Chapter 5

On an especially beautiful day, we were at Porter’s Pool. That was an interesting place that covered several acres. The swimming pool was the largest in the area, and it was equipped with a water slide of somewhat primitive design, but that made the pool unique. In addition to the pool, there was an arcade area and a large dining room that could be rented for parties, etc.

Surrounding the pool were several ponds and lakes with walking paths winding between them and through the woods. Anybody who visited the place and did not find some form of entertainment was a real stick in the mud. This day was a real scorcher with the temperature in the direct sun pushing hard on 100° F, but the temperature was a reasonable high 80s in the shade back on the walking trails.

Frankly, I sunburned easily, and there were no decent sun blockers back then, despite what the advertisements would have you believe. I just couldn’t take the sun any longer, so I decided to take a short walk among the trees. Surprisingly, there were very few other people who had the same idea. In fact, most people had stayed home on this day.

My balance problem was improving rapidly, and I was now able to walk as much as half a mile if I paced myself and made full use of my walking staff. Anyway, I decided to give the cooling trees a try (in south Alabama, a temperature of 85° F was considered cool). I set out on a little used path that led me rather deep into the woods. This was no problem, all I had to worry about were snakes, poison ivy, ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, gnats, and flies. Just the usual thing.

I had gotten about 400 yards into the woods and was resting when I heard a woman’s voice yelling and screaming for somebody to leave her alone. Obviously, she needed help, so I gathered myself and rushed as fast as I could toward the sound. There were rest spots all along the trail, and the first one I came to was the one wherein lay the problem.

A naked teen girl was lying on her back on the grass, and a young man who looked to me like a football player was kneeling between her legs. He, too, was naked, and I could see his erect cock sticking out from his crotch. Another young man who looked the same was holding the girl’s arms above her head. The intent was obvious.

So far, the girl had avoided penetration because she was bouncing around too much for the man to get his cock aligned. He was trying to hold her hips steady, and he needed both hands for that job. That meant that he was having to twist his body to align his cock with her vagina, and that was just not working. It looked to me like the only way he could be successful with this rape was to start hitting the girl to knock her unconscious or to force her to be still. Well, I hoped that my efforts were going to make that impossible.

I gave no thought to my personal safety, but moved as quickly as I could to aid the girl. I was wearing my bracers because I never went anywhere out of the water without them, and I had my staff/baton in my hand. Neither man noticed me because they were too intent on the rape, so I came as a complete surprise, and that was a great help to me.

The first thing I did was to hit the man between the girl’s legs as hard as I could across his back at kidney level with my baton. The way he screamed in pain, you would have thought that it was a death blow, and it may well have felt like that. Such a blow could kill, but not immediately.

The other man, who was watching the girl’s crotch and urging the rapist on so that he could get his turn, noticed me at last as the rapist fell to one side away from me. The way the man was standing put his left knee within easy range of my baton, and I struck too quickly for him to dodge. His knee was shattered by the blow, and he fell to one side so that it was easy for me to reach his other knee. That one, too, received one of my baton’s love taps, and he was totally out of action. The only way for him to reach a hospital was with considerable help.

On a just-in-case basis, I crushed the knees of the other guy so that he could not attack me or escape. At this point, the girl was crying hysterically, and I did not blame her. I made no effort to make her stop crying because I figured that it was a good way to get the horror out of her system.

The problem now was how to handle a naked teenaged girl. The one-piece swim suit had been cut off her with a knife. There were no bikinis at the time. We needed some way to cover her nakedness before she showed up in public. This was still during the era when a rape victim was treated as if she had enticed the rapist. Yes, stupid, I knew, but that was life in the deep South at the time.

Fortunately, there were a couple of bath towels that had belonged to the rapists, and I used them to fashion a covering for the girl. She said that she had not been penetrated by either man, so we figured that we would save her the shame and embarrassment. Her family was at the pool, so I helped her to reach their car before I found her mother and told her what had happened. The woman found her husband, and they rushed to their daughter in the parking lot. That was the last I ever saw of any of them.

I put on a show of being barely able to walk when I next went to the pool’s office to report two injured boys who needed medical attention. I told the woman I spoke to how to find the boys and disappeared until Dad showed up to take my brother and me home. I never mentioned the episode to anybody, especially to my brother, for fear of trouble growing out of my attack on the two young men. I couldn’t prove the attempted rape and I did not have the girl’s name, so I had no defense. The best thing that I could do was simply to vanish.

A couple of days later, a report was printed in the local newspaper of the “accident” at Porter’s Pool. The boys were in the hospital and not expected ever to walk normally again. One of the boys also had very painful internal injuries, but they were not life-threatening. That one article was all that was ever said about the event.

I figured that I had gotten away with the whole thing and was minding my own business. This was the time when the annual polio panic began. Of course, nobody knew how the disease was caught nor how it was spread, but it was always in hot weather and usually clustered around swimming pools. Well, that shut down the pools until the panic was over, a period of three to six weeks, depending on a lot of things, seemingly including the hot weather.

Anyway, like any other sensible person, I avoided the swimming pools during this time and switched my attention to reading. I usually rode my tricycle to the library in the morning before the day’s heat had a chance to build up. I also picked the route that was lined by trees and had only a few low hills. That meant that my choices were limited, and I quickly settled on one that was the most comfortable for me.

It was about 10:00 AM one day when I was headed toward the library. I was riding along a back street with a lot of trees and no parked cars when it happened. I was caught completely by surprise when I heard a shotgun fire and was hit in the back with considerable pain. I immediately whipped my tricycle to the left and was hit on that side by a second shot. At the time, I did not think about why I only felt pain and was not incapacitated when the shot hit me. I found out later.

Meanwhile, by this time, I was so used to reacting to pain inflicted by someone else that I never paused to think. I continued my turn and whipped around in time to see a boy running away along the sidewalk on my side. I must have been so high on adrenaline by then that I could have flown if I had thought of it, but, instead, I pumped those peddles as fast as I could. I actually caught up to the boy just as he was crossing at a street intersection, so I had no trouble poking my extended staff between his legs and tripping him.