DELIVERANCE FOLK

The Hillbillies in our East Tennessee town of Bashful Beaver lived exclusively in a section we called Deliverance--after the Burt Reynolds movie. Cops seldom received a call from Deliverance since Hillbillies didn’t recognize the law. Or law enforcement officers. You could talk to one and they’d look right through you.

We did, however, receive many calls about Deliverance. Hillbillies take care of their own problems so we’d get calls from mail carriers, delivery folks, and such, that there was a body lying beside the road or shots had been fired. One sad afternoon I was assigned such a call.

“Some woman’s screamin’ like she’s being slaughtered”, the UPS driver said. By the time I got to the reported address, all that could be heard was a loud TV.

The “residence” was really just a shack, no bigger than a two-car garage, hammered out of rough-cut lumber. The front door was standing open. Inside were three rooms: One bedroom, a kitchen and the living room. The floors were linoleum rolled over packed-down dirt. Out back was an outhouse and a well nearby that.

There were ten people sitting on the floor—no furniture. No one acknowledged my presence, all transfixed on the TV. At the time, large screen TV’s had just come out. They were a contraption where the front folded out and projected an image on a background. And they were very expensive. This is what the Hillbillies were watching, the latest technology resting incongruously on the linoleum and dirt floor. God only knows where they stole it.

The critters themselves were typical Deliverance folks. There’s something about inbreeding that causes genetic horrors, head shapes that are “lumpy”, distorted. The heads look like they were fashioned in clay, then smashed until the skull is no longer symmetrical and one squinty eye’s an inch higher than the other. The kid playing the banjo in the  Deliverance film is typical of this unmistakable Hillbilly marker.

I said, “Howdy.” No one answered, nor would they ever. So I looked around.

On the rear step, outside the kitchen, I found where the screams had emanated from. Blood was everywhere. It indeed appeared that someone or something had been slaughtered. I called for an Investigator and watched Gomer Pyle reruns on the monster TV until he arrived.

The Investigator, Burly Hardcase, arrived shortly, appraised the scene and said, “Lets look around the house, curtiledge for the body-- which we ain’t gonna find. Been here before, fights between one of them lumpheads and his sister/wife. Knew it’d come to this eventually.”

“What then?” I asked.

“Nuthin’,” Burly said. Didn’t see him or her in there by the TV. I’m sure he’s out in the boondocks burying her right now. Forget about asking them,” he nodded toward the TV crowd. “No one in there’d piss on ya if your skivvies were on fire. So, if we don’t find anything, we move on, write it off.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Move on?. . .”

“Yep,” nuthin’ else to do. Besides it has a good side. That’s one less sow to be squirtin’ out these lopheaded defects. And that ain’t a bad thing.”

I’ve thought about his pragmatic solution many times. In retrospect, Burly may’ve been right.