Chapter 1: The Great Trapper

He was excited. No, he was more, much more than merely of himself. He felt, and rightly so that he was the man of the family, hell yes he was! The thirteen year old carried his first kills draped over his right shoulder. So far as the young man was concerned, fish didn’t really count as true kills, at least not in the way bringing home warm blooded animal kills did. After all, people caught fish, but killed rabbits. Today he had become a real hunter and brought hemp the meat to be cooked and eaten.

He walked down the cracked and poorly maintained sidewalk toward the place where he livedd in the trailer park they called home. He and his mother had lived in their old and rented single wide model for all his remembered life.

The young man marched along to a cadence only he could hear. His chest was puffed out with the proud swagger of the successful provider of his family of two. All the way home, the wide grin on his face never faltered or changed. The pair of plump jack rabbits draped over his left shoulder, one in front and one in back told the world he was a success.

Several of the older men he passed on his way home nodded to him to acknowledge they were aware of his accomplishment. As soon as he passed, one would nudge the other and smile. They remembered back to the day they were that age brought home their first kills for the dinner table, then sigh. Damn, it seemed so long ago and, at the same time, felt like it had been only yesterday. Cody Williams was unaware of the old men’s thoughts when he passed by them on his way home. Cody opened the door to their old thirty-two foot mobile home, a single wide, one bedroom model. Its original design had meant it to be used as a camper/office trailer, rather than as a main residence, especially for a woman and her now teenage son.

He entered as quiet as he could, shrugged the two prizes off his shoulder and began to ease them across the floor.

His mother smiled when she felt the slight shifting and ignored it. She was bent over the tiny sink in the small kitchenette area of the trailer preparing lunch for the two o them.

“How did the great trapping expedition go, my brave and resourceful son?” she asked. She never turned around to see who had entered. They seldom had visitors, other that the county social worker or the state health nurse.

He laughed aloud at her affectionate, but patronizing attitude. “Well, Mom, it was good and it was bad.” Cody thought of the “bad” and frowned.

As she began to turn around, she asked, “What was ... eeep!” She caught sight of the two dead rabbits lying on the floor, then saw her young son’s proud grin.

“Good lord, did you kill somebody’s pets? Are you in trouble? Who... ?” Her voice trailed off when She saw his proud smile. He shook his head and smiled even harder. The head shake was a definite “no.”

“Mom, both my traps worked, pretty well, just the way I told you they would”

He put a sad puppy expression on his face, then said in a whiny voice, “You shouldn’t laugh at my inventions like you just did. I’m a sensitive kid, you know.”

She lifted the two not yet skinned or butchered from off the floor and held them at arms length. She shuddered, wrinkled her nose and dropped them in the small sink. Then she gave them one last look of distaste. “Oh damn, what am I supposed to do with these things now?”

“Mom,” he gave her an impatient look, “You skin ‘em, you clean ‘em, you cook ‘em and we eat ‘em.”

“Honey, for all your great ideas you forgot one thing.” He looked up at his mother, head cocked to one side.

“This is just thee same as with those first fish you caught and brought home, remember?”

Cody laughed at the his mother’s expression. He smiled at the memory, then laughed and yelled, “What the hell am I going to do with these nasty, slimy things”

In an instant her face lost its good humor. She warned him in a stern voice, “Watch your language, young man. You’re still not too big for me to tan your skinny little butt.”

“Mom, I didn’t say it, you said it, remember? All I asked you is what you usually did with nasty, slimy things, remember? I also remember what you answered. ‘Cut the bastards off with a full knife.’ Then you...”

“Never mind, never mind,” she interrupted. Her face turned a bright crimson as she remembered. She took a deep breath, let it out and shuddered.

Cody saw her anger change to sadness at the memory he had brought back with his teasing. “Mom, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I was just going to say, you only go and do what you did with the fish and go ask Martha Robinson. She knows all about how to cook wild game and stuff.”

She nodded and left the trailer to go to the trailer next to theirs. She returned with a short, wiry old woman who said, “Let’s see those two ‘ugly things’ that has your mama in such an uproar.

“They’re in the sink,” Cody told her.

“I figured that out all by my own self,” I didn’t think you would try to wash ‘em in the toilet.” Cody snorted at her sarcastic remark.

“Boy, I see this puncture in this one’s head. And the other one has its head smashed in. What happened to them? You didn’t torture them, did you?” She looked straight at Cody and waited for an answer.

“No ma’am, why would I want to do something like that? I just used two different versions of my new invention. I wanted to see which way works best.”

“Well, what did you decide? Which one works the best? Stab ‘em in the brains or make mush out of their skulls?” She laughed at the expression on the young boy’s face.