The Crew - a novel by Earl LeClaire

Feb. 10, 2013 - PRLog -- Prohibition is still in effect as I’m telling you this story and everyone with a boat is still making money and being shot at. We had our day. And we paid dearly for it. We were just trying to muscle in on some of the action. I guess ‘muscle in’ isn’t the right terminology. We were more like jackals trying to get our share after the lions brought down the prey."

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Earl LeClaire, poet and raconteur, has worked at a myriad of jobs including, fisherman, lobsterman, nuclear piping designer, historical researcher, cab driver, and chef. He has been writing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction since 1971. He has published poetry, fiction and food articles in many small press and major magazines in the USA and Europe. Earl was awarded first place in the Aquillrelle Poetry Contest 2 for the poem, “Below the Mayonnaise Factory”. Earl was awarded first place in the Aquillrelle Poetry Contest 2 for the poem, “Below the Mayonnaise Factory”. He is the author of two cookbooks, Cove Creek Farm.Org‘s Old Timey Appalachian Good Foods and Game Cookbook and Old Swamper‘s Shellfish and Clambake Cookbook. His book of vignettes, Night Taxi, is currently out of print. His first book of poetry, Below the Mayonnaise Factory, is available through Catawba Press. Earl, 70, lives in the still rugged and beautiful Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina half a mile from the Tennessee Line. Deliverance, he is quick to remind you, was a product of the late James Dickey’s sometimes strange and twisted mind. However, he says, if you hear banjo music, paddle faster.

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Illustrations  By  Mark  Johnson
Mark M. Johnson is an artist and lives in Shelby, North Carolina.

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Chapter 1
The Crew (beginning)

We were quite a crew. I thought I was tough and getting tougher all the time but the guys I hung around with, Bad Bob Royster, Pike, Hank-The-Man, Manny and Bundog made me look like an altar boy. Prohibition is still in effect as I’m telling you this story and everyone with a boat is still making money and being shot at. We had our day. And we paid dearly for it. We were just trying to muscle in on some of the action. I guess ‘muscle in’ isn’t the right terminology. We were more like jackals trying to get our share after the lions brought down the prey. It was Bob’s idea, I had the boat, Pike managed the distribution, Hank was the ear, Manny had the truck and Bundog was always willing to be sacrificed. That is to say Bundog was a nutzo who never thought beyond the minute and took orders like it was his life’s work, which it probably would have been, had he lived longer. It all happened less than a year ago but it seems like it’s been a lifetime, which, of course, for Pike and Bundog it was.

We’d all been to the reformatory except Pike, he just never got caught. I got four months for stealing a little nineteen-foot sloop out of Charleston Pond. The rich New Yorker it belonged to never used it. It sat at its mooring all summer with sails furled and a canvas dodger protecting it from sun and weather. Wouldn’t you just know the September morning I took it the guy shows up from New York? The Coasties picked me up when I sailed into Point Judith Harbor. Let me tell you, that boat was sweet and fast. I was going to return it. I tried to convince the judge I took it just to sail, which I had, but he sat there, with a face like Boris Karloff in The Hope Diamond Mystery. Yeah, that judge in his black robe staring at me like a doomsayer and not listening to a word I said. He’d already made up his mind.e’d already made up his miondHe’d  The public defender I had was useless. He didn’t defend me as much as just ignored my case. The guy who owned the boat showed up for the hearing and referred to me as a “juvenile delinquent” and a “wharf rat.” The four months I got sentenced to reform school was so light I could’ve served it standing on my head. Yeah, right, believe that and I’ll tell you another one, because every day there was a day spent in Hell. The authorities said Sockanosett was for “the confinement of young persons of idle, vile or vicious habits.” I just never thought I was that bad. But reform school could transform a person into a hard core malefactor. (That’s a term I learned in the pokey, malefactor, that and transgressor). I met Bob in Sockanosett. I’d seen him around town, of course, and in grammar school but I didn’t really know him. He saved my bacon up at the reformatory and we fast became friends. He covered my back, I covered his. There was no black against white as far as the two of us were concerned. We were, so to speak, color blind.

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