The Monster of Greentree

The wind whipped through my hair as I sped down Trapper’s Hill, just outside of town. I was in the lead on my brand-new silver Schwinn with ape handlebars and banana seat. My best friends, Jimmy and Tyler, rode side by side behind me. Only thirty yards behind them our pursuers, the Knight Brothers, were gaining on us. They were older—fourteen, fifteen and sixteen—and a lot bigger than us twelve-year-olds.

"Pete," Jimmy shouted to me, "We’re coming up on River Road, we have to slow down."

He was right, but I refused to let the Knight boys catch us. In the past, they had beat the crap out of us for no better reason than they didn’t like the way we looked. 

A stop sign at the bottom of the hill confirmed Jimmy’s warning. To my right, I saw a tractor-trailer coming up River Road from the furniture plant where my dad worked. 

"We can make it," I shouted over my shoulder. "Don't slow down."

Truthfully, I wasn't sure we’d make it at all, but I picked up speed anyway. The sound of the truck's horn was deafening as I flew through the intersection, but I made it through in plenty of time. I wasn't sure Jimmy and Tyler would be so lucky, but when I looked back the truck was just passing within inches of their rear tires. The timing wasn’t so good for the Knight brothers. They had to veer to their right to avoid slamming into the truck. Unable to stop altogether, they ran right into a thicket of thorn bushes.

"Yes!" I screamed, continuing on down to the tree-lined path leading to the riverbank. "Yes, yes, yes!" 

We stopped beside the water and dropped our bikes in the sand.

"Did you see them go into those bushes? Boy, are they gonna be mad," Tyler said.

Jimmy picked up a flat stone and skimmed it across a slower section of the river. It made it almost to the other side. 

"Hey, look," Tyler said.

We all looked where Tyler was pointing and saw Bob Buckner walking down Trapper’s Hill in our direction. Bob was the town’s only homeless guy but not the harmless-beggar type in need of a bottle of hooch. He stood well over six feet and must have weighed close to three-hundred pounds. Every kid in Greentree knew about Bob. If you were unlucky or stupid enough to get near him, you could expect trouble. Even worse, whenever a child or animal went missing it was always rumored to be Bob’s doing, although no one could ever prove it. How he made the bodies completely disappear was a thing of much conjecture among us kids.

And this menacing giant was coming straight our way.

“Come on,” I said. 

This part of the river ran fast, but it was also flecked with big rocks that stood out tall and brown like skin tags. I began stepping carefully from one rock to the next. When I looked back, the other boys were still watching me from the shore. 

“Come on, he won’t follow us out here,” I shouted.

“It’s not him,” Tyler yelled back, pointing at the hill again where Bob had turned the corner and was lumbering down River Road toward the county bridge. Meanwhile, the Knight brothers, who had finally extracted themselves from the thornbushes, were coming at us, clothes torn and bloody and faces full of malice.

“They’ll trap us out there,” Jimmy cried.

“We’re already trapped,” I yelled back. “Come on!”

Jimmy and Tyler gingerly made their way out until they had reached me, and there we all stood, crowded onto one rock. It was then I realized I had probably made our situation even worse. The Knight brothers had made it down to the shoreline by now and were shouting threats at us. “We can wait here all day, you little bastards,” Troy, the oldest, said at one point. Then he added something that made no sense to me: “Your old man’s a prick, Pete Tanner, and you’re gonna answer for him.”

“Fuck off, Knight!” I yelled back. To my friends, I said, “We can’t stay here.” 

“Nice going!” Jimmy said. He looked like he was about to cry.

“We can do it,” I said, pointing to the opposite shore fifty yards downstream. There, several birch trees leaned low over the water. “If we jump in, we can grab a branch on the way down and pull ourselves ashore.”

Jimmy and Tyler looked at the rushing water, then at the trees, then back at the water. 

“Alright, alright, I’ll go first,” I said.

I drew a long breath and jumped in. The current instantly sucked me under; it was so strong I thought I might never resurface. But a moment later it slowed, and my head broke the surface. Treading in the slightly calmer water, I gulped air voraciously. Almost simultaneously, two more heads popped up near me, and I realized Jimmy and Tyler had jumped in at almost the same time.

Upstream, a familiar adolescent voice was shouting, “I’m gonna kill you, Tanner.” I looked and saw Troy and his brothers on the same rock we’d been standing on just moments ago.

“Fuck you,” I shouted back. 

I didn’t have much time to worry about the Knight brothers. The current was keeping us out in the middle, meaning we would miss the overhanging branches if we stayed. To Tyler and Jimmy, I said, "We’ve got to get closer to the other bank.” 

We began swimming perpendicular to the current the same way I’d been taught to swim in a riptide. Inch by foot, we managed to get closer to the other bank, and by the time we reached the overhanging trees, we were each able to grab a branch before the current could sweep us farther downstream. 

Sitting on the bank, catching my breath, I looked back upstream. The Knight brothers were back on the shore, and now one of them was picking up something big. Before I could say anything, Jimmy shouted, “My bike!” confirming my horror. The Knight brothers each had one of our bicycles, and one-by-one, they were tossing them up in the trees.

“Bastards!” Jimmy shouted so loud I thought he might break a vocal chord. Troy laughed and gave him the finger.

“Forget it,” I said. “We’ll deal with them later. First, we gotta get back across the river.”

We started making our way through the thick trees to the road.

The two-lane county bridge, which spanned the river from South Road—the one we were on—over to River Road was about a mile away. Still in use after nearly seventy years, it did not see as much traffic since the four-lane Beaumont Bridge closer to town had been built in the fifties. But it was perfect for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and the occasional street-illegal dirt bike.

Wet and exhausted, we trudged our way to the bridge and started across. As usual, traffic was light—the occasional car cutting across to avoid heavier traffic on Beaumont Bridge three miles away. We were the only pedestrians, though. That is, until Troy Knight rode his bicycle out from the trees at the other end of the bridge. I had miscalculated, thinking the Knight brothers would have tired of us by now and gone off looking for trouble somewhere else.

“We’d better turn around,” Jimmy said.

“No,” I said. “They’ve got bikes. They’ll catch us.”

“Then what do we do?” Tyler screeched.

I looked over the rail at the water. “We could jump.”

“It’s gotta be fifty feet down,” Tyler said. “If the fall don’t kill us the rocks downstream will.”

“Got a better idea?”

No one did. We just stood there in the middle of the bridge like three stunned rabbits.

Troy was pedaling our way, followed by his brothers. I looked back over the rail. The water was dark under the bridge, so it would probably be deep enough. The question was whether we had enough strength left to make the swim to shore and enough luck left to avoid the rocks.

“Look,” Tyler said. Almost at the same time, Jimmy said, “Can you believe it?”

I turned and saw Bob Buckner coming our way. He was behind the Knight brothers, so they hadn’t seen him yet, but he was moving along faster than I’d ever seen him, making good ground.

“Aw, crap!” I said. Could it get any worse? If the Knight brothers took off when they saw him—which they probably would—we’d be left to fend for ourselves.

“We can outrun Crazy Bob,” Jimmy suggested. “We’ll just have to take our chances when those turds catch up with us.”

I looked over the rail again at the black water. 

“We can’t jump, Pete!” Tyler shouted. 

The Knight brothers were coming on fast. Forty yards behind them, Bob was moving at a clip somewhere between a fast walk and a trot. I grabbed the rail, intending to climb up and over, but even then I knew it was too late. In a moment, I heard a bicycle drop to the pavement. A second later, a hand had me by the wrist and was tearing my grip from the rail. The same hand swung me around, and now I was face to face with Troy Knight.

My eyes were focused on Troy’s blazing eyes, but I guess I was so jacked up that I didn’t see everything else going on in my peripheral vision just as clearly. It was as though the adrenaline rush had expanded my field of vision. To my left, I saw Tyler and Jimmy backing away. To my right, the Troy’s brothers inexplicably were doing the same in the opposite direction.

“You’re a dead fuck!” Troy was saying. He still had me by the wrist and was trying to grab the other one, but I kept jerking away from him. “I’ll fuckin’ throw you over the side, headfirst,” he said. “We’ll see what your old man thinks of that.”

I yelled something—probably “Let me go” or something equally useless, I can’t remember—but he held on tight. And then he was pulling me in and wrapping his arm around my neck in a headlock. With my head down, I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear Troy’s brothers shouting at him, and I remember wondering why they were telling him to run.

Next, there was this great jarring, and I thought my head was going to come off, but Troy let go and I found myself standing there, looking up at the face of the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life. His head looked as big as a horse’s, and the left side bore the scars of some great trauma. There were indentations on his cheekbone and temple, but the worst one—the one that sent kids scurrying off when they saw him—was a great dent in his skull just above his temple. It made his left eye sag, giving him a Quasimodo look.

I forgot all about Troy Knight.

Tyler was shouting to me to get out of there, but my eyes were fixated on this giant in front of me. Meanwhile, Troy was picking himself off the pavement.

“You freak!” he yelled at the giant towering over us. “Stay out of this!”

Bob took a step toward Troy. Troy took two steps back. He dug into his pocket and pulled out something black. In a flash, a blade flipped out.

I didn’t know if the switchblade was meant for me or Bob. Either way, I finally found my voice. “Go away, Troy.”

Troy took a step forward and swung the knife, missing Bob by inches. Bob just stood there, too slow to get out of the way if he got any closer. 

“Knock it off, Troy!” I shouted. From somewhere else on the bridge, I heard his brothers echoing me.

“Think you’re tough?” Troy said, showing Bob the blade again. Suddenly, he slashed at Bob twice, first a forehand then a backhand. The second swing hit paydirt, slicing through Bob’s upper wrist. Bob looked down at the blood oozing from it just as Troy swung again. Without even looking, Bob grabbed Troy’s arm in one meaty mitt. He twisted until I thought Troy’s arm would screw right off, but all it did was make him drop the knife. With his other hand, Bob lifted Troy by the throat until he was three feet off the ground. He made a sound like a word, but it could just as easily have been a grunt. Then he was tossing Troy to the pavement, where he sat up, his elbows skinned, looking not just angry but totally insane. 

I’ll never know why I did it, but all at once I was laughing. The danger wasn’t registering in my brain anymore, only the way this menacing bully looked sitting there on the pavement knowing he was defeated. It was a laugh born of satisfaction. But it didn’t last long. 

Troy glared at me with a hate I’d never seen before. “Don’t go back for your bike, twerp, you won’t find it,” he said in a low growl like a tiger warning off its rival. “We threw your bikes in the river.”

In my mind I saw my prized silver Schwinn, the bicycle I had coveted all my life and finally got last Christmas, lying at the bottom of the muddy river.

I screamed something and ran after Troy. On the way, I picked up the open switchblade on the ground and drew it back. Later, Tyler told me I was already in forward motion with the blade pointed at Troy’s head when Bob grabbed my wrist, but I barely remember it. I twisted and pulled, even though there was no chance of getting free. I wasn’t even thinking; it was like my body had a will of its own.

And then Troy was on his feet, backing away at the beckoning of his brothers who had retreated almost to the River Road end of the bridge. Bob had pried the knife from my fist, and I watched him toss it over the rail. I was still struggling, though I have no idea what I intended to do at this point. It didn’t matter. Bob wasn’t taking any chances. He drew me in a bear hug, a gentle one clearly meant to calm me down. He didn’t let go until I had finally expended every ounce of energy I had left and stood there, limp in his arms, sobbing against his dusty shirt.

Next thing I knew, Jimmy and Tyler were standing next to me, asking if I was okay, and I just kept nodding, still unable to speak for my sobbing. When I finally pulled myself together, we looked down the bridge toward the River Road. The Knight brothers were gone out of sight. But the monster of Greentree was walking along in his usual casual gait, his bleeding arm dripping blood as he went.

Later that evening, I was still feeling pretty shaky, and at supper Mom asked me if I was feeling okay. “You’ve barely touched your meal.”

I shrugged. “I was just thinking about that homeless guy, Bob Buckner. You know, the one with the bashed-in head.”

“What about him?” Dad asked.

“I saw him today. Tyler says he got that way ‘cause his mom dropped him when he was a baby.”

 “Old rumor, and not true,” Dad said. “What happened is some drunken S.O.B. hit Bob across the head with a crowbar twenty years ago. He’s lucky he lived.”

I nodded.

“Matter of fact, just yesterday I fired that same S.O.B. that done it,” Dad said, looking across at Mom. “Ronnie Knight kept showing up for work drunk. He just got out of prison, too, you’d think he would learn.”

Mom looked hard at me. “Pete, I don’t want you near Bob Buckner. He ain’t right in the head.”

I started to answer her. Instead, I shoveled mashed potatoes into my mouth.