“You better watch your step, Stella. That boy might hoe a row better than you.”
I grabbed my things, gave Scraper the finger and stomped back to the house.
The warning reminded me of something Dallas had told me last week when he’d been edging Scraper’s lawn. Seems Scraper had built a catapult from scraps of wood and an old bike tire. According to Dallas, the catapult had a tarp next to it, covering a pile of his three dogs’ poop. Scraper had been sitting in his lawn chair, a pair of binoculars hung from his neck, Dallas said. He went on to detail their exchange.
“What is that?” Dallas had asked, pointing at the tarp.
“What’s it look like?”
“A big pile of poop. Jesus, Scraper, how can you just sit there?”
Scraper shrugged. “Lost my sense of smell a long time ago in a fight. That’s why I pick up the road kill. Watch this.”
He shoveled a pile of filth onto the arm of the catapult, strapped the arm back, and flicked away an elastic band. The arm of the catapult snapped forward, pitching its load into the air. Scraper handed Dallas the binoculars to view the results. Brown clumps surrounded my tanning chair.
“I think you hit a foot or two to the left,” Dallas said. “Don’t you think she’ll call the police or something?”
“She won’t. The sheriff owes me too many favors.” Scraper glanced sideways at Dallas and smiled, but Dallas said it never quite reached his eyes. “Besides, she slept with half of the deputies and dumped them when she was done. None of them will write a report about something as stupid as dog poop in her yard.”
“You looking out for me, Scraper, or was that a warning?” Dallas asked.
“Just a little friendly advice. You humiliated her a long time ago. Don’t think she’s forgotten it.”
When Dallas told me that, I shrugged it off but, like I said, Scraper isn’t as dumb as he pretends to be.
I didn’t say anything to Dallas and tried to pretend it didn’t bother me. If Dallas was telling me about Scraper’s plan, what was he telling Scraper about me? But the next incident was the last straw.
A couple of days later, while I was at my yoga class, Dallas went to work and found Scraper sitting next to the tarp again, catapult ready. On the tarp was a pile of dead dogs, two squirrels, and an opossum.
“You got to be kidding,” Dallas muttered.
Scraper turned in his chair and waved him over to his cooler. “Grab a beer. I got something I want to show you. I ain’t had time to try it out yet.”
Scraper handed him the binoculars and his beer. “Watch this.” He picked up one of the dogs. It was frozen stiff.
“You froze them?” Dallas asked, incredulous.
Scraper nodded. “They’ll fling better.”
Scraper loaded the dog carcass onto the catapult, pulled the lever back and launched it into my yard. It landed a short distance from my chair.
“You sure she’s not home?” Dallas asked.
“Yep.” He loaded one of the squirrels onto the catapult and launched. “Damn, too short.” He loaded an opossum and launched again. It landed a few feet from the dog. “That’ll work. I just want her to be able to smell ’em when she gets outside. She used to hate that smell when I got off work. She didn’t like that part of my job,” Scraper mused out loud, “but she sure liked a challenge. She never could make me do what she wanted.”
“So now you’re throwing dead dogs in her yard?”
“Don’t lecture me on my ex-wife, son. Just because you’re the flavor of the month don’t mean you understand.”
“If you think I’m going to let you throw more crap in her yard when I have to clean it up, you’re wrong,” Dallas said.
“What are you going do about it? You gonna throw me through a glass window like you did Tom Slaughter?”
Dallas said he tried to rein in his rage, but he smashed Scraper’s nose anyway. While Scraper howled and tried to stop the flow of blood, Dallas got in his truck and left. He came to my house that night, and after we made love, he told me what had happened. I didn’t say much, but inside I was seething. Dallas must have known the night was ruined, because he got dressed and practically ran out the door.
The next morning, I found him staining chairs in his garage.
“I need you to do some work for me today,” I said.
He ignored me, moving wood around. Well, I’m not that easy to get rid of, and the bottom line is, he was still my employee.
“Dallas, I’ve got a yard full of dead animals. I need them cleaned up.”
Dallas looked up. “I
’m not cleaning them up. Scraper’s deliberately doing this stuff because he knows he can get to us both.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
He sighed. “I’ll come by after lunch and dig a hole for you. But that’s it. I’m not getting stuck in the middle of whatever it is you two are doing anymore.”
“But I’m not doing anything! It’s all him!”
He straightened up and said, “You two have been fighting World War Three for years. And I see now I’m just the latest weapon.”
“That’s not true,” I lied.
“I know why you hired me. I’m not selling my grandparents’ farm. Not to you. Not to nobody.” He crossed his arms and stared at me, hard, with his lips pressed hard together. Any other day I would have melted. He looked incredibly sexy like that.
Instead, I saw red. That little troublemaker was not going to ruin my plans, and I was going to kill whoever told him about the zoning problems I was having. “After I gave you a job when nobody else would, and let you in my house—”
“Me and apparently every man you hire,” he said. “I might work construction and landscaping, Stella, but I’m not stupid. Now, I said I’d dig you a hole, and I will, but that’s all. Burying road kill is not part of the deal. Scraper knew you’d try to make me clean it up. That’s my punishment for being with you.” He made a show of clamping a new piece of wood and picking up the sander. “I’m not touching them.”
He switched on the sander, drowning out anything I was going to say.
That night I sat and fumed. In my heart, I knew Dallas wasn’t to blame. Scraper and I had played him like a fiddle. Once again that man had pissed in my pot and ruined the only good thing I had going. I’d used all my equity and borrowing power to buy that land to develop it. If Dallas wouldn’t sell his granddad’s land and Scraper controlled the zoning, I was going to end up sitting on a 300-acre piece of dirt. With no houses on it, I’d be lucky if I could sell it at all, much less break even.