The Father-Son Drinking Team of Clayton
                              for Susan Waters
                        Copyright 1990 by Dave Laird

This morning Billybob and his son, Billybob Jr. have nearly finished off
their beers, in the Crown Tavern, as faded and yellowed as the ale in their
glasses, while the barmaid bustles about and spruces the place up for yet
another day in the hamlet of Springdale. Since shortly before 9:00 o'clock
this morning, they have been sitting on cracked and faded barstools, side by
side, drinking beer and swapping tales about various horses they have known.

"Remember that big ugly bay we had last year? Boy, wasn't that the saddest
excuse for a damned horse you ever saw? Why that slew-footed nag couldn't
walk straight to save her soul."

Billybob, Sr. is one of the last members of a group of individuals from a
bygone era known as horsemen. This morning, while the frost was still thick
upon the ground, his own horses stood patiently by the horse trough, their
breath steaming in the frigid morning air, until he appeared and forked over
fresh hay to each of them. Then, partaking of his daily ritual, one at a
time, he talks to them as if they were his children, with the frost thick on
the split rail fence, amidst the smell of the alfalfa hay and the sound of
the grinding of the horse's massive molars.

He singles out one of the horses from the crowd standing in a circle eating
and, holding its massive jaw in his hands, he gently chides the horse, as a
father would do with a wayward child, often shaking his finger under the
horse's nose. The horse appears to be listening to his every word.

Billybob Senior is a genial elf of a man, with a florid, ruddy complexion,
twinkling blue eyes and white hair. A man who dearly loves a well-delivered
joke, he has a particular fondness for earthy, simple humor and spends hours
trading good-hearted jibes with his friends who show up at the tavern early
in the morning.

He and his wife are the morning cleanup crew at the tavern, arriving before
everyone else, about 9:00 AM, right after feeding his horses. While his wife
cleans and mops the broken linoleum floor behind the bar and vacuums the
faded threadbare carpet, he starts a fire during cold weather, in the giant
wood stove that sits against the wall and hauls out the trash left from the
previous evening.

Of course, since they are both still there, sipping their coffee when the
bartender arrives to officially open the tavern, they usually grab the
nearest barstool and welcome the new day and their friends with a beer.

This morning, he is slightly less jovial than usual, however. Tomorrow is a
red-letter day on Senior's calendar, for it is the one day of the month when
the horses are fed extra early, the wood stove stoked well before the dawn
creeps softly over Springdale. For tomorrow morning at 9:15, BillyBob Senior
must attend his court-ordered alcohol abuse class in Spokane. This is an
important step, as he must attend each meeting if he has any hope whatsoever
of getting his driver's license back after being convicted a second time of
drunk driving.

There is a classroom of sorts, which exists in the Spokane County Criminal
Justice System, for those who have been convicted of any offenses relating
to alcohol abuse. To some, this is merely a stopping-off point on their way
to more exalted crimes. To BillyBob Senior, it is an excuse to leave out his
upper dentures, and sit in the back row carousing with some of his newfound
friends and renewing old friendships.

There, in what is supposed to be a schoolroom atmosphere, where the
participants take turns recanting their former lives of alcoholic despair.
Weekly, they repeat the litany that they are forming new friendships,
leading lives of sobriety and refraining from driving until they have
defeated their alcohol dependencies.

To BillyBob Senior, it is merely another amusing diversion. He has already
been through the alcoholism school twice before, for his first and second
drunk driving convictions. However, he is, as all horsemen are known to be,
a patient man, and since, with his upper dentures out, he is comfortable
after a fashion, he invariably takes a seat in the back row, from which to
better keep an eye on all the participants without being noticed by the
instructors.

"Yup, that's quite a class they have down there," he muses to his son,
BillyBob Junior. "Since everybody who attends class is an alcoholic, really
what it boils down to is how well a person can lie."

He slides his voice into a falsetto range.

"Oh, yes sir, I doesn't go into the Crown Tavern anymore, oh no sir. I
formed a whole new bunch of friends who don't drink and raise hell like
before, 'n my wife and I have started attending church once more, yes sir.
And I don't break the law no more, like I was doing, no sir. I have my wife
drive me anywhere I have to go because I understand now I can't drive
without a driver's license."

Much to the amusement of BillyBob Junior, he carefully times it where he
punctuates the last sentence with a noisy fart, and grinning in his patented
toothless elfish way, he slides off the barstool and heads out the door.

"Hell, here it is damn near eleven o'clock. I gotta drive over to Elk and
get some oats."

Winking broadly at the bartender, a short, grey-haired woman with the build
of a bulldog, he cackles once more, about nothing in general, and is gone
out the front door of the tavern, hopping into a faded old Chevy pickup
truck, and fades down the road toward nowhere.