Journal (37 page)

It
kind of makes you wonder doesn’t it, about all the things that seemed to go
against us all the time.  Is there a force out there, something other than just
bad luck, mixing stuff together like the wind and rain and prickly bushes, with
people of different types, some good, some bad, some strong minded, some not,
to make a happening?  Is there someone out there who pulls all the strings, and
who also has it in for us?

I
heard or read somewhere that God might not be the nice, fatherly figure
everyone thinks he is.  Instead, he’s this jokester who plays us like a bunch
of puppets, all for his own amusement.  Personally, I don’t think there really
is a God, but if there is, I vote for that one.  If so, I just wish he’d pull
someone else’s string for a while and leave us the hell alone.

About
a half hour went by before I started to hear people talking, so I slowed way,
way down and moved toward the voices.  After another ten minutes or so, I came to
the source.  It was a group of seventeen men bunched up near a two lane road
going generally north and south.  Some of them were sitting on the ground, or
on a rock, or whatever, while others were standing.  There were several guns in
view.  Some of them were held and some of them were stacked.

From
my angle and distance, and because of the heavy clothes they were wearing, I
couldn’t tell if they were good guys or bad guys.  Meaning I didn’t recognize
any of them, but that still didn’t mean they weren’t from Woburn.  So I
settled-in to watch for a while in the hope I would be able to figure it out. 
The sprinkles turned to rain at this point, so a lot of them moved back under
the trees.

Another
half hour passed, no more than that, and I heard the sound of yet another motor
car coming from back down the road.  A short time after that, I got the shock
of my life.  It was Eric riding in the passenger seat of our little car with
the guy in the red baseball cap and dark glasses driving.  Oh I felt like such
an idiot.  He looked dead when I left him.  I assumed he was dead.  He wasn’t
moving.  He was bloody.  He was stuck under the car.  But here he was, very
much alive and about to make my life rotten once again.  I cursed myself, for
the second time of the day, for not putting a bullet in him to make sure —
idiot, screw-up, a boy trying to do a man’s job, all of that and more.  It was
a mistake, a big, big mistake.

It
did make me feel a little better that Eric looked a mess.  Yeah, at least there
was that.  His head was swelled up like a pumpkin, and there was only what
could be dried blood on his face near the hairline and smeared down next to his
ear.  When he got out of the car, he moved as if every joint in his body ached,
too.  I did that to him.  I should have done more.  I shouldn’t have even had
to look at his ugly face again.

I
didn’t have much time to sour myself or think about more bad luck because, as I
watched all this happen, I saw several in their group raise their guns and
point them down the road.  A few seconds later, I saw a man stagger, more than
run toward them.  Once he was in their view, the guns began to drop back down
one at a time.  This man joined the group that was gathered around Eric and
stopped, bent over, with his hands on his knees.  I could see that several
people were tagreementwotalking to him, but his only answer, at least as far as I could
tell, was to raise one hand just long enough to hold it up, palm out, as if to tell
them to hold their questions until he caught his breath.

There
seemed to be a wait of several seconds while everyone kind of just stood around
looking at him, before Eric hauled off and kicked the man hard in the butt,
causing him to grab the spot and kind of hop and limp around in a circle.  After
that, he started talking and pointing back down the roadway, still half bent
over and still holding his butt.  I know how he felt.  I got Eric’s foot a few
times also.

Eric
started giving orders then, real fast.  The first thing that happened was two
guys grabbed their guns and jogged back the way the man Eric kicked had come from. 
The others began to pick up their gear and garbage and fade back into the trees
and find places to hide themselves.

My
guess — someone was coming, and Eric’s crew was going to jump them.

I
didn’t waste time thinking about it.  Even if those headed toward Eric’s group
weren’t from Woburn, as far as I was concerned, if they were his enemies, I was
their new best friend.  So, I moved south as quickly as I thought was safe, alongside
the road, the wind and rain helping to cover up the noise I was making.  After
a good five minutes, no, a little more than that, I saw one of the men Eric had
sent forward.  He was piling branches on the ground between a tree and a rock
about twenty yards from the edge of the road.  The other man was just standing
watch, facing south.  But the man doing the work suddenly stopped what he was
doing and looked in my direction.  He must have heard me or more likely saw my
movement.  I dropped to the ground and waited, my heart pounding away like
crazy.

After
only a minute or so, the man went back to what he was doing, and I started to
rise up.  Without thinking, I used my bum arm to lift myself and the pain
caused me to drop back down again.  It was a good thing, too, because the guy
doing the work looked back up.  It was a nice trick on his part, and he almost caught
me with it.  I’ll do my best to remember that one.

After
that, I crawled back away from the road, far enough I couldn’t see them, which
meant they couldn’t see me, before rising to my feet and moving south again.

Another
ten minutes, so I guess about another mile, and I found the ones Eric was
waiting for.  There were ten in all, one of them quite a ways out in front, and
another lagging a little to the rear.  I was also pretty sure I recognized one
of them.  I later learned his name was Arvid, but at the time, I kept thinking
it was Everett or Delbert.  No matter.  I don’t know why I even added that.  It’s
really not important to anything.  Anyway, what made me remember him is that around
town he always wore this plaid beret like thing with a little fuzzy ball on
top, and he was wearing it then.

The
next thing I had to do was get their attention without getting my butt shot,
and there wasn’t much time to do it either.  See, I wasn’t sure that they’d
recognize me, especially with my face all beat up the way it was.  I could also
feel my nose was all swollen up.  I had no idea what that made me look like.  It
sure made it after the rain had stopped22it hard to breathe.  I can tell you that.

If
I could have planned it out, I probably would have done it differently.  There
was no time, though, so I put my guns on the ground, took off my coat and
walked toward them with my hands high up in the air.

One
of the men in the middle saw me and turned with his shotgun pointed dead on.  I
tell you, I could almost feel the pellets hitting me.  It was a weird, weird
feeling but one I was feeling a lot.

One
person told me to “freeze.”  Another person told me to keep my hands up and
keep walking.  A third person told me to put my hands on top of my head.  I
didn’t know what to do, but I definitely wanted them to stop shouting.  I
wasn’t sure if their voices would carry to Eric’s lookouts.

So
in a very slow motion, I lowered one hand to my mouth, put my index finger to
my lips, pointed in the direction of Eric’s men, put my finger back to my lips,
and put my hands on top of my head.  I placed my hands there instead of leaving
them up because raising them like they had been was killing my shoulder.

After
that, I saw a couple of the men look in the direction I pointed while the
others looked at one another as if they were trying to figure out what was
going on.  A couple of seconds later, one of them gave me a hand signal to move
toward them, at the same time keeping his gun pointed at me.  As I was walking
forward, I saw more and more heads looking both in front of them and behind
them.  Some even got off the road altogether and into the bushes with their
guns ready to go.

When
I got close enough that I could talk in a normal voice, I said what you’d
expect me to say, “don’t shoot,” followed by all kinds of things I thought they
might recognize; my name, mom’s name, that we’d been kidnapped and escaped, the
town’s name, the crops we grew, the names of every person I could remember and
finally, “there are people waiting up ahead to shoot you.”  That made them perk
up.

Still,
it took them a while to wind down.  First, they had me lay on the ground face
down.  Next, one of them approached and searched me and in the process hurt my
shoulder, I might add.  After that, I heard a woman’s voice, so they weren’t
all men, which was common (many women went out on patrol).  She said, “I know
him, he’s Anna’s son,” and I felt a hand on my arm, my bad one again, lifting
me up.  It made me cry out and grab it.

I
told them again about the ambush up ahead, and the two lookouts, and the plan
to attack the town, and that I needed to get back to mom and Alan.  It all came
out pretty much in a string of words without much detail attached to it.

The
man named Arvid was the leader, and he told everyone to get off the road.  He next
signaled the man up ahead to stay where he was and the woman who was behind
them to join him.  As they all grouped up, I started to step in, but he
directed me away and told the woman who recognized me to, “Stay with him.” 
That kind of made me mad, but I didn’t say anything.  I guess I was just glad
to be with people who weren’t going to try to hurt me.

This
woman I’m speaking of said her name was Tracy Pickens.  She’s maybe five feet
tall and big chested, with dark brown eyes and black hair showing a few strands
of early gray, and cut short enough to show her ears.  She was wearing a tan
canvas coat with a hood attached to it, black pants with mud on the knees, and
heavy brown boots that made her feet look too large for her body.  She smiled a
lot as well, which was nice to see for a change.  Mom, Alan, and I haven’t been
doing a lot of smiling lately.

So
while the others talked, I put the time to use by explaining to Tracy in a
little more detail about mom and Alan being hurt, and how I needed to get back
to them as soon as possible.

She
started to ask me questions to fill in the blanks when Arvid walked back up and
interrupted her.  He informed us that he had decided to sneak around the two
lookouts using my route back, (with me in the lead), cross over the road, and
come up behind the group waiting for them.  So that’s what we started about
doing, right after I collected my guns.

I
took them further back into the hills, just to be safe, and ran them for the
first five minutes.  After that, we walked for another ten minutes before
turning quietly back to the road.  Once we were near, we scouted a short
distance in both directions, just to make sure my estimate of where Eric’s
lookouts were was good, and afterwards we crossed the road in twos.  Once
across, I led them right to the ambush site, although a long way in back of
them.  That’s where we halted to make the final plan.

Arvid
started right out by telling me to “stay put,” and “keep out of things.”  I
think he tried to soften his hard way of saying it by telling me that everyone
in his group had been practicing together and so knew what was expected of
them.  If I got involved in the fight, it might just screw things up.  That may
have been his way of softening things up, but to me it still sounded like he
didn’t trust me.  To his face I nodded and said, “OK.”  In my head I was
calling him ten of the worst wash house names I could think of.

So
I sat there on the ground, behind a rock, all safe and sound, while he and the
others snuck down closer to Eric and his crew.

I’m
sure that anyone who has been reading this thing can figure out that Arvid’s
plan and my plan weren’t exactly the same plan.  There was no damn way I was
going to sit behind a rock and miss out on a chance to do what I should have
done earlier, kill Eric.  So the second that Arvid was out of sight, I started
moving downhill myself.  I just walked further to the left is all, in a perfect
position to spot anyone escaping.  See, I knew something they didn’t.  Eric
isn’t the type to stand there and slug it out if he thought he wasn’t going to
win.  He’s the type who takes off running and comes back to get you later.  I’d
wait for him.

No
sooner had I settled into my very own ambush spot, than it started.  First, it
was just a couple of pops, probably because somebody spotted somebody else, followed
by the whole Woburn militia unleashing everything they had at the backs of
Eric’s men.  I held my place and checked and re-checked the safety on my little
carbine.  Out loud, I actually said, “No mistakes.”that’s what I didwot

The
first person I saw was that guy in the red ball cap and dark glasses.  He came
out from behind a bush in a half crouch, tip toeing his way north.  I told
myself, he wasn’t Eric but he’d do for now.  I let him get a couple of steps
into the open and let loose three or four shots in a row.  Some of them must
have hit because I saw him twist and zig, and go a couple of more steps before
his knees gave out on him, and he dropped flat to the ground.  I was feeling
pretty proud of myself about that when Eric stepped out beyond the same bush
and took a couple of shots at me with this big old pistol he was holding.  I
can’t swear to it, but I think one of his bullets went right past my head.