Spirits and Demons

The Wild West

                                                               Part Twenty Seven

  Every day after school ended Mike would go straight home to do his homework and get it out of the way so he could enjoy the rest of the day swimming. He was highly inspired since being placed in the eleventh grade and his homework seemed easy enough. The new challenges created a ripple effect within his family. Going to his bedroom to do his homework one day, he walked in and discovered Ricky held their mother by the throat against the wall. Her feet dangling in the air above the floor, her face purple almost black, Mike barely heard her choked cry for help. No time to think, Mike dropped his books where he stood and ran across the room screaming as loud as he could at Ricky to let her go. Ricky's face was in a deep, dark solid red rage and he looked to be in some kind of trance. Mike doubled his fists and slammed Ricky in the head as hard and as fast as possible until finally Ricky and their mother both fell to the floor gasping for breath. Mike was also out of breath from having to hit Ricky so many times so hard. Heart racing madly and feeling as if he'd have a heart attack, Mike dragged Ricky to the hall to get him away from their mother and Jimmy Don and Ronny came running to see what all the commotion was about. Mike quickly related to them what Ricky had done and they dragged Ricky outside while Mike tended to their mother. She laid in the floor for what seemed like an eternity. Slowly the dark, blue black color left her face and she was able to catch her breath. Jimmy Don and Ronny came back in the house and helped Mike get her on her feet and they carried her to lie down on her bed. They brought her water and stayed by her side for hours until they were sure she would recover. Ricky had taken off and no one knew where he'd gone. Virginia made them promise to not tell Arlis what had happened for she feared he would beat  Ricky to death if he knew. From that moment on Jimmy Don, Mike, and Ronny knew their mother could never be left alone with Ricky anywhere. They agreed there would always be one of them near their mother so nothing like this would ever happen again. Everyone except Arlis knew Ricky was mentally unstable, even Tommy and Kathy since they'd been crying the whole afternoon.

  Mike and Ronny went swimming with their cousins Dennis and David while Jimmy Don stayed with their mother to protect her from Ricky. Dennis and David took them to the Koontz's house where the largest swimming pool in town was. The Koontz's owned the local grocery store and many of the neighborhood kids went swimming there. Much to Mike's and Ronny's surprise, Ricky was swimming in the pool when they arrived. The crazy thing was Ricky acted like nothing at all had happened and Mike realized then that Ricky really didn't recall what he'd done. It seemed as if Ricky would blackout while still awake and become very violent and after he'd been violent he'd not recall a single thing he'd done. Dennis and David were Virginia's sister's kids. Aunt Sis had three other children besides Dennis and David. Dewayne, Donna Gail, and Debbie were Mike's other three cousins. Dewayne was into hot rodding, Donna Gail was just plain beautiful, and Debbie was simply ordinary looking and slow. Their dad, Uncle Jimmy worked offshore and would be gone for weeks at a time. Virginia's brother, Earl managed a drilling company in Beaumont nearby while Yvonne managed their rental houses and trailer park. Virginia's cousin, John Ed worked as maintenance man for Uncle Earl and Aunt Yvonne. John Ed's dad, Edward and his wife Katie also lived in Winnie. Edward was retired and Katie still worked as a registered nurse. Edward was a small man and Katie was a huge woman. Everyone joked all the time about him being like a fly on an elephant. Edward was the life of the party, he was a comedian and a half, always impersonating some favorite movie star or another. Katie was a dead serious woman whom rarely laughed except once in a blue moon Edward would have her smiling and laughing. Realizing she was laughing out loud, she'd close her red face tight from her embarrassing outburst. Somewhere during a past war that Edward was wounded in, he'd met Katie when she was the nurse tending to him. She was a huge Russian woman he fell in love with, brought her home and married her much to his family's disbelief. Virginia related when she was a little girl, she and her sister's were always happy to see their Uncle Edward and Aunt Katie when they'd drop by for a visit. Aunt Katie would always bring them a pair of store bought panties apiece. They were thrilled to receive what they called fancy panties since they mostly had to wear panties made from the cotton fabric that came from flour sacks.

  John Ed was a huge lumberjack of a man and no one could ever figure out why he was so big and his dad was so small. Everyone related it to the Massengill blood line. The Massengill's were country folks for sure and most of them were very large and muscular. John Ed had become the town drunk and on weekends would fistfight anyone including the local police to which there was only one policeman in the town of Winnie. Winnie is an oil boom town which kind of explains why John Ed would usually be in a fight every night at the local bar. There were two bars in Winnie and it didn't matter which bar John Ed went to, he always ended up in fights beating everyone's ass no matter how drunk he was. The local policeman, Jack would call surrounding counties for all the backup he could get to help try to handle John Ed. It wasn't uncommon to see John Ed knocking Jack and several other policeman to the ground, taking their guns away from them and leaning against one of their patrol cars, spinning their pistols with both hands and shooting them into the air until all the bullets were spent. He'd drop the pistols quite a few times but he'd bend over and pick them up, all the while warning the police to stay on the ground or he'd beat on them some more. It was always a scary yet hilarious sight and the confrontations always ended when John Ed would come to his senses, hand the officers their guns back and voluntarily go and sit in Jack's patrol car to be taken to jail until he sobered up. Mike thought to himself Texas is part of the wild west and he'd simply have to be very careful and adjust to living around violence and crazed relatives.