Bam-Bam's trailer used to sit 40 yards down the hill off to the left of the gravel road that ran down to Duckworth from where County T ends, 11 miles north of State 7. Duckworth road is paved now -- it's considered part of T. Civilization arrives in Dogpatch. They laid that blacktop several years ago, about the time I got sober. I miss my ripping and running days sometimes, but mostly I don't. Nobody misses the dust and noise from all the traffic that used to run down to Duckworth on the weekends. It let up considerably after the tavern and package store closed. Bam-Bam's place burned a couple of years ago. Brush fire. Took the 400-square-foot deck out front with it.
I didn't know Bam-Bam that well. He was one of the weekenders. They called him Bam-Bam because he liked to snap off a couple of rounds at odd moments with this Colt Python he kept around his trailer. The Python is one of the few pistols that comes in just the caliber you expect it to: Every Python I've ever seen has been a .357 magnum. I wouldn't be surprised if Colt never made them in any other caliber. If you can't rely on Colt's taste in these matters, whose can you rely on?
I never saw Bam-Bam hit anything with it but twice, both times in the same day, but then I never hunted with him. He was a drinking buddy, not a hunting buddy -- an important distinction -- and an annoying drunk at that. Right at the height of the party he'd whip out that Python, hold it straight up in the air and BAM! BAM! make the statement that had become his signature. Being a serious drinker, he usually pulled this stunt next to a keg on the deck out front of the trailer, where everyone was sure to get an earful. Sometimes he pulled it next to the keg when it was in the bathroom sitting in the bathtub, that being the logical place to keep a keg indoors, since all good kegs spend their short, happy lives in large plastic trash sacks packed with ice and rock salt. Anyone hanging around the bathroom got an even bigger earful. Then the next day we had to find a ladder and some patching tar and climb up on the roof of his trailer.
Despite the noise, I liked Bam-Bam’s habit of shooting holes in his bathroom ceiling. It had a certain panache about it, an élan vitale, if you will. On the other hand, if you ask why I can't hear for shit today -- and you will need to speak loudly -- I lay a good bit of the blame at Bam-Bam's door. When you're drinking, though, you tend to ignore such indiscretions.
Bam-Bam's last Fourth of July party started out as a three-kegger, about where we usually began, although it was hard to predict where things would end up. Sometimes we'd get Muelling down at Duckworth to open up after hours to sell us another keg -- and then later, another; and maybe again toward dawn, yet another -- but sometimes he wouldn't. I always thought it sad that the happiness of so many should rest in the hands of one man. It was that deck what drew us to Bam-Bam's, plus the barbecue pit he'd built entirely out of fire brick scavenged out of the fireplace on the old Stanfield property. His parties always featured a "goat roast," which "goat" was spitted whole and roasting over that pit. Our goat had just that morning, ten minutes before sunrise, been rubbing the velvet off his antlers in the timber 15 yards east of the gravel road that comes the back way into Duckworth from Staindrop. No doubt he was dreaming about all the does he was fixing to fill with fawns in the fall, if he lived that long.
He didn't. Just as the sun cracked the horizon, me and Wylie Collins -- who we called "Coyote" for a number of reasons, not the least of them being he was something of a cartoon -- came slipping over the hill in Wylie's dark green F250 four-wheel-drive portable deer stand, Bam-Bam sitting between us, moseying along in the same general direction as our goat. We were all of us sipping beers, except the goat, of course. I hadn't even realized we were cruising for camp meat. I thought we were just out looking -- you know, reveling in the rosy-fingered rays of dawn, that sort of thing. Goat had his head up, ears making the high sign, and had probably been standing stock still for several minutes, listening to us grind down the road in low second. Just as we pulled abreast of him, he wiggled his ears.
It was that wiggle what fucked him.
"There's one," Coyote said. That son of a bitch could see deer in the next county.
Before I could get my fingers in my ears, Bam-Bam had snatched that Python off the dash and had it out the window three inches in front of my nose and BAM! had shaved several more decibels of acuity off my right ear. Goat knew this wasn't right, took off running.
"Lead him," Wylie said.
Bam-Bam's arm swung away from my nose as I glanced out the window, just in time to BAM! see our goat do a half-gainer with a twist and land on his back in the buck brush. I had my fingers in my ears by now, so I could better enjoy the show. The brush thrashed for a few seconds and fell still.
Scratch one for Bam-Bam. We had ourselves a goat.
A few minutes later, gutting the beast where he fell, I showed Bam-Bam where his bullet had hit. Nice shot -- what the Marine Corps would describe as a "GSW (Gun Shot Wound), neck, V-C4 (Vertebra, Fourth Cervical), T&T (through-and-through)." It was the perfect poacher shot, poaching being a sport that cries out for neck or spine placement, since tracking is rarely practical. "Bet you couldn't do that again," I said to Bam-Bam.
I should have kept my damned mouth shut.
The interesting thing about Bam-Bam's parties, in fact about all the hillbilly parties up on the river end of the Lake of the Ozone, was to see in exactly what way they would get out of hand. One year a drunk tried to whack a hunk of venison off the spit with a machete, samurai-style, but caught a glancing blow and served up a chunk of his own forearm instead. The rotation of the spit seemed to throw off his aim. Another time "You-Can't-Stick-Dick" Dicky Day just flat staggered off the porch and broke his ankle. Usually during the year some hillbilly with a few too many under his belt would run off the county road and hit an oak tree, which event was always much harder on vehicle and contents than on the woodwork. We buried a number of those guys through the years. And then one year one of the drunken Magruder twins fell out of a boat, got run over by the skier they were pulling, and drowned. I won't even try to recall all the motorcycle fatalities.
Wylie's contribution was always to find the nicest piece of furniture in the trailer, pass out on it, then let his bladder go. He had some other tricks too, but that was the one he was famous for. You could catch a whiff of Wylie in most of the party-hearty trailers down in that area. He didn't smell quite as bad as tomcat, but he had a definite bouquet. The one thing you never saw or heard of among the locals, though, was firearms accidents. The hillbillies grew up around guns, used them frequently, and had respect for what they could do and how unforgivingly they did it. They also couldn't afford much ammunition.
That last Fourth of July party everyone had shown up with an unusually large number of bottle rockets. We're talking pickup loads here. The previous year someone had hit upon the notion of sitting on Bam-Bam's deck and shooting bottle rockets at the cars silhouetted against the sky line going to and from Duckworth. The idea caught on. That last year the hillbillies had developed it into a science. I noticed a couple of assholes had brought along some big skyrockets, of a size you really don't want flying up your nose. That raised the ante a little higher than I was comfortable with, but it promised an exciting evening.
This bottle-rocket shooting played to mixed reviews. The folks on the deck loved it, but the traffic trying to get in and out of Duckworth was variously amused. A couple of rich old farts from the city, the kind who drag around $30,000 bass boats with dual 300-horsepower inboard motors, stopped and got out of their shiny new extended-cab pickups to cuss and yell at the boozers down the hill. Inspired by these guys, someone had made a bazooka out of three-pound coffee cans with the ends cut out, duct-taped together, punching holes with an ice pick in a ring all the way around the back end about as far in as a bottle-rocket fuse is from the end of the stick. Into this tube they could stuff about 75 bottle rockets at once. A propane torch was kept lit and burning to assure uniform and rapid ignition of the entire load. All you had to do was run that blue flame around the can into those holes, while some guy -- his eyes closed, of course -- shouldered and pointed it . What it lacked in accuracy it made up for in showmanship. The Germans had something like it in the Second World War, called the Nebelwerfer, presumably the Kraut word for "high-volume screaming-mee-mee launcher." Our version really lit up the night, especially with a couple of those big skyrockets thrown in for emphasis.
As the evening wore on, the less potted party guests learned to lead the vehicles, aiming ahead of them by a distance proportional to how fast they were moving. This greatly improved accuracy. They got good enough that a couple of times bottle rockets zipped through open car windows, raising loud cheers from the gallery. Both of these unlucky targets were already playing our "run the gauntlet" game, shooting bottle rockets back at us, so the small explosions in the car interiors were not wholly unexpected. They still must have been exciting for the occupants. Fortunately, no one got lucky with the skyrockets.
I was a little surprised no one called the law. But there wasn't a lot of law back then in Barton County, and what law there was had some sense about when to leave hell enough alone. A lot of the guys who would drive down the road and fire a volley of bottle rockets down at the deck were actually guests just announcing their arrival before they parked down the road and walked back to join the party. It was all just good, clean American fun, of the sort Francis Scott Key liked to write songs about.
One pickup in particular, an old, beat-up light gray Chevy with two guys and a chick in it, kept running up and down the road, apparently for the sole purpose of firing bottle rockets into the party. They distinguished themselves by their accuracy. My friends on the deck started waiting for them with the Nebelwerfer, sending a full salvo at them every time they drove by. Some of the weekenders knew these kids, who were also weekenders. They hailed from Liberty, a town near Kansas City.
About 11:45 p.m., according to the sheriff's report, our friends from Liberty were making yet another pass at a "high rate of speed" up the gravel road toward T, for the purpose of treating the party to yet another volley of bottle rockets, which they were firing through a slightly retracted window on the passenger side. Not a bad system, really. Return rockets were just going out as I leaned over to the keg to draw myself another beer. At that moment Bam-Bam walked out the front door of his trailer, Python in hand. I set the beer down as fast as I could, cussing that son of a bitch because I knew he was going to touch off that hogleg before I got my hearing protection arranged. I saw his arm go up, but then he hesitated. Just as I rammed my fingers home, spilling that beer with my elbow, he lowered the gun and swung it my way, in the same direction as the truck was going down the road. I was watching his arm, not the truck, when BAM! blang BAM! I was blinded momentarily by the muzzle flashes. I remember thinking what a nice, level swing he had, the kind that makes for a great trapshooter, smooth, with an uninterrupted follow-through. I didn't even think about the truck. I did get this uneasy sense that by lowering the gun that way he stood a good chance of blowing the brains out of anyone who might stand up unexpectedly on the porch.
Gasps from other guests on the deck made me turn. The truck had accelerated, swerved in our direction, and left the road. It plowed through ten yards of saplings in the uncleared woods two lots down before center-punching a four-foot-in-diameter oak tree. As the front end crumpled I saw the beams of the headlights, ghostly in the heavy smoke and dust that hung in the air, wrap themselves around that tree in a lover's embrace. Uh-oh, I thought. A rather solid hit. From the glow of the lights on the porch I could see the boy on the passenger side bounce off the windshield and back into his seat. The faint bark of the gunshots, followed a second later by the sound of the vehicle's impact, came echoing back from the hills across the lake. Then silence.
After a second or two guests from the party started to rise and move slowly toward the wreck. The boy on the passenger side opened his door, stumbled out, and fell to the ground holding his head, then got up and shot us a wild-eyed look before darting around to the other side of the pickup. Wylie and I were the first off the porch, running to the scene. As we drew closer we saw that the girl, who had been sitting in the middle of the cab between the two guys, was crying. We were surprised when we came around to the driver's side to find the first boy cowering on the ground with his hands up, crying, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"
Hell if I knew what that was all about. The hole in the back window and a glance in the cab told the story. Wylie grabbed the handle and yanked twice at the driver's door, which was sprung. He finally wrenched it open. The boy who had been driving, a long-haired blond kid I didn't recognize, was slumped over the steering wheel. His hair had fallen to the sides of his head, revealing a small, round hole centered in the back of his skull. Wylie grabbed him by the hair and jerked him upright, exposing the perfect, three-inch exit wound in his forehead, centered perfectly between and just above his eyes. Surprisingly, there wasn't much blood, save around the hole in the windshield where the mushroomed slug had exited the cab. At least he didn't suffer, I thought.
A hand gripped my shoulder. I turned around to see Bam-Bam, the Python still hanging from the other hand at his side, trying to get a look. "Oh my God, help me," he whispered. But like most folks, Bam-Bam had started praying way too late.
"Bam-Bam," Wylie said. "You remember what I told you this morning about leading them?"
Bam-Bam, white as a ghost, emitted a guttural "uh-hunh."
"Well," Wylie said, "just forget it."
It was 3:00 a.m. by the time the sheriff finished taking down the last of the wildly conflicting statements, many of them outright lies, and headed back to town. He’d called the game warden out, who took an intense interest in what was left of that neck-shot deer, July being about as far out of season as you can get. We laid that deer on Bam-Bam, too. After all, he shot the damned thing. We figured it might give him a lesser charge to plead to later. Coyote thought it was just so cute to tell the sheriff it was all my fault, since I'd made a "wager," as he called it -- I was surprised that word was in his vocabulary -- on Bam-Bam's marksmanship. I was still tanked up enough to "tell you something else, pilgrim" in my best John Wayne voice, and informed the sheriff that I wasn't paying off nobody, because "in the first place, head shots ain't neck shots, and in the second place, I only bet on goats." By then, Bam-Bam was long gone in the deputy's car, Python and all. There was still beer left in one of the kegs when the crowd dispersed. No one had to wake up Muelling that night.
Hurrying back to town, the sheriff had just come off MM highway onto old 65 and was accelerating into a curve when he met a drunk out of White Branch who had gotten a little confused about which side of the road it is customary to drive on in this country. The sheriff swerved one way and then another, but the drunk kept tracking him like "some shit-seeking whiskey missile," as the lawman later told the story. It was over in an instant: They hit each other headlight to headlight. Needless to say, both his Crown Vic and her ancient Cadillac were totaled, but thanks to his seatbelt and the incredible ability of a 440-cubic-inch engine block to absorb shock, the sheriff got off with nothing more serious than compound fractures of both legs. The drunk, who was not belted in, came flying through her windshield, bounced once off the top of the Vic, and continued airborne until her trajectory intersected yet another of those large white oaks so common in that part of the Ozarks. This one was across the ditch on the outside of the curve, surrounded by tall grass. She actually clipped the tree with her shoulder on her way past and went spinning akimbo, landing behind it. It took so long to find her that the deputies thought she'd jumped out of her car and run off, this being the usual practice at alcohol-related accident scenes in Barton County, although that theory didn't seem to square with the hole in her windshield. Someone finally heard her moaning in the grass behind that tree. She died as they stuck her in the ambulance.
All things considered, it was one of Barton County's more memorable Fourths.
The prosecutor, being the brother-in-law of the sheriff, got a bit pissy over the incident. He was an idle sort, and having nothing better to do, he refused to accept a plea in the case. Bam-Bam, the penniless idiot, accepted a "public pretender," who let him testify in open court that he had been aiming for the bed of the pickup, which his first shot had indeed hit. Come to think of it, I remembered hearing the impact. He was just trying to scare them, he said, but missed on the second try. The prosecutor didn't miss. Bam-Bam caught 15 years' worth of Murder Two and ended up in Potosi. He never got that Python back, either. It's still on display in the Barton County sheriff's office, twist-tied to their big "Confiscated Weapons and Drug Paraphernalia" pegboard, right next to a couple of Wylie's old hash pipes.
There was no way this was Murder Two, of course. Bam-Bam really didn't intend to hurt anyone. Legally speaking, this was negligent homicide, or at worst involuntary manslaughter. Who gave a rat's ass about that? Judge? Prosecutor? The defense attorney? No. As is usual in the United States, the defendant got all the justice he paid for. No one around Duckworth much cared that Bam-Bam went down for ten more years than the law should have allowed. Most folks figured he deserved extra credit for sheer stupidity. He certainly blew his chance to be selected as the NRA Gun Safety Poster Child.
My opinion at the time, widely shared and much admired, was that people who have trouble holding their liquor should refrain from drinking before 9:00 a.m., as it can lead to problems later in the day. It took me another couple of years to get past this perspective, a year beyond that to achieve the "pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization" so poignantly described in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bam-Bam's party was not the final straw that convinced me I needed to take a look at my drinking.
It was, however, a clue.
James R. Cooley lives in Kansas City, MO. He describes his work as "skanky drinking stories relating episodes from my lavishly misspent youth, or equally frightening tales based on some of the psychotic serial killers I've since met in AA." This is his first story
for Lime Tea.
