Fup

screeched and ranted about how he hated drugs and should shoot his worthless longhaired dipshit ass for trying to corrupt his grandson, but since it was one of the few times that anyone had actually wanted to try Ol' Death Whisper, he relented-though he refused to trade. The longhair, who identified himself as Bill the Thrill, insisted on the optimum dosage, which Granddaddy, using his own tolerance as a guide, calculated to be around a pint. The longhair, though visibly shaken after the first swallow, managed to get down six or seven more quick gulps before he collapsed on the front porch and began writhing in such a way that Boss, Tiny's cantankerous and ever-horny Beagle, had come over and tried to hump him. This action caused a mental transformation in the longhair that was rather hard to follow, but as near as Grand-daddy could ever figure it, the longhair feller must of thought he was a raccoon or something, for he immediately bolted for the walnut tree in the front yard, went up it in a single gigantic bound, and spent the next three hours sitting among the bare limbs hunched over like a sick buzzard. The first hour he wept. The second hour he laughed. The third hour he was silent. At the start of the fourth hour he pitched forward and fell like a sack of wet grain. He broke both arms. On the way into the hospital, he offered to buy Granddaddy's stock on hand and all future production for $20 a pint in exchange for sole distributorship. In a few years it had become a cult item among certain connoisseurs of drooling oblivion, and Granddaddy Jake was able to maintain the $300,000 balance in his and Tiny's joint account.

Tiny's passion was fences. Granddaddy Jake was convinced that Tiny's astonishing growth spurt between the ages of five and nine was due to the fact that he wanted to build fences so bad he'd forced himself to grow big enough to handle the tools. By the time he was twelve, Tiny was building fences that any master would admire, and by twenty his fences were so strong and graceful that the same masters were forced into envy. He worked in stone, picket, post amp; rail, and wire, but he liked the traditional California sheep fence best of all: 36' high sheep mesh stretched on 4x5' redwood posts with a single strand of barbed wire at the top. He like working in wire because wire twanged, and there was nothing that brought him deeper satisfaction than plucking the top strand of barbed wire and listening to it resonate all the way around the circuit of the fence. Lub Knowland called the fences 'Tiny's guitars' and claimed to have heard their distinctive tones on a particularly clear day while he was fishing Beeler Lake in the eastern Sierras, some 200 miles away. Most folks however credited this claim as typical Lub Knowland bullshit.

Nobody was surprised that Tiny built excellent fences, for by temperament he was patient and precise. But nobody could understand why he built them, for Tiny and Granddaddy didn't run any stock, and since coyotes had eaten the Bollen brothers out of the sheep business two years before, none of their immediate neighbors did either.

Granddaddy Jake called him on it one night after dinner: If you ain't fencing nothing in, maybe you're fencing something out.'

But Tiny just shook his head and mumbled, 'Naw, they're just fences, that's what I like to do.'

Granddaddy almost pursued it, then let it slide, repeating with friendly derision, ' 'Just fences, shit! That's like saying my whiskey is just something to drink.'

Tiny, thanks to the bitter vigilance of Emma Gadderly at the Social Welfare Office, had to attend school. From the first grade through his high school graduation he received straight, solid C's, seldom spoke in class, had many pleasant acquaintances and no close friends. In his first day of gym class in high school, the football coach, who had ambitions for the head post at the local J.C., actually got down on his knees and begged Tiny to come out for the team. Tiny said he would like to but he had to get right home after school and work on the ranch fences. The same thing he told Sally Ann Charters when she asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. The same thing he told Herbie and Allan when they wanted him to go with them to Tijuana over the spring break to get their car tuck-and-rolled and carouse the whorehouses. The same thing he told the basketball coach and the track coach. The same thing.

He was content working on his fences. He planned them in the winter, built them in the spring and summer, and made posts in the fall, splitting them out of redwood, finishing them with broadaxe and drawknife till at ten feet you'd swear they'd been milled. By the time he was out of grade school he'd built line fences around the ranch; he spent his high school years cross-fencing, rebuilding, and working on gates, forging his own hinges, fliers, and bolts. When he received his diploma, he started over, perfecting them. He had numerous offers at outstanding wages to build fences for others (two came from as far away as Montana), but he always said, 'Gosh, I'd like to help out, but I just got too much work on my own place-and I kinda have to look out for my Granddaddy.'

Tiny and Granddaddy Jake also shared the sufferings that inevitably attend serious passion. In Granddaddy's case, the cause of his pain was Emma Gadderly, for she-having discovered Jake's still-demanded action from Sheriff Hobson, who, sworn to his peaceful duty, came out and made Granddaddy move it. Until she discovered it again. It was a pain in the ass to keep moving it constantly, seriously irksome to have her leaning on his life, and he invariably included her in his oath-soaked screeds against the mendacious and venal, the tainted and corrupt, mentioning her in the same slimy company as card cheats, beer drinkers, and a sprinkling of his ex-wives. Tiny's nemesis was wild pigs. With their gristled snouts, powerful necks, and purposeful greed, wild pigs are the natural enemies of fences. They like to poke their snouts under them and rip upwards with wanton delight, creating a comfortable passage for their rotund bodies under the upsquashed arch of wire, and if that fails they just tear the fucker down. Tiny had seen three cases where they'd bitten right through the wire. One pig in particular was a personal torment. Lockjaw, so known because he'd never been heard to utter a sound, was a legend in the coastal hills both for his size and the wantonness of his destruction. Tales-subject to the usual human exaggeration- abounded, and even if you reduced them by half, he'd still tore up every garden from Humboldt County to the Marin line, killed enough lambs to keep the valley feedlots in operation for at least five years, rooted enough earth to make tractors blow gaskets in envy, bred so many sows that if they were lined up snout-to-tail they would stretch the length of the San Andreas fault, and all the while eluding the best hunters in northern California. To Tiny, he was the embodiment of suffering. Not only had he destroyed untold stretches of his excellent fence, he'd tore Boss up so bad he'd died. Tiny had taken to hunting Lockjaw occasionally as part of his fence maintenance program, but Lockjaw was not only silent, he was sneaky-and he got a lot sneakier after Tiny put a 100 grain.243 bullet hole through the tip of his left ear at 200 yards. Lockjaw retaliated by trashing Tiny's fences whenever he needed to pass through on his way to a seep-spring wallow he favored on the back of the ridge. There had been skirmishes going on for at least ten years, but it had flared into war when Boss died. Which was one reason Tiny was so antsy to get back to his fencing when the last Hawaiian storm had passed: he'd taken down the northern stretch to rebuild it, and since it had been down for almost half a month Lockjaw might think he was giving up.

The weather had held clear for almost three days, but he was still caught in the checkers marathon with his ailing Granddaddy, who, although claiming he felt just horrible, hadn't coughed or sneezed in four days, consumed his daily jar of whiskey with his customary relish, and generally looked as pert as ever- almost becoming hearty as he closed the gap in the checkers match, cackling with delight as he hit Tiny with moves he'd never seen nor heard of, much less imagined-moves like the Biloxi Blitz, the Double King Kong Dick Twister, and, most dependably, the Ol' Switcheroo-moves so incomprehensibly foolhardy that Tiny had to stretch his talent to succumb to them.

On the first day of April, the score knotted at 499-all the night before, they held the playoff at high noon. Tiny brilliantly maneuvered himself into a position where he could be triple jumped for a king, and though it had taken Granddaddy Jake two moves to see it, he finally seized the opening and eventually won.

'Gotcha with the Triple Dip Overland Sledge-Hammer Nut Crusher,' Granddaddy crowed as Tiny ruefully shook his head. 'Last time I used it was against Pud Clemens up in Newport 'round' '46, '47. But don't feel bad Tiny; you played real good early on when I was weakened with the pneumonia, but I just eventually wore you down with experience.'

'You made a great comeback' Tiny agreed. 'Wish you could whip that cold as easy.'

'Oh, I'm better today-not prime, but passable… might even get out of bed.'

'What do you want for dinner?'

'Hell, long as I'm getting up anyway, I might as well rustle up the grub. Should get another batch cooking, too; supply is falling behind demand. And besides, if you don't get back to work on the North Fork fence pretty soon, Lockjaw's gonna be wallowing under the front porch.'

Tiny was out the door and gone. But when he topped the ridge fifteen minutes later, eager to finish digging the last 100 holes, he saw a sight that enraged him: he'd left the dirt from each previously dug posthole tidily rounded to the left of each hole, and now not a pile remained-they had been trampled, scattered, and generally