Revenge?
Expending useless energy.
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John looked at me with a grin that only five beers can produce.
"So, you're gonna let them run you out of town without gettin' even?"
"Nobody's running me out of town, brother. This promotion has been in the works for nine months. It's just timing that I got it after we split up. How cold is it out there now, fifteen? Ten? I'm going to be living in the sunny South, and it looks like my house will be on a lake if they take my offer. While you're freezing your ass off up here I'll be sittin' on a dock waitin' for Mr. Big."
"Asshole."
I laughed. John loved to fish but he hated ice fishing. I really wish I could take him and his wife Adele with me. He was the closest thing I'd ever have to a brother and his wife was an angel.
His angel appeared just then, ordering a glass of wine and taking off her coat. "Jeez, I froze my ass off out there!"
It came out before I thought. "God, I hope not."
She colored up and giggled. I once told her in an alcoholic fog that her ass was the gold standard all women should be judged by. Her hug told me she wasn't angry but she still brought it up from time to time. She was especially bad to do it when we were out at a restaurant or a club.
"How about her?"
I looked at the attractive woman and grinned. "Naw. A bit flat to be perfect. Still hot, though."
It was a running joke with us. If she wasn't bringing it up John was, just to watch me flame red.
John kissed her and told her we were planning my revenge. She frowned and I laughed. "You need to keep him off those websites. It gives him peculiar ideas. I'm not doing anything stupid enough to put me in jail or run me broke. In two more months I'll be living the high life and she'll still be in this tundra with Bubba. I mean really, Bubba. Could it get anymore cliched?"
Then I laughed. "Besides, I think I got them pretty good already, don't you?"
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It was as sad and stereotypical as it could get. I came home in the middle of the day and caught them in bed. I will admit I had murder in my eyes for a minute but then I calmed and pulled out my phone. They were in their own little world and had no idea I was there. When I had enough pictures, it hit me. Martha hated being cold and wet more than anything in the world.
It was snowing lightly, and the temperature was in the low twenties. I pulled the weather proof cover off the spigot in the garage and hooked the hose to it. We were outside the city limits and still had a well, and this time of year that water was close to freezing!
I had just enough hose to reach the doorway of the bedroom, and I waited until he announced he was about to come before I hit him full blast. He screamed and rolled off Martha. To this day I don't think he got his rocks off. When he moved I gave her a good shot as well.
They were screaming and rolling around. Bubba tried to grab his clothes but I kept hosing him. It got to be too much for him so he ran out of the house. Into the snowstorm, stark naked. He tried to open the door to his truck but I had thoughtfully locked it before I hosed him. I was standing just inside the garage, dousing him every time he exposed himself. He was screaming and begging and the neighbors came out to see what was going on. One of the wives wanted me to stop, but my next door neighbor, a retired cop, just grinned and got his hose out. We took turns dousing him until the police arrived. They threw his ass in the car and if weren't for my neighbor I would have been in a world of trouble. He told them Bubba was threatening me (which was true. The whole time he was steppin' and jumpin' he was screaming about how bad he was gonna kick my ass) and I was using nonlethal force to try to keep him away. The sargeant just grinned and asked if I wanted to press charges. I declined and even let him go in and get his clothes. My darling wife was on the sofa huddling under every blanket we had and was still shivering. The cop's grin got bigger.
Bubba got a free trip to the hospital to be treated for exposure.
Everyone in our small town knew about the incident before night fell. I stayed over with my mother and called Martha, telling her to be out of the house in three days. She balked but my mother called the cops again, and since the house was in her name she was forced to leave.
The divorce wasn't pretty and she almost had a nervous breakdown when she found out we didn't own the house. In the end I gave her the car she just had to have, and half of everything we accumulated, and by we I mean me. She ended up in a small apartment, living on the lump sum I'd paid instead of alimony, trying to find a job before it ran out.
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John grinned at the memory. "Yeah, he'll never live that down. And what your mother did, man that was priceless."
Bubba became a joke. Every time he mouthed off where he worked they threatened to douse him with buckets of water. Women would look at him and giggle. One asked him in front of a bunch of people at the bar where the crew hung out at if he was still suffering from shrinkage, or was it always that small?
He started to slap her and ended up wearing half a dozen mugs of cold beer, and the owners banned him.
He brooded for a while, and after enough alcohol he came up with a brilliant plan. He'd go to my mother's house and whip my ass just to prove how bad he was. He pounded on the front door, and started yelling at Mom to make me come out and face him or he'd take it out on her. The drawback to that plan was I'd already moved back into my old house.
She calmly told him to wait by the door and like the dumbass he was he did. A few minutes later she came around the side of the house with her own garden hose, and nailed him. She'd already called the law and when they got there he was screaming and chasing her down the street, finally collapsing as she darted inside the door of a neighbor, who slammed it. Mom was laughing hysterically. "Jesus is that guy out of shape! I was almost walking there at the end so he could keep up. Tammy, I bet it'll be a while before you make fun of me running 5K's again."
The police picked him up and slammed him into the back of the car. He begged for a blanket, or for them to turn the heater on, but they left it stopped while they interviewed everyone. It seemed to take forever to get everyone' statement and he started turning blue, so they called the EMT's, who wrapped him in a space blanket and took him to the hospital. He was again treated for hypothermia and the cops that interviewed him made it very clear that if anything like this every happened again, they would be very, very slow to respond. Then they arrested him for communicating threats, trespassing, attempted assault, and public intoxication. He was three points above the legal level when they checked him at the hospital.
It took him three weeks to get out of lockup and by then he'd lost his job. On the other hand, he'd gained a new nickname. Bubba was gone forever. His new name was Hoser.
He did it all to himself and I couldn't have asked for a better ending. He left town in the middle of the night and no one ever knew where he went.
With Hoser gone, Martha was facing the prospect of fending for herself and tried everything to force a reconciliation. But it was too little too late. Besides, I was already gone, firmly in place learning my new position. Mom told me she was engaged again a week after the divorce became final. She never did like paying her own bills.
It must have really galled her when our old house went up for sale. She tried to get her new honey to make an offer but he refused. Mom got a good price out of it, and gave the money to me, for a house at the new location. It was almost enough for me to buy the place on the lake I had looked at, and I owed less than the price of a used car when the paperwork was done. I had a plan to pay it off in three years.
A few weeks later there was a knock at my door and there stood Mom, with three suitcases. "Carry these in. I'll be staying here until I find a new house. What? You think I was going to stay in that frozen wasteland while you were down here in the sun? Besides, you're my only child and I refuse to be five hundred miles away when the grandbabies start coming."
My grandparents had passed and left her their home, a two thousand square foot brick two story on a two acre lot. She'd gotten our house in the divorce settlement with my Dad, who disappeared before the first child support payment was due. Mom was a pretty smart cookie and kept the paperwork current. When they found him four years later he owed a bundle. The judge made him pay it all back, adding fifteen per cent a month to the child support he now had to pay or go to jail. When I graduated college he still owed her for two years and she wouldn't forgive it. I guess maybe I get my vindictiveness from her. When my grandmother passed she moved into the house, giving me her old one. I'm glad now we never got around to doing the paperwork.
There was a new subdivision on the ridge above the lake, and she found a nice two bedroom 'retirement' cottage that just happened to look directly down on me. I saw her expensive pair of binoculars on her deck and she blushed, saying she'd taken up birdwatching.
I was still the Yankee that moved into the old Smith place five months later, but Mom was just one of the girls. In less than three months she knew all the gossip in the county. She got her new friends involved and all of a sudden I was getting invitations to meet Mom's new friends, and by sheer coincidence there just happened to be a sweet young thing there who was between relationships at the moment. Most of the time they were as embarrassed as I was, but I did get a couple of good friends out of it. Friends that didn't mind showing up in bikinis and staying the night.
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A year later a woman came by searching for her sister. I hadn't been with her in months, but she had disappeared and the family was looking. She got out of the car and I was surprised to see she had two children with her, twin boys who had just turned six.
She had a judgemental look on her face, but a quick conversation relaxed her. I was keeping a pretty sharp eye on the kids and they were looking hard at the dock.
"Would you like to go out on it?"
They grabbed my hands and were tugging me along. Mom called out. "Hey! Did I give you permission to get near the water?"
I looked back over my shoulder. "It would seem you've been outvoted. You take one and I'll take the other, for safety. Let them have a look around. What could it hurt?"
"They could fall in!"
"We'll fish them out."
"They can't swim."
"Then it would be the perfect time to learn."
I laughed at the expression on her face. "Relax, I was a certified lifeguard when I was young and my first aid certificate is current. Let's just make sure we don't have to use it."
