Dog Days of Summer (Damned of the 2/19th Book Four) - Finished

Original Sins (Rewrite)

Shady OaksTrailer Park

Lot #19

Chehalis, Washington

United States of America

09 August, 1986

2125 Hours

        The pickup truck was warm, the summer heat had been stifling, and the heat still seemed to fill the cab of the truck as I sat there and stared at the trailer home in front of me.

        Bags of trash everywhere, a pickup truck missing engine and hood, a sad looking rottie with a concave stomach that would look at me now and then and thump its tail against the dusty ground, and religious stickers everywhere in the kitchen windows. It had been a single wide trailer, now it was a new looking double-wide, the stickers still on it and the wheels still visible because of a lack of skirting. The skirting was tossed in front of the shed, which was open and showing all the garbage piled up in there. The place somehow looked even shabbier than before, even with the new trailer that couldn't be more than a month old, although I knew inside would be spotless thanks to Martha.

        Martha, my birth mother. Martha and Jed. Jed and Martha. Martha Halley Douglas-Stillwater. Martha Stillwater. Mrs. Jed Stillwater. Momma. Momma and Daddy. Martha had squeezed me out, and together the two of them beat discipline into me with fist, boots, rings, and whatever was at hand. Jed had been brutal my entire life, and Martha had mixed her brutality with the Bible. Broken ribs, broken fingers, concussions, knocked out baby teeth, all of them were their trademarks. She had once beaten me unconscious with a Bible when I was five for giggling at a passage I couldn't even remember.

        It was at those hands I learned that if you were quiet and waited long enough any pain went away. I learned that if you just stood there and took it eventually whoever was beating on you got bored with it and left you alone. I learned how to move far away from the pain, where fear couldn't touch me, and leave my body behind until whoever was doing the beating stopped. It was under their care that I learned that love was a lie, at least for an animal like me. Learned that an animal like me didn't deserve love or affection, not from people, not from animals, and definitely not from Jesus. That I was worth less than my sister just on the fact I was a boy, that I was worth less than my brother because Martha loved him more than me. Triplets, we were, which gave them an extra son they didn't want or care about.

        The lizard short-circuited the memories with an image of Nancy lying next to me as we spooned in the cold barracks room, our body heat under the blankets all that was keeping us from freezing to death. She was smiling at me, her expression sleepy, her eyes soft and vulnerable, the thick jagged scar on her face a soft pink.

...thanks little guy...

        The last time I had been here, I'd been in a car Nancy had rented, with Nancy sitting next to me. She'd been a rock I could hold onto even though I'd felt like I was drowning.

        Now I was sitting in a beat up old pickup truck. The bed was empty, everything I'd bought hidden at the old Tillman Farm. I'd sent Harvey and Glendan on a bullshit errand to keep them busy. I only had a few hours before the meeting, and a lot of ground to cover.

        Logan was in there, with Tera. I'd gathered that much from a few questions asked here and there. I knew that by now the Matrons and my cousins knew I'd been asking questions, but most of the questions had had to do with the Doutree family. Where they were, where they hung out, who lived where, how many kids they had and who was married and who wasn't. That meant that the cousins would have staked out the Doutrees, warned them.