The Hillbilly Pt. 03

The Hillbilly, Part 3

This is the third installment in my Hillbilly series, and it goes back in time to before the first story when Hillbilly's kids were still young. I should be honest with you - I never anticipated this becoming a series. I had one idea, I wrote it, and I was done. I was lucky and people seemed to like the character. Then after some thought I came up with a second story idea and now here I am with the third. I hope the character doesn't become threadbare and I will try to keep it interesting until it isn't.

As before, there is no sex in this story.

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They call me Hillbilly. It goes back to my time in the service and a lot of people don't understand what that name means. They think it means banjo, ignorant, inbred, and dangerous, so let me set you straight on a few things. First, I don't play banjo, but I do play a pretty good bluegrass guitar when the spirit moves me. Second, I don't make moonshine! Not officially, if anybody asks. Moonshine is dangerous if you don't know how to make it right. I drink beer, bourbon and the occasional rye. Third, I'm educated. I went into the service after high school because I got an invitation from Uncle Sam that I could not refuse, and then I went to community college when I got out. Fourth, I'm not inbred. I went to school with my wife, met her parents for the first time when we were in high school, and she waited for me while I served. As for dangerous, I'll let you decide.

There are few places I feel more at home than in a deer blind, and that reminds me of a joke my momma used to tell when she was trying to teach me to speak properly. My favorite desert is pecan pie, and I would pronounce it "pee can". She would always correct me. She'd say, "It's pronounced "pee kahn. A "pee can" is something you take into the deer blind with you, so you can relieve yourself after you drink too much coffee!" I thought that was pretty funny, so I'd mispronounce it every chance I got.

There is one place that I feel more at home than in a deer blind and that's home. Home is everything to me. Home is where my heart is. It's where my wife sleeps and where we raised our kids. Home is where we welcome our friends, and shelter strangers when they need shelter. It's the center of the family and I protect my home as I protect my family. I raised my kids to live in the world, to do right, to make a difference, and to be honorable people. On those rare occasions when the world is not honorable in return, I do what needs to be done.

I'm also what we call a hillbilly engineer. That means that I find creative ways to get complex things done simply. Which brings me to a certain Saturday in early fall. It was back in 1998 and biodiesel was just an idea that a few people were kicking around. There were no commercial biodiesel plants within a hundred miles of where I lived, but a few of us had read about it and it seemed like a cheap way to run our trucks and heat our homes.

Cooking biodiesel is a lot like making moonshine. Like I said, I don't make moonshine, officially, but I know people who have tinkered with it from time to time. It's more of a hobby than a profession. There were a lot of problems in making biodiesel for a hillbilly engineer to solve and we set about gathering and building the hardware we needed. The local restaurants and burger joints were more than happy to give us their used cooking oil since they had to pay to have it removed. The raw oil needs to be filtered and the water drawn off. This requires the right amount of heat, and the wastewater goes to a pig farmer. Then you add a methoxide catalyst. You agitate the mixture and let it rest until the products settle out. The process produces biodiesel and a glycerin coproduct that needs to be drained off. The last step is to remove any remaining impurities and that leaves you with the problem of disposing of the waste products.

You like the way I described that? Like I said, I'm not ignorant.

Cooking biodiesel takes some practice to get it right and then it takes scaled up equipment to produce enough biodiesel in make it worth the effort. We did our early attempts with a coffee maker on an old bench, but making any significant volume of it required fifty-gallon drums and a small barn.

I was never sure it was worth the effort, but it made us feel self-sufficient and any good hillbilly will tell you it's important to be self-sufficient. Then once we were making enough of it, we needed to tune our trucks and furnaces to run properly on biodiesel fuel. We soon became local heroes, and it became difficult to find the used vegetable oil we needed because others were following our lead.

I will admit it produces a very pleasant French fry smell when you start your truck engine, but my wife started to complain that the house smelled like a famous burger joint that shall remain nameless.

Like I said, it was a certain Saturday in early fall and five of us were in my barn cooking biodiesel. A barn is a hillbilly mancave. Things were going well, and we were at that stage where we were waiting for the biodiesel and glycerin to separate, so we took the opportunity to crack a few beers and talk.

JP was more of an honorary hillbilly having grown up in the city, but he was a good old boy at heart, and he often had some very good ideas. "You know we should save some of that raw oil and cook the Thanksgiving turkeys with it."

The rest of us looked at each other like JP was some kind of urban barbarian. That was when Jesse spoke up saying, "Well, I don't know how you do it back in the big city, but here our wives take a lot of pride in cooking that turkey just right. It's sort of a friendly competition between them."

"Yeah, my wife stuffs the bird with herbs from her garden and cooks the stuffing in a pan." Danny was licking his lips and had a look in his eyes like he could taste that bird just thinking about it.

"I'm not saying we should keep them from doing their thing." JP wasn't letting go of it easily. "I've been reading about people who boil their birds in cooking oil. They get a hard boil going and then slowly lower the bird into the pot."

"Whew! I bet that gets interesting if the bird isn't bone dry! Nothing like exploding hot oil to put some excitement in your Thanksgiving." Jase was laughing hard at the whole idea.

"Well, yeah. You want to dry the bird first, but it cooks in minutes instead of hours. It's supposed to come out with a nice crispy skin, cooked through, still tender and moist... It sounded pretty good when I read about it."

"People actually do that?"

"Yeah! We could give it a try."

The guys were starting to nod like they were willing, but there was a lot of skepticism.

The conversation drifted to other topics for a time and then the tone of the afternoon changed. Jase was looking uncomfortable, and he kept looking at me like he wanted to say something, but he couldn't seem to find the words. I finally looked at him and said, "You're looking constipated. You okay?"

The guys thought that was pretty funny.

"Look, um, I need to tell you something, but I don't want you to misunderstand." There has never been a conversation in the history of the world that started that way and ended well. He said, "You know my cousin Kenny? He works at the same place Barbara works."

Now I need to tell you something. I have a sister that my parents named Barbara, but she's always been Babs to me. Then I married a woman also named Barbara. I told her I did it because it was just too much trouble to learn another name, but the truth is I have always called my wife "Barbara" because I am so filled with love and respect for this woman that anything shorter wouldn't do her justice.

So Jase is telling me about his cousin that works with my wife. He leans forward and looks me in the eye. "I'm just telling you what he told me and nothing more. Kenny tells me that there is this asswipe where he and Barbara work that has been bragging about getting it on with your wife." I suppose he read the expression on my face, and he held up both hands as if ready to deflect the blow. "He and I both agree it's bullshit, but I thought you should know."

Nobody was laughing now. "What's the asswipe's name?"

"Curtis."

"Does Curtis have a last name?"

"Miller."

Miller was a common name here, but I knew a lot of them, and I'd never heard of a Curtis.

"I want to meet him."

"You know it's bullshit, right? No way Barbara would go along with that kind of crap."

Jase was worried that I might do something I'd regret, and I was thinking he might be right. Now I'll admit there isn't a man alive who loves his wife and who won't feel a chill of fear run up his spine when he hears a story like that. Despite that, I knew my wife and she had too much class and too much integrity to cheat. Curtis Miller and I were going to have a day of reconning, and it was coming sooner rather than later.

That night over dinner I asked Barbara if she knew a Curtis Miller.

She frowned and then smirked and shook her head. "He's a player at the office, or he thinks he is. Most of the women just laugh at him behind his back, but a few of the young ones seem to be buying into his nonsense."

"What's his game?"

Barbara gave me an odd look when I said that. Then she shirked and said, "He's a water cooler Romeo. From what I hear, he talks smack but it's all whack." Then she laughed at her own joke. My wife thinks she can talk street.

"He isn't a problem for you, is he?"

That's when she put her fork down on her plate. She gives me the eye, and if you're a married man you know what I mean by that, and she says, "Okay, what's going on?"

I'll be damned to hell, or at least the guest room, if I'm going to give a straight answer to that question. "I just heard he was giving you a hard time. That's all."

I figure on a good day I'm one to two steps behind my wife and on a bad day I'm three or four steps behind. This was a very bad day.

"What is Jase's cousin Kenny saying about me?"

"Nothing!"

"What's he saying?"

"I'm serious, he isn't saying anything about you."

She wasn't buying it.

I gave up. "He says that this Curtis Miller is talking smack about you. He claims..." How did I get myself into this position? "Curtis says that he knows you better than he's entitled to."

"You think..."

"No! No. I said he's saying things. I'm trying to figure out how forceful I'm going to be when I talk with him about it."

Barbara thought about things for a minute. Then she said, "I don't want you doing anything. I'll talk with Kenny on Monday."

I knew better than to argue with her, so I decided to see what next week would bring.

Monday night Barbara stormed into the house, threw her purse on the chair, and looked at me like someone was going to die and I was just hoping it wasn't going to be me.

"I spoke with Kenny today."

"Yeah?"

"I want you to have a talk with Curtis for me. Can you do that without getting arrested?"

I thought about it for a moment. "I can. Exactly how should I express myself?"

"Don't get caught!"

That was the first and the last time she ever gave me that answer. It may have had something to do with how I responded.

I spent the rest of the week studying my quarry. I found his den and I studied his movements. I knew his paths and his habits. Contrary to popular belief, you don't track your game so you can catch up and shoot them. You track them to learn where they will be and when they will be there, and then you set up an ambush where you have the best chance of success. By Friday I was ready.

Curtis liked to go to the clubs and cruise for desperate women with no standards. From what I learned, his success rate wasn't good. I waited for him outside the club where he was trolling unsuccessfully and hoped he would come up empty. He did not disappoint me. I took him as he unlocked his car. I've caught fish with more fight in them than him. One minute later I had him tagged, gagged, and bagged in the back of my truck and all the while he never saw my face. I drove the back roads home and managed to hit every rut, every bump, and every pothole along the way. He was mildly disoriented when I backed into my barn.

My original plan was to hang him from the beam by his ankles like so many deer carcasses that I'd hung in that same location, but I'm a careful hillbilly and I read that human beings will die by any of several means if they hang upside down for too long. I was reserving that punishment in the unlikely event that he'd been successful in his efforts, and like I said, I was sure he hadn't been. When I called it quits, he was secured in a fifty-gallon drum we normally used for raw oil. His legs were tied, his arms were bound behind his back, he was gagged, and a burlap bag covered him from his head to his waist. I made sure he was breathing and then retired for the night. Barbara had been oblivious to my activities, or pretended to be, and asked me if I was still planning to speak with Curtis. I told her that I thought tomorrow would be a good time and slept well that night.

Saturday morning I walked down to the barn and quietly removed the lid from the drum. Curtis was quiet, but he was breathing, so I tapped him on the head to let him know I had arrived. That was just to get his attention. He tried to scream which was followed by what I can only assume was a string of invectives, but the gag kept it all to a muffled garble of unintelligible grunts.

"Curtis? Curtis! Are you listening to me?"

He grew quiet and I think by that point I had his attention.

"Curtis, you've been bothering my wife and I want it to stop."

That prompted a renewed string of desperate claims I could not understand.

"Curtis? Curtis! I didn't ask you if you are bothering her. I'm telling you that I know you have been bothering her and I want it to stop."

He was silent now, so I think I was getting through.

"I've been told that you stand around with your dumb-ass friends and you talk trash about my wife. It seems that you claim to have gotten into her pants."

The response that followed was something that I did understand. Even with the burlap bag over his head, I could tell that he was vigorously shaking his head in denial.

"Curtis, this is going to go a lot faster if you don't argue with me."

He was breathing hard now, but he was listening.

"Curtis, I expect this to stop."

There were more garbled sounds, but I had a pretty good guess at what he was trying to say.

"If you don't know who I'm talking about, then it might be a good idea to stop talking smack about all the women. Do you understand me, Curtis?"

He was not only nodding yes; he was bobbing up and down to what limited amount the drum would allow.

Like it or not, and I wasn't sure which way I felt about his sudden conversion of the spirit, I couldn't return him to the world until it was dark again. So I tapped him on the head and said, "Okay, Curtis, I want you to stay here for now and think about what you've done. I'll be back later." That seemed to upset him again, but I resealed the drum and wandered back to the house for breakfast. Now don't worry about Curtis. There were air holes in the drum lid, but I wanted him to hear that lid coming down and the drum being sealed, and I wanted him sitting in the dark while he wondered what I was doing. I thought it was a part of the experience that would help to focus his mind while he contemplated his own behavior. Then I gave the drum a little bump and roll just to make him think about what might happen.

All told, I visited Curtis four more times that day. Each time we had the same conversation and each time he seemed more agreeable than the time before. I think that by the time night fell he was a changed man. Two hours after midnight on a very early Sunday morning I dragged Curtis into the back of my truck and drove to the club where he had been trolling for desperate women just twenty-four hours before. I untied his hands and instructed him to lie there until I was gone. He seemed to take my directions seriously and for all I know he was still there when the sun came up.

Barbara says he never bothered her or the other married women again, and Jase tells me that his cousin says Curtis is a changed man. As for me, I remain a happy hillbilly with a loving wife, happy kids, good friends, and a biodiesel rig in the barn. It took a bit to get that drum clean and we finally decided to use it for kindling and replaced it. It seems that Curtis... Well, you don't want to know that.

We did try that turkey boiled in oil experiment and it turned out quite well. The wives decided they still wanted the traditional bird for Thanksgiving, but we are welcome to try our hand at any other time during turkey season and from time to time we do. I mean, what is life without a little danger? After all, we are hillbilly engineers.

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I have a relative who does that turkey boiled in oil and I've tried it. I like it! It does require a lot of oil and a roasting pan is simpler in the long run, but I can't argue with the results.