Scoping Out The Neighbors

Scout and Colt's friends used to hang out around here all the time. One time I was cooking dinner when I looked out the carport window and saw the boys and their friends on the carport. I saw, to my shock and horror, a rifle with a scope on it, poking through the fence,  pointed at the church parking lot across the street. People were in the parking lot. One of Scout's stupid friends was pointing Scout's rifle towards the people at the church.

God, I thought, what if somebody at the church sees that barrel and thinks we're a sniper and calls the law! I ran outside and started yelling at them. Scout said they were looking through the scope trying to see something. I realized that the gun had the gun lock on it so it wasn't able to be fired but I still wasn't satisfied. Scout said that they were trying to see if there was anybody on the hill in the woods behind the church. He said Tom* and John* had been chased through the woods beside the church.

Scout and Colt's friends, Tom and John, walked through the woods to get to our house. They said that they had been chased by some men riding four wheelers, wearing camo, and carrying crossbows. They stumbled on a camp in the woods and ran away scared. They said they saw a camp set up and there was a van or box truck in the woods they had been living in. They said the men were Mexican. The more they talked, the more Mexicans there were, and the wilder the story became. It went from two to three, to ten or twenty. The number kept growing and growing.

They kept pointing the rifle, looking towards the hill. Tom tried to point out people he could see in the trees. He kept saying that they were so still that they nearly blended into the background but if you looked real hard you could see them. John kept insisting he saw them, too.

I kept asking the boys questions to see if they were high or something but they looked normal. Well, as normal as you can look when you're telling some outrageous tale. They finally said there were probably 80 Mexicans in the woods. I wasn't buying it.

I went inside and told Donny about the boys and their outlandish tale. I thought the boys were nuts but Donny came outside and tried to see if he could see anything. Tom kept standing next to Donny, patting him on the shoulder, and pointing which way to look and Donny was looking through the scope. I kept asking everybody if anybody else saw anything in the woods but nobody paid attention to me.

We got out the binoculars and tried to see something but we couldn't make out a thing. Donny got it in his mind that somebody should call the sheriff and report the incident. I told him that he could call them if he wanted to but I wasn't. He went inside to call 911. When he came back outside he said that they were going to send someone to check it out.

Donny and the boys went across the street to the church parking lot when the sheriff's cars came. He told the sheriff's deputies that he didn't actually see anything but John and Tom did. The deputies asked them some questions and finally sent one  fat deputy up the hill to see if he could see anything. Tom pointed to a scraggly little pine tree and said they were hiding behind that. The deputy just shook his head in disgust and started back down the hill. He said there wasn't anything up there. Of course, he didn't go very far, either. Scout snickered because they sent the cop who was the most out of shape.

After the deputies left, the boys came back to the house to talk about their strange experience. More details came out.

Tom and John swore that they really saw a bunch of Mexicans in the woods and they were really chased. When everything calmed down Scout and I talked about what would become known as the "80 Mexicans in the woods incident." 

We began to piece things together. I heard things that he didn't hear, and he heard things that I didn't hear. What I thought was initially a few men dressed in camouflage with bows became a major encampment.

As we swapped information we realized that the story was much bigger than we thought it was. Tom told Scout that the Mexicans had beat on the backdoor at their trailer and yelled for them to come outside. Tom said he and John ran out the backdoor and through the woods, trying to get away from them. Then he told Scout about the camp they found and about being chased through the woods by men on four wheelers.

The story was so intense that Scout believed him until Tom kept telling Scout that there was a Mexican in top of a pine tree wearing a white t-shirt and a red cap. He kept saying, "Don't you see him? He's right there." Tom told him that one Mexican was wiping the hood of the church bus with a rag after the deputies left. That's when Scout was sure they were seeing things. He said they had been up all night the night before and were probably hallucinating.

Come to find out they had gotten their friend Sabrina* in trouble the night before when they were riding around and caused Sabrina to have an accident. Their lack of sleep and the paranoia they were feeling from the trouble they had the night before must have caught up with them and caused them to flip out.

Donny was lucky the deputies didn't arrest him for filing a false report. He was just reacting to the excitement around him. The boys were lucky they weren't arrested for making a false statement. They had to take a breathalyzer test before the deputies let them go. I was lucky because I got to see all the excitement right here. I love Resaca. There's never a dull moment.

We have a new rule at our house. Don't call the law unless somebody's dead.

AS ALWAYS PIO  **************************************************************************
SABRINA said:

But of course I have a few things to add, lol. That was a crazy night. And I will say even though the guys got me put in jail and my car impounded, I still love them all to death. You forgot to add that I was hiding at your house while everyone was across the street, I had had my feel of officers for one 24 hour period. It was hard to sit back knowing what was going on, but being the girl I was ignored and it all happened so fast I had no time to pull you and scout off to the side to tell you they were not in the right mind state. It took me 3 days to convince Tom that there was not 80 Mexicans in the woods. I eventually had to go into the woods with him so that he could see for himself that there was nothing there. I will never forget the pain in my heart when I saw his face drop and him realizing that he had imagined it all. It is all pretty funny now, but at the moment it was pretty serious. It is funny how things can change in 24 hours, going from having a good day to fighting with people you had never seen to having a wreck and your friends take off only to leave you to go to jail. Then when you get out they are tripping so bad that they have the whole county looking for rouge Mexicans. It was a lesson I hope I have totally learned from. Love all you guys! You keep my life interesting!

*aliases 

Brass Balls

                               

Where do people get the nerve? That's what I'd like          to know. Over the years we have had several strange people who want to impose on us. I don't know why, but they do and it's not even people that we know. I don't know their names or know where they live and, like Rhett Butler, "frankly, my dear I don't give a damn." Strangers would come knocking on our door and ask to use our telephone.

We have had numerous people come to our door expecting me to let them use the telephone. It was really creepy to let strangers into my home when I was alone. I finally bought a cordless telephone so I wouldn't have to let these strangers into my house.

Every time anyone asked to use the phone they have said it was because they were having some trouble and needed to call someone. Well hell, pardon my French, but if they are having trouble in their homes I sure don't need them bringing it over here. I've got troubles of my own and I sure as heck don't go running around the neighborhood when I am in a crisis trying to get my neighbors to help me. They probably wouldn't anyway.

My family was in the living room watching TV and I was in the kitchen when we heard somebody knocking on the outside door of the house one time. Our friends know to come on into the porch and knock on the inside door. That was my first clue. I turned on the outside light and looked out to see who was out there. I saw a stranger.

A young woman stood outside. She asked me to let her use the telephone. I scowled at her and reluctantly growled, "Well, okay." I turned to go get the phone to take to the porch but she followed me into the living room and took the phone from my hand. She said the line was busy and she asked if she could stay here until the line wasn't busy. She told me she had been throwing up and some guy had been putting the make on her while she was puking. Can you imagine? Anyway, she said that she had been having trouble and needed to call someone for a ride. I think she had been drinking or something. She might have been one of the neighborhood crack hos. I don't know.

I was really pissed. I told her that I really didn't want her waiting around to use the telephone. I said "I'd like to know why everybody seemed to think this was some kind of open house where they could stop in and use the phone and ask for a drink of water." I said that because she had the nerve to ask me to pour her a glass of water while she was standing there. I told her "I might as well since everybody in the world seemed to think this was some kind of restaurant or something." She kept talking about being sick until I finally told her, sarcastically, that really made me want to let her use my phone. I told her that it looks like strangers who didn't even know us but who thought it was perfectly fine to come by wanting to borrow something ought to have the decency to come by when they weren't wanting something to meet me and my family and maybe buy honey from us. We sold honey and had a great big old sign by the road when we had honey for sale. She finally handed me the glass and the telephone and said she would leave. She never did answer my question.

Oh yeah, I don't want to forget to mention that she came by that same summer while Donny and I were struggling to lift and carry the huge storm windows off of the windows so that I could clean them and put them back up. She came up to the door and asked to use the phone. Donny gave the phone to her and she stood out front, in our way, while she was trying to call somebody. She could see we were very busy. I was on the makeshift scaffold cleaning the windows when she asked me for a glass of water. I got her a glass of water but I was pissed to think that some kook would be bothering me when it was obvious that I was busy and didn't need to have her here. I'm just too nice, I guess. I was more pissed that I didn't run her off.

I'd like to know why everybody seems to think that anything we've got we should share with them. I wouldn't mind so much if it was friends or relatives but these people are crazy. God knows what they are into. There are lots of loonies around here. I did help friends and neighbors sometimes but they didn't usually bother the crap out of me, either. They knew better. "Neither a borrower, nor a lender, be." I remember Daddy and PawPaw shared tools but PawPaw had most of the tools and Daddy did most of the work on the farm. It was communal living because we lived by my grandparents and my aunts. We never borrowed from the neighbors, though, because they weren't kin. That would be presumptuous and rude.

One time I got so tired of strangers coming and asking to use the telephone that I put a sign on the door that said "Phone Calls $5 - Emergency Only" and people quit coming for a while. That worked okay until God finally blew the storm door off the hinges! Honest. A real strong storm came up and blew the storm door off the hinges. I was amazed. It was a flimsy door but it shouldn't have blown off the porch. I figured it was God's way of telling me to be nice. I didn't put the sign back up again. I don't want God to blow the porch away next time.

I don't mind helping anybody who honestly needs help. There is always somebody who's car breaks down and they pull over near the church across the street. I can see that people like that are probably on the up and up. That's when I don't mind lending my cordless phone. But I don't want to get into some no-account neighbor's problems, who may be sick and breathing germs on my phone, exposing my family to god knows what. They can go bother someone else. I truly believe that we meet angels, unaware, but I don't like being taken advantage of and I don't have to put up with it.

AS ALWAYS PIO

Did I See That?

Something strange is aways going on in Resaca. A few years ago I had a strange experience one cold winter morning. You won't believe what I saw while I was standing at my bedroom window. I had been watching the birds eat from the feeders hanging in a peach tree outside my window.

I saw some movement at the neighbor's. It looked like someone was going in and out of the house next door. There were bushes separating our property so I couldn't see who it was but I noticed that they kept walking off of the porch and, in a few minutes, they would walk back onto the porch and go into the house. I wondered why anybody would keep doing that and chalked it up to just another example of the bizarre behavior of the neighbors in our community.

I went into the livingroom and looked out the window and, you won't believe this, but there was a man standing by the highway at our driveway and he was wearing a pair of blue tennis shoes and . . . nothing else! He didn't have a stitch on, except for his shoes. He was just standing by the road like he was waiting on a ride. What the heck?

I slipped out onto the front porch to lock the outside door, and then the inside door. I was afraid that he might come over here and ask to use the telephone (another crazy neighbor story). While I was doing that, he pivoted around and headed back to his house. I never did see him again, and believe me I tried. I went back to the bedroom and could see a silhouette of somebody going into the house and coming back outside again, like before, but I didn't see him standing near the road again. He might have, but I missed it. Oh, and I missed something else, too. After he left I realized that I hadn't even checked him out! Can you imagine that?

Now there are a lot of rednecks in Georgia and sometimes you can see some dumbass running around without a shirt, even when it's cold, but this is the first time I've ever seen anybody, man or woman, running around without a stitch of clothing on.

The next day I planned to keep my eyes peeled and watch out for any more sightings. It had been really cold around here so, I thought, he better watch out or he might get frostbite. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you think about it, I never saw that dude again.

Don't you just love the south? We grow loonies by the bushels-full.

AS ALWAYS PIO