Rilaly's Blog
Simple Truths

Words: 2803

Rated: PG-13.  Some adult situations.  Some may find these situations may uncomfortable and objectionable.

Ellis Reddick 

“GET OUT!” Ellis Reddick screamed.  His daughter was stunned.  I was stunned.  We knew Ellis was an odd man.  We knew he was prone to erratic behavior.  We weren’t prepared for this.  I could not have built a psychological profile of him at the time, but I could’ve told you that there was something not right about Ellis Reddick.  Even then, I could’ve told you, he was an odd man.

We were on the curbside of a neighborhood road, about a half mile from their house, with the engine of his little red Vega idling with a rattle, when Ellis told her to get out.

“I don’t want to get out,” Julie said in defiance.

“Then give me the thirty-five cents.”

“Make me,” she said to ward off the challenge.  This response was a ritualistic response among seven-year-olds.  When a challenge of this nature is issued to us, the words ‘make me’ slip out as reflexively as a knee bouncing to a doctor’s plastic hammer.

He went after the thirty-five cents.  He went to her hands.  He attempted to pry them open.  He was wrestling with her.  She was laughing.  I was laughing.  This was the hilarious, erratic behavior we came to expect from the man.  He was always doing these things, these non-adult, irrational, not boring things to us, and we loved it.

We didn’t always get Ellis’ sense of humor, but in these little equations he was the adult and we were the kids.  When he joked, we laughed.  We were trying to convince him that we were sophisticated enough and smart enough to get his jokes when we laughed.  It’s what little kids did when adults joked.  We were trying to be cool.

There was something about the strength he put into his continued efforts that turned this whole equation.  He was still struggling, still fighting, and for a moment we both laughed harder.  This was hilarious, I thought, until she pulled out of his tussle with the thirty-five cents and a terrified look on her face.  Being the kid, I decided there was still something to be gained if I continued smiling, until Julie came around to the sophisticated nature of his joke.  I was waiting with a half-smile for the eventual joke to rise to the surface.  I didn’t want to be seen as a naïve kid who didn’t get the joke when it eventually revealed itself.

He went in again.  She deftly avoided his attempts to retrieve the thirty-five cents.  She was crying pretty hard, he was screaming pretty loud, and my smile was faltering.  This was the first true altercation I witnessed between an adult and a child.

“Get out of the car Julie!” he screamed when she popped up and out of the bent position she had taken to protect the coins.  Her face was beat red.  She was confused and scared.

It seemed impossible that this altercation had reached this point.  Minutes prior, Julie whispered, “I just found thirty-five cents.”  She whispered it to tick me off.  She whispered it competitively.  “Where?” I asked.  “In the cushions of the car,” she whispered.  She wanted me to know that she had money now, and in a seven-year-old world, as in any world, money is power.  I began searching in the seats in vain.  I was angry.  Finding money, in this manner, is an accomplishment in a seven-year-old world.  She lorded it over me for another half a beat.  She said something I didn’t hear.  I didn’t want to hear it.  She was mocking me with her money, her power.

“That’s mine,” Ellis said.  His voice always had the remnants of whine to it, but it was particularly powerless in this demand.  “And I want it.”

“Finders keepers,” she said.  It was another tenet of the seven-year-old world we all knew well.  If you lose something, and someone finds it too bad.  You’re out baby!

Ellis lost control. What began as pubescent whining from the man, evolved to outright screaming as he informed her: “It’s my car Julie!”  When that didn’t work, he reminded her: “I just paid for the McDonald’s you ate, and if you don’t give me my thirty-five cents, then you can just walk home!”

“Mmm mmm,” she said.  This response didn’t have as much conviction as the previous ones did.  I think she knew how bad this was going to get, but she couldn’t appear weak and turn back now.

He reached across her.  She flinched.  He opened the door.  “I want the thirty-five cents, or I want you out of my car.”  He screamed versions of this ultimatum over and over, with the engine idling and rattling a half mile from her house, until she exited.

Julie’s body shook with tears as we pulled away from the curb.  I couldn’t understand why she was crying.  I couldn’t understand why he yelled at her, but her crying kept my rapt attention.  A portrait of the scene may have led some to believe that I was mocking her, that I was returning the sentiment of the competitive whisper she gave me, but I wasn’t.  I was seeing realization in those tears.  I was seeing a young, idealistic person lose her innocence.  I was seeing a young girl lose her naiveté.  I was seeing the seeds of cynicism planted in a young brain that didn’t know what cynicism was.

What is a Dad, or a parent for that matter, but a purveyor of sanity in a world that is so hard for a seven year old to understand.  These weren’t sad tears, or bad girl tears that result from being corrected against wrongdoing, these were the convulsive tears of a young girl’s heart breaking.  They were tears that one can never appropriately describe to another in the aftermath.  They were tears that the mind tries to block out to retain sanity while embedding themselves deep into the portion of the brain that forms a personality.  They were tears that you’re never the same after they’re cast.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her as we pulled away.  It was the spectacle of seeing someone’s life come crashing down around them that I couldn’t peel my eyes from.  I should’ve gone with her, I realized, and I wasn’t exactly sure why I didn’t.  She was my best friend.   I think my desire to be seen as the one who didn’t do anything wrong overrode the tenuous loyalties of our seven-year-old world.  Maybe I just couldn’t deal with the shock and awe of it.  I had never seen an adult act like that after all.

Julie cried before, but she wasn’t a crier.  I made her cry.  I was sticking up for myself.  She was picking on me.  She was always picking on me.  One day I had had enough of her, and I decided to show her an unfair truth.  Boys are stronger.  Boys are more ruthless.  Boys aren’t going to be picked on forever.  Boys are going to stand up for themselves.

Julie was the bully of the block.  I was the only one she wouldn’t pick on or beat up, because I stood up to her.  She was willing to do anything to anyone and everyone knew it.  People were terrified of her.  I was the one who made her cry before, but she deserved it when I did it.  I was sticking up for myself when I made her cry.  When I made her cry, she sobbed with the physical pain I caused her, but that ended quickly.  Only her Dad could make her cry those special, all hope is lost tears.

Even before that particular incident, Ellis Reddick scared me.  He was a spooky man, as defined by every Hollywood movie I’ve ever seen.  Hollywood people love his type; unpredictable, prone to violent outbursts, ugly, and mean with a giggle to follow it all.

He was not an attractive man.  He lost most of his hair early on in life.  He had bad teeth.  One of his front teeth was capped gold, and this made him appear even creepier.  He had a high forehead with an unusual slant to it.  His eyes bulged too much.  He didn’t speak well or often.  When a young one would ask him questions about life, as I was prone to do with all the adults in my inner circle, he would provide limited answers that only piqued my interest all the more.

“Why do you keep touching the gear shifter?” I asked him once on an endless drive to nowhere.

“To make sure the engine is still on,” he replied.

I looked up at him waiting to be rewarded for the observant question I had just asked.  The man answered me in a manner similar to the manner one adult would answer another.  There were no sugary tones or smiles that followed.  He answered.  He resumed driving.

“To make sure it’s still on?” I asked looking out on the road to nowhere we were on, while picturing with fear what would happen if the engine did go out.

“Yeah.”

“Is there some fear that it could break down?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

He was the type I began to watch in life.  He was the type that didn’t say anything more than was necessary.  Was this an attitude he reserved for children?  I thought so at the time.  He wasn’t good with children.  He made no effort to try and entertain us.  We were there.  He was there.  He was our supervisor, but he left us alone as long as we didn’t mess with his stuff.  To see if Ellis Reddick was a dynamic creature, I would watch him with adults, until I was satisfied that he was equally inept with them.  I would watch him in groups, and I would see him fade into the woodwork.  He would smile when a polite reaction was called for in these groups.  He would even laugh an evil, little laugh when that was called for by someone in this group, but this was only polite protocol.  He could no more engage an adult in stimulating conversation than he could a child.

Ellis also enjoyed putting a little fear into my brother.  It was part of his sophisticated sense of humor.  My brother was about three years old at the time, and he was more prone to fearing that which he didn’t understand than I was.  Ellis would enter the bathroom and exit with a pair of fake, vampire teeth and an old wig.  I would laugh as my brother scampered back in pure terror, but in truth the man behind the get up frightened me too.  I used to wonder how close he was to hurting us all.  My brother was afraid, because he didn’t know what was going on.  He thought that it was another person stepping towards him with slow menace.  I was scared, because I knew a little more about who Ellis Reddick was.  I would laugh, as I said, but there were moments between the giggles when my mouth would freeze in a worried smile.  I would take everything I knew of the man and put them into a hypothetical puzzle, and I would wonder how much truth was caught up in the horror.

Kids, like animals, grow accustomed to adult humans acting in a very specific manner.  Kids grow accustomed to the tones that adults use around them.  Kids learn that adults act their best around them, and they get bored with it.  This is why it’s always a shock to kids to eventually see their adults laugh hard, get sauced, swim, and kick a football.  Kids then adjust their profiles to the adults’ idiosyncrasies, on a case by case basis, until the adults get boring again.  There is a certain comfort in that boredom that is not realized until one spends a day with Ellis Reddick.

I incidentally used Ellis’ example of the aberrant adult in my own life with the kids and animals around me.  I scared them.  I walked slowly at them with teeth bared in the same manner Ellis did, but I always stopped when the horror grew too great for them to handle.  I always ended up laughing and tackling them saying: “It’s just your good old Uncle.”

Even though I incidentally copied Ellis in this action, the one key to his horror that I didn’t mimic was the sparseness he implored.  I do it all the time, until all the kids and animals adjust their profile to me and grow bored with it.  Ellis used to hide the teeth and wig from us older kids, because he knew we would overdo it.  We tried to get to the teeth and the wig one time.  We found his hiding place.  We told him that we wanted to scare my little brother with them.  He threw a fit.  He hid the items again, in a different place.  He didn’t want us to overdo it.  He wanted it fresh.  He wanted it powerful.

He would also pop his wife in front of us.  Spousal abuse has always been something of a cause for me, because I was subjected to watching this man pop his wife so often.  Like everything else in life, the crime can be diluted by those who make false claims, but that has never entered my sphere of conviction in this crime against females.  I used to hear Ellis’ wife scream and cry as he popped her, and I would laugh at first.  What else is there for a kid to do but laugh, I now ask myself as I look for a defense of my own actions.

I was a little sheltered in a way.  My parents argued, and they occasionally screamed at each other, but it was all the normal fighting that ends in kisses and hugs and reassurances sent to me.  Boring.  Ellis was a new creature in my sphere of discovery.

There were never any kisses or hugs or apologies from Ellis.  The fights Ellis has with his wife were never about establishing ground in a relationship.  I didn’t get it, and I needed to understand.  I wanted to know the construct of the Reddick home, so that I would know how to act.  I couldn’t find a construct.  I found chaos.  I found a man acting on his wife and daughter in a manner that could only be a release of the frustrations for not living the life he wanted to live.  He also liked it.

I’ve surfed through a number of complex theories and hypotheses to try and understand the actions of Ellis Reddick, but I think the fact that he liked it is the best explanation I can come up with.  Some truths are complex, and they have qualifiers and facets that a seven-year-old boy cannot grasp, but some truths are simple.

Julie would scream an eardrum rattling scream when Ellis would hit her mother.  She would cry that hopeless cry, begging them to stop.  “Please stop!” she would scream.  I wondered if that worked at one time when she screamed it.  I wondered if Ellis would look at his only child and realize what he was doing to her and stop.  I wasn’t there all the time, so there could have been a time when her pleas worked.  By the time I got there, her pleas no longer worked.  After a number of these incidents, she stopped crying and screaming.  She got used to it.

The wife never stopped screaming.  Even when it was obvious that Ellis wasn’t using all his force, she would scream.  I could tell these screams were issued in the hopes that someone might hear.  She was being a tattle-tale without actually tattling.  She was also hoping that he would fear others hearing her screams, and his strikes wouldn’t escalate.  By the time I was invited to witness the spectacle, her pre-emptive screams weren’t working anymore either.  More than anything else, I think the two of them screamed, because they were hoping they could appeal to the man’s humanity to stop.  They thought wrong.  He liked it.

I think I may have cried during the first couple beatings I witnessed, and I may have even screamed or yelled out that he stop, but I got used to it after a while.

It was the core to horror to me that he didn’t act like all the other adults I knew.  Most of the adults I knew were consistent and boring.  Ellis had a dichotomy to him that I think he enjoyed displaying.  You never knew what he was going to do.  In the four walled world of his home little world, Ellis Reddick was unpredictable, chaotic, and powerful.  In the outer world, he was invisible.

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