Turkey Hand

I’m up in the Panhandle chasing a good one and creeping myself out. I’m staying in this bunkhouse on a private campground where a man went missing seven months ago. Tonight I drove into town, a little place called Ponce De Leon, to get some eats. Saw a barbecue place half lit and pulled up. In the parking lot sat a single muddy pickup with two men inside. I killed the car and climbed out.

“They still serving?” I asked the passenger.

“No,” he said. “They closed.”

He draped his arm out the window, gently, comfortably, and at the end of his sleeve where his hand should have been was the hand of a turkey. Three tiny blackish-gray fingers — or two and a thumb. I shit you not.

If it was a joke — a means of frightening out-of-towners, say — he played it smoother than any ever played. He didn’t smile or flinch. Just sort of rested his fowl tentacles on the lip of the window.

I slung shale for Defuniak Springs, goose pimpled and questioning. A few minutes down Highway 90 I caught a sign for Vernon. Vernon! You’re welcome for the link.

Tom Lake: VERNON – Nothing binds a town together like a powerful story: the Giants win the pennant, for example, or a mother wolf rescues twin boys from the riverbank, or a silversmith and a borrowed horse conspire to foil the Redcoats.

In this town, the story is broken.

The characters are not heroes. They are not even villains. They are merely conniving mercenaries with a tolerance for gore.

If you have heard of Vernon, population 780, an old steamboat port between the red hills of Alabama and the white shores of Florida’s Emerald Coast, there is a good chance you have heard this story. To the outside world, it has become Vernon’s master narrative.

Poor country folk get desperate. Poor country folk get an idea. Poor country folk buy insurance. Poor country folk fire guns at selves, blowing off hands or feet, and poor country folk get rich.

There are many strange things about this story. Here is one of the strangest.

If you go to Vernon today, you will find that it has nearly been forgotten. Most or all of its limb-deprived protagonists are dead, replaced by able-bodied workers and entrepreneurs who have quietly written Vernon’s sequel: Small town outlives indignity, finds something like prosperity.

But there is one more strange thing about the old story.

It has stayed alive.