Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
S T scratching. A wisp of burnt rubber rolled from beneath the floorboards and the Packard settled on its haunches with a long wheeze. Grayson hollered, "He done et through the wires!" We pulled onto the side of the road, back wheels rubbing the insides of the fenders, a-wha, wha, wha. Yancey ran back, popped the trunk, and the gator came out like a spring, hissing and snapping lest one of us tried to lay a hand on him again. Nobody did. He scooted across the road, took to the ditch and pretty soon, all we could see was bushes twitching. Then we chanced a look. A bundle of wires big as a carrot was chawed through and dead-shorted to the fenderwell like so much burnt spaghetti. We limped back to town, hungry, tired, dirty, no ducks, no gator, no tires. And that's how Grayson came to give up on the punt gun and turn to working on the Packard. But meanwhile, me and Yancey got impatient. Grayson went running for the Packard and came back with a roll of electrical tape and we made a couple of tight wraps around the gator's snout. Duct tape would have saved us a whole lot of trouble, but we didn't have duct tape in those days. We'd near-bouts got our wind back when Grayson asked, "Now what?" It was a common question in those days, right after we'd got halfway through something really stupid. Yancey mopped his face, grinned. "Let's turn him a-loose in Blocker's Store." Blocker's was way down on Seaside Road, a dog-on-the-porch place where everybody shopped before they got cars and could drive to the Piggly Wiggly. Grayson squinted at Yancey and a smile flickered around the corners of his mouth. "Load his ass up," he said. I got the snout and Yancey got the tail. It was another scramble but we got him into the trunk. About three miles down the road, there came a thumping and a P O R T I N G C 76 L A S S I he boy ain't right," Yancey said when he saw the cannon barrel in the thicket behind the garage. We were down to riding our bicycles, Yancey a single-speed Huffy, me a three-speed Sears and Roebuck. I lashed the barrel to my crossbar and went wobbling down the road, the barrel klinkety-clanking against the frame. Mudcat's shop was on the edge of town, next door to the Huck and Buck Community Center, the colored dance hall where the Saturday night straight razors cut three ways, high and wide and frequent. The shop yard was a litter of rusty pipe and cable, bald tires, busted cylinder blocks, trucks that would never run again, saplings and bushes grown up through fenders and frames, all decorated with a generous sprinkling of beer cans, paper plates and plastic cups blown across from the Huck and Buck. You couldn't see the tops of the workbenches for the clutter of tools. There was a pipe cutter, drill press, C S