“My daddy’s not a hippophagist!” I shouted at Worrell who works with me at the 7/11 where just that morning we had put together a tasteful anti-acid display of blues surrounded by a rectangle of greens and an even larger rectangle of reds. Worrell specializes in artistic displays. Like he saw this 7/11 over in Twin City where the laxatives were spread all over creation, and before you could say Pablo Picasso, Worrell pointed out to the manager how to make it more aesthetic. All this from an art course he took at the leisure services night school. My college art course only looked at cube-shaped nudes, so I wasn’t much help.

“I’m just saying that’s the third horse that’s disappeared mysteriously this year. And your daddy is the only man in One Round who ever ate horse meat on a regular basis.”

“Just because he was stationed in Spain for two years don’t mean he’s a hippophagist.” The reason I knew this word was that my daddy loves horsemeat. I kept waiting for Worrell to ask me what a hippophagist was, but he was too sly.

“People in Spain eat horses. Your daddy was in Spain. Says right here in this Reader’s Digest article how this little English girl had a palomino pony some Spanish horse eaters stole one night and the next day them and their whole families had horse stew with onions and carrots and all the trimmings. Invited the whole village. Course them villagers were starving and the British folks was breakfasting on strawberries and cream.”

We were at the rear end of the store. I shoved another six pack of Vanilla Coke up into the freezer.

Worrel punched in the number of can totals on his Texas Instruments calculator designed for Calculus III, but which Worrell uses for inventory. He thinks it impresses our manager, a snappy-dressing black chick who just graduated from the local diploma mill and treats us like cockroaches. “Man, them Coke people are flooding the market with vanilla.”

“Look,” I said, “he eats Vienna sausage, Spam and even eats potted meat with saltines, but that don’t make him a horse eater.”

“You know what goes into potted meat, don’t you?” he asked, looking up at me. I ripped open the plastic rings on a fresh six pack. “New Cokes ain’t gonna sell,” I said, before he could say: horsemeat.

Worrel has this tiny black devil’s fuzz under his lip which he’s shaved down to a long point. Already looks like a Weasel. Now he looks like a Weasel on a Black Sabbath.

“People don’t like change,” I said. “They want the same Coke their granny drunk.”

“My granny called it dope.”

Up at the front the Sheriff sauntered in. “Derwood,” he said, loudly, staring at the new, half-naked Laker’s Cheerleader on the Miller’s display. “You and me need to have a talk.”

I rolled my eyes and wiped my hands on my apron as Worrel whispered: “You gon’ rat on your daddy?”

The Sheriff, Cairo Keys, bought some beef jerky which he gnawed on while we chatted. His fat cheeks puffed out showing red veins and his collars flipped up at the tips showing the little plastic strips he used to keep the collars from flipping up. His daughter went through One Round High–Go, Jackets!–one grade below Worrell and me so we had the lowdown on all her immoral escapades. I went on to two years of college but couldn’t keep my grades up on account of a cheerleader named Patsy Klein. I swear that was her name. If you watch films of any Georgia Southern games between ‘92’and ’94, Patsy’s the cheerleader at the top of the pyramid. She loved to squeal when she dropped –till the guy who was supposed to catch her didn’t and she wound up in traction. Somewhere between getting out of traction and getting back into school she found God and lost me. I was in the middle of my favorite class, Intro. to Existentialism. We met at night in a trailer out Highway 80. The professor gave us a lot of free weed so our minds would be open to all these complicated European ideas. We talked about how Sartre said trees were nauseating and the professor kept asking who would take the leap of faith first. One night, a freshman took the leap of faith off the top of the trailer and his parents sued the school. After that I always associated Kierkegaard with double wides.

“Your daddy won’t answer the front door,” the sheriff said. He leaned his elbow on the counter and glared out over his sunglasses. “Look, I know he’s got some kind of legendary green thumb. But he’s got to help out. I know he’s in there. Called his name a dozen times. Even cranked up my bull horn.”

”His hemorrhoids are acting up,” I said, trying to look nonchalant as I broke open new quarters on the register. “May have to go up to the VA hospital in Dublin.”

“Well, I got Willie Dingle out there in the back seat. He wants to swear out a warrant for your Daddy on account of this horse thing. Willie says he knows your daddy did it because he found them weird boot footprints in the barn. Says your Daddy’s the only man in One Round wears them boots.”

The sheriff was right about the boots. Daddy bought them in Spain and they have this weird square heel that he pays extra for when he has them resoled. But why was he stealing horses from Willie Dingle, a toothless, black, seventy-five year old widower? Only has one horse. I decided this was low—even for my horse-thieving dad.

“Derwood,” he said, leaning forward and whispering, “I got to drive twenty miles over to Lyons to see that vegan Judge Sara Ann Pickwick to get a search warrant. How you think a vegan post-menopausal judge is going to respond to your daddy stealing and eating horses? I’d rather be hog tied in my lounger and forced to watch Oprah for a month. Talk to your daddy, and please, please, tell him to come down to see me. I mean poor old Willie Dingle can barely walk, but he’s pissed as a swarm of mad bees. His horse was named Rastus and Willie says he had his “daddy’s spirit” or some other little Johnny Congaroo hogwash. And I already got folks sniffin’ behind me that will phone the ACLU in a heartbeat.”

As he drove off, I could see Willie Dingle in the back seat with his hat and sunglasses on. He smiled and showed me his gums.

***

“Where’d you put the shufflings?” I said as I passed through the den into the kitchen where I got myself a beer and tossed one to daddy. He was leaned back in his Barca watching “Tales from Talladega.” The “shufflings” is what he calls what’s left of the horse after he’s claimed a few pounds of delicate meat. I looked into the freezer. Sure enough, there were a half-dozen huge plastic zip lock sacks full of horse meat. Even had them labeled: Willie Dingle.

On screen Bobby LaBonte was spinning out down onto the grass and the announcer was bad-mouthing his pit crew for botching the replacement job on his last set of tires.

“Smart-mouthed announcer. Pronounces every damned consonant in the language.”

This is daddy’s intellectual side showing. He knows and uses words like “consonant” and “vowel.”

“Sheriff came by the store, “I said, “Said he tried to get you to come to the front door but you wouldn’t.”

“I was asleep.”

That was a lie. Daddy sleeps four hours a night. The rest of the time he’s on the inter-net learning how to compost with large animal carcasses, the ones he stole.

“When the law comes to your front door, intelligent people open it,” I said, pointing to my temple with my index finger.

He popped open his beer. “The law,” he smirked. “Cairo Keys ain’t the law.”

Daddy’s about five feet tall, bald and has a cleft lip. He gets a disability check from the government cause when he came back from Europe he was stationed at Fort Stewart where the Army sawed down this giant pine tree that fell on his stomach. He was taking a snooze during rifle practice. He has periodic bouts of acid reflux, ulcers and general nausea. He gets a free case of Pepto every month delivered to our front door by your friendly UPS man. Since I never had the urge to join our fighting forces and since I went two years to college, he thinks I’m suffering from mantropy, but I don’t drink smoothies, I don’t own a small pug-face dog, and I have never had a pedicure.

He took me out to his small garden—he has four– where the prettiest tomatoes you ever saw were plumped out fine and full on the vine. He pointed to a spot about fifty yards from the house. His back hoe had already dug out a large hole that was filled with manure and a plastic tarpaulin.

“The shufflings are going right down there where they can do their God-given duty.”

Daddy’s a composting whiz. All three of his gardens are fruitful and multiplying. He mulches and recycles everything, even horse “shufflings.”

“Everybody says you can’t compost large animals but I’m doing it. Landfill won’t take them because of contaminants. If I have them rendered, they separate the fat and protein—and protein is what makes these ‘maters grow so fat. Composting is the only way to go, Derwood. Read a study they did at Cornell.” .”

All the old arguments.

“See, look here, “he said. “I ground old Rastus’ head up into three sections and put those sections down over there.” He pointed to a freshly unearthed spot. “His innards went over there.” He pointed to another plot fresh with upturned earth.

“Willie Dingle didn’t have but one horse.”

“He was a walking corpse, Derwood. Willie was still letting his fourteen grandsons ride him and Old Rastus’ arthritic bones popping like a string of firecrackers. It was flat cruel. Horse needed to go down.”

“Willie’ says the horse was his daddy’s spirit.”

“Yeah, well, I knew that son of a bitch. Man shot his own brother in the back over a football bet.”

I long ago gave up explaining to my daddy the concept of theft, of other people’s property. I thought about what that Native Creek Indian said who visited my philosophy class. We were smoking and reading Carlos Castaneda and it seemed appropriate. He said nothing belongs to man; the earth belongs to the earth, but I read later that he wanted back all the Creek lands west of the Ocmulgee for a mega gambling development he called “Indianola,” an Indian Disneyland where we could smoke the peace pipe with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and contribute to the Native American cause at the roulette wheel.

“Sheriff mentioned the ACLU.”

Daddy gave me that look: jaw dropped, eyes rolling.

“The A friggin’ CLU can kiss my A friggin’ SSS.

”Ain’t but two ss’s in that word,” I pointed out.

***

The next day I woke up to the sound of a bullhorn calling out “Derwood Beasley” in our road out front. I looked out the window and there were nearly a hundred people, TV cameras from WTOC in Savannah, and a whole bunch of men and women in white T-shirts that read “In the Beginning Dog Created the World” and “Animals are human , Too.” I panicked since me and Daddy have the same name–Jr. and Sr.–and I was sure Cairo Keys had located my own private weed patch out in the woods out behind my house. Then, I saw the signs: PETA. I jumped out of bed and threw on my Sunday clothes. I pounded on Daddy’s door but he was snoring.

I straightened my tie before stepping out to meet the media moguls and

California-based special interest groups I figured had somehow heard about the redneck who stole the poor old African-American’s only means of transportation–close-up showing Willie struggling behind a plow–and how the old African American tills his soil in the great American tradition of those who made this country what it is today: the home of Paris Hilton and Larry Flint. And here this Klu Kluxer has robbed him blind. By the way, Willie’s on food stamps, welfare and some government programs I never heard of. The man knows how to work the system.

“Derwood Beasley, come out and face the crime you have committed against the spirit in all creatures!” the bullhorn bellowed. There was a short, chunky woman about my dad’s age behind the horn. She looked like she just drank Drano. Her grey hair was in a long pony tail and she was dressed in something light and multi-colored that followed her down the road like she was floating and not walking. Even from my range I could see she was wearing rings all over. Behind her were dozens of other long-haired women in long, flowing outfits that cause men in One Round to think: soft squeeze. Their signs said a lot of nasty things about the president, his wife and most everybody in his family. I’m talking genetic accusations and behind the bedroom door gossip. Besides my loss of cerebral cell space to cannabis that’s the main reason I stayed out of politics. There’s always somebody who can’t separate the man from the issue. Several State Highway Patrolmen were looking sun-glassed and high-assed with their full disco lights boog-a-looing behind the PETA ladies and one career-minded WTOC camera man had sneaked up onto our porch and was crouched, waiting to snap my Daddy into a scandal of staggering proportions.

“Derwood Beasley, the long arm of humanity has reached all the way to One Round, Georgia and has found you out. Come out now and take your punishment. Unlike the poor defenseless horse you mercilessly slaughtered, we have weapons and the law. ” That was the PETA bullhorn lady. I’ve never seen the highway patrol suck up to a woman like these bulls did. I wondered what she had to do to climb so high in PETA status. Was it like the Masons where you have secret handshakes that change as you go up the PETA ladder? But then, you face natural anatomical limitations. Homo sapiens—and I’m gonna assume here that PETA folks include themselves—have only have five digits; yet there must be dozens of PETA grades on the way up to Ultimate PETA-hood. Some of those upper echelon handshakes probably take practice to master.

“The entire civilized world is watching you, Derwood Beasley! The barbaric act you have committed is going to be televised for all to see what a despicable human being you are!”
I was peeking through the front curtain when Daddy walked up behind me in his underwear, yawning and scratching himself his privates.

“I don’t think you want to face the entire civilized world looking like that,” I said.

By the time I got him dressed and shaved the WTOC cameraman was swinging his legs off the end of the porch and playing with Miserable, our mongrel. The battle had hardly begun when Mizz took a liking to the enemy and licked his hand. Benedict Arnold, I thought, as I watched our numbers dwindle.

Daddy opened the front door and everybody rushed back to their dramatic places.

The PETA lady with bullhorn came up our walk way and stood there with her hands on her hips. She just stared at daddy.

“What’s the matter?” Daddy asked. He looked down to see if his fly was open.

“I just wanted to see what a horse killer looks like.”

“You like what you see?” Daddy said, grinning.

I looked at daddy like he had just asked the anti-Christ in for a beer. “Be careful what you say,” I whispered from behind into his ear. “You’re on TV!”

The PETA lady grinned and sneered at once. Daddy explained how Rastus was being tortured by fourteen little grandchildren. Then he popped the question:

“Want to see my compost efforts?”

Compost efforts?

The PETA lady and my daddy were scoping each other out! There were a hundred people watching them—not to mention the entire civilized world– and they were acting like two college kids sizing each other up at a rush party.

“Simply burying a carcass is not large animal composting,” the PETA lady said. She folded her arms and smirked. “Large animal composting is not possible without some heavy-duty equipment.” She waved off the camera man who was shooting over her shoulder. He looked offended, rolled his eyes and turned back to the crowd and shrugged his shoulders.

“Horse killer!” a few dozen women screamed. “The spirits of horses everywhere will hunt you down and drive you to total madness!”

I figured some of those spirits had already arrived, hacked our e-mail address and were prepared to spam us into oblivion.

Daddy moved closer to the head PETA. He lowered his voice the way I’ve seen him do dozens of times in The Limp Noodle, the only bar in One Round. It never works—at least, it never worked before.

He pointed to a row of his cabbage. “Does them cabbages look puny?” The shufflings under them were buried nearly a year ago.

The Grand PETA Wizard sniffed and walked up and down the cabbage row. She stooped and handled.

“According to the NRCS standards,” daddy said, stooping beside her, speaking in a whisper, “successful decomposition requires a high carbon to nitrogen ratio, 40-65% moisture, and proper aeration. While many composters turn the pile and mechanically aerate it, recent studies at both Texas A&M University and Cornell have shown that static-pile, in-bin composting of large animals,–which is my method–can be carried out successfully, even in a small operation like mine. I have a backhoe and a strapping son. Of course, the serious large animal composter is still required to make sure that the necessary temperatures are reached–the NRCS recommends that the compost attain a temperature greater than 130ºF for at least five days to reduce pathogens.”

The PETA lady stared at daddy. I stared at Daddy. They strolled around all three of his gardens.

“You composted this horse alone?” she asked, bending and handling his fat, red tomatoes and plump zucchinis.

“Our earth mother is my guiding spirit, “Daddy whispered.

That did it. At that moment Ms. Head PETA did one of those hair shakes. You know what I mean: one of those total hair flip-overs that guys at bars are stupid enough to think means: Make your move big fella. Let’s see what you got.

“I treat her as if she was a living, breathing woman,” Daddy said. Then came the coup de gras: “I feel privileged to thrust my fingers into her moistened body. I always use surgeon’s gloves.”

The Head PTA’s eyes lit up. The woman was grinning ear to ear. “And you know about the Cornell studies on composting? PETA helped finance those studies.”

“Lady,” daddy said, “When it comes to burying things, ain’t much I don’t know.”

“Horse killer!” the other PETA ladies shouted, with less vigor. Several of the state’s finest were making moves on the animal rights ladies. I guessed the PETA girls weren’t into midnight cruising with sirens, but there were a few whose hormones were kicking in at the sight of those big leather holsters. A few die hards had figured that their leader was losing sight of the global animal rights mission so they collared Cairo Keys and pushed him out front. Cairo was accompanied by several county deputies. They all marched straight into our house, opened the freezer and held up the bags labeled Willie Dingle so the TV camera could get a clean shot at the magic marker.

*****

I wondered if Kierkegaard would have felt fear and trembling in the One Round jail. Nausea would definitely be in the running—and I don’t mean the kind you roll over and over in your mind while you drink espresso and consider the decline of the western world since Dylan went acoustic, but the kind you get a case of Pepto per month for. I was considering taking pen in hand myself and adding installments two and three to Sartre’s seminal work after the sheriff let me and Worrell peek through the greasy, wire glass door pane in at my hippophagist daddy who sat on the bench, chin in both palms, wriggling his toes in his hush puppies. We slipped a complimentary Butterfinger six pack and a couple of cold Diet Cokes from the store through the food slot at the foot of the door. Daddy waved at Worrell and me and grinned. I sat down on the bench opposite the door.

“Who’s the big black dude?” Worrel asked. He was still at the window looking in.

“Sheriff said he stopped the school bus at the railroad crossing and stole all the kids’ candy bars, “ I said. I got back up and we both sized up daddy’s cell mate. He was tall and thick. His white T-shirt was rolled up to his shoulders. He had a scar down his right arm like a mole had dug a hole from his bi-cep to his wrist.

We sat back down and considered the situation. The vegan judge had come down hard on daddy. At this point I should reveal my personal bias against the judiciary. Previous encounters with the black robes have left me with a broad-reaching situational ethic I would classify as a cross between carpe diem and watch your back. I was sinking into an even deeper dislike for the men and women on the bench when Worrel leapt up.

“Hey,” Worrell said, “That booger comes in the store. Always buys Butterfingers.”

“Butterfingers!” I said.

We looked at each other and cried out: “Big Alvis!”

We craned our necks to get a look inside the wire-reinforced window, but Big Alvis had already jacked daddy against the concrete wall. Daddy sank slowly, his shirt ripped until he landed with a plop like a discarded puppet. Big Alvis was spread eagle in the opposite corner, covered in Butterfinger crumbs and wrappers, sucking his finger tips.

We yelled upstairs for Cairo Keys who finally lumbered down the steps, griping because we were disrupting the Braves-Phillies game.

”You shouldn’t have give your daddy candy. Not with Big Alvis in there.” The sheriff unlocked the cell.

Daddy raised his head like he was still talking to the PETA lady. His eyes were glazed over. He was talking like he was sleep walking. There was trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

“You all right?” I asked, bending down.

“Composting horses is legal in all states,” he said. “It takes time to do an effective job, but composting is rapidly gaining popularity as an inexpensive and environmentally sound method of carcass disposal.”

He was a little deranged. Being reviled by the entire civilized world, having all your horticultural efforts dissed, then having Big Alvis jack you up against the wall in the One Round jail and steal your six pack of Butterfingers–I could sympathize. In his cloud of discouragement Daddy must have thought some important TV person was recording his every word because he kept going on about the benefits of eating horses and composting their shufflings.

“Its biggest advantage,” Daddy went on, spaced-out, “is that it gives you a marketable product in six months.”

The PETA lady appeared. Her un-PETA name was Tamara Wellesley and she told the reporters and cameramen with her that even though my daddy was a confirmed hippophagist and should be punished according the law of the state of Georgia for horse thieving, he was also the most pro-earth environmentalist as she had ever encountered. She said she thought his methods would become a paradigm for serious composters in years to come. The news lady from Savannah nodded her

head and gave the camera a pasted-on smile.

The camera showed daddy still on the floor, babbling, but by the time the news spot was over, even the WTOC poofy-haired anchor man was puzzled as to whether the PETA people were real PETA’s or maybe there was an anti-PETA insurgency group that had sent down spies to sabotage the effort.

“He’s taking this quite hard, isn’t he?” Ms. Wellesley whispered to me after the cameramen had left.

“Yes, ma’m, I think it’s knocked him off his foundation a little.”

She smelled like tea olive—which was nice, but I decided her sexy leather sandals were placing her ringed toes in close contact with some toxic substances. We were all standing in the cell looking down at Daddy who was still slumped on the floor. Lying in Butterfinger wrappers, Big Alvis began to snore. I figured his blood sugar must be 1200.

*****

Once Ms. Tamara—Tammy—sat Willie Dingle down in our kitchen

with some of Daddy’s Early Times and explained to him that getting rid of his horse would have cost him three to five hundred dollars, he withdrew charges. You see he couldn’t just let that horse rot in the field. That’s against the law. And the Land Fill in our county won’t take large animal carcasses for the same reason. Willie left thinking daddy had done him favor. Next Ms. Tammy took her PETA crew over to Twin City where–under the cover of night–daddy had removed two horse carcasses after the animals were struck by lightening because their absentee proctologist landlord didn’t have sense enough to get them inside during an electrical storm. The proctologist saw the big picture quicker than Willie who nearly drank all daddy’s whiskey before he gave Ms. Tammy that toothless grin. The proctologist wrote PETA a check for five hundred dollars once he figured out that he was being lectured to on the inhumane treatment of animals and threatened by Ms. Tammy’s shock and awe machine. She put the check on the table in our kitchen and told daddy that was the first installment on his loan.

“What loan”” he asked.

“The loan you and I are going to take out to create The Georgia Society for Large Animal Composting.”

Ms. Tammy, if haven’t figured it out, is a force of nature. She can ride, shoot and drink. After we became the only facility in the tri-county area that will gather and transport your large animal carcass to a bio-secure site with the Georgia State Agricultural Department’s official stamp, within a year we expanded to a ten acre organic farm complete with a fruit and vegetable show place on the highway. Ms Tammy opened up a PETA headquarters on the court house square and ticked off half the women in the Methodist church we sometimes attend because she came right up in their face on the church porch and said:

“I’ve always wanted to meet a woman who would wear the fur of a helpless animal. Tell me, what other disgusting barbaric acts do you engage in?”

Needless to say, this did not make her wildly popular among the blue hairs, but the sheer economic juggernaut that she and daddy created overpowered any squabbling over fox fur. In the Limp Noodle daddy got his own reserved booth. After several interviews with WTOC, their farm reporter fell in love with daddy’s blueberries and our business took off. We had to hire five full-time agriculture grad students from UGA to keep up with the slippery and ever-changing regs. on large animal composting and we bought several new pieces of equipment including a large carcass lifter and transporter designed by the people who did the study at Cornell.

When Ms. Tammy and Daddy were married, the church was full of sign- carrying PETA ladies. They all wore those flowing, filmy dresses. When the preacher said I do, Daddy did what every man in One Round had wanted to do ever since they first saw Ms. Tammy on TV. He reached around behind and gave her a soft squeeze.