Let’s talk turkey.
It’s open season in Central Park this week. Thankfully, I’ve yet to get shot. That’s a good thing.
Shooting, bullets, guns, rifles and such have always worried me. In the great state of Alabama, this fear of weapons put me at somewhat of a disadvantage when it came to hunting. If there is anything Alabamians love to do,
it’s to shoot stuff.
Take my friends Cooter and Roy, both great Alabamians. Cooter and Roy are from Dutton on Sand Mountain. If you’ve ever been to Sand Mountain, you know where the term “inbred” comes from. Cooter and Roy are mongoloids, but nonetheless are pretty fun to talk to sometimes.
When I was 12, I got to play with my uncle’s BB gun. I think my mama had horrific visions of me somehow managing to shoot myself. Silly mama. If I was going to ping BBs off anyone, it would have been my three sisters and their little Barbie dolls.
Meanwhile, Cooter and Roy got .12 gauge shotguns for their 12th birthdays. I was knocking over tin cans while they were stomping around North Alabama knocking over deer.
But in the same way, my father and I stink at golf, we stink at shooting things. So Mama never let us go on father-son hunts, although we found out that golf can be just as lethal. Next time I go golfing with Dad, I’m going to wear a fluorescent orange vest.
Once I got into high school, Cooter and Roy insisted on taking me hunting. We went turkey hunting near Selma.At the ungodly hour of 3 a.m. Cooter and Roy came charging into my room.
“Whoee. Morgan, go hop on the truck, we’re gonna shoot us some Turkey!” Now, I’ll admit, that I’m prejudiced against turkey. I hate turkey. Turkey meat is dry.
Turkey burgers taste, well, burnt turkey. Turkeys themselves are ugly and noisy.
Most of the time, turkeys are in bad moods or acting silly.
I like eating dignified animals like pigs.
To my great annoyance, I’m always being told how smart turkeys are. Cooter told me that Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the turkey the national bird for the United States because of what a smart animal it is. If turkeys are so darn smart, how come they’re usually dead come Thanksgiving? I wasn’t buying Cooter’s intelligent turkey idea-of course, maybe the bird was smart compared to Cooter.
At 4 a.m., Cooter, Roy, and I left in full Armageddon active wear. Faces were painted. Guns were loaded. Camouflage was camouflaged. I was already worried. By 5 a.m. we had bumped and crashed over every rut from Selma to the middle of nowhere. Roy had hollered “shotgun” and thus was sitting in the pickup’s cab. I might add that the cab was heated. I, however, was not heated save for the mongrel dog that sat beside me in a stupor.
Soon it was getting light out. The three amigos split up. Roy kept making strange gobbling noises. My gobble sounded very much like Norma Desmond —- it attracted no turkeys.
Thus I gave up the goose — or gobble, as it were and clenched the cold steel of my big old shotgun as “Dixie,” Roy’s idiot dog. nuzzled its head into a nearby pine tree.
I could hear Roy and Cooter crashing around the low hills and dales.
Dixie got here head stuck in the pine tree.
It was too early to be doing this kind of thing. I’m afraid I’m a man of the great indoors. While I was struggling to extract Dixie from the long-needled pine, I heard a branch crack behind me.
“For goodness sake Cooter, don’t shoot me. I’m not a turkey.” I hollered.
“Gobble, gobble,” Cooter said as I continued to tug at Dixie’s ample posterior.
“Cooter, put down that dang turkey call and come help me get your demented canine friend out of this tree,” I said tersely. “Gobble, gobble,” Cooter said. At last, with a crash and a thud, Dixie’s head emerged and she promptly began to sniff the same spot. Exasperated, I momentarily considered Dixie’s demise – but that had a sinister ring to it. Instead, I looked up and saw, lo, a turkey where Cooter was supposed to be.
I am ashamed that my first instinct was the climb the tree Dixie was busy sniffing. Turkeys are nasty, mean-looking things. This particular turkey was eyeballing me like he was in fact our national symbol and not just some overstuffed buzzard. For about 10 minutes, I very stealthily crept towards my Constitutionally protected armament. My weapon was lying on the rock where I had left it while pulling on Dixie’s hindquarters.
The turkey observed my motions with a cool look of defiance. In fact, I considered the turkey’s aggressive stance rather rude. Weren’t wild animals supposed to scurry away at the first sign of humans? This was certainly a bold and presumptuous turkey.
I picked up my gun and aimed at the arrogant bird. My feathered enemy actually came closer. Either this bird was the General Patton of the turkey kingdom or just a suicidal ignoramus.
As I carefully put the unsightly son-of-a gun into my sights, I had a moment of angst. “I’m Presbyterian,” I thought, “Do we shoot birds?” Then the dang thing gobbled at me in a decidedly uncivilized way. It seemed to be saying, “Go ahead, make my day.”
I decided to unload both barrels, so to speak, even though I only had one.
I took a deep breath, eyed said the bird, and pulled the trigger. “Click,” went my gun. I had the safety on.
The turkey’s beady little eyes seemed to say, “You sir, are a moron.”
Now I was really gonna turn that bird into a Thanksgiving dinner. That turkey’s goose was cooked. I released the safety, gave the butterball my best Elvis sneer, and let the bullets fly.
I missed that turkey by about 10 feet, knocking bark off Dixie’s pine tree. I swear the turkey sneered back at me and then flew off in a great rush of wind and flapping. Suddenly, I realized I was bleeding. There was blood on my sweater, on my camouflage, and even blood running into my eyes. I was hit. That dang fowl had shot me.
Then I realized the kick from the gun had nicked my forehead. A scratch at most. But I was bleeding like a stuck pig.
Cooter and Roy came running down the slope looking for the carcass of the bird that got away, “Hey Morgan, where’s your kill?”
They were actually going to buy my story about the turkey attacking my head, but then they saw the crescent shape of the site and the bald spot on Dixie’s pine tree. At this point, they began laughing hysterically, and I swear I think I heard a gobble off in the distance.
So Andalusia, this Thanksgiving, eat a turkey for me.