Trouble No Set Like Rain
Jamaican Proverb
It’s Crunch Time in Tennessee. Actually it is Tuesday and voting time, moments of hand-rubbing bliss and false glory; hanging chads and haggard attendants sulking to and fro the rows of voting booths helping the uninitiated behind hanging curtains of some vile fabric grown mildewed since the Eisenhower years learn the subtleties of making certain their vote REALLY counts.
Or at least they think it counts….
Which is the “theory” Red keeps jabbering about while at the same time viciously whittling down a poplar sapling to a fine, deadly point using his favorite replica survival knife from the movie First Blood.
Dammit Red for the fiftieth time, EVERY vote counts and it’s your preordained duty to make sure YOU cast it… I screeched –all the while tottering dangerously on a rusted oil barrel that I’d been sitting on so long my legs were numb, cadaver numb I realized, leagues past any soothing, tingling numb. And suddenly the denatured epiphany: I’m now paralyzed from the thighs down in a cold foul-smelling moonshine shack in the backwoods with a local bartending hooch-brewer that can’t hold his liquor better than most small waterfowl and has become trancingly obsessed with some deranged political conspiracy he just formulated within the past twelve minutes.
My eyes kept to the wood spike that he arced with frenetic aerial sweeps – a deranged conductor of a solipsistic symphony.
I grackle: Ok Red we’ve checked your still and it’s fine. Let’s hop on outta here before my legs fall off.
He squints his eyes, Clint-style I think – the bastard loves The Outlaw Josey Wales, I hafta whittle s’more spikes fer the damm boobie trap awright..
Hopeless. Reasoning is defunct now. I felt a slight dizziness induced via the sourmash fumes; a rising miasma from the large copper pot, and Red flashbacking to jungle combat and primitive deathlust. I considered a furtive radio call to Kimble begging for a little assistance here, but self-preservation dictated otherwise: Red might see and that would be messy, ex-pro wrestlers build anger to explosive heights and lash like silverback gorillas from the greenery – very sudden and very very violent. And with the amount of moonshine he’d been nippin’ at it was distinctly a matter of time.
Listen Boy, it’s the Bonesmen, they got us by the balls. That’s what ol’ Kerry is, just like Bush, a Skull n Bones brethren and they done conspired ‘gainst us awl in some basement up at Yale college, sealed the deal for the fate of mankind years ago. It’s over – a staged spectacle, jus’ you wait, you’re gonna see…
He was sitting on the dirt floor, cross-legged now, eyes down, a tatter of drool was seeping slowly from his lips in one sickening strand. Passed out? I wondered, but unintentionally aloud as well. Red struggled to look up in a series of looping staccato movements and I feared more garbled rhetoric. I hated to tell him that his theories were almost correct, but in reality it’s the Bohemian Society that has us by the cojones, far more sinister than he expected. Red bobbled a few more times but suddenly eased static. Out for sure… I supposed.
I pawed for the two-way radio to make that call to Kimble, rile him from the barstool at the Torpid Toadstool – his regular beer slugging haven.
A few clicks later I admitted to myself that the radio battery was dead. No signal. No static. No nada.
From the rusted hole in the tin roof I could tell it was near dusk. Not many choices left – the legs were immobile. Only option would be to rock the barrel over and smash into the sod, then makes the long crawl homeward until the appendages gain bloodflow. Not another two seconds I’m spending in this godawful shanty.
I pull the ye olde trusty flask from my jacket pocket and take a long pull from it before I commence the barrel-rockin’.
This is gonna be one of those Noches de infierno – I’m sure of it.
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