Practically a dwarf at barely five feet tall, Pod saw eye to eye with his customers only when stamping around on his Pepsi crates platform behind the pharmacy counter. His hoof-like shoes, almost hemispherical, had spawned his nick-name, and his sideline sales of misappropriated Quaaludes made him iconic to a select group of eighth and ninth graders, until he was caught and had to make do peddling kitchen quality LSD. But that was later. In 1971 he was still clomping around on his platform in the Five Points Pharmacy. After Cousin Garnet had told Motsie and Vincent about grinding graveyard bones into powder to make people sleep, Vincent had told Martin and his new friend, Lindsey, about it. The idea turned into conversational fodder, fantasies became ill-thought-out plans, and the day came that fall when a plan waxed real. A Saturday night right before Hallowe'en, bone powder in Motsie's stash pouch, she, Martin, and Vincent headed by the Whackers', where Lindsey sneaked out the back door to join them. They would go over to Pod's old farmhouse beyond the Bolton's, and knock him out with a blow-full so Martin could raid Pod's stash of stolen Quaaludes.
They came through the woods, stopping off first at the Bolton's old Teardrop to smoke some of Vincent's homegrown, and then approached Pod's place from the back. All the lights were off but the blue flicker of a t.v. set in the back bedroom. The window was open just a crack. They crept up to the shrubs and could hear Pod praying, but the shrubbery was too wide for them to blow any bone dust into the window. It seemed they had no choice but to sneak into the house and blow the powder right through the bedroom doorway, so they slid through the screen door onto the screened-in porch. Lindsey was elected to squirm through the doggie-door since she was skinniest. She let the others in, and they all tippy-toed through the dark kitchen in a clump, whispering about which one should go blow the dust into Pod's bedroom.
"I already suffered enough today, Motsie was touching me on the neck with a dead finger bone in the car while that pervo had his hand in my crotch all the way from Raleigh to Five Points, so don't y'all be lookin' at me!" Cried Vincent in a stage whisper that had the others loudly shushing him all at once.
"I already went through the doggie-door for y'all, so don't look at me, either!" Lindsey was fierce next to Vincent and clearly directing her words to Motsie and Martin.
"Okay, people, remain calm," Martin began in a very quiet whisper. "Let's not alert the press. I don't mind slipping through his room to the bathroom by myself and steal the 'ludes, but I think somebody else should go blow Motsie's stuff to knock Pod out first. Motsie did the biggest part already, getting the dead guy's hand bones from a coffin and then grinding them up on my porch, which I also helped, so I'm voting for you, Vincent. If the pervo had squeezed your nuts in a bad way, you'd ha' said so, so it musta not been all that bed. You go..."
Vincent saw everyone looking at him so against his own wishes and better judgement, he reluctantly accepted the velvet pouch and inched to the partially open bedroom door where he lingered for a few seconds and hurried back to the kitchen in a panic.
"Pod was choking some lady out, y'all! We should all rush in together and save her before he has her buried in a whiskey keg under the house!"
Sure enough, now they all heard it. A woman's voice was in there praying for her life, and getting pretty loud. Pod's geriatric beagle hopped down from the sofa and trotted to the kitchen, probably thinking that Vincent was somebody he knew, and Lindsey leaned over to pat his velvety head.
"If y'all aren't gonna help me save that poor lady, then we might wanta think about gettin' outa here before our fingerprints become associated with the scene of a murder." Pod's dog was sniffing the bag Vincent had dangling by it's thong, and made a try for it. Vincent snatched it out of his semi-toothless mouth and bolted for the back door That spooked dog, who began to bay his beagle bark-howl. Lindsey tried to shush him until the living room light went on and she followed Vincent, with Motsie and Martin right behind. The unmistakable schlack of a Winchester chambering a round shifted all their gears into overdrive.
"Damn!" Vincent managed to comment. "Who knew that little club-foot effer could get around so fast? Like a pony!"
The closest cover was a shed in the far corner of the yard. Pod used it as a garage. That's where they headed, but the boom that followed the schlack sprayed the shed wall and some of the trees beyond. A few bits of bird shot found Martin's hind side before he reached cover, but Motsie helped him into the pitch dark shed, and put him into the floor of the car. Everyone piled on top of him and Vincent pulled the lap-blanket over them all. No one breathed for the longest time. Just when Martin whispered that his butt was stinging and he couldn't breathe, Vlincent and Lindsey shushed him saying they heard somebody coming. Motsie couldn't hear a thing with her face pressed into Martin's hair and Lindsey breathing in her ear, pressed down by Vincent on top of her, and a blanket over all of them.
Once they felt pavement under the tires, the radio turned on, and Martin begged Motsie to beg the ones on top of her to move off his rear a little, but the word came back to stay still as stones until the car got someplace where they could jump out. It didn't go far, luckily, and when the somebody had been out of the car for more than a minute, Vincent poked his head over the back seat like a meerkat to make sure the coast was clear.
"Man, this is soo weird, y'all!" Vincent struggled with the dilemma of whether to let everyone in on where they were. "Why in the world was my mother's car in Pod's shed?"
Lindsey complained that Vincent was now squashing her legs too much, and poor Martin was crying at the bottom of the pile. Vincent got out and stood looking at his house while one light after another was turned on. He just could not put all this together. Everyone walked around the corner to the McCrary's, half-carrying Martin, who had to be taken to the Saint Mary's ER to pick out the bird shot. He refused to tell how and where the gunshot had occurred even though it was considered a reportable offense. The police came and questioned all the kids, but no one was about to tell that they'd broken into a house to steal drugs.
Fortunately, the break-in had not been reported yet by Pod, either. After the police left, Lindsey pointed out that Pod would be better off not reporting anything that could bring police investigators snooping inside his house if he had illegal drugs for them to find. She wanted to know about why Vincent and his friends had waited so late to come by the Whackers' since she'd been outside babysitting all afternoon hoping they could go down to the Bamboo in the municipal garden. When she heard all the details of how the bones had been gotten, she was just disgusted.
"Even if Vincent had blown that dust in there, it wasn't gonna work without the stump-hole powers! Over in Cottondale, everybody knows about stump-hole, where you people been hiding?" Inside, she was consumed with envy that she hadn't been in on the adventure with Vincent and his other friends that day. She was jealous that Vincent let Motsie lead him thither and yon like he had a ring in his nose for her to pull, and most of all, it made her sick that any girl could be as bold as Motsie. She thought Motsie was just about like a man. "Not even just a normal man," she thought inside herself, "some kind of wild, bohemian man!"
Motsie had taken to the idea of hitch-hiking that previous summer. Since Martin and Vincent were keen for adventure outside Five Points, they made good company for Saturday-trips during the school year to Chapel Hill, to Dillon, S.C., or to Raleigh. Vincent was now growing his own in the sun room since his dad had left and his mom was around less and less, so if Motsie didn't have the good stuff from her cousins in Benvenue, Vincent would stingily share a little something from home.
In Chapel Hill, they took turns at being a blind harmonica player on the wall until they panhandled enough spare change for lunch across Franklin Street at Hector's. In Dillon, they did the same thing at South of the Border until they had enough for a strip of photobooth snapshots that Motsie mailed to her Cousin Garnet along with a postcard to substantiate the lie about her and Martin having gotten married there in the Summer of Love when they'd been 13. At Dix Hill, they visited a compulsive car-thief friend who was locked up in the creepy Spruill Forensic building, roamed the oak grove, walked the tracks, and followed up on Cousin Garnet's idea about getting some bones from a graveyard. Potters Field at the insane asylum had declined due to erosion, vandalism and the elements of time. The adjacent city dump had garbage trucks driving over the edges so that some of the coffins had slid down hill and were slightly exposed. This made it easy.
"The cafeteria ladies are poking around the edge of the dump with little dinner forks," Vincent laughed breathlessly as he leapt over the tracks and climbed through the kudzu to Martin and Motsie. "They don't look like they like it too much. They were mostly cussin' and sayin' they were gonna quit if they found any bodies."
"I dare Motsie to go find some bones!" Martin chirped to Vincent's obvious horror.
"I'll do it, y'all,' Motsie grinned mischievously. "But y'all come with me as far as those benches by the Kirby building and act like we're just visiting Potter's field to see relatives' graves. Then I'll slip away down the hill by the dump and see if I can blend in with those colored ladies and offer to help poke around. And by 'help,' of course, I mean get some bones."
"I bet any of 'em 'd be glad to give you all their forks and head straight to the bus stop. But I doubt you'll find any bones with a fork," Vincent was quick to add."
"Well, I have my KA-BAR," Motsie lifted her skirt to show most of her thigh and the leather sheath.
Motsie left Martin and Vincent smoking another joint on the benches, and she headed across the field and down the hill to the edge of the dump where the action was. It seemed to take an awfully long time, but Vincent each lay on a bench after the joint, and looked up at the oak leaves and the clouds swimming east behind them, talking about stained glass and aquariums, and other stuff stoned boys think of when there's nothing better to do than look up. Motsie eventually came back looking triumphant, the velvet pouch raised up in one hand showing several pointy angles, and laughed at them for laying there like hobos on park benches.
Hitching back to Five Points, some swarthy foreigner in a hideous avocado green 2-door Opel Kadett insisted that Vincent be the one to ride up front. Motsie and Vincent were fine with that, and crawled to the back seat to enjoy the free ride home. Motsie thought the reason Vincent kept turning around to glare was him recoiling with disgust as she repeatedly touched his neck with a finger bone to make Martin giggle, but as soon as they got out by Martin's house he told her that the foreign man had been groping his crotch all the way.
"Gross, man!" Martin laughed and snatched one of Batboy's pretend gravestones from behind the kitchen for Motsie to use as a grinder. She smashed at the bones on the concrete stoop behind Martin's kitchen, making splinters more than dust, and two or three of the knuckles just shot off to the side yard like rocks from a sling shot. A neighbor's cat got to one of them before they could retrieve it, and ran off to enjoy her snack.
Then they had gone to look for Lindsey at the Whacker's where she babysat during the day every weekend, and had gone over to do the magic on Pod that landed them in the ER with Martin in the middle of the night. Motsie at least was going to be able to call her parents with a good excuse for missing curfew, being there in the emergency room, and Lindsey could use the same one on the Whackers. Martin's parents had driven everybody over to the ER when they showed up, but even though Martin had some explaining to do, he was keeping his lips buttoned. Vincent just went home with Motsie.
They put the bone dust in a stump hole right before mass the next morning. In church, Motsie told Vincent the truth about the bones. She'd gone down the hill where the cafeteria ladies were poking around, and talked to a couple of them.
"They weren't trying one bit hard to find those coffins! They were deliberately poking around as far between the obvious graves as possible. One said I was crazy, and nobody had any business in a graveyard at all unless they were either burying somebody or getting buried. About then I noticed a faded old bucket of Colonel Sanders right there in the dump. I just got some desiccated drumstick and wing bones out of it. They were handy. They looked convincing. I wouldn't ha' touched you on the neck with a real people bone, Vincent; I's just playin'."
Vincent was immensely relieved, and even laughed about the trick.
"Maybe the stump hole powers'll end up makin' 'em as effective as human bones for some future trick!" Vincent could usually find the practical solution to fit most circumstances.
When he finally did go home that evening, there was an extra car in the driveway, and Mrs. Beeching explained that a friend of hers had had a break-in and didn't felt safe at home, so would be staying with them for awhile. The friend was taking a shower in the master bath just then, but when Vincent was helping his mother set the dinner table in the fancy dining room, not the kitchenette, he heard the clopping of Pod's hoof-like shoes down the hall.
