Last Bigfoot in Dixie by Wally Avett

Author:Wally Avett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2019-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

THE BANK RECEPTIONIST was young and pretty who escorted me to the empty conference room.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No,” I said, “I’ll just wait right here.”

“Mr. Moore had to take a phone call,” she said. “He’ll be right with you.”

She left me alone, and I checked out the paneled walnut walls, the massive table, but most of all the two items on the table in front of me—a folded white silk cloth of some sort and a long item wrapped in dusty brown canvas.

Winston Moore came in smiling, surprisingly animated for his age. Under the bright fluorescent lights he looked like an old warrior, the age undeniable, but he was almost bubbling with enthusiasm.

“Got the doll head?”

“Yes sir, right here.”

“First, I want to show you something. Don’t want you to think after yesterday that I’m just an old fool telling tales. Remember I told you about the sword and the Jap flag from the island fight? Here they are.”

He unfolded the musty flag, and it covered half the table, the rising sun icon of Imperial Japan. With care he took the canvas away and held out the sword, stained with apparently equal parts rust and blood.

I held the sword, made by some forgotten bladesmith before the American bombers, before my own birth, and felt the weight, the balance of the heavy blade. I could believe that with force and momentum it could slice through a living body.

“I never saw their emblem on a plane,” he said. “We never faced Jap planes where I was, but a man I met later was at Pearl Harbor when the war started on that Sunday morning. He worked, I think, at an Army hospital and said he was in line at the mess hall for breakfast when it started. Said they ran outside and at first thought the planes were ours. Till they saw the meatball and knew it was Japs.”

World War II safely in the past, souvenirs laid aside, he reached for the baseball-sized silver object I brought out from a paper bag.

“It’s cold?!”

“It’s been in the freezer compartment of our refrigerator, hid behind some ice cream. Junior would have never found it.”

“Let’s let it warm up for a minute or two before we deal with it. I’ll tell you all about Junior.

“Over the years, I’ve loaned money to all sorts of folks in Proctor, including some of the Bradshaws. Junior had been an infrequent customer but made his payments on time and had actually invested a little money with the bank.

“The gossip mill in Proctor—you know, the grapevine, whatever they call it—the local folks talk all the time and deal in a lot of rumors, but lots of it grounded in truth. You just have to sift it out. Lord knows, in the past they’ve talked a lot about me.

“But at any rate, the talk around town is that Junior keeps his dope money hid in the woods in an old buried refrigerator. That’s his safety deposit box, you might say.

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