Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs (Holt Paperback) - Softcover

McManus, Patrick F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805009124 ISBN 13: 9780805009125

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 1988

Synopsis

America's favorite outdoor humorist is back with an outrageously fresh collection of stories. He introduces a variety of friends old and new, and takes readers to many exotic locales outdoors and indoors.

About this title

About the Author:

Patrick F. McManus (1933-2018) is the author of novels, plays, and more than a dozen collections of his humor columns from Outdoor Life and other magazines. There are nearly two million copies of his book in print, including his bestselling The Shoot Canoes, Don't They?; The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw; and A Fine and Pleasant Misery.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Rubber Legs And White-Tail Hairs
Muldoon in LoveAfterwards, I felt bad for a while about Miss Deets, but Mom told me to stop fretting about it. She said the problem was Miss Deets had just been too delicate to teach third grade in our part of the country.Besides being delicate, Miss Deets must have also been rich. I don't recall ever seeing her wear the same dress two days in a row. To mention the other extreme, Mr. Craw, one of the seventh-grade teachers at Delmore Blight Grade School, wore the same suit every day for thirty years. Once, when Mr. Craw was sick, the suit came to school by itself and taught his classes, but only Skip Moseby noticed that Mr. Craw wasn't inside the suit. Skip said the suit did a fair job of explaining dangling participles, which turned out to be a kind of South American lizard. I would have liked to hear the suit's lecture, because at the time I was particularly interested in lizards. But I digress from Miss Deets.No one could understand why a rich and genteel lady like Miss Deets would want to teach third grade at Delmore Blight, but on the first day of school, there she was, smellingof perfume and money, her auburn hair piled on top of her head, her spectacles hanging by a cord around her long, slender, delicate neck. We stood there gawking at her, scarcely believing our good fortune in getting this beautiful lady as our very own third-grade teacher.We boys all fell instantly in love with Miss Deets, but none more than my best friend, Crazy Eddie Muldoon. I loved her quite a bit myself at first, but Eddie would volunteer to skip recess so he could clean the blackboard erasers, whether they needed cleaning or not. For the first month of school, the third grade must have had the cleanest blackboard erasers in the entire history of Delmore Blight Grade School. For me, love was one thing, recess another. God had not intended the two to interfere with each other. But Crazy Eddie now skipped almost every recess in order to help Miss Deets with little chores around the classroom. She was depriving me of my best friend's company, and bit by bit I began to hate her. I wished Miss Deets would go away and never come back.Worse yet, in his continuing efforts to prove his love for Miss Deets, Eddie started studying. He soon became the champion of our weekly spelling bees. "Wonderful, Edward!" Miss Deets would exclaim, when Eddie correctly spelled some stupid word nobody in the entire class would ever have reason to use. Then she would pin a ridiculous little paper star on the front of his shirt, the reward for being the last person standing in the spelling bee. It disgusted me to think Eddie would do all that work, learning how to spell all those words, for nothing more than having Miss Deets pin a ridiculous little paper star on his shirt.Then one day Miss Deets made her fateful error. "Now, pupils," she announced, "I think it important for all youngladies and gentlemen to be able to speak in front of groups. So for the next few weeks we are going to have Show and Tell. Each day, one of you will bring one of your more interesting possessions to school, show it to the class, and then tell us all about it. Doesn't that sound like fun?"Three-fourths of the class, including myself, cringed in horror. We didn't own any possessions, let alone interesting ones! Miss Deets looked at me and smiled. "Patrick, would you like to be first?"I put on my thoughtful expression, as though mentally sorting through all my fascinating possessions to select just the one with which to enthrall the class. My insides, though, churned in terror and embarrassment. What could I possibly bring to Show and Tell? The only thing that came to mind was the family post-hole digger. I imagined myself standing up in front of the class and saying, "This is my post-hole digger. I dig post holes with it." No, Miss Deets probably had a longer speech in mind. I glanced around the room. Several hands of the rich kids from town were waving frantically for attention."Uh, I need more time," I told Miss Deets. Like about fifteen years, I thought, but I didn't tell her that."All right, then, Lester?" Miss Deets said to one of the rich kids. "You may be first."The next day Lester brought his stamp collection to Show and Tell, and held forth on it for about an hour. An enterprising person could have cut the tedium into blocks and sold it for ice. But Miss Deets didn't seem to notice. "That's wonderful, Lester!" she cried. "Oh, I do think stamp collecting is such a rewarding hobby! Thank you very much, Lester, for such a fine and educational presentation. Would you like to clean the blackboard erasers during recess?"I glanced at Crazy Eddie. He was yawning. Eddie had a habit of yawning to conceal his occasional moments of maniacal rage. Good, I thought.At recess, Eddie refused to play. He stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, watching Lester on the third-grade fire escape, smugly pounding the blackboard erasers together. "Did you ever see anything more boring than that stupid stamp collection of Lester's?" he said to me."I think I did once," I said. "But it was so boring I forget what it was.""I've got to come up with something for Show and Tell, something really good," Eddie said. "What do you think about a post-hole digger?"Lester's stamp collection, however, was merely the beginning of a competition that was to escalate daily as each succeeding rich kid tried to top the one before. There were coin collections, doll collections, baseball-card collections, model airplanes powered by their own little engines, electric trains that could chew your heart out just looking at them, and on and on until we had exhausted the supply of rich kids in class. We were now down to us country kids, among whom there were no volunteers for Show and Tell. Miss Deets thought we were merely shy. She didn't realize we had nothing to show and tell about.Rudy Griddle, ordered by Miss Deets to be the first of us to make a presentation, shuffled to the front of the class, his violent shaking surrounding him with a mist of cold sweat. He opened a battered cigar box and tilted it up so we could see the contents. "This here's my collection of cigarette butts," he said. "I pick 'em up along the road. You'll notice there ain't any shorter than an inch. If they's an inch or longer they's keepers. Some folks pick up cigarette butts tosmoke, but I don't. I just collect them for educational purposes. Thank you." He returned to his desk and sat down.The class turned to look at Miss Deets. Her mouth was twisted in revulsion. Suddenly, someone started clapping! Crazy Eddie Muldoon was applauding! And somebody else called out, "Yay, good job, Rudy!" The rest of us country kids joined in the applause and cheering and gave Rudy a standing ovation. He deserved it. After all, he had shown us the way. From now on, Show and Tell would really be interesting.Farley Karp brought in the skunk hide he had tanned himself and gave a very interesting talk on the process, even admitting that he had made a few mistakes, but after all, it was the first skunk hide he had ever tanned. He said he figured from what he had learned on the first one, the next skunk hide he tanned he probably could cut the smell by a good 50 percent, which would be considerable.Bill Stanton brought in his collection of dried wildlife droppings, which he had glued to a pine board in a tasteful display and varnished. It was a fine collection, with each item labeled as to its source.Manny Fogg, who had been unable to think of a single thing to bring to Show and Tell, was fortunate enough to cut his foot with a double-bitted ax three days before his presentation and was able to come in and unwrap the bandages and show us the wound, which his mother had sewed shut with gut leader. It was totally ghastly but also very interesting, and educational too, particularly if you chopped firewood with a double-bitted ax, as most of us did.Show and Tell had begun to tell on Miss Deets. Her face took on a wan and haunted look, and she became cross and jumpy. Once I think she went into the cloakroom and cried,because when she returned, her eyes were all red and glassy. That was the time Laura Ann Struddel brought in the chicken that all the other Struddel chickens had pecked half the feathers off of. Laura Ann had set the chicken on Miss Deets's desk and was using a pointer to explain the phenomenon. The chicken, looking pleased to be on leave from the other chickens, but also a little excited at being the subject of Show and Tell, committed a small indiscretion right there on Miss Deets's desk."Oh, my gahhh ..." Miss Deets gasped, her face going as red as dewberry wine, while we third-graders had a good laugh. This, after all, was the first humor introduced into Show and Tell. From then on, those of us who still had to do Show and Tell tried to work a little comedy into our presentations, but nobody topped the chicken.So many great things had been brought to Show and Tell by the other country kids that I had become desperate to find something of equal interest. Finally, I went with my road-killed toad, explaining how it had been flattened by a truck and afterwards had dried on the pavement, until I came along and peeled it up to save for posterity. The toad went over fairly well, and I even got a couple of laughs out of it, which is about all you can expect from a toad. Even so, Miss Deets chose not to compliment me on my performance. She just sat there slumped in her chair, fanning herself with a sheaf of arithmetic papers. I thought she looked a tad green, but that could have been my imagination.Now only Margaret Fisher and Crazy Eddie were left to do their Show and Tells. I knew Eddie was planning to use several pig organs from a recent butchering, provided they hadn't spoiled too much by the time he got to use them. But Margaret changed his plans....

About this edition

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0805009124
• ISBN 13: 9780805009125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208