Chapter Two – Right, For All the Wrong Reasons
Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 1: All government, of right, originates with the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted solely for the good of the whole. Public officers are the trustees and servants of the people, and at all times, amenable to them.
It was like being the bottom of Bronson's Canyon – the jail cell got dusky before the light left the world outside. Darker than he remembered it ever being, but then the last time he'd spent the night in here had been before he and Luke went off to NASCAR. As the shadows settled around him, Bo found himself counting back in his mind the number of days he'd spent in the Hazzard County jail, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember a single night he'd been in here without Luke. Hours, here and there, waiting for his cousin to bail him out in one way or another, but never an overnight.
He should be relieved, maybe, at not having to fight over the cot, and getting the scratchy blanket all to himself (because as much as Luke claimed to never get cold, somehow he always wound up with the lion's share of the blanket by dawn). No snoring tonight, either. And then there was the argument he was managing to avoid. The one where Luke spouted I-told-you-sos about Miranda, how he knew all along that girl would wind up getting Bo in trouble.
It's the same fight they had the day after that basketball game they coached for the Boar's Nest Bears. The impromptu post-game party thrown in the middle of Hazzard Square was where Bo first ran into Miranda, in a literal kind of a way. Playing rough with Rod Moffett, a fake boxing match, and he'd ducked away from the kid's long armed swing to step on some nearly-bare toes. Tiny, strapped sandals were all that protected the girl's feet from the likes of tall men with big feet.
"Sorry, darlin'," he'd drawled; girls liked it when he called them that. Followed it up with a smile, because she was pretty and not only that, she was no one he'd ever met, much less been out on a date with before. And he could have sworn he'd catalogued every good-looking female within three counties. "You ain't from here," he blurted before he could think better of it.
To her credit, the girl never even glanced at her toes, didn't rub them in dismay. She just looked up through those nearly black bangs, staring at him with eyes as light as Luke's but closer to gray than blue. Startling things, and pretty in their own way.
"No," she'd agreed. "I'm not." Quiet tone to her voice, but the smile she gave back to him spoke volumes about his chances with her. (That and the fact that she didn't giggle and shove him away for using such a bland pick-up line.)
"Roddy," and it took a real feat of concentration to remember what he had been doing here in the first place. "Why don't you go off and play with the guys?"
The kid might or might not have nodded his head, Bo had no idea, since he didn't bother looking in that direction. But he heard the thudding footsteps as Rod trotted away.
"Bo Duke," he'd said, sticking out his hand.
She'd nodded seriously, as if she'd expected no other name to come from his lips. "Miranda Taylor," she'd introduced back.
The afternoon had passed quickly, sharing stories over ice cream cones, walking the perimeter of the square with Bo pointing out all the useful facts about a town that Miranda had lived in for all of a month now. Luke had left him to it, adhering to the tacit agreement to let each other be when one of them found a new conquest.
It wasn't until he'd been seeing her exclusively for a week that Luke's suspicious nature started to reveal itself. Questions about her family had surfaced, but they were easy enough to answer. Her oldest brother, Benjamin, was here in Hazzard with her, and he was just a regular guy. Didn't much care for cars, which might have been his primary flaw, but he and Miranda, plus their other three brothers, had been raised on a horse farm. Not exactly happily, their home life wasn't peaceful, but the two of them had come to Hazzard for a fresh start. Their brother Wilburn, who Miranda claimed was the best looking of the boys (but there was nothing wrong with Benjamin, who while he didn't share his sister's striking eyes, was certainly big and well enough built) would be joining them here soon. In time, she hoped that both boys would get work at the mill, and she'd picked up some steno skills that could be used in the office. If they could all earn a little money, they'd make Hazzard their permanent home. She never exactly explained what made them all want out of Florida, but then he'd never pushed. Seemed like painful territory, and she'd been kind enough not to probe into the details of what had happened to his parents.
But Luke, he didn't care how much something hurt, he'd ask anyway.
"What would make her come to Hazzard, Bo? Why here?"
"Why not Hazzard?" Even without the probation that locked them in this county, he had a pretty good feeling he and Luke would have spent their whole lives here.
Later it was, "How come she left her family behind like that?"
A shrug and, "You went off to join the Marines," only led to a heated discussion of the difference between a tour of duty and running away from home.
"She's trouble, Bo," was a continuing theme, and one that he finally called Luke on.
"What kind of trouble? She ain't on probation, she ain't never even spent a night in jail. And she ain't running from no big-time gambler that wants to kill her and her family just for not taking a dive in a fight." That hadn't been his best move right there. He was a natural at poker, but not when he went revealing his hand like that, showing unsportsmanlike conduct and taking a cheap shot at Luke's brother. Luke's real brother, which Bo wasn't.
And that little admission brought the debate (not fight, somehow they were both tiptoeing around the still-jagged edges of what they'd done to each other over Diane, never quite tumbling into that kind of a brawl) right down to the nuts and bolts of the situation. "Why you, Bo? Of all the men in town, what does Miranda want from you?"
The same thing it always boiled down to. Why did she pick you and not me? For all that Luke liked to surround himself with some kind of impermeable armor, jealousy was always the chink. Any time a girl threatened to get serious about him, his cousin started wondering aloud just what was so great about Bo Duke.
It was enough to make a man forget why he cared about Luke's opinion anyway. And why he gave any merit to the objections of a man who hated everything.
(Oh, but Luke didn't hate everything. He liked wild drives in the General that tamed themselves into afternoons of fishing and swimming. He liked the archery contests made up by two foolish boys who'd agree on a target the size of a twig, then both miss by hilariously wide margins. He liked basketball and baseball and once upon a time he had liked skipping school. He liked outsmarting any dang fool that thought Hazzard was easy pickings, and he liked a good Boar's Nest brawl with Bo there by his side—
That was where all the lines of Luke's life intersected, actually. He seemed to like Bo by his side. Must, because Bo had never been Luke's real brother, and still he'd been kept close. Only problem was that Luke could walk away from Bo (and he had just about done so when Jud was staying with them, and though his brother was gone now, Luke – who never cried about anything – had come pretty close to tears at his departure) and still have family. Bo didn't have that same luxury, wouldn't until he made a family of his own.)
Luke – well, there was no arguing about it, the bars in front of him refuted any point he might make. Here he was, in trouble because of Miranda. Luke was right, but for all the wrong reasons.
Whatever had happened to Miranda, there was no doubt in Bo's mind that it wasn't her fault.
Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 2: Protection to person and property is the paramount duty of the government, and shall be impartial and complete.
"Tomorrow," was the compromise he made with Jesse. "After," the old man insisted, "we go see that new lawyer in town." Whose office wouldn't open until at least nine in the morning, robbing Luke of another two hours of daylight on top of the three he was about to lose this afternoon. Harvest could only wait but so long before food turned into compost, and the family was down one man already. If he was going to be grounded like a teenager with no more sense than the squirrels scrambling around the trunks of trees, at least he was going to install that tractor blade Bo had been forced to abandon when Rosco slapped the handcuffs on him. Jesse wasn't far off, picking corn by hand and watching out of the corners of those bloodshot eyes, just in case Luke decided to sneak off on the tractor at a whopping five miles per hour, engine roaring in complaint against the abuse.
Perhaps he should have flung his arms up in frustration, argued his point and sulked. It just might have eased Jesse's mind, but it would have been pretty close to a lie, and Dukes weren't allowed that luxury.
Those minutes he'd spent in the garage, cooling his heels with Cooter, had taken all the aggravation out of him. Or maybe it was listening to Daisy that did it, his arm around her in comfort or just to keep her still for a little while. She gave voice to every wild thought that tracked through her mind – about what had really happened, how Bo was being railroaded, how she and Luke were just going to have to prove their cousin's innocence – without thought to censoring herself. The more Daisy's half-baked plans revealed themselves (just as Bo's always did), the better aware Luke became that he had no good, solid leads to go on. A temporary sort of a setback, but a serious consideration all the same. Jesse's attempts at keeping Luke from scheming were actually having the opposite result. More time to work through all the possibilities of what had happened, a better chance to nudge the odds into Luke's own favor before taking action. Jesse had simply saved him from going off in Bo-Duke-style, let's-fix-it impetuosity. He'd have to remember to thank his uncle later.
He'd already screwed things up enough, just getting to this point. He kept stumbling over the same obstacles, ever since he'd come back from the military to find his cousins – both of them – with legs about twice as long as they'd been when he shipped out. Daisy was the easier equation to solve; her changes were largely superficial, long hair, short shorts and makeup disguising her tomboy interior. Her core was still there, lurking underneath with that same veiled fragility. She'd as soon kick the shins of whoever hurt her as she would nestle herself into Luke's arms for comfort. Or both, in exactly that order. And then she'd pull herself together, lift up her chin, and march right back out there to get hurt again.
Bo, well, all of Luke's biggest mistakes were made with Bo. The obvious ones, like giving bad navigational advice the night they'd managed to undo generations of Duke tradition by getting caught on a moonshine run, those were easier to manage than the ones he'd never fully understood.
Diane Benson – there was no way she should have been as successful in pulling the Dukes apart as she was. No one had gotten between him and Bo like that, not ever. In the end, Luke had apologized for his part in it, but he'd never fully understood what he was making amends for. He'd been protecting Bo, same as always, and he'd been proven right about the girl and how she was manipulating Bo. Less concerned with the safety of her drivers than the money she could bring in by using their names. Even if Bo's assessment of the situation was a little less blunt, it essentially jibed with Luke's: the carnival came first with Diane.
But the path back to each other had always been easy to follow – Jesse's well-worn trail of apologies and handshakes – so he'd bowed to the tradition. Maybe, he reasoned, it was easier on Bo that way. Luke took partial responsibility and Bo didn't have to feel like half the fool he really was when it came to pretty (and flattering) women.
Luke had been proven right about Diane, and the same thing was happening now with regard to that Miranda Taylor. With Diane, being right about her had been everything to Luke, the center of the whole struggle. If he could prove how right he was, Bo wouldn't make the dang fool jump and get his neck broken. That had been his mantra at the time, but in the end, his being right hadn't stopped the jump. It had only wrenched Bo back to his side, silent and heartbroken. Made a mess of their lives for a couple of weeks until Bo had relearned the rhythm of being a Duke boy, giving as good as he got instead of telling Luke he was dang sick of being picked on.
If he'd never really figured out what he had to be so sorry about with Diane, at least Luke had half a clue when it came to Miranda. Half a clue, but not a whole one, which was maybe worse. And the half he had didn't even make sense: it had something to do with her being better than Jud. Which was like worrying over whether cattle were better than sheep, really. Didn't matter, neither would ever turn a profit on Duke land, just like neither Jud nor Miranda would ever be permanent residents of Hazzard.
But something about Jud had gotten under Bo's skin, and there was really no one to blame that on but himself. He could claim concussion all he wanted, but in the end Bo had been thrown from the roof of a car and nearly drowned himself to save Jud, and the only reason he'd done it was because Luke had made such a big deal about having a brother. Must have been the shock that made his tongue almost as repetitive as Rosco's, stuttering "my brother" over and over again. That right there was a mistake he could recognize, but apologizing for it now would do no good.
Nope, he needed to get Bo out of this mess. Had to come up with a plan, and the only problem with that idea was that without more information he had no idea where to start.
So he settled his mind on a thought, simple chant kind of a thing, really. Exactly the kind of repetitive notion Bo always managed to hear even if it was never spoken out loud. I'm coming, cousin. Wasn't a lie, even it couldn't quite be the truth until tomorrow morning.
Georgia Bill of Rights, Paragraph 3: No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, except by due process of law.
It was the kind of thing that made her want to swat Luke, push and shove at him until he—did something, anything. She knew better, of course. Trying to prod either of her cousins into doing anything they didn't want to was about as useful as reasoning with Maudine to walk a straight line when plowing. It'd just earn a girl a snort, followed by a stubborn refusal to do a single sensible thing.
It was one thing to acquiesce to Jesse's commands; the old man would never accept any other outcome. For all that their uncle couldn't quite make Luke's chin dip in shame the way it used to, he could still make the tough Marine in her cousin take a back seat. So long as he was carefully watched, Luke would obey. And Daisy could understand that.
What ate at her was how calmly Luke could accept to the order, over there humming to himself under the tractor. Like Bo wasn't in jail for a serious offense, like this wasn't Hazzard County, where Boss Hogg would be judge and jury. Executioner maybe not, Boss had no real taste for blood or violence, but sending her baby cousin off to prison for what could amount to life, that would just make the Commissioner's day, maybe even his whole week. There was no one that could stop him except the Dukes, and that would only happen if Luke would come out from under that tractor and start acting like a man who cared that his cousin was on his way up the river—
And that was where it all crumbled down to nothing more than the particles of dust below her feet. Because there was no doubt that Luke would do anything to save Bo from that fate, and whatever he came up with would probably work about as mysteriously as the way the soil of the farm managed to produce crop after crop of corn. Drought and locusts were a greater threat each year, and somehow there was always corn to harvest anyway, come October. And Luke would figure out how to get Bo out of this, using exactly the behavior he was exhibiting over there under the tractor: staying calm and plotting.
Didn't make it any easier on Daisy that Luke was so self-absorbed in the process of planning, not when she wanted justice – right now. She was going to have to figure out a way to keep from going crazy while Luke ticked on Hazzard time. She could do it though, and she would, because the minute Luke started to move, she was going to be right there by his side.