How I Came to Be in Prison and What Happened the Day Before I Was Arrested
By
Dewey Lynne Bugler
Howdy, y’all! Dewey Lynne Bugler here. I’ve been off on a summer vacation, and I’m just now getting my accounts in order so that I can get back to telling you my tales of woe and sorrow and learning. I still hope that you can get something from these stories, and I still swear that I will try my best to not be too preachy, but it’s hard not to sermonize when I have lived with and seen so much of the good and bad, right and wrong, and evil and well-intentioned evil that this world has to offer. Yeah, I only mentioned evil because I have had virtually no experience with the righteous, so you won’t hear nothing on that subject.
Anyway, I reckon that I am gonna go ahead and tell you about how it was that I ended up in prison even though none of my friends, acquaintances, and readers seemed to be interested in knowing about it when I asked what they wanted to hear in my recounting a couple of months ago. As you will recall, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five people wanted to hear about my relationship with Aunt Charlotte, so that’s what you got. I haven’t heard back from even five of you, so I have to wonder if you really wanted to hear about Aunt Charlotte. I have my doubts, or maybe what you thought you wanted to read about wasn’t what happened. I am a writer of truth not romances.
Speaking of Aunt Charlotte, and I was, I have some bad news for those of you who grew to love Aunt Charlotte as a character in my stories or as a real live person, which she is after all—or was. About three days after I published her story for you and a couple days after I read what I had written about her to her and left the manuscript at her trailer for her to read, she passed away. I wish that I could change or lie about how she died because, once again, she will be judged harshly for nature of her death. There is no reason that she should be judged about anything at all, but you know how people are, and, since you can read it in the papers, me saying different is not gonna change anything. The official report from the county coroner is going to say that she died of an accidental overdose of Fentanyl.
Now, I don’t know exactly what it is that I think I am defending Aunt Charlotte from, and I have my very own self told you that she stayed high pretty much all the time, but I simply cannot allow it in my mind that she was a druggie, you know, a helpless, hopeless addict. Yeah, she stayed out at her old trailer all the time by herself, was always alone, and hardly ever left her property. Yeah, she was losing or had lost her mind, memories, and most every type of personal relationship and human communication that kept her tied to the human race. Sure, she no longer dressed quite right nor normal for what most people think a woman should, and she did seem like a spirit walking through a world that she did not want to live in most of the time. She smoked a joint every single time that I brought groceries and cold beer out to her, but I refuse to believe that she was dependent on or using such a cheap, tawdry, hardcore drug as Fentanyl. Let’s face it. You don’t get Fentanyl from good people who care if you live or die. I don’t know why I don’t want to believe the condition that Aunt Charlotte was in. All the evidence was there around me the whole time, but I don’t--I can’t—I won’t believe it. I can’t reduce her to or accept that she lived such a hopeless, hellish existence. Whatcha gonna do?
Anyhow, I was one of the first at her trailer the day she was pronounced dead. One of Ronnie Clark’s granddaughters had found her. This young lady, whose name is not familiar to me and so I can’t recall it, had been getting concerned as she passed by Aunt Charlotte’s trailer of an evening on the Signal Hill road because she saw the same lights glowing in the windows every night. It wasn’t customary for Aunt Charlotte to leave her kitchen or bathroom lights on after she had gone to bed, but the Clark girl had seen those exact same lights on as she came from her second shift job at the hospital for two nights in a row. The third day, the girl headed to work a few minutes early, and when she saw that the lights were on even in the middle of the afternoon, she stopped and knocked on the door. The warped front door was bolted from the inside and could not be opened, but the back sliding door was unlocked, so she went in after hollering out enough that any waken soul coulda heard her. As soon as she stepped into the dining area through the sliding glass door and looked toward the living room, she saw Aunt Charlotte on the couch, lying on her side in a fetal position and facing the back of the couch. She was dressed only in a t-shirt and panties and seemed very much as if she might have been asleep. The girl swore she saw Aunt Charlotte take a breath as she stepped toward her calling out, but it was probably just gasses moving the body, because even by the time I got there, it was clear with the way the blood had pooled in her face, hip, and shoulder that she had been dead for hours, maybe days. I don’t know much about these blood pooling things and death gasses, but Aunt Charlotte had been gone a while.
The Clark girl had called me first because the manuscript of Aunt Charlotte’s Crib was lying on the dining table with an orange sticky note stuck in the middle of it that said, “Call Dewey Lynne,” and then it had my cellphone number, so the girl called me, and explained everything that had brought her to that moment. I informed her to hang up and call 911, and I said I would head that way and be there shortly. When she called, I was about to get in the truck and go check on the cattle down by the river anyway, so instead I headed up the mountain and arrived at Aunt Charlotte’s trailer probably thirty seconds before the coroner arrived with an ambulance blaring right behind him, so I didn’t have time to sweep any evidence that might have harmed Aunt Charlotte’s reputation. Good news is I didn’t have to. You know, not a single speck of any kind of drug, including marijuana, was found in her trailer, not a speck. How do ya figure that? A suspicious feller might want to investigate this odd occurrence further, but, even after thinking about it for a couple months, I can’t see who possibly had anything to gain from Aunt Charlotte being dead. It’s a special kind of evil that kills without gaining something from it, and I cannot fathom Aunt Charlotte being involved in any wickedness like that. No, I think I will accept that she overdosed though I’m not so sure how accidental it was on her part.
Anyhow, Aunt Charlotte’s family took care of the visitation, service, and burial arrangements, and they held her funeral at the Apostolic Pentecostal church down on the east of town, whatever it’s called now, and I surely wish they hadn’t. It was the worst damned mess I have ever seen in my life. You know those Pentecostals are the ones who get the Holy Spirit and start speaking in tongues and other such nonsense whenever they get worked up about something? Well, this here supposed preacher started the service by reading the obituary from the folded paper hand-out that was given to every person at the door, and he followed that up by reading a verse from the Bible about Christians not being a part of the world. From that point on as long as I stayed in the church, he never even said another word about Aunt Charlotte. After he read the Bible verse, he lit into the handful of folks sitting in the front rows, pointing at them with fat, red fingers and shouting admonishment for their worldly ways. He just kept getting louder and louder with his condemnation, and he was ripping the earmarked pages of the Bible he flapped around in his left hand as he flipped through them with a furious intensity. Sweat was dripping from his nose and ears, his sparse white hair was shellacked against the sides of his fat, pink head, and he had big, circular wet stains in his armpits. Some woman sitting in one of those front rows hears enough of the preacher’s yelling and thinks she’s got to join in with the cacophony, and she starts shouting, “Lordy, Jesus, Lordy, Jesus,” and she goes up to a piano on the raised stage behind the pulpit and starts banging on the keys and wailing out in a manner that sounds like someone strung up a cat on a barn rafter by its tail. Then, a scrawny boy in black pants and white shirt two sizes too big for him who had been sitting somewhere near to the wailing woman kicks off his shiny buckled shoes and runs barefoot up to a drum set on the stage opposite the piano and begins banging on the drums and cymbals with absolutely no indication that he knows how to hold a drumstick much less a rhythm. It was a hellish din, and I was fairly sure that I might have descended into Hell itself without even knowing it. I couldn’t stand much more of it. I was two seconds away from drawing my pistols out of their shoulder holsters, firing them into the ceiling, and asking for those folks to stop that ridiculous caterwauling and show some respect for the dead when somebody turned the song “Amazing Grace” on loudly over the intercom and the red-faced mop of a preacher, the wailing piano torturer, and the beatless drum banger got quiet and slipped away somewhere out of my sight. About halfway through the song, I stood up and walked out the front door. I couldn’t stand any more of that. I think about ten other people followed shortly behind me. Whatcha gonna do?
I drove out to the Fredonia cemetery in Richwoods where they were gonna bury Aunt Charlotte. A couple of county workers were out there with a backhoe finishing up digging the grave when I pulled up. I talked to them for a few minutes and gave each of them of them a twenty and told them I didn’t want Aunt Charlotte’s grave dirt sinking in and making a mudhole when they got her covered. They both seemed to understand what I meant. I walked around the cemetery until the funeral procession arrived, a looking at how many of the people lying there memorialized were people that I knew, and I noted how so many of the birth years on the stones were getting closer and closer to mine.
Anyhow, nothing of note occurred during the graveside ceremony, but as much as I don’t care to talk about Uncle Boog, I think that y’all might want to know that, although I had not seen him, his truck, his wife, or his kids at the visitation or church service, he was at the graveside service. I couldn’t see who because the truck’s windows were tinted so darkly, but somebody drove him out to the Fredonia cemetery in his new Ford crew cab pickup, parked by the fence, and Uncle Boog opened the door of the truck and turned sideways in the seat toward the cemetery gate with his feet dangling outside the cab, but he never got out. I think I told you already that he weighs 350-400 pounds. Maybe, he can’t walk no more. I don’t know. I do know that he had to of seen me a standing and walking around out in the cemetery, but our eyes never met, so there was no acknowledgement one man to another. Good thing too because at that particular moment if I had had a reason to walk over by him quite likely I woulda cursed him for a coward. Aunt Charlotte ended up being exactly what Uncle Boog’s actions had made of her, and he had made a mess, and she wasn’t the only one who had been led astray by his words and actions. Even after he left her in such a bind, he couldn’t be bothered to help her when she needed his help the most. Hell, he’s never helped anybody—not even himself I don’t think. And, there I go again writing about something I don’t care to rehash.
I plan on getting Aunt Charlotte a stone since I don’t believe anyone in her family can afford it even if they wanted to get one. If you would like to chip in, call Flo. Don’t call me. I am not likely to remember that I ever talked to you. That’s the way it getting these days.
Anyway, so I’m a fixing to tell you the story about why it is that I went to prison, but mostly about the things that happened in the hours before I was arrested that should have sent to me to prison for life. I hope the statute of limitations is up. I reckon I am gonna go back to the form that I was using when I wrote to you about Uncle Boog and the Dogfight. Let’s consider this here the introduction. In the next few days, I will proceed with Chapter 1, and I damned well plan to stick to the Ardell reading length. See you back here in a day or two.
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