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Thars semi-precious metals in them thar telephoney poles!

What pirates were to the Seven Seas and cowboys were to the Wild West, the drunken Copper Cowboys are to backwoodsy Snyder Township.

As Deperado plays in the background, Billy “The Kidder” Elwood guns his two-tone (rust and mud) Ford Bronco. A cigarette lingers around his lips like a modern day Marlboro Man, minus the dignity, dual eyebrows and full set of choppers.

“Would you turn down that goddern music,” his “pardner” Jerry “Ole Burnt Fingers” Nanders, said from the Bronco roof. He chugs a beer from a 40-ounce bottle, squints in preparation of impending pain, and prepares to snip the copper wire hanging from a telephone pole. “I needs to concentrate.”

Nanders and Elwood are just two of the Copper Cowboys who ride the Snyder Township range looking to rustle copper from telephone lines, high tension wires, and the inside of old homes owned by highly-naive people who are suckered in with Nanders and Elwood’s fake “asbester”-removal scam.

The Copper Cowboys then exchange the copper at scrapyards for enough money to buy vats of whiskey, methamphetamine hits, and wrap-around NASCAR sunglasses.

“It’s good money,” said Elwood. “We can make more in a single night, with pervasive and lengthy beer breaks, than we could if we worked an honest job and watched our spending, that is to say, not spend it on strippers and various accoutrement at Spencer’s gifts.”

Nanders dismisses the dangers of electrocution or becoming, as he says, A crispy Copper Cowboy. “Everything in life is dangerous,” Nanders said as he dipped his singed index finger and thumb into a can of Skool. “Last Saturday after drinking a bad batch of homemade medicine, I got naked, poured kerosene on my body and ran across the railroad bridge, screaming that my undergarments were the ghosts of dead Confederate raiders.”

He looked circumspect. “Wasn’t that dangerous, too?” Nanders asked rhetorically. “Yet I suspect we all will do that again this Saturday night, right?”

Elwood is more pragmatic. “Way I look at it, you get caught, you go to prison and get three squares and television privileges,” he said. “You get hurt, the government pays the bills. And, if you die, you get outta Snyder Township. Ya can’t lose.”

Nanders loads up the remaining copper wire in the back of the Bronco as the rising sun drizzles its beams on the trailers and shacks of the township. Before they speed off, the Copper Cowboys look at their haul.

“That may be copper,” Elwood said. “But that’s gold, Jerry, gold.”
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