“Halt! Who goes there!” yells the Colonel from a crouch in the doorway, his revolver pointed at me.
“It’s me, Colonel!” I hold the carbine over my head.
“What’s the password? Oh, it’s you, Dr. More.” The Colonel holsters his revolver and yanks me inside. “You’re in the line of fire.”
“What is the password?”
“Lurline, but get on in here, boy.”
“What’s up, Colonel?”
Now that I take a second look, I perceive that all is not well with him. His silvery eyebrows are awry and one eye, which has been subject for years to a lateral squint, has turned out ninety degrees. His scarlet and cream uniform is streaked with sweat.
“Rounds have been coming in for the past thirty minutes.” He nods toward the shattered glass of the far window.
“Rounds? From where, Colonel?”
“From the pro shop as best as I can determine,” he says, scanning the distant clubhouse through a pair of binoculars.
“Did you notice a golf cart pass here a while ago?”
“No, but I’ve only been here half an hour. That’s why I’m here, though.”
“Why?”
“To mount a rearguard action until they could get the golf carts and swim trophies out. I’m also worried about the molasses cakes and soybean meal in the barn yonder.” He looks at his watch. “The patrol is supposed to pick me up in fifteen minutes. You better get out too.”
“Colonel, what’s going on?”
“Son, the Bantu boogers have occupied Paradise Country Club.”
“But, Colonel, I haven’t seen any Bantus.”
“Then who in hell is shooting at me, the tennis committee?” The Colonel slumps against the wall. “What’s more, they got Rudy and Al.”
Noticing that the Colonel’s hands are shaking, I offer him a drink from my flask.
“I thank you, son,” says the Colonel gratefully. “Reach me a Seven-Up behind you. They cut the wires but the box is still cold.”
The Colonel knocks back a fair portion of my pint, chases it with Seven-Up, sighs. Presently he takes my arm, cheek gone dusky with emotion. One eye drifts out.
“Doc, what is the one thing you treasure above all else?”
“Well—” I begin, taking time off to fix my own drink.
“I’ll tell you what I cherish, Doc.”
“All right,” I say, taking a drink and feeling the good hot bosky bite of the bourbon.
“The Southern womanhood right here in Paradise! Right?”
“Yes,” I reply, even though 90 percent of the women in Paradise are from the Midwest.
“And I’ll tell you something else!”
“All right.”
“We may be talking about two gentlemen who may have laid down their lives for just that.”
“Who’s that?”
“Rudy and Al!”
“What happened to them?”
“Damnedest thing you ever saw,” says the Colonel, settling down in his canvas chair and putting his good eye to a crack that commands a view of the clubhouse.
I look at my watch impatiently and then study the shattered window. Could a bullet have done it? Perhaps, but the Colonel is a bit nutty today. Taking no chances, I sit in the doorway and keep the heavy jamb between me and the clubhouse, even though the latter is a good four hundred yards distant.
The Colonel takes another drink. “I’ve never seen anything like it son, since I was with the Alabama National Guard in Ecuador.” The Colonel is from Montgomery.
As best I can piece out the Colonel’s rambling, almost incoherent account, the following events took place earlier this morning. There is no reason to doubt their accuracy. For one thing, I witnessed the beginning of the incident on the golf links this morning.
The Colonel was in charge of the security and the transportation of the corps of Christian Kaydettes to Oxford, Mississippi, for the national baton-twirling contest. The Kaydettes had put on an early show for the Pro-Am Bible breakfast, immediately thereafter embarking for Mississippi in two school buses, the first transporting the girls, the second their moms, a formidable crew of ladies who had already fallen out with each other over the merits of their daughters and had boarded the bus carrying their heavy purses in silence. (It was this boarding that I had witnessed earlier in the day.) Firecrackers (not rifles, as I had thought) had been discharged. Banners on the buses read BEAT DAYTON, Dayton, Ohio, being the incumbent champs. Colonel Ringo rode point in his armored Datsun followed by the bus carrying the Kaydettes, followed by Rudy on his Farhad Grotto motorcycle, followed by the busload of moms, each a graduate of the Paradise karate school. The rear was brought up by Al Pulaski, formerly of the Washington, D.C, police and now president of PASHA (Paradise Anglo-Saxon Heritage Association), in his police special, an armored van fitted out with a complete communications system.
Mindful of rumors, however preposterous, of a conspiracy to kidnap the entire Kaydette corps and spirit them off to the fastness of Honey Island Swamp, Colonel Ringo was careful in plotting his route to the Mississippi state line, where the little convoy was to be turned over to the Mississippi Highway Police. Ruling out the interstate as the obvious site of ambush, he selected old state highway 22. All went well until they reached the wooden bridge crossing a finger of Honey Island Swamp formed by Bootlegger Bayou. The Colonel, riding point, felt a premonition (“I learned to smell an ambush in Ecuador,” he told me). Approaching the bridge, however, he saw nothing amiss. It was not until he was halfway across and coming abreast of the draw that he saw what was wrong, saw two things simultaneously and it was hard to say which was worse: one, the cubicle of the drawbridge was occupied by a bridge-tender in an orange robe — Bantu! — two, the draw was beginning to lift. In the space of two seconds he did three things, hit the accelerator, hit the siren to warn the buses, and began to fire his turret gun (“You got to shoot by reflex, son, and I can fire that turret gun like shooting from the hip”).
He made the draw, felt the slight jolt as he dropped an inch or so, shot up the cubicle with the turret gun and, he felt sure, got the Bantu. The girls made it too, though they were badly shaken up by the two-foot drop.
“I got ever last one of those girls to Mississippi, son,” says the Colonel, taking another drink. I watch my flask worriedly. “You talk about some scared girls — did you ever see a school bus make eighty miles an hour on a winding road? But we made it.”
“But, Colonel, what happened to the others?”
The Colonel clucks and tilts his head. “That’s the only bad part.”
Once across the bridge, he didn’t have much time to look back. But he saw enough. The Bantu bridge-tender was out of commission, dead or winged, but the draw went on lifting. Rudy, on his Farhad Grotto Harley-Davidson, saw he couldn’t make the draw and tried to stop short, braking and turning. The Colonel’s last sight of him (“a sight engraved on my memory till my dying day”) was of the orange and green bike flying through the air, Rudy still astride, and plummeting into the alligator-infested waters of Bootlegger Bayou.
The moms? The second bus stopped short of the draw, Al Pulaski in his van behind them.
“You mean the Bantus have captured the mothers?” I ask.
The Colonel looks grave. “All we can do is hope.” On the plus side, the Colonel went on to say, were two factors. Al was there with his van. And the mothers themselves, besides carrying in their heavy purses the usual pistols, Mace guns, and alarms, were mostly graduates of karate and holders of the Green Belt.
“Many a Bantu will bite the dust before they take those gals,” says the Colonel darkly.
“Well, I mean, were there any Bantus attacking? Did you see any? Maybe the bus had time to turn around and get back.”