In a nut shell
Some call it neat. Some call it straight. Like his daddy before him, Samuel Cowell didn’t call it but it called him, straight out of the bottle. The cheap stuff, Old Crow bourbon with the strangulated black bird looking to fly away each time he released his dirty palm off the label. He liked to save the empties, laying them flat, stacking them up into a glass fortress behind the shed with a foolish sense of accomplishment, half expecting a letter of appreciation for his abject depravity. It was his wife’s job to clean up after him, but she knew better than to cross the line. It was drawn around the extended perimeter of the shed behind the house where Samuel engaged in rituals unfit for neighboring civil eyes.
It was just the four of them rehearsing their unique family daily song and dance routine. Samuel, his wife Eleanor, and their offspring, Louise and Ted all ate the lies, all lived the nightmare as one flawed fractured nucleus. Neighborhood woody station wagons passed to and fro right by their front door clueless, traveling safely under the speed limit carrying well rested happy children. Ordinary unsuspecting people walked up and down the sidewalk arm in arm right outside their curtained windows missing every crack. Once a week, their front door would open to the paperboy and as he waited for his fifty cents he would peek inside, all the way through to the back storm door with a clear view of the shed in the background. How could he know? He took his money. He smiled. He said “thank you″ and left to collect the next coin.
On a Saturday afternoon, pointing towards the detached structure out back, eight year old Ted said to the man known as his father, “Hey Daddy, whatcha doin out there all that time in the shed?”
In reality, Ted knew exactly what his father was doing in the shed out back, intentionally poking the bear with his question. He’d been beaten before for less provocation and he wasn’t about to hold his breath waiting on the first blow. Upright as Douglas MacArthur, he stood in stoic defiance before his abuser, ready. He not only expected an onslaught, he craved an onslaught the way Jason next door craved vanilla ice cream. If given a choice, he preferred a belt to the back versus a punch in the face. Black eyes messed up his pretty face. Either way he was looking forward to the fight.
“Boy we’ve been over this already. If I told you once I told you a thousand times. None of your goddamn business! When I’m out there just busy yourself in here with the women. Be more like them. Your mother and sister know better than to ask me what I’m doing in there. This is my house, god damn it and as the man of the house I’m entitled to my own personal space. The shed is off limits to you is all. The sooner you learn up to mind your tongue the better.”
Surprised that his father kept speaking instead of making use of his demonic fists, Ted continued poking, enjoying enacting his version of Russian roulette. For Ted making others feel uncomfortable was becoming an art form. As a problem child and as a source of pain for the detached family from day one, he exercised his skill relentlessly. His much older sister spent most of her time away from the house and his mother spent all of her time either doing household chores or lying down somewhat unresponsive after taking her nerve medication.
As his father walked away stepping outside of the house, Ted followed
stalking his prey speaking antagonistically to the back of his head. “Why do I see Jason and his Gramps next door going in and out, in and out of their shed all the time with tools. What are you doing in there that I can’t see? I see them next door with tools. Big ones and little ones. They look cool. Screwdrivers. Hammers. And saws too. I think it would be really cool to learn how to fix stuff and build stuff with tools. Isn’t that what sheds are for? To store tools and work on stuff? Are you working with tools out there? I don’t recall hearing any hammering or sawing coming from the shed. Don’t we have some branches out back that need cutting? We got a saw in there I could learn to use?”
Ted’s father was getting older. Tired. He stopped walking and turned abruptly to face his maddening son. He knew there would come a point in time when his son would fight back. He needed to start distancing himself from perpetrating the physical abuse.
“Listen up boy. Keep out. Ya hear me. Case closed. If I see you messing around out here or even asking me about the shed again I’m gonna give it to you. What for. You know I mean it. So just shut your nosy ass pie hole boy and go back inside. Don’t you got some books need reading up there in your room? Or why don’t you go and find some friends to play with in the street. Stick ball. Kick the can. Whatever. Just keep away from me and my shed and stop asking so many damn questions.”
Ted felt deflated when his father uncharacteristically turned away from retaliation and continued to walk away. Failure was not an option. Life was just too boring without the familiar feel of a leather belt against his back, knuckles against his flesh. As he watched his father enter the shed, before he could lock the door, Ted staged a breach he was sure would get him over the finish line.
“I know what you do out here. Sometimes you forget to lock the window when you go to work and I’ve climbed in through the window. Most people don’t keep pictures of naked women wearing ropes and chains in tool boxes meant for tools, do they? Don’t worry. I won’t tell. I like the pictures too.” Ted did not admit just how many times he had snuck in the shed. He had been living on a steady diet of pornographic bondage and erotic mutilation from the time he was three or four, while little Jason next door was being read mother goose nursery rhymes rocked on their porch by his mother.
******
“Officer. It was an accident. I told the boy to never touch my guns. I keep my guns locked up all the time. Honest. I was just cleaning this here one out back and when I went to take a piss, I guess Ted got curious and wandered in the shed and picked up my gun. He’s always been a mischievous little fellow. When I walked in on him I guess he got scared he was gonna get in trouble and I was just trying to wrestle the gun away from him and that’s when it went off.”
******
After the cops left, believing every word, Samuel Cowell put the murder weapon away in the gun case, locked it, and got to thinking on the events of the day and how he was satisfied that what never should have happened in the first place was now a problem solved. He was finally off the hook. Deciding it was best to destroy the history of what no one living in his house wanted to remember anyway he reached into his safe and pulled out Ted’s birth certificate. Before he lit a match to it, his wormy eye caught the word unknown written inside the box marked “Father’s name”.
Ted’s father wasn’t the only one in the house glad that it was over. No. He was sure of it. His wife and daughter were just as relieved. They would not question Ted’s demise, since Samuel was not just Ted’s father, he was also his grandfather, having raped his own daughter one night when he was black out drunk.
When Louise, the young woman known as Ted’s sister, who was really his mother finally got up the courage to leave the house for good the following year to marry Johnny Culpepper Bundy, she rarely thought about Ted.
She thought about him as much as she thought about the stray dog that once bit her on the leg, ultimately euthanized by the pound, and only when and if she noticed the fading scar.