That’s one goofy lookin’ red head

Excerpt Chap 22: The Leech Cemetery Witch

“Stick made his opinion clear regarding the trash bag theory. “Great, we all gonna be seen ridin’ thru town, in the dead of night, in the pourin’ rain, totin’ a bag of dead varmints, and wearin’ trash bags.” Cain’t get any better than that.”

Let me introduce you to “Stick.” David Byrge was his real name, but nobody calls him by that, it’s just plain ol’ Stick. He’s as skinny as a hoe handle. His bright red hair usually looks like the bowl it was cur around. When I say red, I mean “RED,” not light, not dark, not almost, but bright flaming red. He wears bib overalls a lot and worn sneakers.

  You cain’t put a finger on him no-where’s with-out covering a freckle, I mean he’s covered with em. So much so that you’d think they were on the whites of his eyes. He’s been known to drop a fib or two as well, but other than big David, so have the rest of us. I swear he knows about every single dirty joke on the planet, and he ain’t afraid to tell any of em to just about any-body at any time.

Stick’s ol man drives a coal truck.Takes a special kind of stupid to climb on top of sixty thousand pounds, then try to control it down steep mountain roads and switchbacks. It takes years to learn how to operate and control one of those things. They’s been quite a few lose their lives on the mountain. Once that truck takes off down that hill, she takes on a life of her own.

If she gets loose, you got two choices, step out on the tanks and look for a soft spot before jumping and hoping for the best. Or hold on and try to ride it out, either way you’re probably gonna die, simple as that. The secret is picking a gear at the top and leaving her there. Once you try to shift down, she’s gone for sure.

Once she goes over, the grounds to steep to get her back up out of the holler. The mountain side is littered with dead trucks, overgrown with weeds and rusting away just where they landed.