The Devil's Smokehouse

by Justin Jones

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

There were always two options: the closet or under the bed.

 

In the 1960s, young Jenkins and his sister, Jill are trying to grow up in a dusty, hardscrabble area a few miles out from a one-stoplight town in the American southwest. It's a long bus ride through farmland to school where both children put on brave faces to cover up for the nights they suffer at the hands of their violent, alcoholic father, to whom they refer as the Devil. In his drunken rampages, he regularly beats Jenkins, Jill, and their mother, smashes up the shabby dwelling that serves as their home, and then retreats to his bedroom, his chamber of horrors.

 

As they grow into adolescence, Jill copes by focusing on doing well in school so that she can get out as soon as she can, as Jenkins is sucked into a life of truancy and increasing violence. While contemplating eventual revenge on his father, Jenkins must decide how to handle people and situations whose evil and cruelty will test ordinary readers’ imaginations. The realities of the lives of Jenkins and Jill are not unfamiliar to author Justin Jones, who has firsthand experience in the juvenile and adult justice systems. The Devil’s Smokehouse is an unvarnished story of the ravages of rural poverty and an unsparing look at one boy managing to triumph against crushing odds.

 

“A work of fiction inspired by the author's childhood, The Devil's Smokehouse is the inspiring, painful, exhilarating, disturbing, and at times hilarious journey of a child survivor. One who must cross a line in order to keep surviving. Jones weaves plot twists that are fantastical but believable, as only a survivor could.”

—Fury Young, founder of Die Jim Crow Records

 

"It’s a struggle to survive childhood, and that’s the conundrum faced by Jenkins, the narrator of Justin Jones’s coming-of-age mystery novel, The Devil’s Smokehouse. Jenkins underrates the prevalence of evil in his hometown, an impoverished rural community in the middle of the country. Everyone knows everyone in this hamlet where even the local pervert’s identity is an open secret. As he matures, Jenkins uncovers more dark secrets, learning that the twisting threads of big-city drug culture have a stranglehold on some local powerbrokers. Even his own road to nowhere takes an unexpected turn. The Devil’s Smokehouse is a page-turner that is hard to put down."

—Sue Hinton, retired English professor, Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC)

 

"Justin Jones captures the raw essence of humanity in all its beauty and grit. Characters leap from the page with intensity, as they grapple with love, violence, loss, and redemption. Instantly compelling, Jones’s writing is full of wisdom and depth as it goes to people's darkest struggles, and also their most glorious moments of triumph."

—Royal Young, author of Fame Shark

 

Read more

Release date: October 24, 2023

Publisher: River Grove Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

CHAPTER ONEFIRST MEMORIES

A STOIC CORRECTIONAL OFFICER DREW THE CORD, AND THE pale-blue blinds slowly opened, exposing the execution chamber. There was no dust on the aging metal blinds. You will never see dust on the blinds or, as a matter of fact, anywhere else in a well-operated prison. The soon-to-be deceased was strapped to a medical gurney. There were no distinct colors or transition of blanket textures distinguishing the apparatus from any other. The expressed purpose for this chariot of demise was to provide an appropriate position to deliver death. When the blinds were drawn, most witnesses in the viewing seats fixated on the gurney without fully comprehending it. Aside from the prison staff and the usual viewers, such as the arresting law enforcement agency and the prosecutor, few knew what to expect when they first gazed into the death chamber.

The strapped man turned his head to the left to see who would look back at him. He smiled as if to say hello, or perhaps show his pleasure that some family had come to witness his death. Maybe he was just pleased to have anyone present. His body was strapped tightly to the gurney, so he strained his neck to the side and then moved his head up and down to canvass the entire viewing area. Once he saw the government officials straight across from where his head was positioned, he never looked in that direction again.

“You have two minutes for any last words, and I will advise you when the two minutes are up.” The tall, heavyset warden with a pencil-thin mustache announced the official time limit. “At that point, if you continue speaking, I will give the order to let the execution commence anyway.”

The man now stared at the ceiling as he appeared to flex his muscled-up chest and attempted to stretch his short, stocky body as much as the restraints would allow. “I know I must die,” he said. “I’ll die here today as not the same man who committed a senseless, horrible crime, but one who has become a better person than that 19-year-old drug addict that I was. I can’t even fathom that other person, the one I was then. No excuses. I hope my death brings some liberation from the grief I have inflicted on the victim’s family, but I doubt it will.”

He was calm, his voice soft, and his eyes repenting. He thanked the correctional staff for the respect they had bestowed upon him while on death row. Little did he know that he would become a vehicle, an inspiration for my story.

So, let us start from the beginning.

————

My heart was beating furiously, and I was afraid it would explode through my chest. There were always two options: the closet or under the bed. The bed gave more escape options. If he came after me from one side, I could crawl out the other to make my escape. Like all of our furniture, the worn-out bed had been passed down through generations of family. It was huge, or at least seemed so to me when I was a child. I was thankful for the

hiding place and safety the bed provided.

Sometimes the flight from fear would continue through a window. Our windows had screens to keep flies out in the summer. An old-fashioned hook latch was supposed to keep the window screen secure. There were ragged holes around the latch where my sister Jill and I would have to tear the screens to unlatch them from the outside. This was necessary to get back into the house on the many nights we would escape through the front door but have to return crawling silently through the windows.

The house had no air-conditioning, so we needed the open windows to fight the stifling summer heat. Any cool breeze was a blessing. I would lay face down on the hardwood floors under the bed, waiting for the monster’s approach. My breath would cause the dust balls that lived between the cracks in the floor planks to roll as if they had a thousand tiny feet propelling them. I loved the coolness of the worn natural wood floors. Not like you have nowadays, where such floors are expensive and in vogue. Rich people had carpets. These floors were an intricate part of the frame, making it a structurally sound house. I would use my pocket knife to dig the goody from between the wood floor planks. Goody was what I called the mixture of dirt, floor wax, and fuzz balls that lived in the cracks and spacing between planks. If I dug too deep, I would create a passage for light to illuminate the dirt foundation below. The dirt road just a few yards from our house contributed to the ample dust supply. It was like a high-speed freeway for oil tanker trucks. Occasionally my mother would flag one down to see if the driver could drop some oil slush from their tank onto the road. At least for a few days, this would reduce the red dust flying through the house. My sister and I drew pictures in the red dirt that settled and collected on the floors.

The army-green 1962 Chevy pickup had a distinct sound as it pulled onto our dirt and gravel driveway. The sound was our warning, our siren of sorts. A signal that the monster had arrived. The muffler had been torn off and replaced several times. Once, the monster decided to rid our pasture of its thicket of wild plum and persimmon trees. He chose to use the 1962 Chevy as his choice for this mass destruction. With the pickup, he mowed down the weak and smaller trees, but the larger ones eventually stopped his progress. A tractor

was required to remove the Chevy from the high center atop a group of trees that bent but would not break. Neighbors would always assist, as they either felt sorry for my sister and me or were too afraid of the monster to refuse.

The Chevy was also used many times as a battering ram. The pickup didn’t care for our mother’s new stripped-down white Chevy Malibu. The monster commanded the pickup to attack the Malibu. Over and over again, he would ram it, back up, and ram it again. With satisfaction in his growl, the monster would exit the pickup, stare at the Malibu, call it a lying motherfucker, and proceed to his bedroom, his chamber of horrors.

I liked that old pickup, the toughness. It was what I learned to drive on. Then it became a killing machine, when the monster intentionally ran over my dog while it was asleep in the front yard. He hated that dog as I had taught it to hate him. It was very protective of me and would growl and bark whenever the monster prepared to bring his wrath down on me. I looked for days for my dog. Jill and I found out later that my mother had witnessed the murder but didn’t want to tell me for fear of what I might do. I was maybe eight years old at the time. What could I do? I eventually found the bloodstained ground barely hidden by the drying grass of autumn. I wanted revenge—my favorite dog of all time. Maybe this was what my grandpa and Mom were talking about when I eavesdropped and heard them discussing how I would grow out of my anger issues. The monster was responsible for my rage, so why couldn’t they see that?

One day I exchanged bedrooms with Jill. Now my room was the only direct path the monster could take to his bedroom or the only toilet we had. I started calling the monster’s bedroom a den. The thunderous snoring and earsplitting farting echoed into my bedroom. My sister had occupied the middle bedroom for years but never told me how loud those sounds could be. Only an animal could make those sounds. After the move to the middle bedroom that served as a corridor to the monster’s den, I now believed it was my turn to suffer more, and suffer I did. Jill had suffered enough.

Our house was a prefab, even though we did not call such homes by that name in the 1960s. It sat on cement blocks with exposed plumbing underneath. Some blocks were removed to allow the dogs to shelter under the house. Our female dog would have puppies somewhere under the house; it was always like a treasure hunt mixed with Christmas for Jill and me to crawl under that place under the house to find them. We never knew how they were going to look. All dogs roamed free in the

rural county we lived in, so there were many colors, sizes, and shape options from various suspecting dads. Spaying a female dog was expensive and frowned upon. If an owner couldn’t give pups away or didn’t wish to raise them, they were stuffed in a tow sack and thrown in the creek or pond.

Our elongated house was like a trailer made of wood. The three bedrooms were in a row with a tiny bathroom as you entered the hallway. The monster could go through the kitchen and the add-on back utility room, but rarely exercised this option. If he was in a melodic mood, he would come through the middle bedroom. There he would batter and beat on the old upright piano that Jill played. The central bedroom was the only place where this monstrosity of a musical instrument would fit. It was another reason why I should have never traded rooms with my sister.

The house leaked like a sieve when it rained. Buckets, pots, and pans were placed throughout to catch the water. Sometimes the beds had to be shifted to avoid new leaks. The monster would march through, kicking over the captured water in a defiant attempt to remain upright despite his wobbly spaghetti legs. Sometimes he caused more leaks. Sometimes a single-shot .22-caliber Montgomery Ward rifle gunshot would ping through the house. The fool monster would sit quietly in the dark and shoot at mice as they scampered across the floors. We had mouse holes in our baseboards that reminded me of those in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Not sure if he ever hit one. The small-caliber shells would ricochet many times before coming to rest in the ceiling. This made more rain holes, and we’d have to move the beds again. There was no insulation to slow the bullets or divert the rain.

All walls and doors had multiple holes created by the power of the monster’s fist. After a night of drunken wall and door beating, my mother would mix plaster with newspaper and sometimes chicken wire and patch the holes. There was no patching of the doors. The doors were cheap, as were customary for prefabricated homes; they were hollow and not patchable. The lack of insulation caused our little house to swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter. One small gas stove in the front room was all our heat for the entire house, and the water pipes would stay frozen most of the winter.

Jill and I would ask our mom if friends could come over, but she would almost always say no. We didn’t understand then, but she knew our friends’ parents would not let their child come to our house. At that time we were unaware of the monster’s evil notoriety. Still, our unabated imaginations created unusual explanations for all the puffy wall plaster and holes for the rare occasions when

we did have a guest. Jill once explained to a friend that our house was damaged by shrapnel when a tornado came tearing across the yard. I countered her tornado story by explaining that moonshiners had knocked holes in the walls looking for a magic potion they had mistakenly sold to the monster.

My stories always had some link to a memory. I must have been around four or five, but I could vaguely remember riding in the back of a pickup. We would raise our small faces and peer over the pickup bed edge when the bell rang. The bell hung in a tree tied to a string that ran to someone’s house. The monster would pull the line and the bell would ring, and eventually a burly, slow-walking bowlegged man would drop two one-gallon jugs in the back of the truck. We somehow understood what was occurring was clandestine and wrong, but we didn’t know why. Our mother sat in the pickup’s front seat, stoic and staring straight ahead while sucking hard on her Salem cigarette. As the man slowly shuffled back into the shadows, Jill and I would whisper to the wind troll, troll as he turned to leave. Trolls were another explanation for all the patched walls. Jill and I could explain anything away.

The monster entered the house. I whispered down the hallway to see if Jill had heard him. She had. Being in the monster’s least direct path, she rarely retreated to the closet or under the bed. Her mode of security was to hide under the blankets. Even on a hot August night, she would rather sweat to her death than face the monster. That night, like many others, I trembled and allowed my heart to race, scared to death of the monster. I held my breath and waited. Seconds later, the wrath of hell rained down.

He started in the kitchen, breaking all the dishes and slinging the food out of the icebox. His fist blasted through the cheap sheetrock wall from the kitchen into my bedroom. His knuckles must have partially hit a wood stud in the wall because he cried out in pain. The pain only made him angrier. He stomped down the hallway with fists, punching holes in both sides of the hall. It was astonishing that any sheetrock was left from all the previous rampages. He was like the Hulk, easy to anger and strong enough to do real damage. But unlike the

Hulk, there was no good side, no alter ego. I retreated to my false safe place, under the bed.

I saw his steel-toed work boots stop beside my bed. The torn leather exposed the shiny steel embedded in the shoes to protect them from falling objects. When he did work, it was as an oil field machinist. I could smell the oil on the leather boots and see the sheet metal shavings stuck in the soles. Pure silence waved through. I crawled backward until the wall impeded my withdrawal. He reached under the bed and pulled me out by the hair of my head.

“You goddamn little motherfucker!” he yelled. Then his belt came off, and he beat me as I attempted to crawl back under the bed. Again he grabbed me, this time by my feet. “Don’t run from me, Jenkins, you sorry son-of-a-bitch!”

He let go, and I ran into the closet—more silence. Then I heard the mattress and springs of his bed. Compressed by his flopped, plump body, the urine-stained sheets and 20-year-old mattress emitted an ungodly odor. The flicking sound of a cigarette lighter flinging open then shut indicated he was having a smoke from his filterless Camels. The cigarette would soon fall from the monster’s hand when he fell asleep, burning the hardwood floor, and joining a thousand others in a burned offering of abstraction. The yelling, cursing, and screaming at imaginary people continued.

It was a pattern Jill and I knew so well. The monster would fall asleep, then awaken, and stumble through my room in his dirty yellow pee-stained Fruit of the Loom underwear on his way to the toilet. He would end up pissing all over the walls and floor. The bathroom wallpaper was brittle from it. Then the cussing, wall-thrashing, and window-breaking fits would commence. This would repeat itself over and over again until the sun came up. On many of these nights I would not come out of the closet until morning. By dawn the rampage would subside, and eventually the monster would become comatose. Mom would come home from her night-shift job. We would clean the devastation and prepare for the next rampages. Then we went off to school with no sleep. As always, we never discussed the night with anyone.

Our morning alarm clock was sometimes the clinking sound of him flicking open his stainless steel cigarette lighter and then slapping it closed. The monster could do this all with one hand. Our version of a backup alarm was his subsequent coughing, hacking up phlegm, and spitting it on the floor. Then we would hear the metal shavings in his shoes scrape across the floor, causing

 small paisley-like indentions. Like the fuzz balls, these indentions on the floor became just another plaything for me. I would pretend they were stars, comets racing across the sky, or missiles and bullets. My little plastic green army men figurines had to dodge all the projectiles or die.

There were never any photographs or pictures on our walls. I didn’t even know that other families put photos on walls until I got much older. I did put up a Buffalo Springfield concert poster once. I had ordered it from the back of a magazine and was careful where I tacked it to the wall. I selected a location not easily noticed by the monster. It covered two huge holes in the wall. The poster survived a week before the monster snatched it off the wall and cursed the long hair and the Communism it represented. There were now too many holes punched through the walls to hang anything else.

He never injured himself while punching through walls or hitting a stud. Another confirmation he was an indestructible monster. To a child’s mindset, he was not human. I do recall the few times we had visitors to the house. There was a vain attempt to conceal the holes with whatever was available. We probably had more calendars on the walls than anyone else. The calendars just made all the walls appear to have pimples. The plaster always protruded outward and the calendars couldn’t hang flush.

The cramped kitchen, with its small dining table, also served as the torture room. Here we were forced to eat and face the monster. Curtains covered the cabinets, because the doors had been torn off during his rampages. We were forced to eat everything we put on our plates or receive a beating. My favorite food was red beans and cornbread with a side of raw onions. I could never get the portions correct, so countless beatings occurred. I learned that tears could be caused by anger. Tears would drip into my plate as the monster stood over me yelling, “Eat everything on your goddamn motherfucking plate. You try to get up before that fucking plate is clean, and I’ll beat your ass off!”

The kitchen table also was where Mom would tell on Jill and me. A tribunal. She would only do this if the monster had been sober for a few days. He would acknowledge that Mom had spanked us for whatever offenses we had committed,

then continue eating as if it was no big deal. Hell would arrive days later when the monster came home drunk and determined we required additional punishment. For some reason, the monster only seemed to remember our need for a beating while eating in the kitchen. In his alcohol-induced stupor, he would beat us with his much-beloved weapon, a 100 percent raw cowhide belt. Being punished twice for the same offense was our form of double jeopardy.

Sometimes the monster had visitors. Most were from the demon world. Alcohol brings out the demons in those who are possessed. For the rest of us, the unpossessed, alcohol dulls the senses and reduces oxygen to the brain. For others, it makes them invisible. They are invisible in that they don’t seem to think anyone can see what they are doing. I learned that demons hang out with demons, and our monster was the ring leader.

They all had smaller and darker eyes than most people. You could look into their eyes and see nobody was home in there. Their nostrils flared when angry. The monster learned who had demons in them and cultivated them.

Mr. U was one of the possessed who would occasionally visit our house. Remarkable, at my age now, how vivid imagery ingrains in the memory. The demons would go fishing but rarely brought any fish back. They had thrown some snapping turtles in the back of the old ’62 Chevy on a sunny spring day. Only the larger turtles could not escape through the cracked and hole-infested wooded pickup bed. Growling with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, loosely stuck to his lower lip, Mr. U declared, “You see those fucking eyes? The motherfucker needs to die.” The other demons from the fishing trip gathered around.

Mr. U continued staring at the turtle while the others passed around a bottle of cheap whiskey. Finally, the turtle hissed and snapped as if to say, “Fuck you, bring it on.” Mr. U, in a calm demon voice, spoke to the turtle and said, “Okay, you son-of-a-bitch.” Then he bit its head off. He spat it out and delivered a tremendous laugh, with blood running down the corners of his mouth. This confirmed to me, at the age of seven, that there were demons all around me. Even Ozzy Osbourne wouldn’t bite a snapping turtle’s head off. After they left, I buried the turtle with its severed head. I said to God, “If there is a turtle heaven, this one deserves it.” I carved the name I gave him in a small sandstone, “Danny,” and made him a headstone. Turtles became my favorite creature, maybe because of guilt, for I didn’t do anything to save this one. 

The demons loved to create sports for their amusement and demented entertainment. Again, Mr. U was the demon of creation, the patron saint of sport for demons and monsters. Sarsaparilla was my pet raccoon. Jill and I found her when she was only about a month old.

————

Hunters had killed her mother. Once she was full-grown she was no longer allowed in the house. Being kids, we always sneaked her inside to sleep in one of the closets during the day. We didn’t know the word nocturnal, but it didn’t take long to understand that a raccoon was ready to play when the sun went down.

“Jenkins, you little fucker. I hear you keep a coon sow in the house. Why don’t you bring her out here,” Mr. U chuckled one day as he stood in our front yard. I was constantly being called a little motherfucker by the monster’s friends. I was small, skinny, and probably looked like a poster child for malnutrition. Everybody looked large to me, and Mr. U was one of the largest.

He had killed the turtle only a month before, and I wanted no part of him. He had arrived with the monster and four other demons. I fixated on the ground, not wanting to make even the slightest eye contact. Eventually, I shuffled away toward the hog pens. Jill was playing with dolls out by the cellar. The next thing I heard was a dog barking. Mr. U and the monster had taken one of Mr. U’s hunting dogs out of his truck. The barking was insidious.

“Tell you what we are going to do. First, we can bring old Sarsaparilla out and see if she can get away from Bomber here.” The monster took control and started giving instructions to his demon followers.

“No, just throw the dog in the closet with the sow, and winner takes all,” Mr. U countered. The other demons agreed with Mr. U. They started capriciously throwing their money on the porch, with most betting on the dog.

I ran as fast as I could toward the house. As I entered the yard, the monster’s colossal hand stopped all my forward motion. I fell forward and gasped a mouth full of chicken-manure-infested dirt. The monster held me in a breath-defying grasp. “Don’t be a pussy, be a man,” the monster screamed at me. I heard barking, growling, whining—and then silence.

Mr. U stumbled out of the house holding his beloved dead Bomber. The dog’s eyes were gone, and his nose was hanging on with a few hairs. Blood dripped from his mouth like slow ketchup leaving a bottle. His

froze in a snarl. They’d found Sarsaparilla in a closet, where they threw Bomber in and closed the door. Unbeknown to me, raccoons fight a dog by wrapping themselves around its face. The dog never had a chance.

The monster turned me loose, stomped into the house, and brought Sarsaparilla out. Grabbing her back feet, he slung her head into a metal stud pole that held up the front porch roof. Then, to make sure the dastardly deed was complete, he stomped her head until the skull broke open. “We can’t have no damn dog-killing coon around here,” the monster announced with great satisfaction. He slung her in the trash barrel, lit a cigarette, then flicked the match in with her—a sacrifice for the demons by the monster. “Rest in peace, Sarsaparilla,” I sadly whispered as I fought back the tears.

 

CHAPTER TWOTHE HAPPENING

“YOU’RE THE DEVIL, SON. I’LL KILL YOU NOW, SO GET ON OUT of here. You are not going to take these kids. You’re the Devil. I didn’t raise you this away to treat these kids like this!” It was another night of the Devil’s rampage. I was seven and Jill was eight. We’d run to our grandpa’s house for safety.

Grandpa had just labeled him the Devil; it must be true. Grandpa was never wrong. That was why he was our savior, an angel. That was why God did not answer my prayers and kill the monster. God can’t kill the Devil. It made perfect sense now. How did I miss this? The monster was not a monster at all. The Devil controlled and created demons. I had only attended church a few times, and it was all about the Old Testament. Grandpa was a warrior angel who was here to protect us.

The single-shot ten-gauge shotgun was aimed somewhere close to the Devil’s midsection. Grandpa had grabbed the gun just seconds before the Devil stumbled into the bedroom. The Devil announced his arrival by ripping the front screen door off its hinges and then shouting, “Get up, motherfuckers!” With his red face and purple lips, the Devil stood his ground at the end of Grandpa’s bed. The Devil’s eyes were bugging out as he yelled obscenities and drew his fist back. My grandpa held fast as the Devil insisted on taking my sister and me away from Grandpa. I watched Grandpa’s whole body tremble as he attempted to hold the gun steady and not allow the Devil close enough to take it away from him. His finger moved from the trigger guard to the trigger. He looked frail in the moonlight with his long, skinny, pale legs making his boxer underwear appear comically large. Could he—would he—squeeze the trigger and free Jill and me?

No curtains covered my grandpa’s bedroom windows, so the moonlight filtered through dust-covered glass and softened the darkness with a fog-like glow. The ancient cloth window blinds had long ago dissolved into an ingredient for a recipe for dust balls, and all that remained were the wooden rollers attached to the window seal tops. I was so scared that I could not catch my breath. I concentrated on the shotgun. Would it fire? Could Grandpa kill him? The gun was called a Long Tom. Not sure why. Black tape held the butt to the rest of the gun. The blue finish had long ago been consumed by rust. Grandpa always said rust never sleeps, so I hoped this sleepless rust had not rendered the gun useless. Could a weapon even kill the Devil?

“You’re motherfucking crazy, old man, if you think I am leaving without my kids,” he screamed at the top of his lungs. The Devil appeared to change color. The angrier he became, and the louder he shouted, the more his skin turned a dark purple. He balled his hands into a throbbing fist. One punch might kill Grandpa.

That was the first time and last time I ever heard him call Jill and me “my kids.” Until this moment, I had never thought about

being the son of a monster or a devil. I used to tell Jill that she was truly the monster’s child, as she had a somewhat darker complexion like him. I, on the other hand, was pasty white and looked like our mother. Now that Grandpa called him the Devil, what did that make me? This was a defining moment, and my only belief was that I would never survive this life for long.

I had been asleep in bed with Grandpa. Jill was in the next room, sleeping on a threadbare, rotting couch. The room I was afraid to sleep in, as I just knew it was haunted. I had slept in that room only once, but I remember it like it was yesterday. The hand came out of the closet and touched me. It scared me shitless. Sometimes, even today, I think about that ghostly encounter. After that, Jill and I would sometimes sleep in his bed. This ghost, could it have been another angel, maybe like Grandpa? I always believed it was my grandmother, who died before I was born and when the Devil was only twelve. I would consider anything, including ghosts, if it would make the Devil go away.

Jill and I had made the trek to Grandpa’s house many times in the middle of the night. That time we escaped through my sister’s front bedroom window. We decided not to take the gravel road but instead cut through the woods and creek. If the Devil discovered us missing, we could have been easily captured on the road. Plus, we had to pass a neighbor’s house down the hill that had several vicious dogs that scared us. The full moon made our shadows tall and long. The only noise was our feet, stepping on leaves and twigs. Shadows from the trees raced along with us. Finally we crossed the creek, where the water was shallow. We saw a scattering of crawfish. We slid backward several times as we attempted to traverse the steepest and last creek embankment before reaching Grandpa’s house. We ran across his garden to the back of the barn, and felt relief when we finally arrived on Grandpa’s back porch. Besides numerous mosquito bites and thorn scratches, we’d made the journey in good shape.

His doors were never locked, so we walked in through the back. Holding hands, Jill and I crept into his bedroom. Grandpa was lying on his back with no covers and snoring with his mouth wide open. Jill stepped forward to wake him up, but I pulled her back. Witnessing the serenity of his sleep captivated me. This was the first time that I realized someone could sleep like this.

Jill broke my grip and quickly reached the bed. I followed but tripped over Grandpa’s night piss pot. Luckily for us, he had not used it yet tonight. The white-and-red, chipped-painted bucket made a startling sound when it rolled across the wood floor. But Grandpa only slowly

opened his grayish-blue eyes, squinting. Calmly he said, “What are you kids doing here?”

“We are afraid of the monster, Grandpa,” Jill cried.

“Grandpa, he is going to kill us,” I stammered.

“Now, now, settle down, kiddos,” Grandpa softly encouraged. “How you get here?”

“We walked. Cut through the creeks,” I responded with a fake gasping of air added to my voice.

He never asked questions about the monster. He knew; he always knew what his son was. He understood why we were scared. His voice calmed us, for he only had one volume and tone, kind of like elevator music. He pulled back the covers and motioned for me to come to bed. He then got up, grabbed a blanket and pillow, and made Jill a makeshift bed in the living room. My heartbeat finally relaxed, no longer a bass drum. Grandpa quickly fell back asleep. A slight breeze whispered through the bedroom window and scattered a host of dust balls out from under the bed. As they hurried across the floor, I pretended they were an army attacking all the darkness in my life.

Tranquility was interrupted by the sound of a truck engine that needed new pistons. The monster made his grand entrance by driving across the front lawn and crashing his truck on the side of the front porch.

I heard him stumbling and staggering onto the porch, the truck engine still running. I smelled the wretched odor of burned oil and gas fumes spewing blue smoke from the truck’s tailpipe.

Grandpa’s whole body trembled as he attempted to steady the long gun and not allow the Devil to grab it. Everything happened in slow motion. I felt dizzy, trying to focus on what was happening. I was trembling more than Grandpa. I felt my bladder ready to spill. Through the doorway of the bedroom, I could see Jill sitting up on the couch in a frozen position.

This night, Mom had left us at home while she went to work her night shift. The Devil had arrived at our house more agitated than most other times. He was screaming so loud that the windows rattled in our little prefabricated house. His fists were blasting through the sheetrock walls; dishes were thrown throughout the house with screaming threats of no tomorrow. “The truth hurts, and all you motherfuckers are going to rot in hell!” he declared. He stomped down the hardwood floors while scratching his crotch. His eyes bugged out

like those of a giant bullfrog being squeezed. Blood veins popped out of his overheated face as he screamed every obscenity known to man. He stormed past my room and opened the front door, but not the screen. The piss splattered off the screen door and sprayed the living room furniture as he attempted to pee on the front porch. These episodes were getting worse, and this time we thought it was the end; he was going to kill us. That was when Jill and I ran for the creek to Grandpa’s house.

“Son, you’re crazy,” my grandpa said. “You’re drunk. Get on out of here now and leave us alone. I will shoot you.” These words were neither a plea nor a threat; they were spoken as a factual statement. I would try in later years to replicate this type of simple, direct, and purposeful communication.

The Devil raised his massive fist and drew his arm back, preparing for the knockout. Grandpa held the gun steady. Still on the couch, Jill was now covered in a blanket, only her eyes peeking out.

After what felt like an eternity of screaming, cussing, and slinging spit from all corners of his mouth, the Devil backed down. It dawned on me the gun was the equalizer. It made all the difference. My grandpa may have been afraid too, but he held that gun steady on the Devil until he turned and staggered out the front door.

“Fuck all you motherfuckers! You’ll all rot in hell. You’ll damn sure pay for this. To hell with your fucking whore mother!” The Devil continued to scream obscenities as he crawled into his truck.

Grandpa sat on the side of the bed as the Devil peeled out and sped away, rubbing his bald head. The moonlight seemed to brighten, highlighting his snuff-stained sleeveless undershirt. Grandpa was 78 years old. He was still six feet three inches tall, a veteran of World War I, deployed as a mule skinner. He never went to school and could not read or write. His parents were sharecroppers, and he had always been a rancher and farmer. He had lived most of his life in extreme poverty and had survived everything life threw at him. Maybe that was why he now quickly calmed down. But he was my hero, having just come within seconds of killing his son to protect us.

Grandpa never tried to explain what happened. He was always a man of few words, but I wanted words this time. Reassurance that we would never have to run again. What I really wanted was for Grandpa to say, “Wait here. I’ll finish this off so you kids will never have to see the

Devil again.”

In our childish brains, there was never any doubt that Grandpa would save us; he always did. We didn’t know the word at the time, but he was our savior. His stability, consistency, and kindness were our only tangible model of humanity. He didn’t hug or ever say “I love you.” He didn’t have to; we just knew it. I never understood how our savior, our angel, could have participated in the birth and creation of this Devil.

I thought of the times the Devil would awaken us with gunshots. For no reason, he would fire at the moon and stars. That was usually a precursor to him dragging me out at sunrise to hunt squirrels. My job was to circle the giant cottonwood trees, making noise to scare the little varmints to his side of the tree. He did shoot a lot of squirrels. He would make me clean them. I hated it, slicing the tail and pulling the entire skin over the squirrel’s head. Several of the little varmints were always cleaned and in the icebox, waiting to be cooked. We ate them fried, boiled with dumplings, and grilled.

Grandpa was back asleep, loudly snoring, after his Devil confrontation. Death, cleaning squirrels, and shooting at mice seemed trivial compared to what I had just experienced. I had trapped possums and rabbits while trying to play like I was Daniel Boone, trying to be a future redneck. Observing one human about to kill another changed me that night. I didn’t sleep. I watched the sunrise twinkle through the brittle, stained, and ragged front-room window blinds. Grandpa usually went to bed at five in the evening and was up by four in the morning. On this day, he slept in until almost five.

We didn’t want to leave. The Devil would probably sleep until noon. There would still be hell to pay when we got home. Grandpa was on the front porch enjoying the early morning cool breeze. He always wore the same type of clothes: khaki pants, shirt, ranger boots, and a cowboy hat, straw in summer and felt for winter. I was hungry, but I knew Grandpa would only have a carton of milk in the icebox. I knew not to drink any, as he drank right out of it, leaving brown snuff around the opening as evidence.

I wandered around the house like a scared animal looking for the next place to hide. A grossly deteriorating fuzzy couch and one old broken-down rocking chair occupied the front room. Two chairs and a small red peeling Formica table from the 1940s in the middle room. One bed and dresser in the spare bedroom, which grandpa

rented out to an old bachelor merchant marine when he wasn’t traveling the world’s oceans. This man collected rocks from around the world, and I sometimes stole a few. This man also had parked an old Airstream trailer in the pasture but rarely used it. I would tell people that I was going to live in one of those when I grew up.

“Grandpa, I want to live with you,” I pleaded.

“Boy, you can always come back. The Devil comes and goes. The Devil won’t always be in him. He’s gone now, so I’m taking you kids home this morning.”

“Why didn’t you shoot him? Why didn’t you kill him? Were you going to if he grabbed us?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that if you pull a gun on someone, you need to be prepared to use it.”

“He is the Devil, isn’t he?” I asked.

“He is the Devil,” Jill chimed in while wiping tears from her eyes. She stomped the floor and cried, “Let us stay! We want to live with you forever.”

Grandpa didn’t answer, and I took that as a yes.

Grandpa never gave clear answers unless he was speaking of tangible stuff like castrating calves or butchering hogs. But he said one last thing to me that morning, and I have never forgotten it: “Don’t take life so serious, as no one ever gets out alive.” 

 

CHAPTER THREETHE EXPERIMENT

WE HAD LIVED WITH MY GRANDPA UNTIL I WAS AROUND THREE years old. When I was older, I found photos of Grandpa standing with all of us, holding my sister. I was in a diaper and maybe was eighteen months old. Jill, fifteen months older, also appeared to be in a diaper. But the photos were old and faded, so that was my best guess. We were at my grandpa’s house, but I didn’t remember living there. Guess we lived there until he bought the prefabricated home and gave us ten acres of his 160.

Our house would be considered modern compared to his. We had an indoor toilet, though the sewage was piped under the house and into a trench that went nowhere. The septic tank about 40 yards away was continuously full or clogged. Our goat and milk cow always had some green grass to eat along the sewage trench. Once we got a washing machine, and a drainage hose was run to the outside of the house. This was an excellent attraction for frogs, who created tadpoles. Snakes followed the frogs, so a young boy like me had my own miniature Nile River.

More hours were spent on the solid concrete front porch than in the house. It served a lot of purposes. Here we had our first line of defense for killing flies before they invaded our home. We also had scorpion races. The porch had been painted many times, but it never seemed to stick too long. All that chipped paint, along with the blood of thousands of fat ticks we removed from our dogs and stomped to see how far the blood would splatter, was a concrete palette comparable to the best Pollock.

Our drinking water came from a shallow well. This caused many inconveniences, as did the small electric pump that drew the groundwater to the house. As a result, everyone used the same bathwater once the bathtub was filled. I was the youngest, so I bathed last, which meant the water was usually so dirty I could not see my feet. And the water was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, too.

Grandpa’s house was about a mile from ours. It had no indoor toilet or running water. He had an old dirt cellar and several outhouses. One was a milking house, another a chicken house, and one was something like an old garage. The toilet was in there. He had an old fox hide nailed to the wall so you could warm your hands before sitting on a wooden plank with a hole cut in the middle. You never wanted to look into that hole while doing your business. Once I remembered asking my grandpa how I’d been potty-trained, since the toilet was so far away. He replied that butcher paper and newspaper were placed on the back porch floor, which I guessed sounded like solution enough to him.

Then there was Grandpa’s barn: my sanctuary, my refuge from the Devil. Many a day and night, I would find solitude in that old barn. I hid my Hit Parader magazines among the hay bales. If I left them there too long, the rats took full advantage of them for nest building. The Devil prohibited anything that depicted long hair on males, so bands like The Beatles were often cursed as part of his indignation with the world. I was not allowed any hair to touch my forehead, so it was slicked back until I got on the school bus, when it would go its own messy way again.

I’m unsure how we guessed the purpose of the little yellow pills we found in the kitchen cabinet. Jill and I somehow figured out

that they were dangerous. Maybe I’m wrong, but I can recall finding them and our mom screaming at us never to touch them again. That was a sign that they were very important or dangerous. We decided on danger. They’d been strategically placed at the highest shelf’s back where supposedly no child could reach. Mothers always underestimate their children, while fathers don’t pay attention.

During my later elementary years The Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper” made the connection for me about little yellow pills and the ode to all the abused and beaten mothers out there.

Women my mother’s age had generally married as teenagers to escape whatever they were running to escape, only to find themselves in a worse kind of prison. Then children started coming. Did Valium allow her to tolerate suffering? Were we part of this created hell? If so, could we fix it? Did God create Valium to keep a balance between evil and good?

Once chastised and threatened with corporal punishment by the Devil, we were motivated to determine those pills’ purpose. There was no Google in those days, so the only thing to do was to ask the older kids in school. Seek out the thugs who would probably do drugs or know about such things. A different type of Oracle. Our dark web of information.

Jill and I were in elementary school at that time. I was in the third grade, and she was one grade higher. I remember the teacher leaving class after our atomic bomb exercise and then returning and announcing that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Why would anyone kill a good person? I wondered.

I had already started to develop my chameleon abilities and personality. Jill had a select circle of friends with none who would have the ability to advise us on the little yellow pills, but I knew someone. Javier.

Javier was several years older. He’d probably started smoking in the first grade. He was driving old tagless cars up and down the dirt road that ran by our house when we were in the third grade. His parents apparently allowed him to do whatever his heart desired. He had long hair and styled himself as a Mod with Beatle hats, ...

mouth