The Great Shoot Out

One day while I was teaching in Waeldar, Texas, one of my students just would not shut up. She kept running her mouth all morning long. No matter what anyone said, she had a comment to make. Not being the brightest ornament on the tree, most of what she said was just annoying. I finally lost it and told her that she was like a broken Chatty Cathy doll. She kept saying something, but nobody was pulling her string. She had never heard of a Chatty Cathy doll, so I explained that it was a doll with a string hanging out of its neck, and that it talked when you pulled the string. She couldn't picture that, so I acted it out for her. I pretended to pull a string from her neck and said, “Now you talk.” I thought she understood.

The next day, I got called to the office. That child's grandmother had flown up to the school in a rage hollering about how, “That white boy thinks he's gonna tie a string around my sweet grand-baby's neck!” and how she was going to “kill him dead”. The principal, did his best to calm her down, but I honestly don't think we got through to her. After she left, the principal told me that she was embarrassed that she had over reacted, but wasn't willing to back down in front of me. I was not convinced. I drove through town expecting a bullet to put an end to the situation at any second.

I lived on a little thirteen acre farm that had once belonged to the school board president's mother. It was about ten minutes from Waeldar in the middle of nowhere. There had been a small black community out there called Mt. Eden, but the only thing left was a church that was still used and a post office building that was boarded up.

My house was a ramshackle Green Acres sort of affair. It had three bedrooms, but for the most part, I spent all my time in the one in the back where I slept. I chose that room because the others had issues. One, which was the smallest was crammed full of whatever the family had left in the house when the president's mother had passed away. It smelled of mouse urine, and I only went in there on occasion to find furniture or other items to use in the house. The front room had pink walls and was really big with lots of windows. I just didn't like it for some reason. Mom and Dad used to use it when they visited. They called it camping.

My bedroom was in the back corner of the house closest to the bathroom. It had windows on two walls. I put the old window air conditioner in one of them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Luckily, there was a decent shady tree outside, and the room stayed comfortable with a box fan in the other window when it didn't work. In the winter, I hung heavy curtains over the windows and used a kerosene heater to keep the room warm while I was awake. I had an electric mattress pad that kept me warm while sleeping. That and my dog, Trooper, who slept under the covers down by my feet.

I had an electric heater on a timer in the bathroom. It warmed it to a bearable temperature for the morning S³ session. One time, before I put the heater in there, I had to chip ice in the toilet. That old house had absolutely no insulation. The boards you saw inside, were the boards you saw outside. There was no sheet rock or anything. At one point in time, someone had glued newspaper on some of the walls like wallpaper. I'm sure that was to stop the wind.

I absolutely loved living out at that old house. It could be a little scary sometimes. For example, the first night I stayed out there, Trooper and I were awakened in the middle of the night by what sounded like a bunch of lunatic ghost children running by the house. At school the next day, the local teachers got a big laugh about that. I was ready to move back to town, it scared me so badly. Turns out that it was just a pack of coyotes. That's right- a pack of coyotes. I somehow think the ghosts were less frightening.

Anyway, on the night after my run in with that grandmother, Trooper suddenly stood at the front screen door giving this really strange low guttural growl. He was shaking and the hair on his neck and back was standing up. When I got to him, he looked at me with a , “What the hell is that?” expression on his face. I had no idea what he was worrying over, so I carefully stepped out on the porch. Suddenly, the brake lights on my car went on. I panicked. Someone was sitting in my car with their foot on the brake. That grandmother, true to her word, had sent someone out to kill me. I went back in the house, slammed the door, locked it, and ran for my 22 semi-automatic rifle.

I had bought that stupid rifle about a week earlier after coming home from school one day and finding a turd on my kitchen floor that was from no animal I had ever seen. I always left the back door open for Trooper to come in and out as he pleased while I was at school. He was acting a little skittish, so I new something had been in the house with him. It wasn't a mouse. It wasn't a rat. I didn't know what it was. I put Trooper in the car, and we drove to the Gonzales Walmart, where I bought the rifle.

I had never owned a gun before. For the most part, I was scared of the stupid thing. Still, I loaded it and went around the property shooting to get the feel of it. I remember thinking that maybe I could shoot a squirrel or something for dinner, but we never saw any critters. In fact, I never did figure out what that was that came in the house. People at work suggested it was probably a raccoon or possum that Trooper had scared “shitless”, and it would never come back. I had never understood the phrase “scared shitless” until then.

So there I was at my door holding on to a 22 that I barely knew how to shoot. I did know that I would get something like 12 shots or something, I don't really remember, before having to reload. I stepped out on the porch and sure enough, that brake light was still on. Then it went off. Then it went back on again. I hollered, “Get out of my car. I have a gun, and I'll use it if I have to!” The brake light went off, but nobody got out of the car. It was too dark to see who it was. I shouted, “I'm not playing!” and shot the rifle into the air. Nothing happened. I shot it again and stepped a little closer. The brake light went on. I panicked and shot several more times. I screamed, “the sheriff is on the way!” in a scared choking little voice that even I wouldn't have believed. I remember thinking, “Brilliant, Einstein. Why didn't you call?”

Way off to the left about a half mile away, I saw lights coming on at the neighbor's place. I was still standing there looking at my brake lights going on and off thinking how crazy this was. It really pissed me off. I went up to the car like a SWAT team member ready to kill whoever was in there, only to find that there was absolutely nobody in my car. Somehow that was even more terrifying to me. The thought of some ghost intruder sitting there playing with my brakes made my blood run cold. I just froze. I wanted to scream. I couldn't. I wanted to run back to the house. I couldn't. Fortunately, I wasn't scared “shitless”, although I may have wet myself a bit!

I must have lost some time because suddenly someone was talking to me. It was my neighbor, a kindly old man, whom I had never really met except to wave at as he passed by my house. He had a shotgun with him and asked me what was going on. I told him about the brake lights and how I thought someone was in my car. He opened the gate and came over to me and asked, “Where did he go?” I told him that there hadn't been anyone at all. Well, he looked at me like I was crazy. I thought he was going to shoot me for troubling him, but suddenly the stupid brake light came on again. He jumped back and swung his shotgun around at the car. After a few minutes he scratched his head, walked over to my car and kicked it with his foot. The brake light went off. He kicked it again, and the brake light came on. He started laughing, and headed back to his truck. He turned and hollered, “Boy, you gots a short in them wires!”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open and watched him drive into my property, make a loop around me and my car, and drive on out and to his place. I could hear him laughing most of the way. I, however, did not laugh. I cried like a stupid little baby. I felt so embarrassed and just too stupid for words.

That grandma came to a special ed meeting about her grand daughter about two weeks later. She was as nice and friendly as ever. I sometimes wonder, whether or not she had heard about my night of terror.

Snake Tale

Snake Tale

Back in 1983, I was living out in the country about seven or eight miles from Waeldar. I had gotten tired of living a block from the school. There was absolutely no privacy. People asked about any visitors who stopped by. They asked about my packages that came in the mail. I felt like I was under a microscope. I heard from a student at the high school that her daddy, the then president of the school board, had an old farm house available to be rented in Mt. Eden. It sat on the middle of a small 13-acre farm that had been his mother's. I jumped at the opportunity to be farther from the public scrutiny of Waeldar. Even after I saw the place, I was ready to move in.

Now, I have to be honest about the condition of the house. It was in pretty bad shape. I've written about it before and described it as something like a Green Acres kind of place. I pretty much only lived in one room of it. That was a bedroom way in the back that suited me fine. I kept it cool in summer with an old and noisy window AC unit. I kept it warm in the summer with a kerosene heater I bought at the Walmart in Gonzales. To Trooper and me, it was home.

Money was hard to come by the first year I lived there. Waelder ISD had been paying teachers a month before school started for years. TEA put an end to that, and as a result, that year we did not get paid until October first to make up for it. That meant going two months on the July paycheck, which was only about $800. I can't complain too much. There were others with kids in college and mortgages to contend with who were worse off than I. Mom and Marion Hill went through their cabinets and brought a lot of canned stuff to me one day. I took it all to the Home Economics teacher, Patsy Worth. She made sure we all had something to eat for lunch during that horrible time. We all ate in her room like a family.

At the house, I could barely afford anything. I bought a huge sack of the cheapest dog food they had at the grocery store in Gonzales for Trooper. I bought some flour, some cheap cans of cranberry sauce to use as jelly, a small tub of lard, and some powdered milk for me. I made tons of rock hard biscuits during that time.

I had a small fishing tank on my rental property. It was full of little perch. I thought it might have some catfish in it, too, so I asked Mr. Hernandez at NeNe's grocery in Waeldar if he had any chicken livers leftover from the chickens that he barbecued. He gave me a huge box full of the little paper packages you get with a whole chicken. They had a neck, a heart, a liver, and a gizzard in each one. I tried fishing with the liver, but never got a bite. I had put all the rest in the freezer to keep it fresh. I ended up frying it all and eating it with my biscuits. I really like fried chicken necks, gizzards, hearts, and livers.

One day, while I was fishing, Trooper was running around the little creek that runs from the tank and follows the fence line. After a heavy rain, it was more like a little river. Usually, however, the water just sort of sat there. He started barking like a maniac and my heart stopped. The year before, I was fishing at a friend's ranch and Trooper got bit by a copper head. He had been barking the same way just before then. I ran over to get him, but soon saw there was no real danger. Trooper had come across a huge crawdad and was troubling it. It kept trying to back away from him with its claws up in a menacing way, but he wouldn't let it go.

Well, I happen to enjoy eating crawdads. I decided where there was one, there must be more. I had no idea how to catch them. I decided they must be similar to crabs, so I tied a chicken neck to my fishing line and threw it in. Sure enough, a crawdad latched on and stayed on until I could get him over a bucket and wack him loose. The first day I caught about twenty of them. It was a nice little addition to my fried perch and chicken necks.

Now, I had this really cool fishing chair that Marion had given me the previous Christmas. It had a red fishing tackle box attached to it. I used to take it to the little creek and sit right on the edge of it to catch those crawdads. One day, something at my feet got my attention. I watched in sheer terror as the biggest and ugliest water moccasin I had ever seen slithered right between my legs and down into the creek.

I jumped up like a lunatic and ran all the way back to the house. I got my 22 semi automatic, locked Trooper in the kitchen, and ran back to hunt down and kill me a snake! It took a while, but I found him and shot him dead. I did it out of anger. I felt totally violated by it going through my legs like that. I also new that I didn't need him around my personal fishing and crawdadding area, especially with Trooper's history with snakes. And, just to be clear on this- I had no remorse. I murdered that snake in cold blood and would do it again.

Anyway, later that summer, drought conditions stopped the little creek from getting any water, and my crawdad source dried up. So did the fishing tank. I went there one day to fish and it was so low that the water was literally rolling with struggling fish and snakes who had come to feed on them. It was a pitiful site. Somewhere I have a video of it.