Barracuda Memories
Poring through computer files recently I ran across a photo my Northwest-born son sent me from a car show:a pristine “collectible” 1964 gold Barracuda. (He also scored a Barracuda name plate for my souvenirs, but the B broke off during a move.)
He had heard many tales about my first new — and all-time favorite — car, a gold 1964 Plymouth Barracuda. Punch-button transmission, black interior, steering wheel sheathed in polished wood “scales” like an expensive pocket knife; small-block V8, blazingly fast.
Left behind in Georgia when I migrated to the Evergreen State the year he was born, 1973. Even nine years old my Barracuda would have crossed the country readily; Chrysler had a 50,000-mile warranty I never needed to use. But I had my pickup and trailer boat to bring, and we didn’t leave until the mother-to-be was so far along we could not envision the logistics of a tandem road trip, and feared getting separated on the road. (This was years before car phones. I’d never dealt with Citizen’s Band radio, may not have known what a CB was.)
Her swollen belly no longer fit comfortably behind the Barracuda’s steering wheel. It was a strain just following me from Tallahassee to Augusta the first leg of the trip and tired her out. So in Georgia I signed the Barracuda over to my mother, to replace her worn-out Dodge sedan. She drove it to work every day for five more years but when she decided to bring her new boyfriend and my grandmother out West to visit, she acquired a brand-new Monte Carlo. What surprises me as I approach eighty is I have no memory what became of my cherished gold Barracuda after 14 years of service.
At age twenty it was first major purchase of my life, after I sold my first novel for more than I made annually.
Looking at the car-show photo I realized I had on my desktop a 1971 photo taken from a similar rear angle when I used my Barracuda as a hunting car. Duck boat tied on top, back seat folded flat to accommodate decoys, small outboard, shotguns, oars and all the other impedimenta of duck hunting.
Barracuda Abroad
The Barracuda was only five years old when I moved to Nassau and shipped it as deck-cargo on the M.V. Buccaneer. After stormy weather at sea it came through Customs glazed with salt spray. I got it washed, but salt got into every invisible nook and cranny. Toward the end of its service in Georgia my mother reported rust eating through sheet metal everywhere. But that was a long time later. From my island notes:
Histories said the African chief John Connu “required” white slavers to permit Africans in the West Indies a Christmas celebration of old tribal rituals. No single reference as to how he required it. In the library, steel bands tinkling, Obeah or other dark magic seemed implied. I followed his name book to book. He morphed into Johnny Canoe, substituting an Arawak word, then Junkanoo. No cross-reference to the ancient Prester John of papal legend, who wielded remote power with his magic far-seeing mirror. If Johnny Canoe was his descendant, slavers would have been smart not to cross him…and centuries later, Johnny Canoe became Junkanoo, and Bahamians danced. An excellent fantasy novel I never wrote….Meanwhile, the M/V “Buccaneer” out of Jacksonville, Barracuda as deck cargo, finally arrived after delays by bad weather.
A company artist, a former girlfriend, had offset plates from the composing room cut about eighteen inches square, and loaned me black paint and a brush to paint them. I used her white acrylic and my wife’s mascara brush to paint my license-plate numbers and print Nassau Bahamas. The license-division guy assigning LP numbers said there were so many cars on the island he expected it to sink: island humor. Charge was $B25 a year and you letter your own plate. Making license plates is beyond the skill of inmates at Fox Hill Prison: expatriate humor:
When the Barracuda was on the dock, the customs man smirkingly announced $B300 import duty. Accepted my Royal Bank of Canada check after tedious paperwork…Rolling down Bay Street in my Barracuda, the hood now seeming wide enough to land a helicopter, I had to strain to hear eight-cylinder purr after the sewing-machine clatter of Continental cars. But I never wrote the new Out Island tour book I was hired to write. The publisher changed his mind when he saw the budget needed to send me to all the islands.
New Providence Island — November 1969: Up at 4:30 a.m. to go to Lake Killarney. Still feels odd to drive the Barracuda on the wrong side of the road in the predawn, wearing hunting clothes; have to be careful not to drift to the right lane in a kind of trance. No ducks... I talked to a Bahamian duck hunter wearing an electric green shirt. We talked about people building cities and dams and closing off all the duck ranges and not giving one damn about all of us from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer on Long Island who kind of wish they wouldn’t destroy it all…
I waded flooded woods on the other side of Lake Killarney with the air-traffic controller, Saunders, as guide. Accompanied by a couple of Paradise Island croupiers with fancy Charles Daley over-unders. Saunders broke into uncontrollable shivering from wading thigh-deep, but the water was not as cold as Florida water I waded in dungarees as a teenager. His little British car didn’t even have a heater! Manufacturers apparently save a few bucks (or pounds I suppose) by not supplying heaters in cars shipped to the Bahamas…He reveled in the Barracuda’s heater and told me of his lifelong yearning for a pair of chest waders. I asked his boot size.
I stood on the Barracuda roof on top of Gladstone Hill and watched hundreds of ducks on closed-to-shooting Lake Cunningham — and farther off, the pastel phantasmagorical superstructures of cruise ships in the harbour. They looked like some surreal and transient city that would vanish like Brigadoon at sunset, when they sailed…
I posted an urgent airmail to my grandmother with instructions to use my stateside checking account to buy Saunders a pair of chest waders at Proctor’s Hardware on Jacksonville Beach and ship them immediately…Somehow it still seems wrong to drive on the left side of a two-lane road past bogs and open fields when you’re up before daylight to go duck hunting. Your instincts war with your intellect, creating tension. I was so tired I almost dozed. I turned on the car radio — all I could get was some bilingual station. A French speaker carefully coaching illegal Haitians in simple English phrases to help them navigate this English island and avoid Immigration. Saunders showed up late, hustled by with his worn pump gun and vanished on the far side of the lake. Nothing flew. I walked back slowly to the Barracuda, rocks shouldering up bruisingly under my deck shoes. I heard Saunders shoot four times….
Transition: April Fool’s Day, 1970 — Our second wedding anniversary was target for abandoning Nassau for Pennsylvania. I always regretted never catching up with Saunders to give him his chest waders. I didn’t have his address. No one not rich could afford a personal phone in Nassau. I called his control tower from my office but white British-sounding voices informed me black employees were not permitted to use the tower phone. So the waders went north with us.
We stuffed the Barracuda with as many worldly possessions as would fit. Including my Spanish 16-gauge double, disassembled and buried in the bottom of a tin trunk full of household goods on the advice of my wife. The 1968 Gun Control Act forbids import of personal firearms into the States, but damned if I am going to leave it. My oldest sister-in-law successfully smuggled a .30 Remington pump, their father’s gun, into Norway for her Norwegian-farmer groom who liked to hunt. Norwegians have no great respect for government interference in private matters…
Bahamians couldn’t believe I was shipping a car out of the islands. I’d had to pay B$300 “import duty” when it arrived because authorities refused to believe I’d take it with me when I left. The same authorities laughed at me when I asked for my money back. Island car prices were badly inflated. I could have sold the Barracuda for a pretty penny. But cars were never about economics to me — they were about freedom. While I served my two-year Army tour, the Barracuda gave my mother freedom of movement she’d never had, and my brother used it to romance girls.
Barracuda Back Home
Jacksonville— When it was time to collect the Barracuda on the docks, a Customs agent was waiting beside the car. But this was good news: he shook hands and extended his boss’s felicitations. In 1964 I wrote a lengthy magazine story about his boss, the Customs Agent-in-Charge, who liked the story so well he presented me with a whole box of his trademark coal-black cheroots. Customs people must have long memories. When my name popped up on the Barracuda cargo manifest six years later, he dispatched one of his men to take good care of me. The agent signed off on the Barracuda without cracking a door. My wife was impressed, and my Spanish double was home safe….
Barracuda Excursions
Chesapeake Bay, December 1971 — We picked up in a rough wind in pitch-blackness, dumping decoys in the boat fast as we could. When we ran out of paddle-able marsh, I was afraid to stand and pole for fear of tipping in the wind. I went over the side and shoved from behind while my wife used a paddle to find holes. I found ones she missed. Soaked in cold water and hot sweat, I waited for my 245-pound-burdened heart to pack up. But the flesh plodded on. I never fell nor made a misstep nor tipped the boat nor died nor drowned.
We found the invisible shore by dead reckoning; for some reason I never despaired or weakened. My carpal-tunnel wrists gave me my only grief other than a left-leg Charlie horse. My wife got over her mad and became “a little worried and terribly concerned” because I looked so tired.
It was damn cold but I could not feel it for the sweat boiling out of my overweight hide. We were about a quarter of a mile off the car when we made shore. She insisted I “rest” while she walked for the car; I walked a beat to keep loose and avoid chill, and hoped the weary old Barracuda would come through.
I saw the inside dome light, then yellow close-set eyes of the parking lights, and then headlights dipping over the ruts. We sat in the car for a breather, had the last Coke and coffee and orange and sandwich. Then unloaded the boat and loaded the car. Then another break to warm up before we tied the boat on top of the Barracuda as the wind tried to take it away. White salt came through my sweatshirt, wool sweater and ski parka to coat the inside of my camo parka. I sweated down to 237 by a motel scale…
1966 — Barracuda on Harvey Hill
I was home on leave from the Army. “Ready for our date?” she said. I gulped and nodded. She cleared her throat. “Can we take your car? I’m in no shape to drive!” Like I was. I led her to my Barracuda and handed her in, admiring the tidy way she tucked in her tidy body. When I drove away, she waved gaily. “Your grandmother thinks I’m corrupting you.”
“I certainly hope so,” I said. “After that kiss.” Her laughter was a happy silvery sound. She was turned to face me, knees drawn up fetchingly. She had kicked her pumps off. Her hand trailed gently up and down my leg. “Nice slacks….I don’t think I like bucket seats. I can’t get close enough.” I reached behind the seats.“Before my brother went in the Navy — ah!” I brought out a thickly rolled beach towel and pushed it down between the seats.
“Trust your brother. Your folks told me all about his string of beach bunnies.” She swarmed across the towel to snuggle. At some remove, I couldn’t believe the unattainable married beauty was in my arms. When I finally palmed her breasts the nipples almost burned my hands through her frock…She removed my hands and pulled back to her seat. For an eternal moment my eyes refused to convey an image to my brain, as if struck blind. In that moment she reached behind, unzipped and shucked her frock onto the floorboards and came back into my arms stark naked. No panties, no bra…
“Remember when you told me the Barracuda’s back seat folds down like a station wagon?” she said against my mouth. I mumbled something that might have been yes.“Show me,” she whispered…
Too late to think about a room. Now my brain recorded the damn gas tank was half empty. Every thrust caused a hollow boink below the carpet. My brother had warned me. What kind of moron designs a car for fucking and puts the gas tank in such a stupid place? My brain short-circuited my cock. I softened slightly…realized she was clinging to me like a limpet, crying as if her heart were broken. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I love you, goddammit!” First time she’d ever said it. Before I could say anything she sobbed into my shoulder like a hurt child. “I love you and I can’t come! I love you in me and I can’t come. Goddammit, what’s wrong with me!”
The night got worse.
Coon hunters in a pickup truck showed up complaining I had the woods road blocked. When they noticed the big steamed-over back window they began joking about getting them some of that. I was out of the car bareass in a flash, my Colt leveled at their windshield. They backed off and left. I left before they could get mad and come back.
Once on the highway, nothing was going to catch the Barracuda. We wound up on Harvey Hill, highest in the area, where I could keep an eye out. So I thought…
I scrunched down, raised her legs and put my mouth against her feather-soft pubic thatch. Her fingers laced in my hair. Her hips began a slow, intense tidal roll…Then she jerked with alarm. “Oh, my God!” I opened my eyes to blinding white headlights — again — and pushed upright. Into the beam of a big flashlight behind which an official-sounding voice was saying: “Are you all right, Ma’am…Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Sir!” The flashlight beam was snatched away.
Between high beams behind and the rising moon I made out a Florida State Trooper by the door. He actually tipped his Stetson.“My apologies, Sir. I thought the lady might be stranded alone out here…May I suggest getting a room?”…“Same thing my father told me.” “Wise man. Y’all take care now.”
And he was gone. I felt a laugh building inside. It escaped. “You honest to God love me?” “God help me,” she said. “Honest to God I do…God, I don’t want to leave you! But…” But she had to get home to face her life. I released her and keyed the ignition. “I know an all-night gas station that keeps clean restrooms. We can get cleaned up.” She rearranged her dress. “Good,” she said briskly. “I kept my panties and bra in my handbag so they’d be clean when I went home. I had this crazy idea…Somehow, someway, we’re gonna try this again before you leave. But I will never, ever forget Harvey Hill.”
Barracuda road trip, interrupted
She had been unable to find another free evening after our first chaotic date when I was home on annual leave. Best she could do was a poignant lunch. I was committed to another year of military servitude far away. She said she dreaded my departure. I felt empty when I left her, a feeling too familiar from my lost love in Paris…her devotion had finally softened the after-all romantic heart of my grandmother, usually suspicious of women interested in me. My mother already was on her side. Unknown to me, the women in my life hatched a plot: she would leave her husband, child, and job and follow me Northwest.
My mother would come with her, two women who loved me driving my Barracuda cross-country. My favorite uncle, a big wheel in Southern politics, would get my mother’s Post Office transfer expedited to a Washington city. Meanwhile she could waitress while my girlfriend found an art-studio job. But best-laid plans of Venusians, as well as mice and men, gang aft agley...
She planned her escape like a convict because her domineering husband treated her like one. He had acquired a boat for commercial fishing in South Florida. Her presence aboard was required when she could get off work. She told him she had to drive to town for supplies, left the car and took a bus home to pack and flee. He caught up with her at home, packing. Like a canny warden he had smelled something brewing. Did she leave the car keys for him? Did he have spares? Hot-wire the car? Anyway, he caught her.
She never told me what he did when he caught her. But he forced confession of her putative road trip — and naming of her co-conspirators…The rest was ugly. But soon as I was home from the Army we started up again, for one long hot summer…
Barracuda at Christmas
The hot affair ran its course and was over by November. I was ready to swear off women entirely. My grandmother put her thumb on the scales and called the redhead I’d met in the Army, then forsaken for my married paramour. I was sure she was done with me. My grandmother said she wasn’t…
Christmas 1967, Augusta, Ga. — Arriving airliners parked out from the terminal on the concrete. Steps were wheeled out. I waited at the gate as people disembarked beneath December storm clouds. She’d had to change in Chicago first and then Atlanta. All flights South came through Atlanta. She was about halfway back in the straggling file across the pavement. I stood behind the gate as greeters swarmed awaited travelers. Others rushed into the gap. She stood back to let them go. Our gazes met and locked. She seemed faintly amused by the noisy greeting rituals. To me we seemed separated by antic pygmies. Her auburn hair blazed under the gray sky. She wore a Kelly green dress that hugged her curves. A scoop neck showed elegant collarbones beneath the pale column of her neck. Finally she stepped through. Handed me her old Pan Am carry-on. I remember the diffidence with which we came together and turned toward the terminal. Nothing else...
Did we hug? Did we kiss? Did we claim her checked bags? We must have done. All I recall is walking her toward the Barracuda. I was going to unlock the passenger door when she said “I’ll get in this side,” and dropped gracefully behind the steering wheel. She braced against the floor, lifting her hips and reached with her right leg to slide across the bucket seats. The green satin hem rode above her knees. Her calves and quads defined themselves and I thought my god, those legs! She was here. She was in the Barracuda. It seemed like a miracle.
We married April Fool’s Day 1968. Seemed appropriate. From then on, Georgia to Florida to the Bahamas to Pennsylvania and back to Florida before we decided to move West, the Barracuda was always with us. When we needed two cars to get to our separate jobs, she took the Barracuda and I bought a truck. It was hers until I gave it to my mother the year my son was born.
