I got really tired of always answering questions from that head shrinker. He’d never say anything about himself. All he wanted to do was say things like “That’s interesting. How did that make you feel?”

More than anything else, it seemed like he kept asking about my mom and dad. Over and over and over again. I wouldn’t talk much about it, so he’d just look through his file and make notes and stuff. He kept on saying that a feller’s brain is like an onion, and you got to keep peeling away at the layers until you get to what’s underneath.

I never told him, but I thought that was the dumbest thing in the world to say. When you peel away the layers of an onion, all you got is more layers under it, and it’s mostly the same as the first layer And when you get done with them, you got even more after that. And when you finally get all the layers done, all you got left is an empty hand and maybe some snot coming out of your nose and a tear or two. I ain’t about to cry in front of a feller like him, although I’d pick my nose when he wasn’t looking and wipe it under his couch.

Nope, your brain is mostly just a big scab. You keep picking at it and it’s just going to start bleeding again, and then you’re right back where you started from. If psychiatrists poking around into all the things you decided to stop thinking about is such a good thing, then why don’t monkeys and hamsters have little animal psychiatrists too? You’d think all them critters probably got some of that fancy shrinker’s “abandomint issues.”

Just look at my dog. Roger’s mom was dead before he was even born. But if there was a psychiatrist who could talk dog, he wouldn’t get nothing out of Roger.

“Roger, how you feel about your dead mom?” he’d ask. “Roger, quit licking your privates and tell me how it makes you feel. Roger. Roger, how come you start humping on that couch every time I ask about that?”

And it wouldn’t be like Roger meant nothing by it. He just happens to like licking himself or going to town on a nice piece of furniture. He’s just a dog. What do you expect?

Dogs don’t know from onions, but they know how to handle scabs. You lick them a little and maybe sniff at it, but ain’t no way they’re going to just rip it off and watch it start bleeding all over again.

Even when they throw up they eat up all the barf before anyone’s likely to step in it.

Not psychiatrists, though. Nope. Not only do they want to step in it, they want to hold it in their hands close to their face, give it a good hard sniff and maybe stick a finger in it and give the whole world a taste off their finger.

Ain’t no reason to do that.

She was the kind of girl that any guy would want. The way her hair flowed around her face–well, maybe that’s not true. I should probably set it straight. My psychiatrist says I’m always exaggerating things, and–well, that’s not true either. My psychiatrist is always telling me I’m always lying. He says I lie through my teeth because I’m just trying to hide from the way things are. The way things are is how I see them and how I see them isn’t so great, so sometimes I just change it.

He’s right about lying. You can milk a cow only so many times. At some point it ain’t white anymore. I’ve churned some good lies. But I’m not going to do it this time. This time I’m going to tell the truth. This time I’m going to tell exactly what happened. Monica deserves that. She was good to me. She still is good to me. I love her.

Monica wasn’t that great to look at to be honest. She was a little heavy — I like to say a little pillowy, and she had a round face, and maybe she had a little bit of acne. But you know I’m no spring chicken either, although I guess I am because I’m fifteen.

Monica lived down the street from me. Then we moved in together.

I first met her when I used to stand at the bus stop. She had a boyfriend before then who’d come and pick her up. I don’t know if it was her boyfriend or not, but some guy used to come and pick her up. One day he just didn’t make it, so…maybe I should talk about that, but maybe I won’t for now.

But anyway, one day he didn’t make it, so I wound up standing next to her at the bus stop. Which was my really good fortune. Heh. Except it wasn’t, was it?

When she came and waited at the bus stop with me, she gave me one quick smile. It was the nicest smile I think I ever saw, and that is the truth. I mean–I’ll take a polygraph test for my psychiatrist and he’ll see I’m not lying. She had a smile that just opened up wide. A giant gash across her face. But instead of blood coming out there was teeth. Beautiful, bright shiny teeth. It was the kind of smile I just wanted to bury my face into. I wanted to make that smile mine.

Well anyhow that wasn’t so smart because the first thing I said to her when I saw her was: “I want to make that smile mine.” And I think she sort of took it the wrong way because she stopped smiling. Well, we didn’t really talk much after that.

So after a while of waiting there the bus finally shows up and I get on at the very front of the bus, and I didn’t know she had friends that took the bus, but she went off to the back even though I tried to squeeze over and make a space for her. She sat next to some other kids who looked a little like her, with black clothes and spiky hair and tired faces. They didn’t smile much.

That was the first time I talked to her. The second time I was following her down the hallway. She walked up to some black girl and was asking about her boyfriend or somebody. I think she saw me following her. I didn’t really mean to follow her.

Well, actually, yes I did mean to follow her. I really did mean to follow her. It’s funny because all those things used to be a big problem, but they’re not much of a problem anymore. We’re really getting along so much better now.

She looked at me, and she said: “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Well, gosh, yeah! Heck, yeah ya do! I live right down the street from you.” I grew up kind of in the sticks all the time before I moved to the Bay Area here in California, and you know, I think she thought I sounded like a rube. I suppose I did, but that’s who I am and I’m not going to change who I am for anybody. Except of course when I lie, which of course I’m not going to do anymore because my shrink says I shouldn’t. My psychiatrist.

So I said “I live down the street from you. Don’t you remember me? My name’s Theo.”

“Oh yeah. Hi.”

And then she went back to talking to her friends. I didn’t really like that much at the time, but I let it roll off my back.

A few days went by. I was taking Roger for a walk. I called him Roger after Roger Moore. He was so smooth, and I kind of thought I was kind of smooth like that or something. I was taking Roger for a walk, and she happened to be leaving her house at the same time and she was taking her dog for a walk too.

Well actually, that’s not really true, is it? We were both taking our dogs for a walk because I saw her taking her dog for a walk and I thought maybe I would take my dog for a walk too, and that’s just what I did.

What I did was, I said “Hi there, Monica!” and she said “Oh!” and then I remembered that she didn’t give me her name. I had to say something. I can’t remember what. I think I said, “I met you, Monica, when I was standing next to you the other day.”

 “Well, I don’t remember telling you my name,” she said, looking kind of worried.

I didn’t miss a beat. “Well, I guess you must’ve, because I got it, don’t I.’

She stopped looking worried. “That really is just the way you talk, isn’t it?”

“What the dickens do you mean?”

She said — well, she didn’t say nothing because she was laughing so hard. She had that big, toothy, gashy smile of hers. That made me smile too. Then she said, “I think you’re okay.” And I smiled back.

I’m actually not a bad looking guy, and that ain’t no lie. I’m about six feet tall, which is pretty tall for my age, and I think I’m just about as sharp as a whip. At least that’s what everybody says. There’s a whole bunch of high-falutin fancy smart people in all my advanced placement classes, but, none of them ever get better grades than me — well, not very often. I don’t let them for very long.

Anyway, like I was saying, we were going out for a walk together with our dogs, me with Roger and Monica had a dog named–you  know, I don’t know what her dog was named. It’s funny, I know every little inch of her face, but when I think about her I can’t remember all the stuff around her so well. It just all sort of goes away. Like when you almost get hit by a car and you don’t really notice that you peed on yourself. 

I know Monica didn’t have a big smile that day, but it changed when I said something or another to cheer her up with my stupid way of talking.

When we got to the pond I wanted to show her the trick my dog can do.

I said, “You gotta watch this.” I grabbed the biggest dead branch I could find.

Roger’s a pretty small lab. He’s not like a normal lab. He’s a runt lab.

And so–actually he’s not really a runt lab. He’s sort of a mutt. I think he’s got a little lab in him. The labs are the best bird dogs around. Although I’ve never taken him out bird hunting, I reckon that if we still lived up north I could probably take him out and we could go shoot some pheasants together.

She asked me what kind of dog he was and I said he was a lab. She started laughing and laughing again, and she said, “I thought you told me you were supposed to be pretty smart.”

I didn’t change the way I looked, but on the inside I wasn’t so happy about what she said.

But then I tried to let it slide, and we both relaxed. The frown on the inside of me just leapt off my face. Like my foster mom Sam used to say about frowns. She used to say that.

“You gotta watch what Roger does,” I said, showing her the stick. 

“Really? What does Roger do?”

“Well, you got to watch, don’t you?”

She looked at the stick in my hand and looked doubtful. “There’s no way Roger can pick that up.”

I said, “Sure as heck he can.”

Roger liked to retrieve, so I knew he’d try. But to tell you the truth now, that’s what I’m supposed to do, to tell you the truth I’ve never had Roger pick up a stick that big before. Frisbees, small branches, that kind of thing was really his cup of tea. This thing was really more like a twenty pound log with branches.

I thought I’d make her laugh a little bit more because I liked to make her laugh. I made like I threw the stick, but I didn’t throw it. Roger went tearing down the slope after it. He dove in, slamming so hard into the water that for a second even his head was under. He bobbed up and swung his head left and right, paddling hard to lift his neck out of the water and give him the best view of the pond. He was desperate to find that log I hadn’t yet thrown for him, whining and circling. He looked so funny that both of us just laughed and laughed and maybe we laughed a little too much.

I smiled at Monica and said, “Ok. Now watch this.” I wound up back with that stick in both my hands and then unsprung as hard as I could. I was aiming to huck it in there a couple feet to the left of him, hoping for a big splash that would make Monica laugh more.

That was a mistake though. The log cracked Roger on the snout. Old Roger started kicking his legs all around, splashing and waving his head, and his eyes all rolled up. Kind of like a goose that I saw Uncle Theo shoot when I was a little kid.

And I thought, “Oh, heck, Roger’s going to die just like that goose did.” I’d seen Roger’s whole family die, and I even had to kill his mom, so I knew what was at stake. I even held one of his brothers as a puppy as it died in my palm. We’d been through so much together, me and Roger, and I knew a thing or two about death. So I went charging down into the pond to try to save him.

I remember hearing Monica laugh behind me. I don’t know why she was still laughing, but anyway I dove into the water and grabbed old Roger around his belly. The water was only waist deep. I lugged him back up to the bank.

I laid him down to get a look at him and Monica’s dog came up and sniffed Roger and made a face like it didn’t like him, and then I decided that I didn’t like that dog.

We both stared at poor Roger, and Monica stopped laughing because we could both see there was some blood coming out of his nose and one ear. I picked up Roger and threw him over my shoulder. He was droopy and runny and cold. I carried old Roger home on my shoulder the whole way. It wasn’t that far, but it was far enough.

We get back to my house and Roger is starting to come together by that point. He didn’t have the feel of death about him, and I was plenty relieved.

She pet Roger and I pet him too. We decided then that maybe we didn’t have to tell nobody what happened to him. It was kind of nice, because now Monica and I had our own secret. I think Monica and I both kind of liked that. The best way to become good friends is to share a secret.

It’s a way to share something, and sharing’s pretty nice. I think that’s why I like this recorder so much.

I went down to the store the other day to go buy one and I had to go through this electronics boutique. You always hear about how people are so busy that they don’t have time to think, but the first thing I noticed was a huge bank of cell phones in the front of the store. I asked them about these recorder systems, and the feller who sold it to me said, “Well, I think we’ve got a couple of them way in the back.”

I think it’s kind of funny that everybody says they don’t have time to think. I suppose it’s true. But everybody sure as heck has time to talk at each other.

Anyway, I felt like maybe Monica and I had done a little talking and maybe a little thinking that day. Which I reckon is really probably the best way to be with a girl.

When I mentioned Uncle Theo, the cop who sits in the front pulled out a big folder filled with stuff on me in it, I guess, because he started looking through it really hard and really fast. When I finished talking about how I met Monica, he turned around and he looked at me and he said something like, “Who the heck is Uncle Theo?” or something like that. He said it kind of stupidly.

I just said I wasn’t going to talk to him. I figured that wherever they’re going to take me, I got to talk to more people like that.

So I told him the truth and I said, “I ain’t going to talk to nobody about nothing unless you guys keep driving me around and showing me more parts of the Bay Area, because I don’t get to drive around very much. Except when I’m going to school on the bus.” Truth is that before I moved down here I thought the Bay Area was where they kept brown horses. At first I thought maybe there was an Appaloosa Area and maybe a Roan Area too. Don’t laugh. I just didn’t travel much out of central Idaho when I was a little kid. I never even saw an ocean until this year.

So then I said, “I’ll make a deal with you, you fat ugly cop and you feller in the black jacket. Here’s the deal: I’ll keep talking in the little Sony recorder here that I got at the electronics boutique, and I’ll keep talking and telling the things that happened to me and the things you probably ought to want to know about, but you got to keep driving.”

I could tell the fat ugly cop who should’ve shaved by now didn’t like the idea because he liked to be in charge. But the bureaucratic looking feller, he got a greedy look on his face and I think he kind of liked that idea of scooping everybody else on it. I think he wants to show up with all the answers.

It’s probably making him mad that I’m saying so, though.

Well anyway, I probably shouldn’t say much more about them or else they’re just going to give up on the deal, so I’ll just say that I don’t like them very much and I’ll let it go at that.

And now I should talk a little bit about Uncle Theo, because I told them I’d tell them something, and it seems to be the thing they kind of latched on to.

First thing you ought to know about Uncle Theo is that there are two kinds of drunks. There’s the kind of drunk that you always see on TV. You know the fellers who sit down with their buddies and have a six pack and then they go and talk about their wives or their girlfriends or they just kind of, you know, have a good time and laugh and smile and maybe cry on each others shoulders and everybody thinks it’s really nice. And they smile a lot and laugh and laugh and laugh.

But not like Monica laughed. Really friendly laugh.

There’s that kind of drunk, but Uncle Theo wasn’t that kind of drunk. He was the other kind, if you know what I mean. Well, I don’t really know if you know what I mean because sometimes I say things that people don’t seem to understand. I think it’s because of my accent.

So I’ll tell you about the other kind of drunk. Uncle Theo would wake up in the morning and he had this funny habit. He’d make this pancake for me in the morning and then he did the funniest thing. He’d butter his pancake really good. I mean there might be a half inch of it caked on in places. Then he’d pour some of his whiskey on it for syrup, and he poured a little drop of it on mine too. I’d smear it around on top of the butter.

When I found out that most folks don’t do that, I asked him why he always did it. He said it gave them some flavor, but I don’t know. I guess it did, because I finally had pancakes without that drop, and it did make it taste different. Kind of gross. But the ones with the little drop of Jim Beam, they were ok.

He always put more than a little drop on his pancakes. After he buttered them up, he’d pour it all over, letting it spill on to the plate in a little pool. When he finished eating every bite, he’d tip his plate up to his mouth and he’d slurp on down the rest of it. Then he’d burp and say, “That’s not a bad start.”

I asked him once how come he didn’t put more than a little drop on mine. He looked at me in kind of a suspicious way, and said he didn’t want to share it much. Uncle Theo didn’t have a whole lot of money, which is the reason why I probably had to leave. Well, that ain’t the reason why I had to leave him, but I guess that’s what I always told people.

We woke up one morning and it was all foggy out, and he decided that he was going to go out and take me and do some pheasant hunting. He was tired of having me in the trailer, and I was always whining when he came back with a couple of dead pheasants. “How come you don’t let me come and go shoot some pheasants with you?”

At that time, I didn’t have Roger. He had a dog named Juice. I asked him why his name was Juice and he said, “I don’t know. It’s just Juice. He’s got a little juice in him too.” I don’t know what he meant. I guess it had to do with the whiskey.

Me and Juice and Uncle Theo, we went out to go and shoot a pheasant. But I think we were going to go shoot a pheasant on a place where we weren’t supposed to shoot pheasants, because he told me I had to be real quiet and sneaky. I had to climb through this barbed wire fence with a big “NO TRESPASSING OR HUNTING” sign on it, and it scratched me up some. The fence, that is, not the sign.

Once we got out in the field, it was a big corn field, he told me to walk about fifty yards away into the field. I wasn’t very good with distances because I was pretty young, so I started just walking and walking and walking. Pretty soon I lost sight of him and I couldn’t hear him anymore through all the tall stalks of corn, so I figured it was probably fifty yards.

I walked out there for a long time by myself.  At first, Juice was coming over to me sometimes, sniffing the ground and stuff. Then he stopped, and I realized maybe I’d walked too far over, and maybe fifty yards wasn’t what I thought.

So I was walking along and I finally saw me a pheasant. I don’t know if you’ve seen pheasants before. Probably not, you stupid cops in your office desks and black coats and spectacles.

But if you seen a pheasant that’s not stuck up on some wall or some magazine, they’re really, really–the boy pheasants are, the girl pheasants are boring. The boy pheasants got really big green heads with a white ring around their neck. That’s why they call them ringnecks, although Uncle Theo always called them cocksuckers.

Well I saw one of them, heh, I saw one of them cocksuckers right in front of me with his big old green head and his orange feathers. He looked at me and I looked at him, and I started swearing at him just like Uncle Theo did.

I yelled, “Come back here you cocksucker!” And I started crashing after that pheasant and he went scrambling off ahead of me through the tall, dry cornrows. He was running off to the left towards where Uncle Theo probably was. I was pretty happy about that.

And I’ll be damned if that Cocksucker didn’t stop and he’d stare at me. Most pheasants don’t do that–they’re smart enough to keep on running. If you see a pheasant once on the ground, you probably ain’t going to see them again. Particularly if you don’t got a dog with you and you don’t got a little tight spot that you can chase them to. This was a big old corn field.

For some reason he kept dodging through the stalks and suddenly stopping to wait for me. I could sometimes just see his long tail wagging and stuff. He was teasing me, and I was laughing the whole time, because I thought it was funny that he seemed to be waiting for me. I ran and ran after that pheasant, and I started blowing really hard, laughing and blowing and yelling “COCKSUCKER! COCKSUCKER!” at the top of my voice when I could get a breath.

I could hear off in the distance that old Juice was starting to laugh too. I could hear him barking because he could hear me coming and he knew something was up. Then I could hear that Uncle Theo was hissing at Juice to pipe down, because the thing about driving a pheasant is that you got to be quiet if somebody is pushing one towards you. You want to keep quiet, because if they get wise they won’t come to you.

I was chasing after Cocksucker, and it seemed like for a long time. I started thinking about how Cocksucker wasn’t just something I was chasing, but kind of like a, I don’t know. I saw a dog race once on TV. There was a greyhound that was chasing after a little white rabbit that wasn’t really a rabbit. I always wondered what would happen if they really caught one. I always thought that greyhounds are nice dogs. I saw one once and he seemed real friendly like. Really nice and calm, but he was an old one. I think that if the greyhound ever did catch the rabbit, it’d kind of just want to sit next to it some. Maybe not kill it so much. Course, he might have. But, I don’t know. I like to think that maybe they’d be friends.

And after a while of running after Cocksucker, I was yelling at him not like I was wanting to kill him or nothing. I just wanted to have friends with him, you know? I know it sounds kind of dumb because I’ve seen lots of pheasants before that Uncle Theo would bring back. And I’ve probably killed a thing or two in my time, too, like you know I have. Poor old Monica, for instance.

But I don’t like seeing things die so much unless they really have to, like Monica did.

As I got thinking about this more and more, I got even more sure I didn’t want to hurt that Cocksucker. I started yelling “COCKSUCKER!” but more angry like. I was scared that I was chasing old Cocksucker right to Uncle Theo.

At first that’s what I wanted to do, but then I thought, “Well, shoot, if I chase him to Uncle Theo then Uncle Theo is just going to kill Cocksucker.” I didn’t want that.

The more I screamed at Cocksucker–I really started screaming at him to stop. Stop, don’t go over there! The harder I screamed, the more he must’ve ran, and I just lost sight of him. I started crying and screaming, “Cocksucker, don’t! Don’t go over there Cocksucker! He going to kill you Cocksucker! Jesus Christ, Cocksucker, just don’t go over there! Don’t go!”

I stopped and hunched over, trying to catch my breath as I was sobbing, and I sobbed real quietly because I wanted to hear anything that’d happen. I didn’t hear nothing for a bit. I just hunched there panting and wheezing and thinking about poor Cocksucker.

Then I thought, “Well, you know pheasants are pretty smart little birds. They’re about as smart as a whip. Maybe old Cocksucker just up and made it free right on out of this corn field. Maybe I’ll get to run into Cocksucker next time we come out, and we can play chase and–”

That’s when I heard a big old boom, and I knew that Cocksucker didn’t get out.

I started moping my way over. As I came into the clearing on the side of the corn field where Uncle Theo was standing, old Juice had Cocksucker in his mouth and there was blood and feathers and meat.

Uncle Theo took a big old tug off his whiskey that he kept in his hunting vest, and he smiled at me and he said, “Man, Theo, that big old cocksucker is toast. I don’t think we got enough left to make a cheeseburger out of him.”

That poor old Cocksucker didn’t suffer much, I guess, because he must’ve jumped out of the field only about five yards from Uncle Theo. He tatered him all right. Hit him square in the chest from only a few feet away and blew his whole guts out. Wasn’t pretty.

I felt real bad for Cocksucker. I felt like I let him down. It wasn’t like with Monica and he’d done something wrong. He was just being a pheasant. He was just being Cocksucker. He wasn’t trying to do nothing wrong. Him and me were just playing. It’s not like I had a lot friends there. I was thinking we could, you know…

Well, I just stood there and started bawling. Started crying so bad. You got to understand that fellers up north, we ain’t like them fellers on the TV shows with the beers and the holding hands and the crying and stuff like that. We don’t do that kind of stuff. That’s just what they show on TV.

I guess that’s what California guys do. Kind of like these two dumb fellers sitting in front of me. I bet they get together and have a beer and cry on each other’s shoulders and they think it’s pretty cool.

But it ain’t right to cry in front of other fellers. I knew what I was doing was really a pretty awful thing. I could tell by the way Uncle Theo, he turned his back on me and stared more at the bird in old Juice’s mouth, and maybe took another tugs off his whiskey. He didn’t think it was right what I was doing neither.

He kept on hunting after that. I just walked on home. He didn’t ask where I was going. I figured he didn’t really want to know. He was just glad I wasn’t around him, crying like a little girl.

I went back to the house and I sat in there and I cried and cried. I don’t know what happened. Something snapped in me.

Well, couple hours later Uncle Theo came on home. He smelled like perfume. I think he must’ve stopped off at Charlotte’s house and had what he always called a little pokey.

I think I know what a little pokey is now, because they had some health classes here in California when I was going to school. They talked about what a pokey was. The teacher said a lot of words about vageyena and orgasmo, and I raised my hand.

I said, “Does that have to do with having a little pokey?” She looked at me and all the other kids in the class started laughing. I knew I said something wrong, but I also got it right.

Anyway, he came back from his little pokey. The teacher never said nothing about perfume, but I guess once you get one you smell like perfume.

He’d been drinking some more, like the second kind of drunk, because you know us good old boys we don’t do the first kind of drunk. He laid down there on the bed and looked at me just once like I was stupid or something. He squirmed out of his clothes and was just laying there all naked on the bed, drunk. His little thing just sitting out there in the bare air.

I looked outside and I could see his truck, with the shotgun in it. I went out to go and take a look at the shotgun because I wanted to see up close what had done it. After I’d seen it tore up Cocksucker, it made me think a lot more. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see the thing that’d hurt my friend.

You see guns in movies, and you see them lying around everywhere where I grew up back in Idaho. But I never really thought about what it could do to someone. Just rip them apart.

I climbed into the truck and sat on the seat, and just stared at it for a few minutes. This shotgun wasn’t like the one sitting ahead of me in the car. The cop’s shotgun is a pump. You pull the long wood handle under the barrel toward you and it makes that “chuh chunk” noise. That’s the noise that says you’re about to do something.

But Uncle Theo’s shotgun was different. I think he stole it from somebody because it was way too nice for him. It was a Beretta. A really fancy Italian shotgun. People always asked him where he got it, and he’d always smile and be sly about it. But he’d never say.

It was a nice Italian shotgun, and it was called an “auto,” although I think it’s actually a semi-automatic. How it works is you push a button on the side and it slams a shell into the chamber really hard. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to get your finger caught in, because it’d hurt.

It’s kind of a funny thing, because it ain’t like an .870 pump like the one sitting in seat in front of me. Them Berettas, they got about seventeen different buttons on them and each one seems to do a different thing, or the same thing in a different way. They got about four different ways for the shell to come in and go out. It really takes you a while to puzzle over it.

I just sat there and moved the mechanism on it. I worked it back and forth, up and down, left and right. The shells would pop out and then pop in and I’d hit a button and all of a sudden all the shells in the magazine came popping out onto my lap. I put the shells back in and then worked it some more. All the shells were wet because I was crying on them.

Then I thought about it some more. It wasn’t really the shotgun’s fault. Shotgun was just doing its job like Cocksucker was just doing his. Didn’t mean nothing.

I thought about my Uncle Theo sitting in there naked, all drunk and smelling like a pokey. Sitting there with that smile on his face that said I was stupid. I thought about that fancy Beretta that he had no right to have–I’m sure of that. It started making me mad. Oh, it just made me so mad.

I came back inside the trailer with that Beretta, and I looked down at Uncle Theo, all sitting there stinking like a, well they say stinking like a whore, and I guess that’s why. Stinking like a pokey. He was still out cold.

I held that shotgun in front of him, the barrel pointed right at his gut. I was about the same distance as Uncle Theo was when he took that shot at Cocksucker. I could’ve killed him right then and there, and maybe I should have. Maybe.

I didn’t, though. I thought that wasn’t right. I couldn’t just go shoot a feller sleeping. That’d be worse than what happened to Cocksucker. At least Cocksucker had a chance of flying, although I think Uncle Theo had actually arkansawed the bird. Arkansawing is when you shoot a bird on the ground.  You shouldn’t ought to do that, because it’s dangerous because you could shoot your dog, and they always say it’s unsportsmanlike. I think Uncle Theo had arkansawed that bird because he was drunk and he probably figured he couldn’t hit him in the air because it’s harder to do that.

Just one more damned thing that he did that he cheated on. Like stealing the gun.

I figured I couldn’t just shoot him right in the belly while he slept. I couldn’t arkansaw a feller. I wasn’t like him.

But I also knew that this was my chance to make it all fair, to square things up for me and for Cocksucker. I started thinking about him having that pokey right after shooting my friend. That’s when I knew what I could do.

I took that Beretta, and really careful so as not to wake him up, I put one of the openings in the side of the gun where the shells go in right over his thing. His thing just lay there in the chamber of the gun, and he was still asleep.

I’d been working that shotgun for a while, so I knew which button to push to make the chamber close really, really fast and hard. My finger was on that button for a long time, thinking about the tears inside that shotgun chamber from when I was crying.

After I gave it a long, hard thought, I pushed that button and it made a loud CHINK! noise, all mechanical. And it slammed down hard on his thing and god damn did he cry.

Well, wouldn’t you know it. They said they didn’t want to hear no more stories in the car. The deal is off, and they stuck me in a cell. I’ve had fellers come in and yell at me like they do on TV, and others acting like they maybe could be my best friends if I just give them a chance. They want me to tell them about her. And the others. The ones they know about. I ain’t said a word to none of them. Ain’t said nothing until just now.

Finally one of them got enough brains together to give me back my recorder.

Maybe I’ll talk and maybe I won’t.

Well now, I guess maybe I’ve been telling a little bit of what the head shrinker would say is probably a fib or a lie, at least an exaggeration. No, he’d probably say it’s a lie.

There’s the kind of lies where you say something that’s just plain not true, and there’s the kind of lies where you make it seem liked something happened and it didn’t really like the way you said it did.

What happened with Monica happened the way I said it. Except I said it in a lie.

Monica and I went out there to that pond, and I threw that stick at my dog. I was the one who threw that stick, and she was the one who laughed. But I wasn’t laughing too.

When I hit my dog with that stick, I got mad. When I got mad I just saw red. I couldn’t think straight at all. My whole brain just froze up. As I was running down there, none of the thinking parts of my head was working. It was all just reflex going in and pulling old Roger out. Diving into that cold water and then pulling him out and then throwing him over my head–I guess all that water cooled off the system enough to think straight.

But there was something about Monica that wasn’t quite settled then, and I figured I could settle it. It might not have been easy, and it might be that not everybody would understand.

But we’d get it worked out.

I ain’t mean to most critters. I don’t mean to be mean to most critters. But there’s one that I ain’t got no problems killing or hurting anytime day or night. Fish. I ain’t never liked fish. I don’t care if they’re creek fish or lake fish or fish you see in the store or nothing.

Fish is about the only kind of meat that you can buy in a store that you can look in the eye. I got kicked out of an Albertsons once because I stared at a big salmon so long. I thought I’d seen something in the way he looked at me through the plastic wrap as I was walking toward the dairy section. I forgot about the milk and I sat there on the linoleum floor under the fluorescent lights staring at the fish, holding him close, trying to see if what I’d glimpsed had meant something. Had there been real brains in there? Had he stared into the face of some bristly bearded man holding a net who had dragged him out of his Alaskan river? Had he looked at that man and tried to tell him something, now that he’d been forced to look at a feller square? Had he sunk down to the depths of the ocean, come back fat and full of wisdom, and struck out for his home creek to try to make a difference?

As some feller in a blue smock bent down to grab me by my armpits, I set the salmon back up in his frozen shelf. I hadn’t glimpsed nothing. It’s often the case that you see in a critter what you hope to see, not what’s there. You can look a fish in the eye and see all the secrets in it, if it had any. But fish ain’t got any secrets worth knowing, because they don’t got the brains or the skin for it.

There are two kinds of mysteries. The kind of mysteries like fish, and the mysteries like birds. You can watch a fish swim around in a creek if you are a little lucky and patient, and you go about it carefully. But you can’t really see what it’s seeing, and when you get near them they go wiggling off. They see a caddis fly land and how it vibrates the water, they feel how their tail drags across the gravel bed as they dart forward, they smell a fly’s egg breaking the surface. But they don’t think about it long–by the time they’ve got it in their stomach they’ve already forgotten it. They live their lives trapped below ground, stuck facing the same strangling water, not remembering any of it. It’s all a stupid mystery.

I like birds though. Smart mystery. They can see it all below them, and nothing’s going to sneak up on them. I can’t imagine what they think as they fly, not in tight creeks but in sky that don’t end. I can’t imagine what it’s like to go in any direction, forever, and see all the angles of the world.

I can’t abide by people who do mean things to birds.

There was this time back at school. I know when I was talking before about Monica I was saying how smart I was and everything. How popular I was. That probably ain’t the truth, exactly. I mean I’m smart, but a lot of folks just–I don’t see eye to eye with a lot of folks. Especially kids.

I was out there during recess on the playground eating a hunk of cinnamon roll. I could see this kid named Kevin Anderson. He was mean, but he was tough too. He used to wrestle in classes after school in competitions. He could wrestle near anyone, except for me. He couldn’t lick me, though, because I had an extra gear. Once we’d wrestled, and well, anyway he only wrestled with me once. He said I didn’t fight fair, but you know I don’t know what fighting fair means. There’s just winning and losing, and I don’t lose. I took a bite or two out of him to prove it.

Kevin and a group of others used to school around out there on the playground, laughing at everybody else and being all cool and stuff. I mostly kept my distance, but in the times where I happened to come across them they all just scuttled off, or I would.

Kevin was in a mean mood I guess. He had some fishing line. There were seagulls always bombing down on the field, eating the French fries and potato chips and pizza crusts that none of us wanted to eat. So we’d throw them out there for the gulls to eat. It was fun to watch them bounce up and down, diving in on our scraps. You could never get close to them because they’d just fly off.

I had one that I used to call Herman who had a black mark on his beak. Sometimes he was a little bigger and sometimes a little smaller.

Anyway, this isn’t about Herman. It’s about some other seagull that Kevin went and messed with. See, what he done was to take one of them pizza crusts like I was talking about, and he took some fishing line and a fish hook. I didn’t know nothing about it until I heard somebody say, “Kevin’s going to go make himself a seagull kite.”

I got a little curious and started wandering over, along with a bunch of other kids. Not close, though–still keeping my distance. A lot of kids thought I was kind of funny after the fight I’d had with Kevin. You keep your distance and you can learn a lot about fish and kids, as long as they don’t see you too much.

Kevin chucked out a couple other pieces of bread for the gulls. “That’s to chum the water,” he told us all with a big wide grin. As about a dozen gulls came swooping in he threw out a pizza crust with a hook tied to a fishing line in it. The crust didn’t hit the ground before a seagull came diving down and snatched it out of the air. He made it about thirty yards up in the air before he ran out of high test fishing line. It snapped his head around. He dropped about ten yards and then made to fly again, but the line wound around a wing. He spun down, one wing flapping like crazy while the other was pinned to his side. Like a maple tree helicopter seed.

He thumped when he hit, but he got his head up pretty quick. He looked scared, switching his head every direction as we all came running. He couldn’t seem to get up. We all ran around him in a big circle, close enough to see but far enough away that we could say it wasn’t our fault. 

We all stared at the bird, and he stared at all of us, wide eyed and quiet. The thick fishing line was pink with blood near his mouth.

“Go poke him with that stick,” somebody whispered.

“Think he’s going to die?”

“He looks pretty hurt.”

“Go get a teacher.”

They were just whispers, though. Nobody moved.

It seemed so mean and stupid, circling around this poor bird like a bunch of sharks. So I just did what any normal-thinking kid would do. I didn’t mean nothing by it.

I just wandered in there, hoping people wouldn’t pay too much attention, and I grabbed him by his head and spun his body around quick. Took a couple of hard swings–he had no intention of dieing when he woke up that day. I couldn’t blame him. More often than not you ain’t planning on dieing in a school yard.

At first he was tense, but as I swung him I could feel his body give that quick tug that tells you the neck has snapped. I stopped then, and his free wing flapped hard for a few seconds–it’s a reflex dead birds sometimes have. A red headed girl screamed.

We all looked at her, and she was staring right into my eyes as I stood there with the dead bird hanging from my hand, his legs slowly kicking and the wing coming to a stop. Her freckly face screamed again. I flinched. I don’t look people in the eye much.

“Don’t…” I whispered.

It was quiet again for just a second. Just as I was hoping maybe I could walk off and people would pretend it hadn’t happened, Josh Swanson shouted “Bird killer!” at me. The rest of them stared at me like I was a freak, like I’d done something evil. Nobody even looked at Josh.

I set the bird down and lowered my eyes to look at the dead gull. Anything was better than looking back at them kids.

“What’d you do that for?” somebody shouted.

“You KILLED him you idiot.”

“You’re fucking crazy Theo.”

“Bird killer! Bird killer!” Josh started shouting. I thought it was the dumbest thing I ever heard until all the other kids started joining in. “BIRD KILLER BIRD KILLER BIRD KILLER” they screamed at me, voices filled with hate. “BIRD KILLER BIRD KILLER.” I was, but the way they said it, it didn’t sound so good. I wish I hadn’t, but I started to cry. I’d do anything now to take back the crying.

I just stood there in the middle of the circle until Mr. Mooney came running out. “What’s going on here?” he boomed, shutting everybody up.

“I said, what is going on here?” He was looking at Kevin, who he knew was usually a pretty good place to start in these sort of situations.

“Nothing,” he told Mr. Mooney’s shoes.

“Somebody better start telling me what happened, or I’m just going to throw a bunch of you kids in detention. Why are all you kids shouting around a dead seagull?”

“Theo did it,” somebody mumbled.

“What was that Josh?”

“Theo killed that seagull. He strangled it,” Josh said, his voice getting braver.

It wasn’t true, of course. Snapping a neck is completely different from strangling something. Who in their right mind would bother trying to strangle a bird?

“Is that true, Theo?” he asked softer. He looked a little disappointed. I was one of those kids a teacher never had to worry about.

I looked up a little and whimpered as tears and snot came flowing down my face.

The bell rang, and kids used it as an excuse to walk away before Mr. Mooney got it into his head to get anybody else in trouble. He stood there looking at me as the rest of the kids left.

“Look, just don’t touch it. And get yourself cleaned up. And don’t put your hands near your face. You can’t touch birds like that. They might have all kinds of diseases. I’ll get this taken care of.”

He started walking back to the building, but when I didn’t follow he came and put his hand behind my back to shove me along with him. I don’t know why, but I guess he didn’t want to leave me out there with the bird.

He picked up a grocery sack that was laying around just as we got near the door. Then he bent over and stared at me square. “It’s going to be ok. We don’t have to report this.” I’d got things back in control by then. I gave him my easy look, still sniffling. I wanted so much to give him, or give anyone, my hard look. But you have to be careful with the hard look.

He turned around to go get the dead gull. I stood there and watched him use the bag as a makeshift glove to pick up the gull and then walk around the side of the building to throw it into a dumpster.

After school got out I stopped off at the dumpster on my way to the bus. I climbed up the chain link fence until I could reach the top of the dumpster, then heaved my body onto its edge. I stretched out and could just reach the dead gull. I yanked hard on his head, and because his neck was already broken it tore off in my hand.

After I slid off the dumpster I shoved the gull head into the front pocket of my jeans. When I got home I looked up Josh’s address in the phone book.

The next morning I set out two hours earlier than normal. It was 45 minutes of bicycling before I was finally in town, and then another 50 minutes of scouting before I found a nice little spot that I was pretty satisfied would work. I stashed my bike in a ditch, where I also found a long, thick stick. I wasn’t sure if I’d need the stick, but like they say, it’s better to have a stick and not need it, than need a stick and not have it.

I sat wedged between a big shrub and a tall picket fence for about 45 more minutes. I didn’t budge an inch. I ain’t like a lot of fidgety kids. I can sit. It was plenty cold enough to see my breath, but I switched positions just often enough to keep everything from freezing. 

I figured I’d scouted well enough when I finally saw Josh through the picket slats. He was riding his bike. He was on the wrong side of the street, though. For a split second I thought about coming back tomorrow. But tomorrow was Saturday, and although I’m patient I didn’t see much point in waiting until Monday. I figured I probably could get him with surprise on my side, and even if I didn’t, he’d have all weekend to think about me, which would suit me fine.

At about fifty feet short of me I came charging out from my hiding spot, the stick pumping in my hand like a sword. He didn’t recognize me at first, and stared at me like I was some strange animal he might tell his friends about later in class. By the time he recognized my face I’d already rammed the stick through the spokes of his front tire.

The bike flipped over and he hit the ground hard. Snapped one of his front teeth right off. I think it was the fall that did that, anyway. I don’t think I was that strong.

Before he knew what was what I was already on top of him. I rolled him over and pinned his shoulders down with my knees.

“Who is the Big Bird Killer?” I asked him real quietly. “Who is? Who is the Big Bird Killer?”

He stared up at me scared, not knowing what to say. There was blood all over his face, oozing out his nose and the big gash on his forehead. “Let me see. Let me see if you want some help listening.” I grabbed his ear and twisted it. “Now who is the Big Bird Killer?”

“Nuh-nobody is,” he gurgled.

“Oh, but you don’t have that right. I am the Big Bird Killer. Oh yes I am. That makes you a liar, doesn’t it? It ain’t no good having things like that coming out of your mouth. Lying all the time.”

I pulled the gull head out of my front pocket. I looked at the head right in the eye–you really can only look at a gull’s eyes one at a time because they’re on the opposite sides of the head–and I asked it on one side, “Is he a liar?”

Then I turned the gull head around to face the other side and I said out of the corner of my mouth, “Yes, I think he is.”

I flipped him back. “You sure?”

“Oh I really think so.”

“Now you got to be sure about this.”

And the bird said back, “Oh, he’s lying. He’s lying a lot.”

“Well what are we going to do about that?”

The seagull said, “He needs judgment. He’s got to pay the price.”

Josh started squirming on the ground, bawling “Get off me. Just get off me.”

“No, I’m sorry, but this here bird says you got to pay the price.”

Then Josh made a big mistake. He took a deep breath and screamed “GET OOOOFFFF ME!”, but he didn’t get to the ME! part, because in the middle of OOOOFFFF he made his mouth just custom shape for stuffing a bird head into it.

So that’s when I took the neck end of the bird and jammed it in. I didn’t think the beak end should go in his mouth first. That was too nice for him. I shoved in the other end, with the stringy chord of throat and meat and blood hanging out of it. I spun it around like a corkscrew. As feathers and gore and disease gagged his mouth, I shouted over and over again, “BIRD LIAR BIRD LIAR BIRD LIAR!”

He started crying like a little girl.

Stupid fish.

After the thing with the seagull Josh told on me. Mr. Palmer, the school principal, called me in to his office. I figured I was probably in for it, but that was kind of expected. I wasn’t crazy. I knew you couldn’t always expect to get things cleaned up right away. But I was nervous. Not about beating the tar out of Josh, but about the way I did it.

Mr. Palmer only had three fingers on his right hand, and that’s counting the big thumb that was rumored to be his toe. He was big, but not like my black teacher Mr. Wallace was. Just round and wheezy. When I got called in I was planning on biding my time and not saying nothing. It was Josh’s word against mine. And Josh was likely to want to reconsider that word in the next few days, if I had my way.

But when I came into the Principal’s Office my plans got changed a little. Uncle Theo was sitting there waiting. He looked sober and mad as hell about it.

“Goddammit Theo. What the hell is going on here?”

“Now sir,” Mr. Palmer began. “We all just want to get to the truth.”

“Well why don’t you just tell me what the fuck you think the truth is.” Uncle Theo was staring at the toe-thumb. It was hard not to, and Uncle Theo wasn’t like most grownups. He’d stare at whatever crossed his path. “You blaming Theo for that too?”

Just about every ounce of blood in Palmer’s fat, sweaty body charged into his cheeks. For a second that seemed to drag on for hours the three of us stared at his weird thumb together.

“Sir, that is an old wound from Vietnam, and I’d appreciate it if you’d try and keep on the subject at–“

“Vietnam, huh?” Uncle Theo looked impressed. “You grease a lot of gooks over there? You take out some Charlie? I wasn’t hardly more than five or six back then, but it sure looked like a grand old time, didn’t it? I seen Platoon. ‘Steers and queers!’ Hah.  Sorry. Guess I’m supposed to feel all like you did some big thing for America and all. It’s got to suck knowing you lost your stroking hand while getting fucked in a losing war. Fucking pussy hippies fucked it up good.”

Palmer didn’t seem to be taking in that Uncle Theo was trying to feel sorry for him. “Your kid may have put another kid, Josh Swanson, in a hospital. I mean he’s really hurt. Maybe broke a rib. Definitely lost a front tooth and broke a wrist.” Palmer looked at me. “Theo, what do you know about this?”

Uncle Theo turned and looked at me. “Yeah, Theo, tell me why the fuck I’m down here talking in this goddamn school anyway?”

“Sir, please don’t swear in here.”

“Excuse me?” Uncle Theo looked back at Palmer, then his thumb.

“I said I can’t allow any more swearing in–“

“So what the fuck happened, Theo? Did you kick the shit out of this kid or what? You better not have or so help me I’m going to break your goddamn little neck for this one.”

“Sir, I said you can’t swear in here.”

“Sorry.”  He was rolling his eyes. Then he looked down on me. “Well come on, Useless. I can say ‘useless’, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “USELESSS. Tell me what you done right this damn darn minute.”

“They going to make us pay for the hospital?” I asked. The trick with Uncle Theo was not to be good or bad, right or wrong. It was all about steering.

 Uncle Theo’s eyes lit up. “Now just a damned darned second here. That’s a really good question. Is that what this is all about? A shakedown? Sticking the blame on my kid so I get stuck with the tab? Because I twisted an ankle two years ago and that goddamn hospital stuck me with a bill for seven hundred bucks. Seven hundred bucks for an X-Ray and five minutes time with some know-it-all doctor. She did have nice tits, but not seven hundred dollars worth of nice tits.”

Uncle Theo was getting worked up. He was leaning over Palmer’s desk on the giant knuckles of his fists, his big hairy arms bulging. Palmer looked a little scared. “Well, now, I uh don’t know–“

“You don’t know. Well what do you know? Who saw Useless here beat the snot out of this Josh kid?”

“Well, we’re going by what the boy has told us–“

“What the boy has told us? Hell, I’ll tell you the exact opposite thing. I’ll tell you Theo was digging up worms to go fishing at the time he was supposed to be stomping this kid. I’ll tell you that there ain’t no god damned way I am going to pay a red cent to some pussy kid who fell over on his bike. You can tell the same god damned thing to his mom and dad and you can tell that to the cops too if you want. Is that all you brought me in here for? You got anything else?”

“I’m going to suspend Theo from school for a week. I really have to.”

Uncle Theo leaned in a little closer on his fists. He lowered his voice to a low growl. “Now you listen here. You do that and next thing you know people are saying this is all my problem when it ain’t. Ask around about me. Ask people if I give a fuck. You may not be all that surprised to find out most people think I’m the stupidest, meanest mother fucking shithead in this town. I ain’t above finding somebody’s home, duct taping their cat and sticking a shotgun barrel down its mouth.” He smiled at the photo of a tired old lady on Palmer’s desk. “Maybe blow its guts out right in your wife’s panty drawer. You know, shit like that. Go ahead and fuck with me. I’ll do shit to you that’ll make you wish you were back in Vietnam shooting Japs.”

Uncle Theo stood up straight and gave the thumb-toe a big smile, like he’d just sold it a used pickup truck. “Well that settles that. Come on, Theo. Let’s let this guy get some real work done.

“Sorry about the hand, by the way. Looks like it hurt like a bitch.”

Nobody mentioned anything about the seagull head, which was what worried me the most.

I first saw that face when I was maybe six or so.

First time I remember seeing it I was at a gas station and I was playing Joust. Nobody has Joust anymore–it was really old and broken down even back then. It had sat there so long it seemed like it’d got sucked into one of the grimy walls. But it was a fun game. You fly around on a big old chicken, and you jump on other chickens and you turn them into eggs.

I just got my butt whooped by some other kid who could Joust better than me, but I beat him eventually. I beat him lots of times eventually.

Anyway, I looked up and I could see her face over my shoulder in the reflection of the glass screen of the video game. She was about twenty feet away. Her eyes were scrunched tightly together and she wore a real frown. You almost never see people actually frown, but she was doing it. Her hands were under her chin, and they kept clenching and unclenching in fists. I could feel the hate steaming off her like spit on a hot sidewalk. I was afraid to turn around. I guess I must have been older than that at the time, because I was playing Joust. Maybe I was seven or so. Well, it don’t matter none I guess.

The thing that mattered was that she was mad. She looked so mad at me, or maybe at the boy next to me I hoped at the time. I figured out pretty soon that she was mad at me, though.

I heard the guy at the counter say, “Hey, ma’am, is there anything I can get for you?” The guy sounded a little worried. She mumbled and maybe bought something, although I was too scared to turn around and see. Then I heard her shuffle out. I watched the other kid play until I finally worked up the guts to walk away from that video game. When I got outside I couldn’t see her. I kept looking back as I walked home to the trailer to make sure.

About a week later she was standing by the 7-11 when I was leaving it. Cambridge was a small town even by Idaho standards, so you get used to seeing the same faces over and over. But it was different with her, because folks almost never even notice me. With her, though, it was always hate poking right at me. It was poking right into me like a sharp stick, like a sharp stick poking right into my stomach. The way that look poked at me even when she wasn’t around made me look behind doors, stare through windows, and hide behind cars to see if I was being followed.

I guess I ought to tell you a little bit more about her. She had this grayish wrinkled face, and these little eyes that were all withered. But at the same time she couldn’t have been more than thirty or thirty five. That was the weird thing–she looked so old, but the kind of old that you once in a long while see just hanging off of a young person like molasses.

She looked old and withered like Mrs. Jeffries, but with the kind of hate that you never see on an old woman. Old women almost never look hateful. They just look tired and fed up.

She had a long, grayish brown pony tail, which is the thing I’ll always remember the most about her. It felt like rough rope in your hands, but it was stiff as wire. I didn’t see it the first couple of times because she never looked away from me. But eventually I saw it when I finally worked up the nerve to walk at an angle to the right of her. She turned and looked away quickly when I started getting close.

The pony tail went all the way to her butt. I always used to wonder if she had a problem with it when she had to go to the bathroom. Sometimes you forget to move things out of the way. You know, like once in a while I’ll be going to the bathroom and I’ll be standing there and remember all of the sudden that I forgot to pull my pants down. Maybe she had a problem like that too, once in a while, because that hair was just so long.

Anyway, I saw her face over and over again, but I never told nobody. It wasn’t like Uncle Theo really cared.

Finally Uncle Theo had to drift out of town. He called it “cruising for boozing,” which was the only way he could make himself feel good about looking for work. He’d work in a town for a spell. Eventually he’d steal something or get himself fired somehow. Then he’d coast for a bit and drink as much of his money as he could and feed me pancakes or oatmeal or ramen. Then when he barely had gas money left he’d move on to the next place. Next town we wound up was New Meadows, Idaho. He was doing yard work.

I was leaving the gas station and I saw her again. I saw her in a Subaru Brat, which is like a Subaru and like a pickup truck too. Kind of stupid looking cars, and they only made them a couple of years.

By then I was getting nightmares about her. I could see her face at night in dreams through the trailer window, and the grey face scared me. I wasn’t scared that she’d bust down a door and come for me, because Uncle Theo could tear her apart. It’s not just that he would drink a lot and he’d shoot things, although if he heard a noise when we lived out in the forest, sometimes he’d just stick his shotgun barrel out the window and fire a shell or two into the night. Uncle Theo wasn’t nothing like me–anyone could see his meanness the minute he came into the room. The Pony Tail Lady was all crazy and hate, but she wasn’t no match for Uncle Theo. Even now, I ain’t no match for Uncle Theo when it comes to making a mess of someone. He had no sympathy, no fear and no limit. When the fire lit in him, he could become something that wasn’t even human. Just raw force. Truth is that I don’t care what they say about alcoholics. I liked him drunk because it seemed to keep the fire from burning too hard. He was still a rattlesnake, but his mind worked slower and you could angle things so he didn’t blow up so much. You could practice your easy smile and other things so you were ready when the Jim Beam wore off.

Anyhow, we moved on ten miles away to McCall and she kept following me. It’s a fancy little resort town. Not as fancy as Sun Valley, but it was pretty fancy with lots of rich folks with their Cadillacs.

I went into an ice cream shop to get me a mint chocolate chip cone, but just off the spur of the moment I just said, “Well, Mr. Ice Cream Man, I’d like me a cup of coffee.” I figured it was high time for me to start drinking some coffee and start acting like a man.

He looked at me like I was crazy, but I just looked him square and said, “I want me some coffee. I’m old enough. I can get me a coffee.”

He grinned at me with his fat vanilla ice cream face and mumbled, “I ain’t going to tell you what you can drink and what you can’t.” I didn’t like the way the beady eyes between his giant cherry nose looked at me.

I put my money on the counter and cool as a cucumber said, “You got that for damn sure.” I said it like Uncle Theo would have said it.

Me and Ice Cream Face met up again three weeks later. The local paper said it was suicide–just another lonely man who drank too much and gave himself a big dose of antifreeze from a horse needle.

Anyway, he poured me a big old cup of joe, and man did it make me squirrelly. I tell you, I drink some Pepsis, and whenever I drink too much of it I get kind of squirrelly. I was squirrelly as heck after that. I was sitting in the coffee shop bouncing up and down, looking all over the place, and my eyes moved around a lot. I just get kind of funny like when, well, squirrelly is the word. Squirrelly.

So I couldn’t sit in there drinking my coffee. I started walking out, and that’s when I saw her across the street. She was just standing there staring at me. There was something that coffee did to me because something in me made me want to run up and punch her or something. Just make her stop. I figured–I don’t know what I figured. I don’t think I thought much. I just came running right at her.

She started backing up and going into her Subaru. I jumped right into her, and I punched her hard in the stomach as hard as I could as we both fell down in the gutter. I wasn’t that old, so it didn’t hurt her that hard. She grabbed me as she fell and we both wrestled on the ground.

“Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you leave me alone?” I kept screaming at her as we rolled around on the street. We were being all ugly there, in the middle of all them rich people. The thing I’ve noticed about rich people is that when you get really ugly they stop paying attention and pretend you aren’t there. Even more than they normally do to me.

I’m rolling around in the gutter in downtown McCall, and I’m screaming and wailing and thrashing and making all kinds of ruckus. I spilled my coffee a long time ago, what was left of it. I kept screaming, “Why don’t you leave me alone!” because she’d scared me so much for so long.

She finally grabbed me by the wrists–really got hold of me–and she yelled at me really fast, just one time. She didn’t want to say much in front of all them rich fellers. She said in a high, record scratching voice “You ain’t going back to him, boy.” Just like that.

I was expecting her to say anything. I was expecting her to say, “You going to die, boy.” Or “I’m going to rip your left arm clean off, boy.” Or “I don’t like you, boy.” Or something like that, you know?

But “You ain’t going back to him, boy”? I didn’t know what to say. I’m usually pretty quick on my feet, but I just stood there stunned. She took advantage of me trying to make up my mind by grabbing the door open and throwing me in the Subaru.

I should’ve got up right then when she ran around to the driver side of the car, but what I saw inside so scared me I could only sit there frozen. On the dashboard there were all these photos of me and Uncle Theo. The Uncle Theo photos didn’t look so good, because it looked like she’d smeared food on them. It looked like ketchup or mustard, and maybe some relish or something. It was all squiggled over with food where his pictures were. But my pictures were fine. Sometimes she drew a nice little ketchup circle around my head.

I just sat there staring at my pictures. Most of the time I don’t even remember seeing her. There was one where I was standing next to the Joust arcade game, but the boy I was playing with wasn’t there that time. But the worst photos were where I was laying in bed. I always dreamed that she was looking through my window, but I didn’t think it was real. She must have looked in some dark night after I was sleeping and Uncle Theo was passed out or out seeing Charlotte. I was so scared then. I didn’t know what to do.

She got in the car and tied my hands with some duct tape. I started screaming “Let me go! Let me go!” People were walking toward us, so she quickly stuck a sock in my mouth and we peeled on out of there.

As she looked ahead she whispered to me, “Don’t you say no more, boy. Don’t you say no more.”

I got to tell you about this sock. Living with Uncle Theo, and some of the other things I’ve done, I’ve eaten some pretty rotten meat in my life. I mean some really foul meat. Been sitting out on a dashboard for a bunch of days. Kind of festery. One time when we got bad off there was this thing on the side of the road. Anyway, I ate some bad things in my life. Some things you wouldn’t want to talk about in a recorder.

But the worst taste I ever had in my life was that sock. It was so bad. She must have been wearing that sock for a month. It was probably a white sock at first, but now it was stained with brown and green and grey. It was also bloody, although that could’ve been from my mouth because my gums bleed sometimes.

We headed south and I think she was worried about the police. We had made quite a scene. Rich folks sometimes call cops on ugly people when they don’t want to do anything themselves.

We were driving south in the Subaru, and I was scared of her and them pictures stuck with sticky tape on the dashboard. The way the ketchup and mustard was smeared in circles and crosses and question marks. I felt so awful and frightened. I’ve been scared of her so long–I guess I’ve been scared of her my whole life it seems like. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

We got south of Cascade and drove into the Payette River canyon. Its sides are steep and covered in trees, and it’s pretty famous for whitewater rafting. Water crashes over the rocks like thousands of runaway shopping carts. The road going down it is windy, and lots of times you look straight down out the side window and see nothing but tumbling water slamming into itself. I’ve stood next to it and thought about logging and clawing out roads with bulldozers and stabbing holes for condominiums. I think the river is where those mountains scream.

It ain’t a great road, and it gets lots of tourists going from Boise to McCall. None of them have a lick of patience, and you get people trying to pass each other at the dumbest places you could imagine. People pass around corners just to get ahead, even if it could get them killed. That road has probably killed more people in a summer than I have in my whole life, but nobody ever says nothing about it. It’s a lucky road.

I felt so bad with that sock in my mouth. I mean I’ve caught some rabbits before and I ain’t always been the best person to the critters I caught. But I didn’t never stuff no nasty sock in their mouth. I always did good by them. Gave them a little food, and a little room to go hoppity hop around in their little metal box. First couple times maybe I left it out in the sun and they didn’t live so long, but I figured out how to take care of them. I knew better than to duct tape a little boy’s hands together and stuff a moldy old nasty sock down his throat.

I started thinking about them rabbits–the ones that didn’t get killed right away by leaving them in the sun–and thinking about how if a little boy my age could catch a rabbit and keep it alive and not make it hateful like this, then how come she couldn’t? She was a lot older than me. She was old enough to know that the thing she was doing was wrong.

It made me angry. Like that time with Monica–this river of red-hot blood came pouring down over my eyes. Not really, but that’s what it felt like. Everything turned reddish and my eyeballs got hot. They burned hot on the inside. I could feel the maggots in me rage like the Payette River, foamy and swirly and so strong.

I looked at her up close for the first time. She had a hairy upper lip and a couple of whiskers on her chin. I hated those whiskers, and I hated those eyes that shot every which way like Jethro’s did before he died. I hated the way her car smelled like armpits and cigarettes and moldy food. I hated her dirty clothes and her young and old face and the way her voice sounded like a scratched record. More than anything, though, I hated that braided pony tail.

Her hair was like that lady Medusa’s, except there was only one snake so the meanness wasn’t spread out over her whole head. Her hair was what I dreamed about at night, wrapping around my bed, tying me down while she laughed and shrieked and stared from the window. Her hair danced in front of my eyes, making fun of me, touching me where I don’t like being touched by nobody. Then finally tying itself around my throat. It froze me into cold, sweaty stone, until it finally choked me in the night and made me scream. It made Uncle Theo get up, holding his gun, shouting at me to wake the fuck up, goddamn it. Wake the fuck up you little shit. I’ll give you something to cry about you little goddamn piece of shit. The hair is what made Uncle Theo beat me in the night.

I had to get away. She was going fast and looking behind in the rear view mirror because she was worried about the cops maybe following us. Just as she was taking a sharp corner, I lifted up my leg and braced my back. I kicked the steering wheel as hard as I could, mashing her hand against the wheel under my foot. She wasn’t holding the wheel tight, and the car didn’t make the turn.

We skidded off the road and slid twenty feet down the steep bank until the car slammed against two tall pine trees. We were only a few feet above the Payette, the car close to tipping completely over. Smoke, the smell of gasoline and the angry roar of the river filled up the inside of the little car.

I guess she’d put on my seatbelt, because I was ok. But when we hit the tree one of her legs snapped under the steering wheel and bone was sticking out. Her face was bloody from hitting the windshield, and her nose was broken.

She just stared at me with her mouth open and her hand turned up. She was leaning against me because of the angle of the car, her faced tilted right into mine. I shook her a little and her eyes blinked, but she didn’t move none. She’d probably broken her backbone.

She finally made her mouth twitch a little, and I bent my head closer because I wanted to hear what she had to say over the noise of the river.

“My baby,” she whispered. “Don’t you go back.” She coughed some, and then kept whispering. “Don’t let him take and wreck you too.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wasn’t her baby. I’d been with Uncle Theo for as long as I could remember. She was trying to confuse me. She knew I had the upper hand and she was trying to get just a minute or two because she knew somebody would stop and help her if I waited just a little. But I knew a thing or two about being tricky. I was too smart for her. I pulled my head away and I couldn’t hear no more of what she was whispering.

It didn’t take me a second to figure out what I was going to do once I saw the pony tail. I scraped my wrists along a jagged piece of metal until I’d cut through the duct tape. Once my hands were free, I pulled that horrible sock out of my mouth. I threw it out a broken window and it fell in the river and was gone quick as lightening. I hope to god it split into a million tiny pieces of string.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and pushed her up with one arm so I could turn and look her square in the face. I mashed my nose right up to her broken nose. I could feel a slick of blood and broken bone shift against my nose. I stared straight into her eyes and took a couple of long deep breaths. Then I said, “Oh I hate you. I hate you so much.”

I remember saying that so clearly. I said it cold and cruel, and my eyes left no doubt that I never hated anyone in my entire life as much as I hated her at that moment. That ain’t no exaggeration.

She stopped moving her lips and whispering words I couldn’t hear even if I wanted to. Her mouth hung open and her eyes filled with fear, and the fear only made me feel more hate and more power.

I grabbed the pony tail laying next to her and held it with my right hand. It wasn’t a snake anymore. It wasn’t scary anymore. It was stiff and useless, like a dead kid’s arm.

I stopped bracing her up and she slid over, half on top of me. I grabbed her jaw by putting my thumb in her mouth and pulled it as far open as I could. I then began shoving the pony tail into her mouth, hard and fast. I knew I didn’t have much time.

It reminds me a little now of when I had to sleep outside with Uncle Theo. In the morning he’d tell me to hurry up and stuff my sleeping bag, and I hated doing it. I knew he’d whup me if I took too long, but when you stuff a sleeping bag sometimes you aren’t strong enough to keep it all down and it comes pushing back up.

Her pony tail was like that. It didn’t go down easy. It got stuck a couple times and it seemed like it was coiling back on itself. It made me panic some, because I knew I just had to get it done.

Her eyes stared wide open back at me while I stuffed and stuffed it down her throat. They blinked, and even though they were starting to bulge some I knew I had to keep forcing it in if I was going to kill her.

A spider web of red blood vessels popped up on her face, and her cheeks and forehead turned purple under all the blood. She stopped gagging.

Finally her head started twitching and the loose skin under her neck shook, and I could see death come down on her. Her eyelids stopped moving. Her wide grey eyes stared into space. I stared into those dead, bloody eyes, and I felt all the anger ease out of me. My body unclenched, and I looked up.

A man with a tidy brown beard was staring at me through the driver’s window. I don’t know long he had been there, but our eyes locked on each other. He looked confused and scared. I guess he thought he was going to be some big hero, and here he was looking at something I bet he never thought he’d ever see. He turned around and shouted up to somebody above him.

I didn’t know what he’d do, but out of habit I started making things look better for me. I knew the cops might be convinced that a lady died in a car wreck, even if that feller said otherwise. But no cop was going to believe that she accidentally choked to death on her pony tail.

I pulled it up out of her throat. There was blood and pieces of food covering it. With any luck the cops would think she just threw up on herself after the wreck.

There wasn’t much else I could do. I shoved her over and then leaned back in my seat. I looked out at the water crashing almost right outside my window.

Maybe it had a reason to be angry. Maybe it didn’t.

The brown bearded feller who saw me never spoke a word of it to nobody, near as I know. I wonder if he thinks about that day much. I wonder what it’s like to be him, knowing you saw some kid murder a lady and you didn’t do or say nothing about it. I ain’t never felt sorry for the Pony Tail Lady, but that was a hell of a thing that happened to him. He was just trying to help out.

He’s probably read about me in the newspapers and he probably recognizes my face. Could he have done something to save Sam or Monica or some of the others? He doesn’t know how slippery I’ve been, so maybe he thinks he could have. Maybe he really could have. I reckon that’s a hell of a thing to have to live with for just a normal feller.

When the papers get word of this recording, I expect they’ll probably try and track him down. I hope they don’t find him. He’s got enough on his mind.

Things happened in a blur after the ambulance came. Seems like the next thing I know I’m sitting on a hospital bed getting talked at by a cop. I didn’t say much, but I nodded when he told me what he thought happened. I pretended to look scared of him, even though I could probably have killed him in less than fifteen seconds with the long needle on the tray behind him. Folks go easy on kids if they look scared the right way.

The cop talked to Uncle Theo for a few minutes before we both went home. I listened in–my bed was pretty close to the waiting room where they talked.

Uncle Theo has told a pack of lies in his time, and most times I can see every angle of what he’s getting at. Truth is he ain’t that bright. I never could figure out why he told the cop the Pony Tail Lady was his sister though.

Some prison head shrinker asked me a question I guess I’m going to get asked a few more times in my life. So I guess I better come up with a good answer about it. No sense getting around it.

He asked me, “Why you gotta go and kill people all the time?”

Well, he didn’t say it just like that, but I can tell that’s what he was thinking. I think he thinks that I just go out and kill folks. Just wake up in the morning, eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then just stab somebody in the eye.

I think he probably figures that I killed Mrs. Jeffries, though I didn’t.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t go out and just kill folks. They just kind of, I guess the best thing I can say is, “How come you, Mr. Fancy Man in your spectacles and everything, how come you don’t?”

I saw on TV once that people were fighting some other fellers in a war and the guns were blazing and people were jumping way up in the air because explosions were going off. It was about Viet Nam.

And there was this time where one of them looks at the other one and says, “We won the battle, but we’re going to lose the war.”

I guess that’s how most people fight their fights, but I don’t.

Difference between me and most folks is that I don’t lose my wars. I just can’t accept that. If I got to win my wars losing every battle along the way, I’m going to do it.