By Any Other Name - 2. Chapter 2

"How do you get rid of a rat?" Joey asked, later, as we all relaxed inside the shack.

It was a quiet afternoon. The only sounds we could hear were the gentle lap-lap of river water as it moved against the concrete back of the center boat well, and a faint drone that was the far off sound of a tractor turning up some field. Days like this always made me feel content, and glad to live where I did. How anyone could stand city life, with the constant hum of cars by the thousands, and the accompanying sounds of human movement and life just everywhere, when they could have this? I just couldn't understand it.

My aunt and uncle lived in Dunkwater, a fairly good-sized city on the other side of the Chuckaluck mountains, and when we visited them, I had always wondered how they slept at night with all that noise. Jet airplanes seemed to fly over every two minutes, there were constant hoots and mumbles from a train yard somewhere nearby, and the steady roar of traffic was just non-stop. But they seemed not to even notice these disturbances in their world, and it made me realize that people can get used to anything, if they choose to do it.

I'd hate to have to do that, too. But even a quick look around Bent Fork and Muskrat Hill will show you that there just aren't a lot of opportunities for a smart boy to make a life for himself. Especially a gay smart boy. Unless I wanted to maybe be a deputy someday - and I didn't - I suppose I'll eventually arrive at a point in life where I'll have to decide when to go, and where.

"Mousetrap?" Rich suggested, rubbing a hand gently over the bare flesh of his boyfriend's belly. Those two had the old sofa, while Dev and I had laid out on the mattress.

Dev had a towel wrapped around his middle while his clothing dried, and Rich and I were each just in our shorts. Joey, who was a jeans man even on the hottest of days, was down to his unders, a sexy pair of powder blue briefs with little in the way of sides, and the word Pump! emblazoned across the waistband. It was a little distracting, and I had already made a mental note to get Dev a few pairs of these things for his birthday.

I sighed at Rich's suggestion. "We can't hurt those guys, much as we'd like to. Nothing illegal, or that makes us wrong, and my dad will kill me." I shook my head. "We need to find a way to make them pay, that won't get us in trouble, and won't hurt anybody."

"You don't want much," Rich said, sighing.

Dev turned and pushed his cheek against mine. "I do want to get those guys. Especially Brad. But if we do, wouldn't that make them just want to get back at us? Where does it stop?"

"Maybe." But I'd already made up my mind about this. "We can't keep letting Brad and his buddies take little pieces out of you and the others, just because they hate me. He needs a taste of his own medicine."

Dev shook his head. "It's not just you, Kelly. Yeah, Brad hates that you're better in wood shop than he is...but he hates all of us, 'cause we're gay."

"And from Bent Fork," Rich added.

"And because we're all smarter, and better looking," Joey said, deadpan.

We all laughed.

Joey nodded. "Okay, so what do we do?"

"Yeah." Rich looked like he was ready for something, but just had no idea what it might be. "How do you pull the teeth on a rat, without getting bit?"

"Well..." I sighed then, because I had no idea, myself.

Dev suddenly grinned against my cheek, and then pulled back and smiled at me. "You don't know, either. Face it, Kelly, we're not the evil shitheads that Brad and his bunch of loser buddies are. Doing cruddy stuff to people doesn't come natural to us."

I smiled, and kissed him. "You're right. So we need to open the doors and let our crazies out. Let's start with weird, and go from there."

Joey laughed. "I like it. Okay...how about we sneak into Brad's room at night, drug him, take him into town, and tie him to a chair, naked, on the courthouse steps?"

Dev let out a startled burst of laughter, and even Rich grinned. "Yeah!"

I shook my head. "I love the idea, but that's assault, kidnapping, and something else stiff for drugging the guy. I want to get him, but I don't want to spend five to ten in Scatterburg for doing it."

"You would think of laws," Joey admonished. But the faint smile he wore told me he wasn't serious - not totally, anyway.

I rolled my eyes at him. "My dad's a deputy, remember? We can't do anything illegal." But then I quickly modified that. "Nothing seriously illegal, anyway. I can go with maybe a little trespassing, but that's about the extent of it."

Rich made a face. "So I guess jamming a fire hose up his ass and turning it on full-force is out of the question?"

I smiled. "Uh, yeah. Popular as that option might be, it would also get us in deep shit with Sheriff Dizzard." I sighed. "Not to mention my old man."

Joey patted Rich's hand, and then looked over at me. "Speaking of Sheriff Dizzard, couldn't Devvy just file a complaint against Kisner? Isn't that assault, throwing a can of paint at someone?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "Although whitewash is just lime and water and salt. If you get it on your skin and leave it there, you'll get a mild burn, but It isn't really dangerous, or poisonous, like some paints might be." I gave Dev a squeeze. "Good thing you didn't get it in your eyes, though. That might have been a different story."

"I had time to duck forward. What got on my face ran down out of my hair."

I shook my head, my anger returning again. "And Brad would have that whole truckload of guys who'd swear up and down that it didn't happen the way you said it did. My dad says cases where it's one guy's word against another's are tough to prosecute. Here there'd be all those other guys disputing what you said happened. I think nothing would happen with a complaint, and I think that would just make Brad happy."

"And I don't want to do that," Dev put in.

I gave him another small hug, and nodded. "No."

Despite what the others said, the root of all of this trouble was Brad's hatred of me. He knew I was gay, for one thing, and that rankled him. Gay was not okay in these parts, though people in Bent Fork at least pretty much kept their opinions to themselves as long as we didn't parade it before them. And, we didn't. Out in public we stayed very cool about things, reserving our affections for our alone-times here at the shack. Bent Fork looked out for it's own in it's odd way, and so long as we stayed kind of invisible, no one much cared what we did.

So there was the fact that the four of us were gay, that Brad didn't like. Then there was the fact of my dad, a deputy, which meant hands off me, at least, because underneath all that hate and anger, Brad didn't want to be in dutch with the law any more than the next guy. With Brad's dad on the city council in Muskrat Hill, anything his idiot son did reflected back on him, and much as old man Kisner hated gays himself, he knew the wisdom of keeping his opinion to himself so as not to mess up what he had.

And finally, there was the fact that I always outperformed Brad in wood shop, which was just the last straw for him. He acted like I was cheating in some way, even though he had been present in the same room when I'd created some of my pieces. My mom had said that Brad probably only had one thing he was reasonably good at, one thing upon which he could base his entire future, and that was building things with wood. Brad's dad made furniture for a living, and he expected his son to take over the business someday. To Brad's dad, his son had to be up to the task, had to be the best. Tad Baker, who also lived over in Muskrat Hill, had told me that Brad's dad was always yelling at his son in the shop, calling him incompetent, and saying that even 'that damn nancy-boy at school' built better furniture than he did.

I could kind of understand Brad's position, but that didn't make me sympathetic to his actions. And the fact that he seemed to control that group of sawhorse knuckleheads he hung with only made him more dangerous. Hate is a tough thing to deal with, especially when you can't hate back. Much as I couldn't stand Brad Kisner and his buddies, I didn't have that much hate in me to do them harm. All I wanted was for them to leave us alone.

But Brad was the key here. His buddies were followers, and without Brad around they never bothered us at all. Something had to change, and I knew that meant doing something about Brad.

I felt Devin's eyes, and then realized that all of them were watching me. "What?"

Rich grinned. "We're just waiting for that nefarious machine between your ears to crank out something suitable."

Devin smiled. "You usually do."

I looked at Joey, who just shrugged. "Most of what I can come up with is illegal as hell. This one's going to need a smoother touch."

I laughed at that. "What I need is some inspiration. Something to prod me."

Dev rubbed his nose against my cheek. "The Thinking Place?"

Rich hooted and grinned. "The Thinking Place."

Joey simply nodded. "Cool. Let's get dressed and go."

* * * * * * *

The county landfill over at Brovard is efficiently run, with the county working hard to please everyone from the EPA people to the local farmers and well-owners. Garbage goes in, gets deposited into a cell, is periodically covered with clay, and once the cell is full, covered with topsoil, and grass planted. Then a new cell is begun. All very efficient and environmentally friendly.

People weren't always this tidy, however. Once upon a time, they just found an out-of-the-way stretch of land, and dumped their trash there. Hawkmore County is dotted with these old dumps, some small and ancient, others larger and more recent. Many people aren't even aware of them. And until the demand for land catches up with what is available and cheap, it's likely to stay that way.

The backcountry can hide a lot of sins. The eight-odd acres between Cowlick Hill and Diamondtop Mountain is mostly tree-covered, a low-lying valley that isn't close to anything or anyone. It's private land, but I couldn't tell you who owns it. But I can tell you that those trees hide one of the coolest places on earth.

Starting somewhere in the mid-nineties, judging by the old cars scattered about the landscape, people began dumping their junk there. Not daily trash, so much - not bottles and cans and empty cereal boxes. No, this was genuine junk, the sort of stuff that you usually had to pay someone to haul away. Old cars; old refrigerators, dishwashers, ranges and washers; farm equipment; broken televisions, and electronic things whose original purpose could only be imagined; toys; bicycles; bed frames; furniture; carnival rides; broken tools; electric motors; lumber; metal; old trailers; old gas pumps; tires and wheels - a planet full of cool stuff, it seemed. Enough stuff to build a battleship, if you were of a mind to, and your budget was dirt cheap.

And I haven't even began to detail what was there, hidden away under the trees. And most of it was unaccountably fresh, a little dirt but no rust, as if time itself had wandered by and forgotten about the place. It was really something special, and a place we all had come to love.

I found the dump when I was young, and I thought it was just incredible to behold. Here was a place to come and browse, to treasure hunt, to build dreams. It was the sort of place one might find the bones of dinosaurs, if one looked long enough, and hard enough.

It was still in use, too, going by the periodic additions of truckloads of new material. How those trucks got there was a little bit of a mystery, as there were no roads to the place, just one narrow path that wound for a mile or so through the woods before finally hitting the shoulder of Route Two down from the Cafferty's place. As a boy I had imagined helicopters flying over under cover of darkness, and raining their contents down through the trees; but it was obvious that the stuff covering the ground had been set here, not dropped from any height.

That little mystery only added to the place for me. While most folk would just see a lot of trash, bees nests, and poison ivy, and nothing useful about the place at all, I saw it as the launching pad for ideas. A treasure house, where some very cool things could get started.

Dev and Rich - even Joey - shared my enthusiasm for treasure hunting, and we'd spent some happy hours here, exploring. The sofa in the shack had come from there, dropped overnight, it seemed, between our visits one day and the next. It hadn't had time to be rained upon, or shit upon by birds, and we carried its not inconsiderable bulk back to the shack just beaming at the ideas of what we were going to use it for. Lots of cool stuff had found its way back to the shack in the last few years, where it now stood in a corner or sat on a shelf, awaiting its return to glory.

I called this repository of lost treasures 'The Thinking Place', because it was a place full of ideas, and craft, and engineering, all of which had finally reached a point where someone had stopped seeing a use for it.

But that did not make it junk!

We'd changed into jeans for the trip, and we each had on a pair of work gloves. You had to be careful, because nature finds a use for everything, even discarded treasures. The occasional wasp's nest in an old dishwasher, and the poison ivy that's grown up here and there, are real dangers. We'd gotten very good at spotting these sorts of things, and no one had been stung or gotten an ivy rash in a couple of years now.

I had never seen another soul at this place, not in five years-worth of visits; but the winding paths among a lot of the stuff laying about spoke of the fact that we were not the only frequenters of the treasure house. There were others that shared the dream.

"So, what are we looking for?" Dev asked, his eyes roving among the stuff piled everywhere. "Hey...that stuff's new since the last time we were here."

I looked to where he was pointing at a large pile of boxes and things, and nodded. My little mental map of the thinking place wasn't perfect, but this close to the point of entry, it was pretty reliable. "Okay, we'll start there."

The boxes were mostly full of metal parts of some kind, all the same, with just a tinge of tarnish on them. Their purpose was completely unknown, and the cryptic part number and description on the boxes did not help to identify them.

"Someone cleaned out an old storeroom, looks like," Joey said.

"Doesn't inspire me, any particular way," Rich added. "Looks like horseshoes for a very tiny horse."

"Yeah." I nodded. "Not what we're looking for. Let's move on."

The carnival rides were mostly pieces, and all dumped in one spot. A few battered horses from a merry-go-round stood and grazed in tall grass near two dented cars from a roller-coaster, and another from a tilt-a-whirl. Around them were assorted signs and colorful sections of plastic and Bakelite, and some larger pieces of steel framework with pulleys and chains and cables still running through them, the paint dulled or even chipped completely away. The exterior of the big tilt-a-whirl car was very dented, like it had maybe come flying off the turntable that had originally held it. But the plastic seats inside were still serviceable, and there was room for four.

The tilt-a-whirl car had been set atop a real car - an old Ford of some type with the roof crushed down to the body - and so afforded a pretty good view of the immediate surrounds. We climbed the doors of the Ford underneath it, and got aboard.

The woods were quiet save for the pleasant songs of birds, and the faintest rustling of leaves moved by the faint breeze. Here was a spot where one could sit and contemplate the world. Or, at least our small part of it.

"I see some new stuff over there," Rich said, pointing off to the left.

"There, too." Dev indicated a clean new mound off in the other direction.

I shook my head. "I can't figure how this stuff gets here. I've never seen a truck up here in all the times I've been here. I know people aren't carrying all this in by hand."

"Yeah." Joey nodded. "And we've been here almost all day a couple of times, and then seen new stuff the next day They must be coming in at night or something."

"Why?" Rich asked. "I guess maybe it's illegal dumping, but it's been going on for years, and no one even hardly knows about this place. What's to hide?"

I had to agree. "Don't know. It is crazy that we've never seen anyone dumping shit here. But it's cool that they do."

Devin patted my knee. "We came here to think, and to figure out what to do about Brad and his friends, remember? We can worry about how stuff gets here some other time."

I had to confess that I hadn't had any ideas yet. Getting back at someone who is willing to play dirty is hard, because it means you have to get down on their level to do it. Brad and his cronies apparently didn't mind at all playing in the dirt, but it was a stretch for me to imagine doing it. It wasn't the way I was raised, and my dad, especially, was a guy who believed in the fair treatment of all. He had once said that being fair put a fella at a disadvantage, so that he had to be even stronger in dealing with others. Which, I had finally learned, meant the same thing as 'nice guys finish last'.

But my dad was good at his job, and the town probably respected him the most of everyone that worked in the sheriff's department. Sheriff Dizzard got a lot of respect, too, but as much of his was born out of fear of his devilish temper than out of admiration for his abilities. My dad's respect was clean, and I was proud of that. He got a lot done by talking sensibly to people, by being reasonable, and I guess that was how I had been trying to approach the problem of Brad Kisner and his friends. Reasonably.

And yet...my dad also liked and respected Mike Dizzard, despite the fact that the sheriff was not always fair, and not always nice in the way he treated people. My dad seemed to think that the sheriff's methods were a little crude, but that his results were good, and that that somehow balanced it all out. Gran would have snorted at that, and said it was simply saying that the end justified the means; but there was apparently some invisible, unknown quantity that most of us missed in Mike Dizzard, that my dad could see, and which he could respect.

Maybe I'd understand it all when I was older. I'd already come to get that some things needed time to take root, and that as far as myself and my friends went, we were still in the process of seeding our lives. My mother would have smiled at that notion, patted me on the arm, and said, "See, Kelly? You do have patience!"

So...maybe I needed to look at this problem less from my dad's point of view, and more from the eyes of Mike Dizzard, who even now seemed to see every problem as an illegal still. His answer to a still would have been an axe, applied just so, and with fervor, and the resulting demolition would have been justice in his eyes.

So maybe what was needed here was not reason, but just a good, old-fashioned axe!

"What are you smiling at?" Joey asked, looking strangely at me. "You see something we don't?"

I started, and then laughed. "Maybe. Maybe I do." I stood up and pointed. "Let's check out that stuff over there."

For the next hour we walked about, sifting through the latest piles and mounds of boxes and bags and junk. There were some interesting things to be found there, but nothing, not a one of them, sparked a plan in my mind. Even so, we had a growing pile of our own, of stuff just too cool to remain behind.

Joey was into things electronic, and his bedroom looked like the parts department at the Radio Shack in Farland, before it went out of business. He was the first guy in Bent Fork to have one of those drones with a camera on it, which he flew about by radio control. We'd used it to explore a lot of the backcountry from the air, and the fairgrounds when the county fair was there, and even to do a little spying on what the folk in Muskrat Hill were up to. It had been a lot of fun when he'd first gotten it, but lately we had gotten on to doing other things again, and the drone was now sitting atop Joey's dresser, waiting for its next outing.

But that never stopped Joey from pulling anything that was electronic from among the masses of stuff, and just now he had the most contributions to the 'take back' pile. Some of it was recognizable - a table radio with a huge cigarette burn atop the plastic case; the chassis from one of those old televisions with the huge glass picture tubes; and something big and square in a green metal case, that had a beefy mechanism inside that was simply bewildering in its complexity.

"I'll bet you don't even know what that is," Dev told him, shaking his head.

Joey managed to look pleased with himself. "Sure, I do. It's an old jukebox - you know, that plays records?"

I gaped at him. My gran had a turntable system in his living room that played 'vinyl', as he called it. "That's some ancient stuff there!" I said.

Rich frowned at the case. "It doesn't look like a jukebox, Joe. I've seen them in the movies. They got flashing lights, and all kinds of chrome and stuff on them."

Joey grabbed the case and wrestled the thing around sideways. "It's military issue...see?"

On the side, in dirt-covered white letters, were the words, PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY, and a long serial number.

"By the kinds of tubes in the chassis, this is early - to mid-fifties technology. Maybe Korean War. The case is messed up and dirty, but the guts are clean. If the tubes are good, they may be worth some money!"

"So take the tubes out," I suggested. "That thing must weigh sixty or seventy pounds, Joey. How are we going to get it back?"

Joey grinned. "It won't be that hard, if we all help."

Rich groaned, but immediately shook his head at me. "Just say yes, Kelly. You know you can't win."

I looked at Dev, who smiled and nodded. "Aw, what the hell. I'll help."

I sighed. "Okay. Leave it here for now. We'll get it on the way out."

But in the very next pile of junk we found a lowboy cart, with one of the wheels missing. It was flat, just a platform riding a few inches off the ground - originally on four wheels - with big steel handles at the ends to guide it. It was scratched and dented, and someone had spilled paint on it and let it dry at some point; but other than the missing wheel, still serviceable.

Joey immediately yipped in happiness, and turned to look back the way we came. "I'll bet one of the back wheels from that old lawnmower we passed a ways back will fit on that axle." He immediately patted the pockets of his jeans, and produced a pair of needle-nosed pliers. "Let me go and look!"

In a few minutes he was back, wheel in-hand. It was slightly smaller in diameter than the wheels on the cart, but not enough to matter, and it slid neatly onto the empty axle as if it belonged there. Joey used the pliers to push the cotter pin through the hole that would secure it in place, and then looked as happy as I'd seen him in some time.

"This trip was blessed by the junk gods," he said, grinning in an uncharacteristic display of good humor. "We can pile a lot of stuff on here and push it back. No need to carry my jukebox now!"

Dev grinned at me, and Richie threw an arm around his boyfriend's shoulders and squeezed him. "Careful. You're smiling."

Joey sighed, and wiped his face clean, returning the serious lines to their proper places. "Better?"

Richie laughed, and kissed Joey's cheek, but didn't say anything more.

We continued hunting, and adding things to the cart. There was some pretty cool junk, but nothing that inspired me to revenge against Brad Kisner's Muskrat Hill mob. The cart grew half full, and then three-quarters, and still nothing had prodded me to action.

And then, in a little clearing where the sun shone down between the trees, a pile of junk waved at us.

"Did you see that?" Devvy asked, in a hushed voice. "There's someone laying in that pile of junk!"

We had all stopped, and were all staring. Thirty feet ahead of us, an arm was sticking up out of a mound of stuff. It would lay flat on the pile briefly, and then raise and wave at us a moment, and then lay flat again.

"Someone needs help!" Rich said, rushing forward.

We left the cart and followed, and quickly neared the pile. As we arrived, we could see that it was two arms waving. The second one had been out of sight around the bulk of the pile. And between those arms was a head, wearing a big, floppy black hat, under which a strange face looked out at us.

"Holy shit!" Rich yelled, skidding to a halt. Joey bumped into him from behind, and Dev grabbed my shoulder to steady himself as he and I ground to a halt.

The face had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all of which looked human enough. The mouth was even set in a smile. But it was the kind of smile the devil might wear when he was teasing someone down the wrong path. There was just something utterly creepy about that face that gave me the shivers, which only moderated a little as I realized that this was not a living, breathing person laying there half immersed in junk.

"What the - ?" Dev began.

Joey laughed. "It's a scarecrow! Don't you see?"

I stared at the creature, and understood then. "Oh. One of those newfangled electronic ones, huh?"

Joey stepped forward excitedly, pointing. "Yeah, see? That floppy hat is covered with film-type solar cells. They keep a battery inside charged, and there's a circuit there that sends a pulse to the little motors in the shoulders every now and then, and the arms wave. You hang the thing in a field, and to the birds it looks like a real person is working there."

Dev laughed. "A real person? Maybe in a chainsaw murderer movie! That thing is weird looking!"

Joey gave out a little frustrated puff of air. "The birds don't know any better, ya goof. All it takes to keep birds away is something that moves like it's dangerous to them. They don't know the difference in the look of the thing!"

"Then why make it so scary looking?" Rich countered. "If it's just for birds, what does it matter how the face looks?"

Joey smiled at his boyfriend patiently. "They got to sell the thing to people, Rich. They make it look like a real scarecrow so that people will buy it."

I looked at the strange form, laying there, and slowly, the beginnings of an idea began to take form. "We'll take it along with the rest of the stuff," I said.

Rich and Dev turned to me as one. "Something?" Dev asked.

I shrugged. "The beginnings of something, maybe. We'll take it, definitely."

Joey grinned, delighted, and took the scarecrow by the shoulders and went to pull it out of the pile. It was then that we discovered that the lower half of the thing, below the waist, was crumpled and tattered, as if it had been run over by a tractor, or maybe an Abrams tank.

"Whoa," Joey said, softly, examining the damage. "This poor dude's had his nuts flattened."

I looked, too, understanding now why the scarecrow was here in the dump. But...it was obvious that the lower half of the thing had only consisted of some sort of lightweight framework for the hips and legs, over which a reasonable facsimile of a pair of jeans had been attached. The jeans were in tatters, and pieces of the frame stuck through here and there, and the lower portion was definitely a mess.

"I can see why they trashed it now," I said. "But...we can cut off that junk. We'll figure out something to put in its place, and then just put an old pair of jeans on him. From a distance, you won't be able to tell he's messed up."

"From a distance?" Dev asked, squinting at me now. He smiled. "You do have an idea."

"Maybe. Isn't Deke Hawkins Day just a couple of weeks away, in Muskrat Hill?"

Dev scratched his head. "Yeah. What about it?"

I gave a little shrug. "I heard that Brad Kisner was going to get some kind of wood award at the festival. Get up on the stand in front of everybody, and get his hand shook by Mayor Stucky, and have the band play, and everything."

Joey snorted. "Wood award! Now I've heard everything!"

Rich grinned. "Oh, yeah. I heard that, too."

I nodded. "Brad's old man arranged it, to make Brad look good. Well, I was thinking...it might be nice if Brad got a little extra attention, there in front of the whole town."

Dev put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me. "I love you when you're being nasty!"

I sighed. "I am never nasty. It's just inspiration."

Joey reached out and poked me with a finger. "Yeah, okay. What have you got in mind?"

I turned and looked again at the scarecrow, and felt an idea forming in the back of my brain. But it wasn't complete just yet, and would need some fleshing out to make it into something we could work with.

"I don't know just yet," I admitted. "It needs time to come to a boil."

Dev moved closer, and rubbed his hip against mine suggestively. "I can help bring you to a boil."

A little thrill ran throughout my body, and I grinned. "Oh, I know you can do that!"

Joey sighed, and looked again at the scarecrow, just as it moved it's arms again. "Sad, that they just tossed this guy here. Didn't even bother to turn him off."

"The sun must have charged him up," I suggested, pointing to the way the floppy hat caught the down pouring of sunlight.

"Yeah." Rich patted his boyfriend on the shoulder. "They could have fixed the legs. The rest of it still works. But I guess their loss is our gain, huh?"

"That's for sure," I said, moving closer to the scarecrow. "Come on, and let's get Boney onto the cart."

Dev moved with me, laughing. "Boney? Is that what you've named him?"

"Yup. He has to have a name, right?"

"Wait a second and let me find the switch to turn him off," Joey said.

The scarecrow was not heavy at all, and was obviously meant to be hung from a pole. The electronic parts of him must have been incredibly lightweight. We hauled him from the pile and placed him onto the ground, and Joey found that the pocket on the front of Boney's plaid shirt was only sewn on at the bottom, and held on at the sides by Velcro. He pulled that back, revealing a tiny, waterproof control panel, with a power switch and a setting knob for the frequency with which the arms would move. He slid the power switch to the 'off' position, and refastened the pocket.

"Bet this thing cost some money new, huh?" I asked, as we hefted Boney and started back to the cart.

Joey shook his head. "Nah. Maybe a few hundred bucks. Probably less. Electronics are dirt cheap since the Chinese came along."

I stared down at the strangely compelling face, thinking to myself that the look of this scarecrow would be enough on its own to scare kids at Halloween. Maybe birds didn't pick up on things like that, and so the arms waved, too. But whoever had designed this thing had a flair for the macabre, no doubt in my mind.

We reached the cart and laid Boney atop the pile of other treasures, and started back to the shack.

The idea in the back of my mind grew with each step as we walked, and by the time we reached the concrete pier by the boathouse, I was trying hard not to grin.