You ever have a think? I mean a sudden inspirational think that just strikes you out of the blue.   Now a think is the same thing as a thought just more intense. Course you have to be careful when it happens that you’re not standing in water, I mean it is a good way to get electrocuted. Big word there for me, I must have had another think.  They are starting to flow off my brain like water. I had better be careful may end up going to the head of the class in school. Not good place to be, then the teacher expects you to know the things. Good way to get you behind kicked by the rest of the class, showing off.

                Well it happened to Max one day. I mean it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. He came up with a brilliant idea. You could see the wheels turning as his face turned red from the strain of it. Actually it may have been the strain of sitting on the john in the outhouse. Yes, outhouse. An in-house was something that the city folk had, indoor plumbing. That was something we only dreamed about out in the boondocks. However Max was living in luxury though, he had a two holer outhouse, me, I only had a one holer. This is where we were at, in the middle of doing our business when he had this sudden attack of a thought. 

                “Fishing.”

                “What?” I said. “Fishing” he repeated, “we need to go fishing.”

                Now that was a revelation, we had not been fishing all summer and the river ran though my place. It was not much of a place to fish, but it had lots of carp. Not much good to eat, but they were fun to catch; they put up a fight like a bobcat cornered in a hole in the ground.  

                So all we had to do now was get worms. We looked under a few rocks, logs and boards there were a few around, but we were short of good fishing worms. The only thing left was to go to where we knew they were the garden. Now this garden was Max’s moms pride and joy and if you didn’t want to suffer life and limb you stayed out. Not that ever stopped us before, so off we headed after a stop to get a shovel for digging with. We hit the garden and it was fast and furious for a few minutes cause it was a hit and run mission. We had to get in there and get the worms and get out before we were caught. It only took a few minutes got a good bunch of worms together and I mean good fat ones not the skinny little ones. 

                We grabbed out poles and headed out. We were well on our way when we heard a huge explosion back at his house and then his mom at which point we put it in high gear and took off. We could hear her yelling at us and saying things that just didn’t sound like love about us. We could only guess that she found the worm dig. Just because we had to dig up a few, seven or eight, plants to find them, we put them back, sort of. After all the fishing was more important.

                We got down to the north end of my place where the river had a small branch that split from the main river. It was slow moving and prefect for fishing. Had a nice bank to sit on and relax. Course we did not have all day to fish, we had to be finished up and gone by the time the sun was going down. Not because we needed to be home, nobody seemed to care about that, it was the mosquitoes that came out then. These babies would pick you up and carry you back to their nest where they called all the relatives together and had thanksgiving dinner and you were the main dish. 

                We got the poles unlimbered, wormed up and into the water. We then sat back and yarned the day away. We managed to catch a couple of nice ones in between naps and were trying for another one before we had to get. 

                All of a sudden Max’s pole bend in half and started to unwind. He was fighting with it and finally got it up to the bank and we both just looked at it open mouthed. On the end of his pole was a turtle. Max had managed to hook it by the shell and drug it in backwards. It was about the size of a dinner plate, but when it turned to look at us I knew it was not going to go good. It turned and looked at us with its jaws opening and snapping shut and you could hear that sound echoing all over the place, those jaws looked like they could bite a railroad spike in half,  it had to be a snapping turtle. As it headed toward us it was now the size of a basketball, those jaws could have bit a railroad rail in half and it was moving at the speed of light, the thing was just a streak as it moved to the attack.

                I took one look at that killing machine and I dropped my pole and jumped over that 4 wire fence like it wasn’t there and was outta there. Max on the other hand tried but he slipped in the mud, fell on the fence and was trying to get over it when that monster, now the size of a German Sheppard,  grabbed him by the pant leg and was getting ready to drag him to its lair for a leisurely lunch.  

He was hanging on to the fence trying to keep from getting eaten when his sister showed up. I told her Max was going to be eaten by a snapping turtle that was the size of a Volkswagen. She just looked at me like I was the village idiot and walked over to where Max was hanging on the fence. When she got there her eyes opened to the size of dinner plates and she started laughing like his being eaten was the funniest thing she had ever seen.   I knew she was evil and now after this there was no hope for her. 

                She kept laughing all the time and crawled over the fence as I watched in horror knowing she was going to help the turtle and feed Max to it. I closed my eyes, Max’s eyes were already shut tight and he was hanging on the fence with a death grip. 

When we heard her talking we knew she hadn’t been eaten so we opened our eyes slowly and looked around and there she was bent over and had pulled the turtle off of Max’s pant leg and held it up, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.   She held a mud turtle about the size of a dinner plate in her hand. She walked over and let it go back in the water where it disappeared in a hurry.   

Max and I both looked around to see where the killer snapping turtle had gone. It was nowhere to be seen, it must of seen the Gargoyle coming and knew it was beat and talked its side kick the mud turtle into taking its place and it high tailed it out of there. That had to be it, it couldn’t be anything else.   

                “You guys were scared of that?” she said, “Really, that little thing was what was trying to eat you?”    “You sissy’s are never going to hear the end of this. I can’t wait to tell everybody at school about this.”

I could see that this was not going to bode well for Max and Me. She was talking about how everybody was going to hear how we were scared to death by an eddy biddy mud turtle.  How we were a couple of sissies and it was a good thing she was around to watch over us. To change the subject of her obvious mental problems, we asked her what she was doing at our fishing hole anyway. 

She said that mom had send her to find us and drag us back and make us put the garden back the way was and she said, with a evil grin, that she had been assigned to watch us and make sure it got done. There was something wrong with this picture we were being unjustly punished for something that was not our fault. To work in the garden is one thing but to put the Gargoyle in charge was cruel and inhumane. I mean fishing is something that has to be done, it is the American way and so you just had to dig worms and just because the garden was the victim of our worm hunt was not our fault, it was there, but to put the Gargoyle in charge of us, that was not right, we were doomed.

                We started walking back home, looking nervously over our shoulders as we went.   We knew that half ton; car eating, killing machine was out there someplace just waiting for us and we knew that it knew that we knew that it knew there would be another day to take us to lunch.  

 

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