A Guitar and a Pen

by Robert Hicks

  And he was always telling jokes that he made up hisself. And they never were a damn bit funny.

  He’d say something like, “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Alley.”

  “Alley who?”

  “Alley Bamy,” and then he’d bust out laughing like he was Bob Hope or something.

  And if you was standing in front of him when he laughed, he’d spit all over you. He kinda gurgled and sounded like a commode flushing, with just about as much water. It was a downright disgusting habit.

  I remember one time at a high school football game when the referee called back a touchdown that our boys made, and our whole side of the field was up hollering. I mean, everybody in town was madder than hell. Well, that won’t good enough for Mr. Curtis Loach. He was drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, and he went running out on the field and called the referee a blind pissant. Then he picked up the football and let the air out of it with his pocketknife.

  And I think one of the worst things that he done was he called everybody “Sweets”: “How you doing, Sweets?” “Well, all right, Sweets.” “I’ll see you later, Sweets.” It was aggravating as hell just to be around him.

  Curtis never did own a car, but he had an old wore-out Ford tractor, and he’d drive that thing all over the place. He’d even drive it to town on Saturday.

  Curtis lived in a mighty run-down old place about three miles out of town. It leaned to one side and he never did cut the grass in the yard. It used to get knee-deep in the summertime.

  His wife used to have a baby every year. They must have had ten or eleven children. Their yard was always full of snotty-nosed kids running around and hollering and carrying on. If you drove up in the yard, they’d all jump right in your car and act like they was driving and go all through your glove compartment.

  One time, Glen Gooden left the keys in his pickup truck, and one of them little kids got it started up and run it right into the side of the house. Knocked part of the front porch down, and that’s the way it stayed. And Glen had to spend a pocketful of his own money to get his truck fixed. Hell, he knew that there won’t no use in trying to make Curtis and that hungry brood of his pay for it.

  I remember that Curtis’s old milk cow used to get out all the time and get into Mrs. Mildred Bennett’s garden. Mr. Bennett told Curtis that the next time his cow got into Mrs. Mildred’s garden, he was gonna pull all her upper teeth. Well, sure enough, the old cow got out again, and when Curtis went to pick her up, he looked in her mouth. Naturally, the cow didn’t have no upper teeth. Curtis got mad as hell and was threatening to shoot Mr. Bennett, till somebody told him what any fool knows: cows don’t have no upper teeth anyway.

  He was a mess, but I’d have to say that Curtis Loach was also about the happiest feller I did ever did see.

  Well, one day a man showed up in town. He was real dressed up and talked with a Yankee accent and was asking around about how to get to Curtis Loach’s place. Nobody knew who he was or what he wanted, but we gave him the directions. It turned out that he was a big lawyer from Chicago, Illinois.

  It seemed that Curtis’s granddaddy had come from Oklahoma and had owned an old no-account piece of farmland out there, and damned if they hadn’t found oil on the place. Curtis, being the next of kin, owned the place now. Just like that, Curtis Loach was as rich as all get out. I’m talking about filthy rich.

  Now, here was an ignorant dirt farmer that never did have two nickels to rub together, and all of a sudden, overnight, he came into millions of dollars. I mean, the man gave him a check for $250,000 just for signing the papers.

  Well, all hell busted aloose in our little part of the world.

  The next morning Curtis went to town and bought him one of them big diesel tractors, and nobody was safe on the roads after that. He was roaring around town on that damn monstrosity, just generally terrorizing everybody, running up on the sidewalk and all. He run right into the light pole in front of the hardware store and knocked off half the electric power in town. He broke the light pole clean in two and didn’t even slow down, just kept right on going.

  When Sheriff Cox finally caught up with him and told him he was gonna have to pay for that light pole, Curtis pulled out a wad of cash money big enough to choke a mule and peeled off a big handful of hundred-dollar bills. He handed them over and said, “Ed, if that ain’t enough, you know where to find me!”

  Then he started buying things. He bought eight color televisions, three refrigerators, a washer and dryer, two living room suites (one for him and one for his wife), a haybaler, a thrashing machine, a corn picker, all kinds of discs and turn plows, fourteen shotguns, an electric stove with a self-cleaning oven, and he bought Simmon’s grocery store slam out of Popsicles. Damn if he didn’t even buy a used bulldozer. He just went crazy.

  Curtis Loach would buy just about anything that anybody would sell him. You couldn’t even get close to his house for the salesmen. They were all over the place, coming from as far away as Virginia, selling everything from Cadillacs to sewing machines. Curtis and his family went through money like it was falling from the sky, but them oil wells in Oklahoma went on pumping and the money just kept on rolling in.

  One day he decided he didn’t like the music on the radio, so he bought the radio station to “put some decent music on the air.” From sunup till sundown, all you could hear was Curtis’s favorite songs. He liked bluegrass, and it was Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs all day long.

  His yard was full of swing sets, his fields were full of farm machinery, his pastures were full of prize cows, and his house was full of every kind of gadget you could imagine. He couldn’t have squeezed another thing into that dilapidated old place with a shoehorn.

  It was dangerous to even be around Curtis’s neighborhood. His wife wrecked three brand-new Lincoln Continentals trying to learn how to drive. And she never did learn how. She finally just give up, and the three wrecked cars set out on the shoulder of the road in front of his house.

  Even with all the aggravation of Curtis driving all over the place in a super-charged diesel tractor, endangering life, limb, and property, and in spite of all the mess that Curtis Loach’s newfound wealth brought into our lives, I’ll have to say that we done a damn good job of enduring it all. That is, we did until some fool sold Curtis Loach an airplane.

  It was a single-engine job, and Curtis took about three hours’ worth of flying lessons, and then the skies over our part of the world became unsafe for birds. Imagine living in a town where a man who couldn’t even drive a car would come flying an airplane over your house at 150 feet at twelve o’clock at night. It was nerve-wracking as hell.

  I’ll have to say one thing for Curtis, though. He looked after his family. He bought his wife a full-length white mink coat. It would have looked real good, but she dipped snuff and was always spitting down the front of it. After a while, it looked like hell.

  What all of us couldn’t figure out was why somebody would buy one of everything in the world and live in a house where the rain fell right through the roof. But we didn’t have to wonder long.

  Curtis hauled off and built him a house like you wouldn’t believe. It must have had thirty rooms. Everything was electrified. It had a swimming pool and tennis court (Curtis didn’t know a damn thing about tennis). It had three acres of the prettiest, greenest lawn you ever have seen. It was built out of fine stone with a paved circular drive.

  It had a reading room, sitting room, drawing room, den, dining room, blue room, living room, full basement, gymnasium, sauna, hot tub, solarium, library, gun room, and a monstrous-sized kitchen. It was three stories of unadulterated fanciness, with six half-baths and eight full baths, with enclosed shower stalls and king-size sunken bathtubs. Now, for a family whose facility had been some thirty yards from the back door and the biggest luxury there was the Sears and Roebuck catalog, that was a pretty fancy place to answer a call of nature.

  The grounds had a greenhouse, a putting green
, an archery range, guest house, eight-car garage, servants’ quarters, and I forgot to mention the whirlpool alongside of the regular heated, chlorinated, Olympic-size swimming pool.

  The paneling in the drawing room used to be in some Catholic church in Italy or somewhere, and a lot of the furniture was named after Looey something or other—some dead French king.

  There was a dumbwaiter in the kitchen that served all the floors and an intercom system that would play music all over the house.

  There was a chandelier in the living room that was bigger than a two-horse wagon wheel, with little diamondlike things just dripping off of it.

  There was a burglar alarm, fire alarm, floodlights, riding stable, and the gun room had a fireplace that was eight foot across and four and a half foot high, made out of native stone.

  It was the fanciest, most uppity-looking, awesome, efficient, centrally heated and air-conditioned structure since the Taj Mahal.

  Curtis had an announcement made over his radio station for everybody to come by and see it the day they moved in. Needless to say, all the women in the town would have done anything short of killing to get a look inside Curtis’s palace, and the men weren’t a whole lot different, so damn near the whole town showed up that day.

  It was like going to Disneyland. I mean, he had his own regulation-sized pool table and one of them televisions with the great big screen on it. It was a sight to see. That house was all, and I mean all, that anybody ever talked about.

  “Did you notice that Weatherby .300 magnum in the gun cabinet?” Or “Gladys, she had a walk-in cooler right in the kitchen with sides of beef hanging in it.” I mean, that’s all you heard.

  We didn’t see much of Curtis in those days. Somebody said he was trying to learn how to play golf. After about six months, he showed up down at the pool room one night, right before closing time. He didn’t try to tell no jokes and didn’t even get on nobody’s nerves. It was just, “Howdy, fellers,” and he just sat at the bar and drank his beer.

  Norman, I believe it was, said after a while, “How you liking the house, Curtis?”

  “It’s all right,” Curtis mumbled.

  “Did you watch the Cowboys game on that big TV?”

  “Naw.”

  “Somebody told me you had a horse up there that cost $100,000 dollars.”

  “Damn ole thoroughbred. Can’t ride the son of a bitch.”

  “Curtis, Graham Fowler told me that you had ten full-time hands working up there.”

  “I can’t understand a word that butler feller says, and if I get up to go to the bathroom at night, when I come back, the damn sheets has been changed. And that woman that cooks can mess up a pot of beans worse than anybody I ever seen.”

  I think that it dawned on everybody at about the same time—I know it did on me—that Curtis Loach was about the most miserable feller I ever did see. He took to spending his days going down to the old house and sitting on the porch. I seen him at the drugstore one day and it seemed like he walked a little slower and his hair was a little grayer.

  We was playing Clarkton one Friday night, and I mean it was an intense game. We scored right before the half, but the jackass in a zebra suit called interference on our boys and brought it back, so we went into halftime tied nothing to nothing.

  Somebody said, “Remember that night that old Curtis Loach run out on the field and busted the football? Life ain’t been the same around here since Curtis got rich.” We all agreed that maybe some of his jokes might even have been a little bit funny.

  Did you ever have one of them déjà vu things happen to you? I mean where you feel like you know everything that’s gonna happen right down to the words people are gonna say? Well, one of them clicked in on me right about then. I heard it in my head before I heard it in my ears. A kind of a waughhhhhh sound from a way off, and it kept getting louder and closer.

  All of a sudden from out of the night and into the lights of the football field there came a big green diesel tractor. There’s a cyclone fence at the north end zone, and he just plowed right on through it.

  There was cheerleaders and band players running, and Curtis Loach, as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, came driving onto the football field. He drove right out to the fifty-yard line and stopped. Damn if the crowd didn’t give him a standing ovation, and then he rode around the field one time and drove away.

  Boy! That crowd was so up and cheered so hard for our boys that we beat Clarkton thirty-one to nothing. It was a fine old night.

  The next day it was in the Raleigh paper that the government was filing a multimillion-dollar tax-fraud suit against Curtis Loach. It seems that Curtis had never filed an income tax return in his whole life. He just didn’t know that you were supposed to. He started attracting attention when he started making all that money, but the IRS had never heard of him.

  They audited and audited and figured and figured, and when they got done it turned out that all Curtis was gonna get to keep was his old farm, his new house, and that diesel tractor he thought so much of.

  They told him, “Mr. Loach, it looks like were gonna have to take just about everything you’ve got.”

  They said old Curtis jumped up and laughed and said, “Come get it.”

  That big house they lived in has changed a considerable amount. The grass in the yard is about knee high. Almost all of the glass has been broke out of the greenhouse, and Curtis keeps a litter of bluetick hound puppies in the drawing room. The swimming pool is green and that bunch of little monsters have tore the dumbwaiter all to hell riding up and down in it. And the yard is full of snotty-nosed kids all running around and hollering and carrying on.

  And I believe that Curtis Loach is the happiest feller I ever did see.

  Charlie Daniels

  Born in 1936 in Wilmington, North Carolina, Charlie Daniels was raised on a musical diet that included Pentecostal gospel, local bluegrass bands, rhythm and blues, and country music.

  His résumé includes recording sessions with artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Flatt and Scruggs, Pete Seeger, Mark O’Connor, Leonard Cohen, Ringo Starr, and Johnny Cash. His 1979 Grammy Award–winning song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” has earned numerous accolades, including three Country Music Association trophies. He earned a Dove Award from the Gospel Music Association in 1994 for The Door, and a 1997 CMA nomination for his remake of “Long Haired Country Boy” featuring John Berry and Hal Ketchum.

  As an author, Daniels published a collection of short stories, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, peopled with the same kind of characters and tall tales as his songs.

  “I used to say, ‘I’m not an outlaw; I’m an outcast,’ ” says the multi-platinum star.“When it gets right down to the nitty-gritty, I’ve just tried to be who I am. I’ve never followed trends or fads. I couldn’t even if I tried. I can’t be them; I can’t be anybody but me.”

  Daniels’s world-famous annual Volunteer Jam concerts have always featured a variety of current stars and heritage artists and are considered by historians his most impressive contribution to Southern music. In April 1998, top stars and two former presidents paid tribute to Daniels when he was named the recipient of the Pioneer Award at the Academy of Country Music’s annual nationally televised ceremonies. You can visit his Web site at www.charliedaniels.com.

  The Elk Hunters

  Tim Johnson

  We drove three hours in my dad’s ’74 Ford four-wheel drive, drinking black coffee from thermoses and eating maple bars we bought at the Noti grocery store the day before. Dad was at the wheel, as always. Napping on the way to our hunting spot was almost impossible, with my brother, Mark, and my father chain-smoking: one Winstons, the other Pall Malls. Mark took pity on me and let me have the window seat so that I could sit nearer to some breathable air. All it really did was draw the smoke over to my side and make my right shoulder cold. It was, after all, 5:00 A.M. on an early September day and still over an hour until sunrise. This was the time we caught up on each other’s life and relive
d the glory days of high school wrestling, female conquests, and hunts from years gone by. Dad mostly listened to our stories (he knew them all), and he would occasionally interject “Bullshit” or chuckle whenever we exaggerated the details. I recall he laughed a lot on those drives.

  We were an odd-looking trio bound together as much by blood as by twenty-five years of hunting trips just like this one. On this trip, we were dressed in a haphazard ensemble of camouflage and flannel. Dad was wearing his black felt hat with the rattlesnake skin he had worn since I can remember. Mark had on a camo hat, and I wore a dark blue ball cap with the letters BMI. We looked nothing like the pro hunters on the sportsman channel, but we were fine with that. In our provincial minds, we were serious elk hunters.

  The three of us traded rifle hunting for bow hunting back in ’85, after my dad quarreled with another elk hunter—an altercation that nearly ended in tragedy for the other guy. Apparently, Dad had made a clean kill on a four-point bull and was just about to field-dress it when another hunter approached and insisted he had shot the elk. After a rather lengthy and heated argument, Dad let the other hunter claim the kill. It’s a little like winning the lottery and having some jerk snatch the ticket out of your hand. The average elk hunter gets one elk about every seven years. One mature bull elk weighs about 1,100 pounds and can give you as much as 300 pounds of meat, enough to feed your family for a year or more. Needless to say, Dad was steamed. When he got to the landing of the freshly logged unit, he could see the elk thief struggling with the carcass on the hillside, obviously “some stupid sonovabitch from Eugene with a dull knife” and clearly not up to the task at hand. Dad said he had him in his crosshairs for over ten minutes and was contemplating putting a 30-06 hollow point through his brain until he thought better of it and drove off.

  Whenever Dad told this story, I could see him reliving his anger. His lips would flatten out and he would squint like Clint Eastwood did in Dirty Harry when confronting a low-life desperado. Then his face would relax and he would say that the outside chance of getting caught and spending his life in the pen had changed his mind. I always thought it was funny that the threat of prison time kept him from pulling the trigger and not that the actual killing would have been wrong. Mark once remarked after hearing this tale, “I would have blown his fucking head off.” But I know he wouldn’t have. He was a tough logger and a great fighter, but he was no murderer. If I had walked in my dad’s shoes that day, I can’t be certain what my reaction would have been. The injustice of losing a big bull elk would have been hard for me to handle. The biggest elk I had ever bagged was a spike. A few days later my dad was on that very same landing and saw the buzzards feasting on what he thought were the entrails from the bull, but when he spied the kill through his binoculars, he could plainly see that the hunter had left the meat to rot on the ground and taken the head for a trophy. I can understand that in the heat of the moment, many men (perhaps even I) would fantasize about pulling the trigger.