When I was ten years old, I was kidnapped along with my best friends Rick and Tinker Mullins on Halloween night. We had finished our treat or treating and were walking down a deserted back road to join our parents at a party at the country club near our houses. We were excited about entering the costume contest.
An old, beat-up, green pick up truck pulled up and stopped. We thought we were going to be offered a ride. A scruffy man got out and started chasing us into the woods. I was almost completely frozen with fear, but my legs were somehow moving and my heart was pounding in my throat. He caught Rick and Tinker and tied them to a tree and came after me. I had on a long black vampire cape that got caught in the underbrush. I screamed and time stood still as he grabbed me like a sack of grain and slung me over his shoulder. I smelled booze on his breath and he had stinking body odor. He tied my hands and put me in the back of the truck. My mother had always told me that men like that would cut off little boys’ genitals. I felt doomed. I was so scared I couldn’t move. He retrieved Tinker and Rick, tied their hands and put them in the back of the truck. He told us if we screamed, he’d shoot our heads off with his shotgun. He drove off with us, headed to the country. He slowed down for one turn that we knew to be near the back nine of our country club. He hadn’t tied us down to the truck bed, so we all three jumped out and ran as fast as we could to the clubhouse.
At the clubhouse, everyone surrounded us as we hysterically told our story. The police were called. We described the truck. They got the man who was inebriated. He told the police we had egged his house and he was just trying to teach us a lesson. He was a sharecropper of sorts who lived on a nearby farm. We had not been anywhere near his house.
The next day Rick, Tinker and I went back to the woods to retrieve our candy. We found all of it.
Years later I heard that that same man had gotten his twelve-year-old daughter pregnant.
