Chapter 5

Hito wo noroeba, ana fŭtatsu - Person (accus.) if-one-curses, holes two (are).

Curse a man, and there will be two graves / “He who seeks revenge digs two graves.”

Almost always attributed incorrectly to Confucius, this quote is first found in an 1876 history book about Japan called “The Mikado’s Empire” by William Elliot Griffis, and also appears in the 1888 “A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese” in a list of Japanese proverbs.

It is always tempting to daydream about getting revenge against the people who have hurt you and screwed us over, by ‘making them pay’ ... with interest. I admit that I still have a fondness for doing this over a decade later. That’s one thing, I now decided during the second day of my trip, about now facing the EoTWaWKI ... it makes a lot of old problems rather moot. With 90-98% of the population very likely to be dead before the end of the year, it was time to lay down permanently some very long held grudges and abandon any and all regrets to the past. It was time I decided, to ‘move on’.

I thought about revenge entirely too much during middle school, about performing some miraculous feat of deus ex machina by humbling the bullies and teachers that couldn’t be made to give a shit, to see them all cast down, put into their place – below my feet. I wanted ... needed, to even up the score. I was hurt, so it is only fair that they should be hurt too!

I considered this from every angle over the course of several years, and decided (rather reluctantly) when I reached high school that this attitude actually empowered my bullies, by making me a victim of my own negative thoughts and emotions. It meant that in my heart, they’d already won. The more I thought about it ... the angrier that admission made me, back then. I just wasn’t going to let them, the bullies or the Administration, ever think that they’d broken me. I might not ever win their games ... but I was damned if I was going to ever lose!

When they broke Patricia, I admit, my resolve to ‘do something’ finally became nearly intolerable. Fortunately, my new plan, cobbled together during that first week of school suspension, didn’t really rely on anyone in Authority to lift their ass or even a finger on my behalf. It would never, ever, happen. I’d learned this lesson the hard way over the years, and Patty’s death had signed the final punctuation note.

Getting beaten near to a pulp was just the first preparatory bit of my revenge plan though. A brief fanfare before the first notes of the symphony even properly began. The documentation of abuse at the hands of law enforcement was just something to prime the pump, so to speak, a hole card stashed away under the table ready to be used as a trump card later. Barely even an appetizer, just something like the sounding of a small trumpet before the cannonade began. This was going to be war and I frankly didn’t much care if I got caught in the fallout ... assuming I could take enough other people down along with me.

No. I had no thoughts of ever going Columbine on my classmates, although I wouldn’t have shed too many tears (authentic ones anyway) if someone else completely cracked up and went postal, shooting up the school. I had other ideas that involved an equally final definitive victory where I wouldn’t end up either dead or incarcerated for the rest of my natural life. But to move forward on any phase of my plan, I first need hard intelligence on my designated targets.

Well, intel was my second priority, after first finding a decent villain’s lair to conduct my scheming at. Proper-Prior-Preparation, etc, required a place other than my home to stash documents and potential evidence that even Roscoe, the stupidest of the county constables, couldn’t get lucky enough to think of searching later. My hands needed to be kept clean enough to survive intense scrutiny, later, assuming outsiders were to get involved ... which is what I was eventually hoping for.

So, the first step of phase one was to sanitize the home environment at my father’s house. I couldn’t be sure that I could ever bleach out my prior web search history cleaner than the wind-driven snow, so I wiped my home pc clean, then security scrubbed the boot hard drive clean with random 1’s and 0’s for two full days before reinstalling Windows and loading up nothing thereafter but homework files to the data directory. Oh, and a screensaver of Rachel Hunter swimsuit pictures. The PC was clean enough now to foil any future expert cyber investigation ... and I’d keep it that way. My external hard drive, lovingly (and accurately) labeled GigaSmut would have to stay permanently disconnected and I boxed it up along with anything else I didn’t want discovered to be moved to my new Lair. That now became my next priority.

In a perfect universe, one that at least tolerated me, if not quite loved my existence, the barn loft at Patty’s house would have been the perfect bit of karmic justice to scheme from, but it wasn’t. Patty’s parents weren’t farmers but they did tend a decent sized garden patch on their three-acre lot. Sneaking into the barn late one afternoon was quite easy ... but getting out of it again, undiscovered, was just about a nightmare! I was no sooner poking around in the loft, looking for a place to run a long extension cord for powering my laptop, when Patty’s parents strolled and parked themselves down for the evening in a pair of deck chairs for a long, long commune with their deceased daughter. It seemed that they did this every evening after dinner for at least an hour, sometimes two or more if the spirit (ha ha) moved them. It was well after 9 p.m. that evening before they left, while I was hugging the floor of the barn hayloft motionless, barely daring to breath. How I didn’t sneeze, I’ll never know. This lair wouldn’t do.

Every semi-rural community is chock-full of old semi-abandoned barns and shacks in various stages of falling down to ruin. The problem was that damned nearly every teenager also knew all of these places just as well as I did. If it was conveniently close to town and not quite a termite infested ruin, then Horny Harriet and Stu the Stud (and their friends) were secretly going there every Friday and Saturday night to smoke dope and ball. I found torn condom wrappers at the first three ‘abandoned’ places that I knew of and I wrote off the rest of the places that I vaguely knew of as being too visible or too distant from my home/school area to be practical. Then serendipity struck me. The farm right across the county road from Patty’s house belonged to the semi-notorious elderly and infirm widow Garland and an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone presented itself ... as I found myself now mostly unemployed ... and quite probable unemployable.

Schoolwork was never job #1 for me and I’d juggled two and sometimes three part-time jobs evenings and weekends since I’d entered high school. None really paid even minimum wage, but in return these side gigs all paid with cash, off of the books, so no W-2 withholding. That pretty much balanced things, I thought, and I really needed the cash ... now that I was needing to put together an evil villain’s lair, but minus the death ray machine.

After winning round one against Frank, knocking his knee out of the final football games of the season and costing our team a trip to the state championship, the mood of most of my employers soured, dramatically. When you’re in a small town, the boosters take their high school football seriously. It literally was the only major sport in town and some folks were more than a bit unhappy with me that I’d cost our team, and our county, a bit of deserved glory. Two of my usual part-time gigs now dried up on me entirely and the idea that any other job opportunity would appear was laughable.

My boss at one of these, a local farm supply store, was surprisingly honest about it, “Kid, they posted a photo of you up in the local Chamber of Commerce, right on their wall of shame board with a loud hint that anybody who hires you is going to find their company name posted up there next for everyone to boycott. There are six county businesses named on that board – three are already out of business and two are either up for sale or facing likely bankruptcy. That last name belongs to that PC shop you already work at and Don, the crazy owner, just couldn’t give the slightly shit what the chamber thinks, since he has the only computer sales and repair shop in the entire county! Me ... I cannot afford to lose the business, sorry, but that’s one of the hassles of doing business around here.”

It was. Everyone knew that basically four or five families together owned 51% or more of the land, businesses and job opportunities in the county and you didn’t cross any of those families or your entire life would go to shit in a big fucking hurry. Their own kids had realized this, early, and had now mobbed themselves up, just like their parents, learning the chops and preparing to become our next generation of robber barons. Pardon me for wanting to throw a wrench in those workings.

Donald (he hated Don), the very geeky (and very likely a low-level sociopath) owner of the county’s only real computer and tech shop, really couldn’t give a rat’s ass that I was persona non-grata ... as long as I’d then work for him on the cheap. Some of our town’s overlords had tried to fuck with him at least once before and he wasn’t having any of it ... then or now. I recited my tale of woe to him and he felt (or probably feigned) a little sympathy ... but he couldn’t increase my hours or pay. Oh, and he asked me to, ‘if convenient’, to try to stay hidden in the back repair area (where I usually worked) and try not to be too visible coming or going. If I could avoid thumbing my nose too blatantly at our betters, I could keep my existing ten-hour a week work schedule. So, my weekly income chopped down by nearly two-thirds, and I was getting desperate, when I noticed an opportunity.

The widow Garland was a town institution, perhaps our most beloved town’s resident and the anchor stone of the local Methodist church, being the official church secretary. She seemed to live there, attending service at least twice a week, headed the Church Council, the Ladies Auxiliary, Crafter’s Fellowship night, taught youth Sunday School and also bible study night for the adults. Oh, and then she baked (or supervised) the fresh cookies that were produced for the weekly fellowship hour held after the main Sunday service. Before her accident, she also spent most of her copious spare time made certain that the twice annual church jumble sales were well stocked by going door-to-door soliciting donations.

How she managed all of that hobbling about with a crushed ankle and a very dodgy hip surpasses ‘the secret that passes all understanding’ in my book. More importantly, she was not a local booster of our school football team and as far as I could tell she had no connection (or interest in) our corrupt local Chamber of Commerce.

While fruitlessly lair hunting, we’d had a brief early winter snowstorm, followed a very light freeze concluded with a nasty arctic front that dumped a good foot of snow on everything. I happened by the Garland house and witnessed her giving her all, trying to shoveling the snow out of her driveway a tiny bit at a time so that she could ‘get to work’, i.e. the church. The country had plowed and sanded the roadways, the important ones anyway, but this just meant an extra two-foot-tall layer of snow was now blocking the driveway. This screamed opportunity.

So, I shoveled out her driveway in about two hours, pro bono, and she (happily) paid me $40, well above the usual going rate, so I seized the moment. Did her barn need cleaning and sorting out? Did the tin carport over the drive next to her house need repair (it obviously did)? When it thawed out, did she need the brush on her oversized lot cleared away? Garden replanted in the spring? Etc.

She did. I didn’t even want to quote her an hourly labor rate, since I was merely ‘your neighbor Josh from just down the road, being helpful and neighborly’ and we worked out a system that worked nicely for the rest of the winter and into the spring. She’d post up a clipboard with a list of everything that she wanted done outside, cut, cleaned or repaired, I’d then do it, checking off the job as done and she’d leave money for me in a flowerpot on the porch for my next visit. I was never disappointed with the pay – it was usually about double what I would have dared to have asked for my teenaged, semi-unskilled labor. If I didn’t know how to fix something I’d learn ... usually by taking it apart, but sometimes I’d have to look it up in a book or online and then find a few parts. She paid every ‘expense’ without question and after a while I stopped keeping receipts or even charging her for the petty stuff like nails, screws & hinges.

Mrs. Garland was barely in her 50’s when her husband was killed one evening by a speeding and slightly tipsy driver whose truck skidded on a wet road right into his oncoming car. She was the passenger and sustained enough permanent injuries to prevent her from moving about with any ease afterwards. A decade later and she was still hobbling about on a cane on the good days, and a walker during cold or wet weather, but she didn’t let it stop her, and I never once heard her complain about either the pain or discomfort. She’d collected nicely on the insurances, paid off the mortgage on their over one hundred acres of good ‘near urban’ farmland and then leased out almost all of it to her neighbors on an annual basis. Her living expenses were minimal and she was entirely happy to pay a teenager more than market rates to fix up everything that had sat out in the rain and rusted since her husband’s passing. And there was a lot of it ... I learned by doing it, and eventually got to be pretty expert at polishing away the rust off of old metal, priming it and then giving it a sweet powder coating of new rust-resistant paint. Even now, I sometimes have that old dream about painstakingly restoring an endless assortment of old lawn furniture, over and over again.

The real reward for me was the barn, which I could see from a glance had great possibilities for secretive evil-working, far from the prying eyes of honest citizens. First it was completely sheltered from view from the county road and the Garland farmhouse by both a low hillock and a fairly substantial grove of fruit trees that had nearly gone entirely feral and overgrown. There was an electrical line that ran up high on tall wooden posts, well above the maximum height of any of the farm equipment, leading to a large tin tractor storage shed, where the late Mr. Garland had kept both of his tractors and other farming equipment. This shed had electrical lighting, and so did the barn nearby when I finally found the disconnected extension cables, after trimming away nearly an acre’s worth of long overgrown brush during a warming break in-between a pair of snow storms.

No one had set foot into the barn, or the top hay loft, in a decade. I was sure of it, as the pristine dust layer was an inch thick in most places. The ground floor was a hodge-podge of assorted smaller mechanical equipment and a large carpentry work area. Shop was my favorite class in school and I could use (or figure out how to safely operate) everything in the work area. Plus, the late Mr. Garland had kept user’s manuals for the lot of them, complete with his original hand-written notes about how he had handled the equipment, recurring issues, repair or operational oddities etc.

The rearward section had piles of other power equipment, mostly mowers and other lawn tools and just needed ‘a bit of TLC’. This was all junk that he’d regularly buy from yard sales, then fix up to near as-new condition for his wife to sell at the next quarterly church jumble. Each item had an attached card with a brief handwritten notation of what he’d thought the problem was. Mr. Garland (like my brother) appeared to be avid admirer of the 7P principles – Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance!

The pile on the left seems to be mostly all ‘fixed’ stuff, awaiting sale, and the opposite pile on the right was all still waiting for attention a decade later. The center stuff was ‘work in progress’, mostly. I could quickly clean off all the fixed stuff and loaded it up in the back of the widow’s car for her to relocate to the church basement, awaiting the next sale in the spring. Some of the central, half fixed projects I could complete, but the rest, along with the left-overs and oddball orphaned stuff, I sadly deemed were not cost effective for me to try to repair and all of this was eventually loaded in a parishioner’s truck, to be the featured attractions ‘As Is” at the local monthly flea market for someone else to deal with.

Once the garage was all cleaned out quite nicely, I ran a long electrical cord up the barn wall from the big quad power outlet that fed the big powered carpentry tools, and at last I had the perfect den of iniquity! If I’d had a girlfriend, it would have been the perfect place to hang-out privately and screw!

I moved up to the loft several small folding worktables, a chair and a pair of wall mounted whiteboards for documenting my findings. All bought with cash from either the local Walmart or a furniture resale, junk shop, or thrift store. I’d replaced a few of the barn boards here and there to secure things up and then caulked up every gap, both to filter out the winter wind and to reduce my light emissions, when working up in the loft, to almost nothing. Nailing a few old canvas tarps to the side walls and a drop curtain for the front eliminated the rest of the light. I gave my lair a final test and turned on every light in the barn, downstairs and up, and then checked for visibility from both the farmhouse and the country road. There was none. Now I had a place to lurk, to brood, and to rub my hands together while giggling maniacally at how ‘soon my evil plan will be complete!’

Soon.

Phase Two was to now start working on the intel side of the equation. I had, of course, my three primary suspects: Frank and his two primary flunkies, Reggie and Morris, and their names were the first ones I wrote onto my first whiteboard, putting Frank at the top of a pyramid, with Reg and Mo below him. I was trying to flowchart a chain of command, just like the FBI would with a cell of terrorists, or the Mafia, but somehow this chart already didn’t feel quite right. It wasn’t until just after Christmas that I figured out just what had been bothering me ... that Reg was not really a follower, but instead he was more likely the real shadow leader of the group.

Just like a mafia consigliere ... the guy in the corner of the room always whispering in the boss’s ear. Who is ‘out’, who is ‘in’, and who hasn’t been showing the proper respect and needs a good beat down. Not just here in high school, but probably going all the way back to elementary school ... well fuck me! I knew this kid ... and once I erased my flowchart to put Reg on a dotted line next to Frank, and not below him, a whole lot of things started to make better sense in context. Old schoolyard casual conversations, once put into this new perspective, started to show shadows of other odd past events and provided me with a few brand-new random puzzle pieces to jot down on my other white board.