“Boomer” Winfrey

Varmint County Correspondent

Now that local elections are over, the big news around Varmint County is that school is back in session and with that, the onset of the football season.  

Admittedly, football ranks beneath several other activities on Varmint County’s list of favorite pastimes. Fishing remains number one among most males above the age of six until Autumn, when hunting moves into the lead. For years, school officials have struggled to find ways to counter the wave of absences among boys from age twelve up during the first couple of weeks of hunting season.

As spectator sports go, however, nothing holds a candle to Varmint County Viper football. Coach B. O. Snodgrass is back on the sidelines again this year, apparently not slowed down much from his recent by-pass surgery that left girl’s basketball coach Penny Haig running the team for a good part of last season.

Penny declined B. O.’s offer to retire and let her have his job. “What you need, coach, is a probation officer. Those boys are all yours!” she declared as she flipped B. O. the keys to the training room and sprinted for her car.

That wasn’t much of an exaggeration, actually. Several of the players on the Viper squad may or may not be over the 21-year-old age limit for playing high school sports. Birth records among the Haigs, Hockmeyers and several other local clans are not all of that reliable, while Doc Filstrup has delivered most babies in Varmint County for the past four decades.

“Doc, you wouldn’t really tamper with your birth certificate files to help B. O. keep some of his players, would you,” Judge Hard Time Harwell once asked.

“Tamper with medical records? Judge, that would be illegal, unethical, immoral and downright cheating! How can you ask such a thing?”

“Well?”

“I’ve never tampered with any records. Of course, I’ve been delivering babies around here for a long time. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them but I’ve got all the records right there in that file cabinet.”

“What file cabinet?”

“The one in the corner there, buried under those big piles of paper.”

“Doc, it would take somebody weeks just to dig through all those paper files.”

“That’s what those auditors from the secondary school athletic association said when they came to inspect the birth certificates of Cobb Hockmeyer, Booger Bratwell and that Pennywell kid last year. They asked me if anyone around here knew how to use a computer.”

“I told ’em most of my patients come in for knife or gunshot wounds, broken bones or the occasional baby delivery. Anything more serious I send ’em over to the hospital at Burrville.”

“Did they find the birth certificates they were looking for?”

“Strangely, no. But then they gave up after a couple of hours when a big rat ran out of one of the piles of paper and up the lady clerk’s dress. They just asked me instead if I could recall when those boys were born.”

“Did you recall?”

“I told ’em that the best I could remember, I delivered the Pennywell boy during the big blizzard of ’98. That’d make him around sixteen. Booger was born sometime shortly after his pa, Barney Bratwell, was killed when that still exploded in, uh, 1996. He must be around seventeen now.”

“I think Barney was killed in ’92, Doc,” the Judge interrupted. “I sentenced him to six months in the county jail but suspended the sentence for a week so he could put his affairs in order. One of those affairs was apparently to cook off a last batch of moonshine, so he avoided jail time the hard way. That’d make his boy, let’s see, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two.”

“Judge, who said Booger was Barney’s boy? If you recall, Barney’s wife Ruby Ann was carrying on with Corky Haig around the time Barney met his fate. If you ask me, Booger looks a lot more like a Haig than a Bratwell. He might have been born a couple of years after Barney’s demise, it’s hard for me to recall exactly.”

As it turned out, whether Booger or Cobb Hockmeyer were too old to play or not, proved to be a moot point. Those two and three other members of B.O.’s team were all suspended a week before the season started when they were charged with attempted armed robbery.

Cobb and his cousin, Danny “Zit” Hockmeyer, along with Booger Bratwell, Pit Bull Pyles and the team’s quarterback, Scoobie Pennywell, were all spending a last weekend out on Mud Lake, boozing it up and running up and down the lake in one of Ike Pinetar’s rental pontoon boats. Scoobie, being Ike’s nephew, got the pontoon for free while the Hockmeyer boys brought along a jug of the family special brew.

“You know what we ought to do?” Cobb commented as the boatload of ballplayers passed the “Ohio Navy,” a cluster of ski boats and cabin cruisers owned by summer tourists, most of them from Ohio, that were tied up together near a popular swimming spot below a rock cliff.

“We oughta run them Yankees off the lake,” Pit Bull slurred. “Theysh always hogging the besht diving spot there at the Painter Cliffs.”

“Naw. We oughta give ’em a little taste of Varmint County hospitality. Wonder if them Yankees ever seen any pirates before?”

And so a plan was hatched. The five boys went back to Mud Lake Marina and swiped a pirate skull and crossbones flag that Ike had tacked to the wall behind the live bait well. That particular flag had been flown by Archie Aslinger and a gang of cronies when they played a practical joke a few years back on Lawyer Philbert McSwine.

Philbert and his lawyer buddies were at an all-night poker party on Sheriff Smokey’s official Varmint County Sheriff’s Department houseboat when Archie and Ike, along with several other local rowdies broke in on the party, disguised as pirates and armed to the teeth. They made Philbert walk the plank and stripped the other lawyers of their clothes, leaving them all marooned on a small island while the pirates made away with the houseboat, chips and money.

The lawyers finally flagged down a fisherman and sped to the marina to report the theft, but there the houseboat was, tied to the dock with every dime still sitting on the card table and their clothes stacked neatly in a corner.

“Pirates! My ruling is you boys had a bit too much to drink, went for a swim and let the houseboat drift off on you. Ike found it floating empty, not half a mile from the marina,” Judge Harwell, who was in on the joke, proclaimed.

The football players planned to pull off a similar stunt with the gang of tourists who were swimming and sunbathing at the foot of Painter Cliff, named for the “Painters” or panthers that used to roam these hills when the first settlers arrived.

The boys roared up to the half dozen ski boats tied around a large pontoon boat, dressed out with fake beards, eye patches and head scarves, and waving a collection of shotguns, pellet rifles and one rusted machete.

“We’re the Mud Lake Buccaneers and we want all your beer, whiskey and women,” Pit Bull Pyles demanded as the collection of balding accountants, overweight insurance agents and middle-aged housewives looked on incredulously.

Finally, one of the older men in the group replied, “You can have the women,” glancing at his wife. “Take ’em, please. But damned if we’ll give up the beer without a fight!”

With that, mild-mannered stockbroker Curtis B. Klinghover of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who spent six weekends a year playing soldier with a group of militiamen in the Catskill Mountains, pulled out his semi-automatic rifle and began spraying bullets at the pirate boat.

Fortunately for the boys, Curtis’ had the aim of a stockbroker, not a militiaman. He managed to shoot a few holes in Ike’s pontoon boat, shoot out the windshield of his Ohio cousin’s expensive ski boat and saw a tree in half up on the top of the Painter Cliff, but he hit nobody before he exhausted the ammo clip.

Before Curtis could reload, the five wannabe pirates, who had all dived in the water screamed, “We surrender! It was all a joke.”

Unfortunately for B. O.’s football team, Curtis Klinghover failed to see the humor. Nor did Ike Pinetar when he surveyed the damage to his rental boat. Sheriff Hiram Potts also failed to appreciate the joke, leaving the players’ fate in the hands of Judge Harwell.

“Before I proceed further with this hearing, I would like to see the victims in my chambers,” Hard Time announced after all five boys offered to plead “guilty” to charges of public intoxication and creating a nuisance.

“You folks can insist that these young men be tried on the original charges of attempted armed robbery and assault. If they’re convicted, they will spend considerable time behind bars and maybe come out as hardened criminals,” the Judge told Curtis B. Klinghover, his wife Matilda and his cousin Sid.

“What is more serious, the Varmint County football team will lose its starting quarterback along with half the offensive line. Folks around here are not likely to take too kindly to you if that happens. I would advise selling your lakeside home and moving as soon as possible.”

“Uh, your honor, is there another alternative?” Curtis asked.

“We can accept their guilty pleas of creating a nuisance, Caleb Hockmeyer will pay for the repairs to your ski boat and Mr. Pinetar’s pontoon boat, I’ll fine the boys court costs and place them on probation for a year and after a two-game suspension, they will all be back on the football field before the big game against Burrville.”

“We’ll accept the plea bargain,” Curtis replied. “One more thing, your honor. My rifle is still being held as evidence. Can I get it back?”

“Mr. Klinghover, considering your aim with that weapon, or lack thereof, I’ve been asked to hold on to that weapon.”

“Who asked you to keep my rifle?”

“That would be your wife, your cousin, your brother-in-law and the commander of that militia group you belong to. They all feel you should be a notable exception to the right to go armed.”