“I don’t know. I feel like I am being watched though. Like now. I am positive someone is watching.” she said.
I moved in close so I could whisper to her. I told her I was going to put on a pair of pants and some flats and get in my truck and drive around the corner and walk back up to the house to have a look around. I wanted her to take off her clothes and walk around the house. That would distract him to the point of not paying attention to his surroundings. She grinned and agreed.
I changed clothes and got in my truck and took off. I drove down the street and parked and came back up the street quietly. Sure enough there he was. Standing at one of her windows masturbating. I had taken to carrying a baseball bat in the truck with me. I took it and swung as hard as I could and hit him in the leg with it. He went down screaming. I hit him twice more and told him to lay still or I would hit him again. It was Mr. Johnson he had gotten out on bond and was right back doing what he had done to get in jail the first time. Ms. Givens called the police who came right away. They put the handcuffs on him and took him away. He was yelling about being set up and attacked. This time he was put in jail without bond.
I went and brought my truck back. I took a bath and went to bed and slept better than I had in a while. The next morning was beautiful. It was cool but not cold and the sun was shining bright through a blue sky. Ms. Givens came in and woke me up. I got up and got ready for school. I put on a blouse and a pair of pants and my saddle oxfords, The only concession I made to looking really feminine was the lacy ankle socks. Well I like them. So there.
I called Sally and asked if she was ready to go to school. She said yes and I met her at her house where her Mom hugged me again and fussed about me not coming back more. We walked to school and I told her about catching Mr. Johnson outside Ms. Givens home last night. She thought it was funny to have smacked him with the bat while he was pleasuring himself. I expressed the view that he couldn’t help himself that he was a really sick man, but I didn’t think he could be trusted to not be violent.
I changed the subject to how good Sally looked. She smiled and told me that she wasn’t the only one that looked good. Annie came out of her house and ran up to us. Sally filled her in on the peeper and she laughed too. I asked if she and Gil had seen each other over the weekend. That started a torrent of how great Gil was and how much she enjoyed being with him. She told me that he wasn’t just a nerd but an athlete who lifted weights and ran every day. I was jealous, I loved to run and do my exercises. We listened to Annie all the way to school. As we approached the school, we saw Amy with her boyfriend.
“Diane, Sally, I just want you to know how much I appreciated the help with the dress. I got more compliments from his Mom and Dad and Jerry just loved it. He got player of the year and I got the most beautiful of the banquet.” she said.
Jerry came up and surprised the poo out of us by telling me thank you for helping Amy. “She looked so good. I was the proudest one there. She looked totally beautiful. Thanks Diane.”
All three of us just about fainted. He called me Diane and in a nice way. I was ecstatic that someone actually used my name without teasing me. Carey came up and had a sad look on her face. “Diane I have some bad news.”
“Don’t tell me. I’m off the Squad.” I said.
“Why yes they just told me. So how did you know?” asked Carey.
“Ms. Givens said that it was going to happen. She said someone complained to the school board and they ruled that boys couldn’t be on the squad.” I said. “But I have it on a good authority that the one that made the ruling was arrested by the FBI yesterday in Mississippi.”
“So do you think they will let you back on the Squad?” asked Carey.
“No, I think it will be a year or two before they will let guys on the squad.” I said. “However I will keep my fingers crossed.”
It was another day in paradise going from class to class. The kids were getting used to my appearance and the changes I was going through so they were saying less and less about it. Some of the jerks who were less endowed with mental capabilities would say something every time they saw me, although I couldn’t help but notice that they wouldn’t actually try anything physical. It was as if they were trying to get me to be the aggressor. Two of them were the children of people on my list. I wondered if they were doing it on purpose. This day went relatively well, I didn’t have to kill anybody, I didn’t get attacked and I only received two death threats in my locker. One was a little extreme though.
I walked up to my locker to get a book and noticed that there were papers sticking out that hadn’t been there before. I checked the lock and found it to be open. I stepped to the hinge side and pulled the locker open. In an instant, a large cotton mouth snake came out and landed on the floor. I jumped back and avoided it. One of the teachers came running up to see what was going on and just about stepped on it. He started screaming and wanted to know what was going on. One of the jerks pointed at me and said it was all my fault for keeping a snake in my locker. The teacher asked if that was true. I told him no I hated snakes. Then the jerk took out a pillow case and got the snake to go in it and he tied it up.
“I’ll just take it and put it outside.” said the jerk.
The teacher wasn’t born yesterday and took the jerk to the office. He got a three day suspension for putting a deadly snake in my locker. Having a pillow case handy and using, it to catch the snake was a dead give-away. He should have gotten rid of the pillow case and not hung around after the teacher showed up. He admitted to putting it in the locker, but he said it was a joke. He was told that the police would be consulted as to whether it was attempted murder. The next day he was arrested and taken to jail for attempted murder. The charges were reduced to especially aggravated battery. He plead guilty to the charge and was given three years of supervised probation where he couldn’t step even a little out of line. I hated that his life was screwed up because he wanted to impress his parents. What I really wanted to know though was where had he found a cotton mouth in the late fall.
The next day I went to the city hall with Uncle Will to take my driving test for my hardship license. I breezed through it and got my license. I was legal to drive now, but I couldn’t go cruising at night or anything like that. I could go to and from school and work and use it for trips to the grocery store and things like that. We went back home and he was talking about the farm that was for sale. He said that he talked to Mr. Williams and he would sell to us but he wanted to live in the house until he died. “I don’t see a real problem with that. Except, would the insurance go for it and would we be responsible for anything that happened to him on the place.” The four of us went to see him that afternoon to work out the details of the sale.
He was a nice man who had a heart attack back in the summer and now he couldn’t work the farm. He was a shell of the man that I remembered. His wife was a pleasant lady who didn’t complain about anything and was just as nice as she could be. Mr. Williams told Uncle Will that he was selling to us because of Granddaddy and how he had treated him in the past, helping him when he got down and not taking anything for it. The other bidder had always been a pain in his behind and he didn’t want him to have the land or the house.
Uncle Will thanked him and suddenly he didn’t want to know how the insurance would work. He told me later that he remembered working the land here and now he knew why they had worked it. We talked about the way the land laid out and how much it produced every year. Finally, he told us that the best thing that we could do was to put it all in vegetables. He felt as though the bottom was going to fall out of cotton and the only thing that wouldn’t fall was food crops.
I didn’t say anything, but I had come to the same conclusion. I was reading the local business papers and the business papers out of Chicago that dealt with agricultural issues. I was even looking at rice as a second crop, anything but cotton.
I asked if I could walk around the place for a
few minutes. Uncle Will said he was going to leave in a few minutes. I told him I would be okay to walk home. He said yeah sure, I’ve heard that before. I just wrinkled up my nose at him and took off. He looked at George and flipped his head for him to go with me. We walked the entire area looking at the fences and the general condition of the land. I noticed that the grass was really thick and it would make great hay. I found the hay baler and the hay that had been cut and baled. There were about four hundred bales of hay stacked in the back. We climbed to the top of the stack and got a bird’s eye view of the area. It was basically flat with a creek running down one edge of it. That area was lower and it seemed to be wet from where we stood. There was a good stand of timber on it that could be worth quite a bit. I noticed that there were quite a few ducks in the creek area. I had talked to the game warden and found out that I didn’t need any permits to allow duck hunting. He said that a bunch of farmers in the Grand Prairie region were closing their farms to all, but paying hunters. They were making good money by providing a place for the hunters to sleep and eat. Most of the hunters were from up north and out west and they were generally very well to do. He gave me the names of a couple of farmers that were doing that and how to get ahold of them and wished me good luck. Uncle Will had started the paper work for the land and got it pushed through. We closed about two weeks later.
George made the comment that he would like to have a deer camp to make some extra money. I thought it was a good idea but with everybody cutting down all the timber and clearing the land, it would be difficult to have enough deer to do it. George thought that maybe we could rent some of the Corp of Engineers land next to the levy to make one. I didn’t know that the Corp of Engineers did anything like that. That would be something to look into.
We walked around the entire place and when we got back to the house, I asked if he was making a profit on the hay. He replied that he was doing better with it than he had with cotton the last year he planted it. I asked if the equipment was going with the farm. He said he would sell it with the farm for a little more. He had a combine and two nice 1066 tractors with all the equipment. George wanted to know when the last time the land had been fertilized and the last time the flooded area had been harvested for timber. I wanted to know if he had any negative problems with the farm. He said none. I asked if he had a buyer for the hay yet.
“Yeah I have found a guy out in Oklahoma that is coming to get it in three days. He said he would take all of the hay he can get his hands on. The National Weather Service is predicting a bad winter out west and they didn’t do well this past summer with the hay. So he thinks he can make a pretty good profit on the hay.” He said.
I knew where a large field was that was right for hay cutting. I talked to George about it and we decided to ask if he would let us cut the grass for hay. We could rent the hay baler and haul it to the house to stack up and sell. Uncle Will wasn’t exactly excited about it but he went along with it. We went and talked to the man about cutting his field and baling it up. He agreed but he wanted a percentage of the profits. Fifty percent to be exact, and we weren’t going to go along with that at all. I told George that I thought he was trying to rip us off. George agreed. We told him that we couldn’t break even on that. We told him we would cut it and bale it for what it normally would cost to cut it. The man told us to beat it he would let it rot down. We bid him goodbye and left. Later that night Uncle Will got a phone call from the man and he wanted us to cut the field now just to get it cut and out of the way. He told him we would cut it on the next day and bale it on Saturday.
The next day Uncle Will went over there with a sickle mower and cut the whole field. He said we should be able to get about a hundred and fifty bales off of it. Mr. Williams let us use the baler and two of his flatbed trailers to put the hay on. He even offered to tell the guy that was buying his hay that we should have some ready on Saturday.
On Saturday, we went out there and got to work. Uncle Will said he didn’t trust the man he talked to at all so he went by the house and his wife signed a contract for him to mow and bale up the grass. We would do this for the hay instead of money. He was a jerk with a capital ‘J’. We got it baled up and stacked on the trailer when the man came down to the field and demanded payment for his hay. Uncle Will pulled out the contract and showed it to him. He wanted to know who signed it yelling and hollering all the time about how he was going to call the Sheriff. Uncle Will told him to go ahead and do it. Then we drove off. This guy was red hot. The reason that all of his fields had lain fallow for the past two years was because he was a thief and the last guy to try and rent his land got ripped off. So no one would work it. Now the guy was having tax problems and was about to lose the farm due to past due taxes. He wanted to rip us off to make a dent in the taxes so he could hang onto the land. Funny though he was driving, a new pickup and he always had these really expensive cowboy boots on and a lot of jewelry that I bet could make his tax bill if he were to sell it.
I had to go pee so I hopped down off the trailer and walked down into the edge of the woods. I peed and found a small path that led down into the woods. I followed it and found a small clearing that had all of these big green leafy bushes growing. You could see where they were kept cultivated and watered. I found two five gallon buckets with leaves in them. I took a couple of leaves and stuck them in my pocket and started back up the path. I heard the owner coming down the path just a fussing. I hid in the bushes on the side of the path. He walked up to the clearing and took the buckets. Two guys came out of the woods on the other side of the clearing and the three of them started gathering the leaves from the bushes. I slipped off and met back up with Uncle Will and showed him the leaves and asked what they were. He told me to get my truck and get going and don’t stop until I reached the house. I had found a marijuana patch and this guy wouldn’t like it if someone had found it. So I was out of there.
Back at the house I was telling George about it when the Sheriff came up. He talked to Uncle Will and looked at the contract. He seemed satisfied with it. “Dennis how are things going? Have those two women from the DHS come back?”
“No sir, I haven’t seen them lately, but I want to thank you for helping me with them.” and I walked over to him and shook his hand. He looked at me kind of funny like, but didn’t say anything. Then he drove off. I didn’t say anything to the others, but I had drawn a map while they were talking to the Sheriff showing the Sheriff where to find the marijuana. I figured I owed him that much.
After the count, we found that we had two hundred and twenty five bales of hay. We had actually made a hundred dollars profit off that one field. Uncle will got another call that night from the man’s wife who had the marijuana. “Mr. Jordan this is Sandra Davis.”
“Yes mam, what can I do for you.” he said.
“I don’t guess anyone knows it, but I am the actual owner of the land that you cut and baled today.” she said.
“No I thought he was the owner since he is your husband.” Uncle Will stated.
“We aren’t married and I don’t think we are going to be living together much longer either. I found something in the garage that I am very opposed to. Anyway I want to know if you would like to rent my land this year and farm it on the shares?” Ms. Davis asked.
“How much land is there?” he asked.
“I have three hundred acres more or less that is tillable. I liked it when you came to me to get a contract signed. By the way, don’t let go of that contract you have. Herman has been trying to find the one that I have all afternoon.” she said.
“You know I would love to have the acres to farm, how about if you meet me and my wife in town on Monday at the lawyer’s office and sign a contract. He could give each one of us a copy and keep the original in his office.” Uncle Will said.
“That would be fine with me.” she said
The next day was Sunday and I decided to skip church to keep a low profile. I worked out and made sure that all of my homework
was done. I was finishing the loft floor when a truck showed up outside. It was the architect that had come out there that day. “Hey is anybody home. He called.”
“Hi there, you are back.” I said.
“Yeah Mr. Givens said you needed an architect to do some drawings for you.” He said.
“That’s right let me get down and let’s talk.” I said.
I got down and walked up to him and stuck out my hand and said, “My name is Diane what is yours?”
“I’m David Hart.” he said and we shook hands.
I told him what I would like to do, but I didn’t know how to do it or how much it would cost. He said he could draw me some plans based on the measurements he had taken the last time he was here. He said that the biggest problem was the roof. It was in bad shape and needed replacing. He had a few things in mind though that he would like to see done. Like changing the way, the side boards run instead of up and down he wanted to have them run horizontally like clapboards. But he wanted to use the existing boards to do it with. His idea was to recycle as much as possible and not waste a thing. I was up for that. He and I talked for a while and then he left again. He was driving an old Datsun truck that was pretty beat up. He looked like a college student.
I had finished putting up the tools when Ralph came out to see me. “Hey dude, what’s going on?”
“Same ole, same ole.” I said.
“Well listen Joey has a bunch of puppies he is trying to give away before his dad takes them and throws them in the creek. He wanted to know if you wanted one.”
“What kind are they?” I asked.
“He said they are half Keeshond and half Schipperke, whatever that is.” he said.
I’ll go and take a look at them. Thanks.” I said.
I went over there and looked at the puppies. The father was a big Keeshond and the mother was a small Schipperke that had a face like a fox but it was solid black and didn’t have a tail. It had this big neck ruff that made it even more attractive. The mother was a beautiful dog. When I got there, Joey was putting one in a car. I walked up and said hello. I asked if he had any left and he said he had one left. She was cute as cute could be. She was playing with a chew toy and the mother was watching everything that went on. I walked up to the mother and put the back of my hand out to her. She sniffed it and let me pet her.
“Damn Dennis, you are the first one besides us that has been able to pet her. She usually doesn’t like strangers.” Joey said.
“She’s so pretty. So where is the puppy that you are trying to give away?” I asked.
“She’s right there behind the tire. We actually gave her to another family but they brought her back. They said she was mean and didn’t mind. She seems a little rambunctious, but that is all.” He said.
I reached out and picked her up and she started licking me and playing. She was a doll. I loved her. I put her down and petted her mother again. “I’ll take her. How much do you want for her?” I said while pulling her off my pants leg that she was chewing on.
“Take her she has been looked at by everybody, but no one wants her. So just take her for free.” He said.
I picked her up and told her to say goodbye to her mom and we left. I put her in the front seat with me and took off. I had the window down on my side and she climbed into my lap and put her front paws on the window sill and watched the world go by. I decided to name her Tiny since she was so small. She was a pistol. That night when I laid down to go to sleep she got ahold of the blanket and pulled it off of me. I would put it back and she would pull it off again. I finally grabbed her and put her under the covers with me and she calmed down and went to sleep. I left her in the barn the next day while I went to school. When I came home, I saw Uncle Will working on one of the tractors and his pants leg was torn.
“Got you a new dog I see.” he said.
“Uh, yes sir.” I said.
“I like it.” he said.
“Thanks.”
He went back to work and I went to the barn. I found Tiny laying on my blanket with a piece of khaki cloth beside her and when I came in, she started barking at me. I reached down and picked her up and she started grunting and squirming to get on her back. She wanted me to rub her belly. She wouldn’t look at me or lick me she just laid there so I would rub her tummy. She was training me right. I thought I had better start letting her know who the boss was. So I started teaching her how to heel and how to come when called. She was a hardhead and I had a little trouble getting her to come when called, but she finally got it down. She would run up to me while I was doing my exercises and get in the way. I would have to stop and love on her to get anything done. She followed me everywhere and got into everything. She would growl at Uncle Will and bite his pants leg. He would pick her up and look her in the eye and tell her, “Listen here. I am the head of this pack and you will do as I say. Do you understand?” She would look at him and then when he put her down she would go right back to doing what she was doing. They played a lot. I know because I would catch Uncle Will with her playing in the tractor yard. He was a softie after all.