Bully Boy's Shotgun Lottery

FICTION Bully Boy's Shotgun Lottery____________ Carl B. Jarrell DORSETT DROPPED THE BLAZER down into first and started up the last steep incline to the mine parking lot. The headlights shone upward on the mountain at a sixty-degree angle, illuminating the poplar, hickory and oak that held these ancient peaks together. After a slipping, sliding one hundred feet final climb (the Blazer in four-wheel drive), the headlight beams leveled off upon the four late model pickup trucks that crowded the small gravel parking lot. Dorsett backed the Blazer into a space directly opposite the inclined access road. Dorsett always showed up for work an hour and a half before the shift started: wanted to be darned sure he'd get a good space, even if he didn't do another darned thing all day long. Dorsett exited his Blazer, not bothering to lock it, with his lunch box and two Stanley thermos bottles of hot black coffee. He'd drink one bottle of the coffee before they went in, and the other bottle would be done before dinner. Dorsett believed in taking a lot of coffee breaks, even if they interfered with his production. He walked out into the yard (which was eerily illuminated by the copper glow of the iodine lights) and the noise of the intake fan three hundred feet past the track portal. One thing he did do, every morning in the winter, at least, was to start the fire. They didn't pay him for that—he just did it out of the goodness of his heart. He dropped his lunch box and bottles off beside the fifty-gallon oil drum in front of the old house trailer that served as an office, and began scouring the yard for trash to burn. Pine halfheaders , a discarded cable reel and a couple of lumps of coal (spilled from number one belt), went into the drum. Then Dorsett walked into the office for the day's accumulation of trash, which would serve as kindling. He was careful not to wake the dispatcher, Billy-Boy Braddock. Let sleeping dogs lie was the best policy for Billy-Boy. They paid Billy-Boy forty-five thousand dollars—plus a lot of Union benefits—to come here every night and sleep on that desk. The bosses wereplumb scared to death ofBilly-Boy, and sowas Dorsett. Hehadheard that Billy-Boy threw a pool table at some feller at the Timber Wolf Club, and he also had heard about Billy breaking his wife's arms for Christmas. But Dorsetthadbeen there the night of the Thousand Dollar Dog and had seen with his own eyes what a mean son-of-a-bitch Billy-Boy was. 36 Dorsett enjoyed going out coon hunting with some of the boys on Saturday nights. He didn't have any dogs of his own, and he rarely went out for the kill, but he liked to sit beside the fire they always made and take the occasional pull off of the bottle of George or Jack or Jim that always showed up. The most avid coon-hunters (Wet-Hen, Stinkbug and Tommy from the mine were among the regulars) had big money in their dogs, and they were always bragging about who had the best. Some of the dogs had cost five hundred bucks. But then BillyBoy started coming out to these hunts, and it wasn't longbefore he had answered an ad in Field and Stream and had sent a thousand dollars to Tennessee for a guaranteed trained Walker coon hound. Billy-Boy said he reckoned that if his dog cost twice as much as the best the other guys had, then it was probably twice the dog. "You get what you pay for, boys," he said. Old Billy had to drive to Charleston and meet his new dog at the airport. Wet-Hen asked if he flew him in first class! The next Saturday night Billy-Boy was at the camp with the Thousand Dollar Dog, and the first thing the dog did was get after a deer. He ran it for two hours, but nobody said a word to Billy-Boy, because they could tell...