Tarn Said

Sunday Photo Fiction this week made me think of Miller’s Crossing, but since I already wrote something very like that I thought I’d take this in another direction. Sort of like if characters from a Faulkner story got pulled into a 1970s dirt bike slasher movie.

Tarn said they had it coming, racing around like that like they was kings of the whole damned woods. And with Miss Lotty laid up too, all night asking what that noise was, what them lights was. They had it coming, Tarn said, and I held with him on that.

It was only clothesline, besides. Not thick enough to stop a body, even. Maybe throw a scare into one of them. Maybe then they wouldn’t come back.

That’s how we started with it, anyway.

Just,  we didn’t get to it right away. We waited two nights more. Maybe that was where the devil got hold of us, because when we was done it wasn’t no clothesline. Four-point Sierra barb wire, 12.75 gauge. And that was just for starters.

You maybe read about the rest of it in the papers, how the wire snagged the first few riders around the neck and knocked ‘em off their dirt bikes. How we had twisted the ends through circular saw blades we brung up from Ryerson’s mill, the ones was leaning rusty against the oil shed all them years. How them blades flew out right at them motorboys, pulled by the wire as fast as you please, them blades tearing them up like the hounds of hell.

To tell it now makes me almost ashamed. Tarn did say they had it coming. And I agreed.