Chapter 1: Humper County Vampires

Humper County, Oklahoma is a nice place to live. A lot of us still have outhouses because crap don't care where it drops. I mean why waste good drinking money on doodads that only shows you're trying to be high toned? We make do with our tar paper shacks, six pickup trucks on blocks in the front yard and an old worn out motor home for a guest room. See what I mean? Nothing fancy here.

However we all figure whatever is fine with Bill Clinton's kin is fine for us. Ever since he "Monica-ized" the Oval Orifice Ol' Slick Willy Clinton is a folk hero to us here in the most civilized part of the whole United States of Oklahoma.

We have our own ways of doing things and our own customs. Hell, it's like our city limits signs say, "Welcome to Humper, Oklahoma. Now Get The Fuck Out." We really don't care all that much for strangers. Why should we? We got the best corn whiskey found anywhere, a local cookbook that has two hundred delicious ways to prepare road kill and some of the horniest women in the south. As long as the welfare checks keep coming in, life is just perfect here. Oh yeah, damn good cat fishing, too.

Our Annual Harvest Festival is the cherry on the soda as far as we are concerned. Every year in Humper County, Oklahoma we have the Harvest Festival. I tell you this is as grand a festival as when those Italian women get pregnant and stomp grapes and give Italian men athlete's mouth. Then the poor fellers have to rub Tinactin spray into their gums before their teeth fall out.

Down here in these parts folks are one hell of a lot smarter than a bunch of wino Italians. Hell, we're better than they are every which way. They are all Catholics and we have it from a good authority that God don't like Catholics much. I mean our Preacher, Billy Bob Hoskins told us so and he is Gods right hand man here in Humper County so he ought to know. Besides we mostly belong to his Real Truth Church.

Any way, we have our festival and celebrate the bumper corn crops we by god pray for all year long and when we get a bumper crop we turn it into fine corn whiskey and fatten everybody's bank account for the next year. I mean that first weekend in November is as fine a time as any sissy eastern dude ever thought of having.

The Humper County Gala Annual Harvest Festival is supposed to start on the first Friday in November right at sundown and go through until Monday morning when we are all supposed the be bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready for another year of hard back breaking work.

Of course some of us start a week early and quit celebrating a week late, but it's all in good fun. Hell, I remember one time Reverend Billy Bob and some holiness type female preacher disappeared for a whole three weeks. They later claimed they was stranded on petticoat Island down on the Red River that we suspect was named after some communist bastard.

You know, in Oklahoma we are lucky as hell. We got more people to hate than anyone else in God's Green Universe and way beyond. I guess that's what makes us so special, all our hate and corn whiskey.

Any way, a few years ago we had this dude show up on the Friday night the festival officially opened. Silas Harper, our local band leader had his bunch, "The Down Home Hog Sloppers" had just finished playing the last song of the first set. There has always been this bunch of guys in suits wander around trying to be inconspicuous every year. They wear these tight in the crotch pantywaist suits and have never ever stepped in cow shit with their pointy shoes in their whole lives. Those are the BATF agents that try to figure out where our stills are and how we get the "product," which is what we call our fine moonshine, out of the state and they never ever find it.

Then we get a few old time revenuers. They usually dress in JC Penney suits and K-Mart shirts. We don't worry about them too much. Everybody hereabouts who plants even five acres of corn has a personal consumption license to make alcohol for fuel in their their farm equipment. As if anyone in his right mind would waste good corn whiskey in a gas engine. That would be like having sex with somebody's granny when there was a high-class bathing beauty offering you free samples.

Then we got these gangster types that come down every year to sample said product and buy it. They all got first names that end in a vowel and talk in grunts. Most of them are called Vinnie, Vito and Gino.

They tried to come down here and take over right after we first started selling to them. They gave it up after we gave their boss an Oklahoma Breeders' Special. We let them take the big tanker full of corn at gunpoint and drive off with it. When they were ten miles out of town we shot out all the tires on the two guard cars and the tanker. We just sat off three hundred yards and shot the living shit out of everything but the tanker.

We didn't want to kill them because we figured they would be good customers once they got educated. They finally took the hint and gave up. We took their boss away from them and cut his clothes off with one of our Oklahoma pig stickers. That's a knife sort of like a Bowie except it's skinnier and sharpened on both edges.

Anyway we tied him over the hood of his own car and let Oral Dougherty's breeding bull at that dude's fat behind. I bet you could hear his yodels all the way to Kansas City. Those seven were let go after they paid us what we had coming plus a little extra for damages.

So every year they come down in their fancy suits and sample the product and buy all we have to sell. The revenuers come around and try to look inconspicuous and fail and we have us the finest festival you ever seen.

The Baptist women bake hams, the Methodist women bake roast beef and the Episcopalian women make all the fancy dishes like candied yams and pickled pigs knuckles and that other exotic shit. Us folks from Reverend Billy Bob's church bring the corn and home made rye whiskey...

Then a few years ago we had this odd man out looking dude show up. He was all dressed up in a fancy black suit with a white shirt and a blood red tie and cape. He walked around looking at people's necks and smiled a lot.

When I noticed he didn't have anything to drink in his hand I said, "Here, have some Oklahoma elixir, good for what ails you." He smiled his thanks and took a swallow. I forgot how powerful that shit was to the uneducated taste buds. What the elixir is made of used to be a secret but everybody knows now so I'll tell you.

You take twenty gallons of hundred ninety proof corn, add three gallons of finely chopped jalapeno or any other peppers that will remove paint and a gallon of garlic to keep the concoction from eating the glass bottles it's stored in after processing. Processing just means we filter the concoction through cheese cloth to remove the pulp of the peppers and garlic.

Let me tell you that old boy's eyes crossed, his eyes got bright red and he fell over in a faint. I figured he needed to be revived so I opened his mouth and poured a little more down his throat.

"Tank you," he wheezed and took my glass from me and emptied it. Whenever a person has his first drink of elixir it knocks him on his ass. It also numbs his taste buds. Then the second and third drinks go down smooth and leave him paralyzed. But not this guy, he stood up and yelled, "I vant blood!"

Hap Osgood, the local blacksmith thought he was challenging for a fight and smashed the stranger in the mouth. He spit a whole mouthful of pointy teeth out on the floor. But he didn't go down. That meant he was one tough son of a bitch. So Hap smacked him again and again, once just above the crotch and once smack dab in the middle of his nuts with an uppercut. The stranger folded and fell to the floor.

Robert Seaton came rushing in from outside and yelled that guy tried to suck..."

"What guy?" I yelled