Sloppy Seconds

Craig's
Highway 70
De Valls Bluff, Arkansas

After driving through a shell of what may once have been a downtown of beautiful redbrick buildings, Highway Seventy took me out to Craig's, a white cinderblock building on th lefthand side of the road. Inside, faded winter scenes on the wallpaper were nothing more than wishful thinking in the blowing heat of the day. There was just one family around a table, and a hip high partition down the middle of the place. I took a table by the window on the other side. There was no sign of a counter or staff...they were all in the back, behind a screendoor.

Out came a lady who seem perturbed by my arrival. No amount of geniality or yes maam's could wrestle a smile from this woman's lips. After a little scuffling, we arrived at my order of a pork sandwich, hot, coleslaw on top, some chips and a sweet tea. For the warmth of the welcome, I felt I'd asked her to wash my socks. Who knows, maybe she'd had a rough morning. Maybe she used to be married to a guy that looks just like me who broke her heart. That's probably it.

Happily, the sandwich made up for it all. I ordered hot, and hot it was, plenty of heat, but not so much that there wasn't also flavor from the meat. It was a sloppy affair on a whitebread bun, but such is the bane of the sauce-on sandwich. You gotta eat fast before the sauce soaks all through. Chopped, i beleive it was, which lends lots of variety to the texture, and the cole slaw coming along just in time to cool things down a bit and with a little crunch to round things out. I got some sauce in my eye and teared up. Funny thing is, I realized after I'd been here awhile that I'd been here before, on a trip to Texas. Lucky me.

Now, i have one thing that is terribly ugly to say, and I hope I'm wrong...the tea tasted like powdered tea mix. There, i've said it. I'm not saying it was powdered sweet tea mix, i'm just saying it reminded me of it. I'd like to believe otherwise.

Every now and then one of the ladies would emerge from the back. The one attending to the family smiled, and mine sweetended up when someone she knew came in. Finished eating, I settled up and read up on the place in an article hanging on the wall. Turns out the partition had been there since segregation. That's hard to get out of your mind.

I went across the street for pie.