Weird Harold, Episode 2 of 5, The Bull

After the DUI Harold was grounded so to speak.  He wasn't allowed to drive for six months and he wouldn't let anyone, including his wife, drive his precious Grand Am.  One would think that just walking between work and home, being stuck on an air base, trouble would be delayed.  Of course the only ones who would think that would be those who didn't know Harold.

On an air base, housing is segregated by rank.  Mid-level enlisted live in two-story four-plexes, Senior enlisted get two-story duplexes, junior officers get duplexes with little circle-driveways, and senior officers get ranch-style individual houses with patios.  Harold was junior enlisted and was lucky to have even gotten a base housing slot.  He lived on the far edge by the fence separating fields and pastures from a his dinky prefab residential neighborhood: small single-story duplexes with paper-thin walls. 

One day in the Spring Harold invited me over to help him make Beer Chili and get ready for a party he had planned.  A dozen of our friends and/or significant others were coming.  When I got there, in the morning, Harold and his wife were already fighting.  Cindy had a temper and her screams were just at that pitch to feel like knife blades cutting down your spine.  Harold had planned the party and bought the beer, but he'd neglected to tell her anything about it.  From what I gathered, listening to her yell, between more new speakers for a car he wasn't able to drive and the party prep, he'd spent the last of their money till payday.

As the fight wore down, Cindy came out with their daughters, said hi to me as if I hadn't been in the front yard listening to the whole thing, and stormed off down the street leaving the stupid party to her stupid husband and his innocent friend.  Harold, true to his character, didn't think anything was wrong.  "She'll come back," he said.  "She loves me too much to stay angry."

Party prep wasn't about decorations or table setting or even cleaning the house.  For Harold, party prep was drinking a lot of beer, listening to the Dire Straits, and stirring the chili every fifteen minutes.  On the path to inebriation we went.

 

Harold's back yard was no more than fifteen feet long, ending at a barbed wire pasture fence.  Staring out the window with a Budweiser in his hand he had a great idea.  Putting this in context, what's a great idea to me now isn't the same thing as a great idea was to me when I was twenty years old.  Today I think stupid, then I thought, what the hell. 

It was late afternoon, we'd been drinking for at least five hours, and there was no sign of his wife when he brought out his pump pellet gun. Sitting in a rickety kitchen chair and aiming it out the window Harold began looking for something to shoot.  I looked closer and saw that sometime earlier he'd cut a little round hole in the screen, perfect for target practice right from his kitchen.  What did he shoot?  Normally he just shot at rabbits and mice in the yard, he told me, but this day he had a better idea.

Just on the other side of the fence, grazing peacefully, was a herd of cattle.  The pellets couldn't penetrate their hide and so the shots were just a nuisance which caused them to move a few feet this way or that whenever they got shot.  Ping, ping, ping went the gun.  Hee Hee, Hee, went Weird Harold and his drunken sidekick.  He was a good shot, I have to say, and we started playing HORSE like on the basketball court where we'd have to match each other's called shots.  We ought to have called it COW, but that would've been too short of a game, and we weren't educated enough to come up with the complicated game, BOVINE.

Then he called a shot I wasn't expecting.  The Bull was at the fence, and more notable than his horns were the testicles hanging down below.  I think we all know what happened next, don't we?   

Hit in the balls, that bull bellowed loud enough to hear over "Money for nothing and your chicks for free. . ." and he charged,gaining speed running parallel to the fence for forty yards and then that bull broke right through into a back yard.  Not slowing down the bull went past a the house, out into a street and gored a parked car.  These were the days when car alarms were becoming popular and they were annoying because they couldn't be turned off except by some odd combination of actions you had to remember like a vault combination.  They were also sensitive enough that one alarm would cause a chain reaction.

An angry bull running through base housing, surrounded by wailing sirens which incited more panic, and what did Harold do?  Well, he closed his window, put away the air rifle, and got two more beers from the cooler.  His exact words were, "We've got to go watch this."  So like criminals unable to resist the scene of their crime we went down the street to follow the destruction, beers in hand.

The streets were small and crowded, so the bull rampaged down them careening car to car and the path was easy to follow by the dents, broken windows, and the loud alarms.  So many people were out, you'd think we had a parade to view, and in a way we did.  When finally stopped by jeeps at the end of one street, the bull turned around and raced back the way he'd come.  People scattered like in Pamplona as that beast raced for some kind of escape.  I climbed up onto the house roof to watch while Harold went in search of his baseball bat so he could protect the precious Grand Am from the stampeding bull.

The pattern repeated itself several times, because the military police had no idea how to coral a one-ton animal.  Their answer was containment until the farmer arrived with a truck.  Too bad there's no farmer on his way in Iraq. 

With the excitement dying down somewhat and the bull tired from running so that he was just standing in the street looking angrily at everyone and everything, occasionally tossing about, breaking another car, Weird Harold with his bat in hand standing next to his precious Grand Am, and the police waiting for the farmer, it was almost time to go back to the chili.

So, what happened to our hero then?  His wife and daughters appeared, of course.  Walking down the road with toddlers in tow, Cindy was gawking at the destruction but not seeing the cause (her husband nor the bull).  That's when the bull decided it was time for another charge.  She looked up, saw the stampeding horns and screamed.  Car alarms around the country silenced themselves in deference to the true master of the scream.

The bull went for it, and our hero decided family over vehicle, so he jumped out and hit that bull with every ounce of power he could put behind his Louisville Slugger.  Somewhat effective as a distraction, the unharmed bull slowed and turned and looked at this imbecile standing in the street with a broken bat and pain-seared arms, and charged anew. 

Meanwhile, I jumped off the roof, grabbed the girls and ran them inside the house, Cindy screaming about her poor husband the hero all the way. 

Harold ran down the street and through the police jeeps with a bull on his heels.  The bull crashed through the jeeps, spraying cops and metal about and reached the freedom of base housing once again. 

We heard later that the bull hadn't done anymore damage, but had wandered around until the farmer arrived with a truck, a horse and a rope and without much trouble took him away.  Harold had bruised ribs and a bleeding cut on his head.  The Grand Am ended up with a long scratch along the passenger side that looked like punks had done a nasty key job.  Cindy thought her husband was a hero and forgave him for his profligate spending.  And no one until this day when I declared it for the internet to see knew why that bull went through that fence.

- rick, the trouble years.

Previous Episode - Weird Harold

Next Episode - Road Trip

Comments

[Cherise]

LOL! Great story, Rick. I hope there is more Weird Harold. His mentality seems to be stuck at age 13.

[CV Rick]

There are at least two more Weird Harold installments .. . I hope y'all don't get bored of him.

[Cherise]

This chick wont get bored, I find it very engaging.

[Lyda Morehouse]

OMG. This story is awesome. I can see why your writing is getting some notice. Weird Harold rules.