Blood in the Woods

by J. P. Willie

  “Why not?” I asked, although I really should have known better.

  “Because I said so, son. I don’t want the rest of the street thinking there are some crazy lunatics running around.”

  “I won’t say anything like that, Momma.”

  “Jody, I know how you are, and you turn everything into a story. Remember when you convinced Alex that Ninjas were hiding in the woods behind his house?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you remember when you told all the kids in Mrs. Thompson’s class that there was a ghoul that lived in the boys’ bathroom, and if they sat on the toilet it’d eat them?”

  “Yeah,” I whined, even though that had been a really good fib.

  “Did you know I was on the phone with Mrs. Thompson for over an hour, listing to all the rest of the crazy stories you’d told everyone in class once she got wind of your ghoul rumor?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Well I was,” Momma spat. “Mrs. Thompson said kids in the school weren’t taking shits anymore due to your little fabrication, and believe me, Jody, I don’t want to have to explain to anyone else that you have an active imagination that runs away with you all the time. So keep your mouth shut and don’t tell anyone about what happened, not even Jack.”

  “Okay, Momma,” I said and went on my merry way, and I never did say a word to anyone.

  Over the summer, Jack and I took a break from our terrorizing activities and focused all our attention to bike ramping. But I’m not talking about your average, everyday bike ramping; I’m talking about country boy bike ramping. We never actually had real ramps, instead we just jumped everything in sight, be it manmade objects such as culverts, or nature’s naturally produced ramps, which were usually huge tree roots that shot up out of the earth.

  Now that I think of it, there was never really all that much technique or skill involved in our new hobby, it just basically boiled down to which of us had the bigger set of balls. And there was nothing we wouldn’t jump, and that’s the reason my fearless ass wound up with a broken arm for the rest of the summer. For some odd reason, Jack wasn’t with me the day I broke my arm, but I’ll never forget how stupid it was of me to try to attempt the stunt I’d pulled that day.

  Kyle Green was five years older than Jack and I, and just happened to be playing catch in his front yard with one of his buddies as I rode past them on my bike one late summer afternoon.

  “Hey, Jody!” Kyle yelled across at me.

  I placed my feet down to the hard pavement and brought my bike to a stop directly in front of his house.

  “I’ve been watching you and Jack do a lot of crazy shit on your bike lately,” Kyle said with what may well have been admiration.

  “Yeah... so?” I prompted.

  “Well,” Kyle said, easing off his baseball glove, “I bet you can’t jump this ditch.”

  “This ditch?” I asked and pointed my finger at the enormous gash that ran alongside the road.

  “Yeah, that ditch,” Kyle repeated, cutting loose a conniving smile. In the back of my mind, I knew I couldn’t make that jump. The ditch was at least six feet wide with dull green, slimy algae growing in it and a ton of trash floating on top of its thin surface layer of grime; there was just no possible way a kid my age could do it. For one, I didn’t have enough room to get up to enough speed; and for two, there was nothing alongside the road that could project me high enough into the air to clear the ditch. But, due to me being an incorrigible show-off, I often made incredibly bad decisions – and this time I would walk away with a permanent scar to remind me just how foolish pride can get the best of you.

  “Oh, that ain’t squat. I can clear that – no problem,” I said confidently.

  Even though I knew I was fucked before I even started, there was no way I was going to let Kyle punk me out and then run around telling everybody that I was pussy. No way, Jack and I had worked too hard for our reputations, and I was not about to bring shame to our names in any way, shape, or form.

  “Oh yeah?” Kyle provoked. “Then let’s see you do it.”

  “Alright, watch this.”

  I brought my feet back up to my pedals, turned around and headed back down in the opposite direction to Kyle’s house. Once I was far enough away, I turned the bike around and stopped in the middle of the street. My heart was racing, and I could hear Kyle screaming, “Come on! I gotta see this!” in the distance, but I tried my very best to ignore him. I thought to myself, all you have to do, Jody, is pull up as hard as you can on your handlebars right after your front tire touches the grass. If you pull hard enough, you just might land on your back tire on the other side of the ditch.

  “Yeah, pull up as hard as I can and I’ll make it,” I said aloud to myself.

  “Let’s go! It’s almost Christmas already!” Kyle screamed while his friend looked on nervously at the impending disaster.

  I took a deep breath, said a small prayer and took off. I could feel the wind blowing through my hair as I pedaled faster and faster, all the while hoping like hell I was going to clear that ditch.

  The next thing I remember was hearing Kyle shout, “Oh shit!” as I flew over my handlebars and head first into the opposite side of the ditch. My left arm struck the ground hard and snapped like a spring twig, the bones bursting from my split skin. I rolled over onto my back as fast as I could, half covered in clinging algae, smelling like sewage and stared with disbelief at my arm. Twin spikes of bone stuck straight out of my flesh, blood steadily flowing from beneath it, the bones yellow, not the stark white you see in the movies. When that image finally set in, I screamed and cried like a little girl. The pain washed over me, a hot, agonizing throb that began in my arm and shot through the entirety of my body, and I was overcome with panic. I scrabbled to my feet, jumped out of the ditch and ran home, screaming bloody murder with Kyle right behind me.

  “You’re gonna be okay, Jody. Everything is going to be okay,” Kyle said, and I think he was panicking more than I was.

  All I could do was wail loudly as tears fell down my face. Once we got to my trailer, Kyle placed his hands on my shoulders and helped lead me up the stairs. Momma opened the front door and came out, with Hunter not far behind. The little turd was sucking on a delicious Popsicle while I was in complete agony.

  “Oh my God!” Momma shrieked as she caught glimpse of my grotesque, horror-movie arm.

  “Miss Gayla,” Kyle said, “he broke his arm while trying to jump a ditch on his bike.”

  “I knew it! I knew it,” Momma ranted, “I told you, Jody. All that daredevil stuff was going come back and bite you in the ass, but oh no, don’t listen to me, I don’t know anything, I’ve just been on this earth twenty plus years longer than you, what do I know?!”

  “Miss Gayla, he needs to go to the hospital,” Kyle said.

  Once Kyle’s words got to Momma’s ears, she stopped ranting and wrapped her arms around me tight.

  “Owwww, Momma! Not so tight!”

  “Hunter, go run and get Pepaw. Tell him Jody broke his arm and we need to go to the hospital.”

  “Okay,” Hunter said, and took off running.

  Three minutes later, Pepaw came roaring up our driveway in his car. He parked right next to the porch where Momma and I were standing.

  “Get him in, Sissy,” Pepaw said through the window.

  “Let’s go, Jody,” Momma whispered.

  The car ride to the hospital had to be the most miserable road trip of my life. Pepaw seemed intent on hitting every single pothole on every road, and I was beginning to think he was doing it on purpose. With every bump came a new surge of white hot pain in my arm, and I screamed for Pepaw to slow down; and boy did he. Pepaw then slowed down to a crawl and I yelled at him again, but this time for him to please go faster.

  “I’m sorry, Jody. What do you want me to do? If I go fast, the bumps make your arm hurt more, and if I go slow, you want me to go faster. So what do you want me to do?” Pepaw asked.

>   “Go fast, Pepaw. Please just get me to the hospital!” I cried.

  Pepaw nodded his head, as if he was a genie granting my wish, and put the pedal to the metal, which sent me flying into the back of my seat. Momma continued to hold me tight as Pepaw hauled tail through the streets of Hammond at breakneck speeds, whipping around corners and running stoplights like they just weren’t there.

  That car ride seemed never-ending, but as soon as I looked over to Momma to ask her for the thousandth time when we were going to be there, Pepaw made a right onto the ER’s entrance road. And within a matter of minutes, I was in the emergency room, still crying like a little girl, standing with Momma while Pepaw talked to the receptionist at the counter.

  Instantly, the ER doors swung open and two orderlies came running out with a wheelchair, and Momma placed her hands on my shoulders and gently spun me around until my rear end was seated in the thing. The orderlies then trundled me into a white room with all types of medical equipment in it. They stopped halfway into the room, took me out of the wheelchair and placed me on the examination table. Momma walked into the room alongside a doctor who looked like he hadn’t slept in months, grabbed a chair and placed it right next to me. The doctor approached and placed a pink towel under my broken arm while the orderlies came back into the room, this time bearing gifts. They rolled a cart in with them, covered with syringes and needles. I felt my eyes widen as I stared at the impossibly huge needle in the middle of the tray, and hoped that they wouldn’t have to use it on me. The doctor barked orders to the two orderlies as I looked over to Momma.

  “What are they going to do?” I asked.

  “They’re going to reset your arm.”

  “What does that –” but before I could finish, the doctor interrupted.

  “All right now, buddy, my name is Doctor Borden. I need you to open your mouth up nice and wide and bite down on this as hard as you can, okay?” Dr. Borden instructed.

  “Okay,” I said, scared shitless.

  I opened my mouth as wide as I could manage, and Dr. Borden placed a wooden bar in my mouth, about as thick as those oversized school pencils you sometime see the little kids carrying around – I never understood why kids used them, the bastards were so damned big it was damned near impossible to do any schoolwork with it. I bit down hard as instructed, and watched Dr. Borden move his hands down to my arm.

  “I want you to bite down hard when you feel pain, okay?” Doctor Borden told me.

  I nodded my head weakly, and rested it down on the table, gazing upward at the fluorescent lights above me.

  “One... Two... Three!”

  On three, I felt an excruciating pain shoot throughout my entire body as the doctor pulled down on my arm, trying to place the bones back together.

  “Arrrggghhhhh... arrrggghhhhh!” I screamed while biting down on that fat chunk of wood.

  “We’re gonna try again, guys, get over here and hold his legs down. We have to keep him from moving. We gotta set this thing,” Dr. Borden sounded grim.

  The pair of orderlies ran over and held my feet down firmly on the table, and I shot Momma a look of anguish.

  “Alright – be tough buddy – Two – Three!”

  ***

  I woke up in one of the recovery rooms on the fourth floor of the hospital, having undergone surgery. I’d passed out on that last tug of my arm, courtesy of Dr. Borden, and was rushed into surgery because they couldn’t reset the bones without slicing my poor arm. It turned out to be one hell of a break, and two metal pins had to be screwed in my arm just to hold the shattered bones together.

  As my vision came back into focus after my drug-induced sleep, I looked down at my arm and saw the almost pristine, white cast – Momma and Pepaw had already signed it. I could have sworn my father had been in the room at some point while I was out, but maybe I’d dreamed it, all thanks to the anesthetics they had given me. But I felt deep down, pretty damned sure I’d seen my father standing over me while I was in that hospital bed. I could even remember what color hat he had on; it was a green John Deere, and I even remembered seeing him smile at me.

  I sat up nice and straight in the bed, looked to my left and saw Momma sitting in the chair next to the lamp. She was reading an old magazine, but once she saw that I was awake, she put it down and came over to give me smooches.

  “You’re awake, Jody,” Momma ran her fingers through my hair, “how you feeling?”

  “Okay I guess. Was Daddy here, Momma?” I asked.

  “Yes. He was here, but he had to go back to work,” Momma told me.

  “He came back. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I saw him standing right next to me.”

  “Yeah, he was here, standing right there, but he had to go. Sorry you didn’t get to talk to him, but he did sign your cast.”

  “Really? Where at?” I asked, excited.

  “Flip your arm over,” Momma said.

  I turned my arm over, which now felt like it weighed a million pounds, and read what my Daddy wrote.

  Bubba-

  Get better.

  Dad.

  My heart lit up like a Christmas tree when I read it, and I slumped down into my bed, making myself comfortable. I could feel a smile trying to sneak its way on my face. A part of me so desperately wanted my father to be a part of my life, and I just wanted to know that he truly loved me. Well, I quickly found out the hard way that you can want in one hand and shit in the other to see which one fills up first, because my father never did become part of my life. My smile quickly went away, and all I felt was disdain and anger for my father; I just wanted to go to sleep, and dream of a father who truly loved me.

  The cast was still on when the school year began; my arm had to stay in a cast for almost the entire first half of fifth-grade, only having to be replaced twice due to my failure to follow instructions – the first when I got the original soaking wet, the second, when I tried cutting the infernal thing off because it was itching up a storm. Every photo taken of me on my tenth birthday, which was a pretty good birthday otherwise, shows me wearing that damned thing with my shiny braces – it’s so embarrassing to look at them, even to this day.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A NEW YEAR: 1991

  After the New Year, the doctors finally removed the cast and rescheduled me for surgery so they could remove the two pins that were in my arm. A month later, I went in at seven in the morning and I was out by one o’clock in the afternoon. The whole process felt like drive-thru surgery to me, done and over with in the blink of an eye. Once the operation was done, they monitored me for a couple of hours, and then I was free to go. And believe me, I couldn’t have been more ecstatic that I would be able to finish the last five months of school feeling like a normal kid again, and it was straight into my fifth-grade summer with my good friend, Jack.

  “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” Jack sang, “my teacher hit me with a ruler, I met her at the bank with a loaded Army tank, glory, glory no more teacher!”

  “Holy shit, that’s pretty funny,” I laughed along, “I got one too, wanna hear it?”

  “Yeah, let me hear it,” Jack encouraged.

  “Deck the halls with gasoline, FA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LALA-LA-LA, strike a match and watch it gleam, FA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LALA-LA-LA, watch the school burn down to ashes, FA-LALA-LALALA-LA-LA-LA, aren’t you glad we play with matches, FA-LALA-LA-LA-LALA-LA-LA!”

  “I have to use that one,” Jack gasped through floods of tears, laughing so hard he could barely breathe.

  We were walking down Rhine Road, heading back toward my trailer and singing the new tunes we’d picked up during the school year. As kids, goofy little songs are a pretty cool way of making the time pass, whether you’re in school or not. Hundreds of such songs were passed around each year, and if I could’ve written down every one I’d heard at school, I’d have a book as thick as the Holy Bible itself. Still to this day, every time I hear a stupid song sung by little kids, it makes me feel alive and makes me wish that a child’s innocence could las
t forever.

  So eventually, Jack and I wound up in my backyard; which was about an acre wide and two acres long. Just recently, Pepaw had installed one of the first satellite dishes on the domestic market. That big, black bastard stood in the middle of my backyard and made our trailer look like it had NASA agents working inside it trying to locate aliens. It was pretty embarrassing now that I think about it, but the thing made us look rich, and that was good enough for me. And when kids asked where I lived, I told them to look for the big, expensive satellite dish, even though only Pepaw got the channels; but no one else really needed to know that.

  Jack and I walked through the ton of pine needles that had fallen from the group of pine trees that huddled together in the middle of our yard. The trees were located roughly fifty feet behind the dish, and as soon as you thought they’d taken over the entire yard, there was a narrow opening that revealed the entrance to woods – which was where the drumming came from what seemed to be a lifetime ago. I hadn’t ventured anywhere in the woods during the whole fifth grade year, because of what happened the last time I was fiddle-farting around behind Angela’s house. Yet, even though what I’d stumbled upon had been intensely horrifying, my curiosity crept back as I stared into the tree line.

  “Wow! Look, Jody,” Jack said, pointing his finger next to one of the pine trees, “A Clearly Canadian bottle.”

  “Who put that there?” I asked him, “I sure didn’t. I haven’t played back here in the longest time.”

  “I don’t know who put it here – can we go break it?”

  “Shit yeah we can!” I replied.