The shotgun lay easily up against his neck as he scanned the tall East Texas trees.
"Some folks want that chicken-fried but they ain't never ate a fat bushy-tail."
Brownish waters splashed up leaves long fallen and soaked.
A green snake slithered through the tea-like liquid, leaving a tiny wake.
It was a perfect day to be buried deep in these swampy woods.
Jake recalled the time not long past when this trail was not so quiet
as men in gray and green were everywhere, chattering endlessly on radios;
picking up shiny or burned pieces of some starship housing daring riders
who were spilled out into a burning sky to fall to earth and die.
He didn't know or understand, ole' Jake, much about those folks.
O, he heard some talk but never saw none of it on no TV.
There weren't no TV lookin' where he and the woman had lived all those years.
Seems someone said a woman doctor was up there. Why he didn't know.
"I'm a might sorry to hear of any folks gettin' hurt while doin' good. It happens.
I remember Lester's boy that went off to that Nam place.
They blowed his leg plumb off. He finally came back home down there and died."
Jake had never seen that before! Waving in an old pine he'd checked a hundred times....
A tattered piece of silver cloth. Way to high to reach, Waving like a tiny flag.
" How'd that git up there?"
Dedicated to Columbia Crew, and that fateful day, February 1, 2003
