Yesterday I went to visit my old buddy Elmore Cooper to help him work on his pickup truck. Even though I’d known him for years, this was the first time I’d been to his house.
Apparently my job was to fix his brakes and his job was to run his mouth and complain about how long it was taking me. It was kinda irritating but I did owe him a favor.
After all, he did bail me out of jail last month after that incident with the purple cow. I won’t get into details right now but them charges was later dropped and if you’re reading this and your name is Judge Andrews of the Gilmer County court system,  I want you to know that I’m completely innocent. If you ain’t the judge then just between you and me, that was one wild night.

Anyway, it was kind of late when we finished working on the truck. Elmore had been sipping some of his home-made corn whiskey and was feeling pretty good. I mentioned that I needed to go to the restroom and Elmore looked at his watch and laughed. He said “You know I ain’t got no indoor toilet, right?”.

I replied “That’s okay. I reckon it won’t kill me to use your outhouse.”

“Nope, but old man Jenkins might!”.

“Who the heck is old man Jenkins?” Sometimes the combination of moonshine and a total lack of intelligence causes Elmore to make even less sense than usual.
I swear I could stick a piece of glass in each ear and use his head for a telescope.

“Well, old Jedidiah Jenkins was the feller who owned this land back before my Daddy bought it. I hear tell that he went to the outhouse one day and got bit by a rattlesnake.
I guess his heart couldn’t take it ’cause he died right then and there. Sometimes late at night you can hear noises coming from the outhouse. First there’s a rattle, follered by
some wholehearted cussing. We’ve moved that outhouse a few times since we’ve been here and that ain’t helped a bit. None of us ever go in there after the sun sets. We’re
planning to build us an indoor toilet come this spring.”

Now, I just had to laugh. Elmore may not the be the sharpest tool in the shed but he has come up with some whoppers in his time. I recollect the time in high school when he told this gal down at the skating rink that he’d been accepted to Harvard and he planned to be a lawyer. He had her going up until she asked him if he planned to live in Boston when he graduated. He looked at her like she was crazy and asked her why he’d ever want to go up that far north. To this day I still don’t know where he thought Harvard was.

I said, “I tell you what, it’ll be dark soon and that’s when I’ll use the outhouse. If I see a ghost I’ll come back tomorrow and wash this rolling landfill you call a truck.”

He just grinned and said “Fine by me!”

So we went inside and ate. I had a couple of swigs of the corn whiskey, not to get my courage up, ’cause of course I weren’t afraid at all, but just because Elmore makes his ’shine so strong you can’t drink it while sitting near an open flame. No sense in passing that up is what I figgered. We sat around and told stories of the good old days. That is, I told stories and Elmore told lies. Even at a young age he took to lying like a trout takes to water. I can almost guarantee that if you see his lips moving, what’s coming out was no closer to the truth than the moon is to my elbow. That’s why I wasn’t worried about no ghost, even though I was starting to recollect I’d heard rumors about this one before.

It got dark pretty soon and I was definitely feeling the need to visit the outhouse. I grabbed the flashlight off the table and started to walk on down. Elmore follered me out the house and sat on a rocking chair on the front porch. “Just remember”, he says, “If’n old man Jenkins shows up, you’ll smell something. I mean something worse than the normal outhouse smells”, he added. “I’ve heard tell that it’s the smoke and brimstone of the devil trying to pull the old man back down to the underworld.”

“Whatever!” I yelled back. I wasn’t about to let Elmore get my goat.

I opened the door to the outhouse and found that it was the standard one-seater. A roll of toilet paper was to the left and a stack of old car and sports magazines were to the right. “All right!” I thought. At least there’s some quality reading material in here. If I was lucky there might just be a Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illustrated in the pile.
So I settled in and got comfortable, flipping through the stack of magazines. Sure enough, I found one with a model on the front wearing a bikini top so small it looked like she was wearing two Band-Aids strung together with fishing line.

Right about then I noticed a funny smell. Kinda rotten and smoky. Suddenly I heard a rattle. Now, I’ve walked up on my share of rattlesnakes, and brother, I know one when I hear one. My eyes shot around looking for the source. The room was pretty small and there was no place for a dang earthworm to hide, let alone a rattler. Then I heard this voice start cussing. Low at first and then it got louder. It seemed to come from right there in the outhouse! I served four years in the Navy and I’ve heard some cussing but this was right up there with the best of them. As I started to rise, a mist filled the air and the voice started screeching like some lost soul from the fiery pits of hell. Almost as bad as my boy sounded when he was two years old and we tried to feed him some cabbage.

I shot up off the seat, pulled my britches up and was out the door like a shot, holding my pants together in one hand and the magazine in the other (ghost or no ghost I wanted to see more of that there model). I was halfway to the house when I heard Elmore laughing like a dang hyena. “It was him!”, I yelled. “It was old man Jenkins!”. Elmore was lauging so hard he pert near fell off the porch. Then I heard someone behind me laughing too so I stopped and looked back. There was Elmore’s two brothers, Bubba and Dale, both of ‘em laughing and carrying on like a couple of fools.

It turned out that these three had rigged that outhouse up like it were some kind of carnival funhouse. There was a walkie-talkie and a rattlenake rattle fixed up under the seat. There was also a thin rubber tube that ran from the back of the outhouse up to the top. Dale had been behind the outhouse pulling on a string making the rattle sound off and puffing on some dried skunk weed and blowing the smoke through the tube and down a crack near the roof. While he was doing that Bubba was watching from the woodshed and then started playing the part of old man Jenkins, yelling into the other walkie-talkie.

Apparently those three had played that same prank on a lot of people and most of them turned around and passed on the rumors about the dang ghost. I guess they didn’t want anybody to know the truth. I couldn’t blame them ’cause I shore didn’t plan on telling anybody what happened either. Now, I didn’t foller through on my first instinct which was to turn all three of those Cooper boys into ghosts right there on the spot. Then they could haunt that dang outhouse for the rest of eternity for all I cared. No, I just buttoned my pants, stuck the magazine into my back pocket, and walked to my car with whatever shreds of dignity I had left. But by the howling behind me, I reckoned that wasn’t very much.

I guess the main lesson I learned that night was this. If you’re ever going to literally have the crap scared out of you, there’s lots of worse places to be than an outhouse.