johnny rogers

by bofa xesjum

johnny rogers lived in a one-room shack out on the outskirts of town, down by the railroad tracks, with his father, jolly rogers, the town drunk. johnny was a bad boy. or at least a damned nuisance. he liked to hide behind bushes and trees and throw things at unsuspecting passersby. and to break windows. that is, he was widely suspected of doing these things. who else would be doing them? one thing he did for sure was not go to school much. or hardly at all. sheriff john brown, who was also the truant officer because the town was not as big as all that, if it was a nice day would sometimes wander down to the old mill or up to the old flooded quarry to see if johnny was at either of those places, trying to catch catfish. every so often, just to keep up appearances, the sheriff would haul johnny back to the school, but mostly he would join him in fishing, or the sheriff would just sit and watch the ripples made in the water by the breeze, or maybe tell stories about old time gunfighters and prizefighters and baseball players, stories of which he had an inexhaustible fund. one afternoon johnny and the sheriff were walking back to town, and the sheriff suddenly said to johnny, you know johnny, this idyllic existence you are leading can not last. if you say so, johnny replied. let me tell you what is going to happen, the sheriff continued. go ahead. one of these days a train is going to pull into the station. and a man will get off. a man dressed in blaclk, and carrying a black bag. he will be a world famous scientist, that nobody ever heard of. from harvard, or the united states government, or the space program, or some such. he will take you away, and he and his team of assistants will do tests on you. to see if you are the one. and if you are the one, and i am confident that you are the one, they will train you and transform you, into the greatest fighting machine the universe has ever seen. they will send you on a mission into deepest space, beyond the blackest black holes in the universe. and you will conquer empires, and slay whole armies of monsters, and be loved by beautiful queens and princesses. maybe you will return from these adventures, maybe not. you may wonder how i know all this, the sheriff said. o k, how do you know? because it happened to me. a man in black came and took me away and gave me the tests. but i did not pass them. they walked the rest of the way back to town in silence. sure enough, five days later, a man in black identifying himself as dr jeremiah fisher arrived at the railroad station, showed his papers and authorization, and took johnny away. that night the sheriff went up to his room above the jail. the jail was empty, with nobody, not even jolly rogers, in the drunk tank. the sheriff, as he did every night, took off his badge and his lawman’s gear, and changed into his clown suit and put on his clown nose. he made himself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, poured some jack daniels whiskey into an old jelly glass, snd watched some of his old tapes of star trek, the andy griffith show, and the big valley.