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.

The Story Page