If you’ve ever been out on a summer night in deep woods country near a body of water and far, far away from houses, concrete, and paved parking lots as coolness drops from the stark blackness of the clear sky and the air gets moist, cooling into a misty fog and covering you like a cool damp washcloth, and the glow of the moon makes the whole world a glittery, silvery sort of color, like fairy dust has been sprinkled over all you see, and the world smells different with musky odors of wet grass, dirt, and honeysuckle, sexual, close, intimate, but your alone and you know it, and it feels just fine to be all alone,--If you’ve ever had that feeling then you know how I felt sitting in the cab of Uncle Boog’s truck smoking that name brand cigarette and feeling the nicotine buzz flow over me as I turned my face to soak in the beams of the bright, fully risen, and broad-faced full moon. All the cares of the world were suddenly gone, and I was living a different dream, and it was a good dream if I could have kept it going, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Something always seems to want to wake a dreamer from a good dream, and for me it was a hankering for a cold beer. You know, to complete the illusion of feeling good. I knew the ice chest in the bed of the truck was full of cold beer, and I was confident about how good one of those might taste, so I opened the truck door on its squealing hinges, jumped down out of the seat, walked around back of the truck, raised and propped up the back glass of the camper shell, and pulled down the tailgate with a jerk of its rusty latch. As I reached up to grab the handle on the big plastic cooler, a lady’s voice called out a question to me in a heavy Mexican accent that was about as sexy as two words could ever be that said somebody else’s name instead of mine.
“Dyoo Boog?”
Yes, she pronounced “you” like “Jew” and “Boog” like “book” with a “g,” but the tone of her question and the way she purred caused a tickle in my loins. Now, I will admit that, when I was seventeen, it didn’t take much to get a rise out of me or my parts, but I was a bit surprised to find my curiosity so aroused. I searched my mind and memories for a proper response to her query in her language. Sadly, my only experience with the Spanish language was through watching cartoons or children’s educational shows on AETN, and I couldn’t find more than one word that was appropriate, and even that one, I wasn’t too sure about.
“No…Boog…he…uh…tio.”
“Dyoo heez uncle?”
“No.”
“I speak Engleesh good.”
“Good. I mean, that’s nice. We weren’t gonna have much of a conversation with the Spanish I know. So, you know my Uncle Boog?”
“I know of heem not know heem.”
“What you know of him good or bad? He…um…shows different sides to different people.”
“Dyoo really want to know what I hear about Boog?”
“No, I don’t suppose so. You wanna a beer, a wine cooler? There’s this new drink called Zima. I’ve not had one. Some of the girls I hang around with like it a lot.”
“Dyoo care what girls like, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Dyou geeve them what they like, eh? What they want?”
The weird, if erotic, nature of this question caused me to turn from my search for a bottle of Zima in the ice chest so that I might get a better look at this female who seemed to be so interested in what I have to offer. She was not a rare type of beauty, but she was a beauty, no doubt. If she had been a sitting on the trunk of the car that she leaned against, she would have looked very similar to the curvy chrome female figure on the mud flaps of big trucks. Her thick black hair, sparkling with some hair product in the bright moonlight, was teased up high on top of her head, and it cascaded down into a bouncy wave on her bare brown shoulders, framing a face that I could not see well in the shadow created by the big hair. She wore a shoulder-less red blouse with frill that ran across the top of her very large, barely contained, breasts and around each of her slim arms. There was a gap between the bottom of her frilly blouse and the top of her white capri pants, exposing a slight pudge of muffin-top, and in the center of her soft, brown stomach, I could see a deep belly button with a gold ring glistening in its warm darkness. She had a narrow waist, wide hips, and plump thighs. Her legs narrowed to thick calves that were exposed beneath a white bow tied at the bottom of each pant leg and bare down to her ankles. Her feet seemed too small to balance the rest of her body, and they were tucked into red, open-toed wedge sandals with high, cork heels. When she sensed that I had turned to look at her, she affected shyness and twisted as if she might hide her face behind her bare, brown shoulder. All this served to do was to accentuate her abundant curves in a flirtatious manner as she leaned into the trunk of an older model Cadillac with the side of her hip. Back then, I didn’t know it. I didn’t have a clue because I was too stupid, but she was seducing me. She was throwing her charm on a rabbit who had no understanding of that kind of magic, and it was a working. I could already envision her hands holding my ears. Her voice pulled me away from my fantasy.
“Eez Uncle Boog okay wich you geev away heez beer?”
“Ah, he doesn’t care at all. A lot of times, he doesn’t even drink himself. He just carries it with him so that others can have it if they want it.”
She pushed herself away from the Caddy’s trunk and took a few awkward steps toward me. It was quite apparent her heels were not appropriate footwear for the loose and loamy soil of the Pour-Off parking area, and, rather than take the chance that she might stumble and fall into the dirt and grass, I offered her a hand as she wobbled toward me like she was on a tightrope. She took my hand in hers without pause and allowed me to lead her slowly over to the back of Uncle Boog’s truck. Our hands were up shoulder high as if we were about to start a square dance or a waltz as we walked, but I quickly let her hand drop when she placed the other on the tailgate. However, when she gained her balance on the truck, she turned with her back to it, raised her arms out as if she might hug me, and asked me to lift her onto the tailgate. This was a bit of conundrum. The mechanics of it all just didn’t seem like that was gonna work. I don’t want to embarrass myself by attempting to judge her weight or by telling you something that might be far wrong, but that woman had curves all over and was a far sight from thin, and, with the lift kit on Uncle Boog’s truck, it was probably two feet from where her round bottom was up to the edge of the tailgate. I had some serious doubt whether I could lift that woman high enough to get her ass where it could slide onto tailgate. Whatcha gonna do?
Well, I couldn’t exactly say no to her at this point, so I got in close, squatted down into a lifting position, and put my hands on the sides of her hip. She placed her hands on my shoulders, leaned in toward me, and then jumped pretty good for woman with such a soft, curvy body. Somehow, with our combined efforts of lifting, jumping, and pushing, we did manage to get one of her substantial butt cheeks onto the edge of the tailgate, and, from there, it was kind of like pushing a hundred pound sack of shelled corn into the back of the truck except in the process of easing her back, my face wound up buried in her abundant cleavage, and it wasn’t just the embarrassment of the sexually comprising situation that warmed my ears. I felt the hot but soft pressure of breast flesh on each cheek, and she was also squeezing her knees into my sides up under my arms. I mean, it was pretty close to being like we were in the throes, if you take my meaning. Somehow, I managed to gather my wits, and I jumped back away from her. It’s a good thing we were out there in the moon and star light because I cannot even imagine how red my face was. It didn’t seem to faze her a bit. All she did was smile and point her feet at me.
“Be a sweetie and take these off please.”
I stepped forward and started taking off her shoes. What else was I gonna do? Tell her no? I undid the gold buckles on the side of one sandal as she squirmed beneath the light touch of my fingers on her bare foot. She giggled like I was tickling her. When I removed the sandal from her left foot, she rubbed her newly bared toes up and down on my right bicep as I undid the buckle on the other shoe. I knew she was teasing me, and I had no idea why, but, man, I was seventeen, and this was like a sexy movie, and I was the lucky star! This woman was playing me, and I knew, but I didn’t care. She could play me like a fiddle for as long as she wanted. If I didn’t get to finish the number with her, well, I could always finish it somewhere else with someone else with her tune in my mind. Even, now, thinking back on it some thirty years or so, I can feel the tingle her toes made on my arm. Isn’t that something?
Anyhow, it took me three or four minutes to get both shoes off, and when I did, I handed them to her like they were made of gold. She set them on her right side and patted the tailgate on her left side with her hand.
“Seet by me, Boog’s nephew.”
Now, I was pretty deeply embedded in this woman’s clutches, but I had not completely lost my mind. I could see the prospect of the two of us ending up in the backseat of a car, fogging up the windows and bouncing the springs, but I also had the nagging feeling that she was up to more than just teasing. Something in the blackness of her eyes seemed more cold than hot. I don’t know how else to explain it. I could feel passion, but it wasn’t really for me or about me, just with me, like she was hoping that someone else was watching. When the thought we might have a curious observer crossed my mind, it cooled my desire a lot. I reckoned that I needed more information about what was going on here, so I stepped over like I was aiming to jump up beside her, but I quickly reached out and grabbed the nearest handle of the ice chest, pulled the cooler forward into the spot where she wanted me to sit, and set myself up on the tailgate on the other side of it from her. She smiled at me over the cooler between us, reached across it, and squeezed my shoulder in her warm hand.
“Dyoo play shy boy now, eh?”
“No, I’ve got a girlfriend. She…uh…well…”
I couldn’t think of anything further to say because I was lying.
“She pretty?”
“I guess.”
“Dyoo don know if she’s pretty?”
“Yeah, I reckon she’s pretty enough.”
“She like me?”
She waved her hands before her body from top to bottom like a model presenting a refrigerator on a game show.
“No, not even close.”
She seemed to take this as a compliment of her unique beauty, and her face beamed with vanity. Honestly, I had no idea what I meant by my comment, but I did not want to continue conversing in a manner that gave her openings to present her body to me, so I went back to the basics of love.
“I don’t believe that I know your name.”
She daintily extended a hand to me across the ice chest. I guess I was supposed to kiss it or something like that, but I shook it between my pointer finger and thumb as she offered her name.
“Felina.”
“Really, like in the song El Paso?”
“I don know.”
“It’s a country-western song from the ‘70’s. It’s about…”
I paused here, remembering that the Felina in the song had eyes that were “wicked and evil while casting a spell.” I decided a general plot description would be better than a thorough explanation, so I told her.
“It’s about a guy who falls in love with a Mexican dancer, and then he kills another guy who dances with her out of jealousy, and he runs off. But, he can’t stay away from her, and when he comes back to town to see her, the guy he killed’s buddies shoot him, and he dies in Felina’s arms.”
“That sounds horreeble.”
“Yeah, I always thought it was romantic, but my explanation makes it seem like the guy’s stupid and Felina’s fickle, so maybe it works better to hear the song.”
“So, dyoo like to be romanteek?”
And, there we were, back to talking about the intimate issues I wished to avoid when suddenly we both noticed at the same time that the noise of the crowd, the constant hum of ring-side shouts, laughter, and loud conversation, interspersed with screams of joy, loss, and desperation, so out of place in the still of the deep country night, had ceased. The dogfights had ended. Either The Tiger or El Diablo was defeated and dead or badly wounded, and the gamblers had either won or lost all the money that had been wagered. Single and paired up human-shaped shadows meandered out of the bright electric light of the brooder and into the much dimmer moon light and dispersed over the sandy berm or toward the cars in the Pour Off parking area. One of those shades strolled toward us in a wavy line as though the person might be drunk and about to fall face-first into the dirt. As the man-shaped shadow neared, I saw that it was Uncle Boog. Turned out, he was not drunk at all. He was just not looking where he was walking because his head was bent down, and he was concentrating on what was in his hands as if he were a palm reader trying to read his own life lines. I didn’t want to interrupt his deliberation, so I kept quiet until he nearly bumped into the back of the truck, and then I said “hey” so as to alert him to the presence of the truck without surprising him. When he looked up at me and grinned, the shadow of his head moved off his hands, and I could see in the moonlight that he was counting a rather substantial stack of money. I could not see the denominations on the bills, but the wad was an inch and a half thick. I suddenly realized that I had no idea whether this type of cash inflow was regular for a man like Uncle Boog, but since he always seemed to be looking for money and ways to make money without much success on either count, and now he had a handful of it, I fully expected him call out for drinks and celebration all around, and I really did think he was about to do when he noticed the figure sitting on the other side of the cooler from me, and his happiness seemed to slam shut like a gate in his face. He put his left hand on my leg just above the knee, squeezed hard, nodded his head toward the front of the truck, and suggested in no uncertain terms that I should follow.
“Up here, now!”
I slid off the gate, excused myself from the busty Mexican lady, and trailed behind him a short ways up the hill into the woods. Suddenly, he turned and grabbed me by the shoulders with both hands. His face was right above mine, and I could see in his eyes that I had crossed line that was not meant to be crossed. I don’t know if it was because we were on a slope, but he suddenly seemed a lot taller and bigger than I was when he questioned me in the most adult-sounding voice I’d ever heard come from his mouth.
“Do you know who that is?”
I didn’t know, and he was angry, daddy-whispering, so I shrugged my shoulders for an answer, feeling like maybe words weren’t a good idea at this time.
“That’s Victor Sanchez’s’ old lady?”
Who? The name was meaningless to me, but “old lady,” I knew what that meant.
“Who?”
“The Mexican who looks like Danny Trejo.”
I think I told you about the Mexican man who looked like a young Danny Trejo earlier in the story. I said that he looked like a young Danny Trejo, but Uncle Boog didn’t say “young Danny Trejo” because even Danny Trejo was young when this story took place. I’m going to guess that this tale that I’m a telling was right around the time that Trejo was in From Dusk til Dawn, but I knew him, the actor, from shows like Deathwish, Bulletproof, and Marked for Death. You know, movies that they might have shown as the second feature at the Stone County Drive-in back when they had the double feature late night picture show. It’s all a blur to me really, the movies that Danny Trejo was in, but you can look them up on the Internet. I don’t mean to be lying to you if the movies don't align with the time in the story. I’m just not sure. What is for sure is that when Uncle Boog said “Danny Trejo” I knew immediately who he was talking about. Still, I was ignorant enough not to know how Victor Sanchez concerned me.
“So, I haven’t been messing around with anybody.”
“Did you touch her feet?”
Now, what kind of gawddamned question was that? I thought and then, how the hell did he know about that? I mean she asked me to take off her shoes, right? Why would I have any reason to say no? What could possibly be wrong with taking off a lady’s shoes for her, especially when she asked me real nice. It’s not like I offered to do it for her. I didn’t make a proposal. She asked me to do it like she was asking me for a glass of water. There was no harm intended. I argued all these things in my head, but I said none of them out to Uncle Boog.
You see, this story about Uncle Boog and the dogfight had to take place before I had ever seen the movie Pulp Fiction because I watched that movie about a thousand times. In that movie, Vincent Vega explains to Jules and the rest of the world including me that a foot massage is in the “same ballpark as sex.” I watched that movie so many times I would have remembered wise admonishment. I would have known that touching another man’s woman’s feet is strictly off-limits, practically taboo, but I swear on Bob’s honor that I had no idea at the time. As far as I am concerned, I was innocent then as far as knowing anything about foot fetishes and not touching a woman’s feet when she has a jealous man. I did not know. Trust me. I would never have done such a thing back then if I had known. Now, well, who knows what I might do if a pretty woman stuck her foot in my face no matter who she belongs to?
I hadn’t answered Uncle Boog’s question yet, so I did.
“She asked me to take her shoes off. She couldn’t hardly walk in the sand.”
“Oh, shit.”
Just so you know, when Uncle Boog says “oh, shit,” the sky probably is falling because he has a lot of moments that are “oh, shit” for me that he doesn’t even give a “crap” about. The situation was desperate, and I knew it without a clue why.
“See if you can’t get her off my truck, and we’ll get out of here before he comes around. Hurry!”
He went around the driver’s side of the truck. I walked back the way that I had come. Felina was still sitting on the tailgate a swinging her bare feet back and forth under the tailgate when I came around the corner. She smiled at me the way a cat smiles at a mouse after she done ate his best friend and pal.
“Dyoo geet Boog straightend out?”
“Yes, ma’am, but Uncle Boog and I need to go. We’ve got things need tendin’ to.”
I reached my hands out to help her down, realized that I did not need to touch that woman again, and pulled my offering back, sheepishly placing my hands into the front pockets of my cargo shorts and staring off into the dark woods. She sat there with her hands out in front of her waiting for me to help her down. Hell, there was no getting away from it now. I quickly stepped forward, grabbed both her hands in mine, and pulled her hard enough that she slid off the tailgate and landed lightly in the sand like a ballet dancer. She did have some balance and athleticism in her when she needed it. I briefly thought about how that combination might have played out in the sack, but I shook the image from my mind. She held my right hand tightly in her left hand as she tiptoed gingerly through the parking area to about halfway between Uncle Boog’s truck and the Caddy she had been leaning on when I first saw her. She stubbornly refused to let go of my right hand, and she was sort of dragging me along behind her when she stopped of a sudden.
“Be a sweetie and grab my shoes please.”
Yeah, right. Of course, she had left her shoes on the truck. They were proof that I had touched her feet. I couldn’t let anybody see her shoes on the back of the truck. That would be a terrible mistake. Those shoes had to go. They needed to be on her feet, but they certainly could not be in Uncle Boog’s truck. I shook my hand out of hers, trotted the five yards or so back to the tailgate, and grabbed the sandals roughly like they were no longer made of precious materials. Well, when I turned back around with her white, cork-heeled open-toed sandals in my hands, guess who was standing there. Yep, Victor Sanchez, that’s who.
Now, I have tried to replay what happened next on that night over and over in my head since it happened, but, for the life of me, I cannot tell you what was said or who said it. I figure, because of the shock and distress of Uncle Boog’s fight with Victor Sanchez, that my brain has blocked those few moments so that I will never know how it came to be that I was in a fight for my survival just like that mutt had been earlier in the evening. The only person who might know what was said and who said it is Uncle Boog, but if he did know and if he does remember, he has never shared it with me. All that I know is that I felt doomed. I couldn’t run, which was my only chance of not getting whipped or killed, because Sanchez's Mexican friends had me surrounded as good as any fence or boarded up arena. I was a football and baseball player, and I could scrap, AND I was about the same height as Sanchez though probably forty pounds lighter, but he was mature, broad in the shoulders and chest, light on his feet and fast with his hands. He also had an aura of great confidence around him from having been in this situation many times—and enjoying it every time. He was a fighter for sure, a killer maybe, but definitely someone who was turned on by the idea that his gal’s desire was fueled to a frenzy while watching him beat on another man.
To my credit, and I still feel pride in my bravery no matter how foolish my pluckiness was, I crouched down and prepared for his onslaught with the idea that I was gonna give him a fight he would not soon forget. I was gonna hurt him even I couldn’t take him down. We had barely made a half circle in amateurish, street fighting boxing stances when he swung a roundhouse right that I easily ducked under and took as my opening for a chance at victory. I stepped toward him and slammed my fist into his belly, thinking that I might have a chance of winning if he was gonna be stupid enough to allow me clean body shots. He was not that stupid. Experienced a fighter as he was, he had expected that I would put all my weight into the opportunity he had given me, and, though my punch shoved some breath out of his mouth with an “oomph,” I lost my balance, and he brought his right elbow down onto my neck and shoulder knocking me down to my knees. In the same swooping motion, he swung his left leg around karate-style to kick me in the back of the head. I remember thinking in that split second how I was gonna die when his cowboy boot struck my head with the velocity of a full roundhouse kick, but halfway through the turn of his body that would have connected his boot to my brain, a man-sized projectile struck Sanchez hard in the chest and knocked him flying down into the sand a flipping and a spinning. Uncle Boog had laid a form tackle on Sanchez at full speed, and they both rolled with the velocity of the attack only to rise back up to their knees like a couple of professional wrestles, staring at one another like two curs looking over a juicy leg bone.
Well, I hate to stop right here, but I reckon I’ll have to tell you what happened next some other time. We’ve come to the Ardell word count. He may be the only friend of mine reading this story. And, if he isn’t my friend, he may the only person reading this story, and I think it’s best to keep my one-person audience happy. Whatcha gonna do?
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