Shit Happens!

No sex in this one; just a quick story about revenge, not having gone quite right.

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I must like jail, or something, because I just did something stupid, and now I'm going back.

It was November 22nd of 1998, and I'd just gotten back from deer hunting -- piss-poor, unsuccessful deer hunting, I might as well admit, 'cause the deer were all wary from the idiots who slogged through the woods making a noise deer could hear from two miles away, and whose mantra was, "Ready! Fire! Aim!" -- gotten back a day earlier than I expected. I couldn't pull into my own driveway because there was some idiot's car blocking it, and I had to pull two doors down to get a parking spot on against the curb. I'd just gotten out of my truck, holding my Winchester Model 70, something I'd never leave in my truck in a neighborhood, when I looked over at mu house and spotted them. My wife and some asshole had stepped out on the porch, and she was kissing him, I guess goodbye. Almost without thinking, I raised my weapon and fired.

My aim wasn't quite as good as it should have been, certainly not as good as I usually am out hunting. Instead of his torso -- his back was toward me -- I caught him just above the back of his right knee. The 30.06 soft tip round blew his leg apart, and traveled through him and hit my wife's left leg mid-thigh.

Within seconds, I was down on the ground, having taken a blow to the back of my head. I should have known that the guy two doors down was a cop, with that military haircut he wore. My hands were pulled behind my pack, and cuffs snapped on. He was off-duty, but had reacted instantly upon hearing weapons fire outside his home. I was outraged, but quickly helpless, and ambulances and police cars rolled up, sirens blaring and lights flashing, just a few minutes later. Neighbors were screaming, and one woman, who I think was a nurse, was trying to keep my wife and the asshole stable until the paramedics got there.

My name's Bill McCollum, and I worked in a welding shop in Allentown. I could stick two pieces of metal together, but I wasn't a real welder; I did a lot of the grunt work at the shop, and drove the delivery truck. The pay wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either, not for someone with my too-few skills.

Of course, I was guilty, obviously guilty, and my public defender let me know it. But I was stupid, too, and insisted that I wasn't going to plead guilty for doing what any married man would do when he saw another man kissing his wife. It was my fucking right to defend my honor, even if it turned out that my wife's honor wasn't worth an empty beer can.

I was a first offender, which should have helped, but I don't guess that it really did. I took the asshole's leg off, blew it to smithereens, and though my wife's leg survived, she would have a nasty limp for the rest of her miserable life. On top of that, she's have an ugly scar down the left side of her face, from where she hit two of the concrete steps as she fell down the small hill on which our house sat.

I got to see Linda, my fucking whore of a wife, in court, I would say every day, but the trial took only one, and the asshole, as the prosecutor wanted the jury to see just what I had done to two 'innocent' people. Maybe that 'innocent' people should have influenced the judge and jury to be lenient, but when I screamed out that it was my fucking right to defend my honor, as my lousy excuse for a lawyer tried to shut me up, well, everything went to shit.

Ten years, ten stinking years, was my sentence, and I was assigned to SCI Rockview, just a few miles north of Pennsylvania State University. It was dull humor that both Penn State and State Pen were in the same county.

Rockview was a medium security facility, but I didn't get to stay there. Medium security or not, it was like every other penitentiary, with the prisoners self-dividing up into the white, Hispanic, and black groups. Me, I had blond hair and blue eyes, and if I wasn't the whitest white guy around, it was close. I wasn't in Rockview all that long when Hector, a Latin Kings thug, decided that he wanted a white girlfriend. I was new, trying to keep out of trouble, but trouble found me, and without the white gang, the prison's Aryan Brotherhood, there to defend me, I got grabbed, held down, and three stinking Mexicans raped my ass.

Medium security means that only medium measures are thought necessary for us to not escape; it didn't mean shit about any security to protect prisoners from each other.

Hector and the Latin Kings were never punished, even though it was obvious from my injuries what had happened to me. Thing is, I was told, right away, what happens to snitches in jail. If I ratted out Hector and his gang, medium security meant than my ten fucking years would be a life sentence, and not a long one.

Fortunately, my cellmate was white, too, and he taught me what I needed to know. Hit the weights, get stronger, and he'd get me in the Brotherhood. I'd never had anything against blacks or Hispanics, but this was a matter of survival. I earned my transfer to SCI Graterford, the maximum security facility, when after I had bulked up, I caught Hector without his entourage, and literally pulled his dick and nuts off.

That didn't earn me any more time, because Hector didn't snitch either. Of course, now that he was a girl, he lost all status with the Kings.

Graterford was fucking brutal, but since I was already Brotherhood I had as much protection as any man could hope for in the fucking system. And while I didn't get any more time, there was no way I'd get early parole. Hell, the judge hadn't even given me credit for time served in pre-trial lockup, so I wasn't going to get out until April of 2009. All that I could do was keep hitting the weights and backing up my Brotherhood buddies.

In January of 2009, Corrections sent me to a halfway house in Allentown. I had a short-timer parole officer, and he did me one, and only one, good turn: he got my commercial driver's license reinstated, so that I could get a job.

My license was only a Class B, meaning that I could drive a straight truck, but not a tractor-trailer. I hit the ready-mix companies, the material haulers, even the old welding shop where I used to work, but it was 2009, the economy fucking stunk, and no place that had drivers ever handle money was going to hire me. There were too many guys with Class Bs out there, looking for work, who didn't have felony records.

Finally, my PO got me a job, with the very apt name of Brown Services.

Really, Brown Services, owned by a guy named Jim Brown. Why was it apt? Because Brown Services was a septic tank and construction porta-john pumping company!

For some unfathomable reason, even in the Great Recession, it was hard for a septic tank pumper to keep drivers.

But Hell, septic tanks were the gravy jobs at Brown. The really shit jobs were the ones pumping out and cleaning porta-johns on construction sites, and as the junior guy, those were the jobs I got.

It got to be August, and hot as the hinges of Hell, when I got sent to this construction site just north of Bethlehem. It was a self-service gas station build in the middle of a working-class residential neighborhood, and after doing my stinking job I headed out . . . and saw my whore ex-wife getting out of her car, the same car she had eleven years ago, in front of this mid 1970s brick rancher. I never knew where she lived before, and never cared after I got the divorce papers while locked up. No child support, 'cause we didn't have kids, and no alimony since she made roughly what I had before shit happened.

She still had the limp, as her left leg was now shorter than her right, and even the built-up left shoe didn't help. I smiled at that, knowing the bitch deserved it. I didn't see the asshole, but he probably dumped her skanky ass after he lost thirty pounds of leg. He deserved that, too.

I wanted more revenge, 'cause what I did already sure as shit didn't deserve ten fucking years in prison. Hell, it deserved a fucking medal, standing up for what's right. But I couldn't think of anything I could do to her or asshole that wouldn't land me right back in the joint.

I had two weeks to stew on it, but nothing came to mind. Then I got my route assignment for the day: right back to that self-service gas station site. It was the middle of my route, so my tank was already half full, and it was about 90º outside.

Maybe I wouldn't have done it, maybe I would have thought it wasn't worth it 'cause it would just land me back in Graterford, if I hadn't been half smoked up that day. Really, if you aren't smoking pot, you just can't get through a day cleaning out portable shitters. But I couldn't help thinking about it as I cleaned up that particularly nasty porta-john, and you know how it is, thought becomes action. I stopped in front of Linda's house, slammed it into reverse, backed right up to the big living room window, smashed it, threw in my big hose and unloaded my whole load of shit right into her fucking house!

I laughed as I drove away, knowing I had destroyed her house and all of her shit inside just as surely as if it had been a meth lab. They'd have to tear that fucking place down now, or, better yet, let the fire department use the place for practice.

Of course, things didn't work out quite the way I'd hoped, as I realized when I was coming down from being smoked up. The cops were at my door by seven in he evening, 'cause it was obvious who did that shit to Linda's house. Yeah, I was going back to Graterford, but for some fucking reason, I just didn't care, maybe because I was burning another one when the cops came.

Turned out that Linda was renting that house, and didn't own it. She had a bastard kid now, so he was out of a home as well as she was. Her Captain fucking Hook boyfriend? He was long gone, and not even her baby daddy.