Uncle Py And The Troll, FFF #25

"He had been told that crawling would get him nowhere, but-" Homer gestured with his arms above his head as I shuffled in through the door of Dave Syke's general store.

"No, no, no," Dave interrupted, "Now that Bob is here, you have to start from the beginning. There is no getting out of it. You promised!" Homer huffed as I settled onto the barrel of nails nearest the pot bellied stove. "What's this?" I asked.

"I was tellin' Dave about my uncle and he insisted that we wait for you. Well, after three games of checkers, Dave wanted to hear the tale, but he insisted that as soon as you showed up, I start all over." I stoked the fire in the stove, packed my pipe and settled in to spend a rainy Friday night of tall tales with the fellows. Dave handed me a mason jar, "Have a sip of this to chase away the chill." The corn liquor burned all the way down and made a warm spot in my middle.

"Alright, I'm listening," I said.

"Now neither one of you ever got to meet my Uncle Py, but he was something else," Homer began after a little nip from the jar to wet his lips. "He had all kinds of adventures and traveled all over the world. Now this particular time was when he was a young man and these mountains was still pretty wild and open country."

"Py? That's kind of a queer name innit?" Dave asked.

"He was named after Pythagoras, one of them old Greek dudes in the Bible," Homer answered. Book learnin' was not one of Homer's strong suits, but it is best not to call a man's shortcomings to his attention in front of others as it's libel to sour a friendship. "Now it was in the fall after the crops was in," Homer began again, "and all of the men of the community would gather up their batch of corn and turn it into shine so it was easier to get down off the mountain and sell it at market in Hecketsville. Now this took a couple of weeks to cook it all up, and of course everybody wanted to try some of the first batch. What followed was one big drunken party that lasted two weeks. They called it an Oh-Gee."

"Orgy?" Dave interrupted again.

"No, you mule-headed somebitch. An orgy you have with girls. This was an Oh-Gee. As in, 'Oh gee, I'm drunk but I'll have another sip'." Homer laughed at his own joke. "Now while they was cookin' up the mash, they'd have coon hunts and wrasslin' matches and story tellin' contests, just to see who could come up with the biggest whopper. Now Uncle Py had spent two weeks blind, stinkin' drunk and he figgered it was about time to go home and sleep it off so he left the others at the still, loaded up his mule and headed down the mountain. Afore he can get down it turns dark and a powerful storm rolls in. The rain comes down hard and you can't see your hand in front of your face. Well, Uncle Py and Della, that's the mule, they lose their way and get off the path."

"Now Uncle Py is not a man easily discouraged and was always of a bright an' cheerful nature. He knows that turning around and looking for the path in the dark is a lost cause so he lights his lantern and decides that he can just find his own way down, since he has been roaming these hills all his life. But the going is tough. The rain has turned the ground to mush and the trees grow thick together, so he has to kinda bust his way through. Now his lantern gives him a little light, but the briers and branches tug at his clothes and every here and there are loose patches of rocks. One wrong step and he goes ass over tea kettle down the mountain to his doom. Della the mule is a pretty sure-footed animal, but Della is blind, so they kinda have to help each other."

"After a couple of hours of stumbling through the dark and the rain, the storm really gets with it and the sky blisters with lightening and the thunder shakes the ground under their feet as it rolls through the valley. Well needless to say, Della gets spooked and takes off at a run dragging Uncle Py with her as well as six gallons of some of the sweetest moonshine this valley ever tasted."

"Despite her load, Uncle Py figgered she drug him a quarter mile through some of the worst briers and brambles the mountain had to offer. Della only stops because they get to a spring wash and she can hear the water rushing by. After hours of rain, there is a lot of water going by and purdy swift too. Uncle Py picks himself up and looks around and he can't even decide which side of the mountain they are on. He is wondering what to do, when by the flash of lightening, he spies a bridge over the washed out gully. He heads for it even though he had never known of any bridge being near the mountain or heard tell of one, but with a bridge you had a landmark, and perhaps a decent trail to follow until he could figure out just where the hell he was."

"So he gets Della calmed down and guides her to the bridge but she smells something and hunches up. About that time the sky lights up again and there in front of him is this big ol' troll. He's eight foot tall if he was an inch. He's long and gangly and green, with these big claws where he ought to have hands. He stinks to high heavens. His eyes glow red in the dark and Uncle Py can smell his putrid breathe in his face." Homer lowers his voice to a growl and grimaces. "You cross my bridge, you pay my toll! Six gold pieces or your life!"

"Now Uncle Py was always quick thinker when he had to be and it kept him out of some tight spots on several occasions. Uncle Py didn't have six gold pieces on him and the troll may as well have asked for the crown of the king of England but Uncle Py had something better than gold. He had shine. So Uncle Py offers the troll some of that instead. The troll clutches the jug in his bony claw and knocks back a big ol' snort. 'Yum' he says and he starts gulping it down."

"Well now that the two of them are on a more friendly basis, Uncle Py pulls out a dollar cigar that he won in a poker game. He lights it with the one dry match that he can find and offers it to the troll, just to be social like. The troll looks up from his drink and takes it and has a puff. Now while the troll has been drinkin', he can't hold the jug to good on account of his claws, so he's dumped a fair amount of shine all over his self. The troll smiles real big as he gets the hang of smokin' the cigar and everything is going just fine until a hot ash falls off the cigar and lands in the wet hairs on the troll's chest."

"All the sudden, whoosh, he catches fire. He dances around tryin to put it out but he still has the cigar in his claw and winds up lighting new spots that wasn't lit before. Now he's madder than a wet hen and he turns on Uncle Py, thinking that he planned on setting him on fire all along. Uncle Py claims that he was trying to take off his wet coat to smother the flames, but either way, when the troll lunged at him, he managed to step out of the way. The bad thing is Della didn't."

"The troll landed on her and knocked her flat, crushing five gallons of moonshine. They went up in an unholy fire ball that scorched the ground for thirty feet. Uncle Py said the only thing that saved him was the fact that he had his wet coat out in front of him or it would have burnt his face off. The blast threw him several feet and he landed on the far side of the bridge. The flash had left him blinded and he had been told as an itty-bitty boy that crawling would get him nowhere but that's what he did. He wandered the hills for three days before Old Man Sedgewick found him and patched him up."

"Uncle Py said he tried several times to find the spot where that bridge was but he could never find it. He did say that for the rest of his life that he could always tell when a bad storm was going to come over the mountain because you could always smell a little bit of burnt mule hair in the breeze."

We all sat silent for a moment as the late November wind whipped rain against the window and the little stove belched smoke from a down draft.

"You're fulla shit," Dave Sykes blurted out. I don't like to point out a man's short comings, but Dave ain't that mannerly.

Doc

My First Sexual Experience

"The first time I had sex, it was great! It was a beautiful experience! A very moving experience! I just wish that someone had been there to enjoy it with me!" -Rodney Dangerfield; "Rappin' Rodney"

"Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms." -Anton Chekov

"There are two things people want more than sex and money -- recognition and praise." -Mary Kay Ash.

The first time you had sex, was it any good? I've often heard people tell how their first time was terrible. A statement that is usually followed by regret that they hadn't waited, or at least picked someone else.

It is the kind of topic that might come up late in the evening after a few beers, and you've settled into some comfy chairs as the radio plays quietly in the background. I've had this conversation with a friend of mine.

"How was your first time Carl?" I asked.

"Mine? Well mine was purdy terrible. I was fourteen and we did it in her daddy's tool shed. She hit me in the face with her elbow and busted out this front toof. I've had to wear a partial plate ever since...but the sex was purdy good," Carl says with mismatched grin. "How 'bout you Doc? How was yours?"

"Mine was magical!" I admitted, because it was.

Now somewhere I have read that an astronomical amount of people had sex on their prom night. The figures elude me, but let's just say it was a very high number. Perhaps you were one of them? Maybe it is the youthful expectation of a night of romance, a sense of a rite of passage, or just plain old friskiness, but apparently a lot of people have parted ways with their virginity after prom.

I was eighteen, and had selected my date with extreme care. She had to be funny, and fun to be with. She had to be intelligent, outgoing, well-spoken and stunningly beautiful, but in the end the choice was easy. I picked from what the football team left. At one point I had added to my list of criteria that she should have "loose morals", but I quickly crossed it out. Who was I kidding? I wanted a date with no morals!

Her name was Curling Iron, as it had been suggested that she had once been caught masturbating with one. If it had been plugged in or turned on at the time was a matter of some speculation amongst the gossips. While most would consider this horrible rumor to be an obvious detraction from a prom date, I considered it a plus. Should the rumor prove true I reasoned, then she is only demonstrating that she has the same raging hormones that I do and is willing to do something about them. I knew the rumors to be false however, and she was simply being slandered by others because she did her own thing and refused to be part of the crowd. Besides, she didn't need a curling iron. Her hair couldn't have been more curly, and it didn't hurt at all that she was a wonderful dancer with a large rack.

I double-dated with my buddy Jason and his girlfriend Carmella. She was a nice country girl with long, dark hair and bad acne but she could tell a good joke or Indian wrestle you to the floor like a calf at branding time. She wasn't much in the dancing department, but Jason didn't bring her to dance with. He drove his mother's Cougar and we picked up our dates in style. The rented tuxes were scratchy and tended to pinch in all the wrong places, but we looked the part of dapper second-rate waiters as we drove down dirt roads to pick up our dates.

We had a sumptuous feast at our local Burger King and headed to the prom. We went in, danced, photos were taken, tepid punch was sipped and we left. We went to my house where romance was about to ensue.

We teased them with promises of the fun to come. Little did they know what was in store for them. Jason and I enticed them with a very sexually charged euchre game, best three out of five. Curling Iron and I lost, but my parents were in bed at this hour, so we decided that we would go upstairs to "listen to some music". I turned on the Hi-Fi in my room but Jason and Carmella decided that they wanted to listen to another station in my sister's bedroom. They left in some haste.

Now my bedroom had been carefully decorated to imply that I was a man of culture and good taste and was therefore a woman trap to begin with, or at least as best as I could replicate from the Style sections of Playboy.

Curling Iron and I sat on my loveseat and held hands as we watched the lights of the equaliser quiver. We kissed. We kissed with a passion that was new to both of us. We reached for each other and held on as if the the world were spiraling out of control and we were the only anchor left to cling to. The lights dimmed.

I wish I'd known then what I do now. It would have smoothed a few rough patches. All the theory you've gathered from books does not prepare you for the momentous occasion that is about to transpire, even if the book was one that your parents had borrowed from the church library. Regardless, you are ill prepared.

She lunges for me with the vigor of a long-denied alley cat and I try to summon every trick I can think of from my one page book. I try to think of erotic Greek vases as I attempt my clumsy version of foreplay, and she grits her teeth. At some point I am out of breathe and sweaty and she looks me in the eye and smiles as she says, "Is that it?"

"No," I lied, "there is lots more!"

I did manage to make her scream her mother's name, but she was on the telephone looking for a ride.

Live and learn, that's my motto.

Carl looked me in the eye and said, "You're fulla shit..."

Doc