Bubba McCoy said he looked out the window of his trailer office the other afternoon and saw a scruffy-looking guy wearing a ballcap and mask walking toward his door.
"I reached in the drawer for my pistol," Bubba said.
"He barged right in. Turned out he was some muckety-muck from Little Rock, where he said most people are wearing a mask, and it was pretty much habit for him by now.
"I said oh, yeah, that, and that we'd had maybe three or four cases countywide and nobody was paying much attention over here anymore.
"I told him not to wear that mask into town or somebody'd shoot him for sure."
"He said he was just in the area checking on his duck lodge and had heard I had the very same late-model, low-mileage, souped-up Dodge Ram on the lot that he'd been looking for, right down to the white color and options. And I did. Highest-priced vehicle on the lot.
"He took it for a drive and we agreed on a price, and he came back the next day with a cashier's check and a mechanic who got under the hood for a while, and then the guy drove it right out of here while the mechanic drove the Suburban they'd come down in."
Who was he?
"Oh, hell, I don't know. I've got the sale documents here somewhere. All that matters is that he was a masked man with $27,500 I wouldn't have got if I'd been keeping myself quarantined."
I said I was glad I was reaching him by phone rather than via a masked visit, and that I took it that I'd found him at Bubba's Auto Emporium.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "Came back to work two weeks ago. I'd sat there long enough watching ESPN 30 for 30 and listening to the old lady make masks for people who weren't gonna wear 'em. Drive down to see her if you need a few hundred.
"I mean, look, y'all from the population centers have got your concerns, and I ain't judgin' that. But it looks to us over here like this virus does its business where the people are bunched up, kinda like Democrats, I guess.
"We ain't been bunched up over here since what's-their-name up the highway had that big Delta party in the '70s that all the people from Little Rock and Memphis came to."
I asked him what a Delta party was, as opposed to a party on a different kind of soil.
"It's a whiskey drunk, not a beer drunk. Ain't no chardonnay. It's a barbecue. It's a catfish fry. It's a live band that only knows Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's dancing in that way the Church of Christ warned you about. It's telling big lies. And then, about 1 a.m., the fun starts.
"It's waking up Sunday morning and making it to church and sittin' there during the sermon wonderin' how you wound up where you were when you woke up. And whether she was somebody's wife or girlfriend or daughter. Or mother."
He asked hadn't I ever been to a Delta party like that. I said yes, once, sort of, south of there, in the early '90s, but that I wound up in a casino in Tunica in the company of several individuals whose names I could not recall.
Bubba said Bill Clinton was at that party in the '70s he was talking about.
"And there's some political insight for you. A Democrat wanting to get votes over here needs to be able to party. We don't like to vote for a politician until we know some secrets on him. And let's just say we voted for Clinton ever time.
"And I'd vote for him again right now.
"He walked in that party about 11:30 with a couple of his local people, and the girls started lining up in their tight jeans to give him directions to their trailer parks. Beat anything I ever saw.
"They was the original Monicas."
All right, since he'd brought up politics, who was it for Bubba--Trump or Biden?
"What difference does it make? One's natural crazy and the other's got dementia.
"Those scientists are gonna get us a vaccine or they ain't. Politicians ain't got a damned thing to do with it.
"I believe politics has become irrelevant in this country except to print money. You ought to get off politics and do more columns like that one you did on your momma. That was fine.
"People care about that. They don't care about politics.
"Whoever is the next president will be judged by history according to what the scientists do. Either we come back like gangbusters, or you and I will spend our golden years in a depression."
A depression, not depression, I clarified.
"Probably both," Bubba said.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/24/2020