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.