After she disappeared from sight, I went about hoeing her garden. I hoed for about forty five minutes or so, then I started to get thirsty. I continued on for about another five minutes, ready to start on the tomatoes. I figured I had reached a good stopping point, so I ran upstairs to get a glass of water.
Joseph was watching television. I don’t recall exactly what he was watching, but it was either “Bonanza” or “Ponderosa.” Honestly, I couldn’t tell them tell the difference between the two. I did, however, know the characters “Festus” and “Sheriff James Arness” of “Gunsmoke.”
At that time, I never really understood the appeal of television. Later, when I found out the Flintstones were on every day after school, I often invited myself over to the Gilbert’s house, staying just long enough to catch them before running home. Eddie usually tagged along. He was in our grade, even though he was younger.
I had just got my water and was going back out towards the door, when I heard Joseph say “hey Mike, you want to see something cool?”
“Sure. What is it?”
He took me to his room and brought out a Rock-em-Sock-em robot. He then asked if I would like to have it. “Of course,” I thought. What eight year old boy in the whole wide world wouldn’t want one? Why would anyone even feel the need to ask that question? That was akin to asking Feenie if she would like a cigarette after four hours without one.
I said that I would love to have one. But then I remembered Eddie. If I had one and he didn’t, then we really couldn’t have fun, could we? I believed if he was in my shoes, he would rather have none at all, than have only one. So I asked him “do you have one for Eddie?”
Joseph thought for a moment, then said “look, I really like these things a lot. But I guess I’d be willing to give them both to you if you’ll try something.”
I imagined that I’d have to eat a cockroach or maybe clean the dishes to get them. “OK, but we got to make it quick. I need to get the tomatoes finished before Granny gets back.”
Joseph sat down on the bed. He said his pee-pee hurt and he needed me to help him make it stop hurting. He pulled both his pants and his underwear down to his knees. He asked “can you put your hand around it and move it up and down? That helps it feel better.”
I was confused. Never before had I ever been asked to touch another male like that. I didn’t even like having to scratch The Old Man’s back in the wintertime, when his skin got so dry countless flakes of dead skin would get under my nails, forcing me to scrub them with a hard brush until I could see through them again.
But Joseph pressed on. He promised me it wouldn’t take long. Though I remained wary, I reluctantly agreed. Those two robots resting on the top of the bookcase begged to be played with.
He showed me how I was supposed to do it. It didn’t look too difficult, so I quickly did as I instructed.
A very short time later, his wee-wee was standing straight up. Mine looked like that sometimes in the morning when I had to pee, so I told him “maybe you should go pee. That will make it go down again.”
He said he would pee in a few minutes. He sat up, asking me to keep massaging. “That really helps it feel better.” He said.
Another minute passed. “Mike,” he said “you know when you get older, sometimes instead of pee, some other stuff comes out of your wee-wee. It makes all the pain go away, too, when it happens. It’s white and tastes like ice cream. Can you help get it out?”
Eight years of life experience hadn’t yet prepared me well enough to realize what he was doing. Thinking I was doing nothing more than helping a brother, I told him I would try to help.
“The problem is it can’t come out unless you have my wee-wee in your mouth,” he explained.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Come here, I’ll show you,” he said.
He put his index and middle fingers in his mouth, then bobbed his head up and down.
“Can you do that to my wee-wee? It’ll only take a couple minutes, I promise.” When I showed wariness, he persisted, saying “I wouldn’t ask, but it’s the only thing that helps make it feel better.”
He still needed to pee, I thought. I hoped he didn’t pee in my mouth. I closed my eyes and did to his wee-wee what he did to his fingers. After about two minutes, the white stuff came out.
I recoiled. It tasted nothing like ice cream. In fact, it tasted far worse than the saltwater I gargled with when I had a sore throat. I spit it out and ran to the kitchen to get some water to wash out the taste.
Eyes watering, I told him I didn’t like it, any of it. He said it was ok. He said he was sure I would like it, but he was wrong. He said next time he would pull his wee-wee out of my mouth before the white stuff came out.
As he handed me the robots, he quietly said “you probably shouldn’t tell anyone about this. You know how Dad sometimes flies off the handle before he gets the whole story. If he asks you where you got the robots, tell him that Granny gave them to you for doing such a good job on the garden. Otherwise, he’ll think you stole them and he’ll whip your ass.”
Though he made a compelling case, I somehow felt he was trying to protect his own ass from a good beating. I remember only one time when The Old Man beat Joseph, but it was a beating of epic proportions, which is saying a lot, given how often he delivered them.
About ten months earlier, Grandpa Joe couldn’t explain to The Old Man’s satisfaction why he ended up in the hospital with two broken ribs. He told The Old Man he slipped and rolled down the stairs. While that seemed plausible, The Old Man pressed him. “I’ve never seen you once come down the stairs without holding the wood rails,” he told him. “If you slipped, you would have dislocated your shoulder like you did when you slipped getting out of the bathtub. That little bastard pushed you, didn’t he?” Grandpa Joe turned his eyes to the floor, saying nothing.
Though Granny was usually able to mediate, she knew by the force with which The Old Man stomped on the stairs there was little she could do to protect her favorite grandson that day. She could only watch as The Old Man dragged Joseph by the hair, out of her house and down the stairs. She pleaded for The Old Man not to hurt Joseph.
Once they reached the bottom, he slapped Joseph harder than I ever remember him hitting anyone, save for some of the men he caught Feenie running around town with on those occasions when she left for a couple weeks. Joseph wilted, bleeding from his mouth as he fell to the ground, crying.
Not yet satisfied, The Old Man was determined to get a point across. He informed Joseph that his impending beating was going to be especially brutal, unless he told the truth. “I hear anything I think is a lie and every one of your pussy little teeth go flying across this garden, do you understand?”
Joseph admitted to pushing Grandpa Joe, causing him to fall. The reason? Grandpa Joe wouldn’t give him money to buy an album he claimed he needed. With that, The Old Man slapped him hard again, his huge hand jarring Joseph’s face, instantly knocking him back to the ground. He warned Joseph that if Grandpa Joe even so much as had a scratch on him from that day forward, Joseph would be “eating teeth three meals a day until there were none left.”
The Old Man went on to say he’d be making daily visits to Grandpa Joe from that day forward. He told Joseph “if I even suspect you’re thinking about picking on that poor old man, I will knock your ass so far into last week, you’ll never get caught back up, you little son-of-a-bitch!”
Suffice to say, Grandpa Joe suffered no more suspicious accidents.
I took my two robots downstairs and placed them beside the house, before he changed his mind. I grabbed the hoe and began working the tomatoes. I couldn’t shake the feeling I had just done something dirty. I began to feel ashamed.
As the afternoon wore on, I felt worse and worse. I stayed outside for the rest of the day. From that point on, if I needed food, I snuck over to Mrs. Winan’s apple tree and took one or two. If I needed water, I used the hose Granny put out to water the garden. I just d
idn’t feel like going back upstairs to be alone with Joseph.
When Granny finally made it home, I was happy to see her. I had just about finished the whole garden. Her garden was a lot smaller than ours. Three of us couldn’t hoe our garden in three days, but I myself could finish hers in a few hours.
“I got you some suckers,” she said as she reached into her store bag. She handed me an orange one and a red one. She asked me what I wanted for lunch. I told her that a peanut butter sandwich would be fine.
After I finished the garden and lunch, I asked Granny if I could go home. There was still enough daylight left to easily make it home.
She said “your dad and mom won’t be back for a couple of hours.” Are you sure you want to walk all that way?”
I really didn’t want to stay until Feenie and The Old Man came to get me. Besides, the bakery was on the way. If I wanted to, I could just wait for James to finish, and I would walk home with him. I just didn’t want to be there with Joseph.
“Yeah. Besides, if it starts to get dark, I can always walk home with James,” I said.
I made it all the way home with thirty minutes of daylight to spare. Lee had finished the clothes, and was enjoying a rare nap. James made it home just shortly after dusk. Eddie came home with Feenie and The Old Man about two and a half hours later.
As soon as Eddie and I were alone, I showed him the robots. When he asked where I got them, I told him what happened. “Joseph put his thing in my mouth.”
He seemed perplexed. I don’t think he understood, because he didn’t have much to say about it, other than that it sounded gross. He wanted to talk about crawdad hunting we planned for the following day. He talked a lot about the funnies he read in the newspaper Grandpa Joe got him. He really liked Grandpa Joe.
Two weeks from that day, when Feenie went to drop me off again at Granny’s, I cried and begged her not to.
“Please let me go to Bingo with you.”
“Why? She asked. “Bingo is for adults. You wouldn’t like it. Besides, Mom needs help working the garden. She might even pay you.”
I was too ashamed to tell her why I didn’t want to be with her mom. Looking back now, I wish I told her. I don’t know if she would have believed me, and even if she did, I don’t know if anything would have come of it. Granny would have done anything within her means to ensure her beloved Joseph wouldn’t have had to pay too dearly.
I relived the entire scenario over again that Saturday. At least it was over quickly. I would have much rather Granny stayed home. But, wanting to get me some candy as payment for hoeing her garden, she had only gone to the KwikStop, a ten minute trip for me, but thirty minutes on her frail legs.
When I got home, I slammed both of those robots into the ground, over and over, until there they were unrecognizable. Sure, they were cool toys, but I paid far too steep a price for them.
The following Tuesday, I ran down to Mrs. Webster’s house, about three quarters of a mile down the road. I told her I would be happy to help her son, Mark, hoe their garden on Saturday. They had a large garden, which meant more work, but work was better than being around Joseph.
When Feenie went to take me to Granny’s the following Saturday, I told her I already promised to help Mrs. Webster. Though disappointed, she had little choice but to allow me to work Mrs. Webster’s garden. I planned to spend every Saturday in that garden if I had to.
I know Joseph will not stop his deviant behavior on his own. I can only pray he gets caught or killed before he destroys somebody else’s life.
If this is the night when God decides to call me home, I pray He will take into account how very young I was when I sold my soul for two stupid plastic toys.
Chapter 7: Hide and Seek
Eddie and I ate some strawberry cake that was sitting on the table. Always hungry, we knew that if we wanted cake, we’d better get it while we could. If we waited until the rest of the kids got home, we doubted we’d get any.
Lee came in and saw the half-eaten cake. He also saw Eddie and me with strawberry cake all over our hands and faces. He said “Mom spent the morning baking that cake for Dad for his birthday. You two had better get out of here. It won’t be long until she gets back.”
Though tearing through her homemade cake like wild animals provided immediate gratification, we quickly realized we had committed an unpardonable act. Things done in the past to merit a severe beating paled in comparison. We agreed she would beat us to death, or at least as close to death as the law allowed. We had taken beatings before, but we knew the one to come would be intolerable.
Eddie and I quickly determined there was only thing we could do: run away. Without so much as packing, we ran all the way to town, careful to stay far enough away from the main road that she wouldn’t be able to see us as she made her way back home.
Once we got to town, we searched for a good place to build our new house. I don’t know how we came to agree upon the area behind Kroger, other than that it was familiar, and we knew they threw food out all the time.
Across the street from Kroger was a store that sold refrigerators. We needed only two of the large boxes that they tossed out to make livable shelter. It took both of us to carry one, so we had to make two trips. Once we got them to our new home, we wrestled with them for over two hours, just to tear them apart. Who knew that cardboard could be so dammed difficult to work with?
Kroger had heaps of little boxes. We used three to support the flaps converging at the center of our new home. Though I was ok with what we already had, Eddie said we’d be happy to have an extra layer, making the ground a little easier to sleep on. “Plus,” he said, “crawling insects usually stay under the cardboard.” That sounded reasonable, so I happily broke open enough boxes to cover the ground. I hoped nothing would bite us after we went to sleep.
We worried about Feenie. Once she realized that we had run away, she’d surely have the whole town looking for us. We reasoned that she’d probably tell the police we beat up a baby, or stole a car; anything to turn up the heat and get the whole town looking for us.
We didn’t expect a any problems on our first day away. While we knew we had run away, we didn’t expect Feenie and The Old Man to know we were gone until very late in the day. We supposed they would think we were up the creek, catching crawdads, at least until it got dark. Only then, we reckoned, would they begin to think that maybe we weren’t coming home that night.
As nighttime approached, we crawled into the makeshift house. A tiny glimmer of light came through a crack where the two flaps of our home overlapped. We were able to see well enough to make out each others faces. I don’t know if Eddie knew it or not, but I was never fond of the dark. That said, having just that tiny amount completely eliminated any reason to be scared.
We lay there and just talked. He talked about Lee. He said he felt bad for Lee, because Feenie was always beating him. I told him “Lee’s a lot older than us. She probably beats him a little harder because he can take it. She beats James a lot, too.”
He replied “yeah, but she can’t hurt James. He doesn’t get hurt. I wish I had his muscles. I’d like to punch her back one good time.”
As the night continued on, we talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said “an astronaut. Those guys are famous since they went to the moon. I hope to get up there when I’m older. What do you want to do?”
He pondered for a bit, then answered “I’d like to try and help Lee. Not only Lee, but Tony Waybright. You see Tony? I don’t think he’s eaten anything in a week. Old Man Waybright gives Junior all the food, and Tony doesn’t ever get anything.”
I agreed with him about Lee and Tony, but I was hoping for a different answer. I asked again “what do you want to be?”
He thought for a minute, then said “I guess something to do with math. It comes kinda easy to me. I can understand the math that James has, and he’s in fourth grade. I like science, too. Maybe I’ll be a math or science teacher.”
He ope
ned one of the flaps that made the roof of our home, then continued on “or maybe I’ll try and figure out how many stars there are in the sky. There are a whole lot of ‘em. If you counted everyone by hand, they say you’d be dead, even before you counted the ones in our galaxy.”
We got a little hungry. We sifted through the day’s throwaways and found a box of powdered donuts. After eating two each, we decided to throw the other two away, feeling full.
We hadn’t counted on how thirsty we would be after eating them. We needed water. We drank all the water we could from a hose in the front yard of the two story brick house, about fifty yards away. I know it’s wrong to take without asking, but I hope the people who lived in that house will understand that since we were on the run, we couldn’t chance it.
We made our way back into our house and talked until it was real late. I told Eddie “this has been the best day ever, next to the day we met the Indian.”
He sighed and said “I think so too, but tomorrow’s going to be even better. When we wake up, how about we head over to the park?
I thought that was the best idea yet. We used to drive past the park all the time. In all my time on earth, we had not once stopped to play in it. Every time we drove by, I saw tons of kids running around in the park, having loads of fun. I couldn’t wait until morning, when I would finally get a chance at all those slides and the swings.
We talked for about another half hour. Eddie grew very tired. He had his eyes closed while I was talking to him. After a few more minutes, he quit answering my questions. He just fell asleep. I never saw Eddie fall asleep while talking. I decided to go to sleep too.
Three Minutes More Page 6
