Pete's News

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT 
AND SOME THAT AIN'T

Howdy folks! This here's ole Pete and Rosebud a comin' at you again!

My mule Rosebud is turnin' dark and broody on me. She puts me in mind of that funny paper dawg, that Snoopy, when he starts settin' on top of his house and playin' like he's a buzzard. That's the very way Rosebud is. If she had a dawg house, she'd be up there on it right now, squattin' on her hind end, lookin' like some kind of big ole hairy vulture.

She gets like that ever now and then. What causes it is them Stephen King books. She gets to readin' them scary books of his. She's read a bunch of 'em. The last one was called The Stand. That's kind of a funny name, it seems to me. It don't make no sense. If it was me, I'd have called it The Deer Stand. It wouldn't fit what it's about, but at least it makes sense. Sorta. More than just plain ole "stand" does.

Anyway, it's all about how this germ gets loose from one of them germ factories like the gov'ment runs. And this here partic'lar germ was a really, really bad'un, see, and purty soon, people was droppin' dead left and right. In a month or two there wasn't but maybe one person in a thousand that was left alive in the whole country. And then things really started to get bad. But that ain't neither here nor there. The point is that it ain't a true story. It's just a scary story that this King feller made up and put in a book. People read it and get all scared for awhile. But then they get over it. Nobody takes it serious. Nobody but Rosebud.

But Rosebud ain't like reg'lar people. In a way, she's a lot like a young'un. Like, I remember when I was a boy I used to read them Tarzan of the Apes books. Granny had a bunch of 'em on a shelf at her house. They was all about this boy that'd been raised in the jungle by gorillas. He'd go swingin' through the jungle on grapevines, whoopin' and hollerin' and just havin' hisself a good ole time. I'd set down and read one of 'em and, next thing you know, me and Denver would be playin' Tarzan. We'd go up in the woods behind the house and that'd be our jungle. There was this one place where we had cut a big vine off at the ground and we'd climb the tree it was growin' on, grab hold of it and try to swing from one tree to the next. You know, like Tarzan done it. But, natcherly, we didn't do it near as good as he did. We 'bout wore the ground out where we fell off that vine. It's a wonder we didn't kill ourselves.

And Rosebud is a lot like we was when it comes to them books. She's a grown-up mule, but she gets to readin' them ole scary books and starts playin' "what-if" in her head. What if there really was a germ got loose and started killin' everbody? What would it be like to be in the middle of somethin' like that? What would we do up here in gump Holler? What would happen in the big cities? She'll set for hours and hours thinkin' about stuff like that.

What makes it worse, Rosebud likes to. . . How is it she puts it? Oh, yes, she likes to "share things with her family and friends." Family meanin' me of course. She likes to take me on these little trips through her imagination. Like with this Stand book she's been readin'. She got me cornered in the kitchen and took me on a trip through this big ole city. And there wasn't a soul there. It was completely empty. Everbody had died off, you see, and me and her was the only ones left.

We walked forever, it seemed like, until we came to the city. At first there were just a few houses along the road and you could see the big buildings in the distance. Everything was perfectly still, perfectly quiet. You could see a dog ever now and then, but not up close. They had gone wild and didn't trust people any more. As we got nearer, I could see paper strewn everywhere. That was what really struck me. I didn't know there was that much paper in the world and I wondered what all of it was doing out there on the street. Every breeze that came along seemed to bring it to life. It would swarm briefly and then settle back down.

There were hundreds of cars and trucks on the streets. Some had crashed into each other but others looked like someone had simply parked them and walked away. Who knows? Maybe they had. But there were no people. Not even any dead bodies. That was strange, I thought. You would think there would be people everywhere, people caught in the middle of whatever they were doing when the germ struck. Some should be left on the street. That bothered me. I found myself wondering where they were, what had happened to them.

"Where are all the dead bodies?"

I asked it out loud, right in the middle of Rosebud's story and I reckon it caught her off guard. She stopped and looked at me like I was some kind of germ myself. She don't like to be inner-ruptured when she's tellin' stories. I reckon it messes up her train of thought or somethin'. Anyway, she just stared at me awhile, and finally got up and stomped off, mutterin' to herself. I seen her go down the road toward Denver's.

That's just as well. Ole Denver will set there and listen at her tell her tales, soakin' up ever word she says for hours at a time. He's about as bad about them scary stories as she is.