ONE TIME Elbie (derived from L.B. for Lloyd Bridges—his parents having named their son for the star of Sea Hunt, which was their favorite '50s TV show. Elbie's mom, Marlene, was the postmistress in Stella, Missouri—folks celebrated the difference between the sexes in those days—and in the summer of 1956, she attended a postal convention down South in the Gulf Coast town of Biloxi, Mississippi. Elbie's brother, J.W., and his father, Jack, went with her. Elbie wasn't with them because he hadn't been born yet. In fact, what follows is the story of his conception, which is not the principal story of this blog, but Bob's your uncle.
This is what happened: It seems that Jack had bought a diving mask with a snorkel tube and a pair of flippers, so he could swim in the surf and scan the sandy bottom for seashells. When Jack emerged from the waves wearing his red Speedo and the mask, snorkel, and flippers, Marlene imagined he was Lloyd Bridges, whereupon she all but swooned and then dragged Jack back to their room at the Howard Johnson. Cooing gently and peeling down her suit, she encouraged Jack to wear the aforementioned accoutrements to bed where she rode him like a porpoise, groaning all the while, "Love me, Lloyd Bridges, love me hard!" Amongst her ecstatic moans, Marlene interspersed various literary and nautical allusions, to wit: sperm whales, harpoons, main masts, bowsprits, narwhals, and moray eels, not to mention Long John Silver, One-Eyed Willie, and, of course, Moby Dick. Marlene was giving Sigmund Freud a run for his money.
You may wonder how I came by this information, since conceptions are typically private affairs. After all, I was a tender ten when Marlene enacted her Sea Hunt fantasy, and I was far away in the Ozark foothills besides. Well, it's like this: Elbie's older brother, J. W. , [derived from "John Wayne" after Jack bought a cowboy hat and bandana in Wheaton, whereupon Marlene swooned, dragged him to the barn, wriggled out of her jeans, etc.] was a good friend of mine. While they were in Biloxi, J.W. said, he ate a bad shrimp po' boy and contracted the runs. Marlene dosed him with tincture of opium—which was legal in those days—and left him to sleep if off; then she returned to the beach at the very moment Jack emerged from the waves and looking to her like Lloyd Bridges.
Marlene and Jack went to their room, cracked the door, and saw that J.W. was still asleep. So, Jack disencumbered himself of the Speedo and hopped in the sack with naught on but the snorkel and flippers. What Jack and Marlene didn't know was that J.W. was moving in and out of consciousness, rather like a tide at sunset. Maybe it was the racket that shook him out of his stupor because when J.W. finally came to, his father was chattering like Flipper while his mother was chanting a shanty and the headboard was thumping against the wall. J.W. closed his eyes and earnestly prayed he was having a paregoric hallucination. When Elbie was born some ten months later, J.W. knew his prayer had gone unanswered. It must've been ten years later when J.W. told me the whole story. An awkward silence ensued, and then we busted out laughing.) Squires told me he knows where the treasure is buried.
"What treasure?" I asked.
"You know, the Spanish gold."
"What're you talking about?" I asked.
Then Elbie told me the story from Mr. Randolph I posted in Blog 3. You can read it for yourself.
Now to the point: Elbie Squires was an unusual child and bright in that peculiarly superfluous way common to boys with strong imaginations but little athletic prowess and no arithmetical skills. By the time he was seven, Elbie had read most of Vance Randolph's folktale books and could tell recite any number of those stories straight from memory. He also watched Johnny Quest every Saturday morning and Sky King every Sunday afternoon. He could tell you those stories, too. And he had also read the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and even a couple of those crazy Catholic books the Protestants leave out. For example, Elbie told me about the sparrow that crapped in Tobit's eyes and made him blind, and I said, "You don't say." He said, "I do say," and then he told me about the two bears that killed some forty-two boys after they, that is, the boys, teased Elisha about his bald head. I said, "Well, that seems a little severe," and he said, "It's in the Baptist Bible, so it must be true and just." That put me back on my heels for a while, but the story never so much as concerned Elbie. There's no end to the things a seven-year-old boy will believe.
Now, I should tell you that I normally had no truck with little kids, but after I dropped out of high school, no one in Stella would have anything to do with me. I had been branded a Commie and a traitor because I mooned an Army recruiter in the high school assembly and so was shunned by most everybody. Everybody except Elbie, that is, who thought I was cool because I was seventeen and would sit down and listen to his stories. So, when he told me the tale about the Spanish Gold and said, "I know where the treasure's buried," I asked, "How can you know that if a cyclone blew the map away?"
He said, "'Cause I found the three turkey feet scratched on a rock."
"Where?"
"Outside Bear Cave. I'll show you if you drive me there."
"Okay." So, I borrowed a shovel and a flashlight and the family station wagon, and we were off. We drove to Jolly Mill—which was still grinding corn in those days—and over the steel bridge and a little further on to the mouth of the cave. Elbie looked around a little, and sure enough, not more than ten feet away from the entrance to the cave were three turkey feet scratched on a rock.
"Did you do that?" I asked.
"Do what?"
"Scratch those turkey feet?"
"Uh. No. Why would I do that?"
"I don't know. When were you here last?"
"Here? Where do you mean?"
"Here, you knucklehead. At this cave."
"Well . . . we had a family picnic at Jolly maybe a week ago."
"Uh-huh. Just what I thought. Tell me truly, did you scratch these turkey feet?"
"No! I swear! I was just lookin' around—uh, J.W. wanted to go inside the cave, but I didn't want to—so I walked over here and just found 'em. Honest Injun."
"Honest Injun?"
"That's what I said."
I knew he was lying but thought, "What the hell?" I had nothing else going on.
So, Elbie took the flashlight and dragged the shovel around the mouth of the cave like he was trying to discern signs and wonders, and then he began scratching at the dirt with the tip of the shovel. He hadn't dug more than a quarter of an inch when he yelled, "It's here! I found it!" whereupon he scraped the dirt off the top of a shoebox. That box couldn't have been in the ground more than, oh, a week—an uncanny coincidence—but his face was shining with rapture as he knelt and pulled off the lid.
"Oooh, look!" he said. "A dinosaur!" Yep, he was taking out a plastic dinosaur all right
"And, oh, what's this? A magnet? It is! It's a magnet. Look!"
Sheesh.
"And here's, no, it can't be, a comic book! Little Lulu!"
I wanted to get mad, but Elbie was just a kid, and I figured something like this was going to happen anyhow. I picked up the shovel from where he'd dropped it and began pecking in the dirt toward the back of the cave. All the while, Elbie was saying, "Oh, could it be?" and "How unlikely! Oooh!" and so on as he took various gee-gaws out of the box.
Anyhow, I was jabbing at the dirt when I saw something kind of dirty white and yellow. I dug the shovel blade under whatever it was and pried up a piece of bone.
"Hey, look at this, Elbie! It looks like some kind of bone." Elbie dropped his things back in the shoebox and came over. Pretty soon both of us were kneeling by the hole and digging at the dirt with our hands. After an hour or so, we had a couple long bones and a piece of a jaw with three or four teeth and a finger joint.
I took the bones to Pap who called Sheriff Jemson who took the bones to the university over in Springfield, and it turns out they were Indian bones that were carbon-dated to be around eight thousand years old. Seems the cave had been used as a grave for an Indian tribe that lived here before the Osage. Of course, some government agency designated Bear Cave a "site of historical interest," which means the local folks never, ever get to go in it again. So much for Bear Cave.
The upshot of all this for young Elbie was that he developed a lifelong interest in anthropology. He eventually got a PhD from the University of Chicago, and today he teaches at Columbia—Missouri, that is, not New York. I still hear from Dr. Squires from time to time, and every couple of years, we have lunch at Darline's Diner when he comes home for a visit.
The upshot of all this for me was what you'd expect. The preacher at the Full Gospel Apostolic Tabernacle Church said I was up to my old shenanigans because I had cast doubt on the veracity of Scripture, "seeing as the whole earth itself cain't be more'n six thousand years old, according to the generations of Adam" so "no human bones can be older than that!" Maxwell Early at the Baptist Church said pretty much the same thing, and even Rev. Humphreys at the Methodist Church said I was probably a "deleterious influence on the mores of Stella's youth." (Nobody ever knew what the hell he was talking about.) It didn't matter that I wasn't the one who dated the bones. It didn't matter that I wasn't sure if they were human. It didn't even matter that I found them by accident. I had flaunted my disrespect for America and President Johnson and the Red, White, and Blue by questioning our involvement in the Vietnam War and so was not only a Commie and a traitor, but also an atheist and freethinker. Seems I never could do anything right, which I was getting used to.
Last I heard, Elbie and J.W. had a new baby brother named Acey. For Alice Cooper. I don't even want to know what Jack had to do for Marlene on that one.