The Crip by Nick Young

He stumbled and pitched forward, shooting out his left hand. And though he stopped himself from going face first into the gully muck, the force of the fall sent an electric shock of pain up his arm. Now on his knees, he grunted and heaved in one breath, then another. He looked up at the sky, scarred by torn scraps of clouds that drifted past the ivory half-moon. It would be nearly midnight by his reckoning. An owl called out from above as a gust of hot wind whipped through the towering maples and bur oak. He cocked his head to the left where a night creature snuffled in the underbrush. Off to the north about a mile, he heard the throaty yap of the big Lab at Crotter’s farm.

He reached down with unguiculated fingers to massage his bare right foot—the clubfoot—where it had caught on a fallen branch. The ache ebbed steadily. He was used to it, for he had endured many instances of pain in the limb and more within—the japes and the childhood cruelties.

He opened his mouth, his breath rank, and ran his tongue over dry, cracked lips. The night air was close, surrendering little of the intense August heat that had gripped the countryside for days. Sweat ran in sour rivulets through the dirt matted within the coarse hair on his bare chest. It was time to move once again through the woods that divided soybean fields from corn and bordered the backyard of the clapboard farmhouse. Refocusing in the dim light that sifted through the trees lest he stumble again, he rose and began picking his way forward, first with his sound left foot, then with a lurch, planting the side of his right foot on the ground. He hurried as fast as he dared, worried that he would be too late to climb into the shrubbery at the rear of the house a hundred yards away, crouch and wait beneath the lighted window for the woman to enter the room and begin taking off her clothes.

#

He existed in a shadow world removed from the ways of others. Thus had it been since he’d run away from home at seventeen, an escape from abuse at the hands of a father lost to rage and alcohol and a mother too weak protect her son or herself. He slipped away in the autumn of the year, on a night of the new moon. At the crest of a nearby hill he looked down upon the ramshackle wooden house with its sagging roof and littered yard, spat once and turned away forever.

With his foot and the weight of his old man’s Army backpack, traveling was slow going, but he managed a few miles before catching sleep for an hour or two in the shelter of a spreading forest pine. Then, in the morning twilight, he rose and made his way over the back roads until he hit Kentucky 56 and thumbed a ride with an 18-wheeler over the Ohio into Illinois. The trucker, belly crowding the steering wheel, with a snarl of graying beard and a greasy Peterbilt cap, asked but two questions.

“Where’re ya headed?” and “The hell you do to yer foot?” It was always the same, and he didn’t bother to reply, turning his face to the window as the big truck rumbled on through the countryside, through towns with populations in the hundreds or too small for even a sign with a number.

It went on this way for more than an hour before the rig slowed at the city limits of Caton Mills and eased up the mile-long main drag.

“This here’s it, pardner. End o’ the line,” announced the driver at the town’s only stop light. “Gotta get me my load o’ hogs.” He muttered a word of thanks and hauled himself down from the cab. As the truck released its air brakes, he watched it pull away. Standing in the light drizzle that had begun to fall, he hoisted the backpack into place and stared across the barren street at a flickering neon sign that hung in a dirty storefront window—LIVE BAIT— POOL.

#

He hadn’t always lived in the rough shack he’d cobbled together from half-rotted planks and castoff sheet metal deep in the woods beyond those who ground out their lives in Caton Mills. For a time he moved among them, ignoring their stares as he shuffled between his rented room above DeMar’s Body Shop and the Bluebird Café where he washed dishes five days a week. The clubfoot made little difference to Maude Culp, the sixtyish owner whose tired hairnet barely covered the yellowing thatch bunched on her head.

“As long as you stay where you belong, out of sight in back,” she had said, giving him a tight-lipped once-over the day he was hired. And as autumn turned to winter and winter to spring, he did as he was told.

Then came the Saturday night when the busboy called in sick, and with customers lined up waiting for tables, he was forced to take one of the big, black plastic tubs from the kitchen and go out front to gather up dirty dishes. Laboriously be made his way from table to table piling dishes, glasses and silverware into the tub. He could hear some snickering behind him, but it wasn’t until the tub was full and he was hurrying to get back to the kitchen that a wave of laughter erupted as he passed by a booth with two cute high school girls and their dates. His clubfoot caught on the leg of a chair and he went sprawling, sending the contents of the bin scattering across the floor. One of the boys in the booth looked down at him and sneered.

“Crip.”

#

It broke open within him that night, the dark wound that had festered since his earliest childhood memories, beginning with his father’s mocking rejection.

“Fucking little gimp. Look at him. Ain’t no kid of mine.” And then he turned the venom on his wife, waving the pint whiskey bottle in her direction. “This is yer doin’, you an’ yer whorin’ around!” The little boy could not understand the meaning of the words, but the hatred in the tone and the pain that contorted his mother’s face cut deeply.

So enough was enough. He never returned to the Bluebird Café, and he abandoned his room over DeMar’s Body Shop, shouldering what few possessions he had in his backpack and lighting out for the woods.

He found his spot in a remote clearing on state forest land just big enough to accommodate the shelter he constructed for himself out of scrap material pilfered from abandoned farm sheds.

To survive, he became a practiced at stealth and thievery. He found it surprisingly easy to acquire most of what he needed from cars and doors left unlocked. He raided chicken coops for eggs and, when able, for a hen that he would turn into a meal over a wood fire. He set snares for rabbits and squirrels.

By day, he stayed out of sight. When the weather allowed, he would hobble a half-mile deeper into the woods and lie on a bed of pine needles by a small pond, close his eyes and let his bruised spirit be soothed by the whisper of the wind and the chorus of birdsong in the treetops. At night, he stayed close to his shelter, watching the slow wheel of the stars and planets in wonderment and incomprehension.

Time passed and he grew more feral in his ways, walling himself off from human interaction, relating to people as a distant and foreign species. And he was left alone, tolerated as a hermit, unthreatening, someone to be pitied and forgotten.

It went on this way for several years until one warm June night when he crouched in the shrubbery beneath the partially-open farmhouse window while the man and and his wife were naked, entwined on their bed. As he tried to pull himself higher to get a better view of the couple, his fingers slipped on the sill, he fell backward and his clubfoot betrayed him, sending him off balance and into the bushes. He lay still, but the noise roused the man to leap from the bed, rush to the window and throw it wide open.

“Who’s out there?” he shouted before catching sight of the figure lying beneath a rhododendron. The light was dim and he could make out nothing but the legs and the one deformed foot. “Goddammit!” the man muttered and jerked himself away from the window.

He knew he must get away, so he struggled upright and began his herky-jerky flight across the backyard. He reached the fence that bordered a large cornfield, and just as he was about to clear the topmost wooden slat, the man burst from his house with a shotgun, raised it to his shoulder—

“You sonofabitch!”

—and pulled the trigger.

The pellets from the 12-gauge ripped into the flesh of his lower back, causing him to cry out and tumble to the ground. Groaning, he pulled himself to his feet and bolted into the corn. He staggered as best he could, knowing he was bleeding, a white-hot haze of pain nearly blinding him as he finally emerged from the field and stumbled into the forest.

He knew his injury was serious, but he would not turn to the outer world for help. Its scorn would be worse than his wounds, so he lurched on.

#

By the time Sheriff Rittenour arrived at the shack, thick clouds had rolled in from the northwest. Soon, the wind would pick up as lightning strobed the countryside. The sheriff walked a few paces back down a narrow pathway before turning back.

“Lot of blood,” he said flatly. “Poor bastard never had a chance,” he continued as he entered the hovel and let his eyes roam over the body curled on the floor, its rough wooden planks now bearing a dark stain. Rittenour’s deputy shook his head.

“Nothin’ but a creep, if you ask me,” he said. “Shoulda run his ass outta here a long time ago.”

There was very little light inside the shack, but the sheriff’s eye caught something. “What’s that he’s holding, Bailey?” The deputy stepped forward, reached down and rolled the body onto its back.

“I’ll be damned,” he said in mild astonishment.

“A teddy bear,” marvelled the sheriff. Bailey squinted to see more clearly in the low light. The stuffed animal, tightly clutched in the corpse’s arms, was soiled and ragged, missing an eye, with one ear partially torn free.

“Scruffy damned thing,” the deputy said.

Sheriff Rittenour turned in the direction of the first clap of thunder from the approaching storm.

“Yeah.”