JENSON’S BOTTOMS

School let out for the summer. Aaron and I still had to wait until we turned 16 to get our official driver’s licenses and until then we were only supposed to operate a motor vehicle when accompanied by an adult. We were still stuck on our bicycles. We went a little farther each day, killing time, staying away from home.

We were riding on the gravel road through Jenson’s Bottoms and we came to an old broken-down wooden house surrounded by junk.

“That’s the Jenson place,” Aaron said.

An old bald guy in overalls walked toward us through the junk like a gnarled demon stepping through a hellscape.

“You boys want to make some money?”

We did need money.

“Ok.”

“I need some help cleaning this place up,” he said. “I’ll pay you two dollars an hour.”

I’d never seen such chaos. Rusty farm implements, mountains of tires, old cars, hubs, wheels, rims, engines, manifolds, tin cans by the thousands, barrels of all shapes and sizes, collapsed sheds, piles of wood, a hundred pretzeled bicycles, sagging, morose swing sets from some child’s nightmare, teeter totters, dilapidated tractors, woe begotten plows, barbed wire, a million scattered nails, screws, signs, pipes, plain old garbage like toilet paper, magazines, newspaper, dead rotted cats, milk cartons, Kool-Aid packets, coats and shirts and pants crawling with insects and vermin, water pumps, metal tanks and tubs that held who knows what at one time but now held still green water where mosquitoes bred, cereal boxes melted into the soil, pill bottles full of pill bugs, old pictures and photographs abandoned like snake skin, and snakes too, writhing their way through the crap looking for a rat.

“You can start with the barn,” he said. “I need it all cleaned out. Take all that shit and throw it down in the gully.”

We followed him through the weedy mess toward an old barn. Gnats swarmed into our eyes and mouths and grasshoppers jumped everywhere. The barn was overflowing with the same sort of stuff. Maybe there was a treasure hidden in there somewhere among the spider webs and bird nests. We could hear animals moving everywhere and it smelled like death.

“You boys look strong. I don’t expect it will take you long to get this cleared out. If you get thirsty, knock on the door. The missus has some Kool-Aid.”

He disappeared like a ghost.

“Shit,” I said. “I should have gone to Trina’s.”

“I should have stayed home and whacked off.”

We started grabbing stuff and walking it over to the side of the gully and tossing it down the side.

“Black widows all over the place in here,” Aaron said.

“The females eat their mates after they fuck them.”

I picked up an old car battery and Aaron picked up a gunny sack full of corn cobs crawling with worms. Most of the stuff was too heavy to move and really a bulldozer was what was needed. Or a can of gasoline and a match. We startled a few possums and a raccoon. Aaron cut his hand on the rusty seat of an old tractor. I found a box with a stack of dusty Playboy magazines in it and we sat around looking at those for a while.

“Good God, look at her!”

“I can’t take it anymore! Keep a look-out!”

Aaron went around back of the barn and jacked off. In three minutes, he came back and it was my turn.

We lasted two hours and didn’t make a dent in the barn. We walked over to the house and knocked on the screen door.

“It’s open!” a woman said from inside.

The house was crammed with useless, random material. Stacks of old newspapers, magazines and boxes reached to the ceiling and we walked through the narrow canyon between it all, following her voice. Missus Jenson sat at the kitchen table that she shared with two chickens and a big fat orange cat. She was so old and ugly we were afraid to look straight at her. The place reeked of urine.

“We have to go now, Mrs. Jenson. We worked for two hours.”

“You boys look hot. You want some nice Kool-Aid?”

She poured two glasses of green Kool-Aid from a grimy pitcher. The cat looked at us and seemed to shake its head no.

“Now, where’s my pocketbook?” she said.

She stood up and began to rummage under the sink.

We picked up our glasses and sniffed them. Aaron took a sip and grimaced. I took a sip. It was warm and had no sugar in it and tasted vaguely of medicine and pine needles.

“Ah, here it is,” she said.

She brought her pocketbook to the table.

“What’s the going rate?”

“Mr. Jenson said two dollars an hour.”

“Each?”

“Yeah.”

She carefully handed Aaron four silver dollars and then handed four to me.

“You boys come back now. Same time tomorrow.”

We managed to turn around and get back to the door and out onto the porch. Mr. Jenson was standing by the barn. He had dropped his overalls to his ankles and was bent half over like he was trying to sit down on an invisible chair. His body was completely hairless including his scrotum, which was round and taut and the size of a softball. His uncircumcised dick was at least 10 inches long and thick as a boat rope. His face was twisted in agony as a stream of liquid the color of Mrs. Jenson’s Kool-Aid flew from his ass in a powerful arc and splattered onto the dirt. The stream stopped and he scooted forward a few feet and then it started again.

We got on our bikes and rode away with our silver dollars in our pockets. I don’t know what Aaron was thinking, but I was lamenting the size of my dick.