Once she was bandaged and taken to the emergency room, Paul Crawford summoned all of us to the living room in the Big House, where the furniture had been pushed to one side. In an eerily close reenactment of High Plains Drifter, a film I saw many years later, Paul Crawford slowly took off his tool belt, pacing the floor and looking into our eyes, waiting for one of us to spill the beans on Terry. We all claimed not to know who was responsible, including Terry.
“Well,” said Paul Crawford, striking terror in our souls, “somebody g’on tell me something,” and he now pulled out his pants belt, pausing dramatically to light his cigar.
The only difference between this cigar lighting and Clint Eastwood’s version was that in the movie he wore a cowboy hat; in Paul Crawford’s version he wore his worker’s hat. Instead of being a gunslinger, he was a belt slinger as it came alive in his hands, like an angry, out-of-control snake. Though his main focus was Terry, we all caught ricochet blows as Paul Crawford taught each of us the meaning of “putting the fear o’ God in yo’ black ass.”
That was the end of our indoor ghetto Disneyland, cigarettes, and pillow fights.
Looking for less controversial pursuits sometime later when the weather had turned beautiful and sunny, Terry and I thought no one would mind if we built ourselves a little clubhouse in the yard out back with some of the loose lumber lying around.
Unbeknownst to us, Freddie did mind and had supposedly been hollering, “Stop making all that goddamned noise!” because he was trying to sleep. With Terry hammering on the outside and me inside the clubhouse hammering, we couldn’t hear anything. Then I became aware that Terry had stopped hammering. Suddenly, the clubhouse begins to disintegrate around me with a giant reverberating sound going Whop! Whop! Whop! and the sun reflecting off the shiny metal blade of Freddie’s long-handled ax.
All I know is that the clubhouse is being chopped down with me in it, and Terry has split. Not only does Freddie not give a damn that I’m inside, he seems uninterested in the fact that splintering wood has slashed into one of my legs, which is now bleeding a small river onto our structure-turned-woodpile as I shriek from pain. Freddie is impervious, like a human buzz saw, demonically possessed with turning our annoying noisy project and me into mulch.
Amid the whop!s and my shrieks and blood and wood splinters flying everywhere, Momma’s voice enters the cacophony as she screams at Freddie, “Stop! Stop it!”
With a grunt, he brings his destruction to a grinding halt, defending himself by declaring, “I told him to stop making all that goddamn noise.”
