By Any Other Name - 3. Chapter 3

"Can you get a little closer?" I asked, leaning on Joey's shoulder as we watched the view displayed on the screen of his laptop. "I want to make sure they haven't changed anything."

"Sure." Joey moved the little joystick, and the drone dropped a little lower, even as Joey zoomed the camera in on the freshly-built grandstand on the front lawn of the Muskrat Hill town hall.

It was early morning, just a half-hour after sunrise, and no one was about. But that the Muskrats were getting ready for a hoopla was obvious. Besides the new grandstand, a number of stalls had been erected, presumably so that local merchants could offer their wares at the festival. A flatbed truck covered with a tarp parked off to one side held a couple of hundred folding chairs, which would undoubtedly be arrayed before the grandstand come Deke Hawkins Day. The front of the town hall had a large canvas sign hanging down the front of it, hand-painted, that supposedly showed local hero Hawkins setting off the dynamite that had warned the town of the approach of Little Phil Sheridan's cavalry during the War Between the States.

It was a grand story, full of rousing adventure and heroism, and Muskrat Hill's one great claim to fame. The blast had been heard in Bent Fork, too, rousing the militia of both towns to action, thus adding the weight to the battle needed to deflect the enemy cavalry to the east, and thus spare the towns from Sheridan's famous policy of 'scorched earth' treatment of Confederate habitations. The Muskrats were proud of their ancestor, and celebrated his valiant warning each year at this time.

"Poppycock and malarkey," my gran always said, accompanying that verdict with a snort of derision. "And just pure bullshit. Your many-times great granddad, Silas Apache Markstrom, told a different story. Old Deke Hawkins was at his still on Hawkins Ridge, above Muskrat Hill, cooking up another batch of his famous Racoon Twister Yeller Hootch, when he saw the Yankees coming through Applesnort Pass. He lit out to save his own butt, and left the fire burning underneath his still. It blew up, and that was the sound that woke the towns to action."

This tale, told by more than just my own ancestor, was one of the reasons the two towns didn't get along. A hero in Muskrat Hill, old Deke Hawkins was just a chickenshit moonshiner who ran off here in Bent Fork, and who got lucky at the way things turned out. The Muskrats said that we were just jealous that Bent Fork didn't have a hero of equal stature, which was why we were always dumping on theirs.

It didn't matter to me. I'd attended one of the Hawkins Day festivals when I was thirteen, with my dad, who was there with Mike Dizzard to represent the county at the gala. Like Bent fork, Muskrat Hill had its own town deputy, but it was customary for the county sheriff to attend. Sheriff Dizzard, who lived outside of Bent Fork, simply gritted his teeth and did his duty, even managing to look and sound pleasant for much of the day-long function. He always took one of his own deputies along, for moral support, and to carry his little metal flask of Old Grandad, another sort of support. I'd gone the one time, since my dad was going, but once had been enough for me, and I hadn't been back since.

The Muskrats liked to dress up old fashioned for the day, with the women in hoop skirts and over-petticoats, and the men in the gray uniforms of the Confederacy, or in loose dark suits over white cotton shirts, with wide bow ties about their necks. I'd thought they looked plain silly, but dad said that was how people dressed in those times. They must have sweat like pigs in the early summer heat, is all I can say.

The set up this year was exactly the same as I remembered it from three years ago. Custom is a hard dog to teach new tricks, and once people set out places for regular functions to happen, they don't like to change things around. That made it easy for me, because I could visualize where everything would be. Mostly I was concerned with the grandstand, and the tall bell tower on the town hall. That last stood a good forty feet above the town square, and was just the right distance where people looking up at anyone standing on the little balcony that ran around the spire underneath the big clock would have trouble making out any details.

In the ten days since we'd found the scarecrow at the thinking place, we'd been busy, hard at work on our own contribution to Deke Hawkins Day. Joey had turned out to be even more of a tech wizard than even Rich had known, figuring out ways to make happen the things I'd dreamed up at the start, and to which we had all contributed as the plan evolved into something larger. What had started in my mind as kind of a prank had grown in that time, to the point where I knew that if my dad learned about it at any time before or after we did this, it would probably be a long time before I would be free to visit the shack again.

At first this had scared me. Dad and I got along well because we mostly thought along the same lines, and viewed the world in the same way. But as our plan grew and became both bolder and more dangerous, I knew in my heart that I was well over the line in terms of both the legality of what we were going to do, and in the moral area of how one treats his neighbors. Although I had singled out Brad for our vengeance, there would be other people around him, not to mention a square full of Muskrats, who would all become witness to what occurred come Deke Hawkins Day.

But...at the same time, the sense of satisfaction I was going to get if we pulled this off seemed worth the risk. It was a juggling act, one that could go either way, with us either maintaining our balance and succeeding, or us slipping up, and everything falling into a heap at our feet.

"Stop worrying," Devvy kept telling me, punctuating his words with a hug or a kiss. "No one is going to get hurt. We'll have a little fun, Brad will get his, and then we can go on and enjoy our summer."

School had let out the day before. I know that I was not the only one that breathed a sigh of relief at that. The guys had had to endure several more bouts of indignity from Kisner and his cronies, and of course Brad had smiled at me every time he saw me, as if to say 'you ain't doing squat about it!'. I responded by turning out the finest tea table for my final grade that Mr. Newcombe had ever seen in his wood shop, so superior even to Brad's in style and finish that I could see him fuming about it, and the tiny fear in his eye over what might happen once his daddy found out about it. I simply smiled at Brad after Mr.Newcombe had finished praising my work in front of the whole class, and winked. "Better luck next time, huh?"

That Brad thought he would not see me again for the whole summer was probably the only mitigating factor that morning, or otherwise he might have simply exploded there and then. But Mr. Newcombe didn't tolerate what he called 'shenanigans' in his class, and the last thing Brad wanted was to be kicked out of his beloved wood shop right at the end of the school year. So he had eaten it, and liked it, and that had made me so happy that I almost skipped down the hall as I went to meet the other guys for the walk home.

I had halfway expected to see Brad at some point, in the hallway or out on the grounds; but he and his buddies had simply left after the dismissal bell, off to start their summers, they thought, with no more complications from anyone from Bent Fork, let alone four harmless gay guys.

How little they knew! And now, the Deke Hawkins celebration was only three days away.

I watched the grandstand as the drone floated almost noiselessly about it. "Up a little higher, so I can see those cross members, okay?"

"Okay."

The front of the grandstand had no top, though there was a square framework set back from the front that supported a canvas canopy. There was a row of chairs at the back of the stand, and people sitting there would be beneath the canopy and out of the sun. But the front of the stand was in the clear, and anyone coming to the microphone would be out in the sun where everyone could see them properly. All I knew is that the design worked for what I had in mind, and that was all that mattered.

With the hundreds of chairs that would be lined up facing the grandstand also facing the town hall and the bell tower, the stage was set for us to have an audience of measure for our performance, one that would surely remember this Deke Hawkins Day for some years to come. And, with the front of the grandstand open to the sky, the principle players would also be able to turn about and see the tower, and witness what was to come.

The equipment we had assembled or built, with Joey doing most of the figuring out and instruction, was simply awesome. The Thinking Place had offered up a huge bounty in materiel, and what we had been unable to find there and adapt to our needs, we simply ordered online and had delivered by super fast mail. The four of us pooled our limited funds, and the final actual outlay of cash was hardly more than a hundred-twenty dollars. That was thirty dollars apiece. Small price to pay for total satisfaction!

We'd checked out the town square at Muskrat Hill twice with the drone, inspecting the new grandstand to make sure that our equipment would work as needed, and checking out the bell tower to ensure that what we were preparing for that structure would also perform as planned. And, lastly, we'd used the drone to scope out a place where we could run the operation from, settling on the roof of the old Hernshaw Hardware, closed up and shuttered for some years now, ever since old man Hernshaw had passed with no heirs.

Muskrat Hill was no bigger than Bent Fork, a main street passing through a center town square, with a few side streets off the square that were lined with shops close in, and which gave way to shaded lawns farther out, hosting rambling old homes that were new when Victoria sat on the throne of England. A lot of the locals lived outside of the town proper, along the winding two-lane blacktop that was Rural Route Two, and off the many gravel roads that ran off the main route and back into the hills.

The town's businesses were clustered around the square and at the heads of the side streets, and the Hernshaw Hardware building was on the square proper, to one side of the Town Hall, at the corner of the square. The old brick building backed up on woods, and now belonged to the town. Merlin Caspar, who owned the dry goods store, had simply added on a new section behind his building after Mr. Hernshaw passed, and filled it with the kinds of items the old hardware store had sold, kind of making another hardware store unneeded. So far, the town had been unable to let the structure, and it had remained empty. So we had what we felt was a safe base of operations, and a quick getaway route through the woods.

Everything seemed to work perfectly for what we needed. And now, with this last look at things to make sure nothing had changed, we were now ready for the most dangerous part of our plan: the actual set up of our equipment in the town itself. That needed to be done the night before the opening of the festival, so that everything would be in place the following morning. We could not risk placing even the simplest elements any earlier, lest they be discovered beforehand, and ruin our plan.

Through the drone's high resolution camera, I scoped out what I could see of the framework supporting the canopy at the back of the grandstand, and could see no changes that might interfere with our carefully-wrought plans. At this stage of the game, if no changes had been made to the stand by now, none would be forthcoming. Indeed, the stand did have a 'finished' look about it now, the row of chairs already lined across the back beneath the canopy certainly suggesting that no more work was to be done there. That the stand had also been built by Brad's dad and a couple of his friends kind of put the icing on the cake for me. Mr. Kisner had, so to speak, set the stage for his son's comeuppance.

I patted Joey's shoulder, and leaned closer to his ear. "Great. Now turn, and let's look at that podium one more time."

The drone turned and the camera came around, and the podium came into view. It stood in the center of the stand, behind the low front railing that ran to the stairs on either side of the grandstand. The outside of the stand had been wrapped in colorful blue and gray vinyl bunting, but the inside had been given a finished look simply by covering the frame with heavy blue waxed paper and stapling it in place. This went for the podium, too, which was just a frame of two-by-fours, and which would have looked clunky if left open. Had the grandstand been intended to be a permanent fixture of the green before the town hall, they would have no doubt sheathed everything in wood; but the stand was basically bolted together, and they simply put it up each year for Deke Hawkins Day, and then took it down again and stored it in the big shed around back of the hall.

The paper covering of the podium was a key feature in the success of our plan, and it wouldn't do at all for someone to get it into their heads to cover the podium with something a little nicer. But it was immediately apparent that that had not happened, and once again I could only grin at that stolid fellow that was 'custom'.

"Okay," I said, patting Joey's shoulder, "you can pull out now. Fly over the roof of the hardware store again for one more look, and then you can head her home."

The drone gained some altitude, turned, and headed for the indicated building. We planned to do a recon of the square each morning just after sun up, to make sure nothing changed. The night before the celebration, we would make our way to Muskrat Hill with our equipment, and set the final stage.

* * * * * * *

Deke Hawkins Day was on a Saturday, and by the night of the Thursday before, we were all a little nervous. We'd arranged to spend the next couple of nights at the shack, the four of us, not a problem for our parents, who figured if we were there, we were staying out of trouble. It was, after all, on my gran's property, albeit a fair walk through the woods from his house on the hill. Neither he nor meemaw had visited the old boathouse since we had taken it over, my grandmother just rolling her eyes and smiling knowingly at what sort of delicious mischief boys might get into when left to their own devices, but taking no interest in seeing for herself. I think she thought we looked at dirty magazines and told blue jokes, and just did teen guy things like any other teen guys. She was an innocent, a little less imaginative than she had once been before her little stroke, and if she had ever known that I was gay, she had forgotten it completely.

I suspected that gran knew, but if he did, he was neutral about it, having long ago decided that family was family, and not really something you could just dispense with. I knew my gran had a low opinion of the law, and of the government in general, and that the idea of his son being a deputy irked him more than a little bit. But he'd evidently gotten used to it, and no longer made the little comments about Sheriff Dizzard, and his one-time propensity to 'bust up' peaceful and law-abiding folk's stills. For a man who said he didn't really like the taste of beer, gran consumed more than enough of it, buying and tossing back at least a case of the stuff each week. It was his refrigerator from which I cadged the occasional brews for our Friday night hangs, and if he had ever noticed the few missing bottles, he'd certainly never wondered at his count being off. I just figured that he figured he'd had a few more than he thought!

Dev and I had the couch this night, while Rich and Joey were sprawled on the mattress. It was a warm evening, and a little sticky, and we were down to our unders for comfort, and for...you know. Nothing like snuggling up against your boyfriend with scarcely anything at all between you.

We had a movie playing - something with zombies in it - but I hadn't even caught the title. The sound was turned low, and the crickets in the woods outside seemed closer to my ears. I was lying behind Dev, one arm over him, my chin atop his shoulder and my cheek pressed close to his ear.

"I love you," I whispered.

"I love you back," he returned, just as softly, and adding a smile for good measure. He gave a little sigh, and rolled over to face me, and I pulled him closer as he offered a sweet kiss. I could feel his other offering pressing against me, down low, and knew we'd be getting to that long before the little core of trapped heroes in the movie finally blew up the zombies and got away.

"Are you nervous about tomorrow night?" he asked then, referring to our planned midnight mission to place our gear.

I gave a little sigh of my own, having been distracted away from all of our plans by his closeness, and now feeling all of them come rushing back. He felt it, and pressed his face closer to mine. "Sorry."

I kissed him. "Don't be. I'm not."

He was quiet a moment, and then: "Kelly? Do you think what we're doing is wrong?"

I'd already mulled this whole question over, and had a ready answer. "Yes. If we get caught, there'll be hell to pay."

I could feel him biting his lip. "Then...why are we doing it?"

I smiled, and gave him a little kiss. "Because we should. Because if we don't, Brad and his bunch will keep taking from us, and we can't just sit and let that happen."

He grunted. "But how will this stop him from picking on us? He won't know it was us that did it."

I had to agree with that. "He might not. But...he's gonna feel what it's like to be made fun of, and I don't think he'll like it. I hope it will make him think about it."

"It's...a little scary, though. We're going to do this with a whole town watching."

"Yep." I had to smile at that. That very fact was part of the payoff! "Sometimes, the only way to deal with injustice is with another injustice. I doesn't make it right, but it does kind of even things out."

Dev laughed, and kissed me. "Bet your dad wouldn't think so."

I gave a little cringe at that. "No. I expect he'll be pissed at me, if he finds out. He may even suspect us, anyway. My dad zeroes in on stuff like that, sometimes."

"So you want to do this? You're not just doing it because of me?"

I pulled back to look at him. "You think that?"

"Well...I wondered."

I smiled, and had to kiss him again. "I'm doing it for you, yes. And for Rich, and for Joey...and for me. I'm tired of taking shit from those guys. Okay?"

Dev gave a little sigh, and snuggled closer to me. "Okay."

I held him, and knew then that what we were doing needed to be done. For Dev, and for Rich, and for Joey. And for me. Nice guys do finish last, if they let that happen. The world is full of unpleasant people, who seem to think they have some sort of right for everything to go their way. Even at the expense of others, who are simply doing their things, living their lives, not bothering anyone. It was unfair, and I'd been raised with fairness squarely in my sights. I had to do something to preserve that ideal, because I really did believe in it.

What I was coming to see was that there was fairness, and then there was fairness. As in equality. There needed to be a balance here, a leveling of the playing field. We had to stop being so nice, stop turning the other cheek, or just wind up with bruises on both of them. It was time for us to act.

It was time for...for...

I hesitated to use the word retribution. And revenge was even worse. They both seemed so small and angry - nasty things, not to be viewed directly. But that there was both revenge and retribution here was plain to me. We were about to be, in our own ways, as nasty to Brad as Brad and his bunch had been to us.

My gran has a saying - one he uses often to describe the events of the world. I'd always kind of smiled at it, because it sounds so much like an old guy thing. But for the first time, I think I really understood what he meant by it.

What goes around, comes around.

And I could see it coming, even now. For Brad Kisner, it was about to come around in a hurry!