Maybury: RIP

FADE IN:

EXT. MAYBURY SOUTH CAROLINA – PRESENT – DAY

THEME MUSIC OVER – THEME is whistled but slow and melancholy – sad.

PULL IN ON a man and boy walking together down a desolate dirt road.

MEDIUM CEMETERY – DAY

The pair wander into a derelict cemetery and stop before a fresh grave. The man is revealed to be OPIE TAYLOR – mid fifties, bald and conservatively dressed. The boy is his son SCOOPER – 10ish redheaded and freckled – and they stare silently at the burial plot before them.

CLOSE ON GRAVE – The headstone reads:

ANDY TAYLOR 1921-2012 Beloved Father, Beliked Uncle, Betolerated Moral Authority – Cornpone Sheriff for 10 Seasons (with reruns)

CLOSE ON OPIE

He sips from a flask he’s concealed in his Bible.

SCOOPER (O.S.)
Pa?

OPIE
Yeah, Scooper.

PULL BACK to include SCOOPER.

SCOOPER
Granpa was mighty old.

OPIE
He lived a long time, son.

SCOOPER
Seemed like he’d never die,
didn’t it.


OPIE
Shore did Scoop. Your ma and
me wondered if he’d ever kick.

SCOOPER
Kick?

OPIE
The bucket – we wondered if
he’d ever kick the bucket.

SCOOPER
That what happens when you die?
You kick a bucket?

OPIE
Not everyone. Uncle Floyd kicked
a state trooper up in Hog Flats. He’s
dead too.

PAN ACROSS GRAVES REVEALING that virtually everyone from Maybury is dead and buried in the same shitty cemetery. Floyd D Barber, Ain’t Bee, Barney Fife, Otis B Drunkard, Goober Pyle, Gomer Piles…

MEDIUM GRAVEYARD

OPIE and SCOOPER shuffle away from the graves and back onto the dirt road, OPIE spitting a brutish lunger onto OTIS’s grave.

OPIE
Pederast.

SCOOPER
What’s a ped a rast, pa?

OPIE
Remember cousin Willy?

SCOOPER
The Boy Scout leader?

OPIE
Yep. Know how he liked to do
tent checks during the jamboree?

PULL BACK FAVORING OTIS’S GRAVE as the pair wander away from the cemetery.
SCOOPER rubs his ass as he responds.

SCOOPER
He did other checks as well. What’s
a prostate?

OPIE
Something Boy Scout leaders shouldn’t
be examining while on bivouac.

SCOOPER
I’ll say.

As the damaged pair leave frame, the soil over OTIS’s grave begins to push up from below, clods rolling aside as the ground opens revealing a very decomposed OTIS – 65 and pickled – as he crawls from what appears to not have been his final resting place.

OTIS
(hocking and hacking)
Powerful parched.

DISSOLVE TO

INT. TAYLOR HOUSE – BEDROOM – NIGHT

OPIE and his haggard wife BUTTY SOO – 46, plain and a trifle flabby – rut it out under the comforter on ANDY’s bed in a fairly uninspired missionary position. BUTTY SOO stares longingly out the window, through the gap in the gingham curtains as OPIE grunts his way to his ineluctable conclusion.

OPIE
Uh, uh, uh, uh, owww.

BUTTY SOO
I told you not to put that in there.

OPIE
Why do you call it that?

BUTTY SOO
What do you want me to call it?
It?

OPIE
I told you what I want you to call it.

BUTTY SOO
Well, it isn’t and it seems silly to
call it one.

OPIE
(finished, he rolls off)
Don’t know what the big deal is.
Prickly Sutton, over in Hamster
Swallow, well his wife calls his…

BUTTY SOO
I know what she calls his, everybody
knows what she calls his. But his is.
Yours ain’t so I cain’t call it that.
(sotto voce)
Magnum. Huh! More like Derringer.

OPIE
I heard that!

BUTTY SOO
Facts is facts, Ope. Ain’t saying it
ta hurt ya.

OPIE
Hey…How do you know Prickly’s is?

BUTTY SOO
Oh grow up. He shows it to everyone.

OPIE
I know – he showed it to me.
(conspiratorial)
He had me touch it.

BUTTY SOO
You touched it?

OPIE
He put it in my hand once when we
were in the locker room. Thought it
was a goldurn snake. Creepy.

PULL BACK THROUGH WINDOW REVEALING the entire cast of the original series zombified and watching this exchange. As one they look at each other and ANDY posits:

ANDY
Well, no brains here. We oughta
head up to Mount Pilate.

They turn and stumble away, disappointed. Gomer shakes his head and it falls off. Hilarity ensues.

FADE TO BLACK


FIN


For Andy