Chapter Text
The family had been called a lot of names over the years; hillbillies, country bumpkins, hicks, white trash, rednecks and most of them were true but only sticks and stones hurt; names, never especially when there was some truth behind them. There were fourteen, sometimes more living on land that had once served as working land. Acres and acres of open space stacked up against endless forest and it suited them; the family had always been somewhat wild. No one really knew what happened to the farm the Padalecki’s had run all those years ago, the land was unrecognizable in current times, no one worked it or owned animals other than untrained pets. No one ploughed fields or tended the earth; it was easier to make money other ways, easier to steal. They lived as off grid as a large group of people could manage in the modern world; they didn’t fear any kind of authority and swanned through life without giving anything much thought. They rigged their electricity supply and ran their own generators when they couldn’t, they had very little in the way of a decent internet connection but stole that too. Car insurance or any kind of insurance meant nothing to anyone; hunting licenses were a myth and permits, permission, certification and documentation, none of that figured on Padalecki land and if anyone tried to get them for any of it, they didn’t, it wasn’t worth the admin and so they were mostly left to their own devices, bothering no one, living as if it was still the dark ages while regularly stepping out into the modern world; ‘normal’ folk stopped and stared.
The main house that had stood for longer than anyone living could remember was solid timber with a huge wrap around porch and a backyard that led right out into the forest; there were no clear boundaries for those who wandered onto the land, the Padalecki’s however knew precisely where they were. There were four trailers set up at the front of the house, two dead close, a third a little further away, a fourth further still. Inside the house lived momma and pop Padalecki and Mr. P’s troubled sister Marlene who often forgot she had three children even though they lived outside her front door. All three of those grown-up children lived out in the trailers. Luanne, the eldest sister lived with her husband Trevor and their two kids. Kimmy, the youngest sister was shacked up with her boyfriend Travis; she was newly pregnant. In the third trailer was Marlene’s middle child, Kyle, who had a wife, Lorraine, and three rug rats between them. In the fourth trailer, far away from the house, almost in the forest lived Jared, mom and pops’ only child, who was the second youngest to Kimmy. Sometimes other cousins who had moved into town came to stay and set up huge family-sized tents on the land; they came and went as they pleased.
Pop Padalecki hadn’t had a paying job for almost thirty years; he cried ‘too infirm’ to work but everyone else knew otherwise. Somehow the family survived, some might have even said they thrived despite their shortcomings but none of them wanted for much and preferred to live simply; luxury was a grill loaded with meat and a cooler filled with ice cold beers at the weekends, all of them together, eating well, sharing food and stories, even though none of them had anything very interesting to tell. From the very beginning of the Padalecki’s and to those who came in to join the family, not one of them had even thought about going to college, only half of them graduated high school but it didn’t matter, they didn’t need certificates to know how to steal. Jared though, the nineteen-year-old son of momma and pop who had paid for his own trailer with money he had earned from his own almost legitimate business collecting and selling scrap metal, had grand plans he mostly kept to himself. No one would have understood his ambition, even though compared to those in the ‘real world’ it wasn’t a dream worth even thinking about; Jared simply wanted his own land, his own space and his own person. He wanted to escape. He didn’t think of it as being in any way disloyal to his family, he believed it to be the dream most young people had at an age when they started thinking about their future. He already had his own business and own home, why couldn’t he dream about an independent life?
The prices of scrap metal was putting money in Jared’s bank, not that he’d ever had any kind of bank account; at nineteen, he’d never even been inside of one. Jared’s ‘bank’ was a small cast iron safe he had kept from one of his collections. That safe alone would have paid him well, better than the copper tubing at four bucks a pound and the bare bright wire at almost five bucks a pound but he liked it too much to send it to scrap. He fixed it up, filled it with money, hid it under his bed and told no one he knew that it even existed. Jared kept it hidden because there was no honor amongst thieves, even the ones who were related. Jared’s momma who was a homely/comely woman, wanted her precious boy right where she could see him. She spent her life in the kitchen preparing subpar food and had almost run a rut into the floor of the house from there to the bedroom. She rarely cleaned, never dusted, and wouldn’t have known where the vacuum was if she had been threatened to reveal its whereabouts but she could cook up a mediocre storm in a fairly grimy kitchen. It was oddly rare for anyone in the family to get sick. Momma believed her cooking was enough to keep Jared exactly where she wanted him and had only ever reluctantly allowed him to move out of the main house and into his own trailer. She saw him less but only a little; the short distance between them had made it impossible for her to watch her baby boy sleeping. Jared locked himself inside his trailer at night.
When the weather was fine, the family who lived in the trailers ate breakfast in the front yard together; a daybreak repast shared between the expanding clan. Momma made biscuits, mountains of them, cut from tubes of Pillsbury Grands! and cooked up vats of gravy from packets then threw in whatever was left over from the day before. She rarely stepped out of the house; Jared was the beck and call boy. The only thing she ever cooked from scratch was pancakes but she didn’t like standing at the stove for too long especially during their long hot summers. Jared’s morning routine was joining his family because his momma demanded it and he rarely ate a meal without the soundtrack of cranky kids, screaming toddlers and bickering couples. His escape was his job and the smallest hours of the day, even then the Padalecki land wasn’t always silent.
Family was family and blood was blood but any partner introduced into the fold was welcomed with open arms; more people meant more money, more light-fingers meant a ‘free’ pool for the kids in the summer, quad bikes for the men to ride around on long hot Sunday’s, a brand new fancy grill that had fallen into the hands of Jared’s cousin Kimmy’s boyfriend Travis who had moved into the mobile trailer with her two months after meeting her and got her pregnant which added up to the same amount of time for both instances. Travis got his feet under the table fast enough and brought gifts to the family to gloss over the fact that he out-‘rednecked’ even the Padalecki’s and was practically feral. Jared believed his cousin Kimmy could have chosen better but even he could see that Travis was just about charming enough and also not likely to stick around after the baby was born.
*
Not one of the family really warmed to Travis entirely though because he brought politics onto the land. The Padalecki’s had no politics; what the government got up to wasn’t any of their business. The authorities had stopped paying attention to them a long time ago, why shouldn’t they return the sentiment. Travis liked to talk big, he liked to start debates the family weren’t equipped to take part in. Only Jared had the capacity to argue back but most of the time he sat quietly, all the while Travis tried to rile the Padalecki’s up, sitting there in his red ball cap, spouting nonsense, trying to educate people who shied away from knowing anything other than the opening times of the closest H-E-B. Travis liked to boast when there was nothing much to boast about and Kimmy sat there silently like her cousin; it was just how Travis liked her. She had been a wild thing once upon a time; a few months younger than Jared. They had the same body count; Kimmy, twenty-two men, Jared twenty-two white-tailed deer. When they announced that she was pregnant, the women set about arranging a gender reveal party because Jared’s other cousin Luanne had seen it on the internet; lavish parties hosted by rich people with no budgets. Luanne and the women of the family had a hundred bucks and a partly used grocery store gift card one of them had found in the parking lot. They would cook up a storm, decorate the outdoor picnic tables with balloons and matching paper plates and cups in pink and blue, Kimmy would be guest of honor and Travis would invite his family too.
It was clear that Kimmy was much more excited about the party than Travis, who turned up for the beer and BBQ. Kimmy had wanted an afternoon tea theme but her baby daddy vetoed it, just like he had vetoed every independent thought she had had since the day they met. The party set up looked a little pathetic with so much land at their disposal and very little in the way of budget; the tables the family used to eat outdoors were covered in plastic pink and blue gingham cloths. There were pink and blue balloons tied to each corner of each of the six benches, paper plates to match, half of which had blown across the uneven grass. Luanne had done her best when most of her budget had gone on the large black helium balloon filled with confetti and glitter in the color of the baby’s gender. She was the only one who knew what they were having.
That morning, Jared had work on; he spent his life on the edge of the Padalecki property with a sketchy internet connection, checking Facebook for people wanting to get rid of scrap metal and other junk. He wasn’t licensed to dispose of public waste but got away with it because most of time it was useful to him, worth his time and money and he always did the job with a friendly demeanour. Most people in the main town knew of the Padalecki’s and most of them agreed that Jared was the nicest of them all.
“Momma?!” Jared called out after he stepped into the home he had grown up in. It had been marginally cleaner and a lot tidier when he was a child; things had gone downhill rapidly. It was dark and dusty and filled with junk piled up on almost every surface. Jared’s pop had rooted himself into the chair that sat in front of the television; he rarely acknowledged his offspring and his extended family. Most of the time they made too much noise. He wouldn’t be at the party but he would expect a plate. Jared didn’t know why he called out to his mother; she was always in the same place; preparing food on a small square of counter top; it was the only clear space she had left. “I’m goin’ to work.”
“Jared, honey. You can’t go to work today; it’s your cousin’s party.”
“I can, it’s not ‘til later. I’ll be back before then,” Jared smiled; he glanced across the open space and at the sliver of sunlight that cast itself across the back of the room, highlighting his father’s bald spot. The place smelt funky and it was always something different. Mostly it was old Crisco and dust, that day it was something sweet but it didn’t make the odor in any way pleasant.
“Will you be stoppin’ by the grocery store?”
Jared smiled tightly. “I guess.”
“Can you get me a teddy bear for the new baby?”
“I guess,” Jared nodded.
“A white one,” Jared’s mom said wistfully then glanced over her shoulder at the mess. “I have some pink ribbon, blue too. Somewhere.”
Jared nodded again. He waited for an offer of money but it knew it would never come. “I’ll see you.”
“A white one,” she pressed.
“Got it,” Jared called out as he left the house. The grill by the party set up was already fired up, flames rising high with Travis squirting lighter fluid onto the flames. That man was going to be a father in five months’ time; it didn’t bear thinking about.