Bubba and the Curse of the Boogity

by C. L. Bevill

  He adjusted the flashlight so that he could see better, and his shoulders slumped. No, it ain’t the Boo. It’s someone in a Boo suit with duct tape around their mouth. And around their arms. And around their torso. And just about everywhere except their legs and feet.

  As a matter of fact, it was Marquita Thaddeus, and she was rather annoyed.

  Bubba was almost disappointed that it hadn’t been a real live Boogity-Boo.

  Chapter 19

  Bubba and the End of the Mystery?

  Getting Marquita out of the hole proved to be moderately challenging, but Bubba finally used the end of the pickax to snag the back of her Boo suit. He pulled her close enough to him that he could grasp her firmly under her arms in order to lift her. Then he essentially dragged her up into the tunnel where he sat her up and awkwardly worked on her duct tape bindings with muck-covered fingers. When he realized he was getting wetter than he should from being in close association with the muddy, drenched woman, he looked down to see a small but steady stream of water coursing through the tunnel. It made a little creek of murky water that spilled into the hole in which she’d just been incarcerated. Bubba expectantly looked up at the ceiling as if he could see the skies above and had an idea that it had begun to rain outside. It seemed like it was a heavy rain, too. Apparently, twenty percent chance of thunderstorms had transmogrified into a hundred percent chance.

  Bubba yanked off the tape around Marquita’s mouth, and she squealed when it took some hair, too. Somewhere along the line she’d lost the Boo mask. (Bubba had to remind himself to sternly ask Simone and Risley if they had another suit besides the one they’d shown him in the trailer. Furthermore, was it actually three suits if one included the one that Daniel wore in filming? He suspected the answer was yes, they had and hmm, why had they withheld that information? Probably because they hadn’t wanted to get in more trouble, but still.) (Also, he expected they had more than a few cans of neon-orange paint, but that was neither here nor there.)

  Once her mouth was freed, Marquita loudly unleashed a virulent stream of profanity that turned Bubba’s cheeks pink. Mostly the words involved suing the former FBI agent and anyone who had anything to do with helping her back into the Stone Age, but there was also intent about tearing someone’s head off and doing something nasty to all kidnappers/abusers/people who are violent and moronic, although she was wildly veering off topic by the end.

  Bubba assisted the dirt-smeared woman to her feet and waited for her to pause in her tirade. “We need to git out,” he said when she did.

  “What?” she demanded. “I’m telling you about how I was…kidnapped by that whackjob and you want to just get of the caves!”

  “Look down,” Bubba said, aiming the flashlight for her. Then he pointed it at the hole she’d been in, and it was more than half full of gurgling brown water. “The caving expert said something about water rising ifin there was a sudden rainstorm, and I reckon there was, so we ain’t in a good spot to linger, and therefore we’re leavin’ before we have to swim out because I don’t have a life vest nor do you.”

  Marquita sputtered, but she couldn’t argue with Bubba’s reasoning. She merely muttered sourly while he cut the yards of duct tape that had been wrapped around her torso. It looked as though Hornbuckle had broken her piggy bank to clear out all the local stores for plain-jane, silver duct tape. When he was done, Marquita vaguely resembled an animal with a severe case of mange.

  When they moved into the outer chamber, Bubba paused to look at Hornbuckle who was still lying on the floor unconscious. The water was rushing past the unconscious woman’s elbow, and one of her hands was actually in the stream. He sighed heavily. Finally, he handed the flashlight to Marquita and said, “I gotta take her with us.”

  More inventive profanity followed that announcement. Marquita must have memorized things from films Bubba had never seen and books he’d never read because there was some inspired and ingenious arrangements concerning camels, their mothers, his mother (that made Bubba grimace and bite down on his lip to keep from saying something to a woman who was justifiably upset and possibly didn’t mean a bit of it), Hornbuckle’s mother, and a thousand red-hot pokers inserted into areas best not mentioned in polite company.

  “She might drown,” Bubba said when she paused again for breath. “You take that flashlight and go up. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Bubba grunted as he hefted Hornbuckle over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. She might be half his weight, but she felt like double his weight when lying over his back. He supposed he shouldn’t move her at all given that she’d gone headfirst into a wall, but there wasn’t a choice to be made here. Leave her to die or move her and risk further injury to her neck and head.

  Bubba sighed. Sighing was getting to be a way of life with him. He could sigh heavily or he could sigh wryly or maybe he could sigh jauntily because he was tired of merely just sighing. A fella could write a book about sighing.

  Bubba reached down to grab the lantern with a free hand and sighed about that, too.

  “Wait,” Marquita said suddenly. “She’s unconscious, right?” Bubba adroitly sensed that the question didn’t really require an answer. “What if she wakes up and starts something?”

  It wasn’t a question that was out of the range of possibility. “Still need to git her out of danger,” he rumbled.

  Marquita stared at him and then at Hornbuckle. She suddenly smirked evilly, and it reminded Bubba of Hornbuckle’s honey badger smile. “I’ve got it,” she announced with an abruptness that bothered him.

  She turned and went to the side of the small room and dug through a pile of debris, which Bubba realized wasn’t debris but supplies Hornbuckle must have brought with her. Marquita tossed aside what looked like a space helmet. Then she briefly examined a scarf and then discarded it. Also, there was a work shirt with the name of Berryhill on the pocket. A carton of Lucky Strikes followed that. Finally, she held up a large roll of duct tape in triumph. “She didn’t use all of the duct tape on me, so what’s good for the goose and all that,” she pronounced.

  Bubba sighed again and put Hornbuckle down and watched while Marquita physically worked a little of her kidnapping out of her system. He had to stop the Hollywood guru toward the end by saying, “No, you cain’t put the tape over both her nose and her mouth.” Marquita compensated for being thwarted by wrapping more of the tape over Hornbuckle’s arms, systematically paying more attention to bare skin.

  “You’d think a roll that big would last longer,” Marquita said vehemently, tossing the empty roll to the floor of the room. “There isn’t more, is there?”

  “No time for that,” Bubba said as he hoisted Hornbuckle up again. The former FBI agent was like a supersized silver burrito. He didn’t know how many feet of duct tape had been on the roll, but it seemed like it had lasted plenty good enough. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to explain it to anyone.

  Marquita muttered, cursed, and prayed all the way up the tunnels. Bubba realized after about a half hour that they weren’t going the same way he’d come down, but they were slowly climbing upward and the water had stopped sluicing its way through the tunnels so he was happy with it. Moderately speaking.

  After the thirty minutes however, Bubba’s back was screaming in protest. “I don’t care to ask about a lady’s weight,” he said conversationally trying to catch his breath, “but how much do you think she weighs?”

  “Don’t care,” Marquita snarled. “She knocked me in the head and wrapped me up in duct tape and threw me in a hole while she dug for some crappy treasure, rambling all the while about how everyone was unfair to her. Hope she gets one of those maximum-security prisons where they don’t allow you to do yoga and they serve starchy carbs for the rest of her life or until they parole her for good behavior. Eat pasta and die, twatwaffle.”

  Bubba stopped to rest while Marquita paced. He carefully placed Hornbuckle against the wall and braced his back on the same wall waiting for his howling muscles to r
elax. He took the lantern and held it up, looking around for some sign that might show him where they were located. It didn’t look exactly like somewhere he’d been, before but there was a peace sign carved in the wall that seemed familiar. The former occupants of Hovious place had been everywhere.

  “I think ifin we go this way we’ll run into that tunnel with the stream that leads outside,” Bubba said. “Then out by the bridge where the Boo threatened Tandy. That wasn’t you then, right?” He shook his head. “No, you were there. Oh yeah, Risley said it was him. Did you have a schedule or something so you wouldn’t run into each other?”

  “Ris squealed?” Marquita asked.

  “They were worried about you.”

  “They?”

  “Simone, too,” Bubba said.

  Marquita paced some more and was obviously thinking about it. “Okay, I admit it. I pretended to be the Boo,” she grumbled. “So did Risley. And Simone once I think. But we didn’t kidnap anyone, and we didn’t throw rocks, so that was someone else pretending to be the Boo. I guess they told you we were just trying to kickstart the movie. We were starting a mystique about the Boogity-Boo monster.”

  “I heard all of this from Simone and Risley. Also, you sabotaged Dan, er, Armand’s vehicle both times, so he wouldn’t show up when there was a ‘real’ Boo appearance, is that right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I wouldn’t tell him that,” Bubba muttered. Daniel Gollihugh wouldn’t take well to being manipulated at the cost of his tires or any other part of his car. Something else popped into Bubba’s head and he asked, “And you weren’t in the tunnels moaning at me, was that yesterday?”

  “No, she—” Marquita forked a devil’s sign at Hornbuckle— “got me yesterday and put me in the damn hole. I think she dragged me down half the mountain. I swear I have rocks in places a proctologist wouldn’t believe.” She wiped muck from her forehead and pulled some hair in front of her eyes to look at it. “My stylist is going to be ticked the eff off.”

  “And Hornbuckle wasn’t playing the Boo,” Bubba surmised.

  “She was looking for treasure. Gold, or silver, or something treasure-y. She didn’t have time to play the Boo,” Marquita insisted. Her mud-covered face crumpled. “Oh, cruddy mcfunderbutt, that means there’s at least one other Boo running around the tunnels. I didn’t put that together before. Us. Someone else throwing the rocks. Then someone in the tunnels, which may or may not be the rock thrower. I’m slower than mud in an August sun.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’ve been in Texas way too long,” she mumbled from behind her hand.

  “You ain’t drank nothing or et since yesterday,” Bubba said, “and I expect you dint sleep very well, so I guess your head ain’t in the place it should be.” He rose up and with a loud pained grunt, hoisted Hornbuckle over his shoulder again, adjusting the lantern in his hand as he did so. “Let’s git you out and have some medical people look at you and her, too.”

  Marquita nodded, obviously somewhat calmer. “This way, right?”

  Bubba thought it was this way, but it was really that way. An hour later they found an exit that he hadn’t seen before. It was a doorway constructed of plywood with pipe handles on the inside. He expected it looked like the ones he had seen Hornbuckle using and the one near the bridge where Tandy had been threatened. He had to put Hornbuckle and the lantern down in order to shove the makeshift door away from the side of the hill. It took him three tries and a triumphant yell in order to complete the deed. The door pretty much exploded outward and frightened the ever-living crud out of a group of law enforcement officials who were drinking coffee and eating bear claws under the nearby pop-up canopy. Both Bubba and Marquita tumbled through the opening like they’d been listening at a door that was suddenly opened from the other side. When they stopped tumbling, everyone was staring at them.

  There was a long telling moment of silence before the reaction ensued. One of them shrieked loudly and screamed, “It’s the Boo! It’s a horde of Boos! There be Boos everywhere!”

  Another one pulled his service weapon and started to swing it in their direction.

  Bubba realized about three things in those extremely brief seconds. One was that he hadn’t thought about Willodean in at least an hour, and he wanted to call her and wake her up regardless of her needing her sleep. Two was that he was covered in mud and it was dark and he had just charged out of a hole in the hill that was about ten feet away from where the caving expert and the law enforcement had set up their base camp. Although there was light from the flashlight in Marquita’s hand, it was dim, and the lantern in the tunnel wasn’t doing anything except silhouetting their shapes. Three was that he was actually in danger of being shot because he had been mistaken for being the Boo, and the man holding the firearm was Officer Smithson, the Pegram Police Department officer who had once stomped on his head with steel-toed boots. (Possibly it could have been the other officer, Haynes, but Bubba was still fuzzy about the entire event.)

  Then a voice Bubba recognized as his mother screamed, “Don’t shoot! That’s no Boo! That’s my son!”

  Regardless of Miz Demetrice’s scream, the shot rang out, and Bubba immediately ducked while simultaneously shoving Marquita down. He fancied that he felt the wind move as the bullet move past his face. He also knew that Smithson wasn’t that good of a shot, and the bullet actually hit the oxidized remnants of a 60s-era Volkswagen van and ricocheted away with a zinging noise that made his guts clench.

  Finally, Sheriff John bellowed at Smithson while he wacked the gun out of his hand. “Dang fool! That’s Bubba!”

  Bubba straightened up and checked everything with patting hands despite hearing the bullet hit the rusting van. He finally took a deep breath. “Need an ambulance,” he announced loudly, and it was a long minute before people started to move.

  * * *

  Bubba watched while representatives from three different law enforcement agencies, two paramedics, and a caving expert managed to carry a now conscious and thrashing Hornbuckle to an ambulance. She was shrieking about stolen treasure and how all of them would get theirs. She smacked a state trooper in the eye, and one of her feet caught the testicles of a paramedic who immediately lay down in the dirt and writhed.

  In the meantime, Marquita was talking to Sheriff John while another paramedic checked her vital statistics. Risley and Simone crowded around the back of the paramedic and waited impatiently. The McGeorge and Tandy North lingered a little distance away as if waiting for an audience with the queen.

  Marquita abruptly slapped the paramedic’s hand away from her arm and took a long drink of a hot cup of coffee. Then she shoved half of a bear claw into her mouth while attempting to chew and swallow at the same time. After most of it had been consumed, she looked up at him staring at her and said, “What? I haven’t eaten for forever,” except it sounded like “Va? Ah avnuh uhen ooh ooheehuh.” (Bubba’s interpretation was noninterventionist while also being broadminded.)

  Bubba had helped himself to two bear claws already and a bottle of water, in that exact order. Then he’d borrowed his mother’s phone while she said, “Willodean woke up about an hour ago and realized you weren’t about, so she called me. She wasn’t really worried because she said you were going hunting for Marquita, but she was concerned. Miz Adelia is sitting with her now. Is that mud or poop on you because I’m not certain I care to have that phone back if it’s poo?”

  Willodean’s cellphone rang once before she answered, “Miz D? You heard anything?”

  “It’s me, darling,” Bubba said, and his mother tittered at the endearment. Miz Demetrice turned to a state trooper and said, “He never calls me darling.”

  The state trooper said, “It’s because you’re not married to him.”

  Miz Demetrice shrugged expressively. Despite the fact that it was 3:00 in the morning and she hadn’t been asleep, she looked elegant in a flowered dress with a matching purse. Even her pumps seemed disinclined to get mud on them, and she appeared magi
cally to be in the one spot in the clearing that didn’t have any muck about.

  “Oh, thank God,” Willodean said. “I mean I was worried, but I wasn’t terribly worried, but still they’ve been saying all kinds of things about tunnels and the Boogity-Boo and then it started to rain. Did you know that rain was not in the forecast and it was this heavy downpour and one of those idiots said something about the tunnels flooding and all I could think about were those kids in that cave in Thailand?” She stopped for breath. “You are all right, aren’t you?”

  “Little muddy, but okay. Please try to relax,” Bubba said soothingly. “I found Marquita and well, that former FBI agent, too. It’s right messy, but ain’t no dead bodies to be found, so that’s all gravy. Gravy on biscuits even.”

  “Found them,” she repeated. “Are they hurt?”

  “Well that Hornbuckle woman knocked herself out on the tunnel wall,” Bubba said carefully. “She seems to be hale and hearty now.” He looked over at the ambulance where Hornbuckle was actively struggling against five men and swearing at them in a way that would give Marquita a run for her money. The paramedic with the damaged testicular area was crawling away as quickly as he could manage and crying something about someone getting him an ice bag.

  “And Marquita?”

  “Oh, she’s thirsty and hungry,” Bubba said. Marquita had discarded the bear claws for a maple bacon bar and an apple fritter, which were held one to a hand. “Yum,” she said as all of the maple bacon bar disappeared into her mouth. She hungrily eyed the apple fritter while she chewed (mostly chewed) the maple bacon bar.

  “Mebe really hungry,” Bubba amended. “Turns out Hornbuckle was hunting for treasure in the tunnels, and Marquita stumbled onto her. Hornbuckle thought Marquita was there to steal the treasure, but Marquita was just playing the Boo and got lost in the tunnels. I reckon Hornbuckle is a couple tacos short of a fiesta platter.”

  “Ooo, tacos.”

  “Might have to wait on that since it’s about seven hours early for the taco place to open.”