Author's Note: This was supposed to go up this morning, but life got in the way.
The timeframe of this story is well before the start of the series, so I gave Rosco/Hazzard County a virtual posse of deputies, based on the pilot when he really did seem to have a bunch. Other than that, I don't think there are any real surprises coming here.
Part One – Waiting
Chapter One
January 1971
She calls herself Summer and if he knows it's not her real name, that only makes her all the more appealing. She's warmth in the middle of a deep freeze, the worst seen this far south since all the old-timers were children and had to chip the ice layer from the top of the trough before the livestock could get a drink each morning. At least that's how it's always gotten told, followed by tales that twist and turn like the frozen mountain footpaths the oldsters claim they had to march over in order to get to school in those days, even if the cornerstone on the Hazzard School, just two flatland miles from the Duke Farm, is older than any of them. It's a lazy county, this place he grew up, recycling old lies for new generations, doing slow loops around the same circles it has since Uncle Jesse was his age some thirty-odd years ago.
Which is part of what makes Summer so appealing. She's an interloper, a foreigner, most likely a transient, and no one to hold him to anything. She wasn't in his third grade glass, doesn't know the tale of how Luke Duke dropped a frog down Missy Kelty's dress in the middle of a lesson on fractions and got himself called Frogman – with equal amounts of disgust and admiration – by the rest of his classmates for the next two years. She didn't see him duck away from every fastball pitch for a full season after getting beaned in the ear during his first year of high school, and she doesn't care what his family does to put food on the table, hasn't heard the stories of an orphaned threesome of cousins being raised half-feral by an old moonshiner. She might have gotten wind of a few drifting tales about how many girls he's gone through since he was a pimple-faced barely-teen that let pretty little Ima Jo Martin break his heart, but he bears no shame about those. Not when Summer, whose mama probably named her Mary in hopes that she'd stay pure for her whole life, is currently bunking with Miss Mabel's crowd in one of the RVs hidden out on the old Potter's Lane. From all accounts she's just a drifter in need of a bed, she cooks and cleans for the other girls and otherwise abstains from involving herself in their lifestyle, but she's not chaste and doesn't expect Luke to be either.
She doesn't ask for much, no promises of anything more than a steady Monday and Thursday night out with him, doesn't probe him or even grumble about how he can't be with her on weekends, doesn't care that one short year ago he was Hazzard High's star quarterback, infamous for wasting time with each and every cheerleader after Friday night games. She never wonders how it is that he could graduate by the skin of his teeth when he's clearly, in the words of educators and guardians alike, smarter than that, doesn't mutter under her breath about whether his aspirations are really so simple as dedicating himself to the family business. She doesn't seem to think twice about how Sheriff Rosco can be found around just about any corner they turn when he takes her out for drives, doesn't mind how half the time his little cousin joins them with whatever sort of a date he can scare up in tow.
In short, she fits perfectly within his current lifestyle, and that's the most important thing she could do.
Now that the days are short and the chores pretty much come down to feeding the few animals they've got then collecting what the livestock provides in return, he realizes the injustice of it all. Or maybe it's the fact that when Jesse gets tired of chicken Luke heads off into the woods by himself on a Wednesday afternoon while Bo's stuck in the middle of listening (again) to a lecture about the assassination of Archduke Something-or-other, and by the time Saturday rolls around and he's free to join the hunt, his cousin's back with enough meat to feed them until spring.
It's not like Bo's that much younger, really, than either of his cousins. Born just barely two years after Luke, and it's no fair that he got stuck three years behind in school. Scarcely a Sophomore now to his cousin's complete freedom, the difference between being born in September and November – well, that and Aunt Lavinia's influence when they were nothing more than a trio of brats making a mess of her tidy household. Luke's too smart to wait another year before starting school (so smart he'd figured out where she hid the cookies, found the moonshine under the sink and dismantled the radio until there was nothing but a pile of circuits left); born just after the September first cutoff, any chance he could be admitted to first grade before his sixth birthday? And old Mr. Murray, the worn out principal with paper-thin wrinkled skin and drooping brown eyes that always seemed like they'd make more sense in a bulldog's face, had relented.
Funny how Lavinia hadn't been as eager to let her younger two rush off to school, interesting to imagine now how he might have been all for going to school at the time. He can vaguely remember wanting to follow off wherever Luke led, even if his cousin never seemed real eager to go there himself and came home complaining all the way about how he had to sit up at the kitchen table with a notebook and pencil until he'd finished whatever schoolwork had followed him home. Didn't matter back then how little Bo liked a thing, doing it with Luke made it all right. His guardians should have taken advantage of his enthusiasm at the time and sent him to school early too; he'd be that much closer to done now.
And then there's Daisy, born in June, not even a half year older than him, but she'll finish a full year before he does, and that part's definitely not fair. The girl's never shown any real interest in hunting, would rather rescue baby animals than stalk their parents (though she seems perfectly willing to cook whatever gets brought home to her, and come eating time, she digs in just as deeply as any of them) and wouldn't disappear with Luke for days on end even if she could. Would seem only fair and perfectly sensible if she'd take one of his years off of his hands; the girl halfway likes school anyway. She could have all thirty months he's got left, as far as Bo is concerned.
Not that he hasn't learned a few things since those days when he was small enough to hide in the hem of his Aunt Lavinia's skirt.
"Bo Duke." It's not a question, that can't be good. If it were, he could come out with something along the lines of nineteen-oh-eight and then shrug his shoulders when crabby old Miss Price made that sour face she uses when an answer is way off base.
But if there's no question, there's no answer, right or wrong, that he can give. So he just looks up at her and lets his blue eyes go wide, because they have a history of going a long way to soften any woman's heart. Smiles broadly, showing his perfectly straight teeth that frequently aid and abet his attempts to flirt his way out of trouble.
These, too, are skills learned by keeping pace with his oldest cousin, dating at an equal rate, riding shotgun on weekend whiskey deliveries where there's the increasingly frequent need to shuck and jive their way past both the federal and the local law. Summers of overnights at the still, and if he has no desire to spend his post-graduation years "cooking" he has figured out a few evasive maneuvers by working with Luke there, sneaking in and out of the woods by a new path each time.
"Yes, Ma'am?" he tries, because if all else fails, whip out the charm. He's about to tell her how pretty she looks when that finger comes out, pointing at him.
"Office," is all she says. Seems to him like the entire staff of the Hazzard School might be plenty happy to see him permanently exit their doors early, too.
"It just seems like," might be pushing his luck. He's already been grumbled at a few times, had a wide finger pointed into his chest once or twice, and gotten reminded about the consequences of sassing his elders. "It wouldn't hurt anything." Other than his hide, which is apparently begging for a tanning right about now if that glower in the old man's eyes is any indication.
Cold night to be sitting out here on frozen logs with no more shelter than dried kudzu draping over a wooden frame hardly taller than him, barely wide enough to camouflage the object that is key to Duke survival. Crude rock fireplace, hydrometer, capped pot and copper coil, all of which can be dismantled and reassembled on the other side of the county in just over two hours, and he might have preferred one of their older still sites in this bitter chill. His favorite, in the deeply wooded southeastern corner of their own land, got itself permanently abandoned some seven years back when Commissioner Buford passed on to the great beyond, leaving his position vulnerable to usurpation by a man with a frightening lack of scruples. Jefferson Davis Hogg, who just happens to have his own hidden distillery somewhere in this same two-hundred-square-mile county, and the first thing the new Commissioner did was to inform the duly constituted law in Hazzard that their primary responsibility was to arrest competing moonshiners, and then he'd issued standing search warrants for properties owned by anyone known to earn their living from the trade. So the Dukes had slipped away in the night, creating a new still site every year or so, and right about now he'd prefer one with more of a southern exposure, away from the wind, nestled a little lower in the hills. But they're in the middle of cooking, fire lit, mash steaming, pot and coil too hot to touch. Nothing to do but settle down for the night and make his case.
"Wouldn't hurt anything." If he ever gets another chance to talk, that is. Just the tone of those few words, and he can tell Jesse's building to a head of steam hot enough to cook up more moonshine than the still that squats in front of them. "You really reckon that him pulling some fool stunt wouldn't hurt? You crash a car at a hundred miles an hour and something's gonna get hurt." Stick poking at coals, flicking embers to the skies like tiny prayers for the safety of his kids. "He's what would get hurt."
"He ain't gonna crash, Jesse." Bo's vehicular feats aren't half as foolish as their aging uncle accuses them of being. "Besides, I'd be right there with him." Riding shotgun while his cousin took the wheel on deliveries, and he really can't understand the objection. Sure, he knows why Daisy's been kept away from the liquor and not permitted to be directly involved in any delivery. There're risks that don't get taken with the women-folk; he and Jesse are in agreement on that. But Bo, he's not any more appealing to the law or any more afraid of doing a bit of time in jail than Luke is.
"Oh," his uncle says, rolling his eyes around from where he's been sniffing the mash for potency. "So you'd both get hurt. Well, then, that makes it much better."
Sarcasm, precisely the tone that would get Luke's backside warmed by the end of a fresh cut switch. "He's a good driver," Luke defends. It's almost easier to argue with the old man's back than his front, what with the incredulous visage he gets treated to when his uncle faces him. He lets himself get looked at, stays silent and waits for Jesse to get back to caring about his craft. Moonshining, and it wasn't his choice, nor Bo's, for this to be the family business. They didn't start it or have much of anything to do with it continuing from pre-revolutionary times to now. Hard to imagine his ancestors, dressed in waistcoats and breeches, white ponytails tied at their necks and stirring sour mash somewhere deep in the woods, but apparently that's what they did. Luke indulges these idle thoughts as a means of passing time until his uncle's fully engrossed in his work again. When the man's unsuspecting back is turned he throws out, "He's sixteen. You let me deliver by the time I was that age." And he'd spent fewer hours behind the wheel than his little cousin has when he first got trusted to drive Sweet Tilly.
"Barely sixteen," he gets reminded, is Bo's age. "And besides, you was already mostly done with school before I let you deliver. He's just a boy." Jesse Duke logic, which is just as warped and twisted as the man's rheumatic fingers, but it's nothing to be argued with. True enough that Luke was closer to graduation than Bo is now, but that's sort of a technicality, what with how Luke got to start school even if he didn't turn six until more than a week after the usual cutoff date for first grade. He's been a year ahead of himself all along, and that doesn't have a dang thing to do with Bo's driving skill. "Boy can't go through a week of school without getting himself into trouble." Which also doesn't mean much of anything. School bores him, leaves his brain idle to get up to no good. "He ain't got the concentration yet." And that right there is where Jesse's wrong; seems to Luke like a deliberate sort of wrong. When Bo's behind the wheel – that's when every bit of his brain is engaged on the task at hand, and both he and his uncle know it. "Besides," Jesse wheedles, his voice slipping up into that range that ought to get all the dogs in the county barking. "We ain't got no need to have that boy out there risking his neck. Ain't no reason you can't drive," which only goes to prove that the man's being more stubborn than smart about this. "What do you figure you're going to do with yourself anyways? Spend all your nights with that girl?" Summer, who Jesse doesn't precisely approve of, though his feelings aren't strong enough to do more than harass Luke about how Aunt Lavinia would have his hide if she was alive and he brought the girl home. "Don't get lazy on me boy."
A new variation on an old theme. Sometimes he gets to hear about the admirable ambitions of Enos Strate, who graduated from school a year ahead of him, and is presently off at the Police Academy. With the blessings of his moonshining father, and it's not like Luke could become a cop even if he wanted to, but according to his uncle, that's not the point. The opposite debate has them discussing Cooter Davenport, recently back in Hazzard after a few years of getting into one sort of trouble then another out in Texas. Now that he's local again, the Davenport boy seems to be at the center of every petty mischief in town, and if the Duke patriarch claims to like Cooter just fine, he doesn't exactly want his boys getting too close to him when trouble is afoot.
But neither of those ultimately lucky, flat-footed Hazzard boys is a reasonable comparison for Luke's current situation.
"Uncle Jesse," probably comes out as frustrated as he feels. The specifics of his thoughts aren't anything he wants to share with anyone. "I ain't going nowhere on purpose." But if he's got to bring up the subject, he reckons this dark corner of the county where if he's lucky it'll disappear into the desolation that surrounds them and never be heard by anyone else nor come to fruition, is the best place to do it. "It's just that I may not always be here, is all." Seems like enough to have to say, but Jesse's eyebrows are down, and the man's not tolerating any of what he figures to be fool nonsense. "You know I turn nineteen this year." And the old man checked the newspaper, same as him, the day after lottery numbers were drawn. Luke is pretty dang close to the top of the list of boys that could find themselves drafted into the armed services.
"Luke." If the dark-toned way his name gets said is any indication, his uncle has figured it out. "Don't go inviting trouble to come looking for you."
He sighs; all things being equal he'd be happy never even to think such a thing. But he doesn't have a choice, and his uncle has just realized that. "I just figure it might be best if Bo got in some practice now." While they can count on Luke riding shotgun with him.
"I ain't convinced," the old man warns, which is just a prelude to, "but I'll think on it."
Sideways sun, only minutes to dusk now. Luke's hand up to ward off the orange glare as he leans against the navy blue of his own fender, swirling the remaining contents of a soda can in his left hand. The cheap stuff that makes his mouth pucker with every sip, but he always drinks it anyway.
Too sweet and that might just be why Bo likes it so much. Or it could be that it's free, the benefit of coming by the garage before closing time. Best time of the year, chill of the air aside, when they have a short wait from the moment the gas pumps get turned off and the old wooden doors slide closed until darkness settles over the land and invites them out to play. Cooter bribes them with cans of soda to hang around until he can get free.
"You ain't even gonna get close," is Luke's assessment of Dobro's taunting. Friday night races, the unofficial pastime for Hazzard boys of a certain age. The usual suspects making idle threats about whose car is going to be minus a bumper by the end of the night, and this is just the warm-up. When Cooter finishes locking the doors and swaggers his way through the maze of haphazardly parked souped-up cars, the intimidation will start in earnest. Just about Bo's favorite part of the week, when he and Luke team up to teach the other guys a lesson, and Summer doesn't wedge herself into the front seat between them. Not that he minds the girl with nearly black eyes and hair to match, just curly enough for Luke to lose his fingers in. It's just that she's got a strange feel about her – temporary, and if she's not going to stay in their lives he wonders why Luke goes out with her every week, when his habit has always been to stay in constant motion like a bee pollinating flowers.
"The way I got it figured," Dobro tells the clouds in the sky from his halfway prone position, sitting on Luke's hood and leaning against the windshield. Head tipped back to guzzle down a little more fizz, and he nearly chokes before he swallows. Next words come out with a slight squeak to them, but that doesn't stop the man from shooting off his mouth, same as he does just about every time they all get together. "Y'all are gonna be spending tomorrow in the junkyard looking for bumpers and quarter panels to replace the ones I'm gonna leave lying on the side of the road." Same load of bull the man unleashes just about weekly. Earns him low grunts and snorts from Brody, who doesn't need to talk tough, because he already is. Big, powerful, and he could probably take down a bear in hand-to-hand combat – if they weren't all scared of him. Luke always responds lazily to Dobro, like he can't hardly be bothered. Bo sometimes forgets himself and snaps back against the fool's blabbering, but it's pointless. No matter whether tonight is spent leading the pack or untangling his car from a tree, Dobro will be spinning these same yarns again next week.
"You ain't gonna touch this thing," Luke reinforces, slapping his hand against his own fender to make his point. Funny how everyone lounges in or on the Falcon, which Luke bought off Cooter's father for a pittance three years ago, and has since cultivated into a powerful piece of machinery. It's not pretty; painted a dull blue and sporting square edges where newer cars are rounded, but under Luke's hand it can make even Cooter's nearly-new, bright yellow Challenger look like nothing more than a kid's go-cart, and it habitually makes mincemeat out of Dobro's sexy little Mustang. "Because Bo's going to be driving her."
Well now. That's an unexpected development for every one of them sitting here in front of the Hazzard Garage – except, of course, the older Duke boy. Bo manages to keep his reaction down to a simple turned head and raised eyebrow. At least he thinks he does; old Luke there always swears Bo's face is easier to read than most books. But he doesn't reckon anyone pays the blonde kid sitting on the passenger door frame a whole lot of mind right now, as the shock wave goes through the rest of the guys.
"Bo?" tries to be incredulity on Dobro's part, but it's just smug. It's you-ain't-really-gonna-let-your-kid-cousin-drive contained in a single syllable that gets laughed out, same way it used to be when Luke brought him along on pick-up games of football. The perils of his cousin growing up too fast, making friends with boys older than them both, and Bo always gets underestimated by them all.
"Yeah," Luke answers back, casual as you please, before tipping his can up and swallowing the last of that too-sweet cola. "And you ain't gonna be able to catch him for nothing," gets followed by a shrug.
Brody snickers; man loves watching Dobro get worked up. Or maybe he also finds it funny that there's going to be a high school kid mixed into their oh-so-adult activities.
Doesn't matter – Luke's over there pulling keys out of his pocket, then tossing them over the roof of the car to him, which makes its own point about how well his driving skills are trusted. Not a one of these boys here has ever been allowed behind the wheel of his cousin's prized possession.
"Don't get me wrong," Dobro chatters on with a smirk. "It's just that I was looking forward to kicking your tail at the Cataluchee Bridge." One-lane, covered, which usually reduces a half-mile section of the course to a game of chicken.
"Well then," Luke says, crushing his empty can with his right hand before tossing it into the trash barrel by the curb, and sometimes the man's just a danged showoff. Or he just takes this kind of thing too far, shoving against Dobro's competitive spirit this close to the start of the race. "You ain't gonna be disappointed none, because I'm gonna drive Cooter's Barracuda."
"Huh?" And there's the man himself, finally, emerging from a solid half-day's work. Mildly dazed from all of about five hours spent under one car or another, and he's just lucky to be the only mechanic in town, or his slothful ways would work against him. "Say what?"
"I need to borrow your car," Luke explains, patting their friend on the cheek like it'll wake him up. Which might not be the wisest thing. "The green one." A moment creeps by as the mechanic's brains shuffle slowly toward actually thinking. About what had been, up until a couple of months ago when he bought the Challenger, the man's baby: the sexy little Plymouth Barracuda that still takes up a prime parking spot in front of the garage, not to mention its place in Cooter's heart. Not that Luke bothers to recognize that their friend hasn't consented to anything; the fluid movement of his athletic body as he crosses the cracked pavement toward the car in question goes to prove that fact.
"Keys are in the ignition," seems to be Cooter giving in to the inevitable, gets met by a twinkle-eyed grin that reminds them all that it's the Barracuda's steering column that just got saved by those few words. Not a one of the boys here needs keys to start a car.
"Yahoo!" Dobro hollers as the rough equivalent to 'gentlemen start your engines,' while the rest of the guys scramble towards their various rides for the night.
The start isn't clean, considering that they lack a flag or starting pistol, but it doesn't much matter. Until blacktop runs to dirt they have to pay some semblance of attention to traffic laws anyway; it's only when they're enveloped by the shadows of the tree-canopy overhang with nothing but red clay under their wheels that there's an utter lack of rules.
Easy to tell, out here amongst the coons and possum, which of the drivers has a habit of running a car for a living, and who does it strictly for fun. Brody's got a heavy-handed, menacing style in his black Camaro, and Dobro likes the way his Mustang kicks up the dirt. Cooter may know the guts of each and every one of these cars from topside to bottom, might even have selected his Challenger based on the ability to scavenge parts from his own Barracuda should anything start to break down. But none of them, for all their talents or moxie, has the skill to drive blacked out like he and Luke do. No need for headlights to know exactly where the road bends, no reason to give away their position or choice of route to their opponents. It's a free-for-all, mad scramble to the grapevine, with Cooter currently in the lead; bright yellow, perfectly painted, not-a-ding-in-it, muscle car, and its owner cackling over the CB about how the rest of the pack can just eat his dust.
Bo reckons there's a reason Luke tidily handed his car over to him, and that it's got something to do with getting him to shut up about driving on moonshine runs, where most nights he begs for a chance behind the wheel. He gets sour faces for his efforts, followed by reminders of how he's supposed to be looking for the gleam of moonlight off the fender of another car – lawman or another runner, because they're equally dangerous – and not whining about how he could drive faster or better. This right here is undoubtedly a test, one he might even be meant to fail, but he's got no plans on doing anything other than winning the race.
Until he doesn't like the feel of the air around him, whistling by his ear too close and tight, clinging like sweat, smelling of danger, and it's not right. Could be that there's a glimmer of light where there shouldn't be, a hum where there ought only be silence, but if either of those is the case, he's unaware of them. What he knows is his own gut, clenching as his right hand takes a firm grip on the hard steering wheel of Luke's old car, the sweat of his palm and the bump of the tires as he pulls right, out of the openness of the road in front of him and into the brush. Screech of branch against car, and he fully expects he'll be spending some part of tomorrow compounding the scratches out of the navy blue skin of this car.
"Good instincts, Bo," comes mumbling over the C.B. in Luke's low voice at the same moment that the road he just spun off of comes alive with light. Red, white and blue, could be the fourth of July, except for the fact that it's January.
"All right, Cooter Davenport." It's Rosco Coltrane, from the sound of that voice twittering with glee through a bullhorn. Squeal of brakes, clank and rattle of cars skittering off into a ditch, choking dust in the air that starts glowing with even more spinning lights. Dobro and Brody, bumbling their way into the mess with sideways skids. Deputies, and it seems like the Hazzard law has either gotten lucky or smart; they've managed to be along the Ridge Road at exactly the time when the weekly race passes through. "Just you boys pull over to the side of the road." Which, near as Bo can tell, is a pointless order. Seems like the side of the road snuck right up and swallowed the whole mess of them.
"Stay put," Luke warns over the C.B. Makes Bo wonder where he is, into which direction he went off course, but it turns out not to matter. "I'm coming to you."
Arguments start out there on the road; too far away for him to follow, but he reckons he can guess that there's a certain amount of innocence being proclaimed, followed by orders to produce licenses and registrations.
He wants to ask Luke where he is, what the plan is, and how, exactly, they're going to fix this mess; he wants to get out there and somehow protect his friends because no Duke can sit idly by and let the law arrest anyone they care about. But even so much as opening the door of the car, crunching it into the branches that surround him, could give away his location. So he slides quietly up onto the doorframe instead, trying to get high enough which to view the proceedings over the branches that surround him. Concentrating on keeping quiet, not to mention staying out of the light that flashes into his eyes with each lazy loop of a bulb in a cruiser's light bar, he gets surprised by Luke's hand on his back. Woodsman's skills at their best; his cousin has managed to sneak up on him without making a sound. Bo manages not to holler in shock, but gets smirked at for jumping anyway.
"Slide back in there." Luke's whisper, familiar as his own breath, lets his heart settle back to a steady beat from where it was jumping around his chest like a nervous rabbit. "And get my bow out of the back seat." Makes it possible to do as he's told, to enjoy what's coming. Luke quietly popping his own trunk open, digging around, then carefully closing it before making his way back to meet Bo at the driver's window. He takes the bow, then offers his free arm as support, letting Bo slip out the window and silently to the ground. They make their quiet way to a slightly more open area, where they can clearly see the entirety of the police activity. Sheriff Coltrane presides over the proceedings like the director of the school play, pointing here and there to indicate where he wants each person to stand. Two deputies idly watch as another two go about patting down the Dukes' friends as though they actually expect to find hidden weapons in the middle of a back road race. For all of a second he's angry that the law of this county always assumes the worst of those that live outside of the four-block radius neatly maintained houses in town, and then he hears the hiss of flame to his right. Turns to watch Luke touch match to wick then draw his arm back, and smiles at the realization that the cops are not entirely wrong about country boys – sometimes they do carry weapons, even if they're not the traditional sort. Fireworks taped to an arrow nocked into a bow, and fired well over everyone's heads to land quite safely in the middle of nowhere. His head ducks and Luke's arms comes around him to shield them both against clumps of dirt and small stones as ground heaves under the explosion.
"Bye, Rosco," he hears Cooter call to the prone sheriff as stock car engines start over on the edge of the road, and dust kicks up to join the rest of the debris in the air. Another close call, and the law really ought to learn not to mess with racers.