Monday, September 23, 2013

Tonight, On Hick of Backroads' Wild Kingdom...

That Hick! He's such a spotlight seeker!

For several days now, he's been dropping hints that I'm not writing about him enough. Not that he even knows what a blog is, or ever expended the effort to read the one story I've since published about him before signing away his rights. Such a narcissist is Hick.

Every time I sit down at my living room laptop, or walk through the upstairs square footage over my dark basement lair, Hick heckles me. "Hey! You're always writing stories about me. You haven't even asked me about my snake story."

No. I have not. Is that something you would think to ask YOUR spouse? Oh, honey...what about your snake story? Yeah. I didn't think that was quite the mainstream marriage conversation topic that Hick imagines it to be.

Tonight, just after we both pulled into the garage at the same time, and right before Hick left for his bowling league, I hit on that bait. "Hey, what about your snake story?"

"What snake story?"

"For days you've been hinting that you want to tell me a snake story. So I can write about it. Did you have an encounter with a snake?"

"Well YEAH! I opened up the BARn door, and there was a snake laying in the middle of the floor!"

"And...?"

"What do you mean?"

"What kind was it? How big? Did you kill it? Did you catch it? Did it bite you? Is it still there?"

"It got under the workbench. I was afraid I'd lost him. But I reached under there and drug him out. He was this big." Hick held his arm straight out from his waist, with his fingers and thumb in a pinchy grip.

"You held him by the tail to measure him?"

"Yeah. And he tried to BITE me! So I pinned his head down with an 'L' clamp."

"Then what?"

"I threw him out the door, past the burn pit. AND HE STARTED TO COME BACK IN THE BARn!"

"Imagine that."

"So I grabbed him and carried him up the field and threw him down the sinkhole."

"Wait! You carried him across the field?" That's a distance of about 100 yards. Hick is no Usain Bolt.

"Well, I couldn't let him come back in the BARn!"

"You dangled him by the tail and carried him across the field?"

"No. He balled up around my arm. And he kept trying to bite me. So I held his head away with that 'L' clamp. Then I threw him down the sinkhole with all the other stuff." He means things like kitchen cabinets from our old house, and various dead critters, and junk that even he doesn't want. Hick regards sinkholes as nature's wastebaskets.

"Threw him down the sinkhole, as in SPLASH? Or threw him down the sinkhole as in the depression covered with dead leaves that slopes down to the hole in the rock?"

"Just down in the big hole, in the leaves."

"He's a SNAKE! He lives in the leaves. He'll come right back out."

"Yeah. But it'll take him longer to get back to the BARn."

"You know that he was in your BARn because he's eating something, right? Mice. Now you'll have blind pink hairless baby mice in your coverall pockets again. Instead of a snake to pick up by the tail."

"Aw. There'll be another snake."

Our Hick is no Marlin Perkins. He doesn't have Jim to do his bitey dangerous work. Hick is his own Jim.

7 comments:

  1. Hell, I'd have squealed like a girl! and then needed a dirty water cocktail.

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  2. Hick is my hero, even if he fell for that old Brer Rabbit trick of, "Please don't throw me in the sinkhole!"

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  3. Not a fan of snakes so I think Hick did pretty good!!!!

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  4. Good god almighty, I hear a banjo playing a song from "Deliverance".

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  5. Snake is not the operative word here for me. SINKHOLE scares the you-know- what out of me more than any snake. Even if that snake unhinged its jaw, it could not swallow up as much as a sink hole.

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  6. joeh,
    That's what Hick did the last time he jammed his hands in his coveralls pockets and grabbed some blind pink hairless baby mice! Well...except for the dirty water cocktail, of course. I suspect he had a snort of Wild Turkey.

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    Leenie,
    Hick is not noted for viewing the world through a veil of suspicion like his wifey. He would gladly swim a scorpion across the river on his back. One time.

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    Stephen,
    The thing is, Hick also said, "I was going to bring it over to the house so you could get a picture, but I thought you might get mad." Darn tootin'!

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    knancy,
    I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man. WAIT! That was Lucky Ned Pepper to Rooster Cogburn just before their shootout on horseback. What I MEANT to say was, that's bold talk for somebody from West Virginia!

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    Linda,
    Val lives on the edge. The edge of a sinkhole.

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  7. Yes, and we West, by God, almost heaven, Virginians don't give a darn tootin' what any of you foreigners think! Ha, ha, ha....Don't you just love some stereotypes? I have fun with them because I see them every day. And I am from here in WV as you said, so no one can accuse me of being anything but funny about myself. I often ask people that I find are not on my wave length if they are from Yawkey, WV. Sometimes they get belligerent and defensive as they think I am being detrimental to their home. Well, hell, my Mother was born there so I know first hand that I can make fun of my own heritage. If you can't laugh - that's THEIR problem. I just love that word Yawkey.

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