The other night I was headed home from work when I saw two women stranded in the middle of a busy intersection with a crying baby and a broke-down Chevy.
The baby was sucking on Mountain Dew in a bottle.
“Wanna use my phone?” I hollered.
The woman wearing a Foxy Mama T-shirt hollered back, “Yeah.”
She sat in my car and talked on the phone, but her end of the conversation was brief: “Naw…Yep…Naw, see we used the money for oil to buy cigarettes. Huh? Well, ’cause we didn’t have any, you mo-ron.”
She hung up and we agreed that I’d drive her to her boyfriend’s house a mile or so away.
“He knows a lot about cars,” she said.
We pulled into his driveway and she chose this moment to say, “Well, actually, this is his swamp slut girlfriend’s house.”
Uh-oh.
She tried to knock on the front door but there was a Doberman on a two-foot chain standing guard.
“Where’s your friend?” I asked when she came back to the car.
“Well, he could be back in jail. I mean, after I swore out them warrants on him and all.”
I just knew she was going to call him her “old man” in a minute.
She started to cuss him.
“Do you mean we’re at the home of your boyfriend’s new girlfriend and her psychotic Doberman and you think a man you had thrown in jail for stealing your beer money is going to help you fix your girlfriend’s broke-down car?”
“Yep. You know,” she says, suddenly looking almost cheery, “when we drove up I could’ve swore I saw him walking with that bony-ass bitch girlfriend of his toward that convenience store across the highway. Let’s go.”
Oh, yes, let’s.
I wait outside while she goes into the store.
Two minutes later, she jumps into my car, slams the door, and folds her arms. She’s furious.
“What happened?”
“He said the baby ain’t his.”
Oh, sweet Jesus.
“What baby? I thought you were just going to ask him to help you get the car started.”
Now, about this time, the object of her desire, a stringy, tattooed, shirtless creature lurched out of the store, grinning drunkenly.
He gave us the finger.
Then she lowered her window and cussed him good and he started beating on my car.
“What’s he doing?” I screamed. “I don’t even know this guy and he’s beating on my car windows.”
She says, “That’s okay, we can get a warrant swore out on him.”
(This is the redneck woman’s answer to every little problem in life. That, and Marlboro Lights.)
I guess maybe I am part redneck because I got a wheel getting out of that parking lot and enjoyed every rubber-burning second of it.
We got back to her friend’s car and I was real relieved to see another skinny, bare-chested, tattooed guy working under the hood.
Foxy Mama looked relieved.
“Guess her old man’s gonna help us out.”
I knew she was going to say that.