Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
orizons H By Roger Pinckney T It was a Federal Criminal Conspiracy: three boys, a cannon barrel and scaup to drive them crazy. he saltwater scaup are mostly gone now, but back when I was a boy they would raft offshore, a thousand, ten thousand at a time. It would take a booming gale to get them moving into the ponds where we could hunt them, but when it blew that hard, we'd be laid ashore, too. We tried to sneak in open water but they would take wing, circling 500 yards out of gun-range like vast clouds of smoke before settling in, a mile or more away. I don't know what happened to all those birds, but you can't blame their demise on us, though we damned sure tried. Me and Grayson and Yancey, young and full of fool ideas, a half-century ago. Those birds liked to drove us crazy. Maybe they did. We entered into a Federal Criminal Conspiracy, figuring to be the Last of the Outlaw Gunners, with a punt gun like they used to shoot scaup in the olden days. Didn't matter if scaup tasted like anchovies . . . didn't matter if the law frowned on cannonading ducks. We'd lash it to the skiff, pile on brush till we looked like a floating marsh island and drift down on them. One shot would be all we'd need. And such a gun fell right out of the sky, the beginnings of it anyway, a twenty-millimeter automatic cannon Mudcat Yarboro pulled from Miss Lucile's strawberry patch. The plane nicked the house, tore off a downspout, busted the clothesline and broke down the chicken fence. The pilot came floating S another shell and a 36-ounce ball peen hammer he called The Big Bopper. The primers were big as hearing aid batteries. Grayson knocked them out with a long punch and The Big Bopper, but he never found anything to go back in the holes. He was figuring up some kind of bushings so he could use shotgun primers, but it all finally got too much and he threw the barrel and the shells into the devil vine behind the garage and went to patching his Packard. That Packard was a moonshiner's delight – '56 Clipper, black and white and big, with a trunk like a phone booth laid sideways. Loaded with Mason jars, the Level Ride would jack the rear end up and if the revenuers didn't hear all the clinking, they'd think you were running empty. But we were too young to run shine just yet. We were out looking for wood ducks one afternoon and a six-foot gator was sunning himself right in the middle of the road. Grayson locked up the brakes and we all hit the road running. The gator got to the water but Yancey got a hold of his tail. When the gator bowed up and made a snatch at him, Yancey flung it over his shoulder. I was second in line and it was like catching a chainsaw with a stuck throttle. We made a gator sandwich, Yancey on top, me on the bottom, the gator in between. "Gimme a rope! Gimmie a rag! Gimmie anything!" We went round and round in the dirt. down, half a mile away, then dangled by his parachute, swinging like a pendulum from a sapling hickory. He swung there awhile, the neighbors loving Miss Lucille the way they did. Mudcat was Yancey's uncle, a welldriller, first to the scene. Mudcat had no real use for a cannon barrel, but it seemed too good a thing to waste. Yancey stole it first chance he got. G rayson didn't know a damn thing about women, never did learn, but he was a cracker-jack when it came to things mechanical. Some sort of breech-loader, number fours in junk cannon shell casings? They were easy to find in those days when we were getting cranked up for Vietnam. Grayson got to working on the shells before he got to working on the gun, cutting wads out of felt gaskets with P O R T I N G C 75 L A S S I C S