#1 resource for Cigar Box Guitars, Free Plans, How-To, Parts & More!

Forty Ounce Feller- short story Part II in the Carroll series

Forty Ounce Feller

My name's Carroll and I'm a guy. I say that up front so there's no confusion. This is a story about Forty Ounce Feller. Forty's birth name is Bobby, but only his momma calls him that. You'll probably figure out the nickname as the story goes on.

I am not on good terms with Forty. We were friendly for a while and then he ripped me off. The old saying, No good deed goes unpunished? I did him a good turn and he payed me back by stealing my lap top, my TV and a few other items he thought might turn a buck. I can't prove it, but I know he done it. Oh, one thing he took was a good looking Seiko watch. That didn't work.

Forty drinks a crap-ton of beer, mostly Old Milwaukee, and always the 40 ounce bottles. He's a screw-up and a ne'er-do-well. Petty thievery and BS schemes. A few years back, he got caught for ripping copper pipe out of an empty house and selling it to some salvage place. He got less than 50 bucks for the copper, The repair cost some landlord over a thousand. Forty got probation.

How did he get caught, you might ask? He left two clues behind. Two empty forties.

Forty's mom lives across the road from me and Forty lives in her garage. He has one semi-redeeming thing about him and that is playing bass guitar. He's incredible. Good enough to play at any level, but being the shit-head that he is, he's lucky he got to play with a local band.

They're a pretty decent band. Good guys too, except Forty. The band's name is Hammer & Tongs. The singer/guitar player is a carpenter and the drummer is a cook. They have one or two gigs most weekends. They would round up Forty before a gig and kind of baby-sit him till they took him home after the gig.

Where I first came into the story is that I make license plate guitars. I gave one to Jason, the guitar player in the band. He used it at some gigs and I was pretty happy about that. Then Forty thought it would be cool if he played a license plate bass. I was up for that, but it turned out Forty wanted to make his own bass and do it in my shop with my help.

I agreed and then regretted it. Forty got a good playing bass with a California license plate. He let me do most of the build. Then he took it to gigs and told people he made it.

We got friendly building the bass together. And man, it was fun the few times we played music together. I don't have anybody around here to play with and Forty made me sound pretty good. Then he rips me off. I confronted him and talked to the sheriff. But like I said, I couldn't prove it.

Not long after that, things changed for Forty. He usually didn't have a car. Or sometimes he'd get a five hundred dollar piece of crap and drive it til' the wheels fell off. He was pretty much unemployable. Then all of a sudden, he was driving a better kind of car. Pretty soon that car was gone and he had a nice Dodge pickup. Talk around town was that Forty had money.

Jimmy at the Kwik Stop told me Forty was mowing grass at the new cemetery east of town. And digging graves with a back hoe. Not a full time job, but making some money.

A new funeral home, Rose Vista, had come into the county seat. It was part of a small chain. I heard later on they had four places. The old funeral home, Paulson's, has been around a long time and is pretty well thought of. But the new place had a nice building and seemed to do good work. And they were much cheaper than Paulson's. So they did pretty good. And right away, they bought ground and started the new cemetery east of the piss-ant little town I live in.

One Friday morning in April, I was up early and went to the Kwik Stop to get a newspaper, breakfast burrito and a 32 ounce Diet Pepsi. It was just after six AM and Forty was in there bleary eyed, covered with dirt. He was in there buying two guess whats.

I recalled getting up to pee around midnight and looking out the window and noticing Forty's pickup was home at that time. I put two and two together and came up with 'What the hell?'

A couple weeks later I was up at two thirty in the morning. As usual, I looked out the window as I peed. There was Forty leaving in the Dodge and heading east. At two thirty on a Tuesday morning.

I went back to bed and couldn't sleep. The worst thing I can do at night is to think about stuff. I was wondering what Forty was up to. I pulled on some clothes, grabbed my cell phone and drove out east.

That new cemetery is in a nice secluded spot. It's surrounded by a game preserve and timber on three sides. You can't really see in there from the road. But it was dark with low clouds and it looked like headlights were bouncing off the clouds.

I got out of my truck, climbed over the gate and walked up the cemetery lane. Forty's Dodge and an old van were in there with the motors running and the lights on. I snuck in there and Forty was running a back-hoe and digging. Another guy was by a grave, giving directions to Forty. I couldn't believe it.

I went back to my truck, called the 911, and asked them to send a deputy with no lights or sirens. He got there in nine minutes and we went up the lane and got in close. There was Forty and another guy loading a casket into the van. The deputy grabbed the other guy and Forty took off running. I can't run fast or far, but I can outrun Forty.

~ ~ ~

Forty is in jail. He'll do around two years. It's dumb, but I feel kinda bad about it. The Omaha paper quoted him during the trial as saying, “I am not a body snatcher.”

Well, he was and he wasn't. The scam was to recover and re-sell the coffins and concrete vault liners. Pretty good money in it too. How many times can you sell and use a five thousand dollar casket?

They would put the corpse back in the grave, refill the dirt and tried to hide any sign of disturbance. Forty's lawyer tried to call the whole thing a 'victimless crime.' Ha. I was there that day and the jury laughed out loud at that one.

The guy they brought in as the local funeral director was the brains behind the whole thing. He took the biggest hit. Forty months in the state pen.

The whole thing was a big scandal. The grave those guys got caught on, that was the third time they had done it.

Forty's mom does not seem to blame me. I spend a lot of time in the wood shop and think of Forty sometimes. I suspect that cold 40 ounce Old Milwaukees are scarce for him right now. Life goes on.

7 members like this

Comment

You need to be a member of Cigar Box Nation to add comments!

Join Cigar Box Nation

Comment by Jamie MacBlues on July 14, 2015 at 11:14am: GLASGOW itself accounts for 45%, Bugsy, the rest of Scotland 5% lol

Comment by Matthew Borczon on July 14, 2015 at 5:48am: great story, well told and very interesting. Really enjoying these....matt

Comment by BUGGY (C) on July 14, 2015 at 4:50am: Jamie
Ouch eye the noo
I have been to Glasgow you be right!
Isnt's bonnie Scotland half of the UK alchol consumption ?

Comment by Jamie MacBlues on July 14, 2015 at 4:45am: When comes to booze, guys, yous is all amateurs!

Comment by BUGGY (C) on July 14, 2015 at 2:20am: Having organised a funeral recently, I have see the cost of coffins a

cardboard one (yes they exist) sets you back £300 - £400 quid plus

Guys there is more proffit in Coffins than CBGS! lol

Plus they didn't tell me, I was getting 100% plastic look handles! (unless the gold effect had already come off that quick!)

Great story John... there's a song in that somewhere? ;>)

But is the above not just good recycling?

Comment by Uncle John on July 14, 2015 at 12:56am: Thanks for all the reads and comments. Folks, read Ron's story comment after reading my story. Ron, super story - that last line was super.

Thanks, Belinda. A lot from real life observations - a guy like Forty I saw, newspaper things, my own experiences. I had the idea for the cemetery thing at least a year back when I saw a new cemetery. Way back, a friend's dad's name was Carroll.

Thanks, Jamie.

Clock, I have a true back hoe story. When my brother died, he was cremated. Some months later I took the task to meet a back hoe company that was going to bury the box his ashes were in. For $250.00. I got there and they had the truck and backhoe, but were going to dig the hole with a (manual) post hole digger. They started in and then were kind enough to let me do most of the work and place brother Jim's ashes in the hole.

Great and funny comment Stephen (Smilingdog).

Thank you, Gary.

Comment by Ron "Oily" Sprague on July 14, 2015 at 12:24am: Cap'n Etheridge leaned on his hick'ry stick, spat a dark green glob of juice that nailed a yellowjacket to the metalled two-lane, and eyeballed the work crew that was weedwhacking the overgrown drainage ditch on the north side.

"Feller!" he bawled into the afternoon haze. "Gitcher skinny corpse-stealin' backside on ovah heah!"

The rest of the work crew snickered as Bobby "Forty Ounce" Feller shuffled over to look at his perpetually-sorrowful reflection in the spit-shined caps of Etheridge's steel toed boots.

"Yessuh, Cap'n, Suh?" Feller had learned through repeated application of the hick'ry stick that Etheridge demanded, and got (naturally), nothing less than full submission and fawning respect from his work crew "guests," as he referred to them in the Warden's hearing.

"Hot today, ain't it?" Feller had also painfully learned the difference between rhetorical and procedural questioning, so a sweat-streaked nod was taken as sufficient acknowledgement. "Heard tell you used to knock 'em back purt' good on the Outside..."

"Yassuh, dat's true 'nuff."

"Heard tell you knows the differnce 'tween a pine box an' a bronze casket..."

Feller began to suspect Something was Up. He nodded again.

"Trusty see mebbe one a' Cap'n Foulard's D Block boys could out-drink ya."

Feller dimly sensed he was being recruited for an event that the Warden would equally dimly approve of, but his instinct for self-preservation refused to kick in, so he shook his head cautiously.

"Bookie sez he's givin' 3 to one odds on D Block. Wife sez she'd like a vacation this year. Are you catchin' my drift, son?"

Feller nodded thoughfully, then took the first of several conversational risks, meantime keeping an eye on Ol' Hick'ry, out of habit.

"Ain't nobody beat me if I'm in trainin', Cap'n."

"Figured you'd say that. Got me an idear." Another green gob plastered itself across the wings of the struggling yellowjacket, concerning which Feller had begun to exhibit an unholy fascination. "Problem is, you gotta die first." The wasp suddenly ceased its vain attempts to wander off to annoy the nearby livestock in the next field. Feller gulped audibly.

"Y'all go on back to clearin' that ditch. Gotta study on this some more. I knows where ya live." Etheridge chuckled wheezily, before hawking another tobacco missile at an inoffensive dragonfly that had stopped to rest on the stalk of an unwhacked weed. Feller shuffled back obediently to take his place in the briefly-interrupted rhythm of raised arms and downward strokes that measured out the remainder of the afternoon.

He could just about visualize two sweating cans of Old Milwaukee...

Comment by bemuzic on July 13, 2015 at 9:56pm: good stuff..I find myself wondering as with a lot of your stories John, how much of it was drawn from real life?