Deviant

by Harold Schechter

  To anyone who had occasion to pass by Eddie’s property, it was evident that the Gein farmstead had also undergone a marked decline in appearance since Augusta’s death. Now that he was all alone, Eddie had simply stopped working the place. The front yard was overgrown with weeds, and the pastures were receding to woodland. The last few head of livestock were gone, sold off by Eddie to pay for his mother’s funeral. Unused pieces of farming equipment—cultivator, fanning mill, manure spreader—sat rusting in the barnyard.

  Because Eddie had such minimal needs, he managed to support himself by leasing a few acres of land to neighboring farmers and hiring himself out as a handyman. For a while, he did work for the township, clearing brush from the roadsides in summer and plowing snow in winter. Since his land was lying fallow, he was also entitled to a small government subsidy through a state soil-conservation program.

  Though a few of the townsfolk took his neglect of the farm as a sign of shiftlessness in Eddie, most of his neighbors considered him an able and hard-working hand. When threshing time came, Eddie was often hired on as one of the crew. Slight as he looked, he had the strength and endurance that come from a lifetime of manual labor. Floyd Reid—who worked alongside Eddie many a time, on threshing crews and at the local lumber mill—was one of those who regarded Gein as “the most dependable person in the county.” And unlike some of the other men, Eddie never used cuss words or spoke out of turn. He was always quiet and well mannered.

  Take the way he behaved during dinnertime. When a farmer got together a threshing crew to help harvest his crops, it was his wife’s responsibility to provide the workers with a solid midday meal—roast beef, baked beans, mashed potatoes, pickles, relishes, hot bread and rolls, freshly churned butter, homemade cottage cheese, jellies, preserves, and assorted fruit pies and cakes, all washed down with fresh milk or iced tea or strong, steaming coffee. As the men filed into the house through the kitchen door, brushing the dust off their heavy bib overalls or mopping their faces with the faded red kerchiefs they kept knotted around their necks, Eddie would hang back, waiting until the last of the crew was seated before finding himself a place.

  Often, when the meal was finished and the other men had all stepped back outside to stretch out in the grass for a while, relax, and have a smoke, Eddie would linger at the table, gazing fixedly at the farmer’s wife and daughters as they bustled about the kitchen. Many of the females—even the very young ones—felt a little disconcerted by the way Eddie sat there inspecting them, his lips twisted into that strange little leering half-smile of his. But they also couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him. His life was so terribly lonely. And he never seemed to mean any harm or disrespect by the looks he gave them. In fact, if one of the girls were to stare back at him, he would immediately jump up from his chair and carry his plate, utensils, and drinking glass over to the sink—a courtesy that none of the other men ever saw fit to perform. More than one farmer’s wife, touched by Eddie’s politeness and by the awful solitariness of his existence, resolved to bake an extra batch of holiday cookies for the forlorn little bachelor come Christmastime and deliver it herself to his home.

  Not many of the farmers, though, shared their wives’ sentimental view of Eddie. Indeed, though they considered him a capable enough worker, some of the men treated Eddie as an outright chucklehead, the perfect patsy for a good practical joke. Generally, after the day’s harvesting was done, the crew would unwind with a tub of iced beer. On a few occasions, one of the fellows would hand Eddie a bottle that had been half filled with brandy. Eddie would guzzle it down without noticing the difference, and, before you knew it, his droopy eyelid would begin to sag even more.

  Then there was the time someone planted a smoke bomb under the hood of Eddie’s pickup. Even those men who didn’t approve of such childish doings—men like Floyd Reid, who felt sorry for Gein and regarded his oddness as the inevitable consequence of his sadly disadvantaged upbringing—couldn’t help but smile at the look on Eddie’s face as he came tumbling out of his truck when the smoke bomb went off.

  For all the stamina he displayed on the job, there was something distinctly, even gratingly, womanish about the shy little bachelor—“weak-acting,” Gyle Ellis called it, whereas Otto Frank tended to think of Eddie as “another Casper Milquetoast.” Eddie claimed, for instance, to be squeamish about blood, and—though he commonly hunted rabbit and squirrel, often in the company of Bob Hill and other local boys he had befriended—he would never kill a deer, he said, because he couldn’t stand to see it dressed out.

  Eddie’s professed aversion to bloodshed was peculiar not only because he’d spent most of his life on a farm, where butchering animals was a standard part of his existence, but also because he seemed so preoccupied with violence. Eddie was a great one for reading and had a particular affection for true crime magazines, the kind with lurid covers of half-naked girls being assaulted by beefy men in trench coats and black leather masks. Eddie couldn’t get enough of these publications and was constantly recounting, for the benefit of anyone who would listen, some especially juicy lust killing he had just read about in the latest issue of Inside Crime or Startling Detective. Murder was one of his favorite topics of conversation. In the company of men, he also tended to talk about women, though his comments—how cute Irene Hill looked or how “nice and plump” Bernice Worden had become—sounded more like the utterances of a schoolboy than the responses of a forty-year-old man.

  Of course, Eddie wasn’t found in the company of men very often. Though the people he came in contact with—the farmers, housewives, and merchants of Plainfield—couldn’t see it, Eddie was, by the early 1950s, in full retreat—from society, from reality, from sanity itself. More and more of his time was spent in the darkness of his decaying farmhouse. In the past, he would kill some time occasionally at the Plainfield ice cream parlor or at the big indoor roller-skating rink in the neighboring village of Hancock. Now, except to do an odd job or run an errand, he rarely went anywhere. In fact, there seemed to be only one place in the area he continued to visit with any regularity: Mary Hogan’s tavern.

  Situated in the tiny town of Pine Grove, about seven miles from the village of Plainfield,, Hogan’s establishment was an odd-looking place. Built of concrete blocks with a semicylindrical roof of corrugated metal, it looked less like a roadside tavern than a warehouse topped with a Blatz Beer sign.

  Having been raised by an abusive, alcoholic father and a fanatically moralistic mother who viewed liquor as only slightly less vile than sex, Eddie wasn’t much of a drinker. But he did indulge in a beer now and then. His real reason for visiting Mary Hogan’s place, though, was not to drink or socialize—he could have accomplished those goals in a number of taverns closer to home—but to observe the proprietress. Eddie was transfixed by her.

  A formidable middle-aged woman who weighted nearly two hundred pounds and spoke with a heavy German accent, Mary Hogan bore—at least in Eddie’s eyes—an unmistakable resemblance to his own mother. What made her so fascinating to him, however, were not just the similarities but, even more, the glaring differences between the two. Augusta had been a saint on earth, the purest, most pious woman in the world. Hogan, by contrast, was a foul-mouthed tavern keeper with a shady, even sinister past. Few hard facts would ever be known about her, but according to rumor, she was twice divorced, had connections to the mob (she had moved to rural Wisconsin from Chicago some years before), and was even reputed to have been a big-city madam. To Eddie, she was like some kind of perverse mirror image of Augusta, as evil as his mother had been good.

  Thinking about the two of them together that way made Eddie feel dizzy. How could God have allowed his mother to waste away and die, while suffering this Hogan creature to live? He couldn’t figure it out.

  One thing was for sure, though. God couldn’t possibly permit such a flagrant injustice to go on for very long. Deep in his bones, Eddie just knew that was true.

  7

  BETH SCOTT and MICHAEL NORMA
N, Haunted Heartland

  “The bond between a mother and her child is often beyond comprehension—a slight, unexpected stirring from the baby’s nursery can awaken her from deepest slumber, an almost sixth sense warns of imminent danger to her little one. But does the sense of peril end at what is taken by most to be death? Or can a mother commune with her child even as she lies in the grave?”

  It is early evening on a drizzly fall day, several years after the death of Augusta Gein. Her bachelor son, now in his mid-forties, has just returned home, having spent the afternoon performing an errand for his neighbors, Lester and Irene Hill, proprietors of a tiny country store in West Plainfield. The Hills purchase their provisions from a warehouse in Wisconsin Rapids, twenty-some miles from Plainfield, and Eddie, having very little else to do with his time, often volunteers to make the trip into the city when the Hills are too busy to pick up their supplies.

  A cold gust of wind blows the rain across Eddie’s stubbled face as he moves across the sagging rear porch of his house, the warped, weatherworn boards creaking under his feet. He pushes open the door into the dank and lightless summer kitchen, letting his watery blue eyes grow accustomed to the dark. He listens for a moment to the mice as they scurry for the corners. Above his head, cobwebs tremble in the blackness between the ceiling and rafters. Nothing else in this place stirs. Apart from the rodents and spiders, Eddie is alone.

  Moving carefully across the trash-littered floor—around decaying cartons of household junk, piles of moldering feed sacks, a couple of rank, mildewed mattresses—he steps to the heavy wooden door on the opposite wall of the shed, enters his kitchen, and puts a match to the oil lamp on the table. The lamp flickers to life beneath the kitchen window, clearly visible behind a curtain so motheaten and tattered that it is nearly transparent. Eddie gazes at the windowpanes, but the glass is coated with such a thick layer of grime that it gives back no reflection.

  It is cold in the house, and Eddie keeps on his plaid flannel jacket and deerhunter’s cap as he prepares his evening meal. Throwing a few sticks of wood into his ancient cookstove, he gets a small fire going, just big enough to warm up his usual pork-and-beans supper. There’s no need for a pot. Eddie just takes an opener to the lid, then set the can right on the stovetop.

  Reaching into his mouth, he removes the moist lump of Wrigley’s he has been chewing and carefully adds it to his gum collection, which he hoards in a one-pound Maxwell House coffee tin on a shelf, along with his other dustcoated treasures. A gas mask. A bunch of used medicine bottles. Three old radios (still workable, though of limited use in a house with no electricity). A boxful of plastic whistles, toy airplanes, and other breakfast-cereal premiums. A decomposing sponge rubber ball. Two sets of yellowed dentures. A wash basin full of sand. His special handmade bowls.

  Eddie sticks a finger into the beans and, satisfied with their temperature, empties them into one of the bowls. He rummages through the jumble of unwashed utensils in his sink and comes up with a spoon. Then, carrying the spoon and bowl in one hand and his oil lamp in the other, he makes his way out of the kitchen.

  The floor is so crowded with filth and debris—food scraps, rodent droppings, grimy rags, empty food cans and oatmeal containers, cardboard boxes overflowing with crime magazines, a half-empty sack of plaster, a stiffened horsehide buggy robe—that, even in the daytime, Eddie cannot negotiate it easily. Now, in the dim circle of light shed by his oil lamp, he cannot avoid stepping into an ash pile or knocking his shins against a rusted metal tub filled with bits of twine, tattered children’s clothes, and shards of broken china.

  As he traverses the kitchen, his shadow slides across the items he has tacked onto one of the dingy, flaking walls. A dozen promotional calendars, a few dating back to the 1930s. An automobile reflector disk inscribed “Accidents Spoil Fun.” A card from the telephone company reading “In Case of Fire, Call 505.” (Eddie does not own a telephone.)

  Then, passing beneath a pair of deer antlers, a rusty horseshoe, and a withered Christmas wreath, all mounted over the doorway and dripping with cobwebs, he steps inside his bedroom.

  It is the only other room in the house that Eddie ever enters. Beyond it lies the Sacred Place, boarded off by Eddie years before. The second story is visited only by an occasional squirrel scuttling down through the chimney.

  Eddie sets his oil lamp and handmade bowl on a wooden crate. Because its underside is so irregular (Eddie has tried to file down some of the bumps, but with limited success), the bowl threatens to tip over, and Eddie takes a moment to balance it on the crate top. Then, picking up a few sticks of kindling from the floor, he starts a fire in the potbellied stove near his bed.

  The room is, if possible, even more squalid than the kitchen, a chaos of discarded food tins, empty cartons, crumpled newspapers, corroded hand tools, old musical instruments (including a broken accordion and a violin without strings), and a three-foot stack of tattered coveralls. A clothesline hung with soiled handkerchiefs is strung above Eddie’s iron bedstead. Amid the insane clutter and filth, the only objects that seem to have been treated with care are Eddie’s firearms: two .22-caliber rifles, a .22 pistol, a 7.65-millimeter Mauser, and a 12-gauge shotgun.

  Outside, the rain has stopped falling, but—though a full moon has emerged from behind the clouds—no light enters the room. Its two windows have been tar-papered shut.

  Seating himself on his sagging, grease-stained mattress, Eddie sifts through the pile of books and periodicals at his feet and selects his reading matter for the evening: a pulp magazine called Man’s Action, with a lurid cover painting of an impossibly big-breasted blonde, outfitted in a Gestapo uniform and applying a riding crop to the naked back of a writhing concentration-camp prisoner. Then, picking up his food, he takes a mouthful of the viscous mixture, opens the magazine on his lap, and begins to read.

  Lately, he has been studying accounts of Nazi barbarities, and tonight, as he spoons down his supper, he pores over a story that relates, in loving detail, the atrocities committed by Ilse Koch, the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” accused of collecting human heads and using the tattooed skin of her victims for lampshades and book bindings. He also likes reading about the deeds of Irma Grese, the angelic-looking nineteen-year-old SS warder who wore a sky-blue jacket that matched the color of her eyes, kept a horse whip stuck in one of her jackboots, and performed her primary duty—selecting enfeebled women and children for extermination at the Auschwitz and Belsen death camps—with uncommon zeal and enjoyment.

  Eddie’s tastes, of course, aren’t limited to Nazi horror stories. He has a special fondness for South Seas adventure yarns, particularly ones concerning cannibals and headhunters. Only recently, he came across a supposedly true-life narrative that he can’t seem to get out of his mind. It concerned a man who murdered a wealthy acquaintance and escaped on his yacht, only to be shipwrecked on a Polynesian isle, where he was captured, tortured, and flayed by the natives. Of particular interest to Eddie was the graphic description of the process used to shrink and preserve the victim’s head, though he also enjoyed the part about the drum that had been fashioned by stretching the skin of the dead man’s abdomen across a hollow gourd.

  Stories about exhumations are also among Eddie’s favorites. He has read everything he can get his hands on about the English “resurrection men,” or “body snatchers,” who peddled corpses to nineteenth-century anatomy schools. Another story set in nineteenth-century Britain, about a club of depraved young aristocrats who dug up corpses of beautiful young women and put them to unspeakable uses, has left an equally lasting mark on Eddie’s fantasy life.

  Lately, Eddie’s imagination has been fired by an astounding tale unfolding in papers and newsweeklies across the nation. And ex-GI—a good-looking young man from New York City—has traveled to Denmark and undergone an operation that has transformed him into a woman. Eddie is fascinated by this story. Since childhood, he has often daydreamed about becoming a girl and imagined what it would feel like to have
female sex parts instead of a penis. For a very long time, of course, his concept of female sex parts was exceptionally imprecise, based entirely on a crude illustration of human reproductive organs in a medical textbook he bought in Wisconsin Rapids. Recently, however, he has been able to study the private parts of several women firsthand. The expression on his face is a perfect mixture of lewdness and contentment as he thinks of these wonderfully intimate and exciting experiences.

  When Eddie can’t find an interesting magazine article about cannibalism, grave robbing, Nazi war crimes, or sexual mutilation, he relies for entertainment on the local newspapers—particularly the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune and the Plainfield Sun—searching their pages for stories about killings, car accidents, suicides, or unexplained disappearances.

  And there is one other kind of news item he examines with great care and gratification.

  He always makes sure to read—and, in certain cases, to tear out and save—the obituaries.

  Having scraped the last of the pork and beans from the inside of his bowl, Eddie drops his magazine onto the floor and gazes up at his Trophies dangling from the opposite wall. Their presence comforts him a bit. Still, he feels very lonely tonight. He misses his mother.

  He closes his eyes and listens for her. On several occasions since her death, he has heard her voice, quite clearly, telling him to be good. But tonight, he hears only the rattle of the branches in the wind and the mice scuttling across his kitchen floor.