“Lightning, come on out!”
Lightning yelled back, “If you want my beer so bad, come on in.”
The policemen opted to wait until Lightning had finished his cooler full of beer.
This is how they arrived at their conclusion:
They did the math: Lightning was a 6’4″ schoolboy.
They weighed the evidence: There were 400 pounds of him.
They considered the facts: He had carried his cooler full of beer into the middle of a thorny briar patch, a fortress of tangled spikes, where he now sat bleeding, drinking beer after beer.
The rest of us had scattered like rabbits through the woods when someone shouted, “Cops!” But Lightning was even slower of foot than he was of wit. He was not bright and he could not run, but he could definitely defend his beer.
All of this happened many years ago in the woods in Mississippi.