Edward Lee - Family Tradition

“Whew!” Bob remarked.

Ashton drew a fat forearm across his brow. “ Damn! ”

Then they both sat down on the boat’s forward seat.

“Sorry, girls,” Bob explained, huffing and puffing and lighting a cigarette. “We’re tuckered out.”

“Yeah,” Ashton followed. He lit a La Corona Whiff petite cigar. “We’re old men compared to you two young racehorses. Hope you don’t mind taking a turn on the crank.”

Oh for God’s sake! Sheree yelled in her mind.

“No biggie, boys,” Carol said, shooting Sheree a knowing grin. “Sheree and I would love to.”

“Besides,” Bob added with a chuckle. “You don’t want us wearing ourselves out, do you?”

“Yeah,” Ashton added. “Then we’d be no good for tonight.”

You’re no good for anything ANY night! Sheree thought.

The two women stood up, got on either side of the handles. They began to crank. But Carol’s frequent grins proved she was going along with the joke. The grin seemed to say This is the price we pay for living with a pair of fat stooges.

Now that Sheree and Carol were on the crank, the boat began to make some headway, in spite of her conclusion that this “pull-ferry” was about six hundred pounds heavier than it should be. Every time Carol rowed down to display her immaculate cleavage, Sheree squeezed her lip between her teeth. Christ, I’m soaking…

The brothers smoked and swapped more bad jokes as Sheree and Carol cranked for all they were worth. The smoke from Ashton’s cigar kept sweeping Sheree’s face, such that she could see herself slapping it right out of her loving boyfriend’s fat mug. She was glazed in sweat by the time they’d cranked to little boat to the ramp on the other side.

“Good job, girls,” Bob complimented, flicking his cigarette butt over the side.

“Yeah,” Ashton said. “You both get an A…for Attractive! ”

And you get an F, Sheree thought. For FAT.

The boat raised a good six inches when Bob and Ashton stepped off. Carol stepped off next, and grabbed Sheree’s arm to help her off.

“Oh, gross,” Sheree remarked instantly. “Sorry I’m so sweaty.”

“I am too, so don’t worry about it,” Carol assured. Then she leaned to Sheree’s ear and whispered, “Besides, I’d love to lick it all off.”

— | — | —

Chapter Four

“’Fraid you’re right, Esau. This one ain’t worth a ’skeeter off a dead skunk’s ass.” Enoch cast an eye at the skinned girl. She looked like bone scraps, little more.

“Bet she don’t weigh more’n wad of my hock.”

“Bet she don’t.”

Of the two huge men, Enoch was more huge, three inches taller than Esau’s six-foot four, and twenty more pounds than his three hundred. Both had beards they hadn’t trimmed in years, long bushy hair, overalls and workboots. Tried and true rednecks, Northwest style. Esau had dragged the girl’s skinless corpse here to what he and his older brother simply referred to as the “tarp.” It was actually an odd, large gully that existed toward the center of the island, about twenty feet wide, fifty long, and God knew how deep. An ideal place in which to discard scraps like this fairly useless thing from the girlie prison. Several days of hard work had been required to effectively cover the gully; Enoch and Esau had felled a dozen trees over it, providing a sufficient framework over which they had unrolled great sheets of olive-drab tarp. Over that, they’d piled enough branches and leaves that the gully was perfectly camouflaged. It was a minor concern but a concern nonetheless. Not too many folks ventured out to Hartsene Island but on the rare occasions when they did, Enoch didn’t need them to be finding out what they’d been doing out here all these years. Their needs had turned the gully into a giant belly full of bones and human gruel; no doubt hundreds of bodies had been dumped beneath the tarp.

Esau threw back the end piece of tarp—the corpse-pit’s door. “’Bout the only good thing was her skin.” He grabbed the corpse’s stiff feet, dragged it over to the dump-hole. “A skinny gal’s skin is tighter, fries up better, ya know?”

“If you say so,” Enoch replied. “You do the cookin’, I’ll do the procurin’.”

After claiming the girl’s skin for a delectable pile of roe-filed crispy spring rolls, Esau had also trimmed all of the flesh from her face (for headcheese), which left a curious sight: drab lanky mouse-brown hair framing a raw skull traced with tendons. “In ya go, Skinny,” Esau said, and kicked the twiglike body into the hole. He could hear it tumble down to the bottom.

“D’ja fuck her?” Enoch asked.

“Yeah, but it weren’t a good nut,” Esau recalled in disappointment. “ Big pussy on her fer such a little thing. I’d rather jerk off with the worms any day.”

“I done told ya ’bout that,” Enoch said in a warning voice. “You leave them worms alone—we need ’em for bait to sell.”

“Aw, Enoch,” ain’t but a half-dozen fishermen came out here last summer. We ain’t gonna make no money.”

“Shut yer booger-hole, boy. They’ll be comin’, just you watch. Bet we make a hunnert dollars at least this season. And that’s a hunnert less that I gotta pinch. Most’a these whores’n hitchhikers I pick up, they ain’t got dick in their wallets. Gettin’ viddles ain’t the problem—it’s gettin’ cash. We got expenses here, like yer blammed satellite dish and yer fancy cookin’ gear’n shit and the danged lecktrick bill. Plus I needs ta put gas in the damn trucks. I cain’t very well pay fer gas with a pot’a yer damn fish stew.”

Esau winced. It’s not fish stew , it’s called booly-base! Damn it!”

“What the fuck ever, boy.”

All Esau did was cook; it was Enoch who served as the supplier. This required frequent drives out to Route 101, to pick up whores at night, and hitchhikers, and bring ’em back ta meet Esau. Whenever he needed a new vehicle, he simply car-jacked one, then painted it a different color, and brought the previous owner or owners back to the island. In fact, about the only real pleasure in Enoch’s life—save for humpin’ what he brought back—was picking out new vehicles whenever he fancied. Right now he had the Nissan Pathfinder island-side and the brand-new Ford Explorer on the other side of the lake. A man had to have somethin’, didn’t he? Esau had his cookin’, Enoch had his trucks. Enoch always made sure to pluck a nice shiny new one with a nice cassette stereo, so’s he could listen to nice music on the long drives back and forth, music like Handsome Dick Manitoba and the Dictators, the Freddie Blassie’s “Pencil-Necked Geek” album, and WCW’s Greatest Hits.

“Pull that there tarp back over the hole, boy. We best be on our way.”

Esau obeyed, unflinching at the waft of corpse-gas when he replaced the flap. He scratched his crotch with one hand, his ass-crack with the other, then loped after Enoch to the Nissan. They drove deeper into the island, toward still more things they had to hide. Just as the gully was camouflaged, so were the sheds, each of which existed for different reasons. The smoke-house, the curing house, the place where they did their marinates. “We still got them two curin’,” Enoch reminded. “Figger we better check on ’em.” What he referred to was the pair of young men he’d picked up on 101, hitching to the point where they said they had relatives. Spunky fellas, they was. Matt’n Mike they said their names was. They fought like reg-ler buggers when Enoch took ’em down with his slapjack. One fella was shaved-headed, with tattoos, and a devil-looking goattee, the other looked like a college boy in a Yankees hat. Enoch had cracked both their noggins with the jack, then cut off their peckers and chewed ’em as jerky on the ride back.