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| No News from Doodlebug Island
by William F. JordanAmos Roundy had, over the course of his twenty-four years, achieved the distinction of becoming the happiest young dissolute on Doodlebug Island. Given to drinking, smoking, gambling, joblessness, and a profane view of life, he was, nevertheless, appreciated for his affability, humor, and generosity. To residents of Doodlebug he wasn’t so much anachronous as he was uniquely eccentric in ways others might envy and wish to emulate but felt prevented from doing so by real or imagined ties to respectability.
Things might have proceeded right along into Amos’ next birthday but that he suffered a series of love affairs with young women who, in the forgiving nature of their sex, agreed to consider marriage were he able to assume the responsibilities involved in forming a successful union and a family, if the latter occurred.
Now, all of us do a little soul searching from time to time—some with greater need than others—but in Amos’ case it was perfect drama to watch. With the gentle urging of care whispering in his ear, he set about changing what had been dissolute to resolute, although knowledge of how and where to begin was entirely missing, and the goal of responsible behavior little more than hope. In jest, someone suggested he begin by comparing his behavior to the injunctions of the Ten Commandments. But when Amos followed the admonition, he found a yawning gulf between the life he’d led and the one to which he aspired.
“My Word!” he exclaimed to a group gathered at Sprigley’s grill, “There isn’t one of those commandments I haven’t broken on a regular basis, and I’m lucky if I haven’t shattered a whole bunch of ‘em altogether and at the same time!” He thought briefly. “No,” he said, “I haven’t killed anyone yet, so maybe that’s a start. But the rest? Old Moses lugged those things down the mountain, and I feel like I’m lugging the pieces back up again!”
Still wrestling with his foibles and the means of redemption weeks later, Amos—now working at Sprigley’s—said to those lunching there, “I’ve decided I was born out of time, I was meant for the fourteenth century when it was fashionable to buy indulgences for your sins. Trying to keep all the commandments all the time is like juggling swords. About the time I’m trying to honor my mother and father, one of ‘em makes me mad and I not only end up a failure in the respect department, but I’ve likely taken the Lord’s name in vain, as well. And as for keeping the Sabbath, just last Sunday, I remembered what day it was about the time I was finishing the six pack I’d filched from Brownie Water’s stash, and wetting my line in Oak Creek!”
Unable to keep or renegotiate the commandments, Amos, nevertheless, awoke to the fact he had moved irrevocably toward improved behavior. “I now live in a box bounded on two sides by weakness and temptation, with virtue and moral good on the other two.” It got to be an observer could tell the condition of his love life by the way Amos leaned toward or away from his former life. For the length of one short romance he tried living ‘frontier style.’ Asked to define it, he was heard to say, “You don’t talk much, and when you do, you say ‘shucks’ instead of something stronger; you say ‘maam’ and ‘sir’ to older folks, and you only kill a man if he really needs killin’.”
“This is supposed to improve your chances with women, make you a better man?” someone asked.
“That’s the idea, partner. It's the code of the west!”
Whether or nor Amos found the same difficulty with the “Code of the West” as he had with the Ten Commandments was never clear. All anyone knew was that he wasn’t heard voicing ‘shucks’, ‘sir’, or ‘maam for any great length of time, and his gregarious nature somehow got in the way of his finding men who needed killing.
It was then he hit upon a strategy unheard of in circles of virtue, one that avoided any impinging voice of guilt while tolerating impuissance. “The carbon emissions people have shown us a modern version of the indulgence racket, he said. “It’s called Cap and Trade. We men simply take the aggregate of the poor behavior we demonstrate, cap that, then trade among ourselves based on personal need or ability!”
Some of the resulting feminine levities nearly amounted to sexual harassment!
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