Later that night Wreck turned to his brother and asked,
"Why did we accept his offer so quickly?"
Ruin grinned,
"You can't figure out why?"
Wreck shook his head.
Ruin's grin broadened,
"It's because that Jamaal Jackson guy reminded us of Tyrone. And Tyrone was the one person we could never say 'no' to, remember?"
Wreck's sky-blue eyes widened with realization when he thought about Tyrone Washington the black man who had reared him and Ruin like sons. The man who had trained him and his brother in the fine arts of fighting and killing.
Their adventure with Tyrone began after a curious chain of events, the first of which began when Wreck and Ruin then known as Corey and Jody Spooner were watching a videotape they had found. A videotape that clearly showed their father, whom they thought was still at work, doing things they had never seen him or any other man do before.
On the videotape they saw their father physically and brutally beat a handsome young blond man senseless then proceed to mutilate the unconscious man's body.
They watched as their nude father picked the equally nude young man up under the arms, hoisted him over his shoulder and, after testing the weight, made his way over to an armchair. Once there, he sat down and cradled the limp blond in his arms on his lap. He hugged the unconscious victim gently, and began to nibble and then BITE the blond man's ears!
Between savage growls, he bit and tore at the blonde's ears brutally…and even bit on his victim's neck until he had nearly drawn blood there. The man's blond head languished on this bitten neck lolling like the bud of a flower on a broken stem. Though he was still unconscious, he moaned in pain.
Their father's long-nailed hands began to scratch savagely at the victim's chest. Slowly he raked his way down the unconscious man's arms, and then down to his flat stomach. Angry red scratches appeared wherever their father's sharpened nails touched.
Both brothers knew that their father could never tire of mutilating his victim's bloody, scratched limp body. They knew then and there that their widowed father could continue with this sadistic behavior for the duration of the six-hour videotape scratching, cutting and biting his inert captive.
After a while the brothers watched as their father manually spread his victim's legs a little wider on his lap. His hand then scraped harshly across the top of his penis and the unconscious blond actually gasped. Still, he was out cold though. On the video their father laid his handsome young victim on the sofa and slowly kissed the limp and lifeless blond youth’s lips rather tenderly instead of brutally. Slowly biting on them, their dad wedged his tongue right in the knocked-out blond lad’s mouth and tried to taste every drop of his saliva. Then he slowly lifted up the unconscious lad’s right arm and licked under it—bathing his armpit hair and savoring ever droplet of his sweat.
The Spooner brothers were seemingly hypnotized as they watched the video. They were completely transfixed when they saw their father move down to his handsome unconscious blonde victim’s beautiful size 12 feet. Their Dad glided his tongue over the knocked out young man’s smelly white sock—sucking on them to siphon every drop of sweat out. He used his teeth to, one by one, pull his unconscious victim’s socks off, revealing the handsome lad’s bare feet. Their father ravenously sucked the blonde man’s toes and hungrily licked his soles. He even put his face against the sole of the unconscious man’s foot and flattened his lips on the limp and lifeless youth’s heel.
Even on the grainy video, the Spooner brothers could see that their father’s victim’s foot was damp. Their dad manually moved it on his face, pressing the sole into his cheek and dragging it up so that he could inhale the sweaty fragrance of it. He licked the arch
and slid his tongue back and forth behind the unconscious blonde boy’s sweaty toes. ... Then he sucked the limp lad’s toes one by one and finished with the big one.
Then he moved to the unconscious blonde youth’s penis.
The Spooner brother’s watched as their father's fingers began to caress and stroke it a little until it began to come to life. Little by little the tool began to expand, being filled with blood and the blond victim's unconscious excitement. With one more stroke, their father smiled to himself.
He shifted the blond youth on his lap, before spreading his legs even wider. He wrapped his hand around the youth's erection, and while ferociously punching and twisting the handsome blond's testicles with my other hand their father began to masturbate him.
Though still out cold, the victim cried in pain. Their father masturbated the young man to a climax. His unconscious victim had bumped and jumped in his arms as his hand sped over his penis. Almost at once, after the blond's orgasm subsided, he began to vomit without awakening.
Then their father moved his hands to victim's testicles, tugging and twisting them mercilessly. He ended the whole brutal experience by taking a screwdriver and plunging it dead-center of his young blond victim's nut-sack!
Both brothers never saw any more of the video because a hideous snarl shattered the quiet atmosphere of the den,
"What the fuck...!?"
Their father, who was home early from work, stepped out of the darkness. SLAP! Before Jody was even able to face him. The air exploded around them. He heard Corey scream as he too was slapped.
"I told you little bastards to NEVER to go into my private things!"
Their father screamed, his eyes full of uncontrollable rage and devoid of all reason or mercy.
Then Jody felt something akin to a sledgehammer slam him in the gut. He and Corey were both punched and flung violently back and both brothers landed with cries of pain as their heads and young bodies struck the floor. As their father beat them in rotation, cries of confusion, pain and terror pierced the night.
As soon as he got the chance, Jody grabbed his brother's wrist and both boys fled the house. Fled on foot down the street and into the dismaying night.
The Johnson family found Jody and Corey lying belly-up and sobbing on their backyard lawn. Both bruised and battered boys had run three blocks from their bloodthirsty father and were trying desperately to catch their breaths when Mrs. Ruth Johnson and her mother-in-law came out the back door. Neither Jody nor Corey saw either of these women until they were standing directly over them.
Though they were hardly more than semi-conscious as they were gently ushered into the house, each boy was introduced in turn to each member of the Johnson clan: there was a handsome boy who was around Jody's age, Hakeem; the apparent head of the household who was tall and resembled a bulkier version of Michael Jordan Amos; his wife, who looked ten years younger than her purported age, Mrs. Ruth Johnson; a muscular young man who looked to be around twenty who went by the name of Marcus.
Last, a senior citizen, her hair silver, her brown eyes stern. She was Amos's mother and Hakeem's grandmother, Miss Mattie Johnson. The boys already knew the old woman by reputation. It was rumored that she was a Louisiana voodoo queen well-versed in the dark arts.
The family's collective heart immediately went out to weeping Corey with his bruised little face and split lip, but it was Jody who garnered the most attention. He was lightly tanned, with a button nose and slightly curly copper-colored hair.
He couldn't have been long into his adolescence, but the way he carried himself made him seem older like a grown man even with a face full of terrified tears. Being a black family, the Johnsons could faultlessly spot a person who had seen some harsh times.
The fact that Jody and Corey were white made no difference whatsoever. When the limp and exhausted boys managed to gasp out the story about how their father had beat them, the Johnson's suspicions were confirmed.
The lads didn't get into just WHY Niles Spooner had taken it upon himself to brutalize his sons, but their injuries were enough to convince the Johnson clan that neither boy should return home just yet.
Amos Johnson gave Corey and Jody a good soaking in the tub before his wife tended to their injuries more thoroughly. When the electrician began to wash Corey's feet, the blond boy murmured with pleasure.
The experience reminded him of the sweet days when his father his TRUE father, not the brutal man who had legally adopted him and changed his last name to match his and Jody's. Back in those sweet days, when he was a really little kid, the blond boy's father had bathed him in the tub, taking special care with his tender young feet.
Corey often dreamed that his deceased dad would return from the dead and take him and Jody away to some safe world. He began to dream of such a world as Amos Johnson almost tenderly caressed his soles with the soapy sponge. And when Amos later began to message Jody's soles with the sponge, the tanned boy actually moaned with rapture. Moaned even more ardently than his half-brother had.
With just a little soap and water on them, the poor, bewildered boys couldn't seem to stay awake. After Mattie whom the boy's were somewhat afraid of due to the rumors which surrounded her in the neighborhood patched them up it wasn't long before they perched themselves on the sofa and began falling in and out of sleep.
When they were fully convinced that they were safe that they could let their guards down completely they dropped all the way into dreamland as if someone had conked them unconscious.
Jody and Corey hid with the Johnson family for some time after that. The Johnsons had taken in kids before. Most often they were black or were abandoned waifs from the stock of newly arrived immigrants from somewhere south of the border.
The family had kept many a Inglewood youngster, bringing them in out the cold. The exhausted Spooner brothers were just the latest. Amos and Marcus carried them to Hakeem's bedroom, undressed them, and tucked them into bed.
Later on the boys would have considered staying with the family indefinitely. But not soon after they were taken in, both boys were retrieved by Niles Spooner.
But even time with their abusive father would be short-lived, for someone else would come into the lives of Jody and Corey Spooner. Someone who would personally see to it that neither boy saw their abusive sire ever again.
On the day of their abduction, Jody and Corey's father had been arguing with them as they drove haphazardly down route 77 towards the town of Brookfield. Their father cursed the two youngsters as he drove. Cursed them venomously for a thousand different reasons, none of which made much sense to either boy. He hit the boys too. Had been hitting them liberally since the day he retrieved them from the home of the "nigger family" that had been looking after them.
In fact, he was reaching over to give Jody several slaps across the face when he lost control of the car.
To Corey the back of the car suddenly seemed to slide away from their dad, and the steering wheel was spinning under the man's clutching hands. Instinctively his dad pressed his foot to the break in an attempt to steer into a skid, but there was no response; the car was going faster and faster, sliding sideways across the road, over the bank, into the woods below.
There was the brittle sound of breaking glass as the car came to a stop, upside down under an elm tree. And then there was just a deep, unearthly silence.
Jody managed to crawl from the wreckage and also pull his brother free. Then they without bothering to even check on the condition of their motionless father fled into the woods beyond the embank.
They crossed the woods, avoiding the numerous black communities as well as the white ones, but they would venture near the small hardscrabble farms they passed as they made their journey to nowhere.
The nights they slept out in the woods became easier and easier, and there was plenty of fish to be caught in the river and streams. And after a while the Spooner brothers began to wonder if they would spend the rest of their lives living like a couple of redskins who had somehow been left behind by the rest of their tribe.
One day they were going to make an attempt at stealing a sweet potato pie from the window of a lone farmhouse when they unexpectedly found themselves standing face to face with the farm's owner.
It was a black man. One who looked like no other the Spooner brothers had ever seen before. The man's dark skin and the way he stood and held his pitchfork they were all intriguing to the boys, who had only seen black people in the form of the kindly Johnson family.
This man here looked positively treacherous. How was such a being possible? Unlike many kids their age, the Spooner brothers were not one to turn and run at the first sign of "potential" danger, so when the man asked who they were and where they had come from, Jody told him even stepped forward with a grin on his young face.
It was then that the man unexpectedly lashed out with the wood-only end of his pitchfork and knocked Jody senseless to the ground. For a few seconds the man seemed concerned that he might have killed the boy, but upon crouching down to examine the motionless Jody was satisfied to find that the lad was still breathing.
Corey, thinking that his brother had been killed, suddenly bolted from the scene and started at a run through the trees feet pounding over the wooded area and dodging between trees. The black stranger wasted no time in picking up a baseball-sized rock, took careful aim at the fleeing youngster, and launched a fast-ball.
There could be heard a cry of pain with a sickening thudding sound as the rock connected with the back of the youngster's right knee. Young Corey tumbled to ground, knocking himself cold upon impact.
Then the black stranger quickly folded the unconscious youngsters into fetal positions and jammed their small bodies into a burlap sack, which he hoisted over his shoulder and carried back down the hill where his farm was located.
Since no whites ever ventured into the African-American boondocks in this area, it was pretty doubtful that anyone would come snooping around it in search of a couple of so called "trailer trash" boys who clearly hailed from some other state.
In other words, this enterprising stranger realized that he had been lucky enough to bag himself a couple of untraceable young farmhands for his homestead slaves. And he sorely needed slaves in recent months due to his recently diagnosed debilitating heart condition.
Though he would have preferred to have mature men helping him with the heavy work around his farm, these boys would do in a pinch.
When Jody and Corey finally regained consciousness, it was no surprise that they weren't ready to begin work on the black stranger's farm right away. Their heads throbbed, and their equilibriums were way off, especially Jody's.
Upon realizing that they had been kidnapped, they tried to remain brave only cried sporadically. And after their captor a man named Tyrone Washington whipped them with his belt a few times, the brothers stopped even trying to plead. Instead the boys endured in silence, their blue and gray eyes bright with fear.
Liberally applied beatings gradually persuaded the boys to do whatever Tyrone ordered him to, and within a day or two the Spooner brothers were busy laboring away on their captor's farm.
They quickly learned how to do their chores without complaint. And eventually their captor discovered the boys' inner rage and saw to their "education". Jody and Corey quickly became less slaves and more of apprentices.
Tyrone had been a mercenary in the days before he hid himself away from law-enforcement and the rest of the world within a hardscrabble farm in an obscure town. He found that he and his captives shared certain specific interests — killing and a desire for making money. Often, but not always, the two desires could be combined. So he began teaching the two boys how to do so.
During such times, the Spooner brothers could have easily run away escaped their captor forever. But they didn't want to. Corey and Jody knew that if they left the farm unattended, it would go to hell. And they had put too much of their own sweat and blood into Tyrone's farm to allow that to happen. Still, there was another reason the boys didn't want to leave.
They were growing attached to their captor. And they weren't sure why.
The Spooner brothers' hatred of their father had been so uncomplicated, so natural and easy quite different from the range of emotions they felt towards their black captor. Sometimes Jody and Corey wondered how they could dislike so many things about the man who'd kidnapped them, and yet still love him. And how they could despise Tyrone for having abducted and enslaved him, and yet still find themselves anxious for the ex-mercenary's approval.
And there was no doubt that the man was becoming fond of them as well. When the Spooner brothers both complained of a burning fever and dizziness, Tyrone immediately summoned a "discreet" physician in his community, and when the boys were diagnosed with chicken pox, he personally nursed them through the illness, pacing their sickroom with a parent's worry.
After the boys recovered, Tyrone began to unconsciously keep the youngsters near him more during the day, and gradually the ex-mercenary began to teach them everything he knew of murder and mayhem for profit. And that eventually became Corey and Jody's new names Wreck and Ruin.
Both boys were well into their adolescence when Tyrone had his first heart attack.
It wasn't a serious one, but he was forced to slow down. This man who had been so godlike before suddenly revealed some fragility, and Wreck and Ruin realized that they cared deeply for him. Tyrone had taken them from being desperate backwoods scavengers and made them into reasonably happy human beings; he had educated them, he'd seen to it that the boys became cultured and knowledgeable and "skilled". Both boys feared that their mentor would die.
But Tyrone wasn't about to give up the ghost. He began to regain his strength daily. And the brothers' former captor had almost completely recovered the day he met Imani Woods.
Imani had the sort of exotic ethnic beauty that commanded both awe and respect. Her raven-black hair, coffee colored skin, and tall, blade-thin body turned the heads of every man in four counties.
She was the daughter of a black undertaker in Windham, located a couple of towns away. She and Tyrone had met at an old fashioned "jump-the-broom" wedding the groom was a friend of Tyrone's, and the bride was Imani's sister. They reached for the same chitterling on a platter and within a few minutes found themselves outside on the porch of the house, talking. By the time the moon was in clear view Tyrone had invited her to the home he now shared with the two young brothers.
From the start Imani had not liked the two brothers. She was possessive and she had no intention of sharing Tyrone with the children who had, in effect, become her new boyfriend's surrogate sons. During breakfast on her first day sleeping over at the homestead, Imani threw down the gauntlet, ordering the brothers when Tyrone wasn't within earshot of course to stay out of her way.
After breakfast, Wreck and Ruin tried to help her with the housework, but were met with stubborn refusal. Imani was not going to have some white boychildren invading HER new personal space within HER man's home. It was against nature. So Wreck and Ruin left the house to complete their daily chores in the stables.
Their friction with Imani grew every day. It reached the point where Wreck and Ruin decided to take a small vacation away from Tyrone's homestead to stay with the Johnson family in Inglewood.
Tyrone truly loved Wreck and Ruin, everyone knew that. But when he heard the news that the boys were going to be going away for a few days and consequently leaving him alone with Imani a visible burden seemed to slide off his shoulders. The brothers' former captor suddenly had a jaunty bounce to his step.
And Imani was unabashedly glad to see the boys leave.
She was so eager to get Wreck and Ruin away from the homestead and away from Tyrone that for a week before their scheduled departure the boys had to keep asking her for clothes each morning because she had already packed everything.
"We don't need all these clothes," Ruin told her. "Wreck and I are only going be gone for a week,"
Imani only shrugged with a clear glint of disappointment in her eyes.
It was then that Wreck and Ruin decided that their temporary vacation away from the homestead would be a permanent one. They still remained the closest of friends with Tyrone Washington, but they never again shared a home with him and his jealous lover.
As his mind drifted back to the present, Ruin asked his brother,
"You think ole Tyrone still lives on that farm?"
Wreck shook his head,
"Last I heard he and Imani bought a house in Ladera Heights where they own a soul food restaurant."
The muscular gray-eyed youth was taken aback,
"He's still with Imani? Man even though he knows a thousand different ways to assassinate someone, I didn't think he'd survive living with that bitch."
To be continued….