Pascagoula Shuffle Chapter 1

On A summer day much like this one , I swung out of the driveway onto a roadtrip to the deep Delta. My two traveling companions were a 69 Cutlass Convertible and a sexy but duplicitious cupcake I had meet at the Star Bar.5 feet tall, a betty page haircut,curvy, and with a collection of form fitting clothes pulled from a 50's exploitation film
like "HOT ROD HELLCATS" or "BAD DRAGSTRIP GIRLS GONE BAD".Ever see a Russ Myer film?
I met her two weeks before on a July night at the Star Bar when the Blacktop Rockets were playing a double bill with Redneck Greece.Rockabilly heaven baby!
Downstairs in the bar between sets, I slithered through the crowd and called to Mike, the bartender, for a cold PBR(The only drink of choice for any self-respecting hep cat at the Star Bar).My eyes as usual were trawling the crowd for eye candy when a bump at my shoulder focused my attention to my left side, my dead ear side that is.Smiling back at me with an expression reserved for those who have made some whitty observation or ironic comment and are waiting for the perfect comeback, were a pair of big green eyes and a cupie doll mouth.Maybe just a little smirk hanging back there too."I said how about a drink"
She leaned in a little more as I turned my deaf side away."Sure what can I get you"
I said with an expansive sweep of my hands across the vista of liquor lining the wall."Vodka Martini dry, oh and by the way I'm Kat".As I shook her hand a vague recollection of all the girls I'd ever known who went by "Kat" should have set off a few alarms...but I was on my third beer.We talked a while and she later mentioned that she had seen me arrive in my Marina Blue convertible and how much she liked old cars .With the leather racing jacket with the white stripe across the the sleeves, Lucky 13 patch on the back and the fact that she also owned a 68 Barracuda fastback ,and that she was wearing a pair of stilletoes usually reserved for strippers and bondage fetish pictorials in Maxim didn't hurt the vibe either.Houston we look like a GO here.
The conversation rolled on until the Blacktop Rockets finished upstairs but you might guess that I was no longer interested in the music up there but specifically in the girl from Passcagoola.Soft delta accent without a hint of the debutante,nor of the trailer either.She said she had come to Atlanta to get away from the family and started out as a secretary in Dunwoody for a small law firm I had by coincidence worked with a few years before (so we got to laugh over the eccentricities of some of the attorneys there).Later she had quit and bought a share in a small store in the area that sold things like skull and crossbone lunch boxes,bobbel head Elvises(ELVI PLURAL...?)and latex bustiers with mad kittys on them.And so the conversation rolled like a new set of wheels.Smooth......
A couple of hours later we where standing out on the hot 4am concrete, leaning against her Barracuda and saying amorous goodbyes.4:35 A.M..ohh you get the picture....It was the begining of a brief but torrid affair that would end in the Delta hundreds of miles away and improbably involve a shrimp boat and a jumped bail bond.