The simmering cold war that existed between Lovella Sampson and I escalated into a near white trash holocaust over a pilfered extension ladder. My ex-stepmother-in-law lived in the neighboring trailer. She wanted to recycle the ladder for the few bucks she hoped the aluminum would bring. I wanted to keep the ladder in case I needed to get on the roof with a pair of binoculars in the event Shelly in the trailer down the street decided to nude sunbathe again. Since I owned the ladder, I foolishly believed I should have final say in the matter.

The problem came down to Lovella needing money. Since she was unable to work, because employment required working, family members paid her utilities. Their charity, however, didn’t extend into the realm of tobacco and recreational drugs.

Lovella began hocking technology I thought made Alabama living a little bit easier. The microwave disappeared. The bread maker. The DVD player and all her John Wayne DVDs. The electric blanket. Later, the tiller, the gas-powered generator, the family toolbox harboring the sort of tools needed to complete tasks like changing the brakes on my Chevy LUV or turning a screw. I’m sure she would have sold the Craftsman riding lawnmower out from under me if she could have found a buyer interested in purchasing a rider so broken down, you had to push it from behind to cut the grass.

Once she depleted her belongings, she switched to scrap metal.

From the kitchen window of our trailer, the wife and I watched Lovella set upon the horse shed in the back meadow like some sort of white trash dervish, slinging sheets of tin into the bed of her old Chevy pick-up.

“She’s working pretty damn hard for a woman trying to get on disability,” I said.

“She’s working like a woman possessed,” the wife agreed.

“Nonsense. You know Ellen exorcised those demons from Lovella with her Southern Baptist hoodoo.”

I watched the exorcism with my own eyes. It was a sort of laying of hands meant to dispose of the demons that compelled Lovella to smoke blunts and watch Judge Judy all day.

“They must’ve come back with a vengeance,” the wife said, shaking her head as Lovella muscled the shed’s roof onto the bed of the truck. “And brought all their rowdy friends.’

The next day found me and my four-year-old son in the front yard practicing T-ball. I was as good as I was likely going to get, but the boy still had a lot of work ahead of him, especially when it came to catching pop-ups with anything other than his forehead.

Next door, Lovella hunkered next to her central cooling and heating unit, taking it apart for the copper and whatever other scrap metal prizes the innards contained.

I heard a pop and a hiss. A white, vaporous cloud exploded into the air. Lovella jumped up and ran away. As the bilious fog crept toward me and the boy, Lovella hollered, “y’all git away from that there cloud’a Freon.”

The mist had already enveloped my chihuahua/terrier, Lenny. That bow-legged, whup-eyed little fucker just couldn’t run fast enough. I grabbed the boy and retreated into the house trailer.

That evening, while Lovella drove along back country roads searching for empty beer cans, I looked at her pile of scrap metal, curious as to what all she’d managed to scavenge. That’s where I found my extension ladder, that aluminum stairway to Shelly’s glistening breasts. Since it was too long to hide behind the couch, and leaving it in the middle of the front room would incur the wife’s wrath, I shoved the damn thing under Lovella’s trailer where she wouldn’t think to look. I had to sever a couple thin PVC pipes down there, but I eventually muscled it all the way under, gouging trenches in the suddenly muddy ground.

I was awakened the next morning by a loud, cop-like pounding on my screen door. It shook the whole damn trailer. I roused myself from the couch and checked my phone. 11:05 in the AM. Good god, someone was going to catch a knife in the eye for this. Hell, my four-year-old knew better than to wake me before noon.

Lovella’s sister, Lucille, stood on my porch. She closely resembled Lovella. All Lovella’s inbred brothers and sisters closely resembled each other in a fish-like spawn of Cthulhu sort of way. She regarded me with her watery blue eyes.

“Where’s my ladder?”

“Ladder? What?”

“Lovella said you took my ladder. It’s my ladder. I want it back.”

“You gotta be outta your fucking mind.”

“I want my ladder.”

“What ladder? Describe this ladder, you crazy bitch.”

“It’s… a ladder.”

“Yeah, and behind you, you’ll find…. the stairs. Now, fuck off.”

Ten minutes later, there came more pounding on the door. “Oh, Jesus Christ, you answer it,” I told the wife. “I don’t want to have to kick an old woman’s ass.”

Beating the elderly was a habit of mine I took no pride in. Gray hair made me see red. It’s why I never visited my grandmother in the nursing home. I couldn’t make it through the Greta Garbo wing of the Shady Acres assisted living home without getting into a slap fight with some Korean War vet who didn’t appreciate the length of my hair or my ability to use my legs.

The wife answered the door. “You gotta be kidding me,” she said. “Get a load of this.”

Lovella stood on the front porch. She held an old timey sixteen-gauge shotgun almost exactly like the sixteen-gauge shotgun in my closet. The gun I now owned once belonged to Lovella before the police confiscated it when she threatened to kill herself. How many old timey, sixteen-gauge shotguns did this crazy woman possess?

Standing there, staring down the shotgun’s deep, black hole, I thought back to the last time she pointed a weapon at me. Granted, I deserved it that time. I was on top of her trailer with a slide whistle and two high beam flashlights pretending to be a UFO, when she crashed out of her front door firing a warning shot in the air before leveling the blue steel my way.

“I want my damn ladder back,” she muttered. “And them pot plants you cut down. Them’s mine.”

Oh, I thought, so those pot plants on the edge of my property were not placed there by a benevolent god.

“I guess I’m gonna hafta call Ellen,” the wife said. “Look like you’re gonna need another exorcism.”

The thought of Lovella’s daughter, Ellen, laying hands and chanting in tongues with her God Squad of fellow believers shook Lovella, enabling me to reach forward and snag the sixteen-gauge out of her shaky hands.

“Now, I got your ladder and two old timey, sixteen-gauge shotguns, you crazy bitch.”

No sooner did I get to laugh maniacally then she dropped down into a karate stance and kicked me in the balls

“Oooooowwwwaaaahhhh!” I hollered. I leaned against the shotgun, beginning to pant from the agony.

I’d been kicked in the balls by thirty-two different women in my time. Lovella was the second oldest woman to ever have the pleasure of striking my sack in displeasure.

The telephone appeared in the wife’s hand. She phoned Ellen.

Lovella’s eyes popped big around as flying saucers. She fled down the steps and ran toward her trailer. I set the stock against my shoulder and aimed the shotgun at the back of her head.  The wife grabbed the gun away from me.

“You can’t go shooting every woman who racks you in the nuts,” she chided.

“Why not? Maybe if I had retaliated in such a fashion the first time, I wouldn’t be sitting on thirty-two nut shots.”

As the wife called Ellen, and Ellen, in turn, phoned her god squad of demon expellers, Lovella phoned her collection of Lovecraftian, incestual kin.

There was Roger the lisping pedophile, Nellie the one-armed Avon lady, Willard the chicken farmer/fucker, Augusten the arsonist who pioneered the possum bomb (during dry summers, he’d trap possums, douse them in kerosene, light them on fire, and release them into the brush fields of his enemies). Also, hanging back, Chrissy the whore, who once fucked a elderly fella so he’d buy her a set of new used tires for her truck. It wasn’t so good a deal for the old man since the tires at least still held some traction.

The whole sorry lot of them converged on Lovella’s trailer in a herd of beat-to-hell, rusted-out pick-up trucks. They all stared balefully at me as I sat on my porch flanked by old timey, sixteen-gauge shotguns. I nestled an ice bag against my testicles. By setting my jaw and narrowing my eyes, I succeeded in looking menacing.

They tried to match me in the appearance of malice by picking their teeth with their thumbnails and scratching at their pubic hair with the same hand. In Nellie’s defense, she didn’t have a choice. It was like something out of The Shitkicker Shadow Over Innsmouth except the protagonist (me) wasn’t given to fainting spells in the face of eldritch incestual horror.

“Lovella. Why ain’t your water working?” I heard Chrissy call out.

“Dern water run out, I reckon,” Lovella answered.

We would have continued this Lovecraftian standoff indefinitely had the Southern Baptist panel van not roared into view. Ellen and her crack team of exorcists arrived, heralded by the rousing chorus of “Therefore by the Grace of God Go I” blaring from a loudspeaker.

The Sampson clan, scared out of their half-wits, evacuated in a flurry of pot smoke and rusted quarter panels.

Ellen leapt from the passenger side door of the van like an evangelical Colonel Kilgore. Her husband, Jerry, slipped out from behind the steering wheel, shoulders hunched in the universal symbol of husbandly defeat. The panel door rolled back, releasing five men and women in identical tan dockers and blue shirts. They all clutched bibles as though they were six irons.

“Mama!” Ellen called. “It’s time to get them demons out of you once and for all.”

The Jesus brigade fanned out in a wedge formation with Ellen in the lead. Jerry lagged behind. I could tell he’d rather hang out on the porch with me but feared I’d ask him how his son was doing on the high school cheerleading squad.

“That cocksucker stole my ladder,” Lovella spat.

“I don’t think so, mama.”

Lovella ducked inside her trailer. Ellen and the Exorcists found her huddled behind a wall of canned vegetables left over from the food stuffs stockpiled during the frenzied days leading up to Y2K. They dragged her out, kicking and hissing, her cries for her purloined ladder sounding like so much satanic gibberish. As they loaded her into the panel van, Jerry circled Lovella’s trailer. Curious as to why there was a steady stream of water gushing from beneath the trailer, he pulled back a section of the underpinning.

“Ellen,” he called. “I found the ladder.”

“Forget the ladder,” Ellen hollered back. “We’ve got a stage 6 servant of Amaymon on our hands.”

Jerry dropped the underpinning and rushed back to the van which rocked from the commotion inside. He jumped behind the wheel and tore out of the yard. For a moment, I thought the van was going to capsize as it veered back onto the road. But, I suppose, God helped maintain its equilibrium.

“What the hell was that all about?” the wife asked.

Shelly’s breasts, I thought. Shelly’s glistening breasts.

@KarlofKoweski