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ice and hoping the six cans they had would be enough to get the job done. They had just finished a short pit stop up a dirt side road when the misunderstanding occurred. As they were pulling back onto the highway, the back glass exploded in a hail of gunfire and several holes appeared in the front windshield. A.J. slumped down and floored it, heading for town and the protection of Slim. Eugene was hunkered in the right floorboard, cursing and bleeding from a small wound in his left earlobe. It seemed that the pale rider was upon them. Then they heard a siren, and a blue light began to flash. The car chasing them was Slim’s cruiser. A.J. pulled over, and Slim was all over them.
    “Freeze!” he hollered, approaching the truck slowly behind the barrels of the largest shotgun A.J. had ever seen. Slim eased up to the truck and jerked open the door. Confusion replaced his fierce expression when he realized who occupied the truck.
    “What the hell were you boys doing up that road back there?” he demanded, keeping the shotgun aimed in their direction.
    “We were taking a leak,” Eugene growled from the floorboard. “I can’t believe you just shot me for pissing on a dirt road.”
    “You weren’t stealing pigs?” Slim asked, lowering the ten-gauge a little.
    “Do you see any pigs?” A.J. asked. He had a lot of fairly un-explainable truck damage to explain when he got home and was becoming cranky now that another sunrise seemed to be in his future. “Eugene, you got any pigs down there with you?”
    “Nope.”
    “Goddamn,” Slim said quietly. He lowered the shotgun all the way. “A.J., take Eugene down to Doc Miller’s and get his ear fixed. I’ll go talk to your folks.”
    It turned out there had been a rash of hog thefts in the area, and Slim had received an anonymous pork tip earlier in the day. He was a man who would not tolerate pig theft, and even
suspected
pig theft would be dealt with harshly. When A.J. and Eugene pulled up the side road that led to Rabbit Brown’s barn, they had no idea they were under Slim’s zealous scrutiny. When they stopped to relieve themselves, he had vaulted into action. The real swine thief was busy at the time stealing fifteen hogs from Slim.
    When Slim attempted to explain the mishap to Eugene’s father, Johnny Mack spoke no word. He simply stepped into the house for a moment and returned with his twelve-gauge and a box of shells. Slim executed a quick retreat as Johnny Mack stood on the porch, slowly loading the pump shotgun. The luckless constable fared no better when he talked to A.J.’s father. John Robert Longstreet was a man of few syllables and spent only one on Slim Neal.
    “Git,” he said, pointing to the road. Slim got.
    Slim was fired over the incident, but he was reinstated two months later when no one else could be found to take the job for what it paid. The town council extracted his solemn promise to only shoot at confirmed perpetrators in the future. Then they returned his badge after knocking from his wage the price of the new glass in John Robert’s truck. Johnny Mack attempted to whip Eugene over the incident, because the boy should have been home reading the Bible and not out peeing on Rabbit Brown’s pigs. The whipping didn’t go well, however, due to Eugene’s objections over being punished for getting shot while urinating on a dirt road. John Robert didn’t try to whip A.J., but the incident indicated to him that the boy had way too much spare time on his hands. Thus A.J. spent all his free time during the following several weeks replacing rotten fence posts around the back field at the farm.
    “If you get to needing to pee while you’re out there, just drag her out and let her rip,” John Robert said, chuckling at his merry joke. “Just make sure your granmama’s not around.”
    But those were the old times, long gone and mostly forgotten. Eugene and A.J. stood by the Jeep in the clearing and admired Eugene’s handiwork. Rufus trotted up