Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2

by John G. Hartness

  “How many of these things do you have?” I said, launching myself to spear the construct in what would have been its gut, if it hadn’t been a pile of rocks instead. I hit it solid, but instead of it folding over my tackle and going down, it stood perfectly still and I heard a crack as my right clavicle snapped like a twig. I dropped face-first onto the carpet, holding my shoulder as I swore creatively.

  I rolled over a couple of times to get out of stomping range and pulled myself to my feet. I put myself in between the golem and Mark, who was on his knees starting to cry. “Back off him, Rocky, and nobody gets hurt.”

  “Nobody I care about has gotten hurt yet, jackass,” Jacob said from the foot of the stairs. I hefted the sledge one-handed and hurled it at the golem, but instead of throwing it at the head, like I would normally do, I aimed at the right leg, hitting it square in the knee-stone. It wobbled and had to take a few seconds to reassemble itself, and that’s all the time I needed. I drew Bertha in a backwards left-handed draw because my right arm was completely useless, but after a few seconds, I had her in my left hand, safety off, and leveled at the golem’s head. It took two steps forward, and Bertha barked in my hand. I put a fifty-caliber pistol round straight through the strangely inscribed rock in the center of the golem’s forehead, and it immediately collapsed back into a ton or so of patio pavers and gravel.

  “How did you do that?” Jacob cried.

  I grinned. “I’m a good shot, kid. Agent Smith out there is an even better one. Right now he’s loading up a Remington 700 with high-explosive rounds, and as soon as he finds the right stone in your big golem out there, he’s going to blow it up and you’re out of the monster business.”

  “I’ll just make more. I can make as many as I want. I’m a wizard!”

  “Yeah, but will it get you anything?” I asked.

  “What?” He kept his eyes on the gun in my hand, so I tried to holster it. I couldn’t manage to get it back in the shoulder rig with my busted shoulder, so I clicked the safety on and shoved it into the waistband of my pants. It was a lot more uncomfortable than they make it look on TV. For one thing, I’ve got a gut, so the hammer was mashing into my belly the whole time. For another, the Desert Eagle is a big gun, so the barrel was a lot closer to my prized possession than I really liked, safety or not. But I stopped thinking about guns and my penis for a few minutes and turned my attention back to Jacob.

  “What good will it do you to beat these guys up?” I asked. “Will it make them like you? Will it make you cool? Will it get you laid? Or will you just have company being miserable?”

  “What do you care? What does anybody care?” Jacob started waving his hands around, and they started to glow a little.

  “Can we just talk for a minute before you try to reanimate this heap behind me and I have to break your jaw for you?” I asked.

  Jacob put his hands down and walked over to the pile of rocks that I’d de-animated. He sat on the rocks and motioned to the couch. I took the seat with a sigh and a wince, then pulled the pistol out of my pants and laid it on the side table.

  We sat there staring at each other for a minute before he broke the silence. “All right, talk. You wanted to talk, say something. What kind of adult wisdom do you have that will make me change my mind and want to hug it out with these assholes who have made my life a living hell for the past three years?”

  “Nothing. I’ve got nothing. If you want something to make you feel better, you’re looking in the wrong place, kid. I’m not the talker. I’m the punch shit ’til it falls down guy. My partner, he’s the talker. But he ain’t here. So all you got is me. And all I got is I’m sorry. I’m sorry these guys are assholes. I’m sorry they fucked with you and made you miserable. I’m sorry you had to go through that. But you don’t get to kill ‘em for it.”

  “So it’s okay for them to drive me to suicide, but I can’t return the favor?”

  “No, it’s not okay. What they did to you ain’t okay, and it’s gonna haunt you for a long time, but eventually—”

  “If you tell me it gets better like some fucking YouTube video, I’m going to animate this golem and rip you to pieces.”

  “But it does get better, Jacob.” Skeeter’s voice came from my right, from the TV over the fireplace. I turned and saw my best friend’s face on the screen.

  “Skeeter? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Saving your ass, as usual,” he replied. “Jacob, I’m Billy. Billy Jones. I’d shake your hand, but it was hard enough to hack your home network and get video. I haven’t quite managed teleportation yet.”

  “You hacked my network? Nobody can hack my network.” Jake didn’t look nearly as freaked out by the intrusion into our conversation as by the idea of someone breaking his network security. I’ll never understand geeks. I’ll understand elves before I understand geeks, and elves are some inscrutable bastards.

  “You’re good, kid. But I’m better, and I’ve got the whole NSA working with me. It took me ten minutes, that’s pretty good. The DOD only took me five. But I’m here now, and I promise, it gets better. High school is the worst, man. Especially for people like us.”

  “Skeeter, I’m pretty sure there ain’t but one person ever been like you,” I said.

  Skeeter laughed. “He’s got a point. I hit almost every check mark on the ostracism list. I’m black, I’m gay, I’m adopted, and I’m smarter than almost everybody. And I’m not quite smart enough to keep my damn mouth shut. That didn’t make for a good time in high school.”

  “Yeah?” Jacob’s mouth curled up in a sneer. “You had it so tough, how many times did you try to kill yourself?”

  “Three.” Skeeter’s gaze held steady into the camera. My mouth dropped open. This was news to me, and he’d been my best friend for almost twenty years. “I took a fistful of sleeping pills when I was in eighth grade, I ran my car off the road into a tree when I was in high school, and I cut my wrists in tenth grade.” He held up an arm to the camera. “It’s been a long time, but if you look close you can still see the marks.”

  He was right, I could. There were very faint white lines on the light brown skin of his wrists. But that wasn’t what bothered me the most. Skeeter and I weren’t all that tight in middle school, but by the time he learned to drive, I thought of him as my best friend. Hell, I taught him to drive. I remembered that wreck, when he ran off the road and hit a tree. He told me he spilled animal crackers in the floorboard and was reaching for them and lost control of the car.

  “Skeeter…” I started, but didn’t know what say.

  “Shut up, Bubba. This one’s mine.” I snapped my mouth shut and let him roll.

  “You see, Jacob, I figure high school is like this torture for every shitty thing we did in a past life, all jammed into four years. But there’s one good thing about high school.”

  “What’s that, smart guy?”

  “It ends. It ends, and you get to leave, and if you don’t ever want to see these assholes again, you don’t have to. You can block them on Facebook, ignore their suckass LinkedIn requests looking for a job, and move far enough away that you don’t ever have to see them again. And you can find people who see how awesome you are and appreciate you for that, and that turns out to be the best revenge.”

  “I’m partial to putting them in the hospital and making sure they don’t ever play baseball again,” Jacob said. I kept my mouth shut tight, especially since my agreeing with him was probably counterproductive. Frankly, I didn’t mind a little ass-whooping in the name of justice; I just couldn’t let him kill anybody.

  “They showed the world my dick!” Jacob shouted. “They uploaded that video to the internet and it went viral. They posted pictures of it all over the school website. They did other stupid shit, too. They egged my house, wrecked the paint on my mom’s car. They painted swastikas on my garage door. My dad’s an atheist, for fuck’s sake, but did they care? No! They just wanted a reason, so they picked on the Jew-boy.”

  “Yeah, that
sucks. It’s probably a lot like having people throw fried chicken at you in the cafeteria when you’re the only black kid in school. Or cutting out pictures of penises and covering your locker with them because you’re the only gay kid. Or burning a cross in your front yard for Halloween. Oh wait, that wasn’t Halloween, and those white robes weren’t ghost costumes.”

  “That shit doesn’t happen anymore,” Jacob sneered.

  “Yeah, and people don’t call you a Jesus-killer, do they? ‘Cause people don’t do that anymore? Nobody mutters ‘nigger’ under their breath if you cut them off in line at the grocery store, and God forbid I walk into a convenience store wearing a fucking hoodie. No, that shit doesn’t happen anymore. Ask Trayvon Martin. You’ve had it bad, kid. There’s no question. You didn’t deserve it. Still no question. But you’re too fucking smart for this. You keep down this road, and it’s not gonna be me doing the talking. It’s gonna be him,” he pointed to me. “And he ain’t much for conversation.”

  “You can still turn this around, Jacob,” I said. “You haven’t killed anybody. You hurt Eric pretty bad, but we’ve got a few resources up our sleeve that can get him back to normal better and faster than anybody expects. So if you’ll agree to stop raising golems and wrecking schools—”

  “And students,” Skeeter chimed in.

  “And students,” I agreed, “we can make this go away.”

  Jacob sat there on his couch looking between me and Skeeter for at least a minute, then he turned his gaze on Mark. “Just what are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I’m here to apologize,” Mark said. He reached up and wiped a tear from his eyes. “I never knew it was so bad for you. I didn’t know about the swastika shit, man. You gotta believe that. My granddad fought the Nazis in World War II. I grew up hearing his stories. I would never do that.”

  “But you did the rest of it.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Why?” I watched Jacob’s face change, and he wasn’t a psycho monster-summoner bent on destruction. He was just a hurt little kid whose friend shit on him, and he wanted to know why.

  “Man, I wish I had a good answer. But it’s all chickenshit stuff. I fucked with you so they wouldn’t fuck with me. I wanted to be cool. I was on the team, but I wasn’t cool. I wasn’t one of them, you know. No matter how I played, it was always something. But when they started picking on you, and I helped, then I was cool. Then I belonged, you know?”

  “By making me miserable?”

  “I’m sorry. I know that ain’t enough, and I know you don’t believe it, but I am sorry.”

  “What about you?” Jacob turned his gaze to me.

  “What about me? I hit things. He’s the smart one.” I jerked a thumb at Skeeter’s huge head on the screen.

  “Yeah, but have you ever apologized to him? For the shit you did before y’all were friends?”

  “Huh?” I was honestly confused. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done to Skeeter. As far as I could remember, we’d always been friends, ever since that day at the flagpole. “I didn’t ever do anything to him.”

  “Oh bullshit,” Jacob said. “You were the jock, right? You’re telling me you never screwed with the gay kid?”

  “No, not that I remember. Did I, Skeet?” I looked to the screen, and his face told me everything. “Shit. What did I do?”

  “There was the time you put the ‘faggot’ sign on my back and I walked around most of the school day without knowing it. Three teachers even saw it and did nothing. Then there was the time you and your buddies thought it would be funny to cut out pictures of me and the kicker for the football team and tape them together like we were kissing, then photocopy them and post them all over school.”

  “Okay, I gotta admit, I remember that one, but it was more on Dennis than on you.” I even smiled a little at the memory.

  “Yeah, well do you remember that Dennis transferred after that year?”

  “Yeah, but his dad got a job somewhere out of state.”

  “His dad got that job and left town because Dennis came out to him when that picture went up, and he couldn’t face being seen by his bowling team and hunting buddies with his fag son. He moved out of state and stuck Dennis in a private school that ‘reprograms’ gay youth. Dennis hung himself in his room second semester.”

  I collapsed back into the couch, my mouth hanging open. I had no idea. I assumed Dennis was straight because he always had a date to the dances after football games. I mean, he was on the football team, even if he was the kicker. “Are you sure?” I asked, my voice real quiet.

  Skeeter reached down and held up a piece of paper to the camera. It was a string of photo booth pictures, like from old carnivals. It was Dennis and Skeeter. In the first picture they were smiling at the camera, then in the second they looked at each other, and in the third they were kissing. “This is what we really looked like kissing, Bubba. Not like the half-done Photoshop job y’all did with scissors and tape.”

  “Oh my God, Skeet. I never knew. I am so sorry. I didn’t know. I thought it was just some fun, you know. Just…”

  “Just messing with the gay kid, fucking with Dennis because being a kicker is the gay thing to do on the football team, because you can’t be gay and cool, because—you know, I don’t know why, I can’t imagine why somebody who’s fundamentally decent would do that shit. So tell me, Bubba, why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know, Skeet. I don’t even remember where the idea came from anymore. All I can say is I’m sorry.” My guts felt like I’d been punched by a Sasquatch. I just sat there in silence, all the little slights from all those years ago coming back to haunt me in the living room of a kid I’d come to stop or save, and still unsure of which one it was going to be.

  “You’ve made up for it since then, Bubba. You didn’t even know you were doing it, but you have. But back then, for just a minute when you had that idea that you thought was funny, you changed a bunch of lives.” He turned his attention to Jacob. “And that’s what you’re doing right here, Jacob. You’ve got a power to change a lot of lives. You can do things that only a few people can do. You’ve got the magic, now it’s all about how you use it. Are you going to destroy people, or are you going to take all that pain, all that hurt, and turn it into something good?”

  Jacob sat there on the couch, just staring back and forth between Skeeter and me. “Is all that true?” he finally asked.

  “You can Google Dennis Farner in Georgia if you want to confirm it,” Skeeter said.

  “What do I do now?” Jacob asked.

  “Well, that depends on you,” I said. “If you want to throw down, put your mojo into that pile of rocks beside you and we’ll probably tear up your parents’ house. And frankly, as bad as my arm hurts, I’m past the point of screwing around, so I’ll probably just shoot you. If you think you might be willing to try to forgive these assholes and stop tearing up the whole town, then you and Mark move all these rocks out of your living room, you deactivate the walking mountain in the front yard, and we leave. The government sends your school a check for the trophy cases, we send a healer to Eric’s hospital room, and somebody finds a way to sew Steve’s lips together. Because if I ever hear another word outta that kid, I’m gonna come back here and kill him myself.”

  Jacob looked from me to Skeeter, then to Mark, then back to Skeeter. “Thanks. I hate you had to go through all that shit, and I’m sorry your friend died.”

  “Me too,” Skeeter said, looking down at the strip of photos. “He was pretty awesome. But he’s part of the reason why I do this. I feel like if I can help somebody else, it keeps him alive somehow.”

  Jacob turned to Mark and stood up. He held out a hand and said, “You wanna help me move all these rocks?”

  “You gonna use any of them to kill me?” Mark asked, a little half-grin on his face.

  “Not until we get the vacuuming done, at least,” Jacob said. Mark took his hand, and the boys started cleaning up the mess, hauling the rocks out to the bac
k yard and tossing them into a creek.

  I went out the front door and motioned Agent Smith over. “You got another Suburban?” I asked, pointing at the mass of twisted metal and shattered glass.

  He nodded and pulled a radio off his belt. “Clear, come on around,” he said into the walkie. A black Suburban came around the corner, followed by the black rollback wrecker I’d seen earlier. Or an identical wrecker, I didn’t know how many DEMON had in Memphis. The Suburban pulled up to the sidewalk and a pudgy red-haired agent with a goatee got out.

  “I’m Agent Smith. I’ll be your driver for the trip back home,” he said.

  I looked from Agent Smith to Agent Smith. One red-haired, one blonde, one clean-shaven, one with a goatee. “Y’all ain’t kin, are you?”

  “Agent Amy explained to us that you wouldn’t be paying much attention to our names, so we might as well all be Agent Smith. We just wanted to see if you’d notice,” Agent Smith #2 said. “My name’s actually—”

  “Amy’s right, Smith is fine.” I waved him off and got in the truck. I strapped on my seatbelt and pushed the button on my earpiece.

  “You there, Skeet?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know, Bubba. Are you?”

  “I didn’t know a lot of that stuff, Skeeter.”

  “I didn’t want you to know a lot of that stuff, Bubba.”

  “You know you’re my best friend, right?”

  “Yeah, and you’re mine.”

  “Even though I probably killed your first boyfriend?”

  “You didn’t kill Dennis. Dennis killed Dennis. And what you did sure didn’t help, but it wasn’t the cause, either. He had a darkness inside him, Bubba. I tried to help him fight it, I swear to God I did. But sometimes…”

  “Sometimes the darkness wins,” I said.

  “Yeah, sometimes it does.”

  “But not today.”