This all took place in 1996, but I’m going to keep some details hidden or altered because I don’t want this all come back to me IRL. I still don’t know if I could be prosecuted for anything since I was a kid, but I’m not willing to take the risk of getting my life ruined by what happened all the way back then.
The most important contextualizing is that this all went down in Appalachia. I really don’t think most people understand how 3rd world and desolate Appalachia really is. Most people can’t even fucking pronounce Appalachia correctly, let alone comprehend what kind of lives those of us from there lived.
What’s normal where I grew up isn’t what’s normal for most Americans. It’s not normal to never have eaten a homemade meal. It’s not normal that most “funny” family stories are to do with being molested or abused. It’s not normal that I had never tried toothpaste until I was a tween. It’s not normal that my teacher told my brother and I we weren’t allowed back to the school we walked three miles on unpaved road to until we stopped smelling so bad—but she never called CPS.
Nobody cares about fucking Appalachians. You can see why we get befuddled when some college kid mentions our “white privilege”. My childhood had more in common with an Afghani refugee than some kid from California or New York.
When you live in a world like that, how can you learn to think that any life matters? Nobody has ever treated you like you’re worth anything more than a dying rabies racoon on the side of the freeway. This context is important because this was the mentality that helped me survived my childhood, but also lead to what happened.
To start the real story: our bungalow was down a dirt road four miles from town. That may seem like a short distance, but we didn’t have a working truck and everything around us was dense forestry. It was me, my little brother, my momma, her boyfriend, his mom, and sometimes his daughter from a previous relationship. It was a three bedroom shack with a broken fridge and undrinkable water we had to boil if we wanted to drink—but it always tasted bad so we drank Mountain Dew and ice tea instead for hydration.
Once ejected from school for being smelly (the shower water gave me a rash so I wasn’t gonna use it), my brother and I started playing in the forest right behind our property. You can get lost in this area pretty easily if you don’t know what you’re doing. It was only a few yards into the trees that the house and road completely disappeared and left you in the sea of trees. Sound didn’t travel any further than sight. My momma never heard a peep out of us even when we were screaming our heads off.
After a little while we started to make a stick breadcrumb trail to help us explore deeper in. We would dig branches into the ground, sticking up like twig trees, and that would be our guide point back to the house. I don’t know how far away from the property we really got. It was probably a lot less distance covered now compared to how it felt then.
That’s when we stumbled out the other side into Winky’s property. Who’s Winky? A neighbour who lived on a road parallel to ours. If you walked in a straight line through the woods you’d end up at his house. We didn’t know him very well because momma said if we got too close he’d try to stick a finger up our asses. I don’t know if he was a kiddy-diddler or if she just made that up because she didn’t like him for some other reason. I wouldn’t put it past him just because he was a weird looking fuck. With a permanent snarl on his face and a lazy eye (why he was called Winky, I think). His backyard was a tetanus death trap, covered in broken down cars and scrap metal that he sold or hoarded, I’m not sure.
The first time Winky saw us playing in his yard he picked up an old sickle and threw it at me. Luckily he missed and we darted back to our stick path and up to home. But now we had a game: see how riled up we could get Winky. We had nothing else to do. Go home and watch Momma pop 10x the recommended dose of pain pills for her bad back? Go stare at the broken TV screen her boyfriend smashed and pretend Batman was on? There was nothing else to do. No other distraction from what our life was, so we tormented a man with possibly even a sadder life than our own.
Winky didn’t seem to have any family. Momma said he used to have a daughter but she went missing before I was born. And his wife left him and moved away. Didn’t mean he wasn’t a piece of shit, but he was still a sad case. Regardless, my brother and I started stealing stuff from his yard to build our own fort halfway between his house and ours. I used to be so unafraid of spiders. I would pick up a sheet of rusty metal, wipe the spider egg sac off and smash the spider with my bare hand, and be on my way back to our fort.
We usually did this when Winky was on one of his runs to pick up more junk. He owned a gun and we didn’t want him to shoot at us, but he would still notice when his garbage was missing. So when we got caught I heard him hurling curses and carrying a piece of pipe he’d taken off the back of his truck.
“YOU LITTLE N** I’LL FUCKING SHOW YA WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TAKE MY SHIT”
My brother and I scurried off. Usually he didn’t follow us into the forest because he also knew how dangerous it was. This time, though, he did. He was mad enough not to care about getting lost. We jettisoned the bits and pieces we’d been collecting, inexplicably making a new trail for him to follow us.
Our house was on a slope up from his place. We had to climb down and up a ditch by carefully grabbing the old tree roots sticking out of the side of the ditch. It’s only like a 5-6 foot inclined climb, but it’s certainly hard to do when in a hurry. Even at the time I had a brief heart stopping moment when I felt the root almost give out as I grabbed onto it to hoist myself up. Still, I scrambled up.
Winky, however, was heavier than us. We were clambering up the slope when we heard Winky scream. My brother was too afraid to go back. So I went alone while he ran home. Winky was at the bottom of the ditch, one leg twisted round the wrong way. He screamed bloody murder, not even aware of my presence.
My first thought was to go back home and get help for him. Then I started to overthink it. If we helped Winky, he would tell Momma what we’d been doing. Then we’d be in trouble. Then Momma’s boyfriend would beat us up.
I stopped running and started walking. The forest quickly smothered Winky’s screams. Then I was alone in the wilderness with nothing but the sound of rustling leaves and crushing weight of fear in my chest.
My brother hadn’t said anything to Momma when I got back. I guess we both had the same idea about getting in trouble. He never went down to the trees again. But I decided I needed to cover up what we’d been doing. I went back into the woods early the next morning and followed the stick path. The shitty fort we’d been building easily came apart, now just another mysterious junk pile in the middle of nowhere.
Creeping as quietly as I could, I scooted down the slope and looked over the edge of the ditch. Winky was still there, crumpled up in a little ball. He wasn’t moving. It gets cold at night, so maybe hypothermia had gotten him. I travelled sideways to find an easier part of the ditch to get down. He still didn’t move as I walked right by him. Why hadn’t he crawled home? It was only like 3 minutes away. Maybe he’d broken more than just that leg and couldn’t have moved at all. Maybe he’d had a heart attack from all that screaming.
I started to uproot our stick trail, pulling them out of the dirt and chucking them into the forest. I followed the stick trail all the way back to the ditch, putting my back into pulling out the dead branch while pretending I didn’t see Winky several yards away. My skeleton about jumped out of my skin when I heard him speak.
“You little shit!” he hissed. “You better get your ass out of here and call 911 or I’m gonna shove that stick so far up your ass you become a scarecrow!”
He didn’t make himself appealing to help. I dropped the stick and bolted back towards his house. I was terrified of trying to navigate my way back up the ditch while he was there hollering at me. I instead took the long way back home by following the road. It took a good long extra while, but nobody noticed my absence.
I didn’t go back for a few days. My brother and I didn’t even speak about what happened. We’d be even more trouble if we came clean now, so we’d made a silent agreement to pretend it never happened.
I went back one more time. Mainly to get those last sticks on the slope so no trail could ever be found. My heart tried to bust through my rib cage as I eased down the slope. There wasn’t any sound. A part of me thought he’d be gone. But no, he was there. No longer crumpled up, just lying on his back with one hand resting on his stomach. His eyes were closed and his lips were slightly parted. He didn’t look to be breathing. Inhaling sharply, I picked up a rock and chucked it down onto him. He didn’t react. I threw another one. He still didn’t move. I sat down and chucked rocks and sticks at the body until it looked like someone had done a shoddy job covering the body under foliage. Winky was dead. That was for sure.
I went back home, throwing sticks away the whole time to permanently end the trail. I felt oddly empty. No fear, no sadness, not even guilt. Perhaps because it didn’t feel real. For the rest of that summer I felt numb. Completely detached from what happened.
Winky was never found. But I guess nobody ever really looked. Nobody cared. He was written off as another missing person in Appalachia. No relatives to claim his property, so it sits derelict. I looked it up on Google Maps. All his weird scrap metal still littered everywhere.
I only started to think about how messed up it was when Momma’s boyfriend beat her to death and my brother and I got shuffled into foster care. I haven’t seen my brother since, and neither of us have attempted to contact each other. Maybe he’s dead too, or maybe both just want to leave the past in the past.
I got lucky. I got out of Appalachia. No college degree or anything fancy but I do have a job and I rent a home. I go back and forth on whether I should tell authorities what I saw (or what I did). Winky’s body probably isn’t there anymore. Critters would’ve scattered all the pieces long ago. Winky wouldn’t be laid to rest, but maybe my conscience would be eased.
Maybe I was a bad kid, but I was a bad kid in a bad situation. Nothing can fix what happened, so I’m not sure if I should ruin my life over the death of some weirdo in the woods. I wish I could be a better person and take culpability. But there are things you can’t understand if you haven’t grown up like me. If you’ve grown up where life doesn’t matter, a rotten raccoon on the highway starts to look mighty similar to a crumpled up human corpse at the bottom of a ditch.