The other day a cop stopped me after I’d been to the dentist, the horse dentist that is. I was driving down Highway 128 real slow and kind of crowding the centerline because of all the potholes. I was in the “farm rig,” which is an older dodge with a flatbed and an old metal horse trailer that’s needed a paint job for the last ten years. I already had the window down because the air conditioner doesn’t work anymore. So, as the policeman ambled up the drivers side of my rig he was giving it the evil eye, I could sense the doubt he had towards my old beat up truck and trailer. Finally, when he’d ambled all the way up to my driver side door, where I sat with an arm hanging out, he asked the question. “You been drinking today sir?” I said, “no sir, but my horse is stoned out of his mind.”
Instantly the policeman’s eyes flashed. I am sure his mind thought of a scenario with a hippie horse wearing a red bandana smoking weed in a dark barroom with Willie Nelson singing Blue Eyes Crying in the rain. My comment jolted him and it took a couple of seconds for him to realize there had to be more to this story. Finally, after his mind came back to him, he asked, “care to explain that?”
I said, “yes sir, you see I had to take ole Lucky to the horse dentist and get his teeth worked on. The dentist even pulled a tooth he was in such bad shape.“
I pulled the tooth out of my front shirt pocket and held it out to him. The policeman kind of backed up just a tad. I think he thought maybe Lucky’s tooth had the hee bee jeebies or something.
The policeman was still looking kind of at me the way a cat looks at a mouse, so I finished my story. I said, “Buck, the horse dentist gave Lucky some medicine to kind of knock him out so he could pull that bad tooth, so I been avoiding the potholes and driving real slow because Lucky is still drunk and I don’t want him to fall down in the trailer and break a leg. He was my son’s first big horse after his pony died of cancer. We are all really attached to ole Lucky, he’s twenty six this year. He’s a double bred dry doc. We’ve won every timed event there is in rodeo on him, from roping to running barrels. He’s even been to Colorado elk hunting with us.”
The policeman’s face kind of softened and he said, “I had a horse when I was a kid, lots of fond memories from that horse. You try to keep it on your side of the yellow line and get that horse home safe. You have a good day.”
The policeman shook his head as he was walking back to his car. I guess it’s not everyday he gets to pull over a drunk horse.
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.
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