JUST THE
FACTS, MA'AM
From the Chapter "Deep
Roots"
The Jones
family had an older, wizened relative known as, “Sis.”
She was very small, skinny, and sort of all wrinkled up.
Her face was always beet-red from the sunburn she got working in the beet
fields and at other outdoor jobs all of her life.
She had to run around in the rain to get wet, but she could out-work and
out-cuss any woman and most men. She
wasn’t a particularly bad or immoral woman; she just didn’t give a rat’s
posterior about what people thought about her or her behavior.
She enjoyed hanging around one of the downtown pool halls, hustling beer
and cigarette money from the younger, cocky male pool shooters by beating them
at games of nine-ball.
When
Sis was ninety-two years old she was in the pool hall late one evening doing
what she did best, beating naïve and unsuspecting males at pool.
At
one o’clock
in the morning she sidled up to the bar after
winning twenty dollars from a completely obnoxious thirty-five year-old dipstick
from
Nebraska
who had the personality of Bevis and Butthead.
She lit a Lucky Strike, leaned over the bar, and shouted at the bartender
to bring her a shot of Old Crow bourbon with a beer chaser back.
The dipstick from
Nebraska
, already discombobulated by having been hustled
at pool by this ninety-two year old red-faced, dried-up looking woman with
snow-white hair, tried to salvage his pride by getting in the last word.
He
shouted to the bartender, “Whiskey, my arse.
Bring this gnarled-up, pool hustling old crone some warm milk before she
dries up and blows away.”
Most
of the regulars hanging at the bar could have warned this smart-aleck not to
fool with Sis, but he had been acting like a horse’s rear-end all night, so
they decided he deserved to experience what was to come next.
Sis
jumped down off the bar stool, grabbed a pool cue from an unsuspecting shooter
and, holding the pool cue like a baseball bat, began advancing toward the fool
from Nebraska, leaving no doubt by the invectives flowing from her mouth what
she intended to do with the pool cue. Most
of her imprecations had something to do with taking "batting practice"
on certain sensitive parts of his anatomy. I
wonder what she meant.
When
the police arrived to restore the disturbed peace, she had the smart-aleck from
Nebraska
cowering in a back corner of the pool hall, and
was about to visit considerable pain and suffering on him with her pool cue.
The police officer let the man escape with his hide intact.
That slacker from
Nebraska
was never seen in that pool hall, or for that
matter, in
Fort Collins
, again. Sis
got off with a stern warning from the police officer, and a round of applause,
accompanied by several rounds of free drinks, from her admirers at the bar.
Sis
accompanied my aunt, my brother, and me on a train trip from
Americus
to
Colorado
one summer.
She brought along a half-gallon glass jar filled with strips of dried
beef. She chewed on those awful
smelling beef strips nonstop for the three days it took the train to reach
Colorado
. The
smell alone was enough to knock a buzzard off a meat wagon, although she seemed
impervious to it. The mephitic beef
strips had such a negative effect on me I developed a deep, lifelong repugnance
for corned beef, pastrami, and Slim Jim beef jerky.
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