Edward Lee - Creekers

He and Eagle roamed the woods whenever they could, but they never found the “things” that Uncle Frank said ten-year-olds shouldn’t see.

“Uncle Frank said a girl got raked out here once,” Eagle told him one day when they were shooting slingshots at bottles by the creek. “He said it said so in the paper.”

“A girl got raked? What’s that?”

Eagle seemed to know everything, and, as he lined up his next shot—at a Briardale Cola bottle—he spoke like it was nothing.

“It’s when a man puts his pee-er in a lady, and she doesn’t want to.”

This confused him. “Why would a man want to do that?

“‘Cos it feels good, stupid. Don’t you know anything? He squirts baby-juice in her, and it feels good.”

“Oh… What’s baby-juice?”

Eagle laughed. “You’re stupider than Larry on the Three Stooges! Baby-juice is the stuff that comes out a man’s pee-er when he puts it in a lady. It makes ’em have babies. But when rake-ists do it, they do other things too.” Eagle pulled the slingshot back. “Bad things.”

This made him wonder. When Eagle hit the Briardale Cola bottle, it exploded. “What bad things?” he asked Eagle.

They called him Eagle because he had blond hair, but his father always made him get a crewcut, so he looked like a bald eagle. And Eagle said, “Well, they beat the ladies up too, and sometimes they kill ’em.”

Something bloomed in the little boy’s head, a curiosity like the time he broke his arm, and it itched under the plaster so bad he stuck one of his aunt’s knitting needles up there to scratch it. When Doc Smith took the cast off, he cried ’cos the doctor did it with a little saw that sounded worse than Doc Verib’s dentist drill. And when the cast fell away, his arm was covered with white flakes, and all the hairs on his arm had turned blacker than Lisa Cottergim’s eyebrows. She was an Oriental girl who got ’dopted by her parents, and her pretty eyebrows were blacker than a crow’s feathers. Maybe she was Chinese, and that’s why they had this Chinese flu going around that his teacher had told him about. But, anyway, Doc Smith told him his hairs turned black only ’cos the plaster had covered the hairs from the sun for six weeks. And anyway something itched in his head just like the way his skin itched under the cast.

“What kind of…bad things?” he asked.

Eagle hogged the next shot at one of his G.I. Joes that had busted ’cos a rubber band broke inside and made his head fall off. “Like really bad things,” he said. His eye opened behind the rock. “Like this lady? After the man squirted a lot of baby-juice in her peehole, he squirted some in her butt, too—”

“He did not!” the little boy exclaimed, appalled.

“Yes he did, ’cos I heard my dad and Uncle Frank talking about it one night they thought I was asleep. They were watching Naked City and talking about the lady who got raked. And the rake-ist squirted baby-juice up the lady’s butt, too, and then…”

“What!” the little boy nearly shrieked.

“Then he tied her to a tree and hit her with a monkey wrench, and then he stuck the monkey wrench up her peehole. And after that—” Eagle seemed to pause, like he did when he was making something up— “he hit her in the head with a rake and kilt her.”

“With a rake? Why?”

“Why?” Eagle laughed at him again. “Because that’s what rake-ist’s do, stupid. That’s why they call it rake.”

The little boy wondered about this. It didn’t make sense. “But why would a man ever want to do that to a lady?”

“Don’t really know,” Eagle said. “But Uncle Frank said there was lots of folks in the world who were sick in the head, and I guess that’s why. And, anyway, Big Chief Mullins ‘vester-gated the rake, and he told the papers it was a Creeker who done it.”

Creeker, the little boy thought. He let Eagle hog another shot ’cos he was too busy thinking. Creeker…

The word slid down his belly hot and ugly and worse than his aunt’s stuffed peppers, and even worse than her corned beef and cabbage with the lumpy tomato sauce that he hated even more. He’d heard a little bit about the Creekers, just little bits. No one talked about ’em much, like they was some bad secret or something, or like the way nobody ever talked much about Mrs. Nixerman, who got sick in the head and would run around buck naked at night with her big fat bubs flapping. She had to go to a special hospital in Crownsville that was only for people who were sick in the head. But even though he’d heard a little bit about Creekers, he asked Eagle anyway, ’cos he figured Eagle might know more. And that’s what fascinated the little boy, like about the rake-ist, and the “things” in the woods, and all that.

He wanted to know.

“What’s a Creeker?” he asked.

“Aw, you’re stupider than Larry and Shemp!” Eagle guffawed. “A Creeker is someone who got born by their father or brother’s baby-juice. And there’s somethin’ about it—I’m not sure what—but if a father like puts his pee-er in his daughter and squirts his baby-juice in her peehole, the baby comes out all wrong. And the same if a mother lets her son squirt his baby-juice in her. Uncle Frank said it’s ’cos you’re not supposed to do it, and God gets so mad, he makes the babies come out wrong.”

Wrong, the little boy thought. It slid down his gut just like the word Creeker, and just like his aunt’s corned beef and cabbage and the stuffed peppers. “How you mean…wrong?”

The headless, naked G.I. Joe took Eagle’s rock right in the chest, and pieces of plastic flew everywhere—

WHAP!

“The babies come out like the hippie, peacenik babies Uncle Frank told me about. These hippies take LSD and it messes up a man’s baby-juice, and it makes the babies real ugly and wrong. Same as Creekers. They’se just hillfolk who only squirt their juice into their reller-tives. And their babies get, like, real big heads like a fishbowl and giant red eyes that are crooked, and ten fingers on each hand instead of five. And girl Creekers sometimes had extra bubs and nipples like a hog and stuff. Sometimes they get born without no arms or legs, so the Creeker fathers kill ’em. They eat ’em.”

“They do not!” the little boy wailed.

“Shore they do, ’cos Uncle Frank told me. And lots of ’em got teeth like Kevin Furman’s bulldog.”

The little boy shuddered. He wasn’t feeling too good to begin with—on account of his aunt’s stuffed peppers, he was sure—but this made him feel even worse. ’Cos Kevin Furman’s bulldog Pepper had the gnarliest, ugliest yellow teeth, and he couldn’t imagine anything scarier than a person with those same kind of teeth in their mouth…

‘Cos there wasn’t nothing uglier than Kevin Furman’s bulldog.

“And there’s something worse,” Eagle said, lining up the next hogged shot.

“What?”

“I don’t know if I should tell ya, ’cos you’d probably cry like a baby.

Eagle missed the next target, a big dead toad they’d found by the creek. But one time Dave Houseman told them his friend Mike Cutt would take live toads and shoot ’em with the slingshot, and he’d even play baseball with live toads. He’d swing the bat, and the toad’s guts would spray way out. And the little boy couldn’t think of anything grosser. And then Eagle continued, “the Creekers, you know, they got their own whorehouse out here somewhere.”

“What’s—” the little boy gulped. “—what’s a…whorehouse?”

Eagle rolled his eyes. His next shot, too, missed the big, dead toad. “It’s a place where men pay money to squirt their juice into ladies, ya moe-ron. Don’t ya know nuthin’? And sometimes the whores put a man’s pee-er in their mouths and let ’em squirt their baby-juice there—”