“Moldy”
Moley paused to watch as his dust settled along the rutted gravel road. He squatted behind the mottled trunk of a huge sycamore, his thin frame well hidden, one hand lovingly caressing a wild gray beard, the other tenderly clutching the hot clay pipe in which smoldered a good grade of local grass. “Guess nobody followed me,” he whispered to the sycamore. “Guess the old camouflaged van’s hidden well enough, too.” He wore his moth-eaten slouch hat, butternut wool jacket, jeans, and a “Mississippi Militia” belt buckle dug in 1975. He’d had his weekly shower this morning.
“Better get going. Ain’t got all day.” He grunted as he scooped the metal detector and shovel from their rests against the tree, wheeled, and strode confidently along a faint path into the ravine. After a while he tuned the detector and swung it carelessly, listening intently to the earphones strapped across his head. “Nothing in here. Hunted out by them creeps from Jackson. The scoundrels try not to leave much for us Vicksburg boys,” he said to no one. “Gotta get up in them hills, around the trenches.”
Except for an occasional blip from the detector Moley traveled a silent world. No footsteps. No briars scraping like nylon zippers along his jeans. Couldn’t even hear his own lonely voice, just a drone that tickled his cheeks.
“Moley,” he said absently without knowing. First, “The Mole,” then “Moley,” and now, sometimes, even “Moldy.” Just jealous. Them boys from Jackson was jealous. He could dig more civil war relics in one trip than they got in a year. Called him “Moldy.” Ha!
He jerked to a halt as the detector whined like a tomcat in heat. “Nothing supposed to be here,” he mused softly. “Sounds like iron. Enough to fool the discriminator.” He held the detector head two feet off the ground in order to judge size and location. “Square, I think. Symmetrical. Good smooth signal, too, soft on both ends. Ain’t deep, neither.”
Moley frowned as he drove the sharpshooter into the hillock that hid the signal; a dull “clunk” jarred his soundless world. Wood. Old board with nails, probably. Scraping dirt and vines aside he backed away in wonder. “Coffin!” he ventured loudly, throwing aside the earphones to uncover the entire top of the plank box in a fury of raking spade. “Wonder what’s inside? Gotta look. Might be a body. Naw. Too small.”
He pried the cedar box open, exhilarated at once by the greased skins that wrapped the contents. Rifles! he thought at once. Ought to be in good shape, too! Indeed, the skins had resisted intact the exposure to water and rot of a hundred-thirty years beneath the surface. Moley plunged his hands inside and withdrew them immediately. Felt like raw beef liver! Garbage! Greasy, slithery, loathsome garbage! Damn! His stomach almost curdled. But he had to see.
Gingerly holding his knife at arm’s length he parted the skins. His eyes widened; a stringy mass of dark brown thongs, slimy with gray and black infestations, spread before him. They emitted an overpowering stench. The refuse gagged and suffocated; he turned to avoid nausea. “What the hell?” he wondered aloud.
Whatever it was, Moley recognized that it had been meticulously packed for preservation. It had been important to the Boys in Gray. It deserved inspection. He completed unearthing the wooden container, pulled it from its burial plot, and with great effort dragged it to the van, there loading it on board for the short drive to his small house on Confederate Avenue. He already suspected the truth.
Moley spread a canvas over the cool grass under the oak in his backyard, dumped the contents of the box upon it, then hosed the narrow strips until they separated and the slime dissolved and washed away. “Yep,” he muttered disappointedly as he examined the bits and pieces and hung the dark segments across the wooden fence to dry. “Jerky. Mule jerky. That’s all the boys had to eat. Hidden so it wouldn’t be stolen, probably. Why couldn't it be rifles? Damn!” The fence was covered by hanging fillets when he finished. He went inside to scrub his hands. “Why not rifles?” he asked the washbasin.
The idea that he would sample the jerky came later in the day as he endured his weekly wait in the long line at the employment office, stroking his beard and pulling occasionally at his flaming pipe. The hot sun would dry the jerky, kill any germs. It would be a unique experience. Maybe he would write it up, send it to North-South Trader Magazine. Might make him famous!
Sugarplump lay sprawled near the television devouring praline ice cream, her favorite, when he returned. “Home, Sugarplump,” he yelled, “what’s for supper?”
His wife glared from the tortured sofa, a trickle of white dripping from her pudgy fingers to the floor. “What’d you say, boy?” she snarled.
God! Moley thought. Did I screw up again? “Sugar-lump, dear,” he hastened. “What kind of day did my sugarlump have?”
“I’ll crane you with my jacker for calling me ‘Sugarplump,’” she growled. Her “jacker” was the length of heavy 4/0 copper cable Moley had given her to use in case of car-jackers. She carried it everywhere now.
“Sorry, dear,” Moley whimpered.
“Sorry don’t cut it!” The sofa and the pine floor beneath it shrieked as Sugarplump shifted her weight to rise; her little piglet curls had gone flat with perspiration.
“I’ll be out back,” Moley wailed as he hurried out the back door toward the small shop where he spent much of his time. He checked the jerky as he passed. Yep. Dry and hard and brittle as Geronimo’s bones. Smelled good, too, like mule. He selected a strip which cracked like peanut brittle when he bit off a small chew. “Not bad,” he marveled. “After a hundred and thirty years underground, not bad.” He munched hungrily astride a tall stool and flipped the worn pages of his Confederate belt buckle book.
“Pretty damn good,” he decided in a little while as he retrieved another strip and gnawed. “Kinda tastes like deep-fried field mouse. Can’t beat a good roast field mouse. Pull their tails straight and cook ‘em crisp and eat ‘em kinda like the corn dogs you get at the fair, with lots of mustard. Mmmm…”
The photographs of Confederate buckles floated and fused. “What the heck?” Moley asked the
book in awe. “Ain’t smoked no grass lately…”
The book sailed nonchalantly across the shop, then soared back, pages wildly flapping. It hissed, “Moley, are you a man or a field mouse? Go show that woman who’s boss. Give it to her good! You know you can!”
“Sure I can!” Moley bellowed in answer. “I’m a man. Rebel. Brave. Potent.”
Moley bid the hovering book a resolute “good night,” slammed the shop door, and strode toward his bedroom. The snores roaring from Sugarplump’s open mouth deterred him not. “Wake up, Sugarplump,” he demanded as he jumped in bed and rolled down the incline to her body. He pulled the “jacker” from beneath her curls and dropped it to the floor. The mass stirred and sputtered. “Let’s play, Sugarplump,” Moley ordered.
“Go to sleep, jerk,” Sugarplump muttered sleepily. “I need a man. Which you ain’t.”
That was the last Moley remembered. Except for the dreams. Strange dreams…
Moley was consuming a roast leg of Rottweiler when Hot Shot limped in and asked if he’d hunt old man Goodson’s place tonight. “Got a trail we can find in the dark,” Hot Shot boasted as he tore himself off a chunk of Rottweiler. The roast was even better than the grilled leg of coyote they’d had last week. “Let’s get Sugarplump to drop us off at midnight, pick us up at five AM.”
“Old man Goodson and his shotgun,” Moley speculated with full mouth. “He won’t know?”
“Naw. Half deaf. Never hear us.”
“How about you? How’s your rear end?”
“Sore. But not too bad.”
Hot Shot suffered from a widely-recognized cannon-ball-diggers malady, “Hot-Shot Hemorrhoid,” named not after the fiery projectile, but after this very person, “Hot Shot” Hawkins, the first relic hunter to collapse in the field while attempting to lug out two eight-inch cannon balls at once. Hot Shot recovered, and was now famous for the statement uttered while the medics were lifting him into the ambulance: “Don’t leave my balls! Get my balls!” The medics were mystified, but after checking closely to be sure Hot Shot was whole, concluded he was merely delirious from pain.
“Let’s do it!” Moley said.
“We’ll be like two slippery snakes in the grass!” Hot Shot crowed as he massaged his bony posterior and smoothed the few strands of dark hair atop his sunburned scalp.
Having by midnight fortified themselves with sufficient quantities of beer that they would have agreed to a nighttime scuba dive into the Mississippi River, should there be a possibility there were relics down there, Moley and Hot Shot loaded their equipment aboard Sugarplump’s Caddy. After a short drive they disembarked at the drop-off near old man Goodson’s place. “Be back here at five, Sugarlump,” Moley said as he got out.
Sugarplump grinned; her upper lip curled over the tip of her nose. “Sure thing, Moldy,” she said. “Just you be here. Good luck.” Her caustic giggle gave Moley the chills. He stared, ill at ease, as the taillights faded. Then he chased after Hot Shot, who had scurried on ahead.
The forbidden hillside, only a hundred yards from Goodson’s house, proved to be all they had anticipated. “Already got a big signal!” Hot Shot squealed after a few seconds. He clawed the ground and puffed. “Schenkl shell!” he yelled after a moment. “It’s a beauty!”
Moley rushed to get his detector into operation. After a dozen traverses it screamed over a wide signal that practically shouted “Shell! Artillery shell!” Moley tore into Mother Earth with his spade, and inches beneath the surface heard the “whump!” that meant shovel had encountered vintage 1863 cast iron. Parrott shell!
“Did you growl, Moley?” Hot Shot whispered anxiously while Moley blissfully stroked his cannon ball.
“Growl?” He removed the earphones. “Why would I growl? I’m the happiest man in Mississippi.” “Listen.”
Moley heard it then, a low-pitched rumble that must be coming from the throat of the biggest hound in Mississippi. He straightened, clutching detector and spade and Parrott shell. “Dog,” he said casually, pointing. “Big dog. In them bushes over there.”
“More than one,” Hot Shot said fearfully. “A pack.”
“Mr. Goodson!” Moley recalled Sugarplump’s malicious cackles. “He let his dogs out. Reckon someone called him…”
One of the beasts stepped boldly into the moonlight and growled fiercely. “Chow, ain’t it?” Moley ventured. “We ain’t never tried leg o’ Chow…” Another Chow stepped into view, growling more earnestly than the first, then another, and another; in moments the entire pack of monstrous animals was in view, each yowling and smacking and savoring the next few minutes… “I don’t know about you, Hot Shot,” Moley whispered, “but I’m fixing to haul cabooty…”
They never figured that man was faster than Chow, but with the howling pack right behind, they were in the process of proving just that…
“Wake up! Moley. You’re having another wet dream!” It was Sugarplump, whacking his mouth with a wad of fist and kicking his ribs with a number twelve.
“Wha… Wha…,” Moley managed as he tried to control feet still churning under the bed sheets. “What happened?”
“You and those dreams,” she complained.
“Nightmare,” he answered groggily as consciousness returned. “Musta been that mule jerky. Musta had a fungus or something.”
Sugarplump ignored his words and sighed. “You were wonderful last night, Moley. MR. Moley,” she said dreamily. “I never knew you could be like THAT.”
Moley sat up. “Wha… Whaddaya mean?”
“You’re the greatest, Mr. Moley.” She stroked his cheek and navel. Moley sagged with the bed as she moved closer. “What a man! Come here!”
A while later Moley lay puzzled and exhausted and wondered if Sugarplump would notice if he spiked her praline ice cream with little chunks of Confederate mule jerky. Alas, however, he found upon his eventual arising that it was not to be. Outside, most of the dogs in town were ending their war over the remnants of ancient mule. The police and fire departments had been on alert all night, attempting to quell a citywide canine uprising that rivaled the Siege of ’63 in scope and spectacle. It was another day for which Vicksburg would be famous.
Moley paused to watch as his dust settled along the rutted gravel road. He squatted behind the mottled trunk of a huge sycamore, his thin frame well hidden, one hand lovingly caressing a wild gray beard, the other tenderly clutching the hot clay pipe in which smoldered a good grade of local grass. “Guess nobody followed me,” he whispered to the sycamore. “Guess the old camouflaged van’s hidden well enough, too.” He wore his moth-eaten slouch hat, butternut wool jacket, jeans, and a “Mississippi Militia” belt buckle dug in 1975. He’d had his weekly shower this morning.
“Better get going. Ain’t got all day.” He grunted as he scooped the metal detector and shovel from their rests against the tree, wheeled, and strode confidently along a faint path into the ravine. After a while he tuned the detector and swung it carelessly, listening intently to the earphones strapped across his head. “Nothing in here. Hunted out by them creeps from Jackson. The scoundrels try not to leave much for us Vicksburg boys,” he said to no one. “Gotta get up in them hills, around the trenches.”
Except for an occasional blip from the detector Moley traveled a silent world. No footsteps. No briars scraping like nylon zippers along his jeans. Couldn’t even hear his own lonely voice, just a drone that tickled his cheeks.
“Moley,” he said absently without knowing. First, “The Mole,” then “Moley,” and now, sometimes, even “Moldy.” Just jealous. Them boys from Jackson was jealous. He could dig more civil war relics in one trip than they got in a year. Called him “Moldy.” Ha!
He jerked to a halt as the detector whined like a tomcat in heat. “Nothing supposed to be here,” he mused softly. “Sounds like iron. Enough to fool the discriminator.” He held the detector head two feet off the ground in order to judge size and location. “Square, I think. Symmetrical. Good smooth signal, too, soft on both ends. Ain’t deep, neither.”
Moley frowned as he drove the sharpshooter into the hillock that hid the signal; a dull “clunk” jarred his soundless world. Wood. Old board with nails, probably. Scraping dirt and vines aside he backed away in wonder. “Coffin!” he ventured loudly, throwing aside the earphones to uncover the entire top of the plank box in a fury of raking spade. “Wonder what’s inside? Gotta look. Might be a body. Naw. Too small.”
He pried the cedar box open, exhilarated at once by the greased skins that wrapped the contents. Rifles! he thought at once. Ought to be in good shape, too! Indeed, the skins had resisted intact the exposure to water and rot of a hundred-thirty years beneath the surface. Moley plunged his hands inside and withdrew them immediately. Felt like raw beef liver! Garbage! Greasy, slithery, loathsome garbage! Damn! His stomach almost curdled. But he had to see.
Gingerly holding his knife at arm’s length he parted the skins. His eyes widened; a stringy mass of dark brown thongs, slimy with gray and black infestations, spread before him. They emitted an overpowering stench. The refuse gagged and suffocated; he turned to avoid nausea. “What the hell?” he wondered aloud.
Whatever it was, Moley recognized that it had been meticulously packed for preservation. It had been important to the Boys in Gray. It deserved inspection. He completed unearthing the wooden container, pulled it from its burial plot, and with great effort dragged it to the van, there loading it on board for the short drive to his small house on Confederate Avenue. He already suspected the truth.
Moley spread a canvas over the cool grass under the oak in his backyard, dumped the contents of the box upon it, then hosed the narrow strips until they separated and the slime dissolved and washed away. “Yep,” he muttered disappointedly as he examined the bits and pieces and hung the dark segments across the wooden fence to dry. “Jerky. Mule jerky. That’s all the boys had to eat. Hidden so it wouldn’t be stolen, probably. Why couldn't it be rifles? Damn!” The fence was covered by hanging fillets when he finished. He went inside to scrub his hands. “Why not rifles?” he asked the washbasin.
The idea that he would sample the jerky came later in the day as he endured his weekly wait in the long line at the employment office, stroking his beard and pulling occasionally at his flaming pipe. The hot sun would dry the jerky, kill any germs. It would be a unique experience. Maybe he would write it up, send it to North-South Trader Magazine. Might make him famous!
Sugarplump lay sprawled near the television devouring praline ice cream, her favorite, when he returned. “Home, Sugarplump,” he yelled, “what’s for supper?”
His wife glared from the tortured sofa, a trickle of white dripping from her pudgy fingers to the floor. “What’d you say, boy?” she snarled.
God! Moley thought. Did I screw up again? “Sugar-lump, dear,” he hastened. “What kind of day did my sugarlump have?”
“I’ll crane you with my jacker for calling me ‘Sugarplump,’” she growled. Her “jacker” was the length of heavy 4/0 copper cable Moley had given her to use in case of car-jackers. She carried it everywhere now.
“Sorry, dear,” Moley whimpered.
“Sorry don’t cut it!” The sofa and the pine floor beneath it shrieked as Sugarplump shifted her weight to rise; her little piglet curls had gone flat with perspiration.
“I’ll be out back,” Moley wailed as he hurried out the back door toward the small shop where he spent much of his time. He checked the jerky as he passed. Yep. Dry and hard and brittle as Geronimo’s bones. Smelled good, too, like mule. He selected a strip which cracked like peanut brittle when he bit off a small chew. “Not bad,” he marveled. “After a hundred and thirty years underground, not bad.” He munched hungrily astride a tall stool and flipped the worn pages of his Confederate belt buckle book.
“Pretty damn good,” he decided in a little while as he retrieved another strip and gnawed. “Kinda tastes like deep-fried field mouse. Can’t beat a good roast field mouse. Pull their tails straight and cook ‘em crisp and eat ‘em kinda like the corn dogs you get at the fair, with lots of mustard. Mmmm…”
The photographs of Confederate buckles floated and fused. “What the heck?” Moley asked the
book in awe. “Ain’t smoked no grass lately…”The book sailed nonchalantly across the shop, then soared back, pages wildly flapping. It hissed, “Moley, are you a man or a field mouse? Go show that woman who’s boss. Give it to her good! You know you can!”
“Sure I can!” Moley bellowed in answer. “I’m a man. Rebel. Brave. Potent.”
Moley bid the hovering book a resolute “good night,” slammed the shop door, and strode toward his bedroom. The snores roaring from Sugarplump’s open mouth deterred him not. “Wake up, Sugarplump,” he demanded as he jumped in bed and rolled down the incline to her body. He pulled the “jacker” from beneath her curls and dropped it to the floor. The mass stirred and sputtered. “Let’s play, Sugarplump,” Moley ordered.
“Go to sleep, jerk,” Sugarplump muttered sleepily. “I need a man. Which you ain’t.”
That was the last Moley remembered. Except for the dreams. Strange dreams…
Moley was consuming a roast leg of Rottweiler when Hot Shot limped in and asked if he’d hunt old man Goodson’s place tonight. “Got a trail we can find in the dark,” Hot Shot boasted as he tore himself off a chunk of Rottweiler. The roast was even better than the grilled leg of coyote they’d had last week. “Let’s get Sugarplump to drop us off at midnight, pick us up at five AM.”
“Old man Goodson and his shotgun,” Moley speculated with full mouth. “He won’t know?”
“Naw. Half deaf. Never hear us.”
“How about you? How’s your rear end?”
“Sore. But not too bad.”
Hot Shot suffered from a widely-recognized cannon-ball-diggers malady, “Hot-Shot Hemorrhoid,” named not after the fiery projectile, but after this very person, “Hot Shot” Hawkins, the first relic hunter to collapse in the field while attempting to lug out two eight-inch cannon balls at once. Hot Shot recovered, and was now famous for the statement uttered while the medics were lifting him into the ambulance: “Don’t leave my balls! Get my balls!” The medics were mystified, but after checking closely to be sure Hot Shot was whole, concluded he was merely delirious from pain.
“Let’s do it!” Moley said.
“We’ll be like two slippery snakes in the grass!” Hot Shot crowed as he massaged his bony posterior and smoothed the few strands of dark hair atop his sunburned scalp.
Having by midnight fortified themselves with sufficient quantities of beer that they would have agreed to a nighttime scuba dive into the Mississippi River, should there be a possibility there were relics down there, Moley and Hot Shot loaded their equipment aboard Sugarplump’s Caddy. After a short drive they disembarked at the drop-off near old man Goodson’s place. “Be back here at five, Sugarlump,” Moley said as he got out.
Sugarplump grinned; her upper lip curled over the tip of her nose. “Sure thing, Moldy,” she said. “Just you be here. Good luck.” Her caustic giggle gave Moley the chills. He stared, ill at ease, as the taillights faded. Then he chased after Hot Shot, who had scurried on ahead.
The forbidden hillside, only a hundred yards from Goodson’s house, proved to be all they had anticipated. “Already got a big signal!” Hot Shot squealed after a few seconds. He clawed the ground and puffed. “Schenkl shell!” he yelled after a moment. “It’s a beauty!”
Moley rushed to get his detector into operation. After a dozen traverses it screamed over a wide signal that practically shouted “Shell! Artillery shell!” Moley tore into Mother Earth with his spade, and inches beneath the surface heard the “whump!” that meant shovel had encountered vintage 1863 cast iron. Parrott shell!
“Did you growl, Moley?” Hot Shot whispered anxiously while Moley blissfully stroked his cannon ball.
“Growl?” He removed the earphones. “Why would I growl? I’m the happiest man in Mississippi.” “Listen.”
Moley heard it then, a low-pitched rumble that must be coming from the throat of the biggest hound in Mississippi. He straightened, clutching detector and spade and Parrott shell. “Dog,” he said casually, pointing. “Big dog. In them bushes over there.”
“More than one,” Hot Shot said fearfully. “A pack.”
“Mr. Goodson!” Moley recalled Sugarplump’s malicious cackles. “He let his dogs out. Reckon someone called him…”
One of the beasts stepped boldly into the moonlight and growled fiercely. “Chow, ain’t it?” Moley ventured. “We ain’t never tried leg o’ Chow…” Another Chow stepped into view, growling more earnestly than the first, then another, and another; in moments the entire pack of monstrous animals was in view, each yowling and smacking and savoring the next few minutes… “I don’t know about you, Hot Shot,” Moley whispered, “but I’m fixing to haul cabooty…”
They never figured that man was faster than Chow, but with the howling pack right behind, they were in the process of proving just that…
“Wake up! Moley. You’re having another wet dream!” It was Sugarplump, whacking his mouth with a wad of fist and kicking his ribs with a number twelve.
“Wha… Wha…,” Moley managed as he tried to control feet still churning under the bed sheets. “What happened?”
“You and those dreams,” she complained.
“Nightmare,” he answered groggily as consciousness returned. “Musta been that mule jerky. Musta had a fungus or something.”
Sugarplump ignored his words and sighed. “You were wonderful last night, Moley. MR. Moley,” she said dreamily. “I never knew you could be like THAT.”
Moley sat up. “Wha… Whaddaya mean?”
“You’re the greatest, Mr. Moley.” She stroked his cheek and navel. Moley sagged with the bed as she moved closer. “What a man! Come here!”
A while later Moley lay puzzled and exhausted and wondered if Sugarplump would notice if he spiked her praline ice cream with little chunks of Confederate mule jerky. Alas, however, he found upon his eventual arising that it was not to be. Outside, most of the dogs in town were ending their war over the remnants of ancient mule. The police and fire departments had been on alert all night, attempting to quell a citywide canine uprising that rivaled the Siege of ’63 in scope and spectacle. It was another day for which Vicksburg would be famous.
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