Picking up where I left yesterday morning...
Ozzie Plimpton and Gopher Lewis had a lot to do with what happened to Uncle Boog and me on that summer night so long ago, but I must confess that I know very little about the history of either one of these characters as I never circulated in the same crowd with those types of folks. I don’t even know, when they call Mr. Lewis “Gopher,” whether they mean the animal or whether they mean “Gofer.” You know, like he was a gofer for Ozzie Plimpton, doing his bidding and performing tasks for him. He was definitely one of Ozzie’s minions like Jimbo Tuttle, and now that I think about it, I’m not sure that I ever saw Gopher Lewis without Ozzie Plimpton watching him or pointing out things to him. That is a weird thing to think after all these years of reliving this particular afternoon and night.
I suspect that they called the man Gopher because of his looks. He was a short man, an inch or so either side of five feet, with legs that were bowed like they were formed while he was a sitting on a horse. His arms were covered in a coat of black wiry hair so thick that you couldn’t even see the color of the skin. He had a nose that was wide and long like a short snout rather than a big nose, and his small, black eyes set too close to it on either side for him to see much past it. He had a small, cramped mouth with over-sized teeth, especially the front two that looked, well, just like a gopher’s buckteeth. They seemed to always be bothering him because he habitually closed his lips down over them and pursed and wiggled his lips around, which greatly exaggerated the animal look that I credit him with. He had bushy eyebrows that joined together above his snout and close-set eyes, and he kept his wiry black head hair buzzed short underneath a straw cowboy hat that he curled up tightly on both sides revealing his clownishly big ears. I suppose that the man was so gawd-awful ugly that some might have considered him cute. I don’t know about that.
But, I do have some positive things to say about this man that I learned to have respect for from living with Daddy. No matter who Gopher Lewis worked for or what kind of business he was actually up to, I never saw this man when he wasn’t working. Whether it was a mending Ozzie’s fence, changing a tire on Ozzie’s truck, stacking firewood on Ozzie’s porch, or, like now, up a power pole tying together electric wires while Ozzie supervised, this man was always engaged in some sort of physical labor. Kind of like Daddy in two ways, always working and always stuck in the same spot on the economic totem pole. Neither one was ever gonna get to the top. They were just stuck down near the bottom making faces while nothing ever changed. I haven’t caught up with any information about Gopher since I came back from the pen, but I doubt he’s improved his situation, and Daddy? Well, you all know that he probably worked himself to death while I was serving my sentence. Whatcha gonna do?
From what I’ve gathered over the years, Ozzie Plimpton was ahead in life when his mama gave birth to him. He was the only male heir in a family that had built an empire on bootleg moonshine back before the Great Depression and World War II. His daddy and his uncle, whose names I never have heard, used all the cash money they got selling untaxed homemade liquor buying up the good, farmland on Turkey Creek and over the other side of Rushing Mountain on the middle fork of the Red River. Then, they took to raising beef cattle and cutting timber, and so on. Of course, it makes sense that he would get his Daddy’s half of the Plimpton Empire, but rumor has it that Ozzie got his uncle’s half granted to him by serving a five-year manslaughter stint in the state pen that should have been his uncle’s. You know how those old stories go. It might or might not have been factual, but it’s a good story anyway.
Sure enough true is that he married into the only other moonshining family in Stone County when he married Hester Morris. They say that the marriage was merely a truce or a peace treaty between the two families, and I reckon I never heard about any feuding between the families in my lifetime even though they both live in the same valley. Anyhow, Hester didn’t bring any money or land into the marriage with her, and her people didn’t fare too well after her daddy was killed in World War II or the Korean War. The whole Morris bootlegging venture kind of fizzled, and all the boys, gray-haired old timers to me, became dirt farmers and cattle ranchers, and the girls were all married off to men who might have improved the family’s situation but never did. Nowadays, folks say Hester, a frail specter of a woman, haunts the second floor of the Plimpton house, a huge plantation style home with porches all around it, and Ozzie never has anything to do with her. They say that Ozzie keeps a bed in a spare room next to the kitchen and only ever goes into the house to eat his meals alone and to sleep. There is an old black woman who has been with the family since she was a little girl who cooks, cleans, and takes care of the house. I’ve seen her in the grocery store, and I think she may be deaf or dumb because she never speaks to anyone. Anyway, I’ve also heard that Ozzie Plimpton has money in stocks and could be a billionaire, maybe richer than Warren Buffet. As you can tell, I’m only retelling things I’ve heard that might not be a bit true. It doesn’t matter one lick either. Let me tell you what does matter.
Ozzie Plimpton stood there at the bottom of the pole telling Gopher what to do and then watching him do it without offering a hand. I had seen this man who was probably rich beyond my wildest dreams about a dozen times, and it always surprised me that a man who had the money to buy or be anything he wanted would choose to look the way he did. He was about an average height, but he was big, and he was fat. He was broad side-to-side, but he was just as broad front-to-back. His head sat on his shoulders like a snowman’s head does, and his round face looked swollen and red like he’d eaten something his was allergic to. He had a thin nose that barely extended past the folds of his fat cheeks, and his lipless mouth was pulled down into a perpetual frown by the weight of his heavy jowls. These jowls seemed to rest on the top of his chest, and they had completely swallowed up his neck, which made his beady, snake-like eyes, black, piercing, and soulless, look even more evil. Tufts of thin white hair stuck out from beneath his hat on the back of his head, and when he took off his hat to wipe his sweaty forehead on the inside of his shirt sleeve, you could see that his splotched, red head was bald on top in the center. He had on a long-sleeved white Oxford dress shirt with thin red stripes even though it was July and very hot and dry. The top two buttons of the shirt were undone, and white, wire-like chest hair curled tightly over the trim of a ribbed A-shirt. The shirts were tight tucked into a pair of blue dress pants sort of held in place with a shiny leather belt that could barely be seen beneath a roll of fat that made a complete circle around his waist. The pants legs went down only about as far as his fat ankles, exposing wrinkly white socks that had settled down onto the tops of patent leather loafers with gold square buckles. With his straw Panama hat and other get up, he looked like somebody might have dressed him in the 1940s or 50s, and he hadn’t changed clothes since. Maybe he hadn’t. I’d never seen him dressed differently.
Anyhow, I finished my second cold beer and kept my eye on those two characters as Uncle Boog pulled the blue Ford truck up into the edge of the woods outside the open area people use for parking and across a big dip from the pavilion, killed the engine of the truck, and set the parking brake.
“You go on down to the creek while I talk to Ozzie. Don’t get another beer until I find out what he thinks about your being here.”
All along, I was thinking that we had settled that back at the gate with Jimbo, but I sensed that now wasn’t the time for me to be pressing about whys and wherefores, so I lit up a name brand cigarette, went down by the creek and started searching the bank for flat rocks to skip on the water, but really what I was trying to do was hear what Uncle Boog and Ozzie were talking about. Normally, with the creek water flowing over the ledge, a person couldn’t hear anything but the splashing of water, but there was no water, and it was the time of the evening when no birds were singing, no breeze was blowing, and there was a general hush over all creation. I skipped a rock across the pool in case anybody was looking at me, and then, I listened. Here is pretty close to what they said.
“What are ya bringing a boy here down tonight for? This ain’t the night, Boog. Run’im on back home.”
“He won’t be any trouble, Oz. He knows better than to say anything. He’d stand a worse whoopin’ from his dad than anything he’d get down here if his dad even heard that he was here.”
Ozzie turned his gaze from Gopher Lewis, who was climbing back down the pole one cautious and well-planted step at a time, and looked over at me. His stare stirred a chill in the air, and goosebumps raised on my arms as I reared back with my right arm and skipped another stone across the still, waveless surface of the water.
“If the law comes, does he know to hit the woods?”
“Better’n than some of the twits other men will bring.”
“You’re runnin’ your mouth a little reckless while lookin’ for favors.”
“I ain’t askin’ for nothin’. He won’t be the youngest here tonight, but he’ll be the smartest. I’ll stand for him if it comes to it.”
“And I will make sure that you do. Can he work? Gopher needs some help building a ring.”
“He’ll work most men you know into the ground. He’d be glad to help.”
Ozzie Plimpton grunted and turned to hold the rolled orange extension cord that Gopher Lewis held out to him as Gopher leaned over to unfasten the boot spikes from his calves. Uncle Boog made a big wave at me in the air, signaling to come up. Somehow, he had managed to find me some work I’m sure he had no intention to help with. He had no idea that I had heard every word.
“Hey, Vern, come on up here and give Gopher a hand. You might make a couple bucks.”
Uncle Boog was turned away from Ozzie and Gopher as he said this, but I saw both their faces as they glared into his back. I wouldn’t be getting any money from either one of those two. This job would end up being a freebie, and I knew it all along even though I went up and helped Gopher anyway.
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