In the woods

            There are people nobody should go into the woods with. Drunks, druggies and psychopaths are very high on that list. Especially when those guys are carrying all the weapons they can lift. And they have enough ammunition to stock a small third world warlord. So a trip to a cabin with about ten or twelve of the assorted drunks, druggies and psychos sounded like a can’t miss idea. Big Earl packed up all of his implements of destruction, bought two years worth of ammo and headed east. He was driving one of three hearses.

 

Now at this point it might just do to say that if your company vehicle is a hearse, working there just ain’t a good idea. Especially when the company isn’t a funeral home. It is a bar with a seriously bad reputation. That is bad by Texas standards. Where bars with chicken wire in front of the bandstands are considered family joints. None the less there was Big Earl in a hearse loaded with booze, a five gallon jug filled with Black Mollies and assorted hallucinogens and three gun crazy strippers. The other two hearses with all the assorted ne’er do wells followed along behind him. It was going to be a fun weekend.

 

            Big Earl was driving because he had been to the bar owner’s cabin a few times in the past. The cabin was located in the Big Piney area of East Texas. Earl used to drive the bar owner’s dad, Pop Kirk, out there for a monthly high stakes poker game. He’d then serve drinks, if they didn’t bring along some girls for that. Pop Kirk usually brought along a few ladies with somewhat flexible morals just to keep the party lubricated and to amuse the losers. Blowjobs have a tendency to make you forget that Pop won with far more regularity than the laws of chance allowed. Earl never said that Pop Kirk cheated. Others may not be quite as diplomatic as he was.

 

            Anyhow, Earl was driving, and eventually everyone got to the cabin. Pat, the bar owner, had won the cabin in a big time poker game in Shreveport one year. There was a bit of a dispute about the hand Pat won with. The argument was settled in typical Texas style and Pat, being the gentleman he was, paid for the funeral out of his own pocket. Smith and Wesson beat a pair of Queens every time. Not to mention the former owner should have brought more money to the game and he brought a knife to a gun fight. It just showed bad judgment all the way around.

 

The cabin was a small, three room place that only had electricity because the local utility owner played in Pop’s high stakes games. The place had been built in the late 1800’s. It was an old clapboard cabin with a covered porch on the front and both sides. The back wall was made of local stone and had a big fireplace in the center of it. Before Pat got it, somebody had added on a kitchen and a bedroom just past the stone wall. The bedroom door was punched through the stone on the left side of the fireplace and the kitchen door was likewise punched through on the right. The toilet was a two seat out house down the hill a bit. Water came from a well the county said was safe. But, since the county water commissioner occasionally played out there and he didn’t drink the water, Big Earl drinking the water was not gonna happen.

 

Pat had arrived early and put his stuff in the bedroom. Pat had brought three big old bar-b-que grills, a mess of steaks, ice chests full of mixers and ice and all the fixing’s for a great cookout. Pat was one hell of a good cook on the grill. When the hearses full of chemicals, more alcohol and assorted assholes pulled in front of the cabin, Pat already had steaks going and one grill full of baking potatoes getting happy. Pat knew in his heart that these guys did not need to add hungry to their normally surly dispositions to make them just a bit testy.

 

The usual suspects piled out of the hearses, unloaded all their shit and proceeded to start on the evenings festivities. All the bad guys knew that tomorrow they were going to have a shoot off for the prize of “Best Pistolero”. This was an annual contest that did not necessarily mean the most accurate shooter got it. Last years winner had put thirteen out of fifteen rounds in the chest of a man sized target; at twenty five feet; in four and a half seconds. Throwing enough lead in a short amount of time while not disabling too many innocent bystanders is always considered good form. First prize was a gallon of good booze of choice and one hundred dollars. Everybody wanted to win. The rules, however, did not state that the contestants had to be sober when the contest started. The rules also did not state what kind of guns the contestants had to use. Crazy Dave was probably the biggest psycho of the bunch and he claimed the weapon of choice he had brought was a hand howitzer. Nobody doubted him in the least.

 

So after the food, for some unknown reason, the general consensus was it would be a good idea to have a drinking contest. Go figure. Since Pat refused to enter and had retired with two of the strippers to the bedroom, first prize was going to be the remaining stripper for the night. Cross-eyed Kate had no problem with that. Drinking, drugs and folks whose grasp of reality was tenuous at best was not a good combination. They never did get around to the shoot off.

 

In retrospect, this was probably not the most well thought out idea anybody ever had. But, considering the mental capabilities of the co-workers, a drink-off couldn’t hurt. Oh how wrong could one group of people be? Three hours later Big Earl ended up winning the hand, and assorted other parts, of the delectable darling. He promised to burn an offering to God later and headed off to the kitchen for a long night of guess the disease.

 

He got the kitchen because it was the only other room with a door in the cabin. The rest of the guys were opening and mixing whatever chemistry experiments they would be imbibing that night as the happy couple closed the door. That young lady and Earl tried everything their perverse little minds could come up with and finally fell asleep in the middle of the night.

 

While Big Earl and the young lady were in the kitchen playing slap and tickle the bouncers figured out who was going to sleep where in truly modern fashion. Big Tiny, all six foot seven, four hundred and twenty pounds of him, said, “I got the couch. Everybody else sleeps in the floor.” Since Big Tiny had the brain of a peach pit and the disposition of a wolverine with a migraine, nobody wanted to dispute his position. It was a fine example of democracy in action. Also, it turned out, a very bad idea. The couch was due to be thrown out. Rats had made a home in it. Rats that knew better than to come out while all those people were moving around. Once everything got quiet though, that was another story.

 

Big Tiny, even drunk, was a very light sleeper. So when a rat bit Big Tiny’s toe Big Tiny woke up. He felt something on his leg, so he did the only logical thing he could think of. Big Tiny grabbed the 45 caliber pistol by his head and shot at what he thought was the intruder. He missed the rat and blew off his own big toe. It was at this point that the feces hit the rotating air dispenser. And, when that happens, dispersal is never even.

 

The pistol shot woke everyone. Big Tiny was screaming, “I’m hit.” Thinking that somebody was shooting at us, several of the less than sober heroes grabbed their weapons and started laying down suppressing fire through the cabin walls. These were the bouncers that had been in Vietnam. They were yelling at the rest of the drunks, ne’er do wells, criminals and such to shoot through the walls and keep whoever was outside down. Before long everybody in the cabin was shooting out in a different direction. Glass was breaking, wood was splintering, the poker table was knocked over and chips were dancing across the floor. At some point one of the idiots shot a lighter fluid can and caught one corner of the cabin on fire. Things were getting exciting. After what felt like hours, the gunfire slowed up enough for the heroes to hear Pat yelling for everyone to stop shooting. By this time the fire was going at a pretty good clip.

 

An ex-special services sergeant listened at the door for a few minutes and heard nothing outside. A couple of the other vets ran outside to look around. When they yelled that everything was clear everybody piled out the door. Nobody was there. Pat started yelling at everyone. The over armed, drunk, stoned and never particularly stable crowd started yelling back at him. Somebody finally noticed my stripper standing in the remains of the cabin door screaming, “Big Tiny has been shot!” Theyy left a few guards, just in case the phantom bad guys came back, and went back in to the burning cabin to drag the alleged victim out and see how bad it was. Eventually, the situation got sorted out.

 

Two of the hearses had been shot up too bad to use. The one closest to the cabin had a hole in one fender, through the engine block and out the other fender. Crazy Dave claimed that one for his hand howitzer. The third hearse had only lost some glass, a nicked radiator hose and a few minor bullet holes in the body.

 

The ex-sergeant had been a medic on one of his tours in ‘Nam so he patched up Big Tiny. About five or six of the stronger bouncers loaded the shot up dumb shit into the working hearse. Along with the three strippers. Pat figured out that Earl was the only other guy that had not been in the main room. So he probably was the closest to an innocent bystander available. Innocence in this case meant he was not provably guilty. That made Earl Pat’s designated driver. Earl drove into through Little Hope and Rhonesboro to Gilmer, the closest town with an emergency room. Pat sent a flatbed truck back to get everything that was left in the woods. That ended up being ten bouncers, twenty four pistols, a couple of shotguns, five long guns and seventeen thousand rounds of assorted ammunition.

 

The final score that night was bouncers nothing, rats a great big ONE. The rats got one big toe, a hundred year old cabin burned to the ground and two and a half hearses. Big Tiny never did walk right after that. The hearse Earl drove to town didn’t run right after that night either.

 

 

Pat never forgave his team for killing his “Big Thicket” hideout.

Baseball, learning how to catch the hard way

 

            Once again we are off into that happy place called Big Earl’s childhood. Laughing children playing together, picnics in the local parks, puppies and kittens wrestling around while the little tykes napped, Mommies reading fairy tales, sleep time with stuffed animals and fluffy blankets. Cotton candy clouds, gingerbread houses, sweet treats growing on bushes and rivers of chocolate. None of that shit was in Big Earl’s childhood.

 

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, the French Marquis would have been pleased with Pop’s teaching methods. Pop, Earl’s father, had a bit of a short fuse. Especially when it came to trying to help raise his first born child, Earl. Pop seemed to think that the best way to make Earl learn anything was to beat him if he got anything wrong. That appeared to be the way to teach his son how to catch a ball, too.

 

Pop wanted his oldest son on a kid’s baseball team. So, he signed the boy up without checking to see if the lad was even the slightest bit interested. Earl didn’t know how to catch, throw or field. Not a chance he was interested in his loving father teaching him. Pop went to the first practice and saw that, barring the demise of every other kid on the team; Earl was destined for a career of riding the pine. It was time for any red blooded American man to teach his lad the manly art of catching and pitching.

 

Pop played on a men’s team, but the men didn’t normally bring their kids to a game. Those players were almost all war vets and used baseball as a way to have some time with the guys away from the stress of families. Pop was a pretty good pitcher and thought if he could throw and catch, his son should be able to also. He grabbed his bucket of practice balls and the glove he had used when he was a kid and headed out to teach Earl the game of spring.

 

At first Pop underhanded a few balls to Earl. Earl didn’t have any luck trying to catch them. That first practice was the only time Earl had ever even held a glove, let alone wear one. And he had not seen much baseball. Pop told Earl to throw the balls back to him. After walking all over his yard, his neighbor’s yard and the alley behind those yards finding balls, it was decided to concentrate on catching. The fact that Earl had hands of stone didn’t figure in too well. Long story short, Pop decided he would teach that boy to catch, one way or the other.

 

He stood Earl up in front of the wooden fence in the back yard. Pop showed Earl where to hold his hands and told him when he had caught all the balls in the bucket practice was over. Pop paced out the distance to a pitchers mound and tossed a few to his son. Said son didn’t catch any of them. Not one. Not even the ones that accidentally hit his glove. This just ticked Pop off. He figured even an idiot could catch one by accident. Therefore, the boy wasn’t even trying. He threw the rest of the balls in the bucket a bit harder, figuring if they stung a bit the boy would be motivated to stop some of them. Score after the first bucket, balls twenty something, crying assed baby boy nothing. Pop and the cry baby picked up all the balls and put them back in the bucket.

 

Earl wanted to go inside; Pop wanted his SON to learn to catch. “You want to go inside, catch the God Damned balls.” A few smacks to stop all the crying and they were off on the great American pastime once again. Pop and Earl had picked up all the balls and filled the bucket again. The family fun was just beginning. Pop went through the third bucket, starting out aiming at Earl’s chest with medium pitches and, by the end of the bucket, was throwing high hard ones right at the boys face. Earl ended up catching three. Those three went into a pitiful pile to one side. Not too many in that little pile but none of them were coming back for more. Pop told Earl, “You caught those; all you have to do now is catch the rest of them. I know you can catch, you just have to do it.” Pop made Earl grab all but the three he had caught and put them in the bucket. Back to the mound.

 

Earl was hurting and wanted to be anywhere on the planet other than here. Pop was getting tired and really angry that his kid wouldn’t make the tiny effort to be more like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood. Batter up. Pop pitched, Earl missed and the time wore on. Two more baseballs went into the caught pile. The bucket collected the rest and the lesson continued. Pop was hungry, the sun was getting lower in the west and there were still balls in that Damned bucket.

 

Pop decided he was taking it too easy on his son. So, Pop started throwing smoke. Pop had been the starting pitcher on his ships team in the Navy. He had even gotten a little interest from some minor league scouts. A couple of his pitches hit Earl hard enough to drop him. Pop told him to get his ass up, stop sniveling and catch the last few balls. Pop thought, all he has to do is catch a few more and I can go get dinner.

 

Earl never saw the one that stopped the practice. The sun was in his eyes, on top of being nearly swollen shut from crying. Pop threw, something blocked the sun for a split second and then it was nap time. Once again Earl made a trip to the emergency room. And it wouldn’t be his last one either. Pop told the nurses that the boy fell out of a tree. Good enough. Nobody asked Earl what happened. There wasn’t a shortage of Indian kids whose parents didn’t have insurance. Doctors and nurses asking questions cost time and money. None of which the hospital was likely to get back. So unless Pop killed one of the boys, it was just easier to write it up the way the parents told them.

 

Pop gave up on teaching Earl to catch. It was the start of a long tradition of giving up on Earl. Teach, beat, give up. Teach, beat, give up. There grew to be shorter and shorter periods of beating until Pop finally gave up entirely on Big Earl.

 

When, to the surprise of everyone in the family, Big Earl became the first person in his family to graduate from high school, Pop called him aside. Earl didn’t expect a graduation present. Pop looked at his oldest son and said, “You are a worthless son-of-a-bitch and you will never amount to anything as long as you live.” Happy graduation.

 

Some kids get cars when they graduate. Others get rings, watches, college money, any and all kinds of presents that last a short while and are then replaced. Pop actually beat all of the other parents with his present. He gave Big Earl motivation to prove that, no matter what else happened in his life, Pop would always know he was wrong.

 

There is actually a bit of justice in that.

Bad boy

Some kids have supportive parents. Parents, who help them learn, make sure they grow up to be good people and care for others. Parents like that were all over the television in the fifties and sixties. Ward and June Cleaver raised Wally and the Beaver to be great kids. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were wonderful parents. Shows like “My Three Sons” and “Father Knows Best” showed how you were supposed to raise your children. Big Earl never had any idea what that was like. Not to say his mother was a bad person, she wasn’t. However, his father was the one who got credit for Earl.

 

One of Big Earl’s defining memories of his childhood was watching his Mom run from the house with her three other boys after yelling at Pop, “You may have him, but you are not getting these three!” Earl’s attention was on the beating he was getting at the time, but he did remember. Pain will focus your attention marvelously. This particular beating was in the section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known to the local whites as “Turley”. It was the only area where mixed blood families were allowed to live at that time. Pop and Earl were in the current family home. The inside walls were a dingy white. The furniture was old way before Pop was born. A broken down brown couch sat in front of a dirty, streaked window. That couch wasn’t helped by four overactive boys. A couple of torn, stained chairs and two mismatched lamps sitting on milk crates finished the furniture. In Oklahoma it was just about average for poor Indians. In any other state Mom, Pop and the four boys would have been white trash rednecks. Trailer trash, as folks like that were called all across the Deep South.

 

It had to have been summer. The windows and front door were open. The screen door was closed and the screen was torn on it. Maybe Earl tore it; maybe one of the other boys tore it. But Earl was the one getting the beating for it. Mom had just taken off after yelling at Pop. Pop stepped to the door and screamed at her to keep running. Earl remembered thinking that he might just get off easy. Then he realized that Pop wasn’t going to go after them.

 

That is when Earl got really stupid. As Pop turned back towards him, Earl ran and head butted Pop right in the nuts. Bad idea. Pop’s first punch caught Earl on the forehead and made him see stars. He should have gone down then. Pop’s second punch was a stomach punch that felt like, and probably did, hit backbone. Earl went down then, by God. Pop stood over him for a couple of seconds catching his breath. Pop looked at Earl like the boy was already dead and said, “You think you are a bad boy. You worthless piece of shit, I will show you what bad is.” All in all, Earl didn’t want to find out what bad was.

 

Then Pop left the room. And Earl heard a very bad sound. The sound was a closet door opening. The hall closet door. That one door was where Pop kept all kinds of interesting stuff. Guns were on the top shelf, where the kids couldn’t reach them. Tools were in an old tool box on the floor of the closet. Hammers, pliers, shovels, trowels and saws were all in there, resting. All of them were waiting for their call to duty. A machete Pop had brought back from World War Two. All kinds of tools were resting in there that could potentially be made into implements of destruction. Lots of potential badness waiting to happen if this was the time. Earl kind of hoped Pop was getting his coat to leave. No such luck ensued.

 

It is odd what a person might notice at times like this. Lying on the floor crying, trying to breathe, Earl saw a bug on the floor, just in front of his face. It was a ladybug. It did not care about what was happening with Pop. It was just walking across the floor about to go under a wrinkle in the rug. An Indian rug from when the family had lived in Phoenix, where his first brother was born. Before everything started going to Hell. Earl was lying on the floor watching this bug trundle along toward the rug and all he could think was. “Run for your life bug. He’s coming back.”

 

Outside the sky was blue, the day wasn’t all that hot and life was pretty good. Pop and Mom’s place was away from other houses. It was one of those houses that didn’t get burned in the Tulsa Race Riot before the war. But everything around it was gone and grown over. Outside nobody could hear a boy crying and hollering for help, because they were too far away. Earl always liked to think that, because the other option was that people heard and did nothing. Inside with our hero, Pop and that little bug, things are about to get real interesting again.

 

Earl wanted to run. He just didn’t have the air to get up yet. He probably should have tried anyway. Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty. He just wasn’t smart enough yet. Earl was about to get smarter quick. Pop came back carrying a bat. That was one of the things in the hall closet Earl hadn’t thought of. A Louisville Slugger Pop used when he played ball with a bunch of other young war vets. “You want to find out about bad boy; you are going to find out about bad.” That was when Pop hit him with the bat for the first time. The first time. Then Pop drew back like he was going for the fences. Batter up. The bug didn’t make it to the rug. Pop stepped on it as he was coming into his swing. And then he hit Earl a few more times. And then Earl just didn’t remember anything else.

 

Big Earl woke up in a hospital. It wasn’t the first time that ever happened. It wasn’t the last. A doctor in a white coat asked him what happened. Earl tried to answer but couldn’t say anything yet. That is when he heard his father’s voice. “The boy is clumsy. He fell down the stairs into the basement.” It was just like if the voice of God commanded.

 

So it was said, so it was done.

 

You see, people had come to try and take the kids away from Pop before. Earl already knew how that worked. Social workers that didn’t care about their clients would ask questions nobody followed up on. The kids would spend a few days in the care of some overworked foster parents that never even learned their names. And the family would come together and swear the charges were unsubstantiated. Eventually everyone would be brought back to Pop. Things would end up just like they were before.

 

Earl got a drink of water from a nurse and told the doctor, “I tripped going into the basement.” There was nothing the doctor could do after that. It was the fifties in Oklahoma. Nobody much cared if a half breed Indian beat up one of his kids. Social care in the fifties was for lower middle to low class white kids. If there was time and money enough, they might help a few Negro kids. There was never enough time, money or doctors to care about Indians.

 

If Pop had killed Earl the police might have investigated. But then, it might not have mattered to them at all. It wasn’t like Oklahoma was going to run out of Indians any time soon. And a mean assed, half breed Indian that beat his kids was just not a high priority to the local police

 

You see, it didn’t matter that there wasn’t a basement. It didn’t matter that the doctor wanted to help. It didn’t even matter that Mom had run and left Earl with Pop. She had to save what she could. Earl was just the price she paid to save the others. Even Earl knew that she was doing the only thing she could do to save the other three boys. Nobody blamed her but herself. Sometimes the choices a person makes in life extract a price far beyond what they think they can pay. You make your choices and then you spend the rest of your life trying to decide whether or not you made the right one.

 

That may be why, later in life, Mom protected Big Earl. Even years later, after she grew to be afraid of him. Afraid of what she had allowed him to become. She really, really hoped she was wrong about what she thought he was. But she never stopped loving him. And sometimes, loving the Bad Boy is all you can ask of a Mother.

 

Just ask Mom.