We turned and looked at the old man. He popped his false teeth and clattered them together, still in his mouth. It was demonic. Benny and I laughed and he gave us each a silver dollar.

His skin laid back, quit against gravity and the form of a skull present, with eyes deep in sockets, and false teeth, amber stained in fresh tobacco.

He impaled seven men with a bayonet, it was known, to escape captivity, and later, after many promotions, three U-Boats surrendered to him.

Then he comes home and marries and fights no more.

G.G. ran the house, top to bottom. Papaw used to have the skunk-house; he built it after coming home from service. It was large, square, and the earth around it conceded first forming a kind of moat that kept the children from entering.

“Boys,” came the rattling admonition, “boys, you best behave. Behave, or its the skunk-house for you!” And then he laughed, a throttling guffaw, clearing his lungs that, until he was 4, made Benny cry.

It was his workshop, till his fluid filled chest kept him from going out of the house. Full of tools, antique tools also. But more, he kept his navy detritus accumulated in there. He had told us stories, but the remainder, we had to deduce from the items that eventually became our toys and were left about the yard in various states of use and decay.

Hillbilly Jimmy declared the skunk-house condemned and no one from our generation had been inside, whatever remained there belonged to the mystery. The stench of skunk was so strong sometimes that you ran, thinking you’d been sprayed by a skunk unseen.

Benny had seen Hillbilly Jimmy eviscerate the feral hog with the knife Dad gave him, and this ratcheted up his involvement with the new blade, a buck knife. The action of slicing, the visceral quality of tearing at something motivated Benny to look for items he could hack away at.

Benny came up to me, I was sitting on a deck of earth overlooking a creek which cut away slowly at the landscape.

“I Fashioned this weapon,” and he showed me the bladeless handle of a hockey stick, with his new blade taped to it as a spear, “it’s to kill Fat Eyes.”

Fat Eyes had frightened me for three years now after I had a vision of him and a fire in the closet. The creature I imagined was standing at the foot of my bed here in G.G.’s after I had noted flames flickering in the open black maw of a closet. I thought I was awake and trying to call out for help but all that was heard came out as a kind of terrifying cry, like cows brought to slaughter. The night terrors, sleep paralysis. Fat Eyes stood short, short for an eight-year-old. With a bulbous kind of head, a shock of dark hair and eyes, abnormally large.

I would lay in bed after that, awake, cool with fear and he would creep out from the dark areas of the forest, running with that chopping gait, part gallop, part slither, gaining ground, drawing nearer, like Shelley’s creature visible on the ice plain, till he reached the home and entered through unknown spaces. The creaking home sounding his arrival.

Benny sat up and listened to the tales as I informed him of Fat Eye’s nearness, and he, the brave son, only thought of impaling him on the new blade-stick he had fashioned, never revealing fear.

Benny had wrapped his spear in a beach towel, to mostly conceal it, though the blade’s tip was cutting through the cloth. Benny unfurled the spear and now threw it at a wooden wall. It stuck well. He marked a circle in a circle and began throwing the weapon with earnest ambition, repeatedly.