A Visit to Tatum

“A Visit to Tatum”

Driving on a wide-open road in the middle of nowhere can be relaxing but not when your fuel warning light is shining at you. That’s the kind of feeling you don’t ever want to have.

As many times as I’d driven the stretch of I-44 between St. Louis and Springfield I had figured out a few things. Things like the best places to stop for a bite and exactly how much gas I needed to have in my tank. Over almost a year and a half dozen trips, I’d never had any problems until that day last month.

Ordinarily if I’d left my house without a full tank, I knew a stop in Rolla would take care of things, but there was so much going on at the office I hadn’t paid attention to details like that. Looking at the warning light, I figured I’d be able to drive about twenty-five miles on what was left in the tank but it was thirty miles to Rolla. Should I risk the drive? It was farm country with very little to see besides cows and corn fields.

It seemed like I’d be doing a white knuckle drive, with one eye on the road and one on the gas gauge. A few minutes later I saw a highway sign that I’d never paid much attention to on my previous trips. It read “Tatum Exit 27”. I’d probably seen the sign before but it just didn’t register in my memory. The warning light seemed to be telling me not to take any chances. I hit my turn signal and eased my way on to the exit ramp.

At the end of the ramp was a T-intersection with a small, paved road. If I turned left I could get back on to the highway. A right turn would, I assumed, take me to Tatum. Strangely, someone had closed off the section of the road in that direction. A large, steel drum had been placed in the middle of the narrow road. There was no sign of a building let alone a town. I felt more than a little nervous. I had two choices, get back on the highway and hope I could make it to Rolla or turn on to the small road and see where it would lead me. Neither option felt like a good one. I hesitated then decided to find out what was in this town that I’d never heard of. The barrel wasn’t too heavy, and I managed to wrestle it off to the side of the road and then headed toward Tatum.

After about a hundred yards of driving through what felt like a tunnel of large Pin Oak trees on both sides of the road I reached an opening. Off to my right was a large, faded sign that read “Parker’s Garage” and under that “Gas - Oil - Minor Repairs”. A smaller sign below it that looked like an afterthought read “Snack Bar”. I turned into what passed for an entrance and stopped.

Up ahead on the left were three rows of identical mobile homes, all white and all in less than good condition. Some looked like they weren’t lived in. There were only a few cars parked in the driveways. On the right, past the sign was the entrance to a large parking area and a three-bay brick garage. A small, white clapboard church sat at the far edge of the parking area. Beyond that, in every direction, was a whole lot of nothing. Beautiful rolling hills but nothing else.

To call Tatum a town was a real stretch but all I needed was a full tank of gas and then I’d be on my way. There were no signs of people or activity as I slowly drove past a long row of mailboxes at the entrance driveway to the trailers. Each box had the trailer owner’s address and name stenciled on it. There was a Parker, two Oldachs, three Larimores, two more Parkers, another Larimore, another Parker and two more Oldachs. It was hard to miss the strangeness of all those trailers being home to just three families.

There were two fuel pumps under a dilapidated canopy near the garage and I pulled up to the one marked “Regular”. There was no one in sight and after waiting for a few minutes I got out and grabbed hold of the nozzle. The readout showed I’d only pumped a dollar’s worth of gas when I heard a man calling to me. “Whoa, hold on there, mister, that’s my job!”

I turned and saw a skinny, middle-aged man in blue coveralls and a stained gray cap walking toward me. The name patch sewn on to his uniform read “Leonard”. “Oh, sorry, Leonard,” I said, “I thought it was self-serve.”

The man glared and took the pump from my hand. “Well, it ain’t, we do our own work around here.” His total lack of warmth and even a hint of a smile were surprising.

“I guess a lot of people make that mistake, huh?” Trying to put a friendlier tone on the conversation didn’t seem to have any effect.

“Nope, we don’t get a lot of people here. Don’t want to, cause we’ve got all them trucks to gas up and take care of.” He motioned toward the far end of the dirt and gravel parking area where three identical red vans were parked on a patch of asphalt. From the striping on the pavement it looked like there were empty spaces for other vans that must have been elsewhere at the moment. On the side of each of them was painted “Parker Delivery”. Leonard saw me looking them over. “That’s why we have these pumps. They’re for them vans and the school van to Cuba, not for strangers.”

“Then why the sign on the road over there? It makes it sound like you’re a regular business.”

“That sign’s been there nearly forty years. Old Tatum Parker put it up back when he got his friends at the capital to put in the exit from the highway. He wanted this business and the town to be somethin’ the rest of us folks didn’t.”

The readout on the pump showed that Leonard had already put more than enough into my tank to get me to Springfield so I wasn’t reluctant to challenge him a little. “So then why didn’t you just tell me that it’s your gas only and send me on my way?”

“Wouldn’t be Christian.” He rubbed the cuff of his sleeve across his nose.

As he finished filling my tank I looked back again to the row of mailboxes along the road. I thought again how odd it was that all those trailers housed the members of only three families. Maybe it was wrong to pry but it was too late, my curiosity had gotten the best of me. “So, Leonard, I saw the names on the mailboxes and I don’t see any other roads around here. Is that everyone in Tatum?”

He pulled the nozzle from my filler and looked at me. It wasn’t a friendly look. “Yeah, that’s Tatum; them trailers, the church and this garage.”

“And are you a Parker?”

“Nope, an Oldach. Is that important to you?”

His demeanor was starting to piss me off but it was also bringing out my snarky side. “No, I was just curious. I’ve driven this stretch of road many times and never noticed the sign for Tatum.”

“That’s the way we like it, nice and private.” he answered. He pulled a rag from his back pocket, wiped his nose and said, “That’s twenty-one seventy and we prefer cash.”

“No problem, but I’ll need a receipt from you.”

Leonard let out a long, deep sigh and muttered, “Ain’t that the way? There’s always somethin’ more.”

I nodded and said, “Yeah, I guess there is.” As I followed him to the garage I looked at the red vans again. “So tell me, what does Parker Delivery deliver?”

Leonard was not a patient man. He let out another deep sigh and answered, “You sure do ask a lot of questions. There are some folks in Rolla and Cuba. We deliver whatever they ask us to. We don’t ask em’ what it is and they don’t tell us.” It was a vague answer but I knew it would be the only one I’d get. We went into the garage and I laid two twenty dollar bills on the counter in front of him and then looked around.

The small area in front of the cash counter was barely big enough to stand in. The walls were covered with outdated product signs and a large array of black and white photographs. They were portraits of what a banner sign on the wall said were three generations of the men and women who’d operated Parker’s Garage and Parker Delivery over the years. That was the moment that I understood the mailboxes. There was Jim Parker and his wife Mary Oldach Parker. Next to them were Peter Larimore and his wife Cheryl Parker Larimore. Finishing the top row were Thomas Oldach and Margie Larimore Oldach and finally Nathan Parker and his wife Sandra Oldach Parker. I scanned the entire wall and every single face was attached to one of those three names. That explained the mailboxes and I figured it also explained in a very weird way Leonard’s comment about wanting privacy.

It looked like he was having some difficulty making change in the register and writing out my receipt. I let him struggle and looked into what the sign called a snack bar. There was a short red laminate counter with four stools and holes in the floor where two other stools had been removed. In front of that was a larger, empty area that looked like it might have been a dining room at some time in the past. There was noise coming from the kitchen but I saw no one. I turned back to Leonard and asked, “Is there someone in the snack bar that can get me a cup of coffee… to go?”

He looked up from his mathematical struggles, appearing to be irritated by my interruption and said, “I suppose she can get you a coffee if you have your own cup.”

“A paper cup would be just fine with me.”

“Look, mister…what’s your name by the way? I need it for the receipt.”

“It’s Wesley Ames.”

“Okay, Mr. Ames, it’s like I said before, we don’t get a lot of strangers here. The men who drive them vans all live here and them boys like their coffee in a real cup.” That’s how she pours it.” He went back to working on the receipt.

I shook my head, totally taken aback by his attitude and walked out to my car. I took out the insulated cup that I always kept filled with water, emptied it on to the ground and walked back inside, right past Leonard and into the snack bar. A woman in the kitchen noticed me through the pass-through window behind the counter. She looked surprised to see a strange face. I held up my empty cup and called out “Coffee?”

She hesitated so long that I thought she was deliberately avoiding me. Finally she made it around the corner to the kitchen door and stood behind the counter. She said nothing and just stared at me.

“I was wondering if you could fill this with coffee for me. Leonard said you would.”

“Leonard don’t run the snack bar, but I guess I can do it.” She reached for my cup, looked at it a moment and said, “This is a pretty big cup, I’m gonna have to charge you extra.”

“I sighed, not at all surprised that she was just as unfriendly as Leonard. “That’s fine.”

I watched her fill my cup and wondered how long that coffee pot had been sitting on a burner in an empty snack bar. She put the lid back on the cup, handed it to me and said in a monotone voice, “Three bucks even.”

“Okay, I’ll just give it to Leonard from my change.”

“You weren’t listenin’ to me. Leonard don’t run the snack bar. You gotta pay me.”

I put the cup on the counter, pulled three singles from my wallet and handed it to her.”

She took the bills from my hand and stood there looking at me. Finally, she said, “I accept tips.”

I was really tempted to reach into my pocket and take out a dime but I just shook my head and handed her another buck. She took it without saying anything and walked back into the kitchen.

Leonard had finally solved the riddle of making change and writing it down. He handed me my receipt and change and without saying “Thank you” or “Have a nice day” like every other service attendant in America would do. He turned and walked away, into a small storage room and closed the door behind him. Clearly, our little transaction was over.

As I turned my car around and headed back toward the small road it definitely felt good to be leaving Tatum. I wondered if I should wrestle the drum back on to the road after I got past it but decided not to. I was pretty sure that Leonard would here soon, eager to get the road blocked again. The rest of my drive to Springfield would have been more pleasant if it weren’t for my cup of bitter, boiled coffee and the bad mood I was in from my contact with the strange town of Tatum. A town like none I’d ever seen with people I’d hoped I’d never run into again. And they’d shown me very clearly that they felt the same way.

Before I’d left Springfield the next morning I‘d made sure to top off my gas tank. One of life’s lessons learned the hard way. My drive of one hundred and twenty-three miles would be non-stop and, hopefully, uneventful. I wasn’t surprised that right about the time I saw the exit for Rolla I started thinking about my strange experience of the day before. A town that I’d never heard of before was now all I could think about. I kept an eye on my odometer so I’d be ready in time to see the northbound sign for Exit 27 to Tatum and give it the finger as I passed by it. I slowed down a little when I got close to the area where I thought it would be. After a minute or so I spotted something ahead as odd as Tatum itself. A short remnant of the green metal post that once held the exit sign protruded above the grass along the shoulder. Someone, and I guessed it was Leonard, had cut down the sign. I looked across the median and saw that the sign along the southbound lanes was also gone. I pulled on to the shoulder and stopped.

A picture started to form in my mind, a picture of what must have happened overnight. A skinny man in blue coveralls and a stained gray cap came along, holding a flashlight and a hacksaw. He was crouched in the darkness with the guardrails hiding most of him from view. Between ducking down for passing cars he stood there and sawed away at the posts, first the northbound and then the south. I pictured his smile as each sign crashed to the ground and how he must have enjoyed dragging them into the weeds. And I pictured how his smile must have grown when he was sure that he’d just made it a lot harder for any strangers to visit Tatum in the future.

I smiled, lifted my coffee cup and tipped it in the direction of Tatum. “Here’s to you, Leonard Oldach, you strange man, and to your whole strange town.” I took a sip of coffee and added, “And on behalf of every single driver who will pass this way, I swear if you hadn’t cut those signs down, I would have.”