Far-L

lol - good one - somebody would have to do some serious research to come up with that juicy morsel...

I guess the clarification is necessary for those that might not know any better that by "Walking Tall" Mike doesn't mean The Rock in the remake version but the original "Walking Tall" which was a very controversial movie made in the 70's and based on the real life story of a Tennessee sheriff named Bufurd Pusser. That movie was based on a book called "The 12th of August" by a guy named W.R Morris, who wrote a few other books including one called "The Stateline Mob".

Growing up, my brother and I were very fortunate enough to be sent to some of the best private schools in the country. Our pop had gone to the same school that Einstein and some of the other famous physicists had attended in Switzerland and education was critical to both our parents. Although our father made decent cash as an upper management career IBM guy, he was not the one paying for our education. Our Grandfather was on the hook for that. I always thought it was a bit strange that he had the loot to do that since he was a plumbing contractor but never seemed to work in all the years I knew him.

Our pops passed away, sadly well before his father. When our Grandfather died; therefore, the estate was left for my brother and I to deal with. Our granddad lived in Corinth Mississippi right next door to his brother. His brother was quite a colorful character compared to his plumber sibling. We used to hear stories about grocery bags full of cash that he had laying around the house and if we asked about them then we would be told "Oh, your Uncle Nelson is a professional gambler."

When we came to Corinth to deal with things, all of a sudden we started meeting all sorts of folks that we had never met before but who all seemed to know way more about us than we could imagine. And then they started asking us strange questions, like "Well did you boys know about your relations and your family history?" Finally, one asked "Did you know about these books?" So we went to the local bookstore in a dilapidated old mall that was soon to be annihilated by another Walmart and picked up the books. We started reading and did not stop until the last page was turned and the truth revealed.

Apparently, the sleeply little town of Corinth MS during the 1930's was known as "little chicago" for all the hillbilly hooligan shenanigans going on there. Running booze, games of chance, girls that would entertain a fella for the right price and a nice cold bottle of co' cola were all part of the Roadhouse scene. One particular Roadhouse where truckers would stop to lose their paychecks was particularly ornery and this is where a young Bufurd had his ass handed to him by some good ol' boys. There were actually a few buildings with some on the Tennessee side of the border and the others on the Mississippi side. Whenever the law would get to meddling too much then they would up and move one way other the other across the state line to deal with the problem.

Sure enough, the last name of "Timlake" kept popping up in these books starting with a guy named Clyde who everyone just called "Red" who was regarded as the founder of what came to be known as "the State Line Mob". Turns out Uncle Nelson ran the high stakes table in the classier joint.

Reading on we found that some of the people in the book had actually been coming by. One of them was a guy who had a reputation as a mean old sob who used to carry a ballpeen hammer to lunk drunks with and whose house had once been sprayed with a machine gun in some sort of territorial dispute. Now he was going through my Grandparents old antiques while his big billy joe bob friend stood at the base of the stairs with his hand tucked suspiciously in his fishing vest.

This was about the point we started to get really, really scared.

I am not really sure what I was thinking at the time but I became convinced that I needed a gun. I went down to the local gun store where they told me "your id is from California son so you are going to have to pick this up in two weeks." A complete stranger at the other end of the store looked up from the shotgun he was taking a gander at, "Oh don't worry about that - I'll vouch for him - that there's a Timlake boy." Five minutes later I was walking out with a galil .308 that is essentially the Cadillac of AK47s.

We finished loading out then pulled away hauling a trailer of old heirlooms from the back of my grandpappy's plush 5th Avenue. I don't think we let our guard down until we hit the desolate and flat for miles middle of Texas.

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