Shrieks of a pitch to raise both the quick and the dead woke me the next morning. The discovery that he’d spent the night with a rattlesnake had Vikers dancing about in the predawn light, waving his hands in the air, and squealing like a hysterical girl.
“It’s dead,” his bunkies repeated a dozen times, to no avail, for, as Iyaiya must of known, Vikers had snakephobia bad and he had been driven out of his senses. This was better than I could of ever hoped for in the way of cutting the man down. I gulped down three cups of coffee, eager for the next act of my play.
Vikers quit shrieking around the time my bladder threatened to burst. I strutted off to the edge of camp and faced out toward the line of blue mountains, streaked along the top with orange where the sun was peeking up.
Trying to think of a song that’d get everyone’s attention, I recalled a ditty we’d learned off of a stomper who worked in a cotton gin back in Hempstead. Though the man coughed constantly, as, like most of them there, he was dying of cotton lung from breathing in clouds of lint all day, he managed to teach us the words that I bellowed out now.
There’s a yellow girl in Texas
That I’m going down to see
No other darkies know her
No darkey, only me
She cried so when I left her
That it like to broke my heart,
And if I only find her,
We never more will part
When I opened up and really sang, I had a voice that could make water tremble in a horse trough. It was a voice you felt in the pit of your gut. Like me, whether you thought my voice was pretty or not didn’t count for much, it would get the job done.
And the job then was to get every trooper’s attention. Which it did. They shifted their stares from Vikers, who had collapsed into whimpering trembles, to me. I hawked and snorted and spit before commencing the main act. Having gotten bushels more schooling than I ever cared to on how to pee like a man, I took my stance, spreading my legs as though extra bracing was required to counterbalance the magnificent weight being pulled forth, before I dug into the fly of my britches and took hold of what I’d planted there. Then, although there was no one at my side, I performed a maneuver I’d seen the less endowed among the men use and covered up what little of the spout I allowed to protrude with one hand. The other I rested on my hip in the manner of the jauntier troopers. And then, standing straight up, I turned loose of all that used coffee. Though but a dribble, it did squirt out from roughly the right place.
“Hoo-WEE!” Lem said, startling me, as he took his place at my side and unbuttoned. “Thought we already done crossed the Mississippi.”
Though Lem was happily occupied in unloosing a majestic arc, I turned away.
“Oh, sorry, Bill,” Lem said. “Thought you was over your bashful spell. No disrespect intended.”
“None taken, Lem,” I answered.
More hawking and spitting covered any telltale clanks of the spout against the pewter buttons of my fly as I tucked my equipment back into its kerchief holder, closed the fly, hitched up my suspenders, and turned to face Vikers. Though he tried to glare back at me, it didn’t work as he’d gone the color of cold ashes and his hands were trembling.
I sauntered his way and, when the only sound was the far-off chittering of prairie dogs barking out their good mornings to each other and warning us not to come any closer, I said to Vikers, “Next one’ll be alive.”