The Legend of Pickle Jack McCoy

Dedicated to my 7-year-old son, Jack, who has three nicknames, one of which stuck.

Pickle Jack McCoy himself. The pickles don’t last long at our house!

Note: I just noticed that this story about my son, Jack, was originally posted on April Fool’s Day 2023. The question is did this story really happen or not?

The narrator of this tale is now grown and has his own Substack site. He says it really happened.

***

The tale that follows might seem impossible to believe - no seven-year-old boy could be that brave, could think that fast or throw a rock that hard - but it all really happened. I know it happened because I saw it all happen.

Everybody in Paw Paw Michigan knew Jackson Mason Rice loved pickles more than any boy who’d ever lived, but “Little Jack” (aka “Jack Rabbit”) didn’t become known as Pickle Jack McCoy until one blistering hot summer afternoon in 2022 when Pickle Jack faced down Catfish himself, straight razor, alligators and all.

This was post plague. The adults had let us back into school but school had long been over when about six of us gathered up our rocks and headed towards the river. We always saved the flat ones because they skipped across the water better. (Jack of course had the record: four skips!)

On that day, Jack, always wanting one extra excursion, talked us into going to the Piggly Wiggly first … so he could get a big jug of Vlasics.

When you have that many good rocks in your pockets, you have to throw some of them, and so about Maple Street we started firing them - sidearm - at the curb. We were only 20 feet from the curb but nobody could hit the strike zone.

“Let me show you how to do it,” said Jack. 

On his very first fling, Jack hit the curb square in the middle. 

What none of us had thought about is that rocks can ricochet … as this one did.

Just like our mothers told us, we’d all been watching out for cars. We just hadn’t been looking out for bicycles. 

None of us had noticed that riding down the road on his old bicycle with two baskets on the bumper was our town’s most evil and nefarious character, Catfish. 

Nobody knew Catfish’s real name. We just knew he delivered groceries for Old Man Johnson at the Pig. 

Catfish was the color of old couch leather, 6’2 and a half, about 55 years old and he had a pencil-thin mustache that looked like the whiskers of a river cat. 

Every kid in town also knew that Catfish carried around a straight razor and that he hated children.

“I’m going to cut you with this straight razor, boy!”

I don’t know if Catfish really said this to my friend Tommy’s older brother a couple summers earlier, but Tommy swears he did.

The rock hit Catfish right below his catfish mustache. I don’t know how he stayed on his bike. He almost crashed into the Spoonapple’s mailbox … which is when the cuss words started and all of us scattered … except for Jack.

Pickle Jack later told me he was planning to apologize to Catfish, but when Catfish discarded his bike and started walking at a very brisk pace toward Jack, and then started going for something in his pocket, Jack figured out pretty quick that he might be in for more than a close shave.

“You leave me alone, you muddy old fish!” Jack said.

The Chase was on …

I had just jumped head-first into the Spoonapple’s giant hedges and saw Jack take off for the river. Catfish got back on his bike and the pursuit was on. 

It’s amazing how fast a little boy can run when a Catfish with a straight razor is right behind you.

Being a good friend and all, I decided to follow … from a safe distance of course.

I didn’t even know Jack could swim that well, but he made it to the river, dove in and quickly swam to the little sandbar we called Gilligan’s Island.

Catfish, as one might imagine, could also swim and he started in right after him.

I thought that might be the last I ever saw of my friend Jack Rabbit, until Jack started screaming, “Gator! Gator!” and pointing frantically at something in the water.

This stopped Catfish in mid-stroke. 

Jack had some left-over rocks in his pockets and started chunking them at what I thought must be a giant and hungry reptile.

“Catfish, gator! … Watch out for the gator!” Jack kept screaming.

Catfish, we later surmised, must have been terrified of alligators because he swam back to the shore faster than Jack Rabbit had swum to the island.

The exertion of racing a hungry gator to the shore must have dampened Catfish’s desire to filet my friend, The Rabbit. But before resuming his deliveries, Catfish took one last look back at the island and hollered, “I’ll get you one day, kid!”

I was still hiding in the trees by the bank watching all of this. 

Fifteen minutes later - when we were sure Catfish was gone - Jack swam back to the shore like nothing had even happened. 

By then, our whole gang had re-assembled for the after-action report.

“Water feels good,” Jack said. “Ya’ll want to come in for a dip?”

“What about the gator!?” I said.

Jack laughed. 

“There’s no alligators in Paw Paw, Michigan, you knucklehead,” he said.

Then Jack saw it. A big jug of dills, camouflaged in the weeds, had fallen out of Catfish’s basket.

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” said Jack, who quickly unscrewed the top and took a big bite out of one of the biggest cucumbers at the top of the jug.

In all my years since, I don’t think I’ve seen a grander smile.

We all enjoyed a belly laugh and I think it was Tommy who said, “You are no longer the Jack Rabbit, you are now Pickle Jack Rice.”

I could tell that Pickle Jack liked his new nickname, but he instantly improved it.

“Call me Pickle Jack McCoy,” he said.

No doubt about it. That had a much better ring to it.

And that’s how the legend of Pickle Jack McCoy was born.