A Pleasant Evening Down South

A couple of hours ago, I remembered that I owe McDougal about $1,600 (US) for several assorted expenses and debts that have added up over the past six nights.

I also remembered that McDougal had my family tied up in gunny sacks in the crawl space beneath his trailer.

I also remembered that he had poked three holes in my liver with an ivory handled letter opener he'd received as a gift from Margaret Thatcher in 1981 ... and that he'd bound my hands and feet with leather straps and had secured a long piece of nylon (maybe about 30 feet long or so) to my ankles and was dragging me behind his Cutlass at that very moment.

I wondered why I hadn't thought of all that before.

I wondered if surgeons would be able to reattach my right thumb or to cosmetically repair the words McDougal had etched into my back with an ice scraper: cogito ergo vagina.

I wondered if McDougal was going to stop the Cutlass and come back and talk to me again.

I wondered if he was going to tell me another joke like the last time we stopped, when he said:

“A rabi, a nun, and a prizefighter walk into a bar. The nun and the prizefighter sit in a booth, and send the rabi to the bar to place their drink orders. The rabi says to the bartender, 'I'll have an imported beer, two bottles of Listerine, and a dozen egg whites.' The bartender says, 'Your honor, I can understand about the beer, and even the Listerine, but what the hell are you going to do with a dozen egg whites?' The rabi didn't say, a word. He shot the bartender eight times in the mouth, then went and sat down with the prizefighter and the nun. The nun was shocked. She says to the rabi, 'Mr. Ashcroft, why on earth did you just shoot that man?'”

I'm not really sure how the joke ended, or for that matter, if it was even a joke at all. I think McDougal might have actually been recounting some experience from earlier in the evening. Either way, I passed out before McDougal got to the punchline because the plastic bag he'd placed over my head restricted the amount of oxygen that was available to me at the time.

He didn't stop though until we got back across the border, when he said he forgot why he had cut off my thumb and tied me to his bumper.

“That's funny,” I said. “Over the course of this evening, I've forgotten most things I knew in my life, too.”

McDougal said that in my case, that actually made sense because he'd removed the left side of my brain and sold it to some Mexican scientists for beer and gas money in Matamoros.

It had been a long night, and McDougal and I were both pretty hungry, so we stopped at a Denny's in Brownsville. McDougal ordered the Texas Scrambler and I just had some toast.