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The boy sat very quietly in the corner on the hot summer evening. A smell of rancid sweat and fetid cooking filled the atmosphere of the shack. With patience unheard of in most fourteen-year-olds, only his eyes followed as his stepfather crossed the kitchen with increasingly slower lurches. With a crash the old man finally sat down at the kitchen table, head nodding, close to sleep.
The boy had sat there so long that a crust of dried blood had formed on his face, blood from a wound received when he tried to protect his mother from the brutal beating she had received two hours ago. A 12 gauge Greener shotgun leaned on the wall near the boy's corner, and unknown by the old man, it had been loaded with two stolen loads of buckshot by the boy that very morning, for today was the day when it became too much, when the sweat and the blood and the smell of gut wrenching fear had to stop, one way or the other.
In one swift move, the kid darted from his chair, scooped up the double, and sidestepped to a halt in front of his stepfather. The old man looked up and said in his characteristic whine, "Put the gun down, boy. You don't know what you're doing. Who'd look after your ma and you?"
The boy didn't waste time talking. "Go to hell, you old bastard," was his only comment. A slight tremor could be heard in the voice, but that was his only sign of nervousness. He pulled the forward trigger, and the old man's neck turned into a bloody pulp.
Although the man was already dead, the kid muttered "bastard" again, this time in a calm voice that would never again be nervous, then he aimed the left barrel for the old man's mouth and pulled the rear trigger. He always had hated the look of those rotten teeth.
The deputy sheriff and the coroner had been at the grisly scene for an hour and a half. According to the widow, her late husband had gotten drunk and shot himself while cleaning his shotgun. The deputy didn't believe it for one minute, but he knew what this worthless old scumbag had been like. The boy's torn face and the woman's swollen lips gave mute testimony to that. It was a cinch that one was covering for the other, but which one was which? And for that matter, what jury in this country would convict either one for what was obviously an act of self preservation?
The coroner came to stand beside him and showed that he had started to write the letter A on the form on his clipboard, then waited for the deputy's okay before continuing. The lawman stared at the lad for a minute and found him gazing back at him. He thought, "The kid could go either way. We could have used more like him in the war, though, and maybe he'll turn out all right."
The deputy quickly turned to the coroner and nodded his head in agreement, whereupon the other finished writing the words, Accidental Shooting. As they left the sorry little kitchen, the deputy took one last look around. That second barrel was the dead giveaway, but they hadn't even mentioned it in their reports. As he finally turned away, a feeling akin to a shudder ran up his backbone as the thought hit him, "Dear God, what if I'm wrong?"
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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