Anyhoo, where was I? Oh, yes. Opal was as mean as her mama and younger and fitter to boot.

And there I was, taking a leisurely patrol through the Bad Section of Town, when I notice what appears to be a nekkid man laying flat on his back in the middle of the dirt road, with Opal (fully clothed, thank you, God) sitting square upon his stomach, facing towards his feet. This in and of itself was enough to warrant further investigation, but the prostrate man was beating upon Opal’s broad back with his fists and screaming at the top of his lungs.

Kissing the thoughts of a tranquil evening goodbye, I checked my pepperspray, stepped out of the cruiser, and eased up on the couple.

“Desmond,” I greeted the gentleman, “Opal. What’s on y’alls minds?”

“Go ‘way, Mister Dawg,”said Opal, without turning around, “This don’t concern the law none.”

“Oh, Sweet Jesus,” yelped Desmond, “Mister Dawg, you got to do something!”

Well, hell.

I’m here to tell you folks, walking up on that sort of thing without advance warning can make a feller get kind of wobble-legged around the knees.

“Opal,” I yipped, “You turn loose of that! Now!”

You know, there are certain things the Academy just doesn’t prepare you for.

“Opal, you turn loose of Desmond. Let him go to his mama’s house, then you come over to the car and you talk to me.”

“Okay, Mister Dawg. I don’t care where Desmond goes.”

Good, I think, wondering just where the heck I put the extra-large handcuffs.

“Opal,” I interjected sternly, “Turn loose of Desmond and let’s talk about this.”

“No!”

Well, so much for negotiation. I unlimbered my can of pepper spray…and considered what a stiff dose of OC would do to Desmond’s…anatomy. Okay, maybe not my best idea.

Out came the expandable baton. Oh, hell, what was I going to do, rap her knuckles? Damn.

Once more into the breach … I took a deep, steadying breath, eased up on Opal, threw one arm around her fire-hydrant-sized neck, and promptly rammed the thumb on the other hand deep into the angle between her jaw and ear.

Opal apparently forgot to attend the Pain Compliance Class where the smarmy little instructor confidently tells you that this technique will cause anybody to stop what they’re doing and follow instructions, ’cause near as I could tell, not only did she not turn loose, she actually tightened down a good deal.

Leastways, that was the impression I got from Desmond.

Okay. Plan B. To hell with SOPs. I slid my arm across, snuggled in a good rear armbar choke, and hauled back for all I was worth.

*sigh*

Choke…sliiiiide…swear…
Sliidddeee…choke…swear…
Swear…slide…swearswearswear…choke…swear…

Somewhere in the middle of this, the Sheriff’s cruiser pulled to a stop behind us, and out stepped himself.

“I am,” I panted with great dignity, “Trying to resolve a property dispute.”

Long pause, while the Sheriff pinched the bridge of his nose and practiced breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth.

“Opal.”

“Mister Randy?”

“Turn loose of Desmond.”

“I done told Mister Dawg, this ain’t no concern of the law.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, Opal. Drop that and get over here.”

The Sheriff heaved the mighty sigh of a man who is unfairly beset by the evils of the world, wandered over to the bar-ditch and started kicking through the assorted stumps, branches and planks, while Opal glowered, Desmond wheezed, and I leaned against Opal’s broad back and contemplated mutiny.

The Sheriff wandered over to out little tableau.

“I mean, sure when you get bit by one of them big hairy bastards, you fall down and froth at the mouth for a while, but for sheer screaming agony, a scorpion sting will do it every time.”

“No,” I thought, “Oh, hell no.”

“Opal,” said the Sheriff, gently, as he stopped next to me, “I’m not going to tell you again. You turn loose of Desmond, and you do it now.”

“Now, Mister Randy…”

Folks, if I’m lying, I’m dying: not only did Opal detach herself from Desmond’s anatomy, she levitated six entire feet into the air, one arm going around the equator, and one taking the cross-Polar route, hit the ground (rating a 4 on the Richter Scale), and took off down the street like a berserk cape buffalo, screaming for Big Mama every foot of the way.

The Sheriff dusted off his hands, fixed me with a gimlet eye, and huffed: “What did I tell you about working smarter; not harder?”

*sigh*

Several years later, I received one of those ‘Joke-a-Day’ spam e-mails. Out of curiosity, I opened it up, and there was this post, with nary a mention of little old me. I banged off an e-mail suggesting that it was bad policy to send plagiarized material to the author of that material. Never got a response back.

And please, if you catch someone claiming my stuff as his, kick him in the butt for me.

Ahem.

You just might be a rural Peace Officer …

If your hat, belt and boots cost more than your sidearm.If you know what a ‘court gun’ is.

If directions to a location involve livestock, property descriptions, or the words: “When you get off the pavement.”

If the winner of the last three bar room brawls was last years Homecoming Queen.

If dressing up for court involves pressed Wranglers and a Brushpopper shirt.

If anyone on the Department is named ‘Bubba’.

If you don’t know Bubba’s real name.

If you’ve ever gotten a confession from a critter by threatening him with either his Mama or God.

If your interview for the job involved the question: “Can you take a whuppin’?”

If you have more weapons and ammunition in your cruiser than most small nations have in their armies.

If you’ve ever had an ‘Officer Involved Shooting’ where the victim was a feral hog or other four-pawed critter with an appetite.

If the calibre of your sidearm is regarded as an artillery round in Europe.

You’ve ever had to mediate a dispute concerning the paternity of a litter of puppies.

If you have the impression that the Feds regard your department as being marginally more civilized than the Viking Hordes.

If you’ve ever gone to an emergency wearing only your hat, pajamas, gun and boots.

If spurs are a department-issued item.

*sigh*

*sigh*

Ahem.

We had been badgering Mom and Dad regarding the space program for some weeks, until finally Mom ground and mixed some sulphur, sugar, charcoal, saltpetre and water into a paste, poured it into the end of a piece of bamboo and left it to dry on the back porch for about three days.

After the three days were up, Dad propped the bamboo against a stump in the front yard, stuffed two matches up into the end with the dried gunk, lit the wood end of the matches, and Voila! — the bamboo pinwheeled down the street with a really neat blue jet coming out one end. (“Ah,” said Dad, “Russian design.”)

This may not have been our mothers’ best idea.

Through trial-and-error (much error), we discovered the penultimate lizard-launcher: If you tied one end of a three-foot cord to the hind leg of your astro-lizard, and the other end of the cord to your bamboo, you achieved stability and guidance, since the drag provided by the cord (and lizard) kept the nose of the rocket pointed up.

(Of course, being firmly taped to the nose of a bamboo rocket tends to lead to guidance-wrecking struggles when a Hero of the Swampland succumbs to his baser instincts. Much better for the Hero to be sitting on the ground, wondering: “Okay, what have those little bastards come up with — what’s burning — WHOAAA-aaaaaa-aaaa!“)

Anyhoo, one evening we’re watching a semi-successful launch and Dad mentions just kind of off-paw, “Interesting stuff, black powder.”

Up perk our ears.

“Of course, the charcoal around here is awful, so your mom is using sugar to boost the fuel value of the carbon, but basically it’s the same thing that the Chinese came up with.”

Chris and I looked at each other. A new day was born in the fledgling Nigerian Space Program.

ICBMs.

Having been fed a diet of H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and R. E. Howard we knew what black powder was — we were just a bit puzzled why ours was going “ffsshhtt” instead of “boom”.

The obvious answer was that ours was a solid cake instead of a powder, and after some trial runs we were delighted to discover that this was, indeed, the case.

We had arbitrarily decided that ten bamboo rockets would be a suitable deterrent arsenal, so we mixed up about a bucket-full of black powder and placed it in the garden shed to bake.

I’m not exactly sure what happened, because everyone I’ve spoken to confidently tells me that solid black powder does not have the consistency of year-old high-grade concrete.

Ours did.

So, there we were, sitting on the driveway, having spent 20 minutes thumping an upside-down bucket on the drive slab (oh, the sparks) and being rewarded with a perfect mould of the inside of a ten-gallon bucket cast in charcoal-grey high-test dam-building material. Not a crumb to be seen.

*sigh*

Not to be defeated, my brother and I fetched our (steel) rock hammers, and with a mighty effort from our scrawny, sub-teenage muscles managed to reduce our war materiel to a large pile of walnut-sized chunks. Totally unsuitable for our purposes, and at a considerable expenditure in sweat (and sparks, I should add – steel hammers and a concrete driveway).

Anyhoo, somewhere along in our ruminations, we remembered The Coffee Grinder.

One of Mom’s friends had purchased for her a coffee grinder in Italy, and it was a doozy. 220 volt, gleaming stainless steel, two — count ’em, two — glass bean hoppers, each of which held about two bricks’ worth of beans, hand-fitted grinding blades — State of the Art in Coffee-Making Technology.

Mom doesn’t drink coffee. She loathes the stuff.

So, there it sat, clamped on the end of the kitchen table, bean hoppers filled with some love-in-a-canoe coffee beans, plugged into the wall, and completely and totally unused.

Chris and I forthwith requisitioned this technology for the War Effort.

In between the two hoppers was an open chute directly into the feed screw, to allow the addition of various and sundry stuff to your coffee mixture, so we promptly dropped one of our smaller chunks of black powder into the chute.

Much coughing and grinding, and Voila! Finely-ground black powder — and no sweat. Perfect.

We promptly snatched one hopper, tossed the beans contained therein into the yard, filled it full of chunks, re-attached it to the grinder and began to process our powder.

We were about ten or so minutes into the task (now, pay attention here, ’cause this is kind of important), and being slightly impatient, were hand-feeding chunks into the open chute to speed up the process some, when we began noticing that the grinder was making a funny noise.

Not a grinding sound, not even the squeal of blades designed for comparatively soft coffee beans masticating chunks the consistency of granite, but a weird kind of “ffsst…fsstttt…ffsstttsstt” noise.

And there was an odd glow. Kind of a pinkly-orange glow, a bit like an old mercury-vapour lamp in shade, but more flickery.

“fsst…fffftthh…fzzsstt”

And smoke. Did I mention the smoke?

“fzzsstt…fsshhhzztt”

Chris and I, not being altogether gormless, had just come to the conclusion that Bad Things were About To Happen, when Dad chose that moment to walk through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

“Hey, boys. Staying our of tr … what the hell?”

Now, Dad was absent-minded. And Dad would frequently fail to observe minor details while his mind was else-where. Like pythons and wives. Waist-deep water in his office. Rioting natives. With machetes. You know — the small things.

Next thing I knew, Dad had each of us under one arm, pivoted, hit the door, button-hooked the end of the dining room, swept Mom off the couch, and hit the deck behind The Chest.

“Um, I’m sorry, are we interrupting something?” inquired Tom’s girlfriend, Whazzername.

“FOOMF,” declared the kitchen. Tom dropped his drink.

chh-BLAM!

Ahem.

Mom didn’t see it quite that way, of course.

By-the-by, translating English into Injured Redneck is more difficult than one might think.

Ahem.

I had been out west of town, settling a dispute concerning the paternity of a litter of puppies and was heading back to the SO on one of those lovely Panhandle fall afternoons.

I had the window down, just generally enjoying myself, when I was passed by a 1958 Chevy pickup doing approximately twice the legal speed limit.

*sigh*

About ten miles later, I get this Chevy pulled over, when the driver gets out and sprints back to the cruiser. Friends of mine will tell you that I have a real dislike for people doing that, so I promptly tear into him:

“Bobby, what the hell are you doing?”

“Well,” he says, scrunching and fidgeting with his gimme hat, “I done murdered Earl, and I thought I might oughta find a doctor for him.”

Bobby’s expression kind of wrinkles up, and he mauls his cap a bit more. “I kilt Earl.”

Oh, God. This I don’t need. I find myself speaking very slowly and carefully, “Bobby, are you sure you killed Earl?”

“We-eeell, I shot him in the face with a shotgun.”

Oh, yeah. That’ll do the trick. I feel a headache tip-toeing it’s way up my spine with all the dainty grace of a rhino in steel-toed combat boots.

He abruptly takes on a hunted expression. His hands clutch convulsively at the John Deere cap — he knows there’s a legal trick somewhere in my words. He seeks a neutral, non-condemning answer, an answer which won’t violate his Fifth Amendment Rights — he has it!

“You mean, this time?”

*sigh*

“One felony at a time, Bobby. And where’s the body?”

Bobby looks at the truck, “He’s in the back.”

Oh, joy. I swallow a couple of times, take a deep breath, latch onto the ankles of the cadaver and begin to pull him out from under the toolbox, when the Deceased promptly spasms violently in my grip, such spasm together with the deep, sonorous tone of a bell sounding in a place where there weren’t any bells, causes me to turn loose of the ankles of the Dearly Departed and tumble into the bar ditch.

Okay. No problem.

“Ju brogd by dode.”

I concentrate on a particularly ambitious sticker.

“By ond brugga choosts be in de ged, and deen de gops breg by dode.”

I roll to my feet, and carefully amble back to the cruiser, and fish around in the back seat until I find a handkerchief, walk back to the pickup and hand it to Earl.

“Thakds” he mubbled, dabbling the blood flowing down his face and revealing several dozen dark grey (one might even go as far as to call them lead-colored) pimples.

I sit on the bumper, fishing around in my vest for a badly needed stick of gum, “Hunting accident?” I hazard, minutely studying a paleolithic stick of Juicy Fruit clutched in my ever-so-slightly trembling paw.

“Dumg fezant tookt off betweeg us, and by dumg chit brugga wagn’t looging where he was chooging…”

“Quail, Earl,” I say very firmly, “Pheasant season is still a couple of weeks away.”

“Dugn’t magger. By dumg chit brugga goodn’t git a bull in de bugt widt a figgle angyway.”

I look at Bobby, who is cogitating intently, “That about what happened, Bobby?”

“I’m pretty sure it was a pheasant,” opines Bobby, carefully, “It had a long tail, and a ring around it’s neck and it was a lot bigger than one of them little quail.”

“Bobby, don’t say anything. Now, nod your head. No, keep nodding. Did you accidentally shoot your brother while hunting birds? Good. Take Earl to the doctor and get him patched up.”

“Dumg chit brugga goona neeg a goctor agger I gicg his bugt.”

“Oh, yeah? You and which army?”

Which was the last thing I heard as I went in search of a badly-needed, soothing cup of tea.

Ahem.

Big Mama was the matriarch of what passed for a crime family in our neck of the woods. She was responsible for most of our crime, until she got too big, then she left it up to her family.

Anyhoo, I was on duty one day when the word came in: Big Mama had Passed On. We were in the middle of a Moment of Silence (“Thank God”, murmured the Sheriff) when the ambulance crew requested help.

We had a problem. Hoo boy, did we have a problem. When I say Big Mama was big, I mean she overloaded the 300 pound weight limit on the stretcher by a good bit. We couldn’t even get her off the bed. After a couple of hours, we worked out a plan: someone scooted over to the local monument company and borrowed their forklift and a spare pallet, the volunteer fire department got out the Jaws of Life and popped the exterior wall off of Big Mama’s bedroom. Six of us rolled her onto the pallet, then we raised the pallet and put it (and Big Mama) onto the hosebed of a firetruck. Voila!

Which, in retrospect, was probably responsible for what happened later.

The day of the funeral arrived. I had to be there, because–true to form–four of Big Mama’s nephews, cousins and grandkids were in jail on various charges. My handcuffed, shackled and leg-ironed charges and I showed up early, and let me tell you–I was impressed. Someone, somewhere had found a casket big enough, and Big Mama was laid out in her Sunday Finest with a peaceful smile on her face.

Which in and of itself was shocking. I had only ever seen Big Mama when she was fighting and cussing fit to make a sailor blush. Never saw her smile until she was gone. Looked downright odd.

Anyhoo, we’re there early, and I’m listening to the gossip, which was all based on whether Big Mama’s youngest daughter would show her face. Big Mama had, years earlier, attempted to rearrange her daughters’ giblets with a set of pinking shears, and daughter had run off to California, vowing Never to Return.

Well, she came back. And that performance should have gotten her an Oscar, I’m here to tell you. But I’m ahead of myself.

Four, count ’em, four Baptist preachers got up behind the pulpit and lied their butts off about the Deceased. Three different people got up to sing muzak versions of pop songs. The Eulogy was a masterpiece–bore no more resemblance to the Dearly Departed than a toady-frog resembles a polecat–but it sounded nice.

Then, finally, it was almost over. The family rose up and walked past the casket in saying their Final Farewells (and stealing any jewelry left on the body), with the entire congregation looking on and sniffling. And last in line was Baby Daughter.

Like I said–a masterpiece. Baby Daughter had to be supported by two cousins in her time of grief. She was bravely fighting back tears, as she tenderly touched the frozen features of Big mama, then she’d turn to leave, and then wail: “Oh, Big Mama, why’d you leave us!?” And the two cousins would gently lead her away, but she’d turn back to the casket, and blubber, “But I can’t leave her!”

Someone get that girl an Emmy Award.

Anyhoo, This went on for about five minutes, until finally, Baby Daughter flings herself across Big Mama and wails, “Come back, Big Mama, come back!”

And Big Mama did. Sort of. Well, actually, she kinda flopped a bit and made a ‘song of the humpback whales’ kind of noise, as a glowing green ball appeared over the casket.

And then I noticed that I was the only person left in the church. Everyone else was sprinting down the hill.

With the Head Preacher and my four leg-ironed prisoners leading the pack, I might add. And the glowing green ball was the tritium insert in my front sight.

I also noticed, about that time, that I was in a Weaver stance that was so solid that it took me about five minutes to bust my knees loose enough to sneak down the aisle to make sure Big Mama was well-and-truly deceased.

(There are rumours floating about that I actually poked the Departed with stick during my examination. I deny these allegations. I couldn’t find a stick. So I stood at the Amen Pew and tossed flower arrangements instead.)