Houston Blog

"Y'all are gonna have to shoot Moe," he told Chip and Steve. "He crows before dawn. I just can't take it any more."

"Townes, I can't do that man," Chip said. "Plus, I know Cindy loves Moe."

"No, she's cool with it," Townes assured. "She's sick of getting woken up too. Plus, my cat just had kittens and I'm out of cat food. Moe will make a nice meal for her, and she needs one."

Chip and Steve agreed to take part in the murder of Moe, but only if Townes, who had one arm in a sling from a recent truck wreck, would be the actual triggerman.

"Alright, here's what we'll do," Townes said. "Steve, you flush Moe out in the open. I'll prop the shotgun on the porch rail here and shoot him. Chip - you take this hatchet and give him the coup de grace."

Amazingly, the plan went off without a hitch, and soon enough, Moe was plucked and boiling in a pot on the wood-stove.

Which is about when Cindy started to wake up, and Townes's trademark wicked, if hilarious, cruelty kicked in. He picked up one of Moe's claws, carried it over to the groggy Cindy, and said "Hey Cindy, Moe wants to say goodbye." He pulled Moe's tendons to make the gruesome claw look like it was waving.

Cindy shot awake and lunged for the shotgun at the side of the bed and chased the laughing Townes out into the gray dawn. Obviously, she hadn't been in on the plot after all.

Somehow, things calmed down a bit. Chip remembered that later that morning a journalist - he thinks it was Chet Flippo -- had made the pilgrimage out to interview Townes. Townes was showing Flippo around his rural eden - "Here's my morning glories, here's the outhouse," and so on.

And then he comes to the henhouse. "We've got three hens - Eenie, Meenie, and Miney," Townes said.

"Where's Moe?" asked the journalist.

"There ain't no Moe," Townes cracked.

"To this day," Chip insisted to me, "I think Townes concocted that whole horrible scene just to set that one-liner up."