As a kid, while walking around the downtown area of my small town, I often saw the same woman on the sidewalks, scaring anyone in her path with wild ramblings and finger pointing.

Her name was Hattie Mae Jensen and everyone in town just called her Hattie Mae, or Crazy Hattie. She lived a few miles west of town on a country road that she walked every day in order to make a few dollars sweeping the sidewalks for the merchants. She also used her workday as a chance to terrorize anyone walking by her. Of course she didn't see it as such. She thought of herself as a crusader in a way, and constantly reminded merchants and customers alike about their eternal damnation and their possible salvation. Some of the townspeople were used to it: after all, Hattie had done this for years, according to my dad. Most folks tolerated her until she got too carried away, by shaking her fists at people or grabbing at them in order to get their full attention. The women and kids were frightened of her antics; the men just tolerated her until eventually a business owner or passerby would tell her to go home.

When I was only eight or nine years old, I rode downtown on a hot summer morning with my grandparents. My grandmother had business at the bank and the town florist, and my grandfather needed to take a watch for repair at old man Lane's jewelry and watch shop. They gave me money and off I went to the drug store, looking forward to a milkshake and some hard browsing of the comic books. I normally read flipped through at least one while standing there and would buy another one on my way out. I pondered whether or not to invest my money on the adventures of Batman or The Incredible Hulk as I passed by the front of the bank. My grandmother had just entered the bank lobby and disappeared from sight when Crazy Hattie spotted me.

Mr. Goodman at the hardware store had hired her to sweep his sidewalk that particular morning. Unfortunately for me, I was the only person on the sidewalk and walking in her direction. She left me no choice as to which direction I had to walk. Hattie stood between me and my Marvel and D.C. super heroes, so I pressed on, trying to ignore her. I thought I had made it, too. I walked a wide circle around her, trying to ignore and slip quickly into the drug store. I could feel her watching me the whole time. Then I realized the broom had stopped sweeping across the sidewalk.

"Hey, boy," she said. Her deeply wrinkled skin - I thought she was in her sixties - and unkempt hair reminded me of a witch on a broomstick that my Mom put on our front porch every Halloween. Each brown hair on her head seemed to stick out in a different direction, with no sense of purpose at all, as if rarely touched by a comb or brush.

I froze and said nothing. I had been scared of this woman my whole life and this was my first experience with Crazy Hattie face to face. Her dark eyes were sunk deep into sockets that seemed much too close together.

"Wha's a matter, cat got 'cher tongue?" she said, bending down to within a few inches of my face. She talked so fast, the words just slurred together and it was hard to tell where one word ended and the other started.

"I'm going to the drug store," I said. She leaned on her broom, a big-boned woman, with large, rough hands, like a farmer's. Her shoulders would have seemed way too wide for a woman's but her thick waist and rear end gave her whole upper body a sense of balance. A grin snuck out from under her wrinkles and her oversized, pitted nose. My feet anchored me to the sidewalk like two blocks of lead. I silently prayed someone would see Hattie standing over me and immediately come to my rescue.

"Dem kids need our help," she said.

"What kids? Where?" I looked behind her at an empty sidewalk and street.

"You know which 'uns, up der," she said and pointed at the upper floors of the clothing store across the square. Nobody used the upstairs portions of their stores anymore, except for storage. Customers were never up there. "They's trapped," she said.

I looked even harder because now despite my fear, she had me interested. I'd never heard anything about kids being trapped upstairs in our old downtown buildings.

"Nobody's there," I said.

"Nobody?" she said and recoiled, then cackled, a half laugh and half scream kind of thing, as if I'd said the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. "Them kids is in der, trapped and in trouble." Her eyes widened and then bulged, like alien heads just before they explode in science fiction movies. "Dey trapped in der," she said again and grabbed me by my upper arm, and squeezed.

I yelled and soon Mr. Goodman threw open his glass front door. The little bell on the inside handle jingled wildly as he bounded onto the sidewalk in quick strides.

"Hattie!" he said. "You leave the kids alone. I can't have you scaring customers on the sidewalk. Leave him be!"

Crazy Hattie let go of my arm as soon as she heard the door fly open, and she backed away and resumed her sweeping.

"Max," he said. "Where were you going son?"

"To the drug store," I said, "for a comic and a milkshake." I couldn't take my eyes off Crazy Hattie. The woman who my friends and I discussed as being the craziest person in town had just supplied me with enough scary dreams to last a lifetime.

"Come on, I'll walk you," Mr. Goodman said. He gently put a hand on my shoulder and turned me back to my journey, when Crazy Hattie did her crazy cackle laugh thing again. We both stopped and looked back at her.

She pointed her broom at me and shook it. "I'll get dem kids out myself," she said and cackled again.

"That's enough!" Mr. Goodman said. Hattie recoiled and resumed sweeping, as if nothing had happened.

Safely inside the drug store, I found an Incredible Hulk that I knew I didn't have, bought it from Darlene at ran the cash register, and found a table inside the soda shop. I decided that reading my new comic would take my mind off Crazy Hattie. Hulk would surely demolish a tank or a bad guy, and I liked it when he did that.

Before I finished reading the Sea Monkeys ad on the back cover, a female voice interrupted me.

"What can I get for you, hon?" Jerri Lynn Stillman, the owner's daughter who ran the soda shop, stood next to me chewing her gum like it was the last piece left on earth. The chocolate shake she made for me carried me over until my grandparents found me. Mr. Goodman from the hardware store had told them all about my experience with Crazy Hattie. He also told them that he ran Hattie off for the day and sent her home.

My grandparents found me finishing up both my comic book and my shake at the same time. After grilling about my incident, they exchanged pleasantries with a few patrons and the Stillman family, all of who worked at the pharmacy.

As we said our goodbyes to everyone, I noticed a commotion outside: people walking briskly in front of the pharmacy, all headed in the same direction, and pointing across the square. Pretty soon Jimmy Earl Wilkins, the town policeman who my grandfather said was scared of his own shadow, ran by in a big hurry. We all followed right out the front door of the pharmacy. Whatever was happening across the square was bound to be big news and nobody wanted to miss it.

I ran through the small park in the middle of the square, the one with the gazebo in the middle, but the crowd that had gathered, maybe fifty people, blocked my view. I climbed the monkey bar set on the edge of the playground and saw Crazy Hattie standing on the street in front of Harmon's Clothing Store, the same place she had pointed out to me and talked about the kids being trapped upstairs. Jimmy Earl the cop stood several yards away, pointing his ancient revolver at her. He might as well have pointed a potato at her, because Crazy Hattie completely ignored him. Instead, she focused on the upstairs windows. Two of the four were broken, and from the way she held a lemon-sized rock in her hand, it was easy to predict the fate of the last two windows, unless Hattie missed or Jimmy Earl shot her first.

"Hattie, just stop it now," Jimmy Earl said. He circled her slowly, still pointing his pistol at her. Some of the women from our church who often visited my grandmother's house for a game of Rook had gathered not far way from me on the monkey bars and they all shrieked and moaned like I'd heard women do at the circus just a few months before. They were convinced, I suppose, that nothing good would come of the standoff between Jimmy Earl and Crazy Hattie.

"Dem kids is burning up," Hattie said. "Dey burning up in dat upstairs. Dey's trapped. Dey's trapped!" Her eyes bulged out again, just like when she talked to me earlier on the sidewalk. She didn't look at anyone in particular, especially Jimmy Earl.

"There ain't no kids up there Hattie," Jimmy Earl pleaded. "Hell, there ain't no fire either. Everything's fine." His words croaked out in desperation, and the hopelessness was easy to pick up for a kid like me even. Small town cops didn't get much training on dealing with mental cases, and poor Jimmy Earl was doing the best he could.

"Lies," Hattie said. "Yur tellin' lies. Dem kids're burnin' up."

Before Jimmy Earl could answer, she launched her rock and shattered the third window as effortlessly as Benny Malone, our high school shortstop who had scouts by the dozens watching his games the past two years. He made throwing a baseball look like the most natural act a person can perform, and oddly Hattie had her own fluid movements and first-rate accuracy.

Some of the women from church groaned again. One more rock sat on the ground at Hattie's feet. Despite Jimmy Earl's useless protests, she picked it up. In the movies, I suppose Jimmy Earl would have shot Hattie one time, in the arm or somewhere else so not to kill her, but this wasn't the movies, this was a small logging and farming town in Arkansas, and so Jimmy Earl, knowing Hattie was armed only with one final rock, wisely holstered his gun.

Hattie hit the fourth window a bit low and to the right, but it shattered just the same. Before she could say another word or make another move, Jimmy Earl tackled her and pinned her to the ground on her ample stomach. After a few seconds of struggling, Jimmy Earl finally handcuffed her hands behind her back and stood her up. A fine layer of dirt clung to her simple blue cotton dress and the side of her face. She spat at Jimmy Earl and the onlookers a few times, then settled for defiant silence and when assistant deputy Donald Proffitt showed up with the cop car, Hattie sat down on the back seat without a fight.

Jimmy Earl and Donald stood around in front of the store talking to Mr. and Mrs. Harmon, the owners, for a few minutes. The crowd remained but broke into groups of gossipers who discussed the whole crazy event blow by blow. Fresh onlookers arrived and got the scoop over and over from eyewitnesses. Nobody had ever seen such a thing.

My grandmother's Rook partners and my grandfather's fellow deacons stood around my perch on the monkey bars, recounting everything. The men shook their heads and some laughed at Jimmy Earl.

I heard a loud thud, but ignored it. Then I heard it again and noticed my grandfather looking around as well.

"Do you hear that?" he asked nobody in particular. It didn't take us long to find out the source of the noise: Hattie wasn't finished.

She had turned around in the back seat of the squad car and was now kicking the back glass with both feet, still handcuffed, her thick leather shoes slamming against it like my grandfather's donkey had done to his stall door a few times at the farm.

"Better go get Jimmy Earl," someone said. Apparently Jimmy Earl's investigation had led him upstairs to the broken glass.

With another donkey-like effort, Hattie kicked out the back glass completely, in one piece. It shattered several times over, with spider web-like patterns spreading away from the center, but it held together. She then spun around on the back seat and wiggled out through the hole. Jimmy Earl ran out of the store just in time to see Hattie jumping up and down on the trunk of the police car, her thick body denting the car metal with each hard landing.

When Jimmy approached, she jumped off and tried to outrun him up the street. Babbling incoherently, she kicked at Jimmy Earl and spit at him until Donald snuck up from behind and tackled her. This time, Donald put his handcuffs around her thick ankles and the two of them barely managed to carry her back to the car. She flopped like a fish as they wrestled her into the back seat for a short ride to the town jail.

After the brick-throwing incident, my dad told me that Crazy Hattie was "taken away." As the years went by and I grew into adolescence, we often drove by her house on the way to our favorite fishing creek. He'd say something like "wonder where Hattie is now?" every fourth or fifth time we drove by her place.

During the spring of my sixteenth birthday, on one of our trips by her house, I noticed a young girl and boy standing in Hattie's front yard. "Did someone move into Crazy Hattie's house?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, I heard something about that. Seems like Hattie's nephew moved his family into the house. Wonder if she's with them?"

"If she's still alive," I said. "She was old back then." We both knew exactly what "back then" referred to.

"Well, really, she just looked old back then. She was only in her forties I'd say. She had a hard life, and to a kid, I guess she probably looked a lot older."

I imagined Crazy Hattie sitting in a padded room somewhere, blabbering on about fires and trapped kids. As the spring turned into summer, neither of us mentioned her as we drove by to our fishing hole. That summer, I passed my driving test. My friend Chris and I fished every afternoon after we hauled hay for local farmers. When I didn't have a hay-hauling job, I mowed grass for a few neighbors, or cut limbs, or just anything I could to earn a few bucks. After finishing our jobs for the day, I'd pick up Chris in my Dad's ragged old Ford pickup, the one he quit driving to work but refused to trade in when he bought his new one. He saved this one for me as a hand-me-down, which was fine with me, anything to save me from walking in the Arkansas heat. Its old battery sometimes gave out in the heat and had to be charged overnight, but it never stranded me beyond a short walk home.

One especially hot Friday, Chris and I finished hauling hay at about three o'clock in the afternoon and drove to our fishing hole for some quality time with the small bass we had been catching all summer. I left my Mom a note saying I should be home just after dark. It just seemed right that Chris and I would take advantage of our early end to the week. On our drive out to the creek, we hardly even gave Crazy Hattie's house a glance.

After four hours of fishing, each of us had three small bass and were refreshed somewhat after sitting by the water under a shade tree. We had talked away our problems with girls, discussed the upcoming football season, and voiced our concerns over taking Geometry instead of Algebra II. Chris called an end to a fine day.

"It's time to call the dogs and pee on the fire," he said. He cracked open a cold soda. We were still a couple of years away from sneaking a beer or two with us on our fishing trips.

Within a couple of minutes, we rumbled lazily along the half asphalt, half dirt road that led back into town, kicking up a light cloud of dust behind the old Ford.

"I think when I get home, I'm gonna take a long, hot shower," I said.

Chris pushed the brim of his baseball cap up to the top of his head and thumped a drum beat on the outside of the truck door. The air conditioner never worked, so we were used to driving with the windows down.

"Snake," he said, sitting up straight and leaning over the dashboard.

"Where?"

"My side of the road, half in the ditch."

Most southern males we knew took every opportunity to run over a snake, especially a poisonous one, and I was no different. I put my right tires down into the ditch and slowed down.

"Shoot, he's going middle," Chris said, "back to your side."

I finally saw the snake, a long, thick rattlesnake that just kept coming out of the ditch and stretching into the road. I had never seen one this big and this alive in my life. I slowed the truck down and tried to line up the tires on my side with the snake.

The truck crawled along, but due to bad spark plugs and old plug wires, it didn't idle so well at low speeds. I felt the tires finally rise up onto a hump, and I hit the brakes quickly. If I was on top of him, I wanted to stay for a while and make sure he died.

"Boy, folks in town are gonna love this one," Chris said.

The old Ford died. Instead of trying to crank it, I peered out the window. The snake head and about another three feet of him were free of the driver side front tire. I had only gotten him at roughly the halfway point.

"I'm gonna back up and do it again," I said to Chris, who was all the way on my side, trying to look out my window.

"Big sumbitch, ain't he?" he said. "Get him again."

When I turned the key, nothing happened, not even a click from the starter.

"Put it back in park," Chris said and pointed and my gear indicator on top of the steering column. I hadn't shifted back to park yet.

That time when I turned the key nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing.

"Uh oh," I said.

"What?"

"Dead battery. I'll bet you."

"Now?"

"You know it's been giving me trouble with the heat and all. Guess it finally died. We'll have to walk until we can phone my folks."

I looked out my window again. The trapped rattlesnake bumped his head into my truck door, mad as hell. If the door had been open, he could have easily slipped his head into the floorboard and bitten either of my legs.

"I'll have to get out on your side," I said.

"I'm not stepping out there. What if there's another one?"

He looked out his window at the tall green grass of the ditch. "I'm not stepping anywhere near that ditch."

"Then let's crawl out your window and jump into the back. We can pick our spot from there."

A few seconds later, the two of us stood in the back of the truck, watching the snake.

"He's nowhere near dead. You should just put it in neutral and see if you can roll off him."

"I'm not climbing back into the cab. No way. If we're gonna get help, we'd better start hiking to a phone. It's almost dark."

"Do you have a flashlight?"

He knew the answer from the look on my face. Why would we ever need one? We usually came home well before dark, plus we left a note.

We jumped into the road and walked a wide circle around the buzzing rattler. I guess the excitement of the snake and the problem with the truck battery took my mind off the fact that the closest house to our truck belonged to Crazy Hattie and her family of interlopers.

"You know which house is first," I said.

"We're not stopping there," Chris said.

"But it will save us a mile and a half of walking," I said, even though I didn't want to stop there either.

"We're not stopping there. The snake was enough excitement for me, man."

As we approached Crazy Hattie's home, visibility was limited to maybe fifty yards due to the oncoming darkness, just far enough to see the front porch of her house. The whole front yard opened up void of any significant trees. I silently hoped nobody would be left in the yard at all. Maybe they were eating or something else normal on the inside. If you've read this far you probably guessed that Crazy Hattie and I were too cosmically connected by now for me just slip by without incident.

Within seconds of when I first spotted the porch, a dog barked. I never remembered seeing a dog, but a large black and tan mutt bellowed from the front yard and almost immediately the front door flew open. I could only make out a silhouette inside the doorframe, but I could tell by the shape of it that it was Crazy Hattie.

"Who's out der?" she yelled. "Who's in my yard?"

"Oh, man," Chris said in a low voice. "It's her."

"Damn it," I said and we both picked up the pace.

Hattie bounded down off her porch much like a school kid runs to greet a weary father after work. The large mutt stayed in the yard and howled in a deep, mournful voice, like a hound dog finding a fresh trail. The thought occurred to me that this hound might have found a fresh trail after all - ours.

I figured if we kept walking and ignored her we might make it. Hattie got within ten or fifteen yards of the road and walked parallel with us, step for step, but she never came any closer. In the near total darkness, I could make out that same wild hair from the past, now gray and white. Otherwise, she looked the same to me as she had the day she rode away handcuffed in the back of Jimmy Earl's squad car. Her simple, cotton jogging suit stretched tight over her plump body and she drug her house shoes through the dirt, but she kept up with us, watching our every move. She had the same exaggerated movements I remembered as a child, and just like before, they made her seem aggressive, whether she meant to be or not, but how could anyone tell?

"Who you?" she asked as we all three strode bigger and bigger steps. "Who dat in Hattie's yard?"

"Don't say nothing, just keep walking," I said to Chris, trying to ignore Hattie.

Chris took off like a sprinter and ran. It was so dark I didn't really see him do it; I could hear his footsteps hitting on the dirt road and I knew he was gone. Crazy Hattie cackled in her maniacal, high-pitched voice, somewhere between a scream and a laugh - just like in the past. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I felt the goose bumps rise on each arm. My senses turned on wide open. I heard each of my own breaths and felt a warm breeze in my face. Hattie's cackle grew louder and louder in my ears like wearing headphones hooked to some CD player that played her laugh over and over. Without thinking, I felt the dense summer air flowing harder and harder against my face and realized I was running as well, and catching up quickly with Chris.

When I caught him he slowed down, looked behind us and stopped. I ran on for a few more yards and finally stopped as well. Both of us heaved the warm air and bent over, like we always did while running sprints after football practice.

"She didn't follow," he said between heavy breaths.

"Good." I was grabbing my pants legs now, trying not to puke.

"Let's walk for a while," he said. "Maybe someone will drive by and we can hitch a ride."

For another half mile we walked as comfortably as possible. One mile down, we estimated, and one mile left until old man Rogers' farmhouse. Surely he or Mrs. Rogers would be awake, sipping a hot cup of coffee like old people tend to do even in the middle of summer, in front of the television, maybe watching a favorite TV show. My dad could be there in five minutes.

As we discussed our predicament, the soft glow of headlights reached us from behind. We stopped in the middle of the road -- finally a ride. In our town, odds were good that we would know the driver and could ask for a lift into town, maybe even all the way home.

"Thank God," Chris said and we moved onto the driver's side of this vehicle coming at us. We waved our hands and arms. When it slowed a wave of relief hit me. Someone recognized these two high school guys and felt sorry for them.

In the darkness I could only make out the face of the driver. He looked familiar, but I couldn't remember from where. As he rolled the window down, my mind connected the face with the person just as Crazy Hattie leaned over from the passenger side of the front seat and pointed a broom at us. Her nephew was the driver that I still had no name for, but it was definitely the guy I saw on many fishing trips as we passed Hattie's house.

"Dats dem boys, right there, who done walked in my yard," she said and shook her broom at us.

Once again Chris ran. His boots dug into the dirt road as he churned away at full speed. Oddly, the nephew grinned at me. Since his crazy aunt was chasing us, I would expect a frown, but he grinned. . Without waiting for him to speak or for Hattie to shake the broom at me again, I darted right down the middle of the dirt road, trying desperately to catch up to Chris. Crazy Hattie and her grinning nephew drove straight down the road behind us. They did not try to run over us. They followed us at slow speed, right in the middle of the road, and right behind us.

After another hundred or so yards, my lungs and then my legs began to fade. Grinning Nephew gunned the motor and zoomed past both of us. They continued for half of a mile while Chris and I slowed to a stop, watching their taillights in the distance.

"Oh, God, what was that all about?" Chris said between heavy, deep breaths.

"He grinned at me," I said. "He grinned and I ran."

"Oh shit, they're coming back," Chris said, and sure enough, Grinning Nephew pulled into the wood yard parking lot, stopped, and backed into our road. Their headlights hit us flush in the face and it was obvious to us both that he was about to drive right at us. But he didn't. Hattie got out and bent down to the ground, picking up something. When she got back in Grinning Nephew gunned the car in our direction.

I didn't actually see Grinning Nephew gun the car at us. By then, we jumped the ditch on the south side of the road and tried to leap over a barbed-wire fence, except my boots caught something as I crossed and I crashed down on the other side. My face and right eye banged down hard and Chris helped me scramble to my feet. Dazed, I ran behind him through a giant pasture that we had driven by hundreds of times in our lives. I doubt either of us ever knew we would run through it under these exact circumstances. No way Grinning Nephew could get to us in there, since the ditch and fence ran the length of the property.

After running a hundred yards or so, we stopped. By now the car sat menacingly in the road. Grinning Nephew honked the horn and then turned off the headlights, out of our eyes. Crazy Hattie climbed onto the hood of the car and threw something at us. Chris had no idea what, but I knew.

"Rocks," I said. "She picked them up out of the wood yard parking lot when they turned the car around." As I said it, Hattie threw one rock after another at us, coming up well short of course. We stood and watched, amazed at her tenacity. When she ran out of stones, she slammed her broom down on the hood of the car, several times, and cackled, in that amusing yet frightening way of hers. I've never heard a human make that noise since then, which is fine with me. We finally turned and jogged away, her cackle growing fainter and fainter in the distance.

We walked the pasture until we came to the Rogers farmhouse, which butted against the pasture fencerow. Luckily, the lights burned in the front of the house and as we knocked, Chris and I exchanged one of those glances that you share with your best friend maybe a dozen times in your young days. You know the kind of look I'm talking about, the kind where you acknowledge that you just survived something together that nearly made you soil your underwear. Mrs. Rogers made a big fuss over my bruised and cut face, and apologized several times for not having any bandages. Instead, I held a plastic bag full of ice over the fresh bruise and dabbed at the cut with a wet paper towel.

When my Dad answered the phone, I said, "Dad, I need some jumper cables, a flashlight, some bandages, and a gun." The other end of the line went dead silent. My father was thinking about what I had said, trying to absorb the combination of items I had hurriedly listed for him. His oldest son didn't come home at dark, as expected, and I had to believe they were a bit worried by now.

His reply was one we would laugh about for many years in our family. He said, "Boy, what in the hell have you gotten yourself into?"

We never found out why Hattie chased us with such vigor that night. Our crack investigators in the local police department went to Hattie's house to try and find out. Frustrated, they instead warned Grinning Nephew not to encourage her and not to drive her during any more of her fits. He agreed to do so, and I always wondered, did he really say something to them, anything, or did he just grin and nod?

Chris and I never went back to our favorite fishing hole after that night. Not really because we were afraid of Hattie, but because football started soon and the next summer we worked jobs that were more regular in hours and the timing just never seemed to work out. When we both went off to college, together, my father called during my sophomore year and told me that Hattie had died.

Grinning Nephew drove into town one morning and found the deputies dutifully reading the paper and eating sausage biscuits. When they arrived at her house with the local EMTs, Hattie lay on her bed, as if asleep. Jimmy Earl, the cop who so long ago battled Hattie in front of the whole town, later told my Dad that under Hattie's bed he found a neat pile of lemon-sized rocks, perfect for throwing.

Sohn Enis lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife, Kristi, and their Basset Hound, Gracie. He works as a technical writer for a local software company in order to pay the bills. While trying to write a novel, he rediscovered his love of short stories and has concentrated on writing those for several months. He is busy submitting his stories to various magazines and contests and is proud of the fact that he finished his first screenplay last year. He hopes to finish his second screenplay (and sell it) later this year.

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