Floyd's Emporium | home
Floyd's Friends | Josie's Stories | Mae's Interviews with Floyd | Mawie's Recipes | Jokes and Anecdotes | The Bookshelf | The Traveling Yard Sale | Favorite Links | Contact Me | Floyd and the Snakeskin Boots
Floyd and the Snakeskin Boots“They’s alligator!”
“Ain’t! They’s crocodile. Crocodile’s greener, and them’s green as a gourd!”
Floyd hobbled to the door and, from a distance of four feet, peered toward the shadowy knobs beneath his bed. “First, I have to tell you boys, they ain’t neither one.”
Benny and Junior’s head swiveled back for another look. “They ain’t?” Junior hunkered two feet closer to the edge of the bed. “Well, what are they? Iguana?’
Josie wondered what tv program Floyd’s nephew had been watching. For sure, he never read about iguanas in a book.
Floyd hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Nope,” he said calmly. “That’s snakeskin.”
Benny frowned. “Aw, you’re joshin’ us.” Junior added, “Can’t make no fitten boots outta snakeskin. It’s too thin.”
“Not for the snake,” Floyd said. “And, I gotta tell you boys, I don’t own a pair of boots.”
As Josie told Mawie later, “Them boys nearly knocked poor Floyd a-windin’getting out of the range of that snake.”
But that isn’t the end of the story. Here it is as Josie later wrote it down in her notebook :
Junior wanted to go get Daddy’s squirrel gun to shoot the snake that coiled under Floyd’s bed. Benny had a better idea. He wanted to use Floyd’s Never Fail Snake Getter technique. The same one he’d used to get a snake out from under Mawie’s hen house last summer. Floyd appeared to consider the idea, but Josie knew he’d never risk blowing his own house sky high with a stick of “dannymite.”
After a thoughtful silence, Floyd declared, “I know a better way of settling that snake’s hash.”
Josie could hardly wait to see what inventive way her friend would employ. She craned her neck around his shoulder, hoping to determine whether the reptile was poisonous or not. She’d checked out a book on snakes from the school library, and shared her knowledge with Floyd’s skeptic nephews. “If it’s as green as Junior says, then it’s probably a green snake, or maybe a ribbon snake. Both of those are harmless.’
“Yeah,” Floyd agreed. “And they’re beneficial, ‘cause they eat rats. Not that I HAVE any rats, mind you.”
“Harmless!” cried Benny. “Beneficial!” cried Junior. Together they cried, “They ALL kin bite!”
“Indeed they can,” Floyd nodded. "Josie, bring me one of them biscuits off the table. We’ll lure the creature outside.”
Josie glanced to where the biscuit platter sat haloed by the hanging lamp light. “What biscuits? Benny and Junior ate them all.”
“Get Wind-Up,” suggested Junior. “He’ll have that snake out from under there in a second.”
“No!” objected Benny. “If he gets bit, his head’ll swell up like a circus balloon.”
“Circus!” both boys yelled in unison. “GET CHARLIE!”
Josie held out both arms to stop the brothers’ charge toward the door. “Never in this world! Do you want Charlie’s head to swell up like a balloon?”
Junior wheedled, “But cats got long claws. He can puncture that snake like this--” He gave several wide sweeps in the air, his fingers curled like claws.
Floyd halted them all with a pronouncement. “I believe the best thing to do is find Mawie.”
They all looked at him in disbelief. Mawie was far from mild-mannered and helpless, but they didn’t think she would tackle a snake under a bed. Cornered critters were not to be messed with. Before anyone could offer an opinion on that scenario, Junior screeched, “It’s gone! I don’t see it no more.”
Benny scoffed, “It’s crawled further up under the bed, dummy. “We’ll never get it out now without pulling the bed out from the wall.”
“I ain’t touching that bed,” Junior declared. “I might shovel rocks in the pond for six hours, but I ain’t getting snakebit. You remember what happened to Grover’s foot.”
“I remember what happened to the snake that bit the woman who went berry picking,” Benny said.
“That was just a story,” Josie blurted, and was sorry she did, for Floyd looked a mite sheepish.
He stepped to the dresser and picked up a huge flashlight. Handing it to Josie, he said, “You shine the light, like you’re hunting for something you dropped, and make a shadow. I can’t get that low to the floor anymore.”
Josie knelt a safe distance away and turned on the powerful flashlight. Her gaze followed the beam over the floorboards beneath Floyd’s bed. Aside from the two walls where they met a thin layer of dust that perennially escaped Floyd’s broom, and several wispy clumps of animal hair from Charlie the Circus Cat and Wind-Up, there was nothing.
“It’s gone,” she said, straightening up and giving back the flashlight. “Do you think it crawled behind the dresser?” That piece of furniture was adjacent to the foot of the bed. Then she spotted something small and round and dark, about a handspan from the bed leg closest to the far corner. “Floyd, is there a knothole in one of the floorboards?”
Floyd began to laugh. “Why, there sure is! I recollect when your granddaddy helped me build this place. But the knot was IN that board when I nailed it down. It must have rotted out over the years. I bet that snake come up through the hole, and left the same way.”
So the four of them pulled the bed into the middle of the room, and Floyd nailed a patch over the knot hole. “Reckon he won’t use THAT little door anymore.”
“Yeah,” Benny agreed. “But now you got a snake pinned up under your house.”
Junior grinned, rubbing his palms together in anticipation. “Time for the Never Fail Snake Getter!”
Floyd shook his head. “You fellers won’t be happy till I dannymite my house, will you.”
Something outside the window caught Josie’s eye. The slanting autumn sunlight caught a drift of oak leaves, and glinted off something greenish brown basking on Floyd’s back porch. The round eye of a four-foot-long snake seemed to wink at her.
End
Note from LuciBuck: You can read ALL 16 of the original Floyd stories in the Second Edition (smaller format, no TofC or page numbers) by using Josie's link to Lulu.com on the page above called Josie's Stories)