The arrival of puberty is a turbulent time for boys. The rapid growth of the testicles, the breaking voice, uncontrollable erections, and sprouting pubic hair, not to mention the newly discovered sexual function makes all kids a little bit goofy, but it turned Dennis into an absolute fucking basket case. Of course he had always been a little different; with a family like his it was probably inevitable.

He lived with his father and uncle, an eighteen-year-old half brother, and his uncle’s adoptive son in a small ramshackle house up in the woods. There was running water but no power, and they used bottled gas for cooking and lights. They had all moved into the house after Dennis’s mother’s death and his uncle’s divorce. His father and uncle both worked in the woods as loggers and his older brother pulled green chain in a sawmill. I drove up by their place a couple of times on my way fishing and wasn’t too impressed with their lifestyle. As soon as it got warm enough they’d drag all the beds outside and sleep in the yard, which was okay, but they also ran around buck-ass naked a lot of the time, oblivious to any of the hunters, fisherman, or other people that wandered out that far. There was junk all over the place and the house always looked as if it was on the verge of collapse. A few years later they could be described as Hippies, and nowadays they would probably be referred to as Rednecks, but back then most people simply called them Hillbillies. Dennis was apparently well fed and healthy, and although shabby his clothes were usually clean, providing he didn’t have to change a tire or work under the hood of the car on the way to school. The school bus didn’t go out that far, so he and the younger cousin drove themselves six miles down the dirt road in an old bullet-nosed Studebaker to the nearest school bus stop.

Dennis was an okay kid and he didn’t seem to be much different than the other elementary school kids. The only thing I remember that was unique about him was his behavior in the shower. Most young boys make a cursory pass through the shower, just barely getting wet and taking just a swipe or two across their bodies with the bar of soap before rinsing off and hurriedly dressing. Not Dennis. Hot water or bathroom time may have been scarce at home or something, but whatever the reason he was the only kid in his sixth grade class that seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness. He would soap up and then work the lather all over his body, including between his legs and into the crack of his ass, and then spend a long time rinsing it all off. He was always the last to leave the shower and frequently hadn’t yet finished dressing when the bell rang.

Halfway through his seventh grade year Dennis started to change. His childish soprano voice started to crack, and wispy hair, fine as smoke, appeared on his crotch. This was normal; I’ve observed hundreds of boys and most enter puberty some time in the seventh or eighth grades. There are always a few early and late bloomers, of course, but by and large they start getting goofy about the time they turn thirteen. The mental change seems as dramatic as the physical transformation. They know their bodies are changing, but they aren’t really prepared for it. Nowadays the schools have Sex Ed classes to help kids deal with it, but in the 1960’s that kind of thing was unheard of. A kid’s dad might give him ‘The Talk’; otherwise it was just a matter of what he could learn from classmates or older brothers about masturbation and reproduction, and they wouldn’t know or care about birth control or VD protection until they were in high school.

He came back to school the next fall as an eighth grade teenager, and it was no surprise to see that his once-wispy pubic hair had coalesced into a thick mat of curls. He was still a boy and not a man and it hadn’t crept onto his thighs and belly, but it was there for all to see and for his less fortunate classmates to admire. Two weeks later it was gone. What the hell? I thought. An early bloomer who had entered puberty by the sixth grade might have been embarrassed by the hair that made him different from his classmates and may have wished it gone, but older boys like Dennis consider it a status symbol and proof of their impending manhood. Later on they would become more obsessed with their genitals and the reproductive function, but for these little farts crotch hair is a badge of maturity worn with pride and no way in hell would a normal kid either shave it off or allow another person to deprive him of it. I watched one boy who was cornered and outnumbered and forced to make a choice lick a dog turd in lieu of submitting to having his crotch shaved.

I knew that there were diseases and treatments that cause a person to lose his hair but I couldn’t fathom this young boy having a affliction like that, so I went to one of my other hiding places in the service access behind the shower room and observed him close up, eyeball to crotch. He had definitely been shaved. Faint, coarse stubble was visible as were a couple of nicks from a clumsily handled razor. The boy was obviously embarrassed about it too. Normally he strutted around naked unashamed and proud, but now he modestly covered his genitals, like a naked young teenager in the company of men at a public pool locker room would do, and he demurely faced the wall to shower, towel off, and dress. I had been a custodian at Highland for over twenty years at that time and had a number of secret observation posts and had seen every kid that went through there and everything that went on there but that was a new one for me. I decided to keep an eye on the boy and see just what the hell the problem was.

By January his pubic hair had grown back in and he no longer looked like a hairless infant with big balls and I figured maybe the shaving was just a one-time thing inflicted on him as a prank by his buddies, but in early February something else happened. He was absent from school for several days then returned to school with even more reason to hide his crotch from his classmates. His balls were swollen and his whole scrotum was a greenish-purple hue. I had seen it before and it had also happened to me; he had taken a hell of a hit in the nuts.

PE class was hard on him that day and being as how he was extremely uncomfortable the teacher excused him early. He went alone to the shower room, and then I learned that his swollen nuts weren’t the only things bothering him. He stripped down but before showering lifted one leg onto the bench and reached around to remove a small square of somewhat bloody toilet paper from his ass. He then took a small tube of some kind of ointment from his locker and applied a generous dollop of it right into his hole. After showering he poked in a fresh piece of toiler paper before donning his clothes. There may have been another explanation, but it was obvious to me that someone racked his balls and buttfucked him.

I could have notified the principal or at least the PE teacher, but the truth was that I hadn’t had any business seeing the kid naked in the first place, and also I had already been reminded that my concern as custodian was supposed to be maintenance of the facility and not the welfare of the students. There was another issue that bothered me aside from the obvious abuse that Dennis had suffered, and that was the welfare of his younger cousin. I knew for a fact that whatever happened to Dennis didn’t happen at school so I assumed it was a home problem and that meant that his younger cousin could also be a victim. The younger boy was a fifth grader and as such he didn’t dress down for PE, but he did use the toilet occasionally, so I kept an eye on him when ever he went in to take a shit. There wasn’t any obvious blood on his underwear nor did he appear to have any asshole discomfort. I didn’t question the boy, of course, but he seemed to have been spared the treatment being given his cousin.

Like I said earlier, the whole family unit was sort of weird, but I couldn’t see any of them as molesters. The older half brother hung around town a lot with several different girls, all of who seemed to like him. I saw him buying rubbers a time or two and I had heard it through the grape vine that he was quite a young stud and that at least one of the girls had marriage in mind. The uncle was not above suspicion, nor was Dennis’s father, but there wasn’t any hard evidence to suggest that either of them liked boys for sex partners.

He healed up from the trauma in a few weeks and didn’t seem unduly mentally distressed so I just kind of forgot about him and his troubles until the first week in May when fishing season opened up. It was hot and the ice was off of the high lakes by then, so I drove up to try my luck fishing for trout. The road went right by their house and I couldn’t help but look over as I passed. The uncle was out on the front porch, stark naked, pissing over the rail. He didn’t stop and go back into the house or even try to turn away; he just smiled and waved when he saw me. I turned away in disgust and drove on up the road. I have never been known as a prude, nor am I a neat freak, but I sure as hell couldn’t live like that.

I motored on up the road and had just gone around the corner when a flash of something white caught my eye. I looked again and couldn’t see it, so I continued on up the road another quarter mile before it dawned on me that what I had seen looked just like a person’s ass. I stopped and retrieved my old binoculars from under the seat then walked back down the road to take a closer look, fully expecting to see an old flour sack tied to a tree, flapping in the breeze, or something like that.

What I saw was Dennis. His bare white ass stood out like a beacon. He was crouched under a small tree, messing with something that I couldn’t see. He finally stepped away, and only then did I realize that he had tied a length slender rope around his scrotum, causing his balls to bugle out as if protesting their captivity. He stepped away from the tree and threw the other end of the rope around a branch ten feet or so off of the ground. He then took a small tube of something and smeared a little bit of it on what looked like a broken-off branch on the trunk of the tree a couple of feet off of the ground. I focused on the branch, and it was plain that the six inch long stub had been worn or sanded perfectly smooth. Denis stoked his cock until it was hard, all five inches standing upright almost parallel to his belly, before bending over and easing himself onto the lubricated stub of the tree limb. He then stood upright, pulled the slack out of the rope tied around his balls, and tied the free end to another branch right above his head. My eyes were now locked onto the boy as he continued to masturbate, squirming with obvious pain or ecstasy on the tree limb that impaled him while at the same using his free hand to tug on the rope that was stretching his balls. I had seen some pretty kinky shit go down at the school, and I knew from my own adolescence that kids that age have a fascination their nuts, with but this took the cake.

The show was over in less than a minute. He suddenly arched his back then bent his head forward, catching the first blast of his semen in his face. He slumped forward slightly, still impaled, and I turned away and walked back to my truck, somewhat embarrassed about having watched his kinky orgasm.

I tried to concentrate on fishing, but it was no use. My heart just wasn’t in it, and I finally called it a day a couple of hours before dark. I couldn’t help but look over in the direction of the tree as I drove by, but there was nothing to see. Farther down the road Dennis’s father was sanding on his front porch, actually wearing pants, and hollering. The truck window was down and I could plainly hear him calling for his son. He finally saw me, flagged me over, and asked me to keep an eye out for his boy, as he was supposed to have been home a couple of hours ago. I didn’t say anything to the boy’s father, but instead turned around and drove back up to where I’d last seen the boy.

He was still there, upside down, shoulders barely touching the ground, almost suspended by the rope still tied around his testicles. Several flies rooted around in the shit and blood that remained adhered to the tree limb stub that once entertained his ass, and the black swollen balls that extended almost to his knees were supporting their own colony of flies. Residue from a second orgasm was painted in three shiny streaks across his hairless belly.

I left him like that and drove down the road several miles to the nearest phone to call the ambulance and sheriff. I couldn’t face his father with the news that his son had accidentally castrated himself while jacking off.

Medical confidentiality prevented me from learning why he had passed out, and once he had regained consciousness he refused to enlighten anyone who was inclined to spread gossip as to just what had happened. He didn’t return to school that year and the whole family abandoned their cabin that summer and moved elsewhere, and I never heard anything else about them.