counter this time. She was younger than Thelma, tougher
looking. She had a moon-shaped face, wore thick glasses, and was missing a
couple of bottom front teeth. I’d find out her name was Sue, that one of the
armed guards was her man, Steve, and that they lived in a camp called “What happened to Mac and
Thelma?” I asked. “I don’t think they could
handle it here.” Sue blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “It’s bad enough
for me and Steve. We already work twelve hours a day, and last night when the
relief-shift guy got here, he was so drunk, all he could do was pass out on
the couch.” My friend Jim asked what all the hubbub had been about, and Sue told us about Bubba
Fletcher’s call. “During hunting season, everybody’s bound to have a story
that somebody got shot at. We have one lady wrote a big long letter. Somebody
supposedly fired into her trailer.” “Anybody hurt?” I asked. Sue shook her head. “I
think they just did it to make her mad. And break-ins happen all the time,”
she added. “On Friday, Saturday nights, people are bashing this person, that
person. You’re just gonna get that. I’m waiting for
somebody to break into my trailer.” She patted the nine-millimeter pistol
that she kept in plain sight on the counter. About that time, the CB
behind her squawked. It was Steve and the other guard reporting that they
couldn’t find the person who had shot at Bubba Fletcher. Sue said she figured
it was a hermit property owner who lived way back in the woods somewhere.
“Nobody knows who he is or where he’s going or where he’s been to.” She said he’d been
spotted a couple of times in the camping area, though, and some people were
starting to get nervous. “Scared the living daylights out of one couple,”
she said. They reported the man was wearing camouflage. He had long hair and
carried a high-powered rifle. People had started calling him “the camouflage
man.” “A rumor starts,” Sue
said, “and before you know it, there’s a crazy man running around in
camouflage around here.” She shook her head again and flicked cigarette ash
into an empty Budweiser can. “But I can think of a couple of people this
description fits. One person in particular comes to mind.” I asked her who that
might be. I was thinking about the man Powell told me lived in a tin shack on
a hammock way back in the woods, the marijuana farmer of some consequence,
the guy who stank. “I’m not spreading
gossip,” Sue said. “I wouldn’t want Pete to get mad at me. I just . . . I think society’s given this man a bad
rap. He can’t deal with the anxiety, the panic attack the city gives him.”
Then she looked directly at me. “Desperate men do desperate things.” Later that afternoon, we
saw Steve skinning a wild hog, and Jim started taking photographs until Steve
looked up from his bloody work and said, “I can tell you right now you’re not
taking any pictures of me.” “What if I shoot around
you?” Jim said. “I’ve been doing this
since I was a kid,” Steve said, “and there ain’t no
way you can get a picture of me skinning a hog without me being in it. I had
enough of that in So Jim put his camera
away. Whether a real or mythic
figure, the camouflage man seemed to be an emblem of divisions within the
Hunt Club itself, for the club was not a classless society. There were the
hog hunters, and then there were the “camo
hunters,” and in between stood everybody else. The hog hunters’ greatest fear
was that the person or persons most likely to destroy the club would try to
do it from the inside out. Their distrust of the stealthy bird and deer
hunters seemed to coalesce around the legend of the camouflage man. The first thing Hunt Club
members will tell you, by the way, is that “Hunt Club” is not the name of
their organization. The official name is River Ranch Property Owners
Association, Inc.—not to be confused with Powell’s group, the River Ranch
Landowners Association. Members say the use of the term “Hunt Club” is “an
attempt to downgrade” them. Hardly anyone, though, even among the members
themselves, actually refers to the organization as anything other than the
Hunt Club. It’s a simple, straightforward name that accurately describes
what most of the members say they do—hunt. But hunters are a notably diverse
lot, differentiated by such incidental factors as age, sex, race, religion,
and place of origin; and by two fundamental considerations: animal hunted
and type of weapon used. I have never seen a black
man hunt anything at River Ranch Acres, for instance. This may have something
to do with the unhappy history of the counties that make up central The area that now
encompasses On the vast pine and
palmetto prairies of central People began calling the
cow hunters “crackers” because of the sounds their rawhide whips made when
snapped above the heads of cows. And the open range was crucial to the
culture that grew up around this livelihood. Men could get killed for
erecting fences, or cutting fences, either one. Even in the twentieth
century, fence wars had taken the lives of prominent The deer and bird hunters
sometimes referred to the hog hunters as “rednecks,” “white trash,” or just
“jerks.” The hog hunters most often referred to the other hunters as “shitheads.” I came from the same
stock as the hog hunters, those poor whites from the That had been many years
ago, and despite a stint in the Army, I still didn’t know much about guns.
But I knew enough to understand that the guns the hog hunters carried were
not just for hunting hogs. Despite this realization,
I didn’t bring a gun with me on my next trip to River Ranch. Instead, I
brought a global
positioning system (GPS) personal navigator. A GPS device is an extraordinary
invention. Hand-held, battery-operated, and inexpensive, it can get a fix on
satellites and, with the information beamed back, tell you exactly where you
are on the surface of the earth. I have always needed such a device. A GPS
can plot a course to a desired destination. It can point you the direction
home when you’re lost. It can calculate your speed, your progress, your
estimated time of arrival. When it’s in simulation mode, you can watch a map
of the future, with you moving across it in a straight line toward your
objective. It even has a “man overboard” feature. If you were in a boat in
the middle of a lake, say, and happened to fall overboard, your companion
with a GPS could immediately punch a button, and no matter how far the boat
traveled before it stopped, he’d be able to find you by following the GPS’s
instructions on the screen. I used aerial
photographs, topo maps, and the GPS to locate Dad’s
land. I’d gone through dense thicket and mudholes
whose water came over the hood of my Jeep. I’d seen rows of squatters’
houses, some fastidiously neat, and some, like the camp belonging to a
family called the Mirees, junked up with wrecked
school buses and house trailers and foul-smelling garbage pits. I’d even seen
a suspicious circle of pink trailers with a sign out front, the cut-out
figure of a woman with enormous breasts and electrified hair. But the moment
I left the thickets and trailers and junk piles behind, the land opened up
all around me, and a bald eagle soared overhead. The sun was coming from
behind, casting a veneer of light across the field. I was about four miles
from the Hunt Club’s main gate. There were no squatters’ shacks, no sign of
human habitation. It was exactly as I had imagined it—a vast palmetto plain,
dotted with occasional pines. Dad’s land was flat and beautiful in the way
that only empty space itself is beautiful—the perfection being derived from
what is not there. Using the GPS, I found
the approximate corners of his parcel. Then I set up a tent in the middle of
the property and slept a long, sound sleep. The next morning I went
exploring. I was trying to find a way out of River Ranch that would avoid the
Hunt Club’s gate. What I found instead was another gate, locked and guarded
by a stooped and disheveled old man with sparse white hair and a shotgun. One
of his eyes was set in a perpetual squint. Whoever he was, he wasn’t the
camouflage man. I wished the man a good
morning, and he glared up at me with his good eye as though he already
suspected I’d be trouble for him. “I’m looking for the hawk
that got one of my hens,” he said. “I know it’s illegal to shoot them, but
what the hawk did was illegal, too. You with the government?” I shook my head and told
him I was from “The Hunt Club wouldn’t
like that,” he said. “But you can come on in to my place. I got some
black-eyed peas on the stove.” He unlocked the gate, and I followed him down
the rutted road toward his trailer. We passed a catfish pond, two cows, a
brood of bantam chickens, and four pigs. “My people are from I sensed an opening and
asked if I might have a key to his gate, so I wouldn’t have to go all the way
to the Hunt Club’s gatehouse every time I wanted to get to or leave my
property. “Can’t do that,” he said.
“I’ve given keys to the president of the Hunt Club, a couple of beekeepers
who come back here, the cow man, the game warden, and the He leaned his shotgun
against the trailer. “That’s the only ones allowed to use this gate. The rest
have to pay their fifty dollars and go through the Hunt Club.” I followed him up the
steps into the trailer, which smelled of black-eyed peas and pork rind and
disinfectant. The furnishings were sparse—an Easy Boy recliner with the
stuffing of the arms coming out, a black and white TV on a pine table, two
lawn chairs, a sink, a fridge, and an electric range. “Tell you the truth, I’m a little peeved that the Hunt Club makes me pay
$50 a year to go out hunting on that land, especially since it’s my
road. I’m thinking about not paying them this year.” He lifted the lid from
the steaming pot of black-eyed peas and stirred the froth with a wooden
spoon. “Yep,” he said. “They’ll not get their fucking fifty out of me.” I stood and watched a
little of the baseball game on TV, the Braves at Pittsburgh, it appeared, but
I couldn’t be sure, since the volume was turned completely down and the
picture was as grainy as the first shots from America’s landing on the moon.
I think it was the bottom of the seventh inning when the man spooned up two
bowls of black-eyed peas, and we sat down to eat. The black-eyed peas
tasted like smoke. The man had cut up some Vidalia onions and a fresh tomato.
We also had leftover cornbread and glasses of buttermilk to dip the cornbread into, but we didn’t make a
production out of it. We just ate and talked mainly about “Tolliver,” he said.
“Franklin Tolliver. That’s my name. I got an aluminum recycling business up
in I asked him what else he
knew about the Hunt Club, and he gave me a dismissive shrug. I guess he
figured he’d told me enough already. “What about the Doe
Camp?” I asked. Mr. Tolliver looked at me
hard with his good eye. The bad one was crusted over and sunken in. “How’d you hear about
that?” “Just rumors,” I said. Mr. Tolliver took his
time clearing the table, as though he was turning something over in his head.
He deposited the bowls and spoons into the sink with a clatter, filled the
sink with hot water~, and opened a window to let out the steam. It had been a
cold, brisk morning, and I could see the air moving in the whorls at the back
of his head. “I could have bought all
this shit for nothing when I first came down here,” he said. “I’d heard about
the women who worked in the canneries. Their husbands weren’t giving them
enough dick.” He waited, as if to gauge
my reaction to that hopeful bit of news. “I could have been rich,”
he continued. He added that he did, in fact, buy seventeen whorehouses and
parcels of land, but he squandered almost all his money on the whores. “Women using their pussy
to pay the rent—that don’t pay taxes,” he said. I nodded sympathetically. “So if that’s what you’ve
got in mind, getting in with the Hunt Club and all them, just remember what
happened to me.” “What’s that?” “I made a choice,” Mr.
Tolliver said. “I could have either made my fortune or had a good time.” He
looked more or less directly at me, but I couldn’t tell which eye to look
back into, the good one or the one that was bad. “I had a good time,” he
said. That afternoon, when I
stopped at the gatehouse on the way out, another gatekeeper, a woman named
Peanut, asked if that had been my tent and Jeep out there in the hunting
area. She said if they were, the leadership of the Hunt Club wanted to talk
to me. “Anytime,” I said. “They’re upset because
you camped in the hunting area.” I shrugged. “It can be dangerous out
there,” she said. I reminded her that it
wasn’t even hunting season. “That’s not what I mean.”
Her watery blue eyes seemed filled with something like regret. “It’s against
the Hunt Club rules to camp anywhere but the camping area.” I asked her who had
decided what was the camping area and what was the
hunting area. “It’s just a gentleman’s
agreement, I guess,” she said. I told her the land I’d
camped on was mine. “That may be,” she said,
“but the leaders of the Hunt Club can’t guarantee your safety if you camp on
it.” “Aw, come on, Peanut,” I
said. “Nobody’s going to do anything to me out there.” She gazed at me steadily.
She reminded me of Holiness women I’d known in “I like you, Mr.
Covington,” she said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.” And for a long time
nothing did. Mr. Read still intended to survey the land. Problem was, the crews he sent out kept getting lost or stuck in
the mud, or maybe a little scared themselves. It was a while longer before
Mr. Read called with the good news that the corners had been staked. “I
figured it’d surprise you,” he said. “After two years, you deserve it.” I took the next flight
down to Tampa and picked up my old Jeep from a storage place near the
airport, but by the time I got to River Ranch, somebody had already pulled up
a couple of the wooden survey stakes, torn up my “no trespassing” signs, and
driven a swamp buggy over the pitiable dog-wire fence I’d erected around the
place. Back in Birmingham, my
friend Bill Murray, an attorney, told me that in order to assert rightful
ownership of the land, I might need to do it in what the law termed a
“notorious” (or “open” and “noteworthy”) fashion. Even a legal survey might
not be able to blunt a claim of adverse possession, in the remote case that
someone else actually erected a structure and started squatting on my land. So I decided to build a
cabin, a dream I’d had even before Dad died: a primitive retreat with a
well, windmill, and kerosene heater, a place where I could write in solitude
and where the family could take wilderness vacations. It would be right in
the middle of the Hunt Club’s self-proclaimed hunting area, and I figured
that fact alone would meet the definition of “notorious.” If
you’ve ever been stubborn, much of what Dennis Covington writes about in Redneck
Riviera will resonate for you. If you’ve ever wondered just how
fabricated fictional characters set in Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Redneck
Riviera.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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