Treasure of Hazzard was, aside from the alien fiasco, arguably the strangest episode. Alligator wresting, nearly naked (nearly feral) twins, mud wrestling, car chases, boat chases, treasure maps... just bizarre. Luke seems mildly interested in the week's damsel in distress (played by the same actress who was Mary Kaye in Mary Kaye's Baby) but then again...
The girl was all right, really more of an echo of someone he'd known somewhere. Lean, but not skinny, a fine-china look about her that cloaked her strength and intelligence. Hazzard girls, the real ones, who'd grown up out of the red clay tall and willowy as corn, had this same quality.
This one was a professor, or close enough. Not born of the same soil as Luke and no one he could spend more than a day with. To settle into her life he'd have to take up smoking a pipe and wearing suits, maybe blurting out phrases like "it's elementary" and "surely you can't be serious," which were just fancy ways of calling a man an idiot. Heck, an eye roll was more efficient that all those pretty words.
Professor Laura wasn't anything Luke wanted or expected to have. Just a day's worth of what-if, a fool's game of a girl.
Then again, she was enough to make Bo swim with the alligators, or even worse, take his chances with the McCobb twins. Shoot, his cousin had just about exiled himself to the jungle just because Luke took a few minutes to admire the smile of an ultimately unwanted woman. Last seen blind-folded and being paddled off into the swamp by a couple of long-denied, desperately horny, granddaughters of a crazed old moonshiner. Luke going after Bo in the rowboat was strictly a rescue mission.
Which made the giggles of fools, coming from the other side of the reeds, intolerable. In the dangers of the swamp, three childish idiots were clearly playing a game of hide the salami. It was only through sheer force of will that he managed to cut the engine of his own boat so as not to flip the fragile canoe through the force of his own wake. Good fortune, he reminded himself, was what allowed Bo to win a wrestling match with an alligator yesterday. And though Lady Luck seemed as hot for Bo as any other female, there was no promising she'd be hanging out waiting for him to get done with a pair of pixie twins just so she could smile on him.
Coasting up on the canoe was fairly anticlimactic, considering all the kinetic energy behind Luke's approach up to this point. Still it gave him a moment to watch three grinning blondes and consider seriously the purpose of his mission. When it came right down to it, it was no less noble a cause than the ever-present charge upon men to protect women and children from the dangers of the world.
"Sam." The sane twin, he'd felt, back when they were introduced. Not that he had any idea which was which right now. Bo's head turned in his direction, just as blindfolded as it had been when Jeb McCobb saw the canoe making its out to the reeds, then came after Luke. Kill all you damned trespassers had been muttered somewhere amongst the strongly worded suggestion that Luke bring the girls back with their virtue intact. "Untie him."
"Luke," his brilliant cousin deduced. "I—"
"Save it, Bo." It was a sacrifice on Luke's part, really, to shush his cousin. A desire to spare his cousin the public embarrassment of the inevitable tongue lashing Luke would deliver under the slightest provocation.
Bo squinted against the sudden sunshine when the nearer twin ripped off his blindfold and her sister pouted her way through picking at the knot tied around his wrists. Oh, Bo did a creditable job of acting like he wanted to be free, twisting and turning his hands around. Funny how that made it harder for whichever girl it was to work the loops loose. Which just meant a few extra seconds to wait before Luke was steadying the row boat against Bo's rocking weight as he came aboard.
"You girls best get on back to your Grandpa," Luke suggested, that mandate to protect women and children enforcing itself. Turned the rowboat away from two horny girls and kept his wake low until he figured he and Bo were far enough away (or just until he couldn't stand the lack of speed anymore) then revved the engine up as high as it would go.
"Luke," was getting hollered at him, and it was a shame that there was no noisier speed for the boat to run at. A little louder and he'd have a good enough excuse for ignoring Bo. "They ain't after us. You ain't got to kill us getting away from them."
Well no, he didn't have to, but just maybe he wanted to.
"What was you thinking, Bo? They ain't but kids." At least as far as experience with the world went.
"Slow it down, Luke." The boat. Yeah, probably a good idea. Shallow water could show up sudden as a pothole, beaching them and maybe even tossing them overboard and straight to the alligators.
"Another thing," Luke said, cutting the engine down enough that shouting wasn't quite necessary. Though he reckoned his voice was still plenty loud enough. "What was you thinking, jumping into this here water with them gators?"
There was confusion in the way Bo's mouth gaped, even as he signaled to Luke to switch places. Fine, let Bo drive, but he wasn't getting out of answering questions. "You mean yesterday?" was what he finally came out with.
"Yeah yesterday," Luke answered, all mockery. "Why, you done it again today?" And by then he was up at the bow, letting Bo take over the duties at the stern of the boat.
"No, I ain't done it again. I only did it the once because your girlfriend was too dumb to know about staying low in a boat." Only Bo would be so self-centered as to consider himself smarter than a college professor. Oh, she might not have known the dangers of falling into a swamp full of alligators, but—
"At least," Luke snorted, "she didn't go in the water on purpose. What was you thinking?" And there was one more thing he wanted to say. Oh yeah. "She ain't my girlfriend."
"Whoever she is, she coulda got mangled pretty good." Somewhere in the last few minutes, Bo cut the engine entirely, leaving them to drift somewhere between the civilized side of the swamp, and the part that felt like a jungle. "You woulda been happy if I let the gators have her?"
"Laura," she had a name, and she wasn't anyone's girlfriend. "Was smart enough to know to get out of the water. All you hadda do was help me pull her back into the boat." Luke shook his head at the foolishness of unwinnable arguments with Bo. He was only saving the girl's life after all, and he'd swear on that until the day he died. Just a good deed. "We gonna sit out here all day?" Because Bo was doing nothing to get them moving in any particular direction.
"Maybe," his cousin answered, lounging back lazily. "At least until you calm down." Lots of white teeth in that smile being flashed at Luke. A reminder of the alligators that would likely find Bo a tasty snack if Luke threw him overboard, like he deserved.
"Just don't go wrestling with gators no more," was the compromise he offered, his own posture still leaning in towards Bo, to make the importance of his stance on this known. "If you got to," hand gesture, indicating things Luke didn't really want to talk about, "do your thing with some twins, I can live with that. Just don't go getting your pretty self killed."
"Do my thing?" He was getting laughed at for avoiding crudities. "Since when do you ever worry about who I do my thing with?"
"Since you could get an assload of buckshot," Luke snapped at him. "You about ready to go home now?" Because sitting out here with the brightness of the sun reflecting all around, a man could lose a sense of what he was saying. Worse than being drunk, too much sun was.
"Not," and Bo was sitting back up now, elbows coming to rest on his knees, and face only inches from Luke's. "Until you tell me why you care so much about who I do my thing with."
"The twins are…"
"Desperate, is what they are, Luke. What do you care whether they get what they want or not? And don't tell me about no buckshot, 'cause both of us done took our share of that." And it might just be luck that none of it wound up doing any real damage to either of them.
"Let's go home, Bo," seemed a safe answer. "We ain't got no reason to sit in the middle of a mosquito-infested swamp." Which would be a better argument if he'd gotten bitten even once.
Big old patient sigh from Bo, the kind that Luke had seen from many a girl. Just a breath to decide whether to just give Luke Duke what he wanted or insist on promises first.
"You ain't bothered by a few bugs, Luke," Bo informed him. "Nor even gators, not really. What you're afraid of is this."
Luke moved his upper body back, but not fast enough. Bo was already too close even before he got it into his head to lean forward. A kiss, then a hand behind his neck to keep him from getting any further away. Not that he was trying anymore. It was just too sudden and unexpected, Bo's move. Not sweet and gentle at all, kind of abrupt and rough and… gone too fast.
"Am I right?" Bo asked, from half a breath away.
Could be that Luke nodded, he wasn't sure. Mostly he moved forward, hand on Bo's upper arm to pull him in closer. Bright sunshine shield sandwiching them from above and below, the slosh of water underneath, and only alligators for witnesses as the Duke boys pulled each other to lie together on the bottom of a boat in the middle of the swamp.