He'll be the odd man ow!

Although Dean and I were only in junior high school, we had already acquired hoodlum habits. We decided it was less trouble to do wrong than right, and more fun, so we devised a coin flipping scam to beat our schoolmates out of their lunch money.

Operating on the five-flip, odd-man-out-wins-all principle, we two con boys lured suckers in and contrive to have our coins land on heads and tails, insuring we’d win the third guy’s money.

We repeated this four out of five flips. On the fifth flip, we made certain both of our coins landed either tails or heads.

Dean, now a lawyer (with lawyer tendencies back then), would wink his right eye if we were to be heads, his left for tails. If the other gambler’s coin landed the same as ours, we continued flipping until he won.

“Wealth heaped upon wealth, nor truth nor safety buys — the dangers gather as the treasures rise,” a wise philosopher once wrote.

Sure enough, greed undid Dean and me. We became so proficient at our evil scheme that we moved into the big leagues and began flipping dimes — and even quarters!

At recess and lunch, between classes and after school, we attracted a steady stream of unwitting victims with hefty allowances. Our pockets bulged with filthy lucre.

Everyone in our class was terrified of Mr. Crawley’s paddle. It was huge, and the holes drilled through decreased air resistance during the swing, thus accelerating the rate of closure between wood and derrière and thereby greatly increasing the pain’s intensity.

Mr. Crawley didn’t particularly like Dean and me anyway, since he had learned through the grapevine that we gave him his nickname, Mr. Crawdad, which spread like wildfire all over school.

One day, we two hoodlums were in the back of his class counting our winnings, when the student in front of Dean gave him a note.

Upon reading it, he became as pale as Lazarus, come from the dead. The note read, “I will see you two gentlemen in my office after school today. – S. Crawley.”

Our crime spree had come to an abrupt end. There was no doubt we’d be paddled, and while we feared our punishment, what really terrified us was the uncertainty about who would be paddled last.

The horror of watching the other criminal getting whacked to a frazzle, and then having to suffer the same fate was more than either of our remorseful young minds could bear.

Even worse, word had gotten out about the impending torture, and we knew a mob of our enraged victims would hang around after school to hear us howl.

When we entered the death chamber, Mr. Crawley handed each of us a coin and said, “Gentlemen, we’ll flip until one of you is the odd man out.”

“B-b-but, Sir, why are we flipping coins?” Dean quavered.

Grinning sadistically, the executioner said, “Because whoever wins gets paddled last won’t just be the odd man out — he’ll be the odd man ow!

Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss alumnus, Army veteran, and retired Mississippi Delta cotton farmer Jimmy Reed ([email protected]) is a newspaper columnist, author, and college teacher. His latest collection of short stories is available via squarebooks.com (662-236-2262).