My old stories - Jimmy's Revenge

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Chimerix
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My old stories - Jimmy's Revenge

Postby Chimerix » Sun Apr 23, 2023 2:50 am

“Enjoy your cupcake, mud-boy!”

Jimmy sat at the cafeteria table, his glasses and face covered in the lunchroom’s dessert du jour. The thick greasy icing and crumbly cake weren’t enough to hide the flaming humiliation covering his face as he fled the sea of laughing faces, his only goal to reach privacy before the tears came.

It wasn’t that Jimmy was ugly, or small, or poor, or stupid. Really, he was an alright-looking kid from a middle-class family. He did ok in all his classes, was actually rather strong, and even had a sense of humor. It’s just that in a small high school, there has to be a designated target for jocks and bullies. Jimmy wasn’t sure why he got the job, but no one else seemed interested in taking it over for him.

“Mud-boy” was an artifact of the position. Jimmy’s dad specialized in agricultural irrigation, and went out of his way to help local farmers struggling to survive against the monopolistic juggernauts of the world. Part of his cost-cutting measures included using his son for manual labor, and Jimmy spent no small amount of time with a shovel in the bottom of a trench.

You learn a lot of things when you help to run the family business. Jimmy learned all manner of detail about the county’s water system, about soil types and strata, about runoff and absorption and flood relief. And about the county tax map.

Every kid knew about the old Thicket place. Crazy old man Thicket had been dead nearly 70 years. His son had abandoned the property to move to some Big City (some said New York, some said Boston, and some said San Francisco with a knowing wink), and HIS son had never set foot on the property. The modest tax assessment was paid annually so the county never pushed the issue. After all, the land was pretty worthless for agriculture; a sandy wash in a flood zone that had dried up after the Army Corps of Engineers worked their magic on the upper Missouri.

Bless the county engineers, they were diligent. When the new mains and feeds were trenched and laid back in the 60’s, the did install a valve and run an agriculture-grade feed right to the Thicket property line. After all, one never knew what the future might hold, and land was the only thing a man can truly own.

Jimmy was never sure when the idea crystallized. He was sure he never had a “Eureka!” moment, but found himself one day carefully plotting the details of a plan he’d never set out to make. Fortune, as much as anything, had its hand in the endeavor. His dad was hired to install an expansion to the system on the Johnsons’ back lot, the one that lay beside County 588. That lot was only 2 miles from the Thicket house, straight down what passed for a highway in those parts.

The expansion system was a fairly large endeavor, for like most of the farmers in the area, the Johnsons had pieced together the system as they went, cutting every corner that could be cut. This meant some extensive trenching, going clear back to the county feed before laying the pipework in the fields. Definitely not shovel work; Jimmy’s dad had his heavy equipment in play.

It took Jimmy only 2 nights to accomplish the major part of his plan. Sneaking out of the house at 11 pm, bicycling to the Johnsons’, driving the backhoe the 2 miles down County 588, and excavating both the primary trench and a section of the front yard. He was careful to return the backhoe to the same spot he had found it, and to top the tank off with diesel.

The pipe was a little more complicated. Jimmy had to stage a minor off-hours accident, so it appeared someone had failed to set the parking brake on the old Ford pickup at the job site, and it had rolled into the stacked pile of 6” PVC. While half of it was salvaged, no one really counted the broken pieces to see if anything was missing.

The rest of the job took Jimmy over 2 months. Two months of sneaking out at night. Two months of backbreaking labor under a starlit sky. Two months without a proper night’s sleep. And two months of hell under the tender auspices of his high school classmates. Still, he used the time as well as he could.

In the daylight and the evenings, he still socialized with those fringe elements who would have him. He spun yarns and resurrected old tales about the haunting of the Thicket place. His friends, if friends they were, scoffed and laughed, but went on to share the stories with others. And, slowly, the tales entered the mainstream in the weeks before Halloween.

Jocks and bullies love finding ways to appear strong. It was inevitable that someone dared someone, or questioned someone’s testicles, or in some other way implied some degree of chicken-shittedness. From there, it was a done deal. The Thicket place at midnight on Halloween, and anyone not there was a pussy. And bring beer.

Jimmy sat on a blanket with a jacket around his shoulders, hidden from sight by a clump of scraggily bushes. He listened to the laughter, name calling, and general bluster. There were over a dozen of the motherfuckers out there, and with them a gaggle of the plastic girls who swoon over such examples of the human condition. Jimmy felt a little bad about the girls, but felt that had there been no girls at his school, maybe the assholes wouldn’t feel so driven to perform. Still, this was no time for second thoughts, and they certainly were not on the “fiends” list.

Midnight came. A chorus of ape-like noises arose from the baboons on the Thicket front yard, followed by a pause for the swilling of beer. The mighty troop moved out, up onto the front porch. A brief pause was punctuated by the sound of a door being kicked open, then the noise was swallowed by the walls of the house. Jimmy stood, walked back towards the road, and climbed down into hole where the valve to the county water feed lay exposed. It was an old valve, and had been buried a long time. Jimmy put all his strength into it, calloused hands straining against pitted, rusted metal. His back ached, his shoulders burned, his breath came in tortured gasps. Slowly, slowly, in tiny jerks and shudders, the valve began to move. Sweat ran in Jimmy’s eyes as he fought for every degree, his exertions fueled by his rage and humiliation. He would not fail.

When the wheel had finally moved perhaps 30 degrees, it seemed to sense that it faced a superior foe. With one last shudder of resistance, it gave up, and spun freely under Jimmy’s eager hands. Beneath his feet, water began to flow. Jimmy wiped his hands, mopped sweat from his face, and went over to sit on the hood of one of the cars strewn about the shoulder of the road.

He had to wait considerably longer than he had expected. It was well after 2 AM before the gorillas and their playthings emerged from the front door. And as expected, they saw Jimmy sitting there, in the moonlight, daring to perch on one of their trophies of manliness.

A few shouts and guttural noises preceded the rush, but as a mob they rushed indeed. Only not very far. Suddenly the grunts and insults turned into shrieks and exclamations. Girls lamented their shoes, or their dresses. Guys issued death threats. And Jimmy just watched.

They were remarkably slow to actually take alarm. Most had sunk completely to their waists before anyone actually used the word “quicksand.” From that catalytic utterance, though, the whole tribe moved into a spontaneous cacophony of shouts and shrieks, simultaneously struggling in a nearly comic fashion.

The noise diminished gradually, in increments of 1 or 2 voices at a time, until silence fell over the waving arms of the last few. Basketball players, of course. Jimmy waited a couple of minutes longer until the ground in the yard grew still and flat. Then he walked to the valve and turned off the water. It was the work of maybe half-an-hour to rebury the valve and kick the dirt around to cover his tracks. Then, with his shovel across the handlebars of his bicycle, Jimmy headed home. He was really looking forward to the stories being told, years from now, about the mysterious disappearances at the old Thicket place.
The difference between theory and reality is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and reality.

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