HOW TO LOSE A FROZEN HORSE-TURD FIGHT, Part Two

This is the second and final installment of "How to Lose A Frozen Horse-Turd Fight", which is the 4th chapter of the "Oscar" series. Previous chapters are (1) Oscar and Someplace You Don't Want to Go - posted April 13th; (2) Moose and Molly and the Double Wide Bird of Paradise - posted April 29th; (3) Paint It, Wayne - posted June 6th; and (4a) How to Lose A Frozen Horse-Turd Fight Part One, posted July 13th . I recommend reading the chapters in order. Thanks.




Soon the Johnson boys found themselves each morning counting the minutes until the school bus arrived to haul all the kids to town, and living in fear of the end of the school day when it would haul everybody back again. Most of the time around the ranch was spent outside, even in the cold. This was an ordinary thing with the Tooles. Horses lived outside, so they did too. Horses didn't take showers or baths; so ditto for the Toole boys. Horses didn't brush their teeth - well, you get the picture. As the week went on it kept getting a little more frightening every day. With all the slopping through the mud and manure and general filth, by the end of the day everybody on the whole place was quite a sight. Honky and John had brought a lot of clean clothes with them and to their relief, Eliezer and Vernon at least started each day with clean jeans and a laundered shirt on their backs. As near as the Johnsons could determine, neither of their two companions really owned a coat. The cold didn't seem to matter much to Vernon and Eliezer Toole.


By Saturday morning John and Honky could see the end in sight. One more night and they would get picked up by their folks. One more night and they could be returned to the world of a clean kitchen table, swept floors, warm clean covers on the bed, and a bathtub that was ready for actual use in the manner for which it was designed. They were short-timers and they knew it and they could barely stand the wait.


Now it should be said that every last one of the Tooles was good to the guests. Mrs. Toole kept an eye on them and made sure they didn't get into anything really bad. They got fed. They got to wash off with a wash cloth once in awhile. They even got to brush their teeth and Nessie offered to do their laundry after Honky got knocked off a horse by a low tree branch on one of his few riding adventures, and landed in - what else? - a big pile of fresh shit. It was just that the Tooles had their own way and the two Johnson boys had to rub shoulders with it pretty much all day. By week's end mostly they were both just really worn out and tired and homesick.


Out in the yard Saturday morning Billy Brylcreem showed up from somewhere. Neither of the Johnson boys saw him arrive but there were so many horses around, horses everywhere, it seemed likely he had ridden up from his place down by the ferry. Billy was a pretty tough kid himself and was used to recreating with the Toole lads frequently. Now there were five boys to figure out something to do to pass the time. With Billy present Myrna suddenly appeared and kept the numbers even.


Vernon and Eliezer were hunters and a good amount of the time that week had been spent tramping through the trees and brush down by the river, taking potshots at random pheasants and the like. The Toole boys also liked to ride, of course, and spent a fair amount of the week on horseback when they weren't hunting or in town at school. Most of the horses seemed kind of rough and tumble to John and Honky so they managed to stay off them for the most part, especially after Honky got dumped off during his first attempt. Both Johnson boys had ridden, of course, but not like this - the wild stallion in these animals seemed to still be pretty close to the surface as far as the guests could tell.


Another almost unnatural ability that the Toole boys had was - well, they both had throwing arms that were off the charts for any young teen boys. In another environment, with their natural athletic abilities, their raw power, they probably could have ended up playing professional sports. But their lifestyle wasn't going to prepare them for anything like that. Vernon in particular had an arm that could about throw a snowball through a stop sign. Eliezer was pretty close to that level too. Not much technique involved, just raw power. It was just the damnedest thing you ever saw, it really was.


Running around the yard knocking each other into big plowed-up piles of snirt took up part of the day but got kind of tiresome. Snirt, by the way, is what folks around here call it when the snow gets mixed in with the dirt to the extent that a new kinda substance is formed. Plowing the snow on dirt roads or farmyards usually resulted in some hellacious piles of snirt, which just got dirtier and snirtier as they slowly melted - once it warmed up to above freezing that is.
Now the way I heard it, nobody recalls exactly who, but one of the boys suggested they break off into two teams and have a rock fight. Before the snow set in, piles of gravel had been dumped in a couple places in the yard - it was supposed to be dozed out on the farmyard to cover all the dirt and make it more passable during winter, less full of ruts, and so on. Of course it didn't get spread around before the snow came, so now there were two big piles of rocks in the yard.
Certainly it was one of the Toole boys who campaigned for the rock fight. The piles were about twenty-five yards apart and they made some teams - one Toole boy on each team to try and keep it fair. The Johnson boys managed to stay together and joined with Vernon, with Eliezer, Myrna and Billy taking the other rockpile. In no time at all the rocks were flying.


Big rocks, little rocks, handfuls of gravel, it was all sailing through the air. This went on for awhile but somebody figured out that, with the big rock piles to hide behind, nobody was getting hit. And where's the fun in that? You could lob some rocks and try and get them to drop on the enemy but this didn't involve velocity so it wasn't very satisfying - tossing handfuls of gravel into the air maybe caused some dirt and pebbles to rain down on the other team, but most of it wouldn't carry that far so again, no real harm done. A truce was called so the two squads could negotiate some new terms.


Besides piles of snirt and the rockpiles, there was one other thing piled in the Toole yard. With all the horses everywhere there was a real abundance of horseshit around. This was so plentiful it had also been shoved up into piles, but they were much lower hills that a person could not really seek much cover behind. It had been piled when the weather was a bit warmer but now that it had frozen again, you had some nice round "road apples" that were just about as hard as the rocks. And they fit right into the palm of your hand.


By mutual agreement the teams each relocated near their respective horse turd fortresses. The Johnson boys were cold, their fingers were numb except where they were stinging like crazy, their nostrils stuck together when they breathed, and they really just wanted to go indoors somewhere. Maybe wash their hands even. But nonetheless the game was afoot and the battle was re-engaged. Vernon and Eliezer were the big guns on either team, since they had such power and velocity in their throws. Everybody else was kind of laying low at this point, although Billy Brylcreem was up there with the Toole boys some of the time, trying to connect with a target.


Mostly Vernon and Eliezer hit each other. Neither was particularly accurate but they managed to bounce a few off one another. Vernon, having been clocked by a solid steel truck box, getting hit with frozen horse shit didn't bother him much. Eliezer also seemed rather impervious. John and Honky were just wondering when this was all going to play out and they could go eat some cold mashed potatoes or something. Those boys were downright miserable at this point.


Then Vernon decided he needed to strike a lethal blow so his squad could claim the victory. He was as patient generally as a man could be but he was just starting to tire of this business. It was mostly him against Eliezer anyway, and they spent so much time pummeling each other on a daily basis it just wasn't that exciting. He would rather be riding a horse.


So not really having much of an aim, Vernon decided to make up for it with added velocity. He stood up, reared back with a good sized horse turd in his right hand, cocked back his arm, stepped into his throw and fired that turd, straight as a frozen rope as they say, right towards the lair of the adversary. Honky and John crouched halfway hidden behind the dwindling mound of frozen shit, watching the trajectory of this frozen feces missile. They held their breath even more than normal when surrounded by piles of ice cold livestock shit.


As luck would have it, Eliezer had bent down to try and select a satisfactory turd for his next shot, and Billy chose just that instant to pop up to see how the battle was going at the far end of their little Coliseum of Crap. Both the Johnson boys saw what happened next and, to hear them tell it around school afterwards, it was something they would never forget. No matter how hard they tried.


Myrna saw what was coming and said something to Billy like, "Watch out!" The lad turned his head a bit towards her, and right then the Supersonic Horse Turd of Doom and Destruction collided at full speed with his jaw. It was like a new take on the Big Bang Theory or something. Mountains were moved. Seas were parted. Black clouds rolled across the sky at breakneck speed. Or so it seemed to the brothers Johnson as they witnessed the strike from across the yard. The only black hole in sight was the gaping mouth of Billy Brylcreem as the horse shit rocket found it's mark.


Blind-sided as he was, Billy had no chance to prepare - not that much save maybe a quick prayer would be suitable preparation for being hit in the mouth with a frozen horse turd propelled at a speed of over one hundred miles per hour. His jaw shot out of its natural position below the rest of his skull; muscles were torn and teeth went flying. Literally; Myrna had a couple of Billy's teeth in her hair when it was all over with. Blood exploded from Billy's mouth. His nose started to pour out more blood. Billy managed to bite off just the tip of his tongue and promptly swallow it. There was just no immediate way to assess the degree of bone, tissue and tooth damage that was done. The sound was something you might hear if you hit a grapefruit with a claw hammer. Only louder.


Vernon and Eliezer, kind of slow in terms of reacting to anything, just sort of stared at Billy writhing on the frozen ground. Both Honky and John were frozen with fear and for a week afterwards didn't even seem to remember what exactly had happened, though eventually the horrible images all came back to them. But Myrna was there, and she was sweet on Billy as I mentioned before - so she took action.


Not as big as her brothers, Myrna was still a mighty sturdy young gal and no weakling - she could most likely have whomped the hell out of any boys in school up to at least the age of seventeen including the linemen on the football team. She grabbed up Billy in one quick motion, at the same time picking up a couple of his teeth that were on the ground next to him; she headed off towards the house and started yelling for her Ma at the same time.


"Ma! Ma! Open up the door! Billy's got his face busted up on account of Vernon's horse turds! Hey, Ma!"


Eliezer seemed to come around a little at this point, when he heard the desperation in his sister's voice. He started towards the house too, although at a more leisurely pace. He stopped at the old Chrysler station wagon in front of the house and got in and fired it up. He knew they were probably going to have to get Billy to some kind of a doctor; he probably wasn't going to be able to just shake this one off like most injuries that occurred at the Stallion Valley Ranch.
Oscar told me once that Eliezer's name actually translated into "God is Help" in Hebrew. Nobody figured Eliezer actually knew this but somehow I guess he figured he should lend a hand regardless. He got out and opened up the endgate on the old station wagon as Nessie and Myrna carried Billy back out of the house with a big towel wrapped around his head. They tossed him in the back and set off for the ferry dock.




* * * * * * *


About the same time as all this was going on, Milo was downriver a couple miles and going about his business - meaning, he was getting his dynamite ready and working himself up to do a little serious power fishing. He had a date to meet some of those high school kids over by the ferry dock on the Wynona side that afternoon - also, Bird Brain was going to bring him some Seagram's whiskey so he needed to have some fresh fish to make the trade. He already had a bag of dope in the boat and another empty bag to put his catch in, after the bombs went off.
Milo dropped four quarter-sticks of dynamite and then sped off down the river a ways, to set up for the pick-up phase of his operation. His net was ready.

"KA-BOOM! KA-BOOM!" The explosions echoed from deep in the water with a throaty roar. In about a minute the dead fish started bobbing up above the bomb site. Milo got into position.
It didn't take him long to scoop up a half a bag of good looking sturgeon and some pike and even a few nice Rainbow and Brown trout to boot. Milo thought, why the hell mess with fly fishing to get some good trout? These were probably close to 18 inchers and they only took him about five minutes to get a whole passel of them.

Satisfied with his work, he turned the boat downstream towards the ferry. He knew he was late for the meeting with his customers, so he really threw it into gear. He had been pounding down bourbon all morning and he was now finishing off a bottle as he tore along parallel (more or less) with the south bank of the Missouri. There were ice floes here and there and he had to dodge around them as he went. This did not dissuade him from proceeding at full throttle of course.
Meanwhile the Tooles had gotten to the ferry with poor ol' busted up Billy. His dad came running down from the barn, took one look at him and fired up the old diesel engine on the ferry boat - he knew the doc was a hell of a lot closer in Wynona than the one going the other way, with about sixty miles of dirt road in between. Billy was awake and looked at his dad from above the wrapped up towel that covered the bottom half of his face. He wasn't about to actually say anything but just sort of gurgled. His pa knew exactly what he meant though.

The ferry started out for the Wynona dock with just the Toole's station wagon on board. Besides Bartholomew there was Nettie and Myrna in the car along with Billy in the back. Eliezer had come along from the Stallion Valley Ranch and hopped out when they arrived in the Brylcreem's yard in order to locate Bart as quickly as possible; now he took a tremendous leap and jumped back onto the boat as it was leaving the riverbank. For some reason he still held a half thawed horse turd in his hand.

The ferry drew close to the Wynona side and Bart was kind of perplexed to see a whole crew of folks standing on the shore. None of them looked like they were wanting a ferry ride and in fact seemed to be more interested in watching downriver to see if something was coming their way. Bart recognized the bald head of Bird Brain Baner with his built-in bird's nest on the top of his noggin. The rest appeared to be high school boys but he didn't know any of them personally. There were a couple of cars but they had been parked well back from the ferry dock.

About that time Bart realized that there was a huge ice jam along the riverbank right where he needed to dock the ferry. It was probably thirty feet wide and must have drifted up and lodged itself into that position since his last run, which had been the day before. His heart kind of sank because he knew he needed to get his boy onto that dock and into town to see the doctor or dentist or more likely both - but his ferry wasn't going to be able to get through that ice jam. He ran right up against the ice but then idled down the old diesel engine and sat there trying to decide what to do next. The water was too deep and of course way too cold to try and get in there and bust things up by hand.

Somebody on the other side was now pointing downriver and yelling something. About that time Bart heard a noise over the idling diesel. He looked to the west following the sound and saw a site that took even Bart a minute to sort out.

It was that crazy son of a bitch Milo Matrovik in his speedboat. He was coming full speed towards the ferry dock; his boat was swerving like crazy and Bartholomew could now see that the drunken Polish bastard didn't even have a hand on the wheel - there was a bottle in one hand and his big black cowboy hat in the other.

"Wheee-haw!" Milo was hollering. His face was cherry red either from the cold or the booze or both. Two big flour bags were bouncing around by his feet as he stood in the boat, which was careening, apparently out of control, right towards where the ferry was ice jammed, thirty feet from the dock.

Everybody on board and on the shore was watching this whole thing unfold. Nobody knew what to do or what to say, so nobody did or said anything. They just watched. Bart was looking for something to hold onto. With his foot he accidentally kicked over an extra can of diesel fuel that was sitting next to the engine on the ferry.

When that damned speed boat slammed into that ferry, and into the ice jam it was wedged up against, there was so many noises all at once that there didn't seem to be any sound at all. Bart was jarred off his feet. That big chunk of ice had huge cracks through it that made it look like a jigsaw puzzle somebody had just put the finishing touches on. The bow of Milo's speedboat was completely stove in and that thing started sinking so fast you could see it dropping down into the freezing water a foot at a time. At this point though, Milo was no longer on the boat.

At the point of impact, three things had come flying out of that speedboat and onto the ice. One was the bag of dope which was dispersing its contents into the air as it flew. This got the attention of the high school boys on the bank. Another was the bag of fish, and those fish were like flying fish now, they were spinning through the air and ending up all over everything - on the ice, on the deck of the ferry, even some clear up on the bank by where Bird Brain was standing with his mouth hanging open like a barn door after the horses were all long gone.
The third thing to fly out of the speedboat was Milo Matrovik himself. Like some cartoon dog smashing his jalopy into a telephone pole, Milo was catapulted a good twenty feet in front of his doomed speedboat and skidded unceremoniously across the fractured ice. Almost immediately the ice around Milo started to break up and drift. Milo's weight was causing the piece he was on to slowly sink. He was of course out cold.

But then Myrna sprang into action. She leapt from the front of the ferry, gandy-danced across the slippery chunks of ice, and made it to Milo just as his personal ice boat was dipping below the surface on its way to Davy Jones' Locker. She grabbed him by the collar and drug him towards the shore, continuing to skip from one broken sliver of ice to the next.

Milo partially regained his consciousness briefly at some point. What he saw was a large woman surrounded by fish scattered in all directions; this woman had ahold of him and was pulling him towards shore. From the ferry behind him he heard voices - they were calling "Myrna made it! Myrna made it! She saved him!". As he looked back it appeared to him that the entire river was on fire. At that point Milo lapsed back into drunken unconsciousness.

Somehow a spark had ignited the spilled diesel fuel on the deck of Bartholomew Brylcreem's ferry boat. The fuel had spilled over the front and the fire quickly spread; the bow of the ferry and the ice in front of it was covered with flames. It was quite a sight. And a few of those Northern Pike ended up cooked pretty good, as it turned out.

But other than that the fire was not good news. Bart jumped to the engine of the ferry and started it up. He got the ferry going forward as fast as he could; it was pushing the now-shattered ice aside and gradually it made it to the dock on the Wynona side. Then Bartholomew stepped back as the Chrysler wagon driven by Eliezer careened past him through the flames and up onto the dock. Myrna jumped in without the car even stopping, and they set off towards Wynona as fast as possible. In the back Billy Brylcreem looked about and then gurgled his relative satisfaction with the current situation. Bartholomew stepped off his ferry and watched as it was slowly consumed by smoke and flames. Boyd Baner looked at the fish scattered in all directions across the ice, the ferry deck and the riverbank, and decided to just keep the case of whiskey and drink it himself. He set off back towards his car.


* * * * * * *


When word about this whole fantastic incident made its way into town (which really didn't take all that long), I was sitting on a stool in the Vet's Club Bar drinking ice cold Great Falls Select beer with Oscar and Stutterin' Mickey on either side of me. We all listened to the information being relayed, about how Billy Brylcreem got all busted up at the Toole ranch, then got chauffeured across the Missouri by his dad on a burning ferry boat that was rammed midriver by an insane drunken redneck in a speedboat, and then barely made it through an ice storm to get on the road to the doctor in Wynona. Of course the fella relaying this story hadn't actually been there so already the facts were getting a bit distorted.

Mickey's adam's apple was bobbing up and down like a drop target on an overworked pinball machine on a Saturday night. "Whoo-whoo-whaaat happened to B-B-B- whooo! Billy to st-start this business?" he was asking.

The storyteller then relayed what information he had on the horse-turd fight and Vernon's gate-busting shitball strike that felled everyone's new legendary childhood hero, Billy Brylcreem. He also had some info on Milo Matrovik, after they brought him around on the Wynona side of the river by dumping a quarter bottle of Bird Brain's Seagram's down him.

"Milo was pie-eyed as hell, soaked in whiskey, water and fish grease, but he swore up and down that a beautiful golden-haired mermaid had sprung from the water in a shower of ice crystals and fish guts and had drug him to the shore in the nick of time, just before he met his fiery death on the River Styx on his way to the Afterlife once and for all. Milo swore he heard folks calling his savior a mermaid," said Chippy Drago, the young fella who had brought the story into the bar. It sounded to me like maybe Chippy had a bit of a flair for the dramatic himself and that might be more evidence that the story had been somewhat compromised, factwise. I looked at Oscar when the mermaid stuff came up but he was staring at the ceiling and whistling some old Chicago blues ditty, having apparently lost all interest in the entire matter. It did kind of add up, in a sort of wild-eyed redneck booze hound hallucination sort of way. Even Stutterin' Mickey was willing to swallow that one it turned out.

So we all went home. Billy got his jaw wired back together and won a newfound appreciation for Myrna Toole. Vernon decided he better not throw any more frozen shit at anybody unless he was damned sure they were lookin' and could see it coming; other than that things were pretty much unchanged for him. The two Johnson boys found out the best way to lose a frozen horse turd fight and get it over with so everybody could get back in the house before their asses just froze clean off. And they decided they maybe shouldn't raise so much hell at home so that they wouldn't end up sentenced to a week at the Stallion Valley Ranch in the dead of winter with frozen turds piled high in the yard and some overgrown manchild wild maniacs coming at them from all sides. Nobody really knew what Eliezer ended up thinking about the whole experience and it always made me wonder.


* * * * * * * *


As Oscar veered off at his front gate and headed up towards his house that night, I looked at him one last time. He was trying to light one of his exotic cigarettes using a book of matches he had found in a snowdrift outside of the Vet's Club Bar. On the third strike the match took. Sometimes even water isn't wet if things get cold enough I guess.

"Hey," I asked him. "What do you think Eliezer got out of all this anyway? Do you think it made an impression on him?" It was hard to imagine the Toole boys being anything other than disinterested in even the most spectacular events transpiring right in front of them unless horses were involved. But Eliezer had seemed to connect to things in the course of this adventure and like I said, it made me wonder.

Oscar tossed the book of matches into the snow beside his doorstep, as if to say he would know where to find them the next time he needed them.

"God is Help," he said to me without looking back. "God is Help. Eliezer might have to start up his own religion. Or else maybe he'll grow up and buy a bar on the reservation and spread the good word to the People that way."

I couldn't even hear the latch click when the door closed behind him.