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Nice Kitty

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I was tackled by a tiger once.  I must stress that it was voluntary for both me and the tiger.  I was recruited to be tiger tackled as part of a fund raising event to support some charity or other during other events at a county fair.  I was coerced by individuals older than my young self and shamed into the event my various peers.  It was one of several stunts involving tigers, bears, cheetahs, and such; courtesy of a company that trained animals for use as actors in motion pictures.  The tiger, an immense, neutered, Siberian male had a head the size of a beach ball, and breath that could knock a buzzard off an outhouse.  I would love to tell you his name was Larry, because if I had a tiger I would name him Larry.  It would give me a chance to be something I rarely am – laconic.

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In spite of what you may have heard, I am not a genius, nor have I ever claimed to be (at least not since I was 17 and some young winner of the Nordic Combined was batting her eyelashes at me).  I am not a physicist.  I know nearly nothing of quantum mechanics, string theory, or Star Trek’s Heisenberg Compensator.  Some time ago, as I contemplated a premise for a novel that could possibly involve scientific fact and theory so far past my meager knowledge as to fade into the far distance, a friend suggested I look into the massive, multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider that lurks below the surface of the earth across the border of Switzerland and France.  It has been built in the hopes of answering some really big questions.  I looked into it.  It frightens me.

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Theo Vitali was a wild man.  Greek and Italian, his passions ran nearly as high as his blood pressure.  He was a screamer, a thrower, a man so driven that, while he was the high school football coach in my hometown, we lost only two games in 6 years.  In the noisy and crowded locker room one afternoon, somebody asked me what I put on my hair.  I shouted back, “Vitalis!”

Vitali, back in his office and evidently unaware of the question and hearing only the answer, took it to mean that I had offered him personal insult.  He attacked, slamming me into a row of lockers and holding me there by the throat with his fist drawn back, his face flushed with rage, as he screamed and frothed for a while.

Even in those days long past, a teacher couldn’t just run around willy-nilly punching out students, so I was reasonably sure he was not going to actually hit me.  I was a bit concerned, however, he might tear out my throat with his teeth.  Gradually, and with some effort, he gained control, dragged me to the office, left me in the waiting area, screamed and frothed at the principal for a bit, and finally stalked off down the hall muttering to himself and occasionally punching a locker.  In a few moments, the principal called me in.

The Taurus and the Bull

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Leslie Hallcraft smiled at me as he reached over the top rail of a board fence and scratched the back of an immense Charolais bull.

“This is Baby,” he beamed.  “He’s just as sweet as he can be…yes, he is!”

Les was my landlord.  In the outback of the Ozarks, we had rented a two-bedroom rock house from Les and his wife, complete with a barn and paddock for some pigs, a spring-fed catfish pond, and access to 600 acres of trees to cut wood for the furnace.  Les was a nice man, a converted northerner who drove an International Harvester pickup truck and swatted wasps the way normal people swat mosquitoes, often sustaining two dozen stings a day in hot weather.  He was introducing me to his prize bull – a bull nearly as expensive and large as an aircraft carrier, a bull he loved more than his children, a bull he’d installed in the pasture surrounding the barn and paddock where I kept pigs – a bull that was now going to be between me and where I needed to go several times a day.

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When I was a child, racial tension in my small hometown did not exist.  There was no them, only us.  Everybody was white.  The caste system was in effect, to be sure, from the apex of the Caucasian ladder to the depths of the pale trash heap; but all of us were white.  The only American-Indian I was familiar with was riding the range on a horse named Scout with Clayton Moore.  The Cisco Kid represented the Mexican contingent, and, because the only TV channel we got did not carry Amos n’ Andy, black people remained absent.  If there was an African-American living in town, he would have been blond, from Johannesburg, and named Günter.  Racial diversity did not exist.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  One summer we had a lifeguard at the lake who was Hawaiian.  He was pretty dark.  A lot of us kids marveled at the depth of his tan and the sometimes strange way he talked, but the real marvel was his total relaxed ability in the water.

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Don Young was a ladies man.  He had been a ladies man for as long as I’d known him – since about third grade.  He was not a cad, not a heartbreaker, he did not kiss and tell.  He simply loved women and they loved him back.  Don was a year older than I, and had such alarming power with the opposite gender as to leave the rest of us standing in slack-jawed awe.  In fourth grade, a lifted eyebrow from Don caused the love of my life, Cindy Montero, to desert my side without a rearward glance, and then flee to his in spite of the cherry-centered tootsie roll pop I’d just presented to her.  I realized at that very moment that I would never be able to compete with him, but I couldn’t even be angry much less bitter about it.  I liked him too much.  Everybody did.

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I’m sure many if not even most of you out there lay awake nights wondering why I choose to spend the vast majority of my time sequestered away from civilization in the company only of Digger the outstanding dog, Clancy the incredible dog, Grizz the irritating cat, and Laura the coveted wife.  What could possibly have been so disconcerting, if not horrible, as to send me into voluntary exile?  You win.  I’ll tell you.

There was a time in my life when I wanted to change the world.  Really.  I didn’t want to carry placards, march in circles, and shout slogans – that’s not my style.  I didn’t aspire to go to India and work among the poor – the food’s too spicy.  The Peace Corps seemed to be a bit extreme – no television.  So, I became a cop.  My motives were pure.  They really were.  I wanted to crush bad guys to their knees and promote racial harmony in a world of difference.  After a few years of bruises and stitches, shootings and knifings, automatic weapons fire – at me, being spat upon and called names, mindless judges, soulless lawyers, and incredibly doltish juries, my lofty ideals were pretty much reduced to “Us against Them” – “Them” being the civilians of the world.  When I realized what I was becoming, I ran away and found myself in the grasp of almost Arkansas, Missouri, one of the true remaining bastions of “duh” on the planet.

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Before this epic begins, I must warn you that this is a long bit – if you actually intend to pay attention, perhaps a cup of coffee is in order, or a sandwich…a big one.

“C’mon,” she said, “go with me.  I’m gonna look at their new colt.  Let’s take your bike.”

She was Jane Lehr, a veterinarian friend who lived on the outskirts of Barrington Hills, Illinois.  Laura and I were visiting for a few days.  My wife was napping, so Janie and I loaded up on my motorcycle and rode the 10 miles to the Sanford residence so she could check on Sanford’s latest acquisition, a yearling saddlebred.  As we turned off the road onto the gravel lane that wound its way 200 yards to the 7,000 square foot house, Jane asked me to stop.

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Don Brook wore his time in the Marine Corps like a gold medallion around his neck.  Ten years after he left the armed services, Paris Island’s scent was still fresh in his nostrils.  While Brook had never actually seen combat and had been in “The Corps” only a few months, discharged because of the sudden death of his father and health of his invalid mother, he remained a jar-headed life-taker, heart-breaker, and widow-maker.  Hoo-rah.  He was also a good guy.

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I remember my 10^th birthday – and not only because birthdays that end in zero are milestones, but because it was one of the few times I actually went anywhere with my mother.  On the evening before that auspicious day, she and her husband loaded me, Merv Fritz, and Wes Roy in their car and took us to a Dairy Queen in the city for banana splits.  After the Dairy Queen, we went bowling.  After bowling, we went to the Steak n’ Shake for goodness sake!  A little perspective here…these were the “good old days” – over 50 years ago – before fast food in the time when families still ate together, at home, while actually sitting at a table.  Then, after Steak n’ Shake, came the really big deal of the evening.  We went roller skating!  Such an event was huge!  Wow!  More perspective:  back when Andy, Barney, and Aunt Bee were living in Mayberry, how many times did Opie get to go to Mount Pilot for his birthday?  Opie and I had a lot in common.  We’d never heard of soccer moms, play dates, or that hideous term “Stranger Danger”.  We spent summer evenings on the porch or catchin’ lightnin’ bugs or at the free movies in the park.  We hung out with friends until after dark, and something like a cell phone could only have been used by Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, or Captain Video and his Video Rangers.

Attitude In Red

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His name was “El Rojo”.  He was a rooster.  I got him from Jeremiah Mavis when I lived in “Almost Arkansas”, Missouri.  Jeremiah Mavis was an Arkansas Ridge Runner.  Big, raw-boned, and redheaded, he was of hearty Ozark stock.  His biggest claim to fame were his wife’s newly-installed breasts and a four-pound, 12-ounce crappie on his trailer wall.

Jerry assumed all Northerners to be ignorant, but for some reason took a shine to me and would do almost anything – as long as it didn’t involve work – to assist in my Southern education.  Jerry operated on the fringes of the law.  He made moonshine back in the hills somewhere, spotlighted deer on a regular basis, and kept fighting chickens.  Cockfighting qualified as major entertainment in that area in those days, and Jerry had several prime contenders.  His stable of birds rivaled that of “Chicken George”, and when Sheriff Cletus F. Joe Dawkins shut Jerry’s operation down, he was left with more roosters than a man needed.

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He was about 6 and a half feet tall, weighed maybe 280 pounds, and had straight, blue-black hair to below his waist.  He looked down at me through hard, dark-brown eyes from a walnut face and said, “You’re white.  Where’d you get that necklace?”  He was referring to a Native American, deer-bone hairpipe, four-strand choker I was wearing.  I looked up at him and told the truth.

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When I was a young man, I attended official cop school.  Week after week, after week, after week, a select number of young valiants such as I were sequestered from the world, the victims of excessive indoctrination and instruction into the art and function of being police officers.  An amazing amount of subjects were covered, from how to deliver a baby (don’t – run away) to the methods for defending oneself against a knife attack (don’t – run away) to public relations (run away…rapidly) to drug abuse (who and where, not how and when) to search and seizure, Miranda, racial or ethnic profiling, crime scene investigation, interviewing and questioning, firearms, radio procedure, traffic stops, domestic violence, polygraph examination, subject restraint and control, high speed driving technique, criminal psychology, choosing the correct doughnut – on and on and on.  The amount of subject matter was amazing.