The Viceroy and the Val-Hog

Yesterday I mentioned how I was too lazy to walk up to the end of the driveway I worried that if I tried to bring back the trash dumpster from the long driveway, and fell, that I might lie there until Hick came home and ran over me.

Blog buddy Sioux knows Hick pretty well. I think she even met him once. She pooh-poohed (heh, heh, you know what I said) the idea of Hick NOTICING that he ran over me. I think she's right on this one.

Hick is like some real-life reverse version of The Princess and the Pea. More like The Viceroy and the Val-Hog. The former can sense a tiny pea under 124,743 mattresses, and the latter can't feel his wife's body dragging under his car like a brush hog. Don't call it a bush hog. That's just crazy talk. Around here it's a brush hog. For mowing down brush. Only Hick wouldn't use me for that. He'd probably use me more like a blade. To spread gravel evenly over the roads. All the while thinking, "I'm glad we paid Val's sister the ex-mayor's wife way too much money for her half of Val's mom's 2002 Chevy Trailblazer, because this thing is a wizard at blading gravel." Okay. No he wouldn't. I've never heard him utter the word wizard.

After all, Hick is the person who can never notice the humming or grinding noises in T-Hoe's wheels. Doesn't notice them dragging to the right, or making a clickclickclick when a giant freakin' bolt is embedded in the right front tire. It takes an ex-mayor to find a bolt, when he's not even inspecting Val's T-Hoe, but walking her to her car in an effort to hasten her departure from his home.

Hick is the one who can find the only hole in a road, obvious to any front-seat passenger, and also to astute back-seat ones, with plenty of room to straddle it or pass around it on the right, but instead plows right through it at a speed last clocked at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and when chided by Val after the end of her bitten-off tongue regenerates, says, "Val. I did not hit that hole."

Hick is the one who throws caution to the wind, and drives like the wind of Hurricane Katrina is at his back on the way down the gravel road towards EmBee, flinging passenger Val side-to-side like a metronome on Red Bull, her head clacking from Hick's shoulder to T-Hoe's side window more times than a two-year-old's mom says, "NO!" in a candy store.

Hick is the one who says Val almost took out a mailbox with T-Hoe's mirror while staying on her side of the no-center-line road on a blind curve, rather than driving in the middle and counting on nothing coming the opposite way, the nuances of law-abiding roadsmanship lost on the master sweaver with one eye.

Yes. I imagine that Val would remain under the Trailblazer unnoticed until Hick needed his weekly cash allowance to go Goodwill shopping.