What can you say about your
bestest pal in this whole wide world, when he gets arrested for being nake-it
in the middle of town? ‘Not much’, is what the judge said.
“You were standing there, in
front of the preacher and his good wife, nake-it as the day you were born. What
have you got to say for yourself?”
Buzz was thinking that
because of his natural good looks and the ‘great body he’d been given by God’,
that the sight of his nake-it-ness probably overwhelmed the townsfolk.
“I guess I’m just too damn
pretty to be walkin’ about with no britches on.”
Well that did it, the judge
said that Buzz was to knock every door
in town and apologize for standin’ in front of them like the day he was born.
One or two of them said they
had missed the whole darn thing and could Buzz step inside to their homes and
stand nake-it for them so that they could be just as upset as the rest of the
townsfolk. The stupid thing is, I think Buzz did it.
You see, the summer that
Buzz wanted to start Skinny-dippin’ just happened to be the summer when all the
creeks dried up. Sometimes Buzz can be a truly crazy person and maybe, just
maybe, he had chosen that summer so he could complain about the bone-dry
creeks. It’s what he does.
Anyhoo, there weren’t no
water in the creeks to go skinny dippin’, so that was when Buzz suggested that
we might use the water tower which stood next to Mrs McGonigal’s Eatin’ Room
and Entertainments. I asked the grown ups what kinda ‘entertainment’ that Mrs
McGonigal laid on but they always changed the subject and one time, the
preacher nearly choked on his biscuits and gravy. So I stopped askin’.
The water tower was higher
than the church clock – so you can see it was pretty high and you had to climb
up a real shaky ladder. Buzz suggested on the mornin’ of one extra hot day that
we should get up real early and climb the tower, that way no one would see us
and we could stay up there all day. The Sheriff had said it was agin’ the law
to go swimmin’ in the tower on account that it was the water that folks used
for drinkin’ and such and also because Cross-Eyed Larry had pee’d in it one
time.
So we did what Buzz said and
sneaked up the ladder real early. It was real hot, so that the water didn’t
cool us down that much - but boy it was fun, especially being nake-it and all.
Inside the tower there was a
small ledge and if you crawled up to it, you could jump and dive and do just
about everything into the water. Back flips and front flips and such.
Of course we couldn’t come
down until it got dark, so I guess me and Buzz did pee in the water, now and
again’. I’m just sayin’, is all.
Late in the afternoon we
could hear a band coming down the street, apparently the preacher’s wife had
organized a parade for her son, ‘cause he’d memorized the whole of the Good
Book or somethin’. I ain’t critizing but a whole parade. I mean.
Anyway, me and Buzz decided
to jump from the ledge together and somehow we hit the bottom of the water
tower real hard and kinda went through the tower. And where we’d made holes,
well the water kinda started leaking through, and we could hear the screams
from those getting wet below us.
Then I looked at Buzz and he
looked at me and that was the last thing we did before we both fell through the
tower and landed nake-it right in front of the townsfolk. Buzz managed to land
on top of the preacher’s boy which had the preachers wife shoutin’ and
hollerin’ about how these nake-it boys had killed her beautiful son.
You’re saying, I suppose,
that I forgot to mention about me being nake-it and all - and what happened to
me, exactly?
Well, I told the preacher
that I had been trying to baptize Buzz on account of his bad ways an’ all, and
that with the creeks being dry, the water tower was the only place to do it –
don’t ask me where that all came from – I ain’t got a clue. Anyhoo, for some
reason they let me go and decided that Buzz was the guilty one.
Go figure.
bobby stevenson 2013
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