Meeting Mr. Porter
Part I
Things were quiet, maybe too quiet, like things get when there’s not a lot of noise around. My identical third cousin, Arthur ‘Don’t Call Me Art’ Dekko was in The Fline Skwirls Motorbike Clubhouse asleep on his cot with his little ‘possum-headed dog George tucked underneath, both wheezing louder than steam powered locomotives and off-gassing like their diesel belching brothers…only more methane-ish. My beautiful-yet-cruel, legally-rendered bride, Princess Penny Duchess of Stonebroke was a-town probably going from store to store looking for something shiny to buy that she could hang from her neck or earlobes. All the cats were asleep so there was nothing to poke at. I was drinking way too much coffee and thinking of how little I knew about Barbados other than Rhianna was born there on February 20th in 1988, the island is composed mostly of coral; they have a place called Holetown. The citizens have a cool flag with a frog gig on it, the island is about 21 miles long and 14 miles at its widest point and is overpopulated with Green monkeys and mongooses, mongeese, mongi or whatever. Coincidentally it is situationally and geographically located with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. You might say the inhabitants are caught between a sea and a wet place.
Figuring that was sufficient knowledge of a place I will probably never get to go, I ruminated on whether to sweat in the garden or go angling. I grabbed my favorite bird’s-nesting level-wind reel & rod combo, a pocketful of crappie jigs, pocketed a flask of flavorful nutritional nourishment and set my course for the point where El Caballo Bayou and Bayou D’Gradable conflue into a pool we, here in New Monia, fondly refer to as Swallow Hole.
AS per usual, I walked out the main gate and hung a left toward a southerly compass point; my usual route for an angling excursion over there at the Hole. The path turns east along the depth of the ole Stonebroke Non-Profit Fireant and Rodent Ranch which allows me the opportunity to examine the condition of the hog fence bordering the patch of woods between me and Old Man Geezer’s property line. I noticed a thin wisp of smoke, blindingly white against a Smurf colored, cloudless sky. The smoke looked to be emanating from the center of the 20 or so acres of woods that separates Mr. Geezer’s plot and my own. Shouldering a healthy dose of trepidation I opted to investigate.
There was a mud colored F-150 parked in the mud colored mud right in front of a chain linked enclosure that measured about a hundred by hundred feet where sat an old blue and aqua camper circa 1970. It appeared to be recently slid out of the bed of the 150 and set up on cinder blocks positioned smack-dab in the middle of the compound. The smoke that had drawn me this close was coming from a fire that I couldn’t see from my vantage point but was apparently directly behind the camper. As I approached the fence my attention was drawn to a mud colored dog at the gate serenely gazing at me displaying no affection, fear nor aggression. You’ll understand, of course, that such body language from a one-eyed 150 pound, or nearly so, canid can be disquieting if you are indeed the subject of its focus.
With appropriate caution I eased up to the gate and greeted the animal that unblinkingly held his one-orbed fix on my form. The tail didn’t wag. A man stepped from behind the camper and said, “Well either come on in or be on your way, I’ve got things to do…business to tend to.”
I hollered, “Does the dog bite?”
He replied, “It’s a dog. Just open the gate and say ‘Scuse me sir’ then step around him to the left…on the side of his good eye.”
I observed the man’s hands were dripping blood and he was eating what appeared to be a Shipley’s glazed doughnut. I’d come this far so I entered the gate and with a “Scuse me, sir” walked past the dog on its good side.
“You call your dog sir?” said I.
He responded with “It’s Cer…short for Cerberus, keeper of the gates of Hades…Hell.’ My name’s Porter…Conrow Porter…just like corn row only you leave out one of the r’s…the first one.”
Mr. Porter stuck out his bloody hand; I took it in mine and shook it. I noticed he only had one good eye.
