In the woods

            There are people nobody should go into the woods with. Drunks, druggies and psychopaths are very high on that list. Especially when those guys are carrying all the weapons they can lift. And they have enough ammunition to stock a small third world warlord. So a trip to a cabin with about ten or twelve of the assorted drunks, druggies and psychos sounded like a can’t miss idea. Big Earl packed up all of his implements of destruction, bought two years worth of ammo and headed east. He was driving one of three hearses.

 

Now at this point it might just do to say that if your company vehicle is a hearse, working there just ain’t a good idea. Especially when the company isn’t a funeral home. It is a bar with a seriously bad reputation. That is bad by Texas standards. Where bars with chicken wire in front of the bandstands are considered family joints. None the less there was Big Earl in a hearse loaded with booze, a five gallon jug filled with Black Mollies and assorted hallucinogens and three gun crazy strippers. The other two hearses with all the assorted ne’er do wells followed along behind him. It was going to be a fun weekend.

 

            Big Earl was driving because he had been to the bar owner’s cabin a few times in the past. The cabin was located in the Big Piney area of East Texas. Earl used to drive the bar owner’s dad, Pop Kirk, out there for a monthly high stakes poker game. He’d then serve drinks, if they didn’t bring along some girls for that. Pop Kirk usually brought along a few ladies with somewhat flexible morals just to keep the party lubricated and to amuse the losers. Blowjobs have a tendency to make you forget that Pop won with far more regularity than the laws of chance allowed. Earl never said that Pop Kirk cheated. Others may not be quite as diplomatic as he was.

 

            Anyhow, Earl was driving, and eventually everyone got to the cabin. Pat, the bar owner, had won the cabin in a big time poker game in Shreveport one year. There was a bit of a dispute about the hand Pat won with. The argument was settled in typical Texas style and Pat, being the gentleman he was, paid for the funeral out of his own pocket. Smith and Wesson beat a pair of Queens every time. Not to mention the former owner should have brought more money to the game and he brought a knife to a gun fight. It just showed bad judgment all the way around.

 

The cabin was a small, three room place that only had electricity because the local utility owner played in Pop’s high stakes games. The place had been built in the late 1800’s. It was an old clapboard cabin with a covered porch on the front and both sides. The back wall was made of local stone and had a big fireplace in the center of it. Before Pat got it, somebody had added on a kitchen and a bedroom just past the stone wall. The bedroom door was punched through the stone on the left side of the fireplace and the kitchen door was likewise punched through on the right. The toilet was a two seat out house down the hill a bit. Water came from a well the county said was safe. But, since the county water commissioner occasionally played out there and he didn’t drink the water, Big Earl drinking the water was not gonna happen.

 

Pat had arrived early and put his stuff in the bedroom. Pat had brought three big old bar-b-que grills, a mess of steaks, ice chests full of mixers and ice and all the fixing’s for a great cookout. Pat was one hell of a good cook on the grill. When the hearses full of chemicals, more alcohol and assorted assholes pulled in front of the cabin, Pat already had steaks going and one grill full of baking potatoes getting happy. Pat knew in his heart that these guys did not need to add hungry to their normally surly dispositions to make them just a bit testy.

 

The usual suspects piled out of the hearses, unloaded all their shit and proceeded to start on the evenings festivities. All the bad guys knew that tomorrow they were going to have a shoot off for the prize of “Best Pistolero”. This was an annual contest that did not necessarily mean the most accurate shooter got it. Last years winner had put thirteen out of fifteen rounds in the chest of a man sized target; at twenty five feet; in four and a half seconds. Throwing enough lead in a short amount of time while not disabling too many innocent bystanders is always considered good form. First prize was a gallon of good booze of choice and one hundred dollars. Everybody wanted to win. The rules, however, did not state that the contestants had to be sober when the contest started. The rules also did not state what kind of guns the contestants had to use. Crazy Dave was probably the biggest psycho of the bunch and he claimed the weapon of choice he had brought was a hand howitzer. Nobody doubted him in the least.

 

So after the food, for some unknown reason, the general consensus was it would be a good idea to have a drinking contest. Go figure. Since Pat refused to enter and had retired with two of the strippers to the bedroom, first prize was going to be the remaining stripper for the night. Cross-eyed Kate had no problem with that. Drinking, drugs and folks whose grasp of reality was tenuous at best was not a good combination. They never did get around to the shoot off.

 

In retrospect, this was probably not the most well thought out idea anybody ever had. But, considering the mental capabilities of the co-workers, a drink-off couldn’t hurt. Oh how wrong could one group of people be? Three hours later Big Earl ended up winning the hand, and assorted other parts, of the delectable darling. He promised to burn an offering to God later and headed off to the kitchen for a long night of guess the disease.

 

He got the kitchen because it was the only other room with a door in the cabin. The rest of the guys were opening and mixing whatever chemistry experiments they would be imbibing that night as the happy couple closed the door. That young lady and Earl tried everything their perverse little minds could come up with and finally fell asleep in the middle of the night.

 

While Big Earl and the young lady were in the kitchen playing slap and tickle the bouncers figured out who was going to sleep where in truly modern fashion. Big Tiny, all six foot seven, four hundred and twenty pounds of him, said, “I got the couch. Everybody else sleeps in the floor.” Since Big Tiny had the brain of a peach pit and the disposition of a wolverine with a migraine, nobody wanted to dispute his position. It was a fine example of democracy in action. Also, it turned out, a very bad idea. The couch was due to be thrown out. Rats had made a home in it. Rats that knew better than to come out while all those people were moving around. Once everything got quiet though, that was another story.

 

Big Tiny, even drunk, was a very light sleeper. So when a rat bit Big Tiny’s toe Big Tiny woke up. He felt something on his leg, so he did the only logical thing he could think of. Big Tiny grabbed the 45 caliber pistol by his head and shot at what he thought was the intruder. He missed the rat and blew off his own big toe. It was at this point that the feces hit the rotating air dispenser. And, when that happens, dispersal is never even.

 

The pistol shot woke everyone. Big Tiny was screaming, “I’m hit.” Thinking that somebody was shooting at us, several of the less than sober heroes grabbed their weapons and started laying down suppressing fire through the cabin walls. These were the bouncers that had been in Vietnam. They were yelling at the rest of the drunks, ne’er do wells, criminals and such to shoot through the walls and keep whoever was outside down. Before long everybody in the cabin was shooting out in a different direction. Glass was breaking, wood was splintering, the poker table was knocked over and chips were dancing across the floor. At some point one of the idiots shot a lighter fluid can and caught one corner of the cabin on fire. Things were getting exciting. After what felt like hours, the gunfire slowed up enough for the heroes to hear Pat yelling for everyone to stop shooting. By this time the fire was going at a pretty good clip.

 

An ex-special services sergeant listened at the door for a few minutes and heard nothing outside. A couple of the other vets ran outside to look around. When they yelled that everything was clear everybody piled out the door. Nobody was there. Pat started yelling at everyone. The over armed, drunk, stoned and never particularly stable crowd started yelling back at him. Somebody finally noticed my stripper standing in the remains of the cabin door screaming, “Big Tiny has been shot!” Theyy left a few guards, just in case the phantom bad guys came back, and went back in to the burning cabin to drag the alleged victim out and see how bad it was. Eventually, the situation got sorted out.

 

Two of the hearses had been shot up too bad to use. The one closest to the cabin had a hole in one fender, through the engine block and out the other fender. Crazy Dave claimed that one for his hand howitzer. The third hearse had only lost some glass, a nicked radiator hose and a few minor bullet holes in the body.

 

The ex-sergeant had been a medic on one of his tours in ‘Nam so he patched up Big Tiny. About five or six of the stronger bouncers loaded the shot up dumb shit into the working hearse. Along with the three strippers. Pat figured out that Earl was the only other guy that had not been in the main room. So he probably was the closest to an innocent bystander available. Innocence in this case meant he was not provably guilty. That made Earl Pat’s designated driver. Earl drove into through Little Hope and Rhonesboro to Gilmer, the closest town with an emergency room. Pat sent a flatbed truck back to get everything that was left in the woods. That ended up being ten bouncers, twenty four pistols, a couple of shotguns, five long guns and seventeen thousand rounds of assorted ammunition.

 

The final score that night was bouncers nothing, rats a great big ONE. The rats got one big toe, a hundred year old cabin burned to the ground and two and a half hearses. Big Tiny never did walk right after that. The hearse Earl drove to town didn’t run right after that night either.

 

 

Pat never forgave his team for killing his “Big Thicket” hideout.