Those Rowdy, Rough, Ready Red Ryder Riflemen

In my hometown, Leland, a tiny Mississippi Delta farming community, everybody knows everybody … except on Halloween, when kids, disguised in the get-up of ghosts, gangsters, goons, goblins and ghouls, roam the streets and terrorize the residents, who offer treats to avoid tricks. One moonless Halloween Saturday night, my friend Clarence and a pal, both ten years old, having successfully pillaged the neighborhoods, headed toward Leland’s main street to extort goodies from storekeepers and shoppers. To get there, they had to walk across an unlit, rickety old footbridge traversing Deer Creek, the banks of which are lined with gloomy, moss-covered cypress trees overhanging thick patches of lily pads. According to local yore, the eerie apparitions of those who drowned in the miasmic, phantasmagoric slough or were devoured by its resident alligators arise from their watery crypts on Halloween night to bemoan their dreadful deaths. As they approached the bridge, Clarence and his accomplice were not the least bit afraid. Decked out at as notorious gangsters John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly, they were armed with daggers, pistols, and lever-action, long-range, Red Ryder BB rifles.

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