Leland, a tiny Mississippi Delta farming community, is a place where everybody knows everyone. Nothing overly exciting ever happens, except on Halloween, when kids, disguised in the get-up of ghosts, gangsters, goons, goblins and ghouls, roam the streets and terrorize the residents, extorting treats or threatening tricks.
One moonless Halloween Saturday night, my pal Bobee and I, having successfully pillaged the neighborhoods, headed toward the main street to extort goodies from storekeepers and shoppers.
To get there, we had to walk across an unlit, rickety old footbridge traversing Deer Creek, a sinuous stream in which foreboding cypress trees draped moss-covered limbs over murky, tea-colored water.
According to local yore, the eerie apparitions of those who drowned in the miasmic, phantasmagoric slough, or were devoured by its ravenous resident alligators, arise from their watery crypts on Halloween night to bemoan their dreadful deaths.
As we approached the bridge, Bobee and I were not the least bit afraid. Decked out at as notorious gangsters John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly, we were armed with daggers, pistols, and lever-action, long-range, Red Ryder BB rifles.
As we stepped on to the footbridge, we didn’t notice two bigger teenage boys in Casper the Ghost sheets, hiding in bushes on the bank, awaiting a signal from their similarly disguised partners on the other side.
When we were halfway across, the ghosts charged from both directions, shrieking and gesticulating, with their blood-spattered sheets flapping.
With his trusty rifle loaded and ready, my intrepid friend shouted to me, “You mow down the two thugs charging from behind, and I’ll slaughter these two big brutes attacking from the front!” We marauding marksmen kneeled, cocked, and took aim.
To their painful dismay, the bigger boys quickly discovered that their sheets provided no protection against the stinging salvos, and after being hit by a fusillade of well-placed BBs, forgot all about the loot they intended to steal from us smaller boys, and fled in panic.
The would-be assailants attacking from the rear disappeared, while the two others fled toward the safety of Leland’s well-lit main street, with Dillinger and Kelly in hot pursuit, rapidly levering their weapons, aiming with the deadly accuracy of seasoned shooters, and inflicting stinging welts on their intimidators’ derrières, who discarded their sheets and were running for their lives.
Our gangster bloodlust reached a feverish pitch, and in hot pursuit we fired relentlessly, as the terrified teenagers ran down the full length of the main drag, screaming and pleading for help from those witnessing their imminent demise.
The chase led them past Clyde Chatterley’s Convenience Store, a favorite hangout of local farmers, who gathered there on weekends to lounge out front, play dominos, and talk about the crops.
Diminutive John Dillinger and Mini-Machine Gun Kelly were the talk of the town for a long time, and the farmers who witnessed the spectacle still tell the story of the Red Ryder riflemen. From then on, we were known as Leland’s worst Halloween hoodlums: Deadeye Dillinger And Killer Kelly.
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
Other books by Jimmy Reed include The Jaybird Tales.
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