Edward Lee - The Backwoods

There’s the cracker .

It was just an old spring cot the guy slept on. Ricky could make out the form of his body, and the short ink-black hair that almost looked darker than the darkness.

Time to rock, he thought, hefting the mallet’s weight in his hand. He moved forward in short, silent steps. When he got closer he noticed a roughly cut stone of some kind hanging over the guy’s bed; Ricky wouldn’t know in a million years that it was specifically a chrysolite stone, said to bid good dreams and protect one’s home from evil. The stone wasn’t exactly doing a great job tonight.

Another few steps and he was at the head of the cot, looking right down at the stupid rube. The mallet froze high over his head, and in that moment Ricky could see his own shadow thrown against one wall: a shadow of death, a haunter of the dark.

At that single image he smiled, his heart beating faster, because he looked bigger now than he ever had.

“Who the—”

The Squatter’s eyes glimmered in the moonlight, wide open. A hand shot upward, but—

Thud!

—too late.

One whack with the mallet was all it took. Ricky patted the top of the guy’s head, felt no fractures. Good job. Didn’t matter if he was dead or not, because he’d surely die in the fire that Ricky would start in a few minutes. David Something-or-other’s lights were out for good.

A macabre realization occurred to him then . The last thing this weirdo hillbilly saw in his life . . . was me.

Ricky liked that.

He went back out and grabbed the bag. It didn’t take long to put the matchbooks up in a cupboard, along with the acetone and the first bottle of denatured alcohol. Next he pulled a small boiling pot off the wall, set it on the stove, and dropped in a handful of allergy pills.

Now all I gotta do is drag the cracker out of his bed, empty the other bottle of alcohol around the joint . . . and light ’er up.

Ricky liked fires. He’d liked to look at them since he was a kid-when he’d burned his mother and stepfather’s house down with them in it. Bitch had it comin ‘fer lettin’ her old man make me ‘n’ Junior . . . He didn’t finish the thought, but it would suffice to say that fires made him feel like a success. They made him feel transcendental . . . not that he had any clue what that meant.

With some huffing, he dragged the Squatter out of the cot and left him to lie across the floor. Ricky didn’t notice his chest moving up and down, so he guessed he was dead. Burning the fucker up alive had more kick to it, but that was the way the cards fell sometimes.

He noticed a jar on the kitchen counter. Pickled eggs, it looked like. Shit, yeah! I love pickled eggs. He and Junior had loved them as kids; their mom had made them all the time, before she’d started boozing hard and passing out every night, leaving their stepfather free to come into their rooms, and—

Well, that was another story.

He opened the jar, was about to grab an egg, but—

Holy shit!

The stink from the jar hit him in the face like someone dropping a flowerpot on his head.

Smells worse than a fuckin’ pile a’ dead dogs.

He put the jar back, revolted; then—

“Daddy?”

—his eyes bolted open, and he spun.

Shit!

There was someone else in the shack.

A slant of moonlight fell right on her, like a spotlight. A girl—mid-teens, he guessed, but it was hard to really tell with these Squatter girls because so many of them blossomed a few years before other girls.

It must’ve been something in the water.

But whether it was or not scarcely mattered to Ricky. He was all fucked-up in the head to begin with, and now—razzed and bristly over busting the cracker’s coconut in his own bed and about to turn the joint into a late-night bonfire—he was even more fucked-up.

His blood felt hot, excitement tingling on his skin . with his sweat. His crotch felt tight.

“You’re not my daddy!” she objected in that weird slur of clan dialect. She cast a worried glance down at the empty cot.

The guy was lying in darkness behind Ricky. She can’t see him, he realized. He saw her own cot now, wedged in the comer of the room out of the moonlight. “Aw, now don’t’choo worry ‘bout your daddy, sweet- , heart. He’s outside runnin’ a errand, but he’ll be right back. Me ’n’ him are good buddies.”

The girl’s lower lip trembled, not that Ricky was looking at her lower lip. He was looking at the rest, though, his lust holding his eyes open.

“But I ain’t never seen you before,” she questioned.

“Oh, well, that’s ’cos me’n yer daddy, see, we work together on them crab boats.”

Yeah. Ricky was all fucked-up in the head, all right, and as for the girl?

Well, never mind what he did to the girl before he set the place ablaze and slipped out into the night.

(III)

Patricia dreamed of smoke and fire. She was running through the woods somewhere near the moonlit water, and though fires raged around her, she felt nothing even remotely like fear. Instead she felt invulnerable, safe. Heat wafted about her, but caused no injury. If anything, it only stoked the heat of her own desires.

“That’s what the heat is,” a voice calmly pointed out. It was Dr. Sallee sitting in a chair by a stand of trees. “The symbology of the dream mechanism. Our will is guided by conscious and subconscious impulses. It defines us as individuals, in subjective terms that are too complex for the concrete world around us: dreams.”

The voice drifted like the smoke. Patricia tried to focus on the doctor’s words and discern what they might mean with regard to her specifically, but too many other things nagged at her, such as her calm in the midst of this raging forest fire, and the hot tingling of her skin. She felt flushed; she felt . . .

Oh, God . . .

“Just a dream,” she muttered to herself. At least she knew that. “It’s just a dream, so I don’t have to worry about it.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Sallee agreed. But why did he look dead all of a sudden? Face drawn and pallid as old wax? The dark suit he wore was dust-tinged, its fabric frayed.

. As though he’d just climbed out of a coffin after being buried for a long, long time.

“The death of Freudian dynamics, I suppose,” he said, disheartened. “Psychological thesis is dead in this day and age, I’m afraid. I’m dead.”

For whatever reason, then, Patricia laughed.

“But you’re right,” he repeated. Why had his voice reduced to a dark gurgle? “This is a dream, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

Patricia peered at him through smoke.

“And you don’t have to worry about what you do.”

The smoke engulfed him. The fire blazed behind her, so she ran, though she still felt no fear. Her feet crunched twigs and leaves, the earth warm beneath them. Her sexual urgency—her feminine heat —rose with the flames. At one point she broke through the trees, the smoke hanging behind her, and realized she was wandering along the edge of a lake—no. . .

A pond.

The realization seized her then.

This is the pond at Bowen’s Field . . . .

Moonlight blared in her face. Even this late at night she could clearly make out her reflection on the pond’s glass-flat surface.

The vision gave her a mild shock.

She stood pantiless in a sheer nightshirt made even more sheer by profuse perspiration. She seemed a caricature of female sexuality, her parts exaggerated by some aspect of the craft of the dream. Her breasts were ample in life; in the dream, though, they were even larger, higher, so swollen she could’ve been pregnant. The damp nightshirt clung to them, making no secret of nipples just as magnified, with fleshy ends prominent as olives. The dream had deepened her curves and widened her hips, and when (with no volition whatsoever) she raised the hem of the nightshirt, she saw that she was not only missing her panties, but missing pubic hair as well.