Hal Pepke had a hankerin’ for the unusual.  Always had.  Folks speculated that’s how he ended up marrying his cousin, Anaya.  ‘Anaya’ was an Indian name meaning “being completely free”, in this case “completely free” meant not having to worry about the family tree not really branching to the degree it probably should.

Nonetheless, they were a happy couple and pretty much staying out of each others way, free to follow their own passions and pursuits.  Anaya took up stone skipping, spending hours out at Lake Leon honing her craft, eventually getting up to a personal record of 49 skips across the lake.  That fell just short of the world record 51, which was just as well because Hal had forgotten to charge the battery on his Android and the feat wouldn’t have been able to have been proven to the guys at Guinness, anyway.

Hal liked to putter out back behind the house.  He was a regular over at Earl’s Salvage Yard and Formalwear, his favorite thing being creating models of cars that the manufacturer never offered.  “If I could do that and travel,” Hal used to say, “my life would be pretty much complete.”  Folks said the main reason Hal liked to travel as much as he did was due to the fact that the brood of offspring he and Anaya produced tended to run into things and present a hazard in almost any situation they were in.  Brother Bob over at Second Baptist of Fort Stockton was initially hesitant to perform baptisms on the motley crew of children, but he ended up trading Hal performance of the ritual for some bodywork on his Volvo 240.

Hal had just finished up his latest project, turning a 1966 Mustang from Earl’s into a Cobra pick-up truck so he could haul the youngin’s around the place while he was feeding the hogs, and decided to reward himself for his efforts with a trip overseas.

The trip did not achieve the level of enjoyment Hal had hoped for.  In fact, he ended up being the subject of much more attention than he’d ever have assumed would come his way.  Medical professionals in the Netherlands reported the first ever case of “Scrotal Necrosis” after Hal was bitten in the ‘nads by a deadly venomous snouted cobra that was hiding in the toilet.

The 47-year-old was vacationing in South Africa at a wildlife sanctuary when the cobra latched on to the low hanging fruit dangling from above.

It took three hours for a helicopter to get there, load him up, and get him to the nearest trauma center. When he arrived he had “swollen genitals with a deep purple discoloration” indicating severe damage. The patient received eight doses of snake venom antiserum, meds to attempt to control his fever, and dialysis for his malfunctioning kidneys. Surgery was required to remove all the dead tissue from his. . . well, you know.

Witnesses said his junk looked like “a badly sewn Tim Burton puppet with a long, thick stitch running up the middle”. Three weeks after the bite took place, plastic surgeons patched up what was left of his unit with skin grafts taken from his groin.

“On the bright side,” Hal told everybody over at the Rusty Hammer Hardware Store when he got back, “I don’t have to follow through with that vasectomy I’d promised Anaya.”  That was a relief to Brother Bob who didn’t have any bodywork he needed performed, so was having a rough time justifying any future baptisms.

Over at the Lucky Lady, folks argued over which victim had endured the most Cobra-related damage, Hal’s unit or the ’66 Mustang he hauled home from Earl’s.