SAMANTHA
I hold Jimmy around the shoulders and halfway drag him out from under the bridge, shaking. The man who drove us out is enormous and awe-inspiring. He’s wearing an army green trench coat to the ground and pants that look as old as he is. His scruffy hobo beard goes past his neck!
Jimmy’s spewing blood from his mouth, his body feels cold and clammy, and I start sniffling, out of shock, I suppose, or trauma. I force him to walk a couple of blocks, each step painful and trying, before sitting down on a green painted bench underneath a street lamp.
“Open your mouth,” I say. He’s got blood and spit going all down his chin and dripping onto his shirt.
He moans and tilts his head back, and I pry his jaw open gently. The wind starts blowing harder, causing the rain to pelt us like invisible bullets.
I touch my finger to his mouth and moan. Reckon he’s bleeding something awful out of the gums. It looks like they all got shoved a good centimeter up his gums from the awful crack.
“Oh, Jimmy,” I stutter. “Jimmy, you’re hurt, you’ve got to see a doctor!”
He shakes his head, and his body starts to stoop over me. He rests his head on my lap and puts a hand up to his forehead.
“Reckon he hurt you real bad, Jimmy,” I tell him, a little tear dripping off the corner of my nose. “Reckon you shouldn’t have said anything, we should’ve just gone.”
He starts to talk, but then his body starts heaving up-down-up-down like ocean waves, and he clutches my thighs in thick fingers to brace himself, and starts throwing up on the sidewalk.
I have an older sister who’s a drinker, only my parents don’t know that, and when she used to live at home I always held her hair back when she threw up and patted her back.
Jimmy hasn’t got a lot of hair to hold back but I rub his back like he was a baby or my sister, and kind of coo something along the lines of, “S’okay, Jimmy. You’re okay. You is.” I pause, and then I correct my grammar, “Are. You are.”
The sick hits the cement with loud smacking sounds, and he shakes violently on my lap, holding onto my thighs too hard, so it hurts, and I know there’ll be bruises in the morning. But he doesn’t know that, and I won’t tell him.
He wipes off his mouth when he’s done and then wipes his hand on his pants, and pushes his face into my lap. A little bit of warm fluid pools up, probably spit and blood, but I don’t care because he’s here with me and he’s taking care of me, so I kind of stroke his hair and say, “Better not go to sleep, Jimmy, I think I read that somewhere. You shouldn’t go to sleep after you hit your head hard or you won’t wanna wake up.”
He slurs like he’s trying to say something, and then repositions himself so he’s lying on his side and facing my stomach.
“Gotta stick up for us,” he tells me. “If I don’t who will? People will be linin’ up to step on us and use us and hurt us if I don’t.”
“Sometimes you have to take a step back, Jimmy,” I say meekly. “Maybe that was his territory. Maybe we really have to pay to be some places, kind of like exclusive clubs. Or else he thinks we was walking on him. I mean, we are new here.”
He shakes his head, the blood coming out of the side of his mouth and dripping between my legs. “Wif all this new stuff happenin’ Sammy, I figure it’s a trial and error thing. But sometimes you gotta stand your ground.”
He isn’t taking into account that he was standing the bridge troll’s ground, not his ground, but I don’t say anything because his head hurts enough without getting logic pounded into it.
“Okay, Jimmy,” I say. “Okay, except, don’t go and get you killed. Yourself killed. Or else who’ll take care of me?”
“I ain’t gonna get me killed, Samantha. I promise I won’t.”
But how can you hold someone on a promise like that?
PAP
When he didn’t come home, I got nervous. Jim Theodore Daughtry came home, he always did, acause he had to help take care of the Thing. And acause he’d got his Momma and Pap to answer to. I waited for him until Nine PM. He hadn’t never been home past Nine PM afore. S’against the Rules which are marked on the fridge and don’t nobody go against the Rules marked on the fridge.
I grinded my fingernails into my fists so they got filled up with blood and Mrs. Daughtry sneaked up behind me nervous-like and shocked me, and I spun around and near punched her afore I realized she was just Kate. She looked affrighted and like a deer in headlights.
“It’s Nine PM,” I muttered out brusquely.
“It is nine o’clock. But…”
“An’t no ifs, ands or buts about it!” I yelled. “He ain’t been here since this afternoon, plumb missed supper and chores! Had ta do ‘em all by myself. That ain’t right.” I shook my head. “That ain’t right.”
“Maybe he had an accident, Mr. Daughtry. Maybe we ought go out and look for him.” She wrung her apron between her hands. “Maybe he’s lyin’ somewhere in a gutter, all hurt. Maybe he got attacked by a wild animal. Jimmy’s never late.”
I felt a twinge of real nerves hit me then, and run through my whole body. Didn’t—still don’t-- want no wild animal tearin’ my son to bits, acause he’s the only son I got. Don’t got him no more, though.
Reckon I didn’t realize I’d lost him at that point. Figured he’d come home and I’d throw him in the room with the Thing for a couple a days to give him a right shock, maybe even stick him in the cage to learn him better, and that’d be it. He wouldn’t be apt to break the Rules on the fridge again.
Only Jim didn’t come home that night. Next day I summoned police and a group of us got together and hunted the countryside for him, but Jim was gone.
The Irons family was missin’ there girl too, Samantha, and I knowed that Jim and Samantha had been gettin’ a little close at church.
At the end of the week the mystery was solved though. Widow Hamshire, who don’t come to church much and who lives on the edge of town, said she reckoned she saw two young kids, one red hair, one yellow, get on the six-twenty bus on Friday.
Reckon nobody could figure them out where it had been goin’ to, though.
