A Guardian of Innocents Read Free

as it rumbled on towards its next stop, leaving me to stand alone on the corner of West 7 th and Woodward Lane. I was a boy who knew what waited for him half a block away. But I was also a boy who had nowhere else to go. I had no friends whatsoever at that age, none of our relatives lived nearby and I had exactly thirty-two cents in the zipper pocket of my cheap, Velcro-strapped wallet.
    But I wanted to run away just then. Turn 180 degrees around and put as much distance between that house and myself as I possibly could. I wanted to scream, “I don’t give a fuck!” to all the thoughts of all the bad things that can happen to an eleven-year-old runaway.
    But as my feet progressed forward, I realized I wasn’t going to do that.   
    When I was almost at the house, the knowing came again. There was someone else in the house with Jack, but not Doris, another man, a friend of his.
    An intense relief hit me so hard it felt like post-traumatic shock. Jack would never try anything with company in the house. But I still felt uneasy about this man and I didn’t know why.
    I unlocked the front door and walked into the living room where Jack and his buddy were sitting on the couch with both pairs of legs stretched across to the long coffee table in front of them, neither of them making any effort to turn off the porn movie on the television which was clearly visible to me. Two lipstick lesbians going at it. . . Lovely.
    They said not a word to me as I passed in front of them heading straight to my room, not stopping to get a drink or even use the bathroom. But I could feel the gaze of Jack’s friend skimming over my body hungrily, like a jackal that’s spotted a young and injured gazelle. Easy kill.
    I closed the door quietly behind me as I entered my room, gently setting my backpack on the foot of my bed. I flipped on my Nintendo and turned the volume down on my small black and white TV to where it was just barely audible to me. I was scared, and I thought if they don’t hear anything I do, then maybe they’ll forget I’m in the house.
    After about fifteen minutes I was completely enraptured by the video game I was playing… until my door slowly opened, and in walked Jack’s buddy.
    He wasn’t a tall man, but he looked long in the body because he was so disgustingly thin. He was old, probably around sixty, with a bald head and white whiskers growing out of his ears. He had all kinds of flesh-colored bumps on his face. Not pimples, more like in-grown hairs.
    He also had a southern drawl and spoke like he was always out of breath, “Hi yuh, muh name’s Willy. Yuh daddy in there’s a frenduh mine.”
    Willy sat down on my bed next to my backpack. I was sitting in a small wooden chair, one of those really short chairs made especially for children. I was too big to sit in it all the way, but I sat on the edge of it to play video games a lot. My room was small, and when he leaned forward his head was only about two feet away from mine.
    “I thought maybe you n I could git acquainted some. Yuh daddy’s one muh bess cust-mers. Comes intuh muh store all duh time,” Willy declared, then let out a long sigh as if saying those two sentences had drained him of all his energy and strength, “Why dontcha come ovah here on the bed and sit next tuhyuh Unca Willy?”
    I sat there, pretending to ignore him, with my fingers clicking away on the control pad of the Nintendo. After a few seconds passed, Willy said “Boy, I don’t like beeyun eggnord…” 
    The ominous tone in his voice was making me nervous but still I refused to avert my eyes from the TV screen.
    justignorehimjustignorehimandmaybehe’llgoaway
    In my peripheral vision I saw his knee rise upward while his body leaned back. The chair beneath me seemed to disappear and I was falling ass-first onto the floor. Something hard and semi-sharp jabbed me in the lower back, perfectly on the spine.
    My face grimaced with pain as I looked around to see what it was he had done.