Bubba’s karma had not been favorably inclined so far this day. He had bought a bag of large white marbles and a bottle of iridescent yellow paint. His attempts at drilling holes through the marbles were disastrous. They kept slipping out of the vise, and when he tightened the vise more, the marbles cracked. The drill bit kept sliding off, then broke. This went on and got no better until he came up with a clever idea.

At several minutes past three P.M., Honey poked her head inside the shop, a concerned expression on her face.

“Sweetie, you haven’t eaten a thing all day,” she worried.

“Don’t have time.”

“Sweetie, you always have time.”

“Not now.”

She spotted what was left of her favorite large pearl necklace on the workbench.

“Sweetie, what are you doing?”

She dared to venture several inches inside his shop. The pearls were loose and Bubba was widening the holes through them with a 5/64th-inch drill bit.

“Bubba? What are you doing to my pearls? My father gave me those pearls.”

“They’re fake, Honey.”

Bubba threaded black string through one of the pearls and tied a tight knot. He did the same thing with another pearl and took the two lengths of string and tied them together maybe four inches below the pearls. He slowly whirled this above his head like a lasso. He liked the way it felt, and proceeded to make several more.

“Honey, you go on back inside the house,” Bubba said. “This is something you don’t need to see or tell anybody about.”

She wavered in the doorway, her eyes uneasy.

“You’re not doing something sneaky, are you?” she dared to ask.

Bubba didn’t reply.

“Precious, I’ve never known you to do anything sneaky. You’ve always been the most honest man I’ve ever met, so honest everybody’s always taking advantage of you.”

“I’m meeting Smudge at his house around six and we’re heading out to Suffolk.”

She knew what that meant. “Dismal Swamp? Please don’t tell me you’re going there, Bubba.”

“May or may not.”

“Think of all the snakes.” She shivered.

“There’s snakes everywhere, Honey,” said Bubba, who was acutely phobic of snakes and believed no one knew it. “A man can’t spend his life worrying about snakes.”

Smudge had his own workshop, which was much better organized than Bubba’s and equipped with only the essentials. He had the expected table, power miter, radial-arm and band saws, a thickness planer, wood lathe, workbench and shop vacuum. Smudge wasn’t fond of snakes, either, but he used common sense.

The weather had been unseasonably warm. Water moccasins might be stirring in the Dismal Swamp, meaning Smudge had no intention of hunting coons down there. Southampton County would be better, although probably not for Bubba. Smudge was at his workbench Super-Gluing a real rattlesnake rattle to the tail of a long rubber snake. He snagged the snake with a simple eagle-claw hook threaded with twenty feet of monofilament.

21

SMUDGE LOADED THE portable dog pen on the back of his coon-hunting fully loaded V10 Dodge Ram.