Frank jamison

Naked Chase Ends in Arrest

Ricky Stokes was the first one out of the house and right behind him came Horace Riley, screaming at the top of his lungs about what the hell did he think he was doing in his house and Horace, of course, without a stitch of clothes on when all this happened. I swear to God it’s the truth. You can’t make this stuff up.

What happened was that Dorene—that’s Horace’s girlfriend and, once upon a time, his wife, but that’s another story—decided it would be nice if they had them a bottle of wine to help out with the lovemaking. She came out of the bedroom wearing her favorite sheer, baby doll nightie and started behind the little bar Horace had made out of an old dresser he’d found over at the Sweetwater Flea Market one Saturday morning. But when she bent over to see what kind of wine there might be, she spied little old Ricky hunkered down with a half-empty bottle of Old Taylor in his hand. Lord, you could have heard the two of them screaming halfway to the courthouse.

Well, that brought old Horace down the hall in a heartbeat to confront Ricky, who was as terrified by Dorene’s near-nakedness as Dorene was of him seeing her. Ricky dropped the Old Taylor and headed for the door with Horace right behind him, with the intent to fling the bottle at Ricky and the whiskey dripping down his arm and Dorene yelling to not mess up the carpet as Horace was out the door in hot pursuit of Ricky, who was already off the porch. It wasn’t fit to hear what all Horace was yelling at Ricky.

The ruckus brought the neighbors out to see what it was all about. Miss Willy Jackson next door was aghast, to say the least, and she called Bo Bentley. He’s the sheriff and used to live next door to Miss Willy on the other side when he was a child, and she thinks he got to be sheriff partly because she had something to do with his discipline as a boy. What she told him was that that no-good Horace Riley, just like his whole family for years, was terrorizing the neighborhood, running up and down naked as the day he was born, and poor Ricky Stokes was trying to get away from him, but Horace was hoping to beat him with a bottle. It looked like whiskey, she said, as if that was proof enough of everything, then she hung up the phone and went back out on the porch to berate Horace for his no-goodness and all. She yelled at him to leave that poor boy alone and get himself back inside and put some clothes on before the sheriff gets here.

This, of course, brought to Horace’s attention the fact that he was naked, and he realized that a man his age—Horace is seventy-two years old and Dorene is seventy—might present an unwholesome sight to anyone not momentarily interested in sex like he and Dorene had been a few minutes earlier. So he ran back to the porch about the time Bo came screeching around the corner from Hays Avenue, just in time to see Horace taking the steps two at a time. Everybody said later they had no idea old Horace could do that kind of thing. What they meant was take steps two at a time, not the buck-nakedness event. They knew he was capable of that, though he was normally an all right kind of person, except for his and Dorene’s relationship.

For the life of them, nobody can understand what they see in each other and why, after fighting for so long and getting a divorce the way they did, they can now live together in almost perfect peace and harmony. It doesn’t make sense, and things have to add up for folks.

Well, when Bo got out of the squad car and hitched his belt up under his belly, the ones who had been watching from behind their window curtains came out on their porches to see what was going to happen. Bo looked around at all of them and raised both his hands up in the air like he was some kind of Jesus about to calm the waters and told all of them in a loud voice (he sounds sort of like a preacher anyway) to be calm and relax, that everything was under control now, but that was just what he thought because now everything was just about to begin, as you can probably guess.

What he did next was go up on Horace’s porch and knock real hard on the door frame and yell inside. He told Horace to come on out with his clothes on. Nothing was going to happen to him if he gave up peaceably, and to that Horace yelled he hadn’t done anything except to try and defend what was rightfully his own and even to protect an innocent lady from the no-good prying eyes of Ricky Stokes, so why should he have to give himself up? It was Ricky who should be arrested anyway.

This, of course, took Bo by surprise because it wasn’t his impression of what had been taking place at all, and he tended to trust Miss Willy’s judgment a bit more than he should have since she had partly raised him and all. So he yelled in again to Horace to not be difficult, to just come on out now and everything will be all right, but be sure to put on some clothes first. Then he turned toward the street and looked around for Ricky, for he knew he’d need Ricky to verify the particulars of the event, but Ricky, of course, had left for further parts by now. Bo yelled out for him, calling his name, Ricky, Ricky, you come back over here if you can hear me. I need you to tell me what Horace done to you. Ricky, Ricky. 

But Ricky was so far gone, he couldn’t hear his name being called. You see, Ricky lives down in Fite’s Bottom. It’s a section of town down near the river, and that’s no doubt where he’d headed because nobody down there would say a word to Bo about Ricky. They keep to themselves, if you know what I mean.

How all this started was that Horace had Ricky coming up to his house to do some yard work and odd jobs from time to time. The neighbors liked this arrangement a whole lot because at last Horace was keeping up his property for a change, and just that morning he got Ricky to help him haul in the wine and whiskey he had purchased out at Bootlegger’s with which to stock the brand new bar he had converted from the dresser. Our county is legally dry as a bone, but Bootlegger’s stands are ready to satisfy folks’ convivial requirements, and everybody knows Bootlegger’s is owned lock, stock, and barrel by Miss Willy’s no-’count brother, Jubil. Naturally Ricky was easily tempted by all that wine and whiskey and decided to help himself to just one bottle. His idea was, if Horace found out, to tell Horace to just make it his payment for the work he’d done, but of course he didn’t expect to get caught by Horace, and the idea of getting caught by a near-naked Dorene never crossed his mind.

So after Horace paid off Ricky and dismissed him for the day, Dorene was so excited by the new bar that she thought they ought to try it out right away. Now I’m not sure how you try out a new bar other than to open a bottle and have a drink and maybe say a little toast or something like, Here’s to the new bar, but Horace was feeling manly because of his accomplishment with the dresser conversion, and he took Dorene in his arms and gave her a long, wet kiss. We know this because Dorene told it to her friends down at the Kitty Kut Hut—that’s Kitty Markham’s beauty parlor in the garage back of her house.

But after getting paid, Ricky didn’t go on home right away like he should have. He hung out behind the garage and peeped in the window now and then to see if the coast was clear for him to slip in and take a bottle, and he was tickled and somewhat amazed to see old Horace and Dorene having that long kiss; and when they broke it off and went back toward the bedroom, he saw his chance and slipped back inside. Old Horace had stocked up pretty well on the whiskey, and there were several bottles of wine, which neither he nor Ricky knew a thing about. To Horace, there was red wine and white wine, and that was the extent of it, but he wanted to fully impress Dorene with his bar accomplishment, so he’d bought several of each in addition to the whiskey.

This array was disconcerting to Ricky, not knowing which wine was good, red or white, though he understood whiskey as such and thought any of the whiskey would be good enough, so he took the bottle of Old Taylor, his theory being that since Horace had purchased several of those, he probably wouldn’t miss just one. Then Ricky decided, since Dorene had Horace well occupied in the bedroom, he would just sit on the floor behind the dresser-bar and have a little sip for the road, so to speak. The one sip led to another and another and, before long, Ricky was well into the sampling and didn’t notice the bedroom’s return to silence or else he wouldn’t have had to suffer the fright of being discovered by the near-naked Dorene.

Anyway, here’s Bo out on the front porch at Horace and Dorene’s, yelling out to Ricky to come tell him his version of the events, and Horace yelling at Bo, telling him it was all Ricky’s fault, and Miss Willy yelling at Bo, as if he was still a small child living next door to her and it being her God-assigned duty to participate in his proper upbringing, to do something to restore the peace like he was voted in office to do. Bo finally realized he’d lost control of the situation and needed to do something to calm the waters and restore his authority. What he did was walk off the porch without another word and get in the squad car and drive on back up to Hays Avenue and out of sight. This left Miss Willy at a loss for more words and Horace with a feeling of great relief.

It was Dorene who told, down at the Kitty Kut, what transpired over the next few days that led to the final arrest, which came within a hair of disrupting forever the neighborhood’s well-established order, for no one could understand how it was that Miss Willy got taken away in the squad car by Bo himself and fingerprinted and how it was that she was required to give a temperance speech at the high school once a year for the next three years, which, of course, led to her creating the youth temperance league, but that’s another story.

The fact that there was no way for Dorene to know the details of all she told to the Thursday afternoon assemblage at the Kitty Kut is irrelevant. Anyone who will stand in front of a crowd that possesses the incisive judgment of the Kitty Kutters and tell how she was having vigorous sex while she was being robbed of a prized possession cannot be held to a higher standard than anyone else. After repeating the details, beginning with the dresser-bar conversion and how her idea of a celebratory toast led to the diversion into sex and ultimate discovery of the theft in progress, she told how Bo Bentley himself had called her on the phone next morning and asked her to come down to the station and explain her version of the events, which she did, to Bo’s mild embarrassment. The Kitty Kutters wanted her to repeat exactly what she told Bo and she did, never mind that it was substantially the same as what she had just a moment before told them and they were all duly impressed, as if it was the first hearing of the matter.

And if y’all don’t believe it, she said, Bo’s got it all on tape, and y’all can go down and make him play it for you. 

Nobody doubted a word.

Two days after Dorene gave what she called her confession to Bo, Ricky came up out of Fite’s Bottom to Spencer’s drugstore. Ricky sometimes works for Spencer doing bike deliveries. Spencer’s is probably the last of the old-time drugstores. It still has a soda counter, and Spencer keeps a rickety old bicycle and hires Ricky to do home deliveries, except for prescriptions. Nowadays you can’t trust just anybody with prescriptions, so he makes folks come in for those.

As soon as Ricky showed himself, Bo was on him like a duck on a June bug and had his side of the story even before they got back to the office. Ricky swore that all he did was drink a little bit of Horace’s whiskey until Dorene scared the bejesus out of him, which made Bo laugh a little. And then he said, when Horace came at him, it was like he was some kind of common thief. He was afraid for his life, which made Bo laugh again. He said they busted out the door into the yard and there was Miss Willy screaming at Horace to get decent, like she wasn’t up to nothing herself.

That was the pick in the weave that led to Miss Willy’s undoing.

It wasn’t that Bo immediately understood this salient fact. He didn’t have a clue as of yet, but he thought he’d better get Miss Willy’s angle on the story before he put it to rest so the neighborhood could return to its peaceful rhythms, interrupted only occasionally by a small infarction such as this one. He parked in front of Miss Willy’s and eyed Horace and Dorene’s place as he went up the walk to knock on Miss Willy’s front door. Horace had mowed his yard, which Bo took as a good sign. After two or three tries with no answer, he figured Miss Willy might be out back, so he headed around the house, only to discover Jubil’s old white pickup parked in front of Miss Willy’s shed. The truck was loaded with cases of Old Taylor and several of red and white wine. The brand of the wine didn’t mean any more to Bo than it had to Ricky. Wine isn’t a major factor in our town, as you can see.

Well, none of this would have meant anything other than Miss Willy’s bootlegging brother was over for a visit, except that, at that very moment, Miss Willy emerged from the shed and yelled back inside to Jubil to move those other two cases of whiskey to make room for the new batch. That was an instant before she saw Bo standing beside the truck and, at that very moment, Bo had a glimmer of helpless revelation. He had the drop on them, goods and all, but it was the Mother Teresa and guiding light of his youth he’d dropped in on right in the midst of the act, so to speak. His predicament differed from Dorene’s and Ricky’s only in the particulars.

According to the story that Miss Willy swore to the Kitty Kutters, it was she who saved the day. It went like this. Now, Bo, she told him. Don’t get all excited. After that little episode the other day with poor little Ricky Stokes and Horace exposing himself like he did, somebody just had to do something, so I took up the call. You had your hands full, I know. You always were such a sweet boy and so dependable. Look how you’ve grown up to be a pillar of our town. Anyway, Bo, I thought I ought to give some temperance talks down at the school and maybe at the Rotary Club if you’d arrange that for me. I told Jubil here I’d need some samples of what’s available in these parts, don’t you see. He drove all the way over to Brownsville and risked his own good reputation to bring these back so I could show folks how close we all are to temptation. Now take me down to the station and fingerprint me so I can tell those children firsthand just how humiliating it is to be taken to jail. Would you do all that for me, Bo?

She smiled her sweet, saintly smile.