Chapter 7

Mindy arrived while they were doing the inventory. Jennifer was standing on the porch, outside. Deputies were still cataloging evidence seized from the cars of the trespassers. There was some discussion between them about whether or not Walter would have one or more of the cars seized for forfeiture, because they had been used to “transport contraband drugs.” Those in favor argued that it would teach people a lesson. Those opposed pointed out that some of the families involved were very important in the community, and that this would be Walter’s last term as Sheriff if he did something like that.

“What did you do now?” panted Mindy as she stalked up to her daughter.

“Nothing!” complained Jennifer. “I’m a witness.”

“Witnesses don’t carry around bows and arrows,” pointed out Mindy, glancing at the items in each of her daughter’s hands.

“A bunch of kids from school came here to have a party while The Hermit was in the hospital,” said Jennifer. “But he got out of the hospital early, and came home caught them.”

“He caught them?” said Mindy. Her emphasis on the pronoun made it clear she was dubious.

“He chased them off,” said Jennifer. “I watched.” She pointed. “I was up in that tree over there. I wasn’t even on the ground!”

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with a very odd news story I heard on the radio coming over here ... would it?”

“What news story?”

“The one about the naked teenagers on Highway 16 who had traffic backed up for ten miles?”

“Really!” Jennifer’s grin made her mother’s frown deepen.

She was saved by the appearance of Sheriff Beasley, who was putting his notebook back in his pocket.

“Ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat to Mindy. “You must be our Jennifer’s mother.”

“Our Jennifer?” The frown dissolved and Mindy’s eyebrows rose.

“She has been most helpful in resolving the situation,” said Walter. “We know who all the perpetrators are, thanks to her.”

“We live a nice, quiet life, Sheriff,” said Mindy. “We don’t need any drama.”

“Won’t be any, I figure,” said Walter. “All the same kids made a big splash by causing the worst traffic jam this county’s ever seen.”

“Yes,” said Mindy. “It’s all over the news. I’m most curious about why they were ... naked?”

“Seems while they was trespassin’ here on Mr. Higginbotham’s land, and half destroying his house, their clothes all sort of fell into a big bonfire they wasn’t supposed to have made in the first place,” said the Sheriff.

“Sort of fell into the fire,” said Mindy, dryly. Her head swiveled and her eyes pinned on her daughter.

“Wasn’t me,” said Jennifer, calmly. “I told you, he caught them when he came home. I was in the tree the whole time. I never touched any clothing.”

“May I take my daughter home?” asked Mindy, her voice frosty.

“I might need her to make a formal statement,” said Beasley. “But I’m trying to keep her out of it. I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

“Thank you.”

What bothered Jennifer the most wasn’t that her mother didn’t lecture her on the way home. What made her nervous was that her mother didn’t say a single word.

To say that the naked teens caused a sensation is like saying it might have been scary if a Tyrannosaurus Rex was chasing you. The situation took practically a week to get sorted out, but the parents didn’t start causing trouble until the prosecuting attorney in Rapid City began charging the kids with vandalism and trespassing. They were all misdemeanor charges, but the pride of certain pillars of the community was injured. Scholarships were put in jeopardy. Gossip only went up a notch, instead of going away, like most of the parents wanted it to.

It was those parents who demanded that, if their children were going to be punished, The Hermit should be arrested for attempted murder for shooting at them. That’s also when the story of the arrow came out in public for the first time.

Had anyone asked Sheriff Beasley who shot the arrow, he’d have been duty bound to reveal that information. But no one asked him. Chet Nelson owned the only stock brokerage in the five county area, and he considered himself much too important a man to deal with a lowly sheriff. He played golf with the Deputy Director for Information and Analysis in the Black Hills Park Service. And, while Chet wouldn’t have called Terry Davis his friend, Terry did take care of the Nelson vehicles at his auto mechanic shop. Chet’s friend got him an audience, and Terry and Frank went and filed a complaint with the Park Service. Wheels turned and papers got shuffled. An investigation was opened into unlawful use of a firearm on Federal land and aggravated assault on a minor. Two weeks later an FBI agent arrived in town, and when he drove onto the property, he met Bobby Higginbotham face to face ... carrying the 30-30 rifle in question.

The FBI Agent did not have a warrant.

But what was possibly more important, was that the FBI Agent was a former Marine.

Over three or four bottles of locally brewed beer (you did not hear it from me that an FBI Agent might imbibe while on duty) the situation was cussed and discussed, and the agent determined the allegations were unfounded, based on the fact that the property on which the rifle had been discharged was not, in fact, federal land. Further, no Marine worth his salt would miss a man sized target, even at night, unless he intended to miss that target. Somehow, in the notes he had been given, the arrow that Chet Nelson was so upset about never even came up. The agent left, and stopped off at Sheriff Beasley’s office, where he had checked in, to let Walter know the findings of his investigation. Walter gave him a six pack of Holy Terror Ale to take with him. He also wrote down the web address where he could send for more.

Kids are cruel. It’s just a fact. There could be discussion about why, but not here, and not now. Suffice it to say that, when you’re a popular kid and have a problem ... say you’ve been grounded until graduation for making a fool of yourself in public ... you want the attention to be on someone else, and not you. And the best way to make that happen is to point out someone else’s foibles. Such as thinking your nuts were shot off, when in fact all it was, was some dirt hitting them. Or of thinking you could sneak up on The Hermit, and then almost getting your ass shot with an arrow.

So Mike Nelson and Justin Davis had been ragged on for weeks by everybody else who had been just as stupid as they had been. Then, when their fathers made that complaint, they got to start bragging that even if they hadn’t been able to shove that damn rifle up his ass on the night in question, it was going to be done for them by the Federal Bureau of Fucking Investigation!

They walked tall for those few weeks.

Then the FBI bailed, and the heat came back on them even worse.

It was for that reason that Mike and Justin, in their adolescent wisdom, decided the source of their pain had to be made to pay. And of course that source was The Hermit ... not themselves, for fucking with him.

Again, it was Cynthia Williams who played a pivotal role in how things transpired. She looked at the schedule and saw that she was going to be the nurse on duty when patient Higginbotham came back to the hospital for tests to make sure there was no infection in his lungs from his drowning episode. She then yelled at her son, making quite sure he knew how embarrassed she was going to be, when she had to face the man that her son and his friends had so abused by having a drunken sex party on his land.

So Jerry knew when said land would ... again ... be vacant, and he informed Mike about that.

Between the two conspirators - Jerry was only an aider and abettor - Mike was the only one who still had his driving privileges. So he offered to be transportation. Justin, having been a hunter for years, assumed he had the skills to penetrate the target, do what needed to be done, and then get back out without leaving any traces.

He only took one gallon of gasoline with him when Mike dropped him off. But since the A-frame was old, and the wood it was built from was dry, a gallon was more than enough.

What neither Mike nor Justin thought about was that a burning A-Frame might also catch nearby trees on fire.

And then there was the loop of the snare Bobby had rigged. He had installed some two dozen of them in a circle around his house. Justin had missed stepping in one by about six inches on the way in. But he stepped right in the middle of it as he dashed away from the burning building.

Ten seconds later he was swinging fifteen feet off the ground, swinging upside down from his right foot, which had a half inch rope snugged around his ankle.

He screamed, of course. But there was no one near enough to hear him.

Not even when the tenor of his screams changed significantly, as the forest fire he had started began moving toward him.

There are many parts of the federal bureaucracy that don’t work very well. Most of us could make a list of ten such parts of that bureaucracy at the drop of a hat. But the National Forest Fire Service would not be on that list. That’s one place we taxpayers get a lot of bang for our buck.

And this day was no different. The smoke was spotted within minutes, and it only took minutes more for the first two trucks of fire fighters to leave the barn, sirens screaming.

Finally (and luckily for him, ) there was somebody to hear Justin’s screams.

The firefighters found him, and cut him down. The flames were only ten feet away from him. One of the men snatched up the red, plastic one gallon container lying on the ground and sniffed the spout. From that point, it was all downhill for Justin Davis. And when he found out Mike had also seen the smoke and taken off, abandoning him, he decided he wasn’t going down alone.

Chet Nelson’s contact in the park service suddenly stopped answering his calls. Arson was something everyone in the Black Hills took seriously, and the fact that it was a rich kid who caused the damage only made things worse. But it wasn’t until Chet actually saw the damage that he realized how close things had come to there being a death ... and had a religious experience, so to speak.

But that comes later ... much later.

The scene at this point involves flames and smoke and sirens and tired, sweaty, sooty men, trying like hell to stop the flames before they eat up any more national forest.

It was this chaos that Bobby came home to.

Such as it was.

He was stopped by a cordon of volunteers, of course. No civilians were being allowed into the burning area. He had nowhere to go. The smoke and excitement began to get to him. He knew he was going to have an episode if he stayed there, at the line.

So he went to the only other place he could think of to go.

He was in a bad way when he got there. The smoke and flames took him back to the last place there had been smoke and flames. He made it up the road, and into the driveway, but he collapsed as he was getting out of the car.

It was Jennifer who saw him first. She and her mother had been on the other side of the house, trying to see if the flames were coming their way, and trying to decide if they should evacuate or not. It was when Jennifer went inside the house to get the binoculars that she saw The Hermit’s truck sitting, door open, in the driveway.

It took both of them to get him into the house. He was small framed, but muscular, and weighed much more than it looked like he would. That his muscles were stiff made it a little easier. Limp bodies are much harder to handle. Still, he wasn’t exactly unconscious. He was more ... incapacitated. And he was always embarrassed when one of these episodes robbed him of his dignity.

“‘m ah-right,” he gasped.

“Hush,” said Mindy.

They got him into the house and to the nearest thing that was bed-like, which was the couch. His muscles were already beginning to relax, though he still didn’t have control over them. He twitched, and his arms jerked. Mindy sat on one side of him, while Jennifer sank down on the other. Mindy’s hand on his left wrist made it look almost like she was making his arm move in an erratic pattern. In reality, she felt like her touch was necessary, but she didn’t really know what to do for him.

For Jennifer, it was as if he were a dog. She didn’t think of him that way, of course, but she also knew not what to do. So she petted him, stroking his arm and thigh like he was some stressed canine companion.

And, in truth, it was their touch that helped bring him back down. He still lay awkwardly, half reclining, his right shoulder leaning into Jennifer’s chest as she sat, sideways, propping him up. His mind went back to the hospital, when their fingers drifted across the scars on his back, and the sudden relaxation that brought made him go limp almost everywhere.

Almost everywhere.

Passion surged in his mind and body, and his penis became rock hard.

Both women noticed. But of course neither said anything to the other as they stared at the front of his pants, which bulged. That bulge was ominous to the younger woman, which is understandable. To Mindy, though, it was more interesting than dangerous looking. Not that she had any plans to investigate. That simply wasn’t the mood of the moment. But she still noticed. And in this situation, her unconscious mind interpreted that bulge much differently than she might have had he been whole, and normal in the moment. To put it bluntly, her psyche saw that as an honest, unplanned reaction to her, rather than something he was trying to do.

In other words, it was simply a powerful compliment, from a man she was already more interested in than any other man she’d met in many years.

Jennifer’s thought processes were quite different, and much more intentional. She was curious about the scary thing making that bulge. Her memories of “the orgy” she had seen were already somewhat misty. It had been a tumultuous time in her life and she had been much more involved on an emotional level than a simple observer. Her brain had been overloaded that night, and had coped with it by remembering only bits and pieces of the scenes she saw, rather than the whole picture. But she vividly remembered stiff penises, and boys lying on top of girls, their butts rising and falling. Those stiff penises had been inside the girls. She knew that. And there was a penis just like the ones she had seen ... right there ... only a foot from her hand.

Basically, she wished she could see it. But the thought of that made her belly feel funny, and part of her wanted to jump up and go for a run in the forest.

What had been a relatively peaceful three minute interlude passed. The smell of smoke was strong in the house. Mindy looked at the windows and saw the haze of smoke outside.

“Stay with him!” she barked. “I need to see what’s happening outside.”

“‘m better,” slurred Bobby, trying to sit up.

While her mother went to the door and outside, Jennifer helped him by pushing with her chest and hands until he was sitting upright. She stayed pressed against him, to make sure he didn’t fall back toward her. She didn’t think of it as holding him up with her breasts.

But he did.

His hand flailed and landed on her thigh. It stayed there, and he groaned.

“The last time this happened you almost drowned,” whispered Jennifer in his ear. “This is much better. It’s going to be okay.”

“I know,” he groaned. “Feel bad.”

“Of course you feel bad,” she said. “Anybody would feel bad if this happened to them. But you’re safe, and that’s the important part.”

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