Christmas Spirit? Really?
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2016 by Cuentista

Aaron stood back a good ten feet from the intense, crackling fire and watched it burn. It was after two in the morning and it had taken him over an hour on a frigid moonlit night to construct a pyre in a clear-cut area of the mountain as far back up the abandoned logging road as he could drive the old Chevy S10 pickup. A plastic tarp over the rusty bed covered a dozen good-size oak logs, a chainsaw, a few pieces of scrap lumber for kindling, and a body. A cold, drenching rain and sleet during the afternoon insured there was no danger of starting a forest fire.

He’d used the computer in the school library to learn how it was done, and if he’d constructed the pyre correctly, in an hour or so there would be nothing left of his mom but a pile of ashes and some unpleasant memories.

He felt no grief for her death, only a vague disappointment in the futility of her life. How could he grieve for someone who’d been a pathetic empty shell of a woman for as long as he could remember?

And it’s not like her demise came as any big surprise. Joanne Hatter, thirty-four year-old single mother of three died three days earlier, presumably from acute alcohol poisoning ... well, you could probably toss in some complications like malnutrition stemming from her addiction to meth, weed, and opioids; anything to prevent her brain from emerging from its perpetual fog. And then there was whatever diseases she might have picked up from her collection of beaus who often dropped in for a quick and convenient fuck while the kids were at school. They were, for the most part, the idle, chronically unemployed souls who made a bare subsistence living cutting weeds in the summer and shoveling snow in the winter to support their booze and dope habits. Sometimes they’d leave a few bucks, usually not, but anyone was welcome who had some kind of mind-altering substance to share. Joanne never aspired to anything or anyone better, and her life could generally be described as a train wreck.

She knew how to get knocked up (she had three abortions before Medicaid footed the bill to get her tubes tied) and how to push out a baby, but she hadn’t a clue as to how to raise a child, nor did she have any real interest in it. In fact Aaron, the oldest who was not quite eighteen, had been the only functional parent to his sister, Lynn and his brother, Adam since he was seven or eight years old.

It was unlikely that even his mom could have told them with any certainty who their fathers were, and you didn’t have to look too closely at the three of them to see they were each the fruit of different loins. Aaron clearly had a black father, Lynn had flaming red hair, and Adam’s pale skin, black hair and freckles evoked images of an Irish leprechaun.

It was fortunate that the weather in southern West Virginia had been unusually cold and overcast for the past few days; cold enough that his mom’s body hidden under some old blankets in the shed hadn’t decayed to the point that it reeked, thereby alerting the neighbors that something had died. Of course dead dogs, cats and wildlife were fairly common in the hollow, so they might not have paid much attention anyway.

What was most important to Aaron was that the authorities didn’t find out his mom was dead because that would mean he and his sister and brother would be split up and sent to different foster homes or to an orphanage because there were no other relatives that they knew of. He didn’t intend for that to happen; not after all the effort he’d put into bringing them up and keeping them together. They had nothing and no one but each other, and that made for a tight bond.

The welfare checks would continue until his mom failed to check in with WVDHHR (West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources), and that might give him maybe six months or so to get Lynn and Adam through the rest of the school year. He knew the people down at Johnny’s Hardware and Grocery on the highway would cash the checks because they’d been doing it for years, and Aaron had long since mastered forging his mom’s signature.

He was due to graduate in May and that meant he’d have a lot better chance of competing for some kind of decent job to bring in enough income to keep them in groceries and clothing. He planned to apply at the WV Highway Department as soon as he was out of school. He fully intended to see his sister and brother through high school, even if it meant sacrificing any possibility of a college education for himself, something for which he’d held out some slim hope since he discovered early in life that he had a better than average brain. That slim hope was now even slimmer.

The thirty year-old trailer home they lived in wasn’t anything to brag about, but it was paid for and it kept the wind out. It once belonged to his grandad, a coal miner who died at the age of fifty-nine from a combination of black lung and rye whiskey. Aaron’s mom inherited it and the pickup by default because she was an only child and the only living relative. Her mother had long since fled the area for parts unknown in search of a better life.

Aaron drove the pickup to school at Mount View High School and usually got home about a half hour before Lynn and Adam. They didn’t know their mom was dead because he managed to get her out of the house before the school bus dropped them off. He found her on the couch with her cold, dead hands wrapped around a nearly empty bottle of cheap vodka.

When he thought about what would happen to them if he called the sheriff’s office, he decided to get rid of the body and tell his siblings that their mom was probably shacked up somewhere with one of her boyfriends. They wouldn’t need any convincing to buy that story. At some point later on, he’d tell them that she was probably gone for good, and good riddance because their lives would surely improve with her absence.

So he carried her wasted, emaciated body, stiff with rigor mortis to the shed and covered it with some old blankets, padlocked the door and began making plans to dispose of the corpse.


By the time he got the burn site cleaned up and got home from the unofficial cremation around four-thirty in the morning, it was too late to go to bed, so he sat up and drank coffee until it was time to wake up Lynn and Adam and get them ready for school. While they were getting washed up and dressed, he cooked a pot of oatmeal and tossed in a handful of raisins and some brown sugar. When they were fed and on the way out the door, he gave them two dollars each for the vending machines and sent them on their way. Their lunches were free, thank God and the county school system.

When Adam asked when their mom was coming back, Aaron patted his shoulder and said, “Who knows? Do you even care?”

Adam thought about it for a couple of seconds and answered, “Um, no, not really. I was just wonderin’.”

“Yeah, well if we’re lucky, maybe she’ll stay gone for a few more days.”

Once the kids were on the bus and on the way to school, Aaron looked around the trailer and came to the decision that things were going to improve now that the bane of their existence was gone. To start, he’d do a little cleaning before crashing for a few hours of much needed sleep. He was bone tired, physically and emotionally, and he knew he’d be useless in class, so he took the day off.

Once he got started cleaning, he couldn’t stop. The place was - and always had been - a filthy mess, but now that he was going to be the unchallenged head of the household, he had no intention of putting up with it any longer. They might be dirt-poor, but there was no reason they had to live like pigs in a sty. He spent hours washing dishes, pots and pans, scrubbing walls and floors, vacuuming the hallway and the bedrooms, scouring the bath, stripping the beds and washing every piece of cloth he could find in their trailer-sized washer/dryer combo. Even with all that, he knew it would take a while to get the stale smell of cigarettes and spilled beer and booze out of the place.

He finally crashed about two in the afternoon and woke up when he heard the TV come on about six. When he shuffled still fuzzy-brained down the hall to the living room, Lynn looked up from the couch and asked, “Did you clean this place up by yourself? Didn’t you even go to school?”

Aaron chuckled and said, “Me? Nah, it must’ve been gremlins or somethin’. I didn’t get to the grocery store today either, so it looks like we’re havin’ beans and hotdogs and leftover cornbread for supper. That okay with you guys?”

He got shrugs for an answer.

As he was cutting a few wieners into quarters and opening two cans of pinto beans, he asked, “You guys got homework?”

Lynn said, “Did it in study hall.”

Adam said, “I just got one chapter to read for American History.”

Aaron asked, “Well then how come you got your eyes glued to the damn TV? Get to it so I don’t have be naggin’ at ya all evenin’. Homework always comes first, and you know that.”

Adam put on a sneer and challenged, “You’re not the boss of me!”

Aaron put down the can of beans and walked over to stand between his brother and the TV. “How far do you wanna test that theory, bro?”

For a moment, the boy looked like he was going to argue, but he had zero chance of success and he knew it, so he just said, “Shit!” Twelve year-old Adam grabbed his history book off the coffee table and stomped down the hall to the room he shared with his older brother.

“Jeez,” Lynn sniped, “Going through puberty’s sure makin’ him a pain in the butt.”

“Yeah? Well you’re not always Miss sweetness and cooperation yourself sometimes. As I recall, when you were making your transition to adolescence three or four years ago, on a good day you were a major pain in the ass.”

She grinned sheepishly and mumbled, “Maybe.”

“And speakin’ of moody, aren’t you about ready to start your period? I ask because you always wait ‘til it’s already started before you remember you’re out of Tampons.”

Lynn laughed, “Jesus, Aaron, you must be about the only brother in the world who keeps track of his sister’s periods! There’s something weird about that, ya know.”

“Yeah? So tell me, smartass, how well does your mom do lookin’ after your female needs?”

“Ha! She can’t even remember what day of the week it is, so how’s she gonna remember my periods? But now that you bring it up, I think I do need some Tampons. Could you pick some up the next time you go to the store? You know the ones I like.”

“Damn, girl! You’re almost sixteen and you been havin’ your periods since you were twelve. When you gonna learn to be on top of that stuff?”

She laughed again and shot back, “Why should I as long a you’re doing it for me?”

He sighed, “It sure would’ve been nice to have at least one real parent in this family. I’ll pick some up on the way back from school tomorrow when I stop at Goodson’s for groceries.”


Aaron shut off the TV at ten and sent everyone to bed. In spite of his fatigue, he couldn’t get to sleep from worrying about how they were going to manage. Not that his mom had ever done any worrying herself, but now he was the official caretaker, and that meant it was his official job to worry. He sat in the dark living room sipping on a cup of instant coffee and mentally planning out a budget.

By rights, they ought to be better off because there was one less mouth to feed and no money would be going out for booze, dope and cigarettes. By way of cash on hand, he’d found four hundred and thirty-six dollars in his mom’s pocketbook, all that was left of the December welfare money. That’d have to get them through until January. The next welfare check should arrive the Friday before New Years Eve.

He knew when to expect it because since he was thirteen, he’d been grabbing it from the mailbox, taking it down to Johnny’s to cash it, paying their grocery tab, then walking across the highway to the post office to buy money orders for the rest of the monthly bills before handing over whatever was left to his mom. He took on that job after they had their power shut off in the dead of winter four years back. It was a damn good thing they had a wood-burning stove to fall back on. They had to rely on it for cooking as well as heating the trailer. And warming water to bathe in.

Now he kept plenty of firewood out back for that stove, so if he got busy and caulked up the leaks around the trailer’s windows and doors, the electric bill could be kept to a minimum. Once the outside temperature dropped below fifty, his mom always kept the damn thermostat at eighty, probably because her wasted body couldn’t generate enough heat to keep her warm, but he turned it down to sixty-eight after she died and so far nobody had complained.

The most immediate problem was Christmas coming up in two weeks. He hated it. He hated it with a passion, but Lynn and Adam were still close enough to childhood that they still clung to their child-like expectations. His mom would have blown most of the December welfare money on guilt presents they couldn’t afford, and to his thinking, that was just plain stupid. Had it been up to Aaron, the holidays would come and go without a mention, but it really wasn’t up to him, was it? With two younger kids in the house, it was pretty much impossible to escape the annual tribute to the almighty dollar.


The next day when Aaron got home from school, one of his mom’s regulars was sitting on the steps waiting. It was the one he liked the least; the guy who provided her with most of her dope. As he stepped out of the pickup, Jay Neely stood up and demanded, “So where the hell’s yer ol’ lady? I been callin’ all day and she ain’t answerin’!”

Aaron rolled his eyes and answered, “How would I know? She doesn’t confide in me about her personal life. Maybe somebody came by and tempted her away with a full bottle of whiskey.”

Jay fuckin’ Neely laughed, “Could be, but I scored me some oxy last night an’ I figured she might wanna do a little business.” He cupped his crotch to emphasize the nature of the business he had in mind. “How long has she been gone?”

“A few days. Look, I don’t have any idea where she is or who she’s with, so I guess you’ll have to find someone else to share in your good fortune.” With as much sarcasm dripping from his voice as he could manage, Aaron added, “When and if she comes back, I’ll be sure and tell her about all the wonderful times she missed out on.”

Jay got a nasty grin on his face and asked, “Well then how about that good-lookin’ sister o’ yourn? Lynn? Ain’t that her name? Maybe she’s up fer a little partyin’.”

Aaron drew himself up to his full six foot one, a good six inches taller than Jay, and glared at the sleazy, low-life skunk standing between him and the door. “Lynn don’t do that shit, asshole! And if I ever see you anywhere near her or even hear about you pushin’ any of your goddam dope at her, I’m gonna track you down and kick your ass from here to Virginia!”

Jay suspected he could do it, too, but he was too proud to back down from a smartass kid. “You might try, Aaron, but I don’t think much o’ your chances. Just tell your ma I came by. And keep a close eye on yer sister. She’s gettin’ to be a fine lookin’ thang an’ I believe she’s about ripe fer pickin’. Say, is she red-haired all over?”

Aaron’s hackles raised and he doubled up his fists as he took a step forward. “Don’t even think about it, Jay! You lay a hand on her and you’re a dead man! Now get your skinny ass outta here while you can still do it under your own power, or I swear I’ll get Adam’s baseball bat and pound you to jelly!”

Jay jumped down off the steps and started down the drive toward the road at a slow amble, trying his best not to look as concerned about getting his ass kicked as he really was. About half way, he announced over his shoulder, “I’ll spare you the ass whuppin’ you deserve this time, boy, but don’t be testin’ me no more. I’ll only take so much sass from a halfbreed nigger.”

Just to be sure, a few minutes later Aaron walked down to the road and waited for the school bus. He figured Jay fuckin’ Neely was too stupid to make the wiser choice and steer clear.


Friday afternoon after school, four days after he’d disposed of the body, Aaron got Lynn and Adam together and told them, “You know, I’m thinkin’ mom ran off and she ain’t comin’ back. Now if you guys don’t want to be split up and shipped off to some foster home somewhere, you need to keep your mouth shut about this. We’ll do just fine without her ‘cause the welfare checks will keep comin’ for a while. Hell, I been takin’ care of you since you were babies anyhow, so there ain’t nothin’ really changin’. You guys with me on that?”

“Fine by me,” Adam said with a grin. “I hate it when she gets all boozed up and pukes all over the bathroom. Last time she threw up blood and didn’t even clean it up! And it’s sure been a lot more peaceful around here without her yellin’ at us all the time.”

Lynn plopped onto the couch and agreed, “You can count me in. I hope she doesn’t ever come back. Um, and if she doesn’t, can I have her bedroom? It’s bigger than mine.”

“Too late, little sister,” Aaron said with a grin, “I already claimed it. Adam’s startin’ to grow up in the crotch and he needs some place where he can jerk off in private. Some nights he gets so carried away he shakes the bunk bed so much it wakes me up.”

Adam flushed with embarrassment when Lynn broke up laughing. “Hey, I don’t...” Then he caught himself and said, “I got homework,” as he turned to escape down the hall to his room.

“Hold up there, bro!” Aaron stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “We got some more things to talk about here. For one thing, you guys need to agree that since mom ain’t here, I’m officially in charge, and that means I get the last word. If you got an opinion, I wanna hear it, but if we disagree on somethin’ and we can’t talk it out, well then what I say goes. I don’t wanna be hard-assed about it, but we need to agree on who’s callin’ the shots around here. Otherwise, this ain’t gonna work. Like for instance, I don’t wanna see this place get all nasty and smelly like before. And that means you two gotta pull your weight by keepin’ your rooms cleaned up. Now, your rooms are your own private space, but I don’t wanna walk past your door and smell stinky bodies and dirty clothes. You gonna cooperate with me on that?”

Adam and Lynn nodded their agreement.

“Okay, good! Now, for another thing, there’s gotta be more sharin’ of the duties around here. Lynn, I figure you and I can switch off on the cookin’, keepin’ the kitchen cleaned up and doin’ laundry, that kinda stuff. And Adam, since you can’t boil water without burnin’ it, I’d like you to be in charge of takin’ out the trash, keepin’ the bathroom clean and vacuumin’ the floor a couple o’ times a week. That seem fair to you?”

Adam clearly wasn’t thrilled with his assignment but he shrugged and mumbled, “I guess.”

Aaron made his last point. “Alright, now there’s one more thing I wanna say. Lynn, the other day, ol’ Jay fuckin’ Neely was here lookin’ for mom, wantin’ to sell her some dope. I think he has his eye on you and he might try to offer you some free dope to get you hooked. And just so you understand where he’s comin’ from, he doesn’t want money, he wants your body. I warned him off, but he’s pretty stupid and I recon he’ll give it another try sooner or later. You gotta promise me you won’t have nothin’ to do with that jerk. I mean, don’t even talk to him!”

Lynn made a face and said, “Eew! That little creep always smells like a boy’s locker room sprinkled with cheap perfume! I can’t stand to be within fifty feet of him! And anyway, you know I don’t do dope.”

Adam laughed, “How would you know what a boy’s locker room smells like? You been sneakin’ into the gym and sniffin’ jock straps or somethin’?”

Lynn fired back, “Jesus, Adam, you’re sick! What I meant to say was that he smells like you.”

Aaron broke in, “Okay you guys, enough of that. I just wanted to give you a heads up that that butthole might be pokin’ around. If he does, just tell him to get lost or you’ll have your big brother kick his ass. Now, either one of you got anything you wanna add or ask?”

When neither of them had anything, Aaron said, “Okay. Well, for a special celebration of our new, uh, situation, how about we go to McDonald’s for dinner tonight? This ain’t gonna be an every day or even an every week thing. It’s just for tonight.”

“Great,” Adam shouted as he grabbed his jacket off the couch, “I’m supersizing everything!”

In the pickup on the way to McDonald’s, Aaron dropped the bomb he’d been saving. “You guys ain’t gonna like this, but from now on, we gotta run a tight budget, and that means Christmas is gonna be just another day this year ‘cause it’s a big waste of money. I think you’re both grown up enough to live with that, right?”

The source of this story is Storiesonline

To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account (Why register?)

Get No-Registration Temporary Access*

* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.

Close
 

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT...

Storiesonline is for adult entertainment only. By accessing this site you declare that you are of legal age and that you agree with our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.