First off, you are probably already aware, but my name is not Vern. Around the time of the misadventure that I’m sharing with you, a comedian by the name of Jim Varney, playing a character named Ernest P. Worrell, was always talking to some off-screen person he called Vern. Vern never did respond, nor did anybody ever even know what Vern looked like, but he had to be pretty stupid just to hang out with Ernest. Anyhow, Uncle Boog found Varney’s movies and television shows hilarious, and he had VHS tapes of all of them, I reckon. Some, he recorded himself off the satellite. Personally, I found Varney’s humor a little too childish for my tastes and more than a bit insulting to down home, simple country folks like me and my kind, but, for a while, Uncle Boog called anybody he was joking with or generically picking on “Vern,” until nobody thought it was even a tiny bit funny anymore. If you remember Varney and his brand of comedy, then you know what I mean about funny and not funny at all.
Anyhow, after getting the boot spikes off from around his legs, Gopher shambled over to the edge of the brushy field, got in a blue and white three-quarter ton Chevy C10 that he drove all the time, and kept it in first gear as he circled the parking area and put the flatbed trailer it was pulling right in front of the pavilion. The flatbed was loaded with maybe twenty-five oak pallets and roughly the same number of metal fence posts. The truck had a dog box in the back as wide as the truck bed with a slanted metal roof and a cage wire door on the front. The tailgate was shut so that a person couldn’t see into the dog box, but I knew that it contained the infamous fighting pit bull, The Tiger. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing in there before a fight. I guess a dog wouldn’t have any reason to be nervous since he had no idea what was about to happen. The Tiger was most likely sleeping, I reckon.
Anyhow, Gopher got out of the truck putting on some thick leather white mule gloves, then grabbed a post driver made of a capped metal pipe with bent rebar handles welded to it out of the back of the truck and one metal fence post off the trailer as he walked by it. He carried the post and driver up under the pavilion, scanned side-to-side a sight measuring some distance of which I had no awareness, jammed the point of the post into the ground according to his strategy, placed the driver over it, and gave it one good whack. The post buried up in the soft gray wash dirt to its wings on the first stroke. Gopher looked up at me, ran his tongue across his lips, wriggled and pursed them, and said something in a voice so low that I really didn’t hear what he said, but it sounded enough like “Get a pallet” that I went and got a pallet. He raised the post pounder up and slammed it down twice more while I was headed over to the trailer, the ringing of the metal-on-metal echoing violently under the roof. Barehanded, I propped one of the pallets on the top of one of four pallet stacks, caught it by the cross boards on the back and half dragged, half carried it over to Gopher at the sunk post, getting several oak splinters in my hands for the effort. He turned the pallet so that the center two-by-four aligned with the planted post and held up a finger to me as if I was to wait. I did wait while he tottered in his peculiar bow-legged gait to the truck and snatched a bag of plastic zip ties off the dash. When he got back to me, he pulled two zip ties out and zipped the pallet to the post at the center of the pallet and at the top but not at the bottom. He mumbled something like “Get another one,” and I did while he fetched another metal post. Perceiving the plan that he had, I held this pallet against the edge of the other pallet while he matched up the fence post with the center two-by of the pallet, and I leaned it forward while he pounded the post into the ground. After he put down the driver, he pulled three zip ties from the bag, handed them to me, and pointed to where the pallet edges touched. He pointed at the bottom, center, and top, then looked me in the eyes around his snout of a nose and said, “Tight.”
So, for the next hour and half, I kept busy enough building an arena with Gopher that I had no idea what Uncle Boog was doing. He had disappeared from sight, and I was eager enough to get done with a job that I hadn’t expected to be doing that I didn’t take time to look around for him. Ozzie Plimpton stood on the edge of the new concrete slab at the end of the pavilion, grunting out directions every once and a while and taking off his straw hat to fan his fat, sweaty, red, and splotchy face and head. Other than a few glances when his orders got loud, I didn’t pay no mind to him but followed the lead of Gopher as we worked faster and faster as we developed a system of work and came to an understanding of our roles within it. Before I knew it, we had a nice, looking slat-board arena in an oval shape about twenty feet the narrow way and the width of the pavilion the long way. The wash-out dip in the pavilion even lent to the look of a professionally prepared fighting venue that any blood-and-guts gladiator would have been happy to fight and die in, or at least what I thought such a thing might look like from glimpses that I’d seen in movies and documentaries. I don’t reckon too many folks have much experience with real gladiator arenas. What kind of person would?
When we finally connected one end to the other, Gopher walked the oval and shook every pallet vigorously with his gloved hands, making sure they were secure, and they were all tight together and firm to ground with their collective weight. He opened the only pallet that we hadn’t zipped to a post to the inside of the arena and waved his arm for me to go out. I did, and he pulled the arena shut behind us. Then, he startled me by patting me on the back and mumbling something that sounded only a little bit like “thanks.” It was all of anything I ever got for a handful of splinters and a hot and dusty 90 minutes of hard work. I suppose I got the experience of erecting a quick temporary enclosure should I ever need to build a dog fighting arena again. But who needs that kind of experience?
Feeling like I had earned my place at the forthcoming events of the evening through the brotherhood of hard work, I sauntered over to Uncle Boog’s truck, opened the camper lid and tailgate, pulled the big, blue cooler and its icy contents over to me, plunged my hands into the ice cubes and freezing water, fished around with my numbing hands, and pulled out a wine cooler! Yuck! It’s funny how our minds hang on to such minutiae, but it is a true, if terribly unimportant, detail of that evening so many years ago that I went a fishing for a cold beer in Uncle Boog’s blue cooler and came out with a woman’s drink. Of course, I put it back. You didn’t think I would drink it, did you?
Anyhow, the noise of my activities had roused Uncle Boog from an uneasy sleep in the front seat of the truck, and he sat in the open door rubbing his face with his hands when I looked around the corner. I went ahead and asked the world’s most stupid question.
“You been sleepin’?”
He had the diamond pattern of the vinyl seat cover imprinted his cheek, which made his lie even more outrageous than my dumb question.
“Nah, just waitin’ for you to get done and tryin’ to fix the cassette player.”
It was true that the cassette player didn’t work in the truck, but he didn’t have any tools nor any knowledge with which to fix it.
“We’re done. I’m gonna go back over and see if I can see The Tiger.”
“All right. I’ll be along in a minute.”
When I got back over to the newly built pallet arena, I leaned on the top of the pallet wall, quickly regretted it because of the roughness of the wood on my bare forearms, stood back up straight, and took a sip of the cold beer I’d brought. Gopher was in the middle of the ring atop a 15-foot folding ladder a holding the female end of the extension cord he had connected to the nightlight and the male prongs of a big, silver colored brooder light that he was plugging into it. He was adjusting the light up-and-down and side-to-side trying to get the circle of its beam to fill the whole arena area. Ozzie was supervising him, directing him, and holding the bottom of the ladder. When Gopher finally discovered where the light needed to be for its arc to brighten every corner of the oval ring, he took a hammer from the top of the ladder and U-shaped fencing nail from his pocket and nailed the wire and cord to a rafter. The silver brooder light swung crazily, flashing light everywhere under the shade of the pavilion when Gopher let go of it, but he steadied it on his way down the ladder, and you could see that nothing could be hidden in any part of the arena under that bright light. Gopher carried the ladder out from under the roof and leaned it up against a tree.
“You seen him yet?”
Uncle Boog had snuck up on me and clasped me on the back of the neck with a hand still wet and cold from the icy cooler. I hadn’t seen The Tiger yet, and I think I’ll save when I did for the next chapter. This chapter has become too long what with all the building and the details, none of which, I think, may end up being important, but whatcha gonna do?
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