…ain’t hardly nobody ever gets a pension from the CIA…you get throwed in jail if you do your job and you get fired if you don’t…
Monroe D. Underwood
The December darkness came early and with it more rain.
Not to mention Old Dad Underwood and Shorty Connors.
A matter of great import was taken up immediately.
Love.
Shorty Connors said when I was seven I fell in love with a schoolteacher.
He said Miss Strauss.
He said nothing ever come of it.
Old Dad Underwood said when I was seventeen a schoolteacher fell in love with me.
He said Mr. Wilson.
He said nothing ever come of that either.
Shorty Connors said love is a sickness all remedies refusing.
He said Daniel said that.
Old Dad Underwood said ain’t no damn wonder he wound up in the lions’ den.
Shorty Connors said I’m talking about Samuel Daniel.
Old Dad Underwood said I got a hunch they got the wrong Daniel.
He put a pair of beers on his tab.
I said that brings your tab to forty dollars and fifteen cents.
Old Dad Underwood said let me know when she hits fifty.
Shorty Connors said love is where you find it.
Old Dad Underwood nodded.
He said oncet I knowed a feller what fell in love with a twenty-five-gallon crock of creamed turkey.
Shorty Connors said that ain’t as good as a woman.
Old Dad Underwood said the hell it ain’t.
Shorty Connors said but it will go bad.
Old Dad Underwood said that’s what I mean.
Shorty Connors said but good Lord man you can’t take a twenty-five-gallon crock of creamed turkey to bed with you.
Old Dad Underwood said that just shows how much you know.
I turned the television on.
Channel 7’s newscasters were giggling.
An oil tanker had broken in two off the Carolinas.
Two hundred thousand gallons of oil had fouled the coastline.
They giggled.
A nuclear device was missing from the San Diablo Arsenal.
It was no larger than a box of popcorn but it packed enough wallop to level three states.
They giggled.
I turned the television off.
Those guys frightened the hell out of me.
I had a double bromo.
Old Dad Underwood was saying there ain’t but only one sure way of finding out if you are really in love.
Shorty Connors said tell me quick.
Old Dad Underwood said take one of them there nuclear physics.
He said if nothing happens you are in love sure as hell.
Shorty Connors said love is a circle that doth restless move in the same sweet eternity of love.
Old Dad Underwood stared at Shorty Connors.
He said who the hell ever said that?
Shorty Connors said Herrick.
He said Herrick died a bachelor.
Old Dad Underwood said that figgers.
He said a feller what goes around talking like that would get throwed out of a whorehouse.
Grogan came in.
I was glad to see him.
Just then I’d have been glad to see Godzilla.