ORIGINS, O’Connor
“Daletun Chauncy O’Connor, you quit playing with that fucking hedgehog right now and get over here!” A rail thin, wrinkly woman was clearly annoyed at her ten year old son.
The sensitive little boy protested, “but mommy, you said I didn’t have to pick pumpkins today!”
The woman shook her head and walked to the front door of the tiny three bedroom Illinois ranch house. She stared off into the morning sun poking through the autumn tree leaves, then put a slim cigarette to her lips and lit it. She muttered to herself under her breath, “I was in labor for twenty hours with that little fucker, and for what?” She took a long drag off of her cancer stick and exhaled very slowly. “So I could give birth to the biggest pussy humanity has ever known.” With her eyes closed, she took a moment to think carefully about her words, then said with her gravelly voice, “fuck your fucking rodent and get off of your fat ass. You’re picking pumpkins today.”
Daletun pet his hedgehog one last time, then put him in a small travel cage. He got to his feet and carried the cage towards the door like a blue collar worker carrying a lunch box. “Fine mommy,” he said weepy yet defiantly, “but Harvey is coming with us.”
When the family had reached the pumpkin patch, Daletun took the cage out of the car and ran over to see his best friend. “Hey Trentonio, I brought Harvey today to get some exercise!”
Trentonio was picking pumpkins and putting them in big cardboard crates next to a flatbed truck. “Awesome!” he replied.
Daletun continued, “Is Bradburne here today too?”
“Nope,” replied Trentonio as he ate a booger he’d just fished from his nostril. “He and his dad are going to the Bears game today.”
Daletun opened the cage as Harvey the hedgehog snooped around for bugs. An old man with grey hair easily maneuvered a standing forklift over to the cardboard crate and loaded the box of heavy pumpkins onto the back of the flatbed trailer. “It’s a beautiful day, boys,” he said with a mild Irish accent.
Daletun dug ear wax out of his ear and ate it as he replied, “whatever you say, Mr. Jenkins.”
Paddy Jenkins smiled and said, “just make sure you boys don’t go wondering off past the fence. Do you see that mansion over there? It belongs to a man who doesn’t want people on his property. Don’t make him angry.”
Trentonio asked, “Is he a bad man, Mr. Jenkins?”
Jenkins thought about what he was about to say, then shrugged his shoulders as he threw caution to the wind. “Boys, he is indeed bad. He’s bad because he hurts people, and he takes things from people that don’t belong to him. But we don’t talk about it, because he hurts nice people who try to rat him out. He’s a mobster, boys. Don’t mess with mobsters.”
Daletun squinted in the direction of the house and asked, “then how come the police don’t go into his house and arrest him?”
Jenkins laughed to himself and replied, “kid, half of the police force is on his payroll and he blackmails the rest to keep quiet. Besides, his mansion is like a bomb bunker. No one could break in there unless they had a tank. Even then, I’ll bet there’s more concrete in that place than in all the roads in town.” Jenkins shuddered and then said cautiously, “don’t tell anyone I told you this, boys.”
Trentonio farted and giggled to himself as he asked, “what does blackmail mean?”
Jenkins shook his head and said, “I hope you never find out, kid. Now get back to picking pumpkins, boys!”
Daletun and Trentonio started chatting excitedly as they picked pumpkins. “We should become police officers when we get older and arrest mobsters!”
“Yeah! And we could arrest other bad guys too!”
In the distance, a harris hawk swooped from the sky. Daletun saw the hawk out of the corner of his eye and yelled, “Harvey! NOOOO!” but it was too late. The hawk caught the hedgehog unawares and flew back towards the mansion. Daletun fell to his knees crying like a bitch. A few hundred yards away, he saw the well trained hawk land on the arm of the mobster with his dead hedgehog in its talons. This bad man had an impenetrable mansion, but also practiced falconry, and had now taken Harvey from him.
Something inside Daletun’s head changed that moment as tears and snot ran down his face. His brain rewired. He stopped crying and wailing. Upon arriving back at his house, he calmly got out of his mother’s car. “Are you ok?” asked his haggard mother with great concern.
The little boy had a complete lack of emotion for the whole drive home. The boy calmly replied, “I miss my hedgehog, but I’m ok, mother. I’ve never had more clarity and self awareness as to whom I’m supposed to be.”
His bewildered mother’s eyes got big and she crinkled her brow from pure confusion. She stood outside and lit her sixtieth cigarette for the day. The ten year old boy walked assuredly into the house and walked directly to his mothers’ wet bar in the kitchen. He removed a bottle of Jameson and took a large swallow without flinching from the fiery heat of the whiskey as it slid gloriously down his throat.
Later that night, ten year old Daletun was behind the wheel of a stolen fuel tanker truck that he’d hot wired. Trentonio sat shotgun. The truck’s engine idled at the edge of the driveway of the mobsters mansion.
“How did you learn how to hot wire this truck?” asked Trentonio.
Daletun lifted the half empty bottle of Jameson to his ten year old lips and took a big sip. “Television.”
Trentonio continued, “did you learn how to drive from television too?”
“Nope. Learned that at the library.” Daletun had no concern in his voice as he said, “Trentonio, you don’t have to do this you know. This is my destiny. It doesn’t have to be yours.”
Trentonio was nervous but said, “O’Connor, you’ve been my best friend since we were a year old. If we’re gonna kill this bad guy, we do it together.”
Ten year old Trentonio bravely took the bottle of Irish whiskey from his best friend and took a sip as well. In that moment, his voice dropped, body hair started growing in places that previously had none, and he realized he’d tasted happiness for the first true time in his life. In his head, it all made sense. Killing bad guys was his life now too.
What happened next happened quickly. They jumped out of the rig and put a brick on the gas pedal. As the truck crashed into the mansion, it exploded with a loud FUCKY! boom. Flames engulfed the mansion like a heart broken sorority girl crying over a bowl of ice cream as she drowned the whole thing in chocolate syrup. The fire raged for two straight days as firefighters did their best to extinguish the blaze.
When it was all over, the authorities reported that ten mobsters had been trapped inside and had died. A week later, Trentonio and Daletun stood in the pumpkin patch and watched the clean up from a distance. Without emotion, Daletun said, “I’ll never get over Harvey. This is my life now. I’m a killer of bad men.”
Trentonio nodded and said in his now puberty laden baritone voice, “I’m going to call you Doc from now on.”
“Works for me. And I’m calling you Trent.”
The two ten year olds stood in the morning breeze and admired from afar the carnage that they’d created. They smelled faintly of Irish whiskey, as they would for the rest of their natural born lives.