By Devin James Leonard
Daryl was in the basement washing his knives under the faucet when his father called to him from upstairs. He stuffed his instruments inside a plastic bag, stashed them in the sump pump pit, and wiped his bloody hands with a rag on his way to the kitchen. His dad told him Uncle Elmore and his kids were coming to visit.
“You’re watching your cousins today,” he said. “Let’em go in the pool, but keep a mindful eye on’em at all times.”
Daryl balled the bloodstained rag and shoved it down deep into the trash can. “They know how to swim?”
“Hell if I know.” There were four empty bottles of beer on the countertop, and Daryl’s father, Thaddeus Fox, popped the top off another as he leaned against the brick chimney set between the dining and living room. “It ain’t whether or not they know how to swim that’s the problem,” he went on. “Your uncle says one of the boys has got a couple of screws loose. And the other—well, the other one ain’t got no screws.”
“Don’t listen for shit, neither,” Uncle Elmore said upon shuffling into the kitchen. He wore camo pants and a grease-stained tee, side by side of his older brother, but looking like identical twins; men in their fifties with wrinkled faces and purple noses, seven teeth between them, hunched shoulders, and filthy. Seventy-year-old cancer patients riddled with chemo looked better than these men. Daryl had once seen a woman take her last breath after she’d gone four days without water and wondered now how these malnourished hicks could survive all their lives on a diet of nothing but beer and whiskey.
“I got traps to check today,” Daryl told his dad.
“I’ll look in on’em. We’re heading up to the woods to put up new signs.”
Daryl’s father owned ten acres of dense forest behind their home. What he does, he staples “Posted” markers all along the property to keep trespassers away, then come hunting season he disregards everybody else’s and goes wherever the hell he wants.
“I don’t want to watch no kids,” Daryl said. “I got a life of my own, you know.”
“What’s that, fussing around in the basement? Shoot, how old are you now? Nineteen? Twenty? I had all your free time, I’d be out chasing tail, not standing over a bucket of water watching rats drown.”
Daryl thought about smashing one of the empty bottles on the counter and jabbing it into his father’s throat. He’d imagined doing it a thousand times, but never once attempted.
“Just hurry back.”
Daryl’s father shook his head and clicked his tongue, said he and Uncle Elmore were going over to the lake to fish once they’re out the woods. Thaddeus didn’t own a boat, nor did his brother. They just went from dock to dock, casting their lines and filling their buckets with sunfish, what the Fox brothers called Poor Man’s Lobster.
So Daryl would be stuck watching his cousins all day, some kids who, if they were anything like their neanderthal father, would probably sink to the bottom of the pool and drown from thinking they could breathe underwater.
“You must watch them every second, Daryl,” Uncle Elmore instructed.
Daryl heaved a sigh of frustration and finally relented. “Guess we’re all fishing today.”
Uncle Elmore had been staying at the house for a month now, ever since his wife found out he was cheating. Employed by the city, reading the meters and handing out tickets. Saturday afternoons, he’d tell his wife he got called into work and wouldn’t come back until almost midnight. What he didn’t expect his wife to know was that the meters cost nothing after 5pm on the weekends. How his wife knew about free parking on weekends and the man whose responsibility it was to know such things didn’t know it was a mystery to Daryl.
The Fox brothers took off in the pickup at one-thirty, and not two seconds later, when they disappeared around the bend of the county road, Daryl’s aunt Irma came from the opposite corner in her beat-up station wagon. She pulled up to the drive and parked and stared straight ahead with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Never waved hello to Daryl standing on the porch landing or looked behind her where her children sat in the back seat.
“Get the hell out,” she hollered in the rearview mirror. “If you need anything, don’t call me.”
The boys got out with their heads and eyeballs spinning in all directions, like caged animals let out to graze for the first time. Both were young and slender, somewhere between the ages of seven and ten. They carried no luggage with them, and not only did they not have a spare set of clothing, but they were hardly wearing clothes to change out of. Both shirtless and sunburned, one in oil-stained jeans cut off at the upper thighs, the other one wearing something resembling the pant legs that were snipped off the very jeans the other kid had on.
Irma flicked her cigarette out the window onto the tarred and sealed driveway as she backed away, still staring straight ahead, and when she got on the road her engine screamed and her tires peeled as though they were telling Daryl, Good luck, they’re your problem now.
From the back porch, he waved the boys over, but they only stood motionless on the hot, black driveway with no shoes on their bare feet. For christ sake, it was a scorching July day, and Daryl could see heat waves rising off the pavement. Must have been hotter than a skillet atop a wood stove, but these bottle babies with mutated brains incapable of pain or complex thought didn’t so much as flinch.
Again, he told them to come up to the porch, this time yelling at them, but still they would not move. They batted their eyes as a means to react to his speech, ogling like demonic little Children of the Corn with greasy hair that looked like they’d gotten their last haircut from a wood chipper. Daryl imagined that when they did finally move, they’d drop on all fours and stomp over like a couple of chimps and holler unintelligible sounds that only their small, primitive brains would understand.
He had it fixed in his mind already that if they didn’t end up drowning in the pool, he’d kill them himself.
He’d done it once before.
Down the steps Daryl came, and asked, “Wanna go for a swim?”
The children considered this thought by looking at each other in silence, as if telepathically asking one another if they understood this bizarre language Daryl had spoken.
Daryl clapped his hands and slapped his thighs. “Get your asses up here! Now! Move it!” Hollering like they were dogs that wouldn’t listen.
The shouting snapped the boys out of their moronic trance, and they trundled over to the grass and stood in front of their cousin. Side by side, at attention, they waited for their next instruction.
“Your dad is out with my dad right now,” Daryl said. “My dad is Thaddeus Fox, your old man’s brother. That makes us cousins. A pack of Foxes. I’m Daryl. What are your names?”
The taller boy stuck out his lips, revealing yellow buck teeth, and said, “I’m Bert. He’s Ernie.”
“Jesus Christ,” Daryl said. None of the Fox family had a chance at being happy with the names they were given—Daryl, Bert, Ernie, Thaddeus, Elmore. Every single one of them sounded like something you just couldn’t say without it coming out in a country redneck accent. The only exception was Daryl’s older brother Mike, as long as one didn’t refer to him by his full birth name: Michael Jason Fox.
Bert and Ernie, easy enough to remember. At twenty years old, Daryl was meeting his kin for the first time. The only difference between them was their height and the taller one’s banana-colored chompers. Both breathing from their mouths, the shorter one with eyes so dull that if he hadn’t been standing, Daryl would assume he was already dead. He was familiar with those eyes of stone, a lifeless gray, but had never seen them on someone still living.
“Okay, so you are Bert,” he said, pointing to the tall, toothy one. “And you are Ernie,” he said to the other. Neither bobbed their head to confirm.
“How old are you, Bert?”
“Seven,” Bert said.
“And you, Ernie?”
Ernie’s empty doll eyes gleamed up at Daryl. He blinked once.
“He’s five,” Bert said.
“Your uncle Thaddeus tells me you kids might like to swim.”
Bert frowned. Ernie picked his nose.
“You’d think your mother would have packed you some trunks, but whatever. If you’ve got underwear on, and I pray you do, I guess you could go for a dip in those.”
The pool in the backyard was one of those cheap inflatable tubs three feet deep you could build yourself and fill up from a hose and had cost less than the wood for the deck that Daryl and his old man had built up against it. It held two thousand gallons of water and was puncture resistant, but Daryl had found that to be false many times. The blue outer lining, now patched with many silver squares of waterproof duct tape, was from Daryl missing the varmints he’d shoot at from the porch with his twenty-two.
Bert dropped his denim shorts and ran up the deck in his brown tighty-whities and dove in. Ernie did not bother taking off his pants, nor did he waste time following his brother’s steps. The kid sprinted straight toward the pool, crashed against the flimsy rubber wall, and smacked his chest into it and folded over and into the water. Both boys came up and splashed each other, their mouths open, tongues hanging out, slurping at the air.
“Don’t drink the water,” Daryl yelled.
Bert slapped the water at his little brother, and the kid mopped it up. Daryl told them again to stop once, twice, three times, and gave up. A little chlorine couldn’t possibly do any more damage.
On a positive note, at least they were getting cleaned up—the first bath they’d had in weeks, if Daryl had to guess—and thought the clothes could use some laundering, too. After telling Bert to watch his brother for a second, he went back toward the house to scoop up the jean shorts that reeked so badly he had to pinch a corner of the garments with two fingers while holding his breath. He’d smelt dead people that were sweeter than this stench.
He carried the shorts at arm’s length, and by the time he brought them to the pool and threw them in, the kids were gone.
“Bert? Ernie?” He peered down at the water, expecting to see them sunk to the bottom, but they weren’t.
There was scuffling beyond the deck where, further in the backyard, was a small fenced-in garden. Inside, Daryl and his father had grown tomatoes, peppers, summer squash, zucchini, sweet corn, kale, beans and peas, and, in the way back, five marijuana plants. Their prized crop was three large blueberry bushes in the middle of the rectangle plot. The berries weren’t ripe just yet, but Bert and Ernie were tugging at the branches and tearing fruit from their limbs and tossing them into their mouths like scavenging squirrels. If there was one thing Daryl hated more than most people, it was critters getting into the garden. Chipmunks eating the kale, rabbits feasting on the lettuce, woodchucks burrowing under the fence.
Two mongoloid cousins snapping the blueberry branches.
“Get out of there!” Daryl screamed, and they hooted like a couple of orangutans instead of emoting spoken language.
The hose for filling the pool and watering the plants lay on the grass between the deck and garden. Daryl dragged it over and sprayed them with a full penetrating blast to their faces, and with a howl of defiance, they leaped over the fence and went running back toward the house.
Daryl took out his cell while pacing the backyard, called his father and told him to put Elmore on. His father said his uncle was busy taking a shit.
“Dad, your nephews are feral creatures. They don’t listen.”
“The hell do you want from me?” Daryl’s father said. “I told you they were a little funky.”
There was a long silence on the phone, Uncle Elmore’s voice mumbling from a distance, and Daryl’s dad said, “El says to feed’em to calm’em down. But watch’em. If the big one eats too much, he goes buck wild, and if the little one eats too much, he’s liable to puke it up.”
“The big one and the little one. Does the man not know his own kids’ names?”
“Daryl—”
“They’ve already eaten and gone batshit,” Daryl said. “They were just in the garden.”
Daryl’s dad asked if the pot plants were all right. Daryl assured him they were fine, but the blueberry bushes could use some TLC.
His dad grunted. “Keep them away from the garden——and check the traps.”
“You told me you were gonna check them.”
“The ones in the garden, numbskull.”
“Dad, these kids—”
“Just tire the little some-bitches out,” Daryl’s dad said, “and then they won’t be a problem.”
“They won’t be a problem if I kill’em,” Daryl said.
After another long pause, Daryl’s dad said, “I’m not responsible for what you do, son.” Like he didn’t care as long as he didn’t know about it.
Daryl looked up at the house and told his dad he had to go. One of the kids had somehow gotten onto the roof, two stories up in his skivvies with more holes in them than swiss cheese and was hugging the television antenna bolted down, the tendons in his neck sticking out as he tried to pry it up from the shingles.
Daryl cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted another command to go with the ones he’d been shouting for the last five minutes that hadn’t yet worked.
“Hey! Get down from there! Git!”
The boy snapped his face toward Daryl’s voice. He let off the antenna, dropped on all fours, and howled as he galloped across the roof and dove into an open window and disappeared inside the house.
Behind Daryl came a rustling sound. The other kid was back in the garden, plucking six-foot-tall corn stalks out of the ground and breaking them over his knee. Daryl reached for the hose and let the water spray in a jet. At first the boy recoiled from the cold stream blasting him in the face, but then he fought back by charging forward and launching a corn stalk through the air like a Spartan warrior throwing a spear. Daryl ducked at the incoming corn-javelin, where the root-end of the stalk struck the pool deck in an explosion of soil.
The other boy came out of the house, scampering across the yard and hopping the garden fence like a gazelle, and joined his brother. Daryl clenched his fists and went in through the gate, but now the boys were hiding somewhere beyond the blueberries.
To Daryl’s surprise, when he found them, they were sitting on their knees, and peacefully still. Bert and Ernie had magically calmed, but why?
He came up behind them while they sat in a nitwit trance and saw them hunkered next to a small metal trap, what was called a have-a-heart, because it caught varmints and contained them without causing any physical harm. Inside the contraption sat a wild brown rabbit, its scared little body trembling, nose wrinkling, innocent black eyes unblinking.
Daryl’s cave-cousins stared in awe at the tiny creature, their heads tilting as though they were listening to it speak but couldn’t understand the language.
Ernie looked up at Daryl and said, “What do.”
“Was that a question?”
“He wants to know what you’re gonna do with it,” Bert clarified.
Daryl grabbed the steel cage by the top handle and picked it up, holding it at arm’s length like an oil lantern. “Your uncle Thaddeus likes to take them down the road a few miles and release them into the wild. That way, the animal is far enough away where it won’t come back and eat our crop. And also, it lets the animal live. That’s why it’s called a have-a-heart trap.” He smirked and said, “Wanna see what I do to them?”
He carried the caged rabbit out of the garden and up the steps of the pool deck, with the kids following him. Crouching to the edge near the water, the children gathered close, and when Daryl raised the trap over the pool, they gasped.
Bert pulled on Daryl’s shirt with a frantic tug. “You don’t mean to—”
“Drown him?” Daryl nodded and grinned.
Bert and Ernie trembled with desperation, fidgeting as though their bladders were full and they needed to find a bathroom right away.
“If I don’t kill it, it might have babies,” Daryl said, “and then there’ll be dozens of them tearing up the garden.”
“Release him,” Bert pleaded, “into the wild.”
“Peace,” Ernie said, meaning to say please.
“What if he finds his way back?” Daryl said, feigning naivete.
“He won’t,” Bert said. “We’ll go far away.”
“Cover,” Ernie said.
“Cover?”
Ernie slapped his palms over his eyes.
“So, he can’t see where we’re taking him and find his way back,” Bert said.
The rabbit lay still in the trap, only its nose continuing to crinkle. It was a tiny cage, light, but holding it up in the air tired Daryl, and so he set it on the deck, where the kids immediately hovered about it like they could hug the thing through the steel bars of its miniature cell.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he told his cousins. “We’ll take him somewhere far away where he can’t come back. We’ll cover him up so he don’t see where we’re going, but you two got to be blindfolded too.”
“Why us?” Bert asked.
“Because rabbits are mind readers.”
“Say are?” Ernie asked, stunned.
“That’s right. If you guys are watching where we’re going, why all that rabbit’s got to do is look at you with his cute little button nose and—boom—he can see directly into your mind. Then he’ll know for sure how to get back to the house and he’ll be right back in here eating mine and Uncle Thaddeus’s vegetables. And if he does come back, I’m not taking him for a ride but a deep dive, if you know what I mean.”
The kids bobbed their heads, agreeing to being blindfolded.
Since Daryl and his father shared the pickup, all he had for traveling was his Uncle Elmore’s rusted station wagon that was identical to his estranged wife’s. The problem with it, the front doors wouldn’t open. He’d watched his uncle many times park in the drive and tumble out by crawling over the front seat and opening the back door. The vehicle was a death trap, a much larger metal contraption that, say, if it had sunk to the bottom of a lake, would have no heart for its passengers.
Daryl tossed the rabbit in the backseat and let the kids crawl in next. When they cushioned themselves beside the varmint, he said, “No. Get up front.” Once they clawed over the seats and sat in the middle and passenger side, Daryl dug his way in behind the wheel and gave them each some clean rags and tied them over their eyes.
The drive took ten minutes, Daryl travelling along an isolated private road with a couple of rental cabins that no one currently occupied. Once past the shacks, the dirt road ran down to the lake beside a few empty docks and a boat launch. To the left of this area was a small incline of a hill where, once at the top, was a cliff with a twenty-foot drop to the water below.
He drove up the hill and parked the station wagon nose-first, as close to the cliff’s edge as he could get it. His cousins beside him remained still and silent, their eyes blindfolded, seatbelts strapped across their shirtless chests. Before he climbed over the backseat and got out, he rolled his window down, and when he was out, he leaned into the open window and told Bert to slide over without removing his blindfold.
The kid did what he was told, and Daryl said, “I’m stuck on something. I need you to put your foot on the brake and jerk the gear down three clicks when I say so. You got it?”
His blindfolded cousin felt his hands out, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearshift lever. His foot rested on the brake, and he nodded.
Daryl stepped back, looking around in all directions. When he saw no witnesses, he faced the open window and said, with authority in his voice, “Okay, go for it.”
The kid cranked down on the lever. Daryl faced the cliff’s edge with a smile.
And the engine revved.
He didn’t tell the kid to hit the gas, he was expecting the car to just roll forward, but there it went, not forward but back down the hill, the engine squealing as the wheels reversed fast, crunching over rocks as it barreled away from Daryl, heading for a stack of wooden docks set on the level ground at the bottom.
Daryl took chase, but it only took seconds for the crash, the backend of the car smacking into the docks and coming to a stop.
The back window was cracked, the rabbit and the have-a-heart trap upside down on the floor of the backseat. When Daryl checked the front, Ernie sat in the passenger seat, upright and unharmed, still strapped by the seat belt. Bert wasn’t wearing his harness and had smashed his face on the steering wheel. Blood pooled from his nose, yet he didn’t make a peep, his hands resting on his lap. Neither kids had bothered to remove their blindfolds to see what had happened.
Daryl leaned into the window and said, “You put it in reverse. Not drive. Reverse.”
“I do good?” Bert asked while sticking his tongue out to lick the blood dribbling down his lips.
“Not good, kid. Not good at all.”
A car came down the long winding dirt road, passing the cabins and pulling into the lot closest to the boat launch. Daryl sighed and told his cousin to slide over. He was getting back in.
He drove on home and later that night, Daryl’s father and uncle returned piss-drunk and carrying pails full of small-mouth bass submerged in lake water. Daryl was coming back from resetting the have-a-heart trap in the garden and met his father at the garage.
“Catch something?” his dad asked.
Daryl nodded and looked toward the house. “Released a few others.”
Daryl’s dad considered his bucket of fish. “Same. Gotta set the little ones back to let’em grow.”
“Like when you pass up a spike horn, wait for him to become a buck.”
“That’s right. Wait till they’re a little older when they got some big racks on’em. Makes killing’em all the more gratifying.”
Daryl’s dad went into the garage and Daryl went up to the house. The kids were in the living room, an empty pizza box on the table. Ernie sat upright in the recliner with a mound of vomit on his lap, and Bert was standing on the couch, the bandage Daryl had applied to the boy’s nose now torn off. He was painting the wall with his blood, using his fingers as the brush.
Daryl went into the kitchen and washed the chlorine off his hands.
When they’re older, he thought.
When they’re older.
Bio: Devin’s job as a night watchman comprises sitting at a desk monitoring a county building, which allows him eight uninterrupted hours of reading and writing (best job ever). His interests include painting, reading, writing, and exercising. Devin has written six novels, as well as many short stories.
He has published the short story “Grover’s Mill” on The Yard. Devin is also an artist, his work can be purchased HERE.
You can find him on Instagram: devinjamesleonard
Read more Hard Life stories on The Yard: Crime Blog
Photo by The Yard.