"Oh," Balls said.
"So that's my deal, boy. If you kill a perfectly inner-cent splittail, without so much as battin' an eye, and real down'n dirty-like, a real hardcore job... then I'll give you'n yer fat buddy a hunnert gallons of ‘shine to run four days a week... and quadruple yer pay."
Balls shrugged nonchalance. "I'll go do it right now and you'll read about it in the paper tomorrow—"
Snot McKully belted a laugh. "Naw, naw, punk. You do it right now, wheres I can see ya do it. I needs you to show me the ruckin' so I know ya got the nuts fer it."
Balls blinked. "Uh, well, okay but... where's I gonna get a splittail?"
McKully whistled. "Pumpkin? Pull that skinny gal out the coop'n drag her over."
Like an automaton, the teenaged girl with greasy hair loped over to the chicken coop, baggy overalls flowing around her frame. She opened a wire-covered hatch, and suddenly Balls thought he heard a muffled mewling sound.
The fuck's he got in there anyways? Balls wondered. Dicky looked grimly on from the El Camino.
From the coop, out flopped an emaciated woman, nude, and with a black rat's nest for hair, wrists and ankles tied. She mewled through a gag of what appeared to be a pair of very soiled men's shorts. Her eyes were huge orbs of terror in the thin face, and she was so skinny her ribs were deep grooves in paste-white flesh. She was ankle-dragged into the center of the clearing by the young blond girl.
"There's yer splittail, son," McKully said.
"Who the fuck is it?" Balls asked.
"Just some gal—an inner-cent gal we caught walkin' through the woods. Had no choice but ta nab her. Cain't have her tellin' the ATF I got a still here, ya know?"
Balls frowned at the trembling, skin-covered skeleton. "She a creeker or somethin'? How she get so dang skinny?"
"Aw, we caught her over a week ago," McKully explained. He took a slug of his own panther piss from a clichéd glass jar. "Couldn't make my mind up what to do with her so's I stuffed her in the chicken coop. Ain't fed her nothin' 'cos I didn't want her shittin' in my coop." McKully fired yet another nose-loogie off to the side, a big one. The young blond girl was already back to filling more jugs, unconcerned by the event taking place.
"Well, boy?" McKully grinned. "Got the belly fer it, or don't'cha?"
"Shee-it... " Balls ruminated on his thoughts, and then it occurred to him that he didn't give jack-fuck about this unfortunate soul at his feet. Innocent? Absolutely! But could Balls really kill her—kill her down and dirty-like? Could he lay a genuine "ruckin'" on her?
Balls' epiphany was now at hand.
"Dicky! Come gimme a hand!"
"Uh, uh, well—"
"Just come on!"
Dicky moseyed over, hands in pockets.
Balls shook his head when an inadvertent glance showed him the baby eating McKully's jettisoned splat of mucus. These really are some crackers here, he thought. Then he whipped out his Buck knife and snapped! it open. He straddled the emaciated woman and cut off her gag.
She wheezed like a kazoo. "Jaysus, Mary'n Joseph lemme go my God please lemme go! I ain't gonna tell no one 'bout the still I'se swear!"
"A‘corse yer not, honey," Balls said.
Starvation had melted her breasts down to nippled flaps. "Cut me loose I'se beggin' ya! I weren't doin' nothin' but walkin' through the woods! Please please please cut me loose!"
Balls cut the rope binding her ankles.
"Oh God bless ya bless ya bless ya!" she wheezed. "Nows cut my hands free'n git me away from that evil man!"
"Shore, baby," Balls said, but then he sat on her belly with his back toward her face. "Dicky! Spread them walkin' sticks wide as ya can!"
The woman shrieked, her body writhing in the dirt beneath Balls' weight. Dicky reluctantly grabbed her ankles and, struggling against an expected resistance, spread her legs.
A great mound of bristly black pubic hair sprouted at her crotch.
"Dang, Dicky. Looks like a hunk'a sod, don't it?"
"Uh, uh, yeah, Balls, it shore does but, ya know, maybe we shouldn't be doin' this," his friend suggested. "She ain't done nobody no harm. This ain't right."
"‘A'course it ain't," and then began cutting down there with his Buck. He inscribed the knife tip around the hairy triangle. Now the woman was really screaming, and Balls found that he liked that sound very much. It seemed delicious and warm and delectable.
Just like the sugar rolls my grandma used to make...
You could say it was with considerable craft that Balls skinned the woman's pubic mound. He held the ragged triangle of fur up for McKully to see, then flung it away. Blood poured from the wound as if from a bucket, and now the woman, all eighty or so pounds of her, managed to buck so hard, the reflex lifted Balls a good six inches off the ground.
"Dang," Dicky muttered.
Balls faced Snot McKully. "Down'n dirty enough fer ya?"
McKully waved a hand. "Aw, that ain't nothin'. I've scalped gals' pussies before, lots of times. That's the kind'a shit I was doin' fer fun when I was a kid."
"Well I'm glad you said that, Mr. McKully, 'cos I'm just warmin' up," and then Balls strode over to the jugging table. A side glance showed him the young blonde now sitting on the ground with her baby, offering it one of those cherry-tomato nipples. The baby sucked like someone at the bottom of a milkshake.
"You shore ya want yer daughter and the baby watchin' this?" he asked McKully.
McKully just waved a dismissive hand.
Balls grabbed a jug of moonshine and strode back over. Now the woman was sort of pinwheeling in the dirt, her screams grinding down.
"Dicky, git me some rope out the ‘Mino."
Dicky stood in half-shock. "What'cha, what'cha need that fer?"
"Just git it!"
Balls uncapped the jug, then—SPLAP!—dumped a plume of 200-proof grain alcohol on the woman's scalped pubis.
The woman shrieked so loud even Balls jumped back a foot.
So he wants a ruckin', huh? Down'n dirty-like, huh? Balls spotted something near a pile of broken planks next to a fermenter: an old-fashioned brace-style manual drill. He snatched it up, not realizing that he'd just been touched by something called innovation. He rolled his eyes walking back to the scene, noticing now that the blond teenager was back to filling jugs, while her baby was playing with the pubic scalp.
Balls straddled the girl again. Her combination of kicks, flails, and screams filled the clearing with a unique dervish of pandemonium. Balls found that he enjoyed the aural effect. "Dicky! I needs ta get this ‘ho simmered down. Sit on her knees."
Dicky frowned but did as he was told. Now the poor girl was pinned to the ground. Balls put a knee on her cheek, squashing her other cheek into the dirt, and then he started cranking away on the brace-drill. It was tough going at first. That auger-bit turned like a barber pole, making a sound sort of like a meat-grinder, and when it finally ate through her skull, he cranked it into her raw brain about an inch. The girl's screams were extraordinary; they sounded more like a bad wheel bearing than any mode of human protestation. But once that bit sunk in an inch, the screams abated, and her maniacal flailings digressed down to a steady, low-grade convulsion.