Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
electric welder and a venerable case of dynamite drip, drip, dripping nitroglycerine into a bucket on the shelf below. Whenever the dynamite went dry and the bucket got full, Mudcat would pour the nitro back into the box and start the process all over again. "Find me some welding rods," I said. Four hours later we had us a swivelgun muzzle-loader that would throw a pound of shot. Grayson took it better than we expected. He scratched his chin, scratched his fanny, walked in little circles. Then he picked up the gun and held it to the light. "Like a red-bone mule," he said . . . "dangerous at both ends. We got to proof it." Yancey cast his eyes at the soggy dynamite, but Grayson cut him short. "Don't even think about that! We need us some black powder. That gator eat the Sacred Scroll?" Grayson was asking about the roll of toilet paper we kept stashed in a bread bag in the corner of the trunk. "You got to crap?" "No, but we'll need some wadding." We were out at an old sand quarry where they dug for fill to fix the county roads. There was leftover dirt here and there, so we pulled behind a sizable pile, drug the punt gun around to the other side. Grayson broke out a cherry bomb and one of those old brass 12-gauge shotgun shells the government bought for the Winchester trench guns during the First War. He bit the fuse, pulled it out of the cherry bomb, threaded it through the touch hole and commenced to ladle powder with that brass shell, once, twice . . . . "Great God A-mighty," Yancey said. Grayson kept dipping, three times, four. Then came toilet paper and the shot that streamed down the bore with a dry rattling hiss. "Little more . . . little more . . . there!" When Grayson topped it off with another generous swipe off the Sacred Scroll, she was plumb full. We propped it up, fired the fuse and beat feet. There was something mighty S satisfying in that black-powder sound – a low, throaty earthquake ku-whump and a cloud of smoke bigger than a cow. We scrambled around the backside of that dirt pile and the punt gun was gone. "You done blowed it all to hell," Yancey said. We were looking for pieces in the tops of the trees when my foot hung on the muzzle. The whole blessed thing had drove itself clean into the ground. Yancey scratched the ground, got a handhold just like he did with that gator tail. But he couldn't budge it. "Y'all got a shovel?" N ext time there was only two scoops of powder, three of shot and the wads Grayson cut with the Big Bopper. We swung back by Mudcat's again and stole a five-foot stick of inchand-a-quarter iron pipe, drove over to the funeral home for one of those big cardboard casket boxes. Grayson tapped the pipe halfway into the ground with the Big Bopper, I set the gun to swiveling in it, and we propped up the casket box about 40 paces out. And then they elected me, or maybe it was nominated, I'm not sure of the politics. Grayson bit the fuse out of another cherry bomb. I'd have a 50-foot head start, I reckoned. But I didn't. I was choking smoke and spitting soot and Grayson was counting up holes in the casket box when Yancey found the punt gun. The pipe was bent off level with the ground and the barrel was buried in pinestraw, a hundred feet back in the bushes. "A six-foot pattern," Grayson hollered . . . "a pellet every single inch!" That's what I think he said, anyway, my ears ringing so. "And we gonna get in a boat with this beast?" I asked. "Well, it was your own damn idea." "What?" Grayson said it again, mouthing it, so he'd know I'd understand. But I pretended I didn't. And thus, our Federal Criminal Conspiracy came to an abrupt, and timely, end. Not sure if I'm protected by a Statute of Limitations, so keep mum, y'all. P O R T I N G C 79 L A S S I C S