The Potato Patch

Whats he doing now? The rider, steadying his lathered horse spoke down to the man in the road.

What else? Hes picking gnat crap out of ground pepper said the dirty man kicking a wagon rut with his leathery boot minus laces. Been at it pretty near since he was born, his mama showed him how.

The rider spat and gazed out uneasily at the boy squatting in the potato patch. That, that aint right he said. That boy aint right.

It is what it is mister the man retorted hes my son and who are you to say?

The rider glared hard at the man but his eyes soon drifted back to the boy sitting in the plowed dirt singing along to himself the way children sometimes do. Well I had best be getting to the house, this horse is spent he spoke as he kicked the reluctant palomino, his eyes never straying from the little retarded, autistic bastard sitting cross-legged mumbling to himself.

Yeah, I expect you had better the man called out but the rider didnt answer, didnt even look back. With that the man wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his eroding shirt and reached for his shotgun leaned against a fence post and out of view. He let go with one barrel blasting the rider off the horse and into the tall yellow weeds on the roadside, the horse partially wounded labors down the road riderless.

Walking up to the rider and thumbing the other hammer back, he all but places the still smoking barrel in the riders left ear. The rider, doubled up and clutching his own entrails closes his eyes tight in anticipation. A loud report as blood and brain muck spatter the mans axle grease pant-legs. He looks over at the boy, oblivious to the commotion and most everything else for that matter. Grimacing the man breaks the action on the scatter gun and fingers another shell from the pockets of his grimy overalls and makes his way to the dirt where the boy sat.

The man looks down at the boy and smiles sympathetically. The boy sensing the mans presence looks up at him with blinking blue eyes, his fair locks gently picked up by the warm south breeze.

Look away the man instructs the boy and the kid heeds, returning to his own lost world once again. The man grimaces again as he levels the gun off.

The man turns without a word from the crumpled little life form face down in the dirt, nearly decapitated and scans the horizon. The niggers in the field across the rutted road had looked up from their sowing. Back to work! he yelled across.