The day after Roger got hurt by the stick, Monica and me went out.  I think she sort of thought we were going to go daily, because she knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to go take Roger out again if he was feeling better. I said, “Sure, he’s feeling better.”

I smiled on the outside, but I wasn’t smiling so much inside.

I guess I was like that goose that I saw Uncle Theo kill, with his big old grin gaping open, and his eyes rolled back. His mouth sure looked happy, but his eyes didn’t.

Anyway, when we went out this time I told her to go down the slope to the bank of the pond and see if she could go find that stick. She looked at me like she wasn’t quite sure why, and I said, “Go ahead and do it. It’ll be fun.”

And she went down there and she found that stick. But while she was down there, I found myself a lot bigger stick. Actually, I’m lying again. It wasn’t no stick. It was a big old rock. And I just dropped that thing right on her head. Man, when it hit her head it sounded like a big old watermelon getting thwacked with a baseball bat.

She fell face down into that pool of water and she did not look good.

It’s too bad, because I always thought she was a pretty girl, even if most people didn’t.

Well, I guess that’s pretty much most of the Monica story. Monica’s still with me. Her and Roger got a lot closer. You might say that they’re of the same breed now.

What I did was I dragged poor Monica to the side of that bank and I stuck her in some bushes. I came back that night with a backpack and a little hand saw I had from my Boy Scout days.

Back in Idaho I got a merit badge for learning how to field dress and quarter a rabbit, but it’s a shame they didn’t have a patch for field dressing and quartering a person. I probably would’ve got that too that evening. I didn’t even have a flashlight to put in my mouth. I did it all by feel.

I took her home and nobody ever seemed to notice or ask about it. May sound kind a strange, but I never talked to her much around other folks and nobody saw us going out there those couple of times.

I stuck her in the ground and old Roger kept trying to dig her out for a couple days. He finally stopped.

Then I thought, “Well maybe there’s a reason he’s trying to dig her out. I mean, he did have a bone to pick so to speak.”

Then I thought about that, him having a bone to pick, and it seemed kind of funny to me. It made me laugh, kind of like how Monica laughed at poor old Roger, a big old gash in her face.

So, every night, about two in the morning, Roger and I would go out and dig up a little bit of dirt. I’d find myself a nice little hunk, a little hunk of Monica.

Roger really took to the taste. I told him he couldn’t roll around in it. My foster mom noticed the smell. But I gave him his hunk and then I fed him a mint Tic Tac, and nobody seemed the wiser.