I'm Not Crazy

~12~ Sheriff Bud D. McCray

Robbin' people with a six-gun
Guess my race is run
I lost my girl and I lost my fun
I fought the law, and the law won.

~ The Clash

😈😈😈

December 17th - Last year.

The first time I caught wind of the great Crazy change blowing into my life was just after "Parent vs. Teacher" night at school last year. Parent-Teacher Night is another one of those lame time-honored traditions that seems like a good idea, but in reality it really isn't. Typically schools carve out on night sometime in late December, right in time to ruin the Christmas vacation for some unlucky kids. Forcing parents to come to school and have a "So how's my monster doing?" meet and greet, with the person most likely to fail them.

As my last name is O'Reilly, my mother and Buddy McCray ended up going back to back in alphabetical order to wait their turn at the gallows. Somehow while they awaited their fate, they ended up talking for a while. Figured out they had more in common than kids in the same classes at school.

I guess it wasn't really a surprise that they had things in common to talk about, being that both were recently widowed. My father having died a little over a year ago in a helicopter explosion "Over There". Sheriff Buddy being widowed five years from the cancer. I only say "recently widowed" because after that night my mother hasn't worn her wedding ring since. Instead, she started wearing it on a necklace, so as not to give prospective buyers the wrong impression. The prospective buyer, in this case, turned out to be none other than Sheriff Bud D. McCray.

In retrospect, I place the blame for what happened next squarely on The Evil One. Who thinks my mother and Buddy are a cute couple who have a lot in common. Which pretty much consisted of both of them loved dead people once upon a time. Sadly The Evil One was not totally wrong in that thinking.

The thing about widowers is that no one really understands them, other than one of their own kind. So yeah you guessed it ...my mother in her infinite wisdom and long-term loneliness started dating again. Or I should say she allowed herself to get fixed up on a date with the local deputy Sheriff of San Fallcon Valley, by none other than Evie St. Claire.

How this all came to pass is still a little murky to me, save that Buddy and The Evil were apparently not strangers. I found out later that Buddy had worked for The Evil's brother Cheif Wade St. Claire, the San Fallcon police. Turns out that it was The Evil's brother that given Buddy his first badge and a gun. Then they sent him out to hunt down bad guys and kick the crap out them for a living.

So in order to break the big news to me that they were sort of seeing each other? Buddy being ever the gentlemen took my mom and me, out for dinner to TGIF Fridays. The first time I actually met Sheriff Buddy, I hadn't quite put all the pieces together yet of who he was? Or how he and I were already connected through the several layers of the same cesspool of school.

My first impression of Sheriff Buddy was that he a big tall man, with an imposing air to him. One that spoke to an intimate familiarity with violence in all its myriad of forms. He showed up at our townhouse sporting a big white Stetson cowboy hat. While wearing an even bigger gun, slung low in a gunslinger style on his hip holster. The big colt 45. Peacemaker swinging on his hip only added to the whole gunslinger aura. The "don't mess with me or I will gun you down in the street like a rabid dog" cowboy Sheriff thing he is forever rocking.

Growing up on a military base, the whole gunslinger macho mythos thing really didn't bother me too much at all. However, the wannabe Texas Ranger Cop Bronco he drove bothered me a shitton. Especially seeing that I was forced to sit in the backseat on the ride to dinner, behind the cage like a common criminal.