Bite-Size Stories

                       NO TRESPASSING!
                                          by Marie Colligan
The road wasn’t on the map, but it was on the television news that summer—the summer the kids of Harmon’s Hollow became famous.
The last time I walked this road it was but a path and I was but a young girl. The thought sent prickles up my arms. A memory I buried 22 years ago with no pomp, no ceremony, and certainly no regret returned.
            This was the path we kids of Harmon’s Hollow used as a shortcut to our private fishing hole. The “hole”—as we called it—wasn’t really a hole. It was a dog-legged-shaped pond where we spent summer days baiting hooks with fat worms under the shade of the big willow tree. We set our poles—reels wedged between rocks—then lean against an old log or boulder, like modern day Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns waiting for a hit.
            Sometimes, in the fevered afternoons of summer, after we got bored with fishing, we stripped to our underwear and cooled off—swimming in the hole. Any passerby, if indeed a passerby could find the hole, paid no mind to the half-naked pre-pubescent boys and girls splashing and having a darned good old time. We splashed walls of crystal water droplets into the air while our happy voices mimicked the unintelligible gabbling of wild geese.
            It was during one of those heat oppressive afternoons, when every footstep is a burden and the sun bakes blisters on your lips that I became aware of the peeping Tom.

            A thin wisp of cigarette smoke drifting from the copse of cypresses alerted me. Another puff filtering though the branches confirmed it. An intruder, hiding either in or behind the cypresses was watching us.
I made a pretense of splashing not wanting to signal I was aware of the trespasser. I floated to the shady side of the hole beyond the bend of the dog-leg and scaled the root-bound embankment.  The snap of twigs underfoot were swallowed by the whacking of willow branches against the embankment—the noise, like horse whips prodding mules-- aided me in my hastily improvised plan to investigate.
As I crept away from the embankment, a furtive figure slinked from the trees. Good, he’s leaving. My curiosity, however, remained. I circled behind the willow and scrambled at the edges of shadows to the center of the cypresses.
 On all fours—ready to bolt if spotted—I found his puddle of discarded cigarette butts stamped out on the ground. The smell of tobacco lingered under the branches. Judging from the number of butts, the trespasser had been observing us a while. I picked one up and examined it.                                                                                                                   
“ Hmm, self-rolled,” I whispered to myself.
With a spasm of fright, I dropped it when I heard footsteps-- footsteps that could only be heading to the center of the copse where I stood in my underwear. I dropped to my hands and knees and backed out fast—away from the cigarettes, away from the lingering smoke, away from the peeping Tom.                                                                                                                          

             My exit and his entry were perfectly timed. I didn’t get a good look at him, and he didn’t see me. As I took my last few crawl-steps from darkness into daylight, a hand grabbed my ankle twisting me around, dragging me back inside the wall of trees.
“Let me go!” I hissed, yanking and kicking out with my free foot—trying to rid myself of the monster that had me in its grip.
 He pulled my body along the ground. I made futile attempts to grab something, anything, to use as a weapon. My mind was so busy formulating a way to escape, I never thought of screaming. Years later, whenever I thought about the attack, I always wondered why I never screamed. Self-preservation is not a science. Self-defense is.
            Eventually, I slid over something hard. A rock! It was the size of a baseball. I grabbed it keeping it out of sight underneath me until the moment I would use it.
            The skin on my chest and belly was rubbed raw and stung from its rough ride over the ground. My ankle hurt—throbbed actually—from the tortuous pulling. In the dark center of the trees, my abductor turned me onto my back and straddled my legs. With one hand over my mouth, his other hand grappled with my underpants. If he was trying to take them off, he was in for a fight.
            In my mind, I could hear Granny Mae’s warning—her attempt at spoon feeding me the facts of life. “Never let nobody touch your privates, Rosie…and if anyone does tries, you run yo’self to the nearest growed up and git help. Understand?                                                                                                              
            If we lived in the city, I’d run to the nearest policeman. In the Hollow, we were lucky to see the deputy sheriff once a week, usually on Saturday nights, when moonshine made the rounds.
The assault continued. My underpants were nearing my hips. I twisted furiously pummeling his face with my free hand. Two hands would have been better, but I kept the hand with the rock hidden behind me. I made several jabs and hard pokes at his eyes, but none disabled him. It was just luck the combination of my violent thrashings and eye pokings caused him to lose balance. His upper body tipped forward. My moment came.
I smashed the rock against his head and heard the hollow thunk of rock against skull. His entire, intolerable weight fell on me. I wiggled out from under him and saw blood on the rock, blood on his head and blood on my chest. Nauseated, my stomach lurched. I shrunk back—afraid he’d recover and grab me again. But, he didn’t move. I pulled my underpants up. They were dirty, but not ripped.
             I took the rock and crawled back out of the trees, tracing my steps down the shady end of the embankment slipping unnoticed into the water. Shivering, I swished the blood from the rock before lowering it to the bottom of the pond. It sank out of sight. My body stung as I rubbed the dirt and dried blood from my scrapes. I continued my frenzied scrubbing, but even after I washed all traces of dirt and blood off me, I still felt dirty.                                                                                                                 
 I re-joined the fun-doings, but nothing was fun. Thankfully, no one missed me. If any of the kids saw me climb out of the pond they’d assume I went to relieve myself at our make shift latrine—a trench, a log and a whole lot of flies for company—downwind of the hole. We were constantly in and out of the pond for that purpose. Sometimes we even shared the log.
            “Hey, Rosie, what happened to your chest?” One of the kids, I wasn’t quite sure who, yelled out the question from the spot of the most playful splashing.
            “I fell down the embankment.” My answer, quick and logical, drew no further interest. My scratches hid well under clothing.  Each day a new scab fell off and in a week’s time they were gone, but I never rid myself of the stigmata of my invisible scars.            
As the summer days passed, I expected the body of the peeping Tom to be discovered. I knew he wasn’t someone from around the Hollow; I would have recognized him. Definitely a stranger. Who he was I’d never know. What I did know--he was a child molester.
 After several days, it was impossible to ignore the pungent smell. The kids said it must be from a dead animal. How right they were and soon childish curiosity prompted their investigation.
Tommy Rogers spotted the body first. The others ran home screaming into the arms of incredulous parents. That’s when the police, ambulance and TV crews arrived. Their cameras closed in on the wide eyed faces of kids whose interviews added local color to the discovery. That night, the Harmon Hollow kids were on every channel of the evening news.
Now, after so many years, I found myself back in Harmon’s Hollow. The dirt road I remembered was paved. Nothing looked the same. No kitchen gardens, no well pumps, no out-houses. Cars, mailboxes and satellite dishes replaced them. I heard the chatter of TVs inside cheap houses. The new generation of Harmon Hollow kids sat on porches texting friends.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
I walked further along the paved road. The pavement changed to gravel then eased to dirt. Around a bend, a high, chain link fence, interwoven with vines, loomed. Barbed wire coiled along its top. I stopped. The path to the hole was lost in the cover of trees and the tangle of undergrowth behind the fence. At intervals, several large signs attached to the fencing warned:                        
ELECTRIFIED!
KEEP OUT!
PRIVATE PROPERTY
UNITED STATES MILITARY INSTALLATION
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

Indeed.
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1 comment:

  1. The imagery is exceptional. It's a good story, but I think the ending could be adjusted. Who was accused of the murder? There are unanswered questions here. But the very last part is great. "Indeed."

    ReplyDelete