Serpent of Old by T. R. Pearson

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barking Mad Press
Published: 2019-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

“Doodle. You heard of him?”

I hadn’t. Ronnie neither. Or rather the Doodle Ronnie knew was not the Doodle Sugar meant. Ronnie’s Doodle bagged groceries at the Kroger, and most people just called him Chief, while Sugar’s Doodle lived out west in the county where he, apparently, was known for his temper and his cruel streak.

“Used to fight all the time, but he got old,” Sugar told us. “Beat all the women he knew, so he had to start hiring out. Then he had a stroke or something and wasn’t much trouble anymore.”

“He one of yours?” Ronnie asked.

“Sometimes. He’s a ten-minute handjob these days, but he went off somewhere a couple of weeks back, and nobody’s seen him around.”

“What do you mean ‘went off’?” I asked her.

First, she had to send the Guatemalan guy after more sour cream, and then Sugar had trouble picking the dates she needed for her story. She couldn’t decide if he’d gone off on a Tuesday or if maybe it had been a Monday instead, which didn’t make a lick of difference.

I have to say, Rochelle is maybe my only acquaintance who knows how to come out with a story. That’s one of the things I like about him most. He puts the details all in order, and he never backtracks to decide if something happened on Friday morning last or at the dawn of humankind because Rochelle has editorial sense and knows what doesn’t matter. Sugar, though, was a lot more ordinary and treated everything the same, so I waited until she’d worked through her various calendar issues, and then she got tangled up with Ronnie on where exactly her Doodle lived, which sounded to have a lot to do with an old Sunoco station and what side of a smelting chimney out in the county it might be on.

I was finishing my roll and trying to figure what the check might end up being by the time Sugar finally got back around to how long her Doodle had been gone.

“Saturday,” she said. “Three weeks ago now. I was swinging by to see him, and a neighbor boy told me they’d all been wondering where he went.”

“With a stroke?” is what I asked her.

“He could walk all right,” Sugar said. “Drive a little too, but his car was sitting out there in his yard.”

“They find him yet?” Ronnie wanted to know.

Sugar shrugged. “I got kind of busy. Ya’ll’s sap gets up something awful sometimes.”

I caught myself nearly asking Sugar how in the world she did it. She made no bones about being a pro and trading her virtue for pay, but even still I was acquainted with the strain of local man likely to rent Sugar’s affections. They were guys you’d want to HazMat up to touch, and yet Sugar went at those boys in pretty much the altogether and accomplished for them whatever they’d decided that they’d bought.

I had to think it was probably like cleaning fish. The guts and the scales were off-putting, but once you’d done it enough, you just stopped paying much mind.

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