The Lemonade Fourth

On the third of July, Parks and I left our cowcamp along the Payette River and drank our way to Elk City, Idaho. A buddy of ours had taken the job of representing the Idaho County Sheriff's Department as the sole deputy in Elk City. We wanted to see how he handled an entire town full of two-fisted sawmill workers on a holiday when it was un-American to be caught without a beer in your hand.
I provided the transportation. My cruiser at the time was Daisy, a pistachio-green early-sixties Chevrolet Nova, The car had lived so long on logging roads and goat trails that she wore a lodgepole and bailingwire tie-rod splint to her left front wheel. No shit.
A sixpack beyond Grangeville,, Daisy had an asthma attack and coughed to a stop. I unwired her hood, propped it up with a limb, twisted off her air cleaner, set it on a stump, found a rock, and whacked her alongside the float bowl.
She grunted, wheezed, woke up, and we zigzagged on our merry way. A couple of cold ones later I remembered that the air cleaner was back there on the stump. What the hell, it would be there tomorrow on our way back.
Our pal the deputy wasn't real happy to have in his jurisdiction two more rowdies smelling of horse manure and stale beer, but our brotherhood went way back to wintering together in the high country, thirty miles off the road. He knew we'd never give him genuine trouble, so he tolerated our presence, with the stipulation that we not drive an inch farther until the next morning.
Stewart was charged with keeping the peace in Elk City, with keeping whiskey disputes from escalating into battery. He worked to prevent a midnight drive back to log camp from becoming suicide or vehicular manslaughter. He was well equipped for this job. He was the size of a bunk of plywood, his smile was four lanes wide, and he had been a military policeman in Viet Nam, so he was adept at the use of numchuks, sticks of Oriental hardwood held together by toilet chain.
When the fights inevitably broke out in the joints that night, Stewart walked through the bar doors smiling, with the numchuks whipping and clicking around his elbows and shoulders, looking like a hybrid between Bruce Lee and a baton twirler. The sound of that spinning teakwood stopped all activity in the saloon. Without slowing the whirling, the deputy explained that he didn't want anyone to get hurt in Elk City, and that he would appreciate it folks would stop hitting each other, then he flicked one of the numchuks within a cigarette paper of the nose of the fellow picking the fight. It worked every time. Loggers know what it is like to get smacked in the schnoz with a limb. I was proud of him.
At daylight on the Fourth, Parks and I awoke in the dirt beneath Daisy, sore and grungy, partied out, so we decided to head back toward civilization. Fifty miles of gravel later, Daisy sneezed once on the streets of Grangeville, just enough to remind me that I had driven twenty miles past her air cleaner. What the fuck, I'd find another one somewhere.
It was awfully hot in the Salmon River canyon that day. By the time we hit the edge of Riggins, Parks and I had sweated out twenty gallons of party, were cottonmouth parched, and ready for any kind of liquid besides beer. I nudged Daisy into a strip of shade on the north side of a one-horse drive-in restaurant calling itself "The Home of the Savageburger."
There was a long thirsty line of folks at the take-out window. While Parks and I were waiting our turn, beating the dust out of our hats, looking like a pair of escapees from the O. K. Corral drunk tank, an accountant from Minneapolis, decked out in Bermuda shorts, took his place in line behind us. When it came our turn to order, we asked for the biggest cup of lemonade on the premises, please, the fifty-five gallon size if possible.
After we paid for our drinks and were walking back into the shade to administer the dosage, I heard the pale fellow in the plaid shorts tell the high school girl behind the sliding screen that he wanted two orders of french fries, and the biggest cup of lemonade on the premises, the fifty-five gallon size if possible.
Our lemon drinks went down just fine, we'd live to see our cattle again, but Daisy was suffering from the heat too. When I tried to start her she puked a thimble of gasoline out of her naked carb onto the exhaust manifold, and began shooting flames from the corners of her ratty hood. By the time I had the haywire latch untwisted and the hood popped, I could tell I had to do something quickly, or we were going to be in big trouble in a short time.
Just then, around the corner of the building, I saw that the Minnesotan was taking delivery on his order. Without explaining myself, I ran over to the little ledge in front of the take-out window, grabbed his big cup of lemonade, ran back around to Daisy, jerked up her hood, and, with one lucky splash doused her fire. Whew.
The accountant, however, was sure that he had been the victim of a typical Idaho lemonade snatching. He came scooting around the corner of the building, spotted me with his empty cup, and began to pummel me with big, civilized words about how he wanted my name, right now, so he could notify the proper authorities of my exceedingly inappropriate actions, and how there was a good chance I would be hearing from his attorney regarding certain civil damages, blah, blah, blah.
Parks wanted to squish him. It took five minutes to get Parks backed off and the little dude jacked down far enough to explain that I had acted in an emergency, and how, bless him, his good taste in beverages had saved my car, the frenchfry factory, and the greater part of central Idaho from a horrible, smoky death. I considered him to be a true modern hero, and I would gladly pay for anything that he and the members of his family wished to order from the hamburger establishment.
As Parks, Daisy and I limped back onto the highway, the vacationing accountant, his wife, and two young sons were hunkered in their air-conditioned Oldsmobile Vistacruiser, nibbling on Savageburgers and sipping large lemonades. One of the boys waved a little American flag at us.