Blood in the Woods

by J. P. Willie

  One day I happened outside to shoot my trusty BB gun and noticed a big-assed brown mutt digging in the bushes to the right of our trailer. I quietly reached into my pocket and pulled out my plastic cylinder filled with ammo. The tiny brass bullets were just itching to strike the mangy mutt and my heart was beating loud with excitement. I had yet to actually shoot anything with my gun, besides imaginary ninjas, so I dropped a brass ball down the end of the rifle and heard it set into place. I pulled back on the charging handle and pressed it firmly back down, thus arming the gun. I brought the BB gun up into firing position, looked down the sight and aimed center mass on the shit-eater who was still apparently trying his damndest to dig all the way to China. During this brief time of preparation, Trixy came into my peripheral vision from off to the right; she’d come around from the side of the trailer, and walked directly in my line of sight, her wide, brown eyes staring in my general direction. I began to pull back on the trigger and my sight steadied on the shit-eater who was oblivious to his fate. I felt my heart racing with the sheer thrill of the anticipated kill; even though I knew deep down that the BB wasn’t really gonna kill shit. Then, all of a sudden, Momma opened the front door of our trailer; she’d been watching my hunting expedition from the window. “Be careful, Jody, don’t hit Trixy!” she called over.

  But it was too late.

  I squeezed the trigger before Momma’s sentence caught my attention. The brass BB departed so weakly I could practically track its path with my own two eyes. I watched the BB exit the gun’s cheap barrel and I watched with rising panic as it flew towards Trixy...

  And split seconds later, my poor dog took friendly fire to the rib cage. High pitched yelps and howls filled my ears and I looked back at Momma, who simply stared at me with grave disappointment, while in turn I cast her a look of honest regret.

  Meantime, Trixy was giving an Oscar-winning performance for her injury. She took off yelping and hollering up our driveway and then banked a hard left onto Rhine Road, still yipping with pain, finishing up her journey by sharply turning up Pepaw and Memaw’s driveway, and that damned dog didn’t shut the hell up until she dove under the damned house. I felt totally ashamed of myself, I could only wonder what the poor neighbors thought was going on, and wished I could tell them all that it had been an honest-to-God accident. Trixy’s performance had been epic and while deep down I wanted to laugh to avoid an ass whupping, I had to give my own Oscar-winning performance and remain story faced and immensely sorry. Let’s just say I was able to pull an Emmy and only got a small ass chewing from Momma, but poor old Trixy never trusted me again.

  Sorry, girl.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The McSpaddens: 1990

  A year or so passed on Rhine Road and nothing really seemed to change. One day, I saw a little girl walking down the street with an incredibly tall man, and once they got a little closer, I realized the little girl was Jamie McSpadden. I remembered her because the year before, I’d played on the same softball team as her brother Jack. She also had a beauty mark under her left eye that gave her this radiance and the kind of face you just couldn’t forget. When they noticed me staring, the two slowed down a little at the end of my driveway.

  “Did you guys just move here?” I asked.

  Jamie was about five or six years old at the time and she just nodded her head by means of a reply.

  “I didn’t, but she did,” the man told me, his voice warm and kind. “I’m her grandfather; we were just taking a nice stroll down the street while her mommy and daddy finish unpacking. Her brother Jack is at his cousin’s house and is staying there tonight; he’ll be along tomorrow. You two boys should meet,” he finished with a smile on his face.

  “I already know Jack. We played on the same softball team last year,” I told him.

  “Well that’s good,” he replied, again with a warm smile. “I guess you boys won’t have any problem making friends, since you already know one another.” With that, he took hold of Jamie’s hand. “We should get back home, though, nice meeting you,” he concluded and continued his way along the street.

  As I stood there, squinting I watched the two of them become more distant, as they traveled further from my gaze and directly into the deep haze of the sun. I felt a twinge of excitement run through me; finally there’d be someone else to hang out with besides Alex.

  Not more than a day later, I was inside playing Mega-Man on my Nintendo when I heard a knock on our trailer door. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a trailer, but when someone knocks, it’s like the whole damned place shakes with each knuckle rap. I jumped up and dashed from my room at breakneck speed, and out into the narrow hallway, making as much noise as I possibly could. I flew through the cramped kitchen, planning to be the first one to the door.

  Then, seemingly from out of nowhere my mother appeared in front of me and opened the door just as I got to it.

  “Renee!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, “oh my God, I can’t believe you guys moved here! Come on in.”

  “Who is it, Momma? Who is it?” I asked, jumping up and down and trying to see over her shoulder. Momma just ignored me and motioned for the McSpadden family to come inside. Mrs. Renee stood there on the stoop with a smile on her face for a moment, and then motioned her kids inside our trailer.

  Renee McSpadden was a pretty, blonde-haired woman who stood about the same height as my mother and who always seemed to be smoking a cigarette – later in life, she’d quit cold turkey and shock the shit out of us all. She always gave off a good feeling when you were around her; it was akin to being around a person you’d known your whole life, even if you hardly knew her at all. Although my mother didn’t realize it at the time, while watching Renee courteously put out her cigarette before entering our trailer, she was going to remain best friends with this woman for the rest of her life.

  Jack came up the stairs into the trailer first, his hands behind his back and looking like some detective as he checked our place out. The kid was just as scrawny as me, but had blonde hair that looked untidy, as if it had never once seen a comb. He wore a pair of black spandex shorts just like mine and when I looked down at his feet I noticed he was bare-foot. Jack finished scanning the house and turned his head in my direction. “Jody!” he screamed.

  I guess he was excited to see someone he knew. I mean, anyone who has ever moved to a new home knows exactly what I’m talking about. For a nine-year-old kid, moving to a new place can seem like the end of the world - but not for Jack McSpadden, it was just the beginning of a brand new and infinitely exciting friendship. We exchanged a few cursory words and then darted our asses out the front door of the trailer to the swing set out in our front yard.

  Once I became friends with Jack, Alex became real jealous. He would shoot us dirty looks and throw rocks and shit at us while we were on our bikes riding past his house. Every now and then we would allow him to play with us but in the end, we knew we would lose him along the way; quite possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back for Alex and I was when Jack beat the shit out of him in my front yard.

  It had started off like any other day when Jack and I were together. We’d talk about video games, sports, guns and whatever else was on our minds at the time. Alex, who hadn’t gotten the hint that we didn’t want to play with him anymore, decided that he was going to walk over to my yard and show us his new karate moves he’d learned in the class his Mom had signed him up for that spring. The next thing I remember is Jack putting Alex in a headlock, then picking him up and slamming him hard into the ground. Alex let out a sharp screech of pain, which sounded to me kinda like a huge mouse squeaking, when his ribs cracked against the ground.

  “You give up?” Jack yelled, tightening his hands on the back of Alex’s neck.

  “I give, I give!” Alex whined.

  “You got him Jack! You got him!” I said, all the while jumping high up in the air like some freakish cheerleader.

  At that very moment, I heard Alex’s mom screaming
at Jack from across the street, “Let him go, Jack! Let him go right now!”

  Once Jack heard the yelling, he let Alex go. Alex stood up, crying fat tears with snot bubbling from his nose, and took off running back to his house, his arms flailing in every direction.

  “I’m going to call your father, Jack!” Lynda yelled once more from across the street. “And you’re going to get in big trouble, you bully!”

  “Eat me!” Jack yelled back at Alex’s mom.

  I sat there dumbfounded for a minute or two, simply processing what had just transpired; Jack just said the words ‘eat me’ to an adult.

  “Holy shit,” I said out loud.

  The phrase seemed to just tumble from my mouth from shock; I’d never heard a kid talk back to an adult like that before, not once in my nine years on earth.

  “You little bastard!” Lynda screamed back, her face red with frustration.

  And the second she began striding purposefully across the street toward us, Jack was already hauling ass back to his own house, seeking the protection of his own mother. Lynda stopped just as she reached the edge of my yard, raised her fist into the air to shake toward the fleeing Jack. She looked back at me, shaking her head in disappointment (like it was my fault her son got his ass whipped), turned around and went home.

  From that point on, Alex was never allowed to play with us again, which really didn’t matter to me because he moved to New Orleans about three months later. After that, Jack and I became best friends and were always doing something that made our parents crazy whenever we got together. If we weren’t pulling dead animals out of ditches, throwing rocks at houses, putting dog shit in mailboxes and beating on front doors then running away, that only meant we weren’t together that particular day. We quickly gained a reputation on the street as the little motherfuckers of Rhine Road, and we were still only nine years old; and what our neighbors didn’t know was that over the next couple of years, we were only going to get worse. Jack and I didn’t care what anyone thought of us at all, we were proud of our title, and considered it rightfully earned.

  My Pepaw had a dog he’d named Rambo, one of the ugliest dogs ever to step foot on Rhine Road. He was a brown shit-eater that always had thick, oozing eye boogers cemented in the corner of his eyes. His tongue had sort of a blackish color to it and always carried an everlasting smell of shit; but to a kid like me, he was the absolute coolest dog on the planet. Rambo and I did everything together, we were virtually inseparable, apart from the one time he was taken to the pet hospital for over a month for God knows what – Pepaw said he ate something that he shouldn’t have – and I missed him like hell. Eventually, Rambo made a full recovery and returned home. And for me, there was nothing much better than having that dog and Jack by my side; I was happy and safe, oblivious to the evil that lurked so very closely all around me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Evil Has Come

  Lewis Rhine marched up the Jones’s driveway late one afternoon. He was a firecracker ready to explode, the anger clear on his face, for all to see.

  Boom, Boom, Boom!

  The intrusive clatter he made on the front door carried all the way into the kitchen, where Teddie was making dinner. She stood up, hoping it wasn’t her daughter with news of yet another injury obtained by one of the boys, but Gayla always used the back door that connected directly to the kitchen. Teddie tugged off her apron, turned down the burners on the stove and made her way toward the front door.

  “Mr. Rhine, what brings you down here to our side of the street?” she said with a big, beautiful smile.

  “Mrs. Jones, I need to talk to your husband right away. It’s a matter that needs to be discussed right now. Not tomorrow – but today.”

  Lewis Rhine was a crusty old man with a bristly mustache that slunk on his face and which always seemed in need of tightening up. His glasses dug deep into his lower brow and the smell of dairy clung to his farmers’ overalls.

  “Sure, Lewis, I’ll go get Jerry. Would you like to come in and –”

  “No,” Rhine interrupted, “I’ll wait here on the porch, if you don‘t mind.”

  “Sure, wait here.”

  Moments later, Lewis took two steps back as Jerry, the biggest man on Rhine Road, stepped out onto the porch.

  “Well, well. I’ve been living on this street for quite some time now, and this is the first time you’ve ever made it all the way to my house to chat, Lewis. It must be something very important,” Jerry said to Rhine, with a calm yet stern voice.

  “It’s your goddamned dog, Jerry!”

  “Rambo?” Jerry said, puzzled.

  “Yes, Rambo, if that’s what you call the little sum-bitch.”

  “What’s he done, Lewis?”

  “He killed two of my goddamned cows, that’s what he’s done!”

  “What?” Jerry was shocked by this revelation. “Rambo couldn’t have killed any of your cows, Lewis. That’s impossible; he isn’t even fully grown yet.”

  “But I saw your damned dog do it!” Lewis exclaimed, now sounding like a lawyer stating his case to the jury.

  “You saw Rambo attack your cows?” Jerry quizzed the man, even though he could pretty much tell Lewis Rhine was lying straight to his face. Rambo might have been named after Stallone’s hard-ass, but that dog couldn’t harm a fly, let alone a pair of dairy cows. It was a lie, and Lewis was trying to blame anything and anyone for his financial loss.

  “How were they killed, Lewis?”

  “Their fucking hearts were eaten out of their damned chests, Jerry.”

  “Their hearts were eaten out of their chests,” Jerry repeated. He knew full well that wasn’t physically possible, a dog could rip out a throat and gorge on the meat, not waste its time gnawing through ribs. And besides, Jerry had seen Rambo playing with his grandson that morning and there was no blood on Rambo at all, not one drop.

  “Bottom line is they’re dead, and it’s gonna cost me a good chunk of dough to replace them. And that goddamned shit-eater of yours had everything to do with it! There was blood everywhere in my damned barn – it’s taken me all morning to clean up the mess your dog made.”

  “Did you actually see it happen, or are you just assuming this is what happened?” Jerry remained calm.

  “I’m not assuming anything, Jerry! I woke up last night when I heard the thing rustling around in the barn. Right around midnight, it was – and I ran out of the house in my damned underwear. I got to the barn just in enough time to see your ugly ass shit-eater running off toward the road.”

  “And you’re one hundred percent certain it was Rambo, Lewis?” Jerry snorted his derision. “This is just absurd.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure, Jerry,” Lewis said, sarcastically. “And I don’t care how far-fetched this sounds to you. It was a full moon last night; I could have spotted a wild hair on a man’s ass standing two hundred feet away.”

  Jerry’s heart all of a sudden felt like it was falling into the depths of his stomach. He placed his hands on the doorknob to steady himself from falling onto the porch. He then looked back up and met Lewis Rhine’s face.

  “You alright, Jerry?” Rhine said.

  How could Jerry not have seen it sooner? How could he be so stupid? The truth hit him like a power surge in a thunderstorm. He’d been caught off guard – maybe because he hadn’t heard about them for quite some time. Nevertheless, Jerry knew in that instant precisely what had killed Lewis Rhine’s cattle, and it certainly hadn’t been Rambo.

  “Jerry?! You all right, big guy?” Rhine’s anger turned quickly to concern, “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “I’m alright, Lewis, I’m alright. Guess I just lost some wind.”

  “I know how that is,” Lewis said, calming down. “I can hardly bend down to tie my own boots nowadays without my back going out on me. Old age, I guess,” he added with a knowing nod.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Jerry said. “Look, Lewis. I’m sorry about your cows. It�
�s terrible that happened, and I know this is gonna set you back some financially. But, if it was my dog, I can assure you that it won’t happen again.”

  Once more, Lewis Rhine’s face turned bright, cherry red and rage poured from his mouth. “That’s it!? You’re just going to let the little shit-eater run around like nothing ever happened? You need to put him down, Jerry! He slaughtered my damned cows!”

  “Not gonna happen, Lewis,” Jerry said calmly. “That would break my grandson’s heart. Since my daughter got divorced, the kid’s been playing with that dog every damned day. I can’t do that to him.”

  “Well that’s just another reason to kill the little shit-eater! You don’t want a dangerous dog like that playing with your grandson, do you, Jerry?” Rhine growled, his eyes squinty and mean.

  “Like I said, Lewis, I’m sorry about your cows an’ all, but I’m not going to kill Rambo. I’ll gladly pay you the money you need.”

  “I don’t want your goddamned money!” Lewis spat. “I want that shit-eater put down so he doesn’t do this again!”

  “I promise you, Lewis, it won’t happen again. You have my word.”

  Defeated, Rhine backed away – physically as well as mentally – “Well, if I catch your dog anywhere near my herd again, you won’t have to worry about putting him down, ‘cause I’ll put a bullet right between his fucking eyes myself! And you have my word on that!” He took a step backwards, ready to be gone from Jerry’s stoop. “So unless you want your damned dog dead and to meet me in court, keep that thing off my goddamned property!” And with that, Rhine turned on his heels and stormed off the porch and back toward the driveway.

  Jerry didn’t say a word. He just stood there on the porch and watched Lewis make his way down the driveway to his pick-up truck. Jerry knew what he had to do now. He looked over to his daughter’s trailer and saw his grandson playing with Rambo in the front yard. They looked like they were having the time of their lives, and it reminded Jerry of his own time as a youth. He took a deep, wheezing breath, turned around and went back into the house.