A Portion for Foxes

by Daniel Mitchell

  I used to love that sound. It reminded me of camping trips in Dad’s old pickup with the tin camper shell on the back. Back then, I was still small enough to lie crossways on the half sheet of plywood balanced across the back of the cab with a thick piece of foam rubber under my sleeping bag, while Dad and Will lounged in folding chairs and blankets between me and the tailgate.

  In the mornings, I would wake to the smell of bacon and hot chocolate at the first light of dawn. I would stumble to the fire as Dad poured me a cup of Swiss Miss with tiny marshmallows and handed me a forked stick to toast our bread over the flames. That was always my job since it was kind of hard to mess up.

  Dad cooked a whole package of bacon every time, and we made bacon and cheese sandwiches on toast, piling it all so high we had to squeeze and crush them into our mouths, washing down the barely chewed chunks with scalding swallows of chocolaty goodness.

  After breakfast, I would scrub the greasy pans with sand and water followed by some bargain-brand liquid soap. Dad invariably tossed me a giant apple from his special stash of Red Delicious, and we headed for a walk by the water to greet the morning sky.

  I was half asleep and reliving those memories when they turned to thoughts of our trips to Fobb Bottom and the beach where Mike had died—where I’d seen his throat opened and his blood pumping into the firepit.

  Stomping my feet to settle them into my work boots, I tromped downstairs and looked for breakfast. I was surprised to find an empty kitchen. A box of cereal, a bowl, and a spoon were waiting on the table beside a note from Mom:

  Sam,

  I’ve gone to answer the phones in the prayer room at church. Will didn’t come home last night, and your father got called in to work early, so you’ve got the place to yourself. You’ll have to make cereal do for breakfast or cook something yourself, but you better not leave my kitchen a wreck. Back around two or three.

  Love,

  Mom

  P.S. Your father said for you to restack the hay you and Will tossed into the barn before he gets home, or somebody’s getting a sore butt.

  I wasn’t surprised Dad had left something for me to do even in the middle of a wild storm. I'd been gone for months, but that didn't change the fact that work had to be done. I knew the sore-butt threat was an empty one. He’d never actually spanked me, not even when I was four and peed in his boot when Will bribed me with a Snickers.

  Ignoring the box of Frosted Mini Wheats on the table, I grabbed my old slicker from a hook in the back hall, switched to rubber boots, and started for the barn. The rain had been falling for only half an hour, coming down in a gray wall, pounding my head and shoulders with huge drops. It felt more like hail than rain, and the yard was already a lake.

  When I walked through the back gate, the wind whipped my slicker into the fence. It snagged on the barbed wire and ripped all the way up one side. The rain and wind jumped at the chance, and my whole right side was soaked in seconds. Then I pulled open the barn door too quickly, and the wind took it, jerking me off my feet into the mud and dropping about a gallon of water into each boot before I struggled to my feet. Apparently, it was going to be one of those days.

  In late July in Oklahoma, even with the rain, the barn was still near ninety degrees. I left my ruined slicker by the door, tugged off my boots, and dumped the muddy water onto the floor then got to work restacking the hay, squishing with each step.

  We’d been in a hurry on that last load, and since it was Will’s turn to stack, he didn’t bother to change the direction the bales were facing in each row, and they’d collapsed all over the floor. Three rows had fallen at least partially, and I had to pull them all down and start from scratch.

  Hay dust and old dirt were thick in the air before I was finished, and I was coughing up a quarter lung with each bale. Faint squeaks from the feed room let me know nobody had been keeping up with the rats while I was gone, so I took a break to fetch the headlamp and pellet gun from the tack room.

  After setting a trap with a small pile of cracked corn on the floor of the feed room, I sat and waited in the dark for the first faint scurryings. When I flicked on the headlamp, ten fat rats froze for a second in the glare. I managed to wing or kill three outright before they ran back into the safety of the shadows. While working my way through the room and moving various bags and barrels, I shot four and picked three more off the rafters, where they were dumb enough to think they were safe. All I had to do was look for their tails hanging down. They might have been tough, but they weren’t quite as slick as they thought.

  Some of them died easy. Others screamed in their ratty language before I gave them a second pellet or just stomped them. That might sound cruel, but they were rats, and I missed more than I killed.

  Mom never wanted to hear about these rat-hunting expeditions, but Dad always gave me a dollar for every one I got. He’d taught me how to shoot with that same pellet rifle when I was five and encouraged me to practice on the rats. I made a lot of candy and pop money that way as a kid. Later, I just did it for extra allowance.

  I moved into the rest of the barn when the feed room ran low on victims, and I found a huge nest of them under a pile of scrap wood in the corner. When I turned over that last chunk of plywood, I exposed a whole maze of tunnels and nests. Rats went everywhere.

  Useless sneaked in through a loose board at some point and joined me. I shot, pumped, and stomped while he ran around as if he had rabies, snapping and snarling at every shadow. We cleaned out the whole barn as best we could in the darkness. I got bored before the dog did.

  When he finally collapsed, panting, at my feet, I piled up the furry corpses and did a head count before tossing them into an old feed sack to be burned later. All told, we’d killed twenty-seven adults and eight pink babies. That wasn’t a record, but it was close.

  I couldn’t do it often. I had to wait for the population to build back up after a culling. Again, I thought of Mike and all the times we’d killed rats in his daddy’s barn or ours. We used to make a contest out of it and bet five dollars on the winner.

  I’d never really minded killing the adults, but the helpless pink babies used to bother me. That day, for some reason, I felt nothing. No, that wasn’t quite true. I felt a faint rage. I wanted to see them die. Maybe the reason was the storm, maybe something else. While some part of me still winced as I stepped on their tiny heads, it felt right somehow. Helpless or not, they were rats. I pretended they were all Stanglers. Useless ate half of their little bald corpses before I stopped him—no sense in letting him catch rabies or something.

  I blamed my watering eyes on the dust and got back to work stacking the hay. Instead of doing it completely right, I began leaving gaps and holes in the work, forming tunnels and trails through the bales. At the top, I built a thick wall around one entrance to my maze and crawled through it for old times' sake, just as Mike and I had done too many times to count.

  Will used to help build those forts sometimes but thought he was too mature to actually play in them with us. His idea of fun was to wait until we left for the day then mine our hay tunnels with oversized rattraps and cow patties. We usually found them with our fingers in the dark.

  Once, I got really mad and ran to the house, where he was laughing about it, and kicked him in both shins as hard as I could. That wasn’t my brightest idea. He knocked me down, looped a rope around my feet, and left me hanging upside down from the shade tree out back. He wasn’t too mean about it, though. He left Mike in the same predicament two limbs over and only frogged us a couple of times each. It was fun at first before we got dizzy and Mike threw up all over his own hat in the grass below. Only thirty minutes or so later, Dad came home and found us that way, but we were pretty light-headed by then.

  Will took a mild beating for that one, but he’d made his point. Whipping my older brother was impossible when I was eight and he outweighed me by a hundred pounds.

  Crawling through my hay tunnel was only fun once. By the time I wiggled out at the
bottom, hay was clinging to my hair and was matted in the mud and water on my jeans and shirt. I dusted it off as best I could and sat for a while in the dark barn, wishing I’d left the rats alone. I sat listening to the storm, hoping the rain would die down soon. It didn’t.

  I finally gave up waiting and locked up the feed room after making sure no bags were going to get wet if the storm kept up so long that the barn flooded.

  Walking out into the storm, I was careful to keep a good hold on the door so the wind wouldn’t take it again. The last thing I needed was for it to slam open so hard it pulled a hinge.

  Trying to stay dry was pointless, so I took my time walking back to the house. I stopped in the yard and enjoyed the downpour for a while, letting the storm pound the mud, hay, and rat germs from my clothes and skin. The rain wasn’t much cooler than I was and felt like the world’s most violent shower.

  I stood there, face raised to the sky, until Useless came tearing past at a dead run toward the back porch. He slowed down long enough to jump and bounce off me sideways in passing, sheer enthusiasm and fear of the thunder making him act more like a puppy than a ten-year-old cow dog.

  After setting my boots upside down on the porch to drain, I stripped naked in the back room, threw all my clothes into the washer, and headed for the upstairs bathroom and a scalding bath.

  #########

  By four o’clock, I’d received and ignored four texts and three calls from Jenny. The night before in the front seat of my truck had been terrible.

  We drove out to the lake, bounced down a sandy side road where I could be reasonably sure the rangers wouldn’t come, and parked by the water. She was stripping her jeans off by the time I shifted into park.

  Since age twelve, I’d listened to stories in the locker room about sex and had built up a fair idea of what to expect. It was nothing like the stories. In fact, it was awful. She kept yelling over and over for no apparent reason. I had to fight to keep the image of that bloody girl from the night Mike died out of my head. I couldn't tell if Jenny liked it or I was killing her.

  I kept thinking, Is this really what I’ve been so obsessed about for the last five years? Awkward fumbling and wine-cooler kisses? A brand-new hickey on my shoulder and the overpowering urge to take a bath? This is it? Seriously? I expected choirs of angels and a sudden spurt of chest hair. Instead, I got scratches and suck marks.

  I was too excited to argue at first, but as it went on and on, what I wanted more than anything else was just to run home and hide. I felt as if my whole adolescence had been one big, filthy lie. Having finally done it, I realized most of those locker room stories were told by virgins. R-rated movies and internet porn simply had not prepared me for the reality of sex—not even a little bit.

  Afterward, I took her straight home and fled into my bedroom and the last dregs of my childhood. I tried to be proud and manly, but all I really felt was horror. I was scared to death she would want more or that she wouldn't, that I was now her boyfriend or, worse, her baby daddy.

  We hadn’t used a condom since she’d assured me she was on the pill and barely gave me time to speak before attacking me with her vacuum cleaner kisses. To make things worse, she had found herself some cigarettes somewhere, so in addition to strawberry-wine-cooler-flavored spit, I got the wonderful taste of ancient ashtray. Every last trace of her sexiness and my interest in her was gone like a fart in the wind. I thought it would be wonderful, heavenly. Instead, it was actually kind of gross.

  I was working on the theory that if I ignored her long enough, she’d just decide I was a jerk and give it up. Then I wouldn’t have to admit I was terrified of her rather violent version of sex. Convincing Mom to let me skip church the next few weeks was going to be the hardest part, but I would come up with something. If nothing else, by age seven, I'd learned how to puke at will. Even Mom couldn’t argue with puke.

  I sat in the dark, thinking about taking another hot bath, maybe with bubbles that time, and my phone buzzed again. Without even glancing at the number, I turned it off, rolled over on my side, hugging my spare pillow to my chest, and tried to sleep.

  Two hours later, the power came back on. So did my lights and fan and the TV. I jerked upright in bed, my heart feeling as if it was chewing its way out of my chest. That wasn’t the most pleasant way to wake up, but I was grateful to be pulled out of my dream.

  In it, I’d been walking through a sunny field back in the Arbuckles. Flowers were blooming, birds were singing, and only a few puffy clouds were in the sweet, blue sky. Everything looked perfect, but something wasn’t. Just at the edge of my sight under the trees, things were moving. I couldn’t spot them when I turned, but they were there. I could almost hear their breathing. The faintest trace of rot tinged the air and was getting stronger. I ran, but the trees grew closer and closer. So did the sly movements in the shadows. I scrambled up a hill and found a cave, something slapping at my feet as I dove in headfirst.

  I threw rocks and sticks behind myself and spun around, but the cave was gone, and I was in Joseph’s barn, in the snake room, and the cages were all open. That sweet, sick smell was overpowering, and I ran for the door as half-seen things slid toward me, but when I burst through, I was on the hilltop by the grave.

  For a second, I felt safe, but the grave was all wrong. The flowers and colored stones I had left were melting into weird shapes and patterns that hurt my eyes when I tried to make sense of them, and the old stone bench looked like an altar with dark stains running down its sides. Jenny lay there, dressed only in dead flowers, beckoning.

  The oaks ringing the hilltop moved, lurching toward me, the shadows beneath them full of slithering and stench, rat squeaks and hisses. I glimpsed enormous pink faces and panicked. The only way out was the cliff behind me with its one-hundred-eighty-foot drop to the river. No way was the water below deep enough to break my fall onto the submerged rocks. I ran and jumped anyway, falling slower than any feather. As I fell, the red water below parted over the dark, scaly hide and huge teeth of the gator. He rose up expectantly, knobby tail slashing the surface to foam.

  Then the power came on.

  Once my heart decided to actually stay in my chest and I figured my legs might work, I decided to have that bubble bath after all.

  #########

  The storms lasted three days, pounding the fields and yard to mush. Will slept at his girlfriend’s place and only stopped by for clean clothes. Dad went to work each day, and Mom did her volunteer work at the church prayer room, logging calls from friends and strangers, adding their names to the board to be prayed over when the callers took a break. That used to seem strange to me, calling strangers to pray for you. Now, I wondered if my name was on the board. I hoped it was.

  Even Dad couldn’t come up with much for me to do when the weather was so wild, so I played old video games and napped, occasionally taking the battered Kubota side-by-side out for a spin in the mud. After I told him about my run-in with Randy, I was under strict orders to stay home and keep the phone and my shotgun handy.

  Jenny’s calls eventually stopped after her texts became more and more vicious. The last one said I was a scumbag and she was going to tell everyone I was tiny. As the hickeys faded, I decided I could live with that.

  On Wednesday, maybe an hour after Mom left and Dad was long gone, a knock came at the door. Surprised, I looked out my window and saw a lowrider Chevy truck with a fluorescent-green paint job in the yard. I grabbed my shotgun and tiptoed downstairs, pushing double-ought buck shells into the magazine. As quietly as possible, I jacked one round into the chamber and slipped the safety off.

  Opening the front door a crack, I peeked out, and there stood Randy Stangler, dripping on my porch, hands held high and empty.

  “I know your folks are gone. You need to let me in,” Randy said.

  I glanced over his shoulder, looking for Richard and Jesse.

  “It’s just me, Sam, and I ain’t here for trouble.”

  The barrel of my old twelv
e-gauge was surprisingly steady since I was shaking like Granny’s chihuahua on the inside.

  He used his left hand to pull up the tail of his shirt and turned around slowly. “I ain’t got so much as a pocketknife. I need to talk to you, man. Please.”

  I’d never heard Randy say “please” before, not to anyone. I’m an idiot, I thought as I stepped back. “Come on in, but keep your hands where I can see them and don’t do anything stupid,” I said, feeling pretty stupid myself for talking like a TV show.

  I lowered the shotgun but kept both hands on it. Being careful not to turn my back on him, I motioned to the living room and followed several feet behind. He sat on the edge of the couch. I stepped to the side of the window, where I could watch him and the driveway at the same time.

  “Richard wants me to kill you. Says it’ll make a man of me. Prove I’m his brother.”

  “They know I’m back, then?”

  “Not yet, but I’ll have to tell them soon. They still make me drive past sometimes, looking for your truck. You keep hanging around town, they’ll find out sooner or later. Then I’m screwed because I didn’t tell.”

  “I guess I got it all wrong, then. You’re a victim.”

  “Jesus, man. You don’t know what it’s like, living here with your perfect family. I never want to be like Richard and Jesse. Never."

  His face was flushed. Even in the dark, I could see he had something in his eye. Randy Stangler—on the edge of tears in my living room.

  “They cut his throat, Randy. Bled him out like some damn pig.”

  “Yeah. They made me bury him a couple of miles down the lake, drinking beer while I dug the hole and covered him up." He looked down, and a tear flashed in the light on its way to the floor.

  Right then, I almost pulled the trigger. “You think I’m going to feel sorry for you now?”