#fridayflash: Ripple Creek Bar-B-Que

Ripple Creek Bar-B-Que

by
Louise Dragon


So, it’s two days before Memorial Day, Chuck and I have been cooped up at work for the week, the sun is out, the weather is beautiful, and nature is calling to us both.


We grab the dog plus a couple of cold ones and literally jump into Chuck’s beat-up Suburban. At the bottom of the driveway, Chuck says “Left or right?” I flip a coin to tails and shout, “left” with mounting excitement. This will take us north through the Ozarks and I’ve always loved the mountains.


Chuck and I chatter quietly about work, the scenery, and Lucky the dog who is perched precariously on the back seat. We’ve never figured out what she’s looking for, but she either watches through the windows intently or lies prone on her side -- sound asleep. Chuck never takes the same roads on these trips. What would be the point? New roads lead to new adventurers and Chuck, Lucky, and I are all about new adventures. So when we saw the sign proclaiming “Entering Slate Valley,” it garnered our interest immediately.


Slate Valley, it seems, has one of the few remaining slate quarries still in operation. The entire town seemed to be made of slate: slate benches, slate walkways, slate steps, slate fences, etc. We spent the morning exploring the quarry which was “Closed for the Holiday Weekend” according to the sign. We found a slate lined cave, a slate floored lake, and even a small slate adored park.


With rumbling stomachs we made our way to the center of town, still marveling at all of the unique uses this town had found for slate. I think we both saw the unusual sign at the same time, Chuck pointing with his left hand out of the driver’s side window, and me pointing with my right hand. Written in colored chalk on a huge piece of slate were the words “Ripple Creek Bar-B-Que.” I looked at Chuck and he looked back at me with a huge grin. Chuck and I are barbecue freaks. Chuck will travel hundreds of miles to check out new barbecue restaurants or to try a new barbecue sauce. This sign slathered icing on the cake of our fun and exciting day exploring in Slate Valley.


I could see that the building had once been someone’s three-story home, now painted a garish aqua color with stark white trim. The huge slate sign stood between two top-story windows. The eatery itself was on floor number two which was reached by traveling up a set of thick slate steps supported by wide beams. Floor number one lay half buried behind these steps, the high small windows boarded (slated) up. Prickly looking shrubs spiked the lawn in this area. A tired dirt driveway wound around to the back of the building.


The slate steps led up to an old-fashioned front porch, which held a quaint selection of rockers, swings, and deck chairs. An old man with a wiry gray beard down to his belt buckle sat seeding peppers into plastic tub on one of the porch swings.


“Howdy, folks,” he spoke with a phlegmy growl. “Hope you brought yer appetites,”


“Never leave home without ‘em.” Chuck replied as we headed inside.


A siren screamed in the background and the old man almost knocked me over getting to the other side of the porch.


“Lots of bad accidents on holiday weekends,” he murmured, spitting over the porch railing and narrowly missing the picnic tables below.


“Let’s eat inside,” I whispered to Chuck, who nodded readily.


The inside of the self-service restaurant was as quaint as the outside. The walls were dotted with small pieces of slate. Some slates in the kitchen area wore pricing and marketing blurbs. Those slabs in the dining area sported old-fashioned clichés like: “Make it or break it,” “Waste not, want not,” “The lesser of two evils,” and “Cooking with gas.”


Chuck and I bantered pleasantly with the blonde grandmotherly woman behind the counter. Chuck ordered ribs and I ordered a bar-b-qued pork sandwich -- we both asked for extra sauce and cream sodas to wash everything down.


As we sat at an old-fashioned slate topped table and polished off the succulent food, I tried to pump the old woman behind the counter about her sauce recipe and cuts of meat, but she slyly shook her head – a strange little smile playing over her little perch lips.


Later, stuffed to the gills, I inquired about a ladies room. The woman’s pleasant face furrowed into a frown and she glanced toward the front door as if expecting old Pa Kettle to come barging in. She hesitated another few seconds before ushering me through the fragrant kitchen to a small door marked “Privy” at the rear of the kitchen.


A tiny window in the washroom had been painted over, but I could make out movement in the backyard shadows below, so I scratched at a small area of the paint with my thumbnail and peered through to the back yard.


Big mistake!


An old fashioned ambulance squatted below the window and two burly large men bearing a striking resemblance to Ma & Pa Ripple Creek were wheeling a sheet covered gurney into the belly of the building below.


Fear turned my blood to ice water and I took several deep breaths before leaving the little bathroom and making my way across the kitchen and dining room toward Chuck.


The woman watched me closely with fear or malice in her eyes. It was hard for me to tell, I was in such a state of terror I wanted to run, but I pictured Chuck, myself, and Lucky being hacked up and barbequed in the pits under this house.


“Hey, Lizzy, I found the pipe for the barbeque pits,” Chuck said as I approached. He stood by a huge stainless-steel pipe, which ran from floor to ceiling through the dining room.


“Liz, what’s wrong?”


“A little too much delicious barbeque,” I said very loudly struggling to keep my voice steady. My stomach churned queasily at the thought of what we may have just eaten.


“We need to get out of here,” I whispered quickly in Chuck’s ear. “Act natural, she’s watching us.”


Safely in our car, Chuck turned to me. “What the hell?”


“Just get us out of here. Drive slow and act natural,” I said smiling and waving to Pa Kettle on the porch.


As we headed back home I told Chuck what I had seen in the bathroom. The color drained out of his face.


“What should we do?”


“Do? We do nothing! These people are all related around here. I’ll be damned if I want to end up some hillbilly’s dinner. We do nothing and we tell no one, deal?”


Chuck and I don’t explore the Ozark’s much any more. We don’t eat barbeque very much any more either, but we have talked about starting our own business – I’m sure there are other slate quarries around.

#fridayflash: Ripple Creek Bar-B-Que

#fridayflash: Stairway to Heaven

The stone tower loomed out of the landscape like a gray-black splinter. Puzzled, I stared for a moment before retrieving a pair of binoculars for a better view. I’ve lived in this house for twenty-two years, looked out at this same scenery countless times and I’d never noticed this unusual and distinctly out of place stone tower shooting out of the countryside.

I glanced down at my friend Danny, passed out in a weird chalk outline sort of pose on the floor beside me. Should I wake him? We’d been cramming for college finals all night until we’d both collapsed sometime in the early morning hours. Was I dreaming? Stone towers don’t just grow . . .

I was, trying to gauge the distance between it and me when Danny stirred, sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “Wow, Man, what a night. Those Energy Shots worked great, but they wiped me out.”

“Danny you’ve lived here all your life, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Sure, sure, what’s up?”

“I’m seeing a stone tower out there in the woods towards Guilford. I don’t remember a tower anywhere in Guilford, do you?

“Shit, no . . .” Danny said hoisting himself up to look out the picture window.

Danny stared, swiped at his eyes with the heels of his hands, and stared again.
“Oh, Man,” Danny breathed, his breath sour and acrid, bounced at me from the window glass and I winced. He slowly turned his eyes to meet mine. I couldn’t tell if I saw fear, or humor in his gaze – maybe both.

“Have you ever seen it before?”

“Shit, no! That’s the Stairway to Heaven,” Danny said, his voice wavered, but once again I sensed more humor than fear.

“The WHAT?”

“My grandfather called it The Stairway to Heaven,” Danny said. “He swore he could see it out there in the woods the day before his heart attacked.”
“I’m telling, you Man. I didn’t see it then, but this is exactly the way he described it! A tall stone tower teetering up over the trees like that. He begged me to drive out there with him, but I couldn’t see anything. We all thought he was daffy in the head. The next morning he was dead.”

I looked carefully at Danny . . . was he putting me on? With Danny it was hard to tell.
“Let’s drive out there toward Guilford and see if we can find it,” I said.

“You crazy?” Danny almost whimpered. “We find it and we’re dead. Don’t you understand? The tower . . . it takes you to heaven. It means we’re going to die, Man.”

“Gimme a break,” I jeered. “You’re putting me on.”

Danny’s face cracked into a grin and he brayed laughter. “Had you going there, didn’t I?”

I scooped the keys to Danny’s green Saturn off the coffee table. “Come on, let’s go find it.”

Danny grabbed a couple of tiny red bottles of Energy Shot from the kitchen table and followed me out the side door guzzling another wake-up blast as he walked. He tossed the other to me and I drank it down without thought.

As Danny steered us out toward Guilford, I twisted and turned in my seat keeping the stone tower in site at all times.

We drove for almost thirty minutes through the gray pre-dawn mist. The tower hovered closer and closer. It didn’t grow as we approached, but rather the opposite. It shrank into the surrounding countryside, blending into the tree line like a stone chameleon. I didn’t take my eyes off it. Not even when Danny crested the edge of the quarry -- at the base of tower -- doing fifty and slammed into the sandy bottomed pit with enough force to stall the car and knock the wind out of me.

Fog swirled around the tower as Danny and I approached it. The old gray stones gleamed wetly . . .

Greasy looking stone steps wound up and around the tower in a narrow spiral passageway. As we attempted to climb, the steps crumbled like chalk sliding us back to the bottom of the tower.

Again we struggled to pull and push each other up the uneven steps, but once again lost footing and tumbled back to the bottom. This time I whacked my side good on something cold and hard. I found a rusty metal ring at the foot of the steps. Danny and I looked at it, looked at each other, grinned, and grasped the ring. It pulled open a heavy stone square showing more granite steps spiraling down into the dark.

Danny had a small penlight on his key ring; shrouded in its feeble yellow glow we started down the slick stone steps into the dark.

The stonewalls around us trickled water as we descended, still hyped up on energy drinks. The dank air rose up to greet us as muffled skittering sounds echoed from below. I once thought I heard the stone trap door above us grate back into place. It was as though I could see it in the whiter part of my mind, softly rasping closed. But the white, wide-awake part of me slowly receded, blackening into the cold stone abyss below.

Was that Danny screaming? Or was it me?

*************

A State Policeman wound yellow crime tape around the trees at the opening of the old Guilford Quarry. The rear half of a bottle green Saturn jutted from the sandy bottom. Most of the front of the car was buried under a pile of gravel and dirt.

“Car had to of been doing eighty,” one policeman said to the other. “Damn kids’ll never learn.”

The policeman by the car scratched his head. He could see parts of both bloody bodies inside the car where they appeared to have died on impact, but could not explain the two sets of weaving tracks leading from the car and disappearing into the base of the quarry.

End

Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored

#fridayflash: Stairway to Heaven