He wanted to know.
“What’s a Creeker?” he asked.
“Aw, you’re stupider than Larry and Shemp!” Eagle guffawed. “A Creeker is someone who got born by their father or brother’s baby-juice. And there’s somethin’ about it—I’m not sure what—but if a father like puts his pee-er in his daughter and squirts his baby-juice in her peehole, the baby comes out all wrong. And the same if a mother lets her son squirt his baby-juice in her. Uncle Frank said it’s ’cos you’re not supposed to do it, and God gets so mad, he makes the babies come out wrong.”
Wrong, the little boy thought. It slid down his gut just like the word Creeker, and just like his aunt’s corned beef and cabbage and the stuffed peppers. “How you mean…wrong?”
The headless, naked G.I. Joe took Eagle’s rock right in the chest, and pieces of plastic flew everywhere—
WHAP!
“The babies come out like the hippie, peacenik babies Uncle Frank told me about. These hippies take LSD and it messes up a man’s baby-juice, and it makes the babies real ugly and wrong. Same as Creekers. They’se just hillfolk who only squirt their juice into their reller-tives. And their babies get, like, real big heads like a fishbowl and giant red eyes that are crooked, and ten fingers on each hand instead of five. And girl Creekers sometimes had extra bubs and nipples like a hog and stuff. Sometimes they get born without no arms or legs, so the Creeker fathers kill ’em. They eat ’em.”
“They do not!” the little boy wailed.
“Shore they do, ’cos Uncle Frank told me. And lots of ’em got teeth like Kevin Furman’s bulldog.”
The little boy shuddered. He wasn’t feeling too good to begin with—on account of his aunt’s stuffed peppers, he was sure—but this made him feel even worse. ’Cos Kevin Furman’s bulldog Pepper had the gnarliest, ugliest yellow teeth, and he couldn’t imagine anything scarier than a person with those same kind of teeth in their mouth…
‘Cos there wasn’t nothing uglier than Kevin Furman’s bulldog.
“And there’s something worse,” Eagle said, lining up the next hogged shot.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I should tell ya, ’cos you’d probably cry like a baby.
Eagle missed the next target, a big dead toad they’d found by the creek. But one time Dave Houseman told them his friend Mike Cutt would take live toads and shoot ’em with the slingshot, and he’d even play baseball with live toads. He’d swing the bat, and the toad’s guts would spray way out. And the little boy couldn’t think of anything grosser. And then Eagle continued, “the Creekers, you know, they got their own whorehouse out here somewhere.”
“What’s—” the little boy gulped. “—what’s a…whorehouse?”
Eagle rolled his eyes. His next shot, too, missed the big, dead toad. “It’s a place where men pay money to squirt their juice into ladies, ya moe-ron. Don’t ya know nuthin’? And sometimes the whores put a man’s pee-er in their mouths and let ’em squirt their baby-juice there—”
“In their mouths?” the little boy shrieked.
“That’s right, in their mouths too, not just their peeholes. But anyway, I heard Uncle Frank and my dad talkin’ ’bout it one night, and the Creekers have a special whorehouse, where men can pay to squirt their juice into Creeker ladies, like the kind I was tellin’ you about who are all messed up and wrong and gross-looking and have big heads and ten fingers on each hand…”
And teeth like Kevin Furman’s dog, the little boy remembered.
SPLAT!
The little boy looked up. Eagle had finally hit the big dead toad with the slingshot.
The toad’s insides splattered everywhere, in a wormy red mist.
««—»»
That day Eagle had gone on to say that this Creeker whorehouse was supposed to be a secret. Nobody talked much about it just like they didn’t talk much about Mrs. Nixerman. Not just any man could go there—’cos it was special—but only men who were friends with the Creekers. This all fascinated the little boy. That ladies—they were called whores—would let a man do these things to ’em for money, and ‘specially Creeker ladies…
But now the curiosity itched, much much worse than the way his skin itched under Doc Smith’s plaster cast.
The next day Eagle got grounded by his dad, for beating up his brothers Ricky and Billy ’cos Ricky and Billy had called him “bald eagle,” and only Eagle’s friends were allowed to call him that.
But the little boy still itched with curiosity, with the innocent quest for knowledge. He wanted to see…the “things” Uncle Frank had talked about.
So for the whole time Eagle was grounded the little boy wandered around the woods anyway. Right after school. Sometimes he’d stop by the police station and say hi to Big Chief Mullins, who chewed gross-out tobacco but seemed like a very nice man, and sometimes he’d give him licorice sticks; he even offered him a “chaw” once but the little boy didn’t want to put that stuff in his mouth.
««—»»
Summers made the town—his entire world, in fact—a wonderful, lazy dreamland. School was out; he did his paper route in the mornings, mowed lawns in the afternoon, and sometimes Big Chief Mullins would pay him a few dollars to wash the police cars or clean up the station. Most of his money he gave to his aunt, to help out with the bills, but in the summer he always had some left for Cokes and models. And when his work was done, he’d wander.
In the woods.
Maybe Eagle’s Uncle Frank was just kidding them. So far he hadn’t even come close to finding the “things.” There probably aren’t any, he thought one day, trudging through the wooded hills up behind the creek. Probably just said it to scare us…
But why would Uncle Frank do that?
It was mid-August, and the hottest day of the year. His belly didn’t feel right that day. “Too much of that ice cream,” his aunt told him that morning when he got back from his route, but he knew better. It was those stuffed peppers she’d served again last night. But like most ten-year-olds, he wasn’t about to let a bellyache keep him cooped up at home. He felt even worse mowing that day’s lawns; a couple times he thought he might upchuck. Mrs. Young would fire me for sure, he thought, puking stuffed peppers on her lawn! He should’ve stayed home when he was done, but he couldn’t help it. Bad as his belly felt, after he’d cleaned up the mower and put it back in the shed, he headed for the woods.
He crossed the rushing creek, carefully stepping on the stones he and Eagle had thrown in last year. Some green slimy stuff had grown on some of them—he had to be careful. Clumps of frog eggs clung to sticks in the water, and on the bank he almost stepped on a big brown snapping turtle he thought was a pile of mud. Uncle Frank said they’d bite your fingers off if you got too close. On the bank, he kicked over a log. Two fat shiny salamanders sat there, and they had yellow spots, which was neat. But his heart jumped when he kicked over another log: a nest of baby snakes slithered in the damp spot, six of them, but to him it looked like a hundred. And they were brown with tiny diamond heads. Harmless in reality—they were just hognose snakes—but to a ten-year-old boy, any brown snake was surely a copperhead.
He scaled the embankment up a fallen tree, then pushed into the woods. Eech! he thought when he also pushed through a sticky spiderweb suspended invisibly between two trees. Several trails branched out (he and Eagle hadn’t taken all of them) so he took the one to the far left and just started walking…
Maybe one of the trails would lead to the “things.”
He couldn’t imagine exactly what kind of things Uncle Frank meant. Maybe he’d find more of those moldy magazines that had pictures of naked ladies. Or maybe—