The SUP Goddess

The unincorporated hamlet of Pig Spit, advertised on a peeling billboard at the edge of town as the Crossroads of Northern Southeast Iowa, suffers from a name that most towns would’ve traded in years ago. Yet the exceptional—for Iowa—orneriness of at least one hundred of its hundred and ninety-two residents has turned the name into a source of perverse civic pride. Back when the north-south railroad line still ran, Pig Spit was a minor switching station featuring a one-room pork barbecue—the Pig—shack on a narrow strip of land—the Spit—poking into Izzy’s Pond, the local breached quarry and occasionally lethal swimming hole. You had to—still have to—go to the next stop at Lolo, now a half hour drive, if you want such urban amenities as fresh milk, gasoline, public school, or a traffic light, although Lolo’s is a push-button pedestrian crossing and as such, always green.

The Shack, as people have referred to it since its half-assed construction around 1865, goes by the official name of Merle’s, hand-painted over the door. A good thirty percent of the town, male and female, is named Merle on account of some family trees that don’t branch and an esteemed Pig Spit founding ancestor. To simplify matters, they go by compounds like Merle Anne, Bobby Merle and Merle Bo Peep, the current proprietrix of The Shack, full name Merle Bo Peep Fortin Baxter. Merle Bo Peep—Peep for short—makes a hot Missouri barbecue sauce that has grown men sitting in the grass outside the door to wolf down their pork as fast as possible. Her secret ingredient is rumored to be just a touch of pig’s blood suspended in motor oil, both of which she denies.

In Pig Spit, the regional commitment to Iowa Nice as the predominant character trait has been undermined by the genetic input of the Holloways, a family of Confederate deserters and unrepentant hillbillies from Missouri who intended to flee to Canada but made it only as far as the pleasant environs of the pond, which they promptly named after their patriarch, Izzy Holloway, a one-legged, red-headed Baptist minister of no actual theological training. The next day, legend has it, they butchered one of three hogs they’d brought in the wagons and started barbecuing. They named the barbecue joint founded shortly thereafter for Izzy’s wife Merle and so a dynasty was founded. Of sorts.

For some years now a recent Pig Spit returnee named Chapman Button—one hundred ninetieth of the 192 residents, before the Nesbitt twins—has been Merle Bo Peep’s best customer, around nearly every day for a pulled pork sandwich or the brisket special on Wednesday. Chapman isn’t related to the Merles, as the extended Holloway clan is now known, which makes him something of an outsider in Pig Spit although he was born and raised here. He ran away to Hollywood after high school and built sets for twenty years before retiring to Pig Spit, “because it’s Pig Spit, after all,” a phrase that sets local heads nodding with deep intuitive understanding. No place could provide purer contentment than Pig Spit, and nothing is less surprising than fools from elsewhere who fail to comprehend this simple truth.

In the half-collapsed barn behind his three-room house, Chapman indulges a long buried passion for rebuilding old calliopes and throws a tarp over his lathe and drill press as defense against the leaking roof. This pastime would be tolerated better if Chapman hadn’t accessorized his workshop by taking the brass casing from an eight inch naval shell, converting it into a whistle, and hooking it up to an old-fashioned steam boiler running at about a hundred PSI. The whistle shakes windows and is audible for at least a mile when Chapman blows it at the start and end of his unpredictable work day. No one has ever been able to prove that it actually shatters glass, but many a crack is blamed on Chapman. Another of his notorious entertainments is to pour an inch of gasoline in the bottom of an empty five-gallon herbicide can, light a match, throw it in, and dive behind a piece of quarter inch steel he uses as a shield.

A fierce tiger cat named Zorro shares the property, spending his days terrorizing small animals and birds throughout Pig Spit and retreating at night to the barn, where he allows mice to run rampant. Chapman refers to the cherry tree beside the barn as the Cat-Feeding Tree, due to Zorro’s habit of climbing onto a low branch to wait for birds to land within easy pouncing distance. Zorro prefers large prey for the challenge and will attack anything up to the size of a miniature poodle. Broad pink scars from a youthful tangle with a raccoon run across his brow and down his left shoulder so that he resembles a psychotic orange wolverine. Timid children run the other way as he stalks the crumbling sidewalks of Pig Spit, remnants of a brief period in the fifties when the town showed some ambition for infrastructure. Bolder children follow him for entertainment.

Chapman does handyman carpentry and metal work here and there, fixing old warped double hung windows that won’t shut, nailing up a few missing shake shingles after a storm, replacing rotting porch steps and rusted out railings, as and if he feels the inclination. Pig Spit’s residents often don’t realize that they’re on his to-do list until he shows up with his toolbox and corrects whatever’s bothering him. They pay him as appropriate, or sometimes feed him or hand over home canned fruits or jellies or a sack of zucchini in season. Chapman’s fixes don’t come with paint or finishes or sanding but they’re usually improvements, everyone agrees, and it’s good to have him out and about rather than sounding the whistle or blowing things up. On occasion they’ll even bring him a wobbly table or a rocker with a broken arm, so long as they don’t need it any time soon.

Not long after returning to Pig Spit and acquiring the old Conrad place, Chapman made an attempt to restore the barn to its original gabled glory. He walked Pig Spit at night, helping himself to unsecured lumber and poorly attached fence planks. He spent a morning turning a slumping wall into a more upright patchwork of mismatched wood, some of it painted colors that would later identify it for disgruntled previous owners, then stood back to survey his handiwork and found it aesthetically disappointing. Rather than go on doing the same thing in the hope of a better result – the definition of insanity, he’d read somewhere – Chapman gave up on restoring the barn, propped up the walls with a few angled beams, and returned to his true love, calliopes he’d bought cheap at auctions.

Chapman’s work habits are creative, to say the least. He’ll spend days in a fever, metal lathe turning with a fearsome whine, hammering at all hours despite the complaints of the widow Mrs. Sallie Nusom next door, who goes to bed at sundown year round. If the project turns out to be relatively easy, he’ll lose interest, or occasionally he’ll encounter a mechanical problem he needs to work through in his head and spend the next few days pulling carp out of Izzy’s Pond. During one of these spells Chapman witnessed such a singular sight on the water that he dropped his homemade fishing pole and had to dive in after it.

Peep’s seasonal employee, a grad student from Iowa City named Greta Duarte, had paddled to the middle of the pond in her bikini on some kind of stiff board, then stood upright and began to perform stretching exercises. Chapman guessed they might be yoga although he hadn’t seen enough yoga to be sure. He was prevented from shouting out to ask what she was up to by the angry arrival of Peep, expecting help she hadn’t gotten with lunch prep. Peep smokes at least two packs a day and couldn’t shout if the Shack caught on fire (as it has from time to time), but Greta waved agreeably, paddled back to shore, propped her board behind the Shack and disappeared inside.

Chapman approached the board with the sly, silent attitude of a bird hunter sliding into better position in his blind, afraid of being caught by Greta or anyone else in town who might make a tale out of his interest. The board was thicker than he’d first believed, light and solid, a real platform with a soft, knobby surface on one side and fins on the other. Chapman measured its height, width, and depth with hands and fingers. He was about to head back to the barn when he saw Sallie Nusom headed his way, her view partly obscured by the wicker-backed rocker he’d recently repaired for her but forgotten in the back of the barn, now carried upside-down on her shoulders as she charged pond-ward.

As the chair approached him in the light of day, Chapman could see that the mice Zorro disdained had made a meal of its seat. He could also see that Mrs. Nusom was stronger than she appeared to be while swanning around her perennial garden, and spitting mad. Chapman took cover in the pond’s tree belt and ducked home via backyards, watching for the menacing chair. When he dared peek out the front window a few hours later, remnants of chewed wicker and mouse droppings littered the front step. He came and went by the back door for the next few days as a precaution.

Chapman had seen the beginning of the raging trend brought to town by Greta, but he wouldn’t be the one to ride the wave. By the time he’d stopped hiding from Sallie Nusom, sending neighbor kids to fetch his barbecue every day, standup paddle boards were de rigueur in Pig Spit. Not the sort of fancy, store-bought item Greta had imported from the big city, but diverse home-sourced contraptions that looked likely to float.

There was a supposedly waterproof old crib mattress that sank its first time out but made a comeback—after drying out—with a sealing layer of garbage bags and duct tape that required frequent repair. A solid pine door had Titanic-level floating power but was too tippy for floating calisthenics. The most successful attempt involved tractor tire tubes with a length of plywood lashed on top, raft-style, and whitewashed to minimize splinters, but to paddle it to the middle of the pond took several people. No one was willing to admit that Greta’s stand-up paddle board—the acronym SUP began to make the rounds, with chuckles—was superior to anything they could devise, but the competition was getting tense.

Chapman, who liked seeing the mighty of Pig Spit taken down a notch or two, mocked their sunburned efforts. “And if any of you really had any game you’d be out there in a bikini like Greta,” he announced his first time back to the Shack after the wicker chair incident, watching the antics on the pond over brisket al fresco. This was taken as blatant fat shaming by three middle-aged women paddling the tire raft in well-filled t-shirts and leggings.

“If you don’t like the sight of my ass as it is, go back to Hollywood!” shouted Kristen Cuthbert as she struggled to maintain balance and forward momentum.

“I seen him checking out Greta’s board,” said her friend Dana Baxter, Peep’s niece, another major patron of the Shack. “He’s hot for her and it, that’s his problem.”

At this uncomfortable juncture, Greta came out the Shack’s back door to lead the daily lunchtime yoga session and Chapman was forced to retreat into the trees to avoid eye contact with her. Between Greta and Mrs. Nusom, things in Pig Spit had gotten to the point that the same afternoon, Chapman left a full double bowl of food for Zorro in the barn and drove himself up the highway an hour, singing along with Lyle Lovett, for a little respite at his friend Laura Lafferty’s Community Supported Agriculture organic farm.

Laura was of course current on Pig Spit gossip from her weekly drop-offs at the Monday evening farmer’s market. Sensing Chapman’s distress, she held her tongue and put him to work weeding and collecting eggs. In the evening she set a large bowl of greens in front of him, opened a growler of local microbrew, and made ready to get the whole story.

“You feedin’ me weeds again, Laura?” Chapman asked, holding up the white end of a dandelion green.

“And you’ll eat em if you know what’s good for you.”

At Chapman’s tale of lovelorn woe over the splendid, and splendidly equipped, Greta Duarte, Laura made the sort of guttural noise old men make before they spit but kept her saliva to herself.

“Greta Duarte’ll never give you the time of day and that’s a fact. But I think we can set you up with a SUP that’ll make Pig Spit eat its lower lip. Come ‘ere.” Laura led him down to the barn to show him the walk-in cooler she’d just installed. “Came packed in these big sheets of polystyrene foam. Look.”

To Chapman’s wondering eyes she revealed a length of thick foam fully large enough to cut out a paddle board as big or bigger—magnificently manly in size—than Greta’s. Dandelion greens forgotten, he spent the rest of the evening shaping the foam with Laura’s old wood planer and a long knife into the best approximation he could manage. Laura threw some leftover epoxy resin and a splintering wooden canoe paddle into the bed of Chapman’s pickup and sent him back to Pig Spit a happy man. She stood in the drive, arms folded, watching his rooster tail sail down the dirt road.

“Men,” she said to the turkeys. She hiked back to the house to finish off his greens and beer.

The paddle board still needed fins and finishing and Chapman was rabid not to have it discovered before he could march down to Greta’s yoga class with his masterpiece under his arm, but time was growing short. The semester started in Iowa City the following week. Chapman made a trip all the way to the library in Lolo to download DIY videos on SUP design and hit up woodworking buddies for whatever spare resin and hardener they had lying around. Word got back to Pig Spit before he did that Chapman was up to mischief involving epoxy.

Normally Chapman would’ve taken such a project outside, but given that every ambulatory resident of Pig Spit had lately taken to walking by his house at least once a day, he kept the barn doors closed and relied on the natural ventilation of the dilapidated barn to disperse the fumes.

“None of your goddam business,” he said to Zorro.

What with the salvage lumber and junk metal, tools, cat food, spider webs, and generational dust, it was tough to find a clean place for the board, but Chapman pushed everything to the walls and cleared a space. His accumulated stash of epoxy of various ages he mixed up in a gallon ice cream tub, pouring from tubes and jugs that he cast behind him in a frenzy, feeling like a mad scientist. The epoxy poured beautifully onto the foam with only a few bubbles, but the smell was strong enough that after the first coat Chapman stepped out for air. He walked out to the street and tapped charred tobacco out of his pipe against the mailbox.

The first sign of trouble was the orange streak that shot by to round the line of the picket fence at a flat sprint and disappear beyond Mrs. Nusom’s lilac hedge. Chapman, but didn’t think much about aggressive behavior from Zorro. If the cat were rabid, how could anyone tell? Anticipating the awestruck look on Greta’s face when she saw his custom paddle board, he took the tobacco pouch from the pocket of his t-shirt, tamped a little into the pipe bowl, and lit up. There was no traffic, just bird and cicada song, a perfect Iowa summer afternoon. Sweat trickled down his back and he kicked at the runaway purslane underfoot. Better not tell Laura or she’d feed it to him. Chapman hummed a few notes of satisfaction and took off toward the pond on foot to scope out the best launching spot.

Sallie Nusom was coming out to water her geranium baskets just as Troy Nesbitt, one of the kids from around the corner—a towheaded lad in cutoffs and flip-flops—kicked a ball slowly up the sidewalk in the sulky way of children who’ve been ejected from the glow of a screen. Troy looked first at Sallie and her exuberant geraniums, then drifted his gaze in the direction of Chapman Button’s barn next door, half visible behind the tiny house.

“Hey look,” Troy said, and pointed. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. When Sallie turned, the vertical line of dark smoke rising from the barn spoke for itself.

“Oh lord,” she said and dropped the watering can.

The Pig Spit Volunteer Fire Department, housed out of Bobby Merle Holloway’s triple garage about two hundred yards from the Shack—which explains the Shack’s longevity—is the pride of Pig Spit. From the moment the call comes, they can be anywhere in town in under five minutes. On this particular afternoon, Bobby Merle, his sixteen-year-old son Dewey, and Dewey’s best friend Sherm were in the driveway washing the fire engine. They pulled up next to Chapman’s barn so quickly that Bobby Merle would later lament the lack of accurate measurement of what was surely a record response time.

It’s therefore no discredit to the Pig Spit Fire Department that they were too late. The exothermic reaction of large quantities of epoxy resin and hardener, warned of on labels Chapman had cast over his shoulder without reading, had lit first the lumber pile and shortly thereafter the matchstick barn. Troy, the hero of the hour, pulled the blackened paddle board out the door as Sallie Nusom shouted at him to stay away, but heat had melted the foam on the far end into black goo. Once Bobby Merle and Dewey got the whole thing hosed down and pulled wide what was left of the doors, the melting brass pipes of four calliopes sat pitifully under fallen roof beams like a newsreel photo of the firebombing of Dresden.

It all happened so fast that no one fetched Chapman until it was over. Troy’s angry mother arrived to haul him home so the unhappy task fell on Sallie, who was torn between sympathy for a man who’d just lost his barn—the epitome of Iowa tragedy—and optimism about the quiet that might now fall on the neighborhood. Because she was born a Merle, Sallie didn’t sugarcoat.

“Get home quick,” she told Chapman when she found him floating peacefully in t-shirt and cargo shorts in the shady side of the pond closest to the Shack. “Your barn done burned.” Chapman was out of the pond at a speed that might have induced the gullible to believe he walked on water. He didn’t stop to shove his feet into his sneakers but ran barefoot—shrieking when he reached the sizzling asphalt and dodging for shade—past all ten houses on the way home, farther than he’d run since he was Troy’s age.

The firefighters and a crowd of gawking Merles stood staring at the ruins. Peep, on the return leg of a supply run to the Iowa City Aldi, slowed down to see what the fuss was about, spotted Chapman soaking wet, red-faced, and bent over panting in front of the smoking barn, and kept on rolling. She went straight to the Shack, where Greta was putting the last of the condiments in the cooler after cleaning up from the lunch rush. Peep was thrilled to have an audience for her tale, the object of Chapman’s absurd affections no less.

“Guess what I just saw over at Chapman Button’s?” she said as she sailed in, voluminous sundress flapping.

“Who’s Chapman Button?” Greta asked.

Chapman didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of Greta walking up the road after her shift to see his barn, with the telltale half-melted paddle board propped against the fence, because he’d already retreated into his house, locked the door, and turned off the phone. No one could rouse him for several days, to the point where people at the Shack began to speculate about what he could be eating and Peep sent Greta to deliver a plate.

Whether Chapman realized that the SUP goddess was on his property is a question for the ages. No one answered her knock so Greta left the plate on the porch, where Zorro promptly finished it off, and went back to the Shack to finish the dishes. The summer was a success, as far as she was concerned. Pig Spit was a lovely, relaxing place to make a few bucks and she planned to analyze Peep’s sauce in her lab to determine the precise composition of the Pig Spit barbecue miracle. Greta returned to Iowa City to finish her master’s in chemistry and later opened a successful chain of barbecue restaurants.

It took Laura Lafferty to spring Chapman from his self-imposed isolation tank. After a call from Sallie she showed up with a set of tools, took Chapman’s back door off its hinges, and lured him into her pickup with a full rack of Peep’s ribs. After that the house and barn lay as silent as even Sallie could wish, disturbed only by Zorro’s nighttime prowling. During the day he lay on a cushion in the Nusom bay window overlooking Main Street, a king in his castle. The last anyone in Pig Spit heard of Chapman Button, he was the man-of-all-work at Laura’s thriving CSA, where he carried on stockpiling calliopes in the three-sided machinery hangar and ate purslane and dandelions without complaint.