by Donna Ingham
Betty’s little friends would come over to look at Ralph, and it was their opinion that his greatest potential was as boots or belts or handbags. But Betty said No, No. He had greater things in store for him. And little did she know how right she was.
She fitted him out with an alligator harness and trained him to a leash so she could take him for walks to get some exercise. By the time Betty turned sweet sixteen, Ralph was right at 14 feet long and still growing. She was out walking him one day down close to a resaca, one of those south Texas watering holes, and Ralph all of a sudden felt the call of the wild. He headed toward that open water, and tug as she would on that leash, Betty could not get him turned back toward home. Ralph just kept moving toward that resaca.
When he reached the edge, he slid and slithered right in the water, that mischievous grin growing wider than ever. Unable to hold him back but refusing to turn loose of the leash, Betty waded in right behind him—up to her ankles, up to her knees, up to her hips, up to her waist. . . . When she was about neck deep, she did the only thing she knew to do: She climbed aboard and was now riding a 14-foot alligator bareback.
Ralph kept swimming, kept swimming, crossed the resaca, and swam right on into the Rio Grande. He swam up river against the current. Betty was now using the leash like a rein, but there was no controlling Ralph.
Of a late afternoon or evening, though, Ralph would crawl out on the riverbank to do a little basking (alligators like to bask), and Betty would have a chance to dry out a little. Now Ralph subsisted mostly on large insects and small mammals, but Betty had been going hungry until she hit on a plan. She’d noticed that people would just naturally gather to have a look at Ralph, so Betty began to teach him tricks to entertain the crowd. He learned to sit up—way up—and speak, more like a big roar. He could roll over and play dead. But he never did get very good at shaking hands, and no one really wanted to give that trick a try, anyway.
Meanwhile, bookish Betty commenced going to the public library wherever they happened to be to do a little research on alligators, and she came across a book of alligator jokes. So she started telling some for the amusement of the onlookers who came to see Ralph do tricks. For example: What do alligators and storytellers have in common? They both have tails/tales. Or what do you call an alligator with GPS? A navigator. Okay, so they’re pretty corny, but they were entertaining enough, combined with Ralph’s tricks, to get folks to drop some money in the tip jar. And Betty could buy some supper and some Gatorade.
By the time they got to El Paso, they had perfected their act, doing shows all the way up the Rio Grande. Ralph was now full-grown, right at 20 feet long or high, depending on whether he was prone or perpendicular. This time when he came ashore to bask (alligators like to bask), some instinct urged him to keep going ’til he reached the center of town. Sure enough, he found some other imported alligators swimming in a big pond there as a far west Texas tourist attraction. He joined them, and, calling on all his show business experience and expertise, he organized them into the world’s first and only alligator synchronized swim team, thus becoming (wait for it) an instigator. The aquatic show became quite a hit. People came from miles around. Tour buses made regular stops. Ralph and his friends even got their own show on the Animal Channel.
Betty stayed with the troupe long enough to see the performances well established, but, to tell you the truth, she was tiring of show business and yearning for a more storied career. So she blew Ralph a kiss and said, “See you later, alligator,” and went off to college to become a librarian—always partial to books about reptiles in general and alligators in particular.
And Ralph? Well, he became famous in El Paso and lived to be about fifty years old. So beloved was he that there is now a life-size statue of all 20 feet of him sitting up and speaking his roar, just as Betty taught him, right there by the Alligator Fountain on the Plaza de los Lagartos in downtown El Paso. You owe it to yourself to go see it sometime, and when you go, remember to do what Betty did: Blow Ralph a kiss and say, “See you later, alligator.”
The Texan and the Blue Lambs
One of the first stories I adapted for telling is really an old joke told in any number of versions here in Texas. It is an example of a Spoonerism, a play on words that is named after an Oxford don in England who had a penchant for switching the beginning sounds of words to humorous effect. He might say, for example, “you hissed my mystery class” instead of “you missed my history class.” The fun of creating a Spoonerism story is aiming for the punch line with a tale of one’s own making, as in the following.
Say now, let me tell you about an old boy from over around San Angelo. We call that the shortgrass country here in Texas, and that’s where folks raise a lot of cattle and a lot of sheep. Well, sure enough, this old boy raised a lot of cattle and a lot of sheep.
But this one particular year they were having a terrible, terrible drought. I mean it was dry. Why, it was so dry the catfish were carrying canteens. Finally things got so bad that old boy had to sell off all of his cattle and most of his sheep, but he did keep a few lambs.
Then one day his wife was out in the yard doing the wash, and she had a tub of bluing setting over there, and one of those little old lambs came along and fell into that tub of bluing. It went clear under. Why, it was just like a Baptist immersion, it was. But the lamb was all right and climbed out, and it was the prettiest pastel blue you’ve ever seen in your life.
By the next morning that lamb was all dried off and fluffy and over playing with the other lambs by the fence. That fence bordered a road that came into town, and down that road came a Cadillac.
You do know, now, that we have three state holidays here in Texas: We’ve got Remember the Alamo Day and Sam Houston’s Birthday and the Day the New Cadillacs Come Out.
Well anyway, here comes this Cadillac with a man and a woman in it. The woman looks over to the man and says, “Oh, Hon, stop! Do you see that blue lamb over there? I’ve just got to have it.”
So Hon stops and she gets out and goes over to find the rancher who’s there by the barn, piddling around. “Tell me now,” she says, “how much do you want for that blue lamb over there?”
The rancher doesn’t bat an eye. He says, “That blue lamb will cost you twenty-five dollars.”
She doesn’t blink either. She just pulls out her wallet, peels off a couple of tens and a five, gives them to the rancher, goes over and picks up the blue lamb, and puts it in the back of the Cadillac.
Then she and Hon drive off.
Well, our Texan senses opportunity here. So every evening he takes one of those little lambs, dunks it in the bluing, and makes sure it’s all dried off and fluffy by the next morning and playing with the other lambs by the fence.
Sure enough, the Cadillacs keep coming and the Cadillacs keep stopping, and he’s selling those blue lambs hand over fist. He has to go out and buy some more lambs. So it isn’t long before that old boy earns himself a reputation—at least in those parts—and he becomes known as THE BIGGEST LAMB DYER IN TEXAS.
The Texan and the Grass Hut
Once I started telling the blue lamb story, I heard a number of other Spoonerism punch lines from people who would come up to me and say, “Oh, I have one for you.” So I soon created a sequel to the preceding story with one of those orally transmitted gifts.
This rancher and his wife got so rich selling blue lambs that pretty soon they had to start putting all their money into shoeboxes and hiding them under the bed.
Then they did what a lot of Texans do when they get to be semi-retired: They bought themselves an RV, a recreational vehicle. And I mean it was one of those big old forty-foot-long buses with the twinkly lights that go around the windows and everything. First thing they did was drive it down to spend the winter in the Rio Grande Valley with all the other snowbirds who flock into one of those fancy RV resorts in south Texas.
And they played shuf
fleboard and went to the potluck dinners and took square dancing lessons and got their blood pressure checked every Wednesday. Then, when they got tired of all that, they took off in that RV and just crisscrossed the whole United States from south to north and east to west. When they’d seen everything they wanted to see there, they parked their bus back in San Angelo and started buying airplane tickets.
Why, they flew to Hawaii and to all the capitals of Europe and Asia and South America even. Pretty soon, though, their travel agent was running out of places to send them, until one day she called and said she had this tour that promised to take people to the deepest, darkest jungles in the world. Would they like to go?
The Texan said, “Sure ’nough. Sign us up.”
Well, that tour did everything it promised it would. It took them to the deepest, darkest jungles in the world. And the last stop on the tour took them into a jungle that was so deep and so dark that they actually discovered one of those heretofore unknown aboriginal tribes.
Fortunately the natives were friendly and just nearly as curious about the tourists as the tourists were about them. Between them, they did manage to work out a primitive method of communication even, and the tourists learned that the natives’ form of government was a very simple one. It amounted to this: Whoever had in his possession a particularly heavy carved wooden throne was the chief. Simple as that.
Once again, our Texan sensed opportunity here.
The Texan told his wife, the evening before the tour was to head back to the United States, “Sweet Thing, you go on back to San Angelo and take care of things there. I believe I’ll stay here for a while because, as a Texan, I have been many things in my life, but I have never ever yet been a chief. So I’m going to bide my time and get ahold of that throne. Then I’m going to be the chief until I get tired of it. Then I’ll come home.”
So Sweet Thing went on along with the tour, and the Texan remained in the jungle. He made it clear to the natives that he wanted to stay with them for a while, and that was okay with them. They even helped him build a grass hut just like the ones they lived in.
Well, he bided his time until one dark night when he decided the moment had come for him to get his hands on that throne. So he crept across the compound there and into the chief’s hut. He felt around and felt around until he found the throne. Then he laid hold of it—remembering to bend his knees so he wouldn’t throw his back out—and lifted it enough off the ground so as not to leave tracks as he backed into the compound again. When he was in the open, he hefted the throne up a little higher and made his way back to his own hut.
Once he got back with it, however, he decided maybe he shouldn’t spring this thing on them too quickly, so he reckoned he’d just hide the throne until the natives got used to the idea that there would be a new chief.
It was a bit of a struggle, but he managed to lift that heavy old throne and get it wedged up in the bamboo rafters of his little grass hut and covered up with more grass until you couldn’t even tell it was there. Which was good because the next morning the old chief was pretty peeved about the situation, and he instituted a hut-to-hut search. But the Texan had done a really good job of hiding the throne, and the natives never found it.
Several days rocked along there until finally the old chief and his people were ready for the new chief to declare himself. So the Texan decided that the very next morning he would get the throne down and announce his chief-hood. He lay down on his little grass mat-bed that night feeling pretty smug, all right.
But there was one thing the Texan hadn’t counted on. You see, the weight of that big old throne was beginning to severely weaken those bamboo rafters. During the night those rafters began to sway. And they swayed and swayed until finally . . . SNAP! They broke right in two, and that big old heavy throne came crashing down and crushed the very life out of our sleeping Texan.
So, naturally, there’s a moral to this story, and it is this: PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GRASS HOUSES SHOULDN’T STOW THRONES.
The Three Bubbas
Influenced by the likes of James Thurber and others who have created parodies of classic fairy tales, I drafted this one right in the middle of football season one year.
Once upon a Sunday afternoon, the three Bubbas decided to leave their den and let the salsa sit while they went to get another couple of six-packs before the game started. So Big Bubba, his best buddy, Bubba, and the next-door neighbor, Junior Bubba, jumped into Big Bubba’s pickup truck and headed for the Toot ‘n’ Tote’em.
Whereupon the lady of the house passed by the door of the den, saw the salsa sitting there, and decided to enter the forbidden territory to dip a chip or two. She sampled the mild salsa first, but it did not please her palate. So she went to the other extreme and tried the five-alarm salsa. Whooee! That cleared her sinuses for sure, but she didn’t need a second dose. So she grabbed up the medium salsa and the bag of chips and looked for a place to sit down.
There was Big Bubba’s chair, of course, a big old vinyl-covered Barcalounger. That’d be good; in case she spilled some salsa, it’d wipe right off. But dang it, that chair just wasn’t comfortable. She kept sliding around on that plastic and just couldn’t get settled.
So she tried the end of the couch that Big Bubba’s best buddy, Bubba, usually sat on, but it was pretty well Bubba-butt sprung, if you know what I mean, so she didn’t fit there either. Now, Junior Bubba’s end of the couch was more to her liking, so she sat there and hunkered over the bowl and kept dipping until the salsa was all gone.
She clicked the big-screen TV on with the remote just in time to catch the pre-pre-game show, and she watched until she was bored into a semi-stupor. That took all of about two minutes, tops. So she leaned back on the sofa cushions and swung her legs up on the couch and pulled the afghan her mother-in-law had crocheted down off the back of the couch and just gave into it and went to sleep.
When the three Bubbas got back, the TV was on, so they knew they’d had an intruder in the den. They tiptoed in and saw right away that somebody had been in their salsa and that one bowl was clear empty and dipped clean. They didn’t even have to go through that part about who’d been sitting in whose chair because there she was, sound asleep on the couch.
“Hey! What are we going to do, Big Bubba?” asked his best buddy, Bubba.
“Well, Bubba,” Big Bubba said, “we’re going to do the only thing we can do, under the circumstances. We’re going to gather up what’s left of the salsa and what’s left of the chips, and we’re going to take our six-packs next door to Junior Bubba’s house and watch this game on his piddly little-old twenty-inch TV. That’s what we’re going to do.”
Because even the three Bubbas did know very well this modern moral: IT IS ALWAYS BEST TO LET SLEEPING WIVES LIE—WHEREVER THEY DANGED WELL PLEASE.
Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope
Another fractured fairy tale of sorts is one I wrote by formula, so to speak, on the pattern of “Little Red Riding Hood,” supposing that the familiar story was set in Texas. Of course, there are Bubbas in this tale as well.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who liked to rope things—tree stumps, mostly. Although she would occasionally aim for the moving target: a dog, a cat, a visiting cousin.
She lived with her daddy, Bubba, and he was mighty proud of her roping ability, as he was a champion calf roper himself and had the belt buckles to prove it. So when she wasn’t but three or four years old, he gave her a bright orange—well, tangerine-colored—lariat, and she set right in to twirling it. After that everybody took to calling her Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope.
One day when she was maybe seven or eight, Daddy Bubba called her in and said he had a little chore for her to do. She said, “You bet, Daddy Bubba.” She was an agreeable child.
So Daddy Bubba said, “Take this here basket over to your granddaddy Bubba at his house over the river and through the woods. It’s just
a few staple items he might be running low on: some beef jerky and RC Colas and Moon Pies. And now listen to me, darlin’, don’t you be getting off’n the trail or out of your rut, so to speak, because there are all kinds of critters out there in those woods.”
“You bet, Daddy Bubba,” said Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope, and off she went with the basket in one hand and her rope in the other. Now she was just a-Texas two-stepping down that trail and humming an old Willie Nelson tune when she came to a clearing that was plumb full of tree stumps. Well, it was Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope’s policy never to leave a tree stump unroped, so— even though it meant stepping off the trail and out of her rut— she shook her out a loop, twirled it over her head, and let it fly at the closest stump. Caught it, too.
All of a sudden, up popped a big bad jackalope. Now, if you’re not from Texas, you may not know about jackalopes. They’re hybrid creatures, as you might suspect—part jackrabbit and part antelope. Their body’s that of a jackrabbit, only bigger, the size of an antelope. And they have antlers like an antelope. You used to see a lot of them around Texas, but word is they’re extinct now. And I’m going to tell you how it happened.
This particular big bad jackalope said to Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope, “Howdy there, sweetie. And what would your name be?”
“Teeny Tangerine Twirling Rope,” she said, although that wasn’t her real name, of course. Her real name was Bubbette.
“Uh-huh,” replied the big bad jackalope. “Well, you’re a sure enough good roper all right. I saw you lasso that stump. Say now, where are you headed and what’ve you got in that basket?”
“I’m going to see Granddaddy Bubba just over the next rise and take him some beef jerky and RC Colas and Moon Pies,” she said.
