store. That is what both of my granddaddy's called it way way back in the
time....and fi- nally after all of this endless walkin' and walkin' and sangin' and talkin' to himself out loud and walkin' some more and it gets light and then it gets dark and he's still walkin.' Fi- nally Hinton gets the big chance that he's been walkin' and workin' so hard to get to this point - to be able to purchase all the whiskey and as much beer as either he had the money for or how much room he had in that little old brown suitcase. I never thought about that small detail until just now - but Hinton had to make a hard choice
...maybe the hardest choice of his whole life at that moment. And he had to be practical as well, because he could only buy what he could carry back on his long 15-mile walk back to the river city. And like I said it was even harder on Eddie because the old suitcase did not have a handle to carry it
with...truth is there was no easy way to carry that suitcase... it would make your underarms so sore and raw. And weighted down with whiskey it would have had to weight at least a metric ton on that long hot endless self - induced Summer Death March in the Summer of 1984 ! Eddie did tell me later that he wanted a
drink so bad - anybody would if they had gone through all that Eddie did and when he finally got somethang to drink he went out behind the state liquor store - there was a lit- tle clump of trees out behind The State Store and he was able to find a safe place to sit for a little while and open maybe a bottle of 190 Proof Pure Grain alcohol. But he couldn't get as "high" as he wanted too because he still had 15 miles to walk before he could allow himself to really get drunk as you wanna be, which is why he started all this walkin' in the first place. The part of this Cat Tale that really broke
my heart is that when Eddie was about halfway back to The River City - in fact he was right where I-65 crosses Highway 20 by the Race Trac gas stationright down the road.
Eddie thought he saw a State Trooper car comin' up from behind him to check him out so he quickly tossed the suitcase over in the high weeds beside the road. Hinton kept on walkin' with a slight limp this time - he told me one time that he thought that the Cops would have a little pity or show a little more mercy for a crippled man, so he had devel- oped a great little limp. Turns out The State Trooper did not even
look Eddie's way much less even slow down, and Eddie said that when he got back to the suitcase and checked that there was not a drop of anythang left. It all broke when the suitcase hit the ground beide the highway! All of this was goin' on when the beer advertise- ments were all about stuff like " You've been shoveling miles of piles of pigmy shit all day long and now you deserve to get so totally wasted that you puke on your new cowboy boots tonight ! This Bud's for you and all that you do! When Hinton told me that incredible story
I knew what I had to do. I had to take him shoppin'. Where? In Madison of course, 30 more mile over there and back. But we were in The Hardware Store truck this time rolling on rubber tires filled with air - not the shoe leather express . We were headed to get Eddie some groceries
...As I said earlier..you could not get the kind of groceries Eddie needed in The River City because it was still a dry town and also a dry county! •
THREE MUSKETEERS - Wyker, Hinton & Cooper. (Photo Courtesy Dick Cooper)
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80