The Bloody Arm (a high school memoir)
By Bill Helmer, East Sierra Branch
During that year’s Christmas vacation, me and a couple of friends decided we oughta stir things up one night by driving around the next-door town of McAllen, about four times the size of Pharr, with me in the trunk, dangling out a ketchup-covered arm. We did that near a couple of gas stations and nothing happened, we thought. So we trolled the outskirts of downtown where there were a few pedestrians and still nothing happened. Shoot. What we didn’t realize was that everyone who noticed the “bloody arm” was calling the cops.
McAllen police had only one guy at the little station’s radio and only one car with two cops who patrolled the town, no doubt a boring job. Except for this night, when they were looking for us. And when we also had gotten bored with the absence of any commotion (I’m not sure what we expected), we drove along the street with McAllen’s movie theater just as its patrons were coming out. At which point a siren suddenly blew, I pulled in my arm, our car was rudely curbed, and I could hear some yelling as my two friends were thumped over the hood.
Then one of the cops came around to the back and, seeing no arm, slowly opened the trunk lid with a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I didn’t know what to do except grin real big and say, “Howdy.”
Boy, was he annoyed! Next thing I knew my hands were up against the police car (the movie-goers had all stopped to watch), but I was still grinning. The cop said, “We’ll see how funny this is when we get you to the station!”
When we arrived there, we were greeted by what must have been at least fifteen more cops—the country sheriff, several of his deputies, three or four from the state police, some from the Border Patrol, and I’m sure a constable or two. All were laughing, or at least snickering, and I heard one of them say, “Check out the Big Time Criminals!”
The McAllen police had only one cell as part of their regular squad room and we were parked in it, now pretty worried, while in the adjoining room they discussed the matter with their chief, who had stormed around glowering at us while wearing his uniform over his pajamas. Soon enough we were marched into his little office where we spent a good hour being lectured on the dangers of our stunt—how we could have been shot, how we wasted so much police time, and so forth. Finally, a couple of McAllen’s “day” cops, all scowling, let us go. But, amazingly enough, nobody even called our parents!
We were getting off scott-free, so I washed the ketchup off my arm at the squad room’s sink and we got the hell out of there. The next day we told friends and were treated like celebrities. The only untoward thing that happened then was a short front-page story in McAllen’s Valley Evening Monitor. I found out about that late the next night, when I happily marched into the kitchen, quite pleased with myself, to find my dad sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper and drinking a cup of coffee. Unaware of the article, I brightly asked, “Whatta we got in the fridge?” Without looking up he said, “Whattta ya want? Ketchup?”
Turned out that while the Monitor didn’t name us because we were minors, it reported the event under a little one-column headline, “Bloody Arm is Cause of Flurry.”