Barked Up The Wrong Tree

It's a chicken or egg thing, isn't it? Folks and their names. You either better have a great sense of that infant sitting in your arms when you stick a name on it, or early on you better have a great sense of what your name means so as you can arrange your life accordingly, because if not--in either case--someone gets stuck with the wrong name and their whole life can be a rather painful exercise in disconnectedness. Take the above-pictured Stanchion Landreaux for instance (he's the one on top, the human; the dog below is Cooter, Tuck Jennings's bitch). With a name like Stanchion Landreaux you'd think he'd be a lord of the manor type, an expert tamer and ruler of his back 40, someone at peace with the chaos of nature, the wilderness. Far from it, though. As far as possible. The name notwithstanding, Stanchion Landreaux has the personal make-up of the guy standing in an office cubicle, licking glazed donut shards off his fingers and warning people that the toner is low, not like he knows how to do anything about it. If his daddy had been half as wise as he purported and comported himself to be, he would have named his only son something like Phil and done away with the whole Landreaux thing and just made it Landry. Folks is dumbasses most of the time.

It's not like Stanchion is a idiot or nothing. He's got qualities on the plus side. There ain't nobody in the county organize a better pancake breakfast, logistically speaking, than Stanchion. And if you don't mind the odd wince or cringe, his homebrew tastes pretty...well, it gets the job done. Takes the best action photos of the high school's cheerleaders too. That's something. But take him anywhere beyond the smell of a drive-thru or sight of concrete and that boy is more helpless and useless than tits on a shotgun.

So it was with much trepidation in my soul, and I know Curtis Loganbeck's too, when that fool Armsted Callow invited Stanchion along on our annual hunt this year. "Somebody don't get killed or maimed, I'll take it as a happy accident," I told Loganbeck. "Sureshit," he replied, feeling loquacious.

"I'm gonna get me a bear," Stanchion announced when we were still setting up camp t'other side of T.C. Creek. Honey Bun, Stanchion's wife, is gonna have to re-pile that bouffant of hers when she gets the Visa bill for all the hunting haberdashery Stanchion treated himself to. To be kind, the man's portly. Why he needs seventeen layers of vests and such I have no notion.

"If'n a duck don't get you first," Armsted cackled.

"Sureshit," said Loganbeck, feeling convivial.

Anyway, but time passed, as it will insist on doing. We got a few bucks the second day, enough to keep me in venison jerky past March. Stanchion proved to be merely incompetent, which I took as a not insignificant victory. The third morning we was just finishing up the squirrel fritters--the Lunk Stevens way, not the Buddy Mac way, too reedy, them--when Armsted finally cracked with what Stanchion had been doing with the bacon grease every morning. Cracked as in, "Just now what in the hell you doin' with that bacon grease near every day, Stanchion?"

"Soaking my hankies in it," Stanchion replied like duh, as the young ones say. "What else you think I'm doin'? Blow your nose in a sea a bacon aroma like I do, you don't mind the allergy sniffles t'all."

Nonplussed, we all was, at that.

So that day we trekked a ways west, out toward Tuck Jennings's, looking for that big buck we'd seen the day before. "Got a trailer wall just begging for that buckhead," Armsted crowed. I know that trailer wall, opposite the Elvis painting. Call me prejudiced, but that buckhead'd look much better in my den.

"Buck schmuck," Stanchion spat. "I want me a bear. I do believe I'm getting the hang of this hunting thing right quick."

"Well," I offered," how about right quick hanging that shotgun elsewhere? I do kind prize my face is all."

"Sureshit," opined Loganbeck, feeling altruistic.

Half a mile later we were all zipping up, getting rid of Armsted's coffee in some brush, when the barking started. Cooter can smell Loganbeck across about five acres; I do believe the two of them are some kind of long lost kin. Well, a minute later that fyce comes charging down the trail running to Loganbeck, whose arms were already open wide waiting for the embrace, when Stanchion let out an "eeekkk!" (Jesus render me mute if it was anything but a bona fide housewife-encounters-mouse eeekkk!) ear-shattering enough to de-buck the whole county and half of the next one over, too. He--Stanchion--takes off running from whence we came like a monk who just stumbled onto Beale Street. Poor old Loganbeck, standing there waiting for a reunion slobbering like a 60-year-old spinster waiting on an "I do" and that dog run right past him hot on the trail of the turned-tail Stanchion, who by now was maxing out what little speed his corpulence allowed him and yelping sounds I ain't heard since Turgid Noyes had his unfortunate confab with that demonic chainsaw of Bullet Mull's. As he ran for what he thought was his life, Stanchion doffed layer upon layer of his still neatly creased togs, trying to gain more speed I reckon, in a exhibition of dexterity I would have bet anybody but Snipey Horne was far beyond Stanchion's capabilities. Provisions and all whatnot were falling out of pockets as Cooter's barking got closer and closer to Stanchion who, not unwisely if he had possessed the arbor-scaling skills of the twelve-year-old lithe boy he never had been, made the quick decision to get airborne in the nearest tree. But the result, well, that picture up there tells it more succinctly than I could ever muster words for.

That picture, by the way, was snapped by Loganbeck on Stanchion's very own leaping-cheerleader-full digital camera that had fallen out of one of his jettisoned vests' pockets. And as Armsted rolled in the mud cackling, and Tuck Jennings trotted toward us snarling, "c'mere, hound," and Cooter growled and wouldn't let go of Stanchion's ass pocket, and Stanchion whinnied "Help me, Sweet Jesus, help me!" and I surveyed the whole tableau with mild disgust at the entirety of human endeavor, Curtis Loganbeck, after the whizzing sound of the camera's "click," peeked out from behind the camera and, obviously feeling aesthetically proud, said, "Sureashellshit."

"Sixty-five dollars for these trousers," Stanchion lamented afterward, twisted all around and pawing at the bitten-out hole that used to be a back pocket and now just exposed a flabby glute. "Fourteen bucks for a lookalike brand at Wal-Mart," Armsted put in. Cooter lay on the ground snuffling the remains of Stanchion's pocket and hanky; we had been able to separate the dog from Stanchion's ass, but no sane man was going to try to separate dog from fabric or scent. "Beast loves her bacon," was all Tuck offered in the form of explanation or apology.

Yep, Phil Landry would have made sense, but a Stanchion Landreaux barked up a tree with a bacon-soaked hanky makes a man question everything he thinks he knows about anything.

Speaking of which, I know I need to apologize to Orville Schank. God rest your soul, Orville, I know there ain't nothing useless about tits on anything.