The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

It was 1969, Quang Tri Combat Base, Vietnam. His last name was Antoine, and like a lot of guys back then, back there, soldiers got called some derivative of their name or place. We called him Twine. (For example: “Tex” was from Texas; “Pineapple” was from Hawaii, and so forth.) Twine had such a hillbilly accent that when he said “Antoine,” it sounded like “Twine.”

He was  a hillbilly from Georgia, as close to being a foreigner to me, a hick from Iowa, as if he had been from France, or Italy. You had to listen real close to his dialect. It was so slurred and deep-south that it truly was almost undecipherable.

Twine grew up back in the hills and woods, and as soon as he could, he got his driver’s license, and began running his daddy’s moonshine into the local town. It was a good sized city that had a university and a good market for “my daddy’s shine.”

He had a souped up Mercury, and several times had outrun the local highway patrol. You have to realize that at that time, the real muscle cars hadn’t made the scene. The highway patrol drove normal cars, with semi-normal abilities to go fast. So Twine in that souped up V-8 Mercury could more than hold his own. And had, he told me, outrun them more than once.

He was 17, almost 18, it was Saturday morning, his car was loaded with, if I remember right, about 150 pints of good old back-woods-brewed distilled corn moonshine. The trunk was completely full. For real good customers, there were a couple dozen quarts, maybe a few dozen more half-pints.

“I would drive down to fraternity row,” Twine told me, “and I’d just stop, lift the trunk lid, and in less than half an hour, It would all be gone.” That was Twine’s life.

He was headed into town, he told me, when a tire on his Mercury went flat. He pulled over to the side of the highway. Problem? You bet. The spare tire was buried beneath all those jars of shine. He said he was just sitting there, kind of puzzled as to what to do, when a Georgia patrolman pulled up behind him, got out, walked over, and said: “You gonna fix that tire, there, boy?” His manner was not friendly, Twine said.

Twine was silent. Finally the cop told him to open up that trunk, show him the spare. He knew. Twine knew he knew. What a conundrum.

“He broke every jar of my daddy’s moonshine, ‘cept for one. He took that one for the judge.” As Twine was telling me this tale, he was sad all over again. Anyway, the judge looked down at him and said: “You can join the army, or you can go to jail.”

And that was how I met Twine. He had been stationed in Germany, now he was in Vietnam.

“Say,” he told me a short time after I met him, “You want to buy this guitar from me?” He didn’t actually have it, it was disassembled and still in a box back in Germany. But he told me, once he knew I had been and was, I guess, a musician, about it. Showed me pictures. Shot me a price I couldn’t resist. (Remember, a Grade-3 soldier’s pay was barely a hundred bucks.) I do not to this day know exactly when it was made–definitely early sixties, or how he got it. It’s more than possible that he won it in a poker game. But he did not play guitar. I knew that from talking to him.

It was waiting for me at the family farm when I got back. It was a very fancy Framus electric semi-hollow body, sun-burst, two pickups, made back in the sixties when Framus was world-famous for its guitars. I played it briefly in a weekend band, but piano was so much easier for me, with all the lessons my grandma gave me, that that guitar has hung on my wall ever since.

It’s a pretty guitar. Full of memories. Full of Twine and the stories he told me about running shine. Full of Vietnam. It’s for sale.

But not the memories. They’ll stay.

It was a long time ago.