Following Orders: The Story of Obvious Owen
Prologue to the film “Seth and Tia”
By: Jason Michael Hiaeshutter
Eugene Junior
When I was thirteen years old, I caught a bat in my momma’s cellar. My dad had already run off on us at that point so it was up to me to be the man of the house. I was pretty excited when I caught it. I ran upstairs and showed it to momma but she was busy doing naked time with some guy. I don’t remember his name. The guy, not the bat. The bat I named Eugene, like me. I thought Eugene Junior was cool, but when the guy saw him he screamed like a little girl.
“What is that retard boy of yours doing with that rat on wings?” the guy shouted.
“I don’t know,” momma said. “Gene, honey, get that thing out of here. Okay?”
I shrugged my shoulders and took Eugene Junior outside. I decided to take him to my friend’s house across the street. His name was David and I figured he’d think Eugene Junior was cool. I knocked on the front door and his sister answered.
“What is that thing?” she shrieked.
“It’s my new pet bat,” I answered. “Isn’t he cool?”
“Get that disgusting thing out of here you little freak!” she yelled. “David isn’t home. And even if he was, you’re not welcome here after last time.”
She slammed the door in my face. I knew what she was referring to. The last time I was there, David and I were hanging out in his back yard. I found an old Swiss Army knife in my mom’s room one day. It was in a box of some of the things my dad left behind. I brought it to David’s house. I thought it would be cool to carve some spears out of the sticks in their yard. The knife was pretty dull, but it got the job done. David’s family had a dog. I think its name was Max or something. Anyway, that dog never liked me. I don’t know why, but he would growl at me whenever I was around. Well, on this particular day, I decided to do something about it. It was an impulse really; not like it was my intention when I first went over there. But Max started growling and barking at me. He was showing his teeth and acting like he was going to bite me. I knew he wouldn’t because every time I stood up, he would run away. Then I’d sit back down again and he’d come back and growl some more. So anyway, I had just finished carving this perfect point at the end of one of the sticks. Max pulled his usual routine and charged at me. He started showing his teeth, the whole bit. So I looked at the stick, I looked at Max, I looked at the stick again, then I let it fly. I threw my spear right at that stupid dog and it stuck right in his leg. He started hopping around and yelping. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. David’s parents didn’t think so. David convinced them it was an accident, but they still told me I wasn’t allowed to play with David anymore. Like I was going to listen to that.
So David’s sister told me to leave. I could feel Eugene Junior trying to wiggle his wings free from my grip so I had to let him down soon. I looked around and saw that David’s garage door was open. David’s dad liked to do stuff in the garage so there was always really cool stuff in there. I decided to go in and see if there was anything cool I could do with Eugene Junior.
I went inside the garage and hit the button that shut the door. It closed just in time too because just as the door closed, Eugene Junior flew out of my hand. I heard him smack his head against the window of the garage door and watched him flop on the floor. His foot moved a little, but he didn’t attempt to fly away or anything. I think he was stunned.
“Silly bat,” I said.
I looked around and couldn’t really find anything cool to do with him. Then I noticed a can of gasoline next to the lawnmower. I shrugged my shoulders and picked up the can.
“I think you need a bath Eugene Junior,” I said. “Let me get some of that garage floor soot off you.”
I poured some gasoline on the bat and he started flopping around again. I had to think fast. I needed to do something before he flew off. There was a book of matches sitting on top of the grill so I grabbed them. I lit the whole book on fire and threw it onto Eugene Junior. Just as I did, David’s nosey sister opened the door that led into the house. “What the hell are you-” was all she had time to say. Eugene Junior leapt into the air like a flying fireball and darted right for David’s sister. She screamed so loud. I thought it was hilarious. “You’re probably going to want to get outside,” I laughed as I hit the button to the garage door. She ran out and I followed her.
From the sidewalk, we both watched as David’s house burst into flames. It was the greatest sight of my young life. Even though I never did see Eugene Junior again.
Later that day, the police came to my house and told my mother what happened. I heard the guy whose name I couldn’t remember say something like, “this is too much for me,” and he walked out the door. He never came back again. The police told my mom that I was lucky nobody was in the house or things could have been much worse. As it was, I got taken away for a while to live in a place where I slept with seven other kids and was yelled at all the time. I kind of liked it because I didn’t have to decide what to do with myself. One nice lady, I think her name was Miss Schwartzema, told me that someone would always have to watch me because I could not be trusted to make decisions for myself. This was advice I took with me for the rest of my life. I always tried to find someone who was willing to tell me what to do. If I’m not making decisions for myself, I won’t do anything stupid. It was good advice.
THE BATHROOM DOOR INCIDENT
The people in the youth center always seemed to like me. I guess they kind of had to. From my first time there at thirteen, to my last day at eighteen, they sure did see enough of me. One person I ended up spending most of my formative years with was my counselor, Mr. Keil. Mr. Keil was the first person I would see every time I got sent to the youth home. The last time I was sent to Mr. Keil was three days before I turned eighteen. I’d killed one of my mom’s boyfriends.
People always seem to look at me funny when I say I killed somebody. Mr. Keil told me it was because most people feel certain emotions when talking about taking the life of another human being. I could never understand why people would expect me to have any emotion other than happiness for killing that man. He was evil. He was evil to my momma, and he was evil to me. Momma couldn’t see that, but Mr. Keil seemed to understand.
My momma had quite a few different boyfriends. One thing they all seemed to have in common was that none of them liked me. I wasn’t allowed in the house much when I was kid because nobody wanted me around. I didn’t have any friends either. If I was lucky enough to find another kid willing to talk to me, that kids parents would have heard of my incident with Eugene Junior and forbid them from talking to me. As a result, I’d spent a lot of time alone down at the creek behind my house.
On one particular day, I was down at the creek and I heard a crash up in the house. I quickly ran up the hill to see what was going on. It was Elliot, momma’s boyfriend at the time. They were fighting and he’d shoved her through the bathroom door. When I entered the house, the bathroom door was ripped off its hinges and Elliot was standing in the bathroom doorway. Momma was lying on top of the door, which had fallen into the bathtub. Her leg was cut pretty bad and it was bleeding.
At nearly eighteen, I’d already grown into a pretty big boy, and Elliot was kind of a little dude. Needless to say, I intimidated the man. Plus, he’d already thought I was some kind of crazy freak anyway. So when he saw the anger on my face that he made my momma bleed, he tried real hard to calm me down. Even momma tried to tell me not to hurt him, but it was too late for that.
I was seeing red. Both Elliot’s and momma’s voices were barely audible as I grabbed that little twig of a man by his neck and dragged him down to the creek.
“Gene!” Elliot screamed. “Gene, what are you doing with me?”
Through my rage that question was clear as day. It struck me as strange that he’d ask such a question. The answer seemed so obvious. “I’m taking you to the creek,” I said. I
noticed my voice was surprisingly calm.
“No,” he said. “No, what are you doing to me when you get me there you freak?”
I found this question strange as well. The strangest part being that I was dragging him through the dirt as he was asking me this. The question compelled me to stop walking. I let go and turned to stand over him. “I am going to hurt you like you hurt my momma,” I said.
Elliot started to scramble, I think he was trying to get up and run away. I just reached down and grabbed him and went back to dragging him to the creek. “You don’t understand,” he pleaded. “She attacked me first. I was just defending myself.”
“You threw my mother through a door,” I said.
“But she started it,” he answered.
“And I will finish it,” I said.
Through this entire conversation my voice stayed very calm. I didn’t yell. I wasn’t nervous. I simply spoke my mind. People always told me I had a simple mind, maybe this was what they meant. Elliot hurt momma, so I was going to hurt Elliot. It was obvious to me. Anger, fear, aggression. None of those emotions seemed to be a factor. Even as I was retelling the story to Mr. Keil, I had no feeling about the subject. It was how it was.
“You keep saying you were going to hurt him,” Mr. Keil asked.
“Yes, I was,” I shrugged.
“But you ultimately killed him,” Mr. Keil continued. “Was your objective all along to kill him? Or were you truly, in fact, simply going to hurt him?”
For once I was given a question I couldn’t answer.
“Eugene,” Mr. Keil asked again. “Was it you plan to drag Elliot to the creek and murder him?”
“I…” I stuttered. “I don’t know, Mr. Keil.”
And I didn’t. To this day I still don’t know the answer. I dragged Elliot to the creek bed and dropped him there. I expected him to try to get up and run again but he didn’t. The fact that he wasn’t trying to escape enraged me. I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and slammed his face into the water. He began to squirm.
“Well there you go,” I said. “That got you moving, didn’t it?” I pulled him out of the water. “Do you have anything to say yet?”
“Let me go you retarded little fuck,” he said.
“Well that was the wrong answer,” I said as I splashed his head back down. Only this time, I heard a snap. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I noticed right away that the struggling stopped. I pulled him back out of the water, but he was lifeless. He had a large gouge on his forehead and he was bleeding. A lot.
I shook him hard. I was trying to get him to wake up but it wasn’t working. I knew he was dead. I knew I was in trouble.
I walked back up to the house to tell my momma the news. She cried. That was another thing I just didn’t understand. The man just threw her through a door, but she was crying. She was actually sad that he died. Mr. Keil tried to convince me that she was crying because of the trouble she knew I would be in. But I knew that wasn’t true. I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I knew my momma didn’t really care about me. She was just upset because I took another one of her boy toys away. Only this one, I did it up close and personal.
Like I said before, I was three days from my eighteenth birthday. For that reason, they sent me back to the youth center. It was getting to where I considered that place more my home than anywhere else. At least I felt welcome there.
Mr. Keil wrote up his report about my state of mind and I was ruled disturbed but not dangerous. The powers that be decided I was acting in the protection of my mother and therefore not guilty of cold blooded murder. Mr. Keil said that if I’d been just a few days older, things may have gone differently. Even though I was over eighteen by the time of the hearing, I was a minor at the time of the incident. Mr. Keil’s testimony in court also helped steer the jury away from ruling it a crime of passion. He told the court about my calm demeanor during the incident. He said he knew, without a doubt that it wasn’t premeditated and he was nearly certain it wasn’t a crime of passion. He said he felt it was a simple act of necessity in order to stop the violence against my momma. After that, the newspapers actually called me a hero. Of course, my momma didn’t agree. Lucky for me she kept her opinions to herself.
THE ARMY
Home was the last place momma wanted me to be. By the time the trials and the rulings and the newspapers that called me a hero were all over, momma had already gotten a new boyfriend. And after what happened the last time, this guy wanted nothing more than to prove his dominance over me.
“You think I’m scared of you, boy?” he said. It was actually the first thing he said to me. He didn’t even introduce himself. “I aint gonna hesitate to take care of business if you or your momma get out of line. You hear me boy?”
Momma was sitting on the couch in the living room. She didn’t seem to have any interest in sticking up for herself. Let alone for me. “Don’t make trouble Gene, just answer the question.”
I didn’t say a word. I turned around and walked out of the house. I never saw momma again.
Three months into my eighteenth year on this Earth, I made the decision to sign my life away. With nowhere else to turn, I went to see the Army recruiter in my town. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that he knew who I was right away. Like I said, I was in all the papers.
“Well if it isn’t the boy who rescued his mother from the vice of evil itself,” the recruiter said. “What can I help you with today, young man?”
I told him I had nowhere to go. I explained that my mother didn’t see me in the same light others seemed to see me in and I wasn’t welcome in my own home. I told him about all the incidences that happened in my youth and how all my momma’s man friends looked at me as a burden. The recruiter told me that it would all be fine. He explained that everything that happened in my younger days were confidentially sealed because they happened while I was a minor. He said that if I wanted to join the Army there was nothing to stop me but my own mind. He gave me some papers to sign and the next thing I knew I was getting sent off to basic training.
Basic training turned out to be the easiest time of my life. I didn’t have to think for myself at all. I was told what to do and I did it. No questions asked. I liked living that way. There was no pressure. What could be better than that?
The first four years were easy. I liked following orders. I never felt lost or out of place. Some of the other soldiers didn’t seem to like me much. I was always being called stupid, or retarded; all things that I was used to being called at home anyway. My superiors liked me though. I never questioned orders and I was strong as an ox. Two traits my leadership seemed to really like in me. I was the guy they turned to for the real dirty jobs. The ones nobody else wanted to do.
One day I was working a sanitation detail at a water treatment plant. A nearby warehouse was dumping toxic waste illegally into the water source. It was my job to clean it up. There was a row of barrels containing a foam solution of a toxic nature. I think it was what came out of fire extinguishers or something. Anyway, while I was picking up the barrels, I heard a strange whisper. I followed the sound to one of the barrels and looked inside. A little puppy was trapped in the barrel. A cute little brown pug. It had no collar so I couldn’t identify the owner. I had no orders for this type of thing so I brought the dog to my Sergeant. Master Sergeant Reed was his name. Sergeant Reed was not impressed with the dog. He told me he didn’t care what I did as long as I got rid of it. Too bad. It really was kind of cute.
I shrugged my shoulders and walked back to the treatment plant reservoir. I dunked the dogs head under the water and its legs started to kick and struggle. I grabbed all its legs and held them tight so it couldn’t scratch me or wiggle away. The dog started struggling less and less until finally, it stopped squirming all together.
“My God,” I heard Sergeant Reed say behind me. “What the hell did you just do?”
I looked down at the dead puppy. Once again I found myself in a situatio
n where I was asked a question in which I felt the answer was self-evident. “I got rid of the dog, sir,” I said matter of factly. “Just like you ordered me to.”
“I didn’t mean to…” Sergeant Reed started. “You know what? Just dispose of it somehow. I don’t want any evidence that this happened. And we will not speak of it again.”
“How do you want me to dispose of it sir?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” he answered. “Just do as you’re told.”
“Yes sir,” I said. I put the puppy down and finished my duties.
That night, I went home, bringing the dead puppy with me. I was on my second enlistment and was no longer living in the barracks. I had my own place, so naturally I had my own kitchen too. I did the only thing I could think of to dispose of the dog without leaving the body behind. I skinned and butchered the body, cooked it, and ate it. It was disgusting, but it got the job done. The fur I simply burned in the fire pit in my back yard. I had disposed of the animal, just like I was ordered.
The next day I attempted to tell Sergeant Reed how I took care of the dog.
“What dog,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “The dog from yesterday, remember?” I answered. “The one I-”
“Corporal,” the Sergeant said.
“Sir?”
“Shut up.”
It took me a second, but I eventually remembered. I was ordered never to speak of it again. Which I didn’t, until now.
By the time I was 23, Sergeant Reed and I had become like friends. I will never forget the first time he invited me to his home and I met the love of my life. Sergeant Reed’s daughter Adison. Adison was only 15 at the time, but she was still the most beautiful girl in the world. At dinner I would catch her staring at me with her gorgeous blue eyes and look away when I’d glance back. I think Sergeant Reed may have noticed too, but at the time he didn’t say anything.
Adison and I began dating soon after. She would sneak out through her bedroom window and I would pick her up down the street. Sergeant Reed may have liked me, but not enough to let me date his young daughter. We were together almost every day and with each passing moment, we fell more and more in love. We continued to sneak around for three years until finally, I couldn’t keep it a secret anymore.
“We have to get married,” I told her.
“What?” she asked. “My dad would never allow that.”
“You are going to be eighteen in two days,” I said. “Then you can do whatever you want.”
“Yeah but what about you?” she asked.
“What about me?” I chuckled.
“When my dad finds out you’re the one I’ve been sneaking out with, he’ll kill you,” she said.
“I’m willing to take that chance,