Scary Rednecks & Other Inbred Horrors (39 page)

Mason laughed at the memory of
Rolly
, a picture of whom Joe Bob Briggs would put in a dictionary as the icon of
Redneckocity
, John Deere hat, lip full of Beechnut Wintergreen, tattered flannel shirt and greasy blue jeans, walking a hot pink poodle under the moonlight.
 

Rolly
pointed a finger at Weasel, “You need to shut the hell up. And you, my
edumacated
friend,” he added, pointing at Mason, “And you need to stop
laughin
’ at my Get.”
Rolly
had stood up as his blood rose. He shook his head. “Every
fuckin
’ time
somethin
’ happens to Get, you sit around and laugh. You can’t laugh at a man’s dog.” He shook his head and sat down. “Never at a man’s dog.”

Mason slipped out a cigarette, leaned forward and lit it in the campfire. He was careful not to set the brim of his bright orange
Tennessee Volunteers
baseball cap on fire. He wore it every time they went hunting so Weasel wouldn’t mistake him for deer like he did the first time they all went shooting together. He grunted, stared at
Rolly
, then returned his gaze to the dancing flames. “I’m laughing because your dog’s name is an action verb.”

Rolly
spit into the fire and shook his head at his friend. “Actually, Mr. Smarty Pants, it’s a transitive verb,” all vestiges of his ‘Southern Boy’ gone. He stood up, peered into the woods and began his patented whistle, the high pitched sound slicing through the quietness of the night.

Mason shook his head, wondering how a man who looked as one dimensional as
Rolly
could have so many levels to his personality.

“Get! If you get sprayed by a goddamn skunk again I’m
leavin
’ you out here in the woods!”
Rolly
looked over at the rest of the group. “I don’t know what I’m
doin
’ with a sissy ass poodle for a pet, anyway.”

“I told you, John Wayne had pups,” Billy Bob suggested. He had named his
rottweiller
a decidedly masculine name, not realizing that his dog was in fact a female until she gave birth. He still thought of John Wayne as a
he
, but it was an anachronism that Mason enjoyed.

“I
ain’t
takin
’ no pups from a bitch named John Wayne,”
Rolly
spat, looking into the woods like a mother hen. “It’s un-American,” he said placing his cap over his heart. “
Namin
’ a female dog after one of America’s greatest heroes. Anyways, me and Get
get
along just fine. Goddamn that bitch!”

“That’s only ‘cause she can’t fit her paws around a hammer. I swear, if she had looked in a mirror and saw her pink fur, she would have broken every TV, mirror and window in your house just to let you know she wasn’t as
fuckin
’ gay as she looked,” said Billy Bob.

“She can’t be gay, asshole. She’s a girl,” said Mason, glaring at Billy Bob with one of those
I am
gonna
come over there and kick your ass
looks.
  

“Just calm down. Everyone calm down. She’ll come back. She knows you take care of her and she’s loyal,” Mason said, moving between the two.

Rolly
glanced over at Mason for any kind of sarcasm. If there was one thing that
Rolly
couldn’t stand it was being made fun of, even by his closest friends. Mason had figured a long time ago that the whole ‘Southern Boy’ routine was
Rolly’s
way of short-circuiting people. It was okay to laugh at what he pretended to be, but never the real
Rolly
. Never laugh at who he really was. Lucky for the world, no one really knew.

Rolly
stalked back over to the log and plopped down heavily. “She’ll be back. She needs to eat, don’t she? It’s not like she could hunt rabbit or
anythin
’, a little white, fluffy bitch like her.”

Weasel started laughing again. “That would be the shit wouldn’t it,
Rolly
? That little bitch
walkin
’ back into this campsite
carryin
’ a goddamn rabbit in her little mouth.
Catchin
’ the damn Easter Bunny. I bet even the squirrels would laugh at that.”

“I’ll tell you what, Weasel,”
Rolly
said, staring into the flames with a wide smile. “That bitch may surprise your ugly ass just yet.”

Billy Bob was staring off into the woods, his head cocked like he was listening to some far off music. It was the look he got when hunting. If anyone was the real hunter within the group, it was Billy Bob. The boy had hunted game from Alaska to Florida. His house was a museum to the hunt. From the alligator that greeted you at the front door, to the polar bear that seemed to hold the giant screen TV in its paws, to the wolverine toilet paper dispenser he had in the bathroom, he had over sixty stuffed animals and fish adorning the inside of his house. He was always the first one to lead the hunt, knowing exactly what the animal was thinking based on the shape and age of the tracks. He could dissect a bush in a hurricane and still be able to tell what animals had passed by, when they had passed by and the reason they had passed by. Fat old Billy Bob was their animal expert. It was almost enough to make one ignore his alcoholism and tendency to take shots at invisible things after his third six-pack.

Mason passed Billy Bob, walked over to the cooler, and grabbed himself a beer. When he noticed that
Rolly
was
beerless
, he snagged him one as well and yelled “Pull!” like they were shooting clay pigeons.

Rolly
expertly caught the beer and cracked it open, forgetting about his dog for the moment. He took a long sip and grimaced. “I think what I really need is a woman. That would set me up just right.”

Mason shook his head and finished up his cigarette, flicking it into the fire. He often wondered how he had found himself in the company of men like this. He owned and operated a used car lot back in town, made a decent living, but nothing spectacular. The kicker was that he had a master’s degree in literature. That and a dollar bought him coffee every morning. He really hadn’t done much with it other than scribble in one of his growing pile of notebooks every day.
 
Maybe one day he would be a bestselling novelist.

Mason met
Rolly
and the rest of the crew at The Fish Pond, a local bar he started going to after his divorce. They had hit it off right away.
Rolly
may not have any college experience, or even high school for that matter, but he was smarter than a whip.
Rolly
was entirely self taught, reading any book that you handed him. Any book. Mason remembered the stern
shut up and never talk about this
look he got when he was helping
Rolly
clean out his garage and a box fell over, emptying a sprawl of romance paperbacks. To this day, Mason had respected the friendship enough to never mention it. Still,
Rolly
knew a little bit about everything, an aspect of his personality that was often masked by his redneck persona. Yes,
Rolly
was a redneck, but he was an educated redneck.
The worst kind
, thought Mason with a smile.

Weasel listed off to the side of the campfire like a boat that had tacked into a strong wind and began to piss into the grass, fighting balance, gravity and the complication of the process. Mason and
Rolly
watched that with amusement until Weasel did one final jig, bounced off a tree and zipped up.

“You know something, Mason?”
Rolly
said after taking a particularly long sip of his beer. “I got my eye on
Sheela
. I think I’m
fixin
’ to make her mine.”

Sheela
was a waitress down at the Barbecue Pit, a favorite local restaurant, with a decidedly unoriginal name. “Shit,
Rolly
,” Billy Bob said from where he sat perched like Humpty Dumpty on a log, thumbs caught in his rainbow suspenders. “
Sheela
is John
Reynold’s
girl. John will
whup
your ass but good, you even so much as wink at her.”

Rolly
winced like he had been stabbed and looked over at Mason with a pained expression. “Why can’t you shut your ass the hell up, Billy Bob? I wasn’t even
talkin
’ to you. Besides, I whipped Reynolds’s ass twice already.”

Billy Bob snorted. “Yeah, when we was twelve years old at
fuckin
’ summer camp.” He broke out into his trademark guffaws. “As I recall
Rolly
, John had his arm in a cast when you ‘whipped his ass’.” He started laughing again, this time joined by Weasel.

“You know something?
 
I got something to say to you, Billy Bob,”
Rolly
said, his face turning sober. “And you too, Weasel.”

Billy Bob shook his head and smirked. “What’s that,
Rolly
?”

“Fuck you,”
Rolly
said nonchalantly and then shot daggers at Weasel. “And fuck you too. Fuck all of you. John Reynolds will have his ass back in a cast if he even comes near me.”

Everyone started laughing, simply because
Rolly
had managed to keep a straight face through the whole thing. A stranger watching the conversation would probably think that a fight was about to occur. When they saw the deer, everyone suddenly stopped.

It glided from out of the trees and into the clearing, its eyes angry black slits. It snorted through its nose, a ball of red and white fur in its teeth. A huge rack of blood encrusted antlers shook with each plod of the cloven hooves. All the men stared, entranced by the deer’s demeanor, their guns forgotten at their sides.

It approached the campfire and spat something into the dirt with a damp thud. A round, sticky mass of red and white hair lay on the ground. Mason thought he could see Get’s teeth sticking out of the wet, furry ball.

The deer stood glaring at them in defiance as it slowly made eye contact with every one of them. Mason felt cold uncertainty slide through his veins as he stared back into the penetrating eyes.

“
Ixtli
!” the deer shrieked and they all jumped. Billy Bob leapt up from where he sat, turned to run into the woods screaming, and ran full speed into a low branch. He sagged to the ground in a heap. Mason had a fleeting thought that his terrified friend might think the animal had come to extract some unique punishment for killing and mounting so many of its cousins.

The deer gave one final snort of apparent disgust and darted off into the darkness. Mason and
Rolly
glanced at each other, their eyes wide over open mouths. Billy Bob lay on the side of the log where he had passed out, his belly threatening to burst the buttons on his plaid shirt. Weasel’s mouth was opening and closing rapidly as if he had something to say, but couldn’t quite bring himself to tell it.

“What in Jesus H. Christ was that?”
Rolly
whispered, his face ashen. He looked like he had just been punched. “I’d like to say that somebody spiked the fruit punch, Mason, but
judgin
’ by the look on your face I’d say you just saw the same thing that I saw.”

Mason looked tired. “I think that this is the first time in my life that I’m speechless. I pretty much thought it was impossible to do that to me anymore.”

Rolly
stood up slowly and began scanning the woods for any signs of trouble. “What in the hell did he say, Mason? It sounded like ‘
Ixlee
.’ What the fuck does ‘
Ixlee
’ mean?
 
More importantly, what the fuck is a deer
doin
’
sayin
’ it to me…us.”

Mason was shaking his head back and forth, his eyes scanning the surrounding darkness. A deer had just walked…no, not walked…strutted. A deer had just strutted out of the woods, spoke to them, dropped a dead dog at their feet and paused to give them the evil eye.
Things weren’t good
. With that thought, he immediately grabbed his shotgun and began stuffing shells into it.

Rolly
, knowing a good idea when he saw it, did the same. Weasel was too busy watching Billy Bob’s belly, mesmerized by the rise and fall of the massive plaid mound, to worry himself with anything simple and sane like self-protection. His body leaned forward with Billy Bob’s every breath as if he was about to be sucked into the silver dollar-sized belly button.

“What in the hell should we do, Mason?”
Rolly
whined. “You’re the one with the college degree.”

Mason grimaced and brought the gun up, sighting into the trees nervously. “
Rolly
, you’d think something would tell you that I wasn’t taught in school what to do when Bambi turns into a fucking psycho lunatic.”