Chapter Text
Willow
Part One
Have you ever experienced the power of intention?
Now, wait a minute! Don’t get all freaked out. I know, it sounds like horse shit. I thought so too. But I have always had the feeling, even when I was a kid, that there were things going on behind the scenes… things we have no knowledge of - and my curious nature had me trying everything at least once. Anyway, it isn’t that important to the story. So just skip this next paragraph if you want. I don’t care.
I learned about intentions from a woman I met when I was thirteen. She was the mom of one of my not-so-close friends. She would send her son off on some useless errand just to get me alone with her, which I didn’t mind. She was very gentle with me, and we would talk for hours. She broached the subject of intentions by telling me that I was there with her because of one of her intentions. She told me exactly how she said it. “My son’s friend Mitch is a nice and handsome boy. I am going to be his teacher.” And what she taught me was that saying things like that, out loud and using all positive language, forces the world to help make it come true, IF you believe in it. If you truly believe in it, you will go out and find whatever it is you are intending. So she made sure I understood, and made me practice. She said it is strange to imagine, but it has nothing to do with God. It isn’t like praying. It works because it is something built into the universe. Like a computer that is listening for the right words so that it can do what it is programmed to do. It works for almost everything, no matter how trivial. I was thirteen when she taught me.
Fast forward twenty-seven years. By then I had two grown sons. I had gotten good at setting intentions, and they always came true. But I also learned that those intentions, even though they worked as advertised, tended to bring a lot of complications to my life - which was why I now used them very sparingly.
On this occasion, I used it: I was camping again. In Indiana with my son and several of his friends. It was his birthday party - Kyle style, meaning outdoors and remote. We were on a narrow and winding lake, camped atop a hill forested with knotty pines. The place stunk because it had burned out that spring. Everything was covered with black carbon soot and smelled of pine-tar turpentine. I tried to convince them to move to another hill, but this was their traditional spot, complete with a ring of stones for the fire. Whoopy-do. They refused to move.
As a result, all of my clothes were covered in soot, and they reeked. My tent would never be the same. It was my last morning with them. I had to get back to town. They were staying another night. I laid there staring at the early morning glow on the inside of my tent, dreading having to break camp. It was a lot of work to dismantle the tent and pack everything, haul it all down to the lake, load my canoe, paddle five miles into the wind to my truck, unload the canoe, load the truck, and put the canoe on the truck and tie it down like a big hat. But my plan for the trip home held the promise of adventure. I tried to imagine where it would bring me as I drifted in and out of sleep.
I had brought my trailer along, empty. A flat-bed tandem axle with an electric winch. I like to scrounge the backroads for rusty gold. I was so certain that I would find what I was looking for that I kept the trailer available, packing all of my camping stuff in and on the truck.
I spoke to the wall of my tent before starting the journey. “I intend to drive the backroads home, and along the way I will have an opportunity to help someone, and in exchange, I will also benefit. I intend for it to be a win-win situation.”
I have grown so accustomed to the effects of stating things like that, that I cringed inside, wondering what poor soul I was going to end up helping, and what sort of drama it would bring into my life. You might have noticed that I left my end of the win-win completely open. You want to leave room for them (whatever those things are behind the scenes that orchestrate things. All I know is that they are pan-dimensional, meaning they not only are listening, but have access to the future to see the implications of what we do.) As I said, you want to leave room for them to have lots of options, and since they can see into the future, they will know much better than us mortals what constitutes a win. That’s why you have to believe and trust in them.
Seven hours later, I was lost. Seven hours because I hadn’t found anyone to help yet. I wasn’t going to quit roaming around until I did. That’s part of how it works - if you truly believe. In my mind, it meant they were cooking up something really special. Anyway, I wasn’t exactly lost. My GPS knew my coordinates, but it didn’t know that the gravel road it had put me on for the last ten miles no longer had a bridge across the stream. It had been condemned and the road was blocked with a barrier.
I got out and walked around, looking for a way to turn my truck and trailer around. It seemed I would have to back it up an embankment between a couple of trees.
When my rig was finally pointing back the way I had come, I stood there picking dirt and clumps of grass from around my trailer lights, and I straightened the license plate that had become folded under. Suddenly, I heard something splashing through the stream below. It didn’t sound human, at first. The sounds diminished and I nervously waited, listening. Twigs snapped and leaves were crunching. It was climbing up the bank towards me, and I could hear breathing and… it sounded human. A young woman burst out of the bushes. She was barefoot and in her underwear. She had bloody scrapes on her arms and legs from the thorns, and when she saw me, she ran straight at me, waving her arms and crying incoherently.
“Calm down. What is it?” I yelled above her cries. She kept coming at me. I took a step back and stiff-armed her in the chest.
“He’s gonna kill her!” She screamed, clutching at my arm as I fended her off. “My Willa! He says he’s gonna kill her!” She collapsed on her knees crying and panting, nervously glancing over her shoulder. I couldn’t hear anyone else coming, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I hauled her up and sat her in the truck. This is what I had been waiting for. When the result of an intention finally comes, it usually slaps you right in the face. We drove off.
The woman cried and cried. Every time I spoke to her she started up again. “Look here, young lady. Look at me.” I barked as I slammed the shifter into park. I turned to face her. “Who’s Willa? Is she your daughter? Who says they’re going to kill her? Just calm down and tell me.”
Her face started melting again, but she at least managed to nod.
“Well, it’s obvious you aren’t going to tell me. Why are you so afraid? Nobody can get at you now. Look, if you don’t start talking then I can’t help you. So just get out. Either tell me what the fuck is going on, or get out. Now.”
She was so afraid of telling me that she actually reached for the door handle before catching herself. She hesitated and finally made up her mind. Even so, she still could not bring herself to actually speak the words. Not until I was standing at her open door and pulling her out.
“Okay! Okay. I’ll tell you. It’s just that he is so dangerous. We needs to be careful.”
“I’m always careful. Now tell me, who is dangerous?”
“Pete. He’s got her. My Willa. We never had a fight like this. Now that I’ve run off… I mean, that’s how it always is. If I run off, he kills her. If she runs off, he kills me.” She started balling again. “Oh, God, I hope he don’t do nothin’ to her. I’ll never forgive myself.”
She calmed some and I got back in. She started answering my questions more rationally. Pete and Willa were in a cabin on the other side of the stream. She said we would have to back-track and go around twenty miles to get there. Along the way, as I kicked up massive clouds of gravel dust and peppered my fenders with small stones, I found out that Pete was a gun enthusiast and sounded very unstable. It was a mystery why she was with the guy, and had made those threats. I had to stay focused on the immediate threat: her daughter. When I suggested the police, she said he would put a bullet in his own head after taking out anyone else in the vicinity, meaning her daughter.
“He’s wanted by the police?” I asked.
“Oh, God yes. He’s been hiding out for years. That’s always what he says, about killing himself and everybody.”
“What made him blow up all of a sudden?”
“Someone broke in and tore out his safe. All his money and most of his guns, gone. He thinks we must be to blame somehow.”
“Great.”
Slowly, an idea began to hatch. “Reach back there and get that black bag.”
It was my company laptop. I traveled to clients’ facilities and needed to create and print proposals in rural areas, mostly farms. I kept checking my phone and finally found one bar of cellular signal. I stopped the truck. I searched google for documents, found one that would work, edited it some with her full name and address, printed it out, filled in some blanks in ink and signed it with a flourish.
“What is that?” She asked.
“Never mind. How close are we?”
“‘Only bouts a mile.”
“Then get down out of sight. Listen, I’m going to explain what I’m seeing and you’re going to guide me.”
I realized too late that my plan had a major flaw. My appearance. I was covered in soot and smelled of turpentine. But there was nothing I could do about that. I pulled in front of their shack and knocked on the plywood sheet that was serving as the front door. The actual door was in pieces on the porch. Apparently kicked in by the robbers.
“Who’s there?” I heard a snarly man’s voice ask.
“My name is Mitch. Is Grace Blackwater in?”
“She don’t live here no more. Why?”
“She has some money coming to her - a small inheritance. I just need to confirm that this is her address and get a signature.”
The door opened a crack. “You don’t look like no company man.” He said.
“I know. I was out camping. It’s a long story. I just thought since I would be out this way that I could do this myself. We’ve been having trouble getting a hold of her. The mail keeps coming back to us.”
He could see the documents I was holding open in a manilla folder. I pushed them at him in an offer for him to examine them more closely. The door closed and I heard the clunk of the gun being set down on something just inside. The door slowly opened. The moment I saw his other hand, the one that would have had the gun in it, but didn’t, I tackled him hard onto his back. It knocked the wind out of him, and along with it, the fight. He went totally limp. I had heard something crack and I realized it might have been his ribs. “Grace!” I shouted.
I heard the truck door and she flew into the house, right past us, and found her daughter. She was unhurt.
They didn’t have any good rope, just some jute twine that wouldn’t hold him. There was enough of it to bind his wrists behind his back with enough to go twice around his neck. If he struggled, it would choke him.
The girls were a pitiful sight. Willa had dirty streaks all down her face from tears being wiped by filthy hands. Her hair was wild and snarled. Blond, maybe. She was slight and petite, but wiry, and agile. Pete kept muttering threats at them in a menacing way, and they recoiled from his words. He had seen their reaction, and my bewilderment at it, and snickered.
“He can’t hurt you now.”
“Oh, yes he can.” Grace said.
Again, Pete snickered. I lifted up hard on his chicken wing and he let out an agonizing howl. Something popped in his shoulder. The girls cried and hugged each other.
“No, he can’t. I guess you don’t realize what is happening here, do you?”
Grace shrugged.
“We’ve got him. I won’t let him ever hurt you again. Either he packs up his shit and leaves for good, or I bury him in the woods. Simple as that.”
Grace glanced around. “It ain’t quite that simple.” She said in a whisper.
“Why not?”
“Timmy is out there somewhere. God only knows when he might…” She stopped. We heard tires on the gravel road. “That’s him.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this sooner?” I barked. She started crying again, trying to explain, and she was nearly out of her mind. “Willa! Come here sweetheart.”
To my relief, she stepped right up. “Put your knee right here on his back and take hold of these ropes here. If he starts to make any noise at all, you pull on those ropes as hard as you can and keep pulling. It probably won’t kill him, so don’t worry. We just need him to stay quiet. Can you do that?” She nodded and took up the position. “Good girl. I knew I could count on you.”
I turned to Grace, who was still melting. “Does Timmy know about the big fight?”
She shook her head.
“Good. Go out to him and act like Pete had an accident. That he needs help, then follow him in. Don’t you come first, do you hear me? You follow. You understand?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, let’s wait until he’s just about out of his vehicle, then go running out to him.”
It worked. Timmy came charging in. Pete squeaked once before Willa leaned back and strained at the ropes. He rolled her off of him, but she held on to the ropes. She scrambled up and pulled so hard she actually dragged him a couple of feet. Timmy’s eyes grew big as he tried to make sense of it all. He was really just a kid. He turned and caught a fleeting glimpse of my knuckles before all went dark. He woke up beside Pete.
“Anyone else I should know about?” I asked.
“No.” Grace said with confidence, but her doubt immediately took hold.”
“What is it?” I asked. She started in with that frightened hesitation again and I came at her. “What the fuck is going on? Why are you so afraid? What are they into?” I asked.
She did not answer me, and she wouldn’t even look at me.
“Meth.” Said a soft little voice.
“Shut your face you little cunt.” Pete barked.
I relieved Willa of her job and she stepped back to one side. She had a peculiar expression on her face after hearing Pete call her a little cunt. Suddenly, she took a big stride, yelled like a samurai, and stomped him in the neck. I heard a loud crack and thought maybe his neck broke, but it sounded more like loose plywood under the rug. The girl looked up at me as if expecting to be punished. I smiled. She stomped him twice more with a loud “Hai-ya”.
“Feel better?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Willa had come out of her brainwashed fear of them much quicker than her mother. “Now is your chance.” I said to Grace.
Her hand covered her mouth, as if holding back a flood. She just stared at the two men. Then she calmly went out the back door. A dog started barking. Willa and I shared a confused look. We heard her come back in and knock around in the kitchen for a bit before joining us again. She was carrying a pail, and had on rubber gloves. She knelt down and smeared fresh canine feces all over his face. Lots of it. He choked and cursed her as if he would murder the entire female population. He ended up spitting more than cursing because everytime he opened his mouth she shoveled some in it. She made sure it got up his nose and in his ears too. She spared Timmy.
That forced me to have to drag them out back and put them in the kennel with the dog. It was a mean old pit bull. But it seemed to know better than to get too close to me. Pete was sobbing quietly. Timmy was babbling at him, asking Pete what they were going to do, over and over. Pete had no answer except, “Just shut the fuck up.”
Now we sat quietly on the tailgate of my truck. I had pulled it around to the side of the property where we could keep and eye on them and out of sight of the road. Willa and her mother took turns telling me stories about their life before and after the meth operation had moved in on them.
Pete and Timmy and two others had set up a meth cooking kitchen on Grace’s property without her knowledge. She owned nearly a hundred acres but didn’t even know the boundary lines. By the time she discovered them, they were deep into it. There were four of them originally, but the place got raided. Pete and Timmy had ducked into the woods without being discovered, and their accomplices were arrested. Ever since then, they had been cooking batches in a different shed, leaving the original one alone so the cops would think the property was still abandoned. Pete had learned the lesson about sleeping at the kitchen. That’s how the others got caught - sleeping. So when Grace found them, they decided to just sleep at her place, essentially holding them hostage for over two years. They always kept one of them in sight so the other wouldn’t get any ideas. And it was always the threat of suicidal death that kept them under control.
Grace and Willa told me everything they knew. I went and looked at the cook shack. Some of the equipment looked expensive. Like the big generator, stainless steel tables, digital scales. No product or raw materials that I could see. Probably buried nearby. Turns out Pete cared more about that equipment than he did his own life or the life of his partner.
I remember buying a house from a divorced couple once. They went to court to settle disputes about the property of the marriage, and since I was holding the contract on their house, I had attended the hearings. It was amazing how smart the woman’s lawyer was. He recognized immediately that the only thing her soon-to-be ex-husband really cared about was their new riding mower. It might have cost $1500 new, and he let most of the equity in the house, over $75,000 go to her just so he could keep that mower. People are clueless sometimes. Pete seemed no different.
I had a meeting with the men out in the kennel. I started by hosing off the drying dog shit from Pete’s face. I pulled up a sorry old metal chair and spoke through the kennel fence. The dog was terrified of me and cowered in the far corner. Willa was there leaning against me, but not her mom.
“So, here is where we are: You have two choices. Plan A - you decide not to cooperate with me, so, I put you in your meth lab, soak you with fuel, and torch the place to make it look like a meth cooking mishap. The sheriff won’t spend ten minutes investigating, and it is much safer for us knowing there is no way for you to bother us any more. I really hope you pick that one. Plan B - I soak the shed and the two of you in fuel, and from a safe distance, I supervise you packing your equipment. One false move and it is back to plan A. Either way, I need to get some gas. Do you have a trailer to haul all of your crap in?”
We worked out the logistics and by late morning, they were gone.
“Do you think they will be back?” I asked Grace.
“No. I really don’t. If you asked me that this morning I would have said yes. For certain.”
“What changed your mind?”
“You. The way you handled them. They know you out-smarted them. He respects you. He actually seemed sorry he wouldn’t get to spend more time with you.”
“I know what you mean. Like a kid starving for a dad who will set some firm boundaries.”
“Exactly. Yes. That’s it.”
“You seem to be feeling better.” I said.
“I do. Thanks to you.”
“Yeah, thanks to you.” Willa echoed.
“Well, don’t make my head swell up any bigger than it already is. Besides, it wasn’t all me. I had help.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s complicated.”
They both locked onto me. They wanted to know.
“Well, shit. It’s a long-ass fucking story. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
They both nodded.