Jail Bait

One day after school, my neighbor ventured across the pastures to play. Like so many other times, we watched tv, tossed the frisbee around for our dog Sam, climbed the wooden walls to the hay storage areas in the barn—very dangerous—and ventured behind the pond to see what we could discover in the run-off.

We jumped into piles of hay from heights that could break something if we hadn’t landed just right. We collected tadpoles from the stream and laughed as they wriggled in our hands.

We were kids, and fun was the only thing that mattered.

As the sun was setting and the tall grasses radiated with a golden hue, it was time for my friend to go home. Mom and Dad would return from work soon, which meant dinner and whatever else they had planned. Probably bathing and bedtime.

My friend and I ducked between the barbed wire fence and exchanged confused looks when her dogs started barking hysterically.

“Don’t they know it’s just us?” I asked ready to bolt for my house. No way was I getting bit by a dog.

She called out for the mangy mutts to shut up, but they continued on as if they didn’t even know we were coming.

Gripping the cold metal wire, I held the fence open enough for my friend to slip through, but we both stopped dead in our tracks.

Living in a trailer without plywood secured to the bottom of it, like ours, gave my friend and I a vantage point neither of us could have imagined. Someone jumped from her back deck, clad in black boots and dark-blue pants, and took off running, jingling all the while.

“Who?”

She looked at me, eyes-wide with panic. “No one’s home but me.”

“Run!” I screamed, trembling while holding the fence open for her to come back through.

We locked hands and ran all the way back to my house, jumping through the fence so fast we didn’t take the time to worry about the wounds the barbed wire inflicted.

Mom and Dad weren’t home yet. There was no one we could call. The police wouldn’t make it to the middle of nowhere fast enough. We were defenseless. I thought about my dad’s gun, then remembered what happened the last time I shot it.

“Don’t you have a knife or something? Anything? We can’t just sit here and wait for whoever that was to kill us.” My friend gasped for air, skin as pale as the cotton in the field next to us. Her hands were frozen and grasped permanently around my arm. “What about your dad’s machete?”

The fools we were, we grabbed my dad’s machete and instead of locking ourselves in the trailer with it, calling the cops anyway, or waiting for Mom and Dad to get home, we ventured back to her property.

I swung the gigantic, rusted knife through the grasses without chopping any of them down. The blade was dull. Just like our plan. My friend’s dogs weren’t barking anymore, there wasn’t any jingling, and we certainly didn’t spot a murderer waiting for us, but what we did see once we reached her fence was our courage run away.

We walked back to my house and waited for the adults to swoop in to rescue us. While we were daydreaming of all the ways we were going to die, I turned on the tv and saw a news report that had my blood running cold for weeks.

Breaking News: Convict escaped local jail and is on the loose in the Lone Oak area. If you see a man . . . .

I didn’t hear any more, didn’t see any more, past those words. I just knew whoever the escaped convict was, that’s who was in my friend’s house, running away in his black boots and dark-blue pants.

When she finally made it home, the only thing missing was money. Isn’t that what a recently escaped criminal would need?

That’s what I thought.