Side Trail
THE BLACKOUT AT THE NOT SO OK CORRAL
John Duncklee
Downtown Tombstone was unusually quiet. A few sounds from pianos were faint at best as Wyatt Earp and his two brothers, Virgil and Warren, accompanied by the infamous dentist, “Doc” Holiday walked four abreast down the middle of Fremont Street, not for the Not So OK Corral, but to an empty lot where the Clantons and McLowerys waited for the showdown that would become the most famous event in not only Arizona history, but in the entire West.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the sound of bells ringing hovered over the foursome. Wyatt leaned forward, cocking his head to locate the sound. He reached quickly to the holster on his right hip, grabbed the cell phone and brought it up to his face where he opened the instrument, punched a button to turn on the “speaker phone” and held it at arms length with a somewhat fearful look on his face. “Hello,” he said. “Earp here.”
“Wyatt, Ike Clanton, here. When are you coming to get this mess over with?”
“Doggone it Ike,” Wyatt said, with an annoyed tone to his voice. “You know doggone well that I have banned cell phones in town. Do you want to land in jail?”
“Now Wyatt, quit feelin’ that badge on your chest,” Clanton said. “If you banned cell phones in town, what the heck are you doin’ talkin’ on yours?”
“Doggonit Ike Clanton, I am Marshall of Tombstone!”
“There’s too darn many badges in this town. You are Marshall Earp, Johnny Behan is Sheriff Behan. Pretty soon someone will pin a badge on Big Nose Kate and then we will be overloaded with the law,” Ike said.
At that moment another cell phone issued its tone, somewhat different than the one that Wyatt now closed and returned to his holster.
“Doc” Holiday took his time reaching into his vest pocket to withdraw his cell phone. He opened it and saw the caller’s name before answering. “Yeah Kate Love, what is it now?”
“You certainly took your sweet time answering that darn phone, “Doc”.
“I am walking down Fremont Street with three Earps. We are about to face the chance of death by cell phone radiation, and you call to complain about the alacrity with which I answer this pain-in-the-rear communication device. Give me a break Katie Darling.”
“I called to tell you that I have an idea about how we can lower our monthly cell phone bill.”
“Hurry up and tell me, Kate, because the Clantons and Mclowerys are waiting with their cell phones charged and ready.”
“My idea is simple. I should have thought about this long ago when we first got these darn things. You are on Wild and Wooly and my provider is whoreizon. If you change to whoreizon we can call one another at no charge. What do you think?”
“That’s just fine, Kate. Make those changes. If you need my password it is ‘pull a tooth’ all lower case letters. Now leave me be so we can finish up this dirty business with those jaspers and get back to our poker game.”
Wyatt’s cell phone sounded off with its bell ringing again. Wyatt went for his right hip again quickly. “Earp here,” he said, when he had gotten the phone open and ready with the speakerphone on.
“Behan here Wyatt. I need some help. I could open Curly Bill Brocius’ web site, but there’s no cell number. Do you have it?”
“It’s common knowledge that Curly Bill won’t give out his cell number because he doesn’t want inbound calls that he has to pay for. You should go over to the Crystal Palace. I saw him there earlier playing poker with some other cowboys that are not cowboys.”
“Thanks, Wyatt. By the way I went to www.earp.com and got a combination of all you and your brothers.”
“Yeah, we got a good deal from the webmaster for combining all of us. While you are surfing the web, check out www.twoguntootsie.com. That site belongs to that new gal over at the Bird Cage Theater. She has a shot of her all naked except for the pair of six guns in holsters strapped around her waist. I’ll bet five eagles that the FCC nails her for porn.”
“I’ll check that out for sure. That stuff might come under my jurisdiction,” Behan said. “I saw the article in the Epitaph that announced her arrival from Chicago, but it didn’t give any website info.”
“Johnny I gotta hang this darn thing up cause it just told me that its battery need charging. Bye.”
Wyatt and the others started walking toward the vacant lot again. As they approached the Clantons and McLowerys they noticed that none of those bad hombres had their cell phones out of the holsters.
“What is going on here?” Wyatt asked, from a stance he used when drawing his cell phone.
“Wyatt,” Ike Clanton said. “We talked it over between us and even called The Sundance Kid in Brazil to advise us. We have decided that it would be to our advantage to obey the law.”
“I have heard everything now,” Wyatt said, and looked around to his brothers and Holiday to see how they were reacting. “How are we going to make our mark on history if we don’t go through with the plan?”
“Not to worry,” “Doc Holiday” said. “Contact one of those horse pucky and gunsmoke writers of the West and they’ll write it up like we got into it as planned and get it published so we will be famous forever. Nobody will ever know what really happened.”
END (for right now, but there could be more later)
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