by Dan Dillard
*****
Kevin, Jason, Adam, Erin and I—I’m Sam—had adventure on the brain that summer. Kevin and Jason were thirteen, almost fourteen, and were born on the same day. Adam, Jason’s brother, was eleven years old and two months my senior. Thankfully, he never held that over my head. Erin was the only girl.
June was hot, school was out and we were heavy into a game of front yard baseball. I was up at bat, choked up on the bat like dad taught me. All eyes widened as the rusty gray van with no windows drove up and parked in front of her house. It just drove up and parked there. That wasn’t done. It just wasn’t done. I was so stunned my bat dropped to my side and I hardly noticed when the baseball whizzed by, millimeters from my face. It rolled under the hedge.
“Can you believe the stones that guy must have in his shorts?” Kevin asked.
“Do you think he knows what’s livin’ in there?” Erin said. We followed with a chorus of, “Bum bum bummm,” that warning music from late night scary movies.
Standing motionless, we faced the evil house in awe. I expected a giant, axe-wielding, ninja-barbarian to burst forth from the Chevy. He would’ve been summoned from the pages of my comic collection to slay the bloodthirsty fiend that hid within those walls. An epic battle, no doubt.
Instead we saw a grungy looking man in his mid-thirties slide from the driver’s side door and plop to the ground. He wore work boots with stained and dusty coveralls and a ball cap from Napa Auto Parts. It was oily with a salty ring of sweat around the headband. His hair was greasy and thick and stuck out around the cap in sweaty clumps. A shave and a bath might’ve helped his appearance. He exuded what is best described as simplicity.
“He’s doomed,” I said.
The gang nodded. “Wasted,” someone added.
“Toast,” Kevin said.
The van bore no company logo and aside from his hat, neither did his clothes. When he opened the back doors and pulled out a small push mower and a gas can, he looked right at home. Lawn-guy took his hat off to wipe his brow with a dirty sleeve and only succeeded in mixing together the grime of both before replacing his dingy cover.
We watched him pour gas into the mower’s tank, put the container back in the van and shut the doors as if he was diffusing a bomb to save the day. Lawn-guy looked around a couple times, then wheeled the mower up over the curb onto the sidewalk stopped there to light a cigarette. He cranked the mower with one pull and proceeded to cut, smoking the whole time.
After what seemed an eternity, Erin snapped out of her daze first. “What the hell does that slimy fool think he’s doing?” she said.
“Obviously he was sent by the police to cut her grass ‘cause the neighbors complained,” my brother said. “There’s rules against letting your yard go and stuff like that.”
“Really?” I asked. “Rules about cutting your grass? I thought you just did it because your dad made you.”
“And so snakes and things don’t move in,” Adam added.
“Shut up you little fart stains.” Jason said. He continued to stare at the greasy lawn man. Fart stain was one of his more eloquent terms and he used it often. I figured fart stains were something he probably knew a lot about.
Kevin shot him a disapproving look and then looked back toward the sound of the mower and the man who followed it. I think we were all waiting to see if she would come outside. Maybe she would eat him, or kill him all Friday-the-13th-style…or maybe she would turn him into a rat and then fly off on her broom.
After about fifteen minutes, he stopped the mower, wheeled it back to the van and placed it inside. The main yard cut, he left the two empty lots alone. They protected Eunice from the normal neighbors. Whoever the lawn-guy was, he must’ve known that—sensed it. The van backfired when he started up the motor, but then it settled and the strange man drove off.
“He never looked at the house, knocked on the door or anything, just mowed and left,” Erin said with golly-gee bewilderment. She was right. He only cut the front yard from one edge of the wraparound porch to the other. Just enough to frame the old run down house out to the street.
“Maybe she died and he’s cutting the grass so they can sell it?” said Erin.
“There’s no for-sale sign. Besides, if she was dead we would’ve heard something. There would be a block party,” Kevin said.
Erin said, “I doubt we’d hear anything until the stench of her old dead body was so bad the police started snooping around. I saw this movie once…”
Jason interrupted Erin’s speech. “Who cares, you turds? Let’s play ball!” It was rude, but broke the spell the lawn-guy had cast over all of us with his sheer volume, his single most impressive trait.
“You’re a turd!” Was all I could think to say.
Jason charged at me, but Kevin got in between us and patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you pitch?” he said. It diffused the situation temporarily, but I saw him glaring at me over Kevin’s shoulder, just a quick look to let me know I was on his list.
“I’m not a turd,” I said under my breath. Adam nodded at me, but didn’t speak a word. He was grinning and it made me grin. Adam would’ve rather been a turd than get thrashed by his brother. I was all right with that as well.
For a while longer, we played baseball. Then we split up, older boys playing catch while the three younger kids decided to dig for bugs around the front flowerbed.
“Are you two scared of that lady?” asked Erin.
I was terrified of her if for no other reason than she was old. The elderly scared me, except for Gramma and Pops. They were fine, but other old people looked like skeletons with loose skin and fake teeth.
“No,” I lied, then put Adam on the spot. “You?”
He shook his head up and down without shame, his eyes like golf balls. His cheeks turned red and he rubbed his brown hair out of his face before declaring, “Look, a juicy one!” We giggled as the worm slimed loose from his pincer-like grasp and landed back in the soil.
“Me too,” said Erin. “I’m not scared of much, but she creeps me the hell out. Momma says she’s strange in a bad way.”
Erin was much tougher than Adam, maybe tougher than all of us. Erin Chambers was ten and a half and a tomboy. I thought the moon rose and set in her bright green eyes. She had dingy brown hair, freckles across her nose and a smile that twinkled with the promise of mayhem, and she had a better bike than I did. She was my best friend and because she was a girl, she could stand up to Jason.
Adam was shy and quiet, except around me. The best description of his was along for the ride. Wherever Erin and I went, Adam followed without complaint or argument.
“My mom says she smells terrible, just like butt and cat food,” I said in a half-whisper.
Much of what we said we delivered this way, as if classified and for our ears only. Erin twisted up the lower part of her face and made gagging noises. “That’s just nasty,” she said.
Adam’s head rocked back and forth in agreement, his face also scrunched like he smelled a skunk’s asshole. The conversation continued on for an hour or so, each of us trying to best the other on gross descriptions of the way our neighbor smelled. We were very cruel and very descriptive.
Dinnertime came and each went his separate ways. The gears turned in my head about Eunice Stubbins. I didn’t know where those thoughts were headed, but there was something more to that woman and I wanted answers.
Mom had supper ready and Kevin and I were appreciative when we got home. Dad got home just in time to eat with us. I ventured a question about Eunice. “Dad, how long has Miss Stubbins lived in that house?”
Mom and Dad looked up from their plates, and their eyes met. He put his fork down and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Dunno, bud. She was there before we moved in. Why?” he said.
I shrugged and took another bite. I didn’t know what else to say about it.
“Saw a guy cutting her lawn today,” Kevin said. “We thought maybe she was dead.”
I don’t know if he was thinking like I was thinking, but I was glad he kept the conversation going. Mom coughed and took a quick sip of her drink.
“She’s not dead, Kevin. At least I don’t think so. We’d have heard something if she was,” she said. “Don’t you think, honey?”
Dad shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess so, but who do you know that talks to her?”
“True,” mom said, then looked at Kevin and me. “You boys haven’t been bothering her, have you?”
“No,” Kevin and I said, a duet of innocent denial.
“You sure?” dad said.
We nodded, still shoveling food into our mouths. That was the best way to keep myself from overstating, from slipping up and spilling the truth. What would it matter if they knew we watched her? We were just watching.
“Well, let’s keep it that way, shall we?” mom said.
We continued nodding, but that was all about to change. Hell was missing a resident and she lived on our street.
LEGEND
LIFE HAPPENED FOR the next week, nothing out of the ordinary. We played in our little microcosm of four or five neighboring yards using the street in front of the house for bikes, skateboards, and street hockey. On hot days, a sprinkler cooled us off. Otherwise, time was spent taking turns sitting on each other’s front porch or in a driveway or under the shade of an old tree while we plotted out the next journey. It was our routine and our territory and our rules.
That routine changed exactly two weeks later when the gray van with no rear windows again stopped in front of the house on the corner of Rutledge and McNeill. The same greasy man with the same dusty coveralls got out to smoke a cigarette and mow. Again we watched, unable to do anything else.
“I think she’s the devil and he’s one of her minions!” said Erin, subtle as ever.
“What? The devil is a man,” snapped Jason.
“You don’t know that,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”
He snorted. “Maybe she’s a witch, but not a devil—not The Devil. Witches wear black all the time,” Jason reasoned. “I think she’s a witch.”
I didn’t know if devil was appropriate either but witch felt right.
Timid and quiet, Adam asked the question we were all wondering, maybe even Kevin who knew lots of words. “What’s a minion?” he said.
“It’s like an evil henchman or a bad guy’s sidekick. They’d do the devil’s bidding, like bringing her fresh souls to eat,” Erin said. She wiggled her fingers as she said fresh souls just to hammer the horror home.
“Bringing him fresh souls,” Jason argued.
“Whatever,” Erin said. “It even rhymes! Eunice Stubbins, Devil Woman!”
And there it was. Eunice Stubbins, Devil Woman, never shows her face.
A woman none of us knew, or ever would know, defined by a particularly nasty, yet simple poem written by children. Standing there, we watched the strange man mow her lawn and I wondered if the devil woman had ever been a child like us or if she was hatched evil, summoned from some dark realm or conjured through spells and incantations.
It took about an hour to assemble the rest of the poem. We chanted it as the lawn-guy paced to and fro in her front yard. Each line gave me goosebumps, cold chills, the willies, the heebie-jeebies, and the creeps.
Those who see her disappear, gone without a trace.
I spent each night that summer peering over the edge of my blanket, eyes always on the window that faced her house. I lay there, praying she didn’t come crawling through it, smelling like rot and decay, a taste for my young tender flesh in her mouth, black drool running between jagged teeth and dripping on the floor with a wet, plinking sound. And when I finally slept, she cackled in my dreams like a mad person whose mind had given way to violence. After a few days, the nightmares would cease, but every time the lawn man showed up and we revisited the chant, the feeling came back and so did the dreams. She was my nemesis, a necessary villain to balance our innocence.
She smells of death and wears all black and sits alone at home,
The poem snuck up when I was alone and always with a sing-song quality that added menace—a boys’ choir in the devil’s church. I pictured her face, not the one I had seen from a distance, but a different one, a drawn, wrinkled thing with a mouthful of teeth that would rip and tear, yellow eyes with red pupils, flaring nostrils and wild hair that stuck out in grey, twisted tangles.
On cushions made of children’s skin and furniture of bone.
I hated that rhyme, the way it lay there coiled until I was by myself. Then it would slither. When I walked home on those chilly fall evenings after the sun had tucked in, it hid in the shrubs. Then, just before I reached home, it reared a horned and fanged head and revealed its true power, dancing delicately up and down my spine. It made me sweat icicles and held me motionless until I thought I would piss myself. The damned verse made me scream and sprint until I felt like my lungs had caught fire—until they begged to explode. Then I scrambled to reach safety, to get through the door and slam it shut behind me before the monster landed on my shoulders and dug in its claws. As creepy as she already was, we made her a legend. Lawn-guy only made the legend linger like the sweat stains on his coveralls. As long as he was there, we had a reminder.
For lawn-guy’s next visit—the July mowing—my brother and Jason formed a plan. When that day came, and the gray van rumbled down the street toward her house, they put it into action. Erin gave the signal. Shouted through a walkie-talkie and it sounded something like, “Guys! The freakin’ van’s coming!”
Kevin and Jason had been waiting at the neighbor’s house across the street from the Stubbins’ place. Those old people, the Collins, weren’t scary and their driveway served as a bus stop during the school year, especially during the coldest part of the winter when they opened their garage to let us keep warm. Sometimes Mrs. Collins had hot chocolate, but she always had a smile.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked.
“We’ll just go over and talk to him. Ask him some questions,” Jason said.
Kevin looked a little nervous to me, but nodded in agreement.
“You just gonna say, ‘Hey Mister!’ and start asking about Eunice?” I said.
“Something like that,” Kevin said.
“What are you gonna ask?” Adam said.
“Don’t worry about it, ass-breath,” said Jason, and he punched his little brother in the arm. Everyone glared at him. Adam rubbed the future bruise.
“We’ll wait here in case we have to call an ambulance or something,” Erin said.
Our front yard became headquarters for the mission. The older boys crossed Rutledge casually as if nothing was weird. The old van rolled past the stop sign on the other side of McNeill. Perfect timing put them at the van’s grille right as the engine sputtered out. Lawn-guy stepped out and walked to the back. I couldn’t hear what they said, but was nonetheless impressed that the boys followed through with their plan. Something was exchanged, hello’s or hi’s or get-the-hell-away-from-my-van’s. Then Lawn-guy looked beyond the boys toward the house, and waved.
“What the hell?” Erin said. She dropped the walkie-talkie and it opened up, spilling batteries into the grass. Our eyes jumped to the front porch of the house and we saw the open door. The blood drained from our faces as Jason and Kevin saw us and then turned to see what we saw.
“Holy dog shit,” I said.
Standing in the doorway was the figure of the old woman dressed in black. Scraggly white hair and gray skin poked out of the top of a moldy black dress. She stood for a moment in silence, and then raised her hand slowly and pointed at the boys. My heart moved into my throat, and when she let out a shrill scream that scattered Jason and Kevin like scolded dogs, I thought it would leap into my mouth.
Lawn-guy watched them run and shrugged, looking back at the house as the front door shut. Then he glanced back down the street, giving us a tip of the ball cap before he co
mmenced his weekly task, cigarette smoke curling behind him as he pushed the mower.
Kevin arrived first, his face pale and cheeks blazing red. He couldn’t speak for the panting. We sat on the front porch, which was just out of sight of the crazy old lady’s house while he caught his breath.
“Is…she…gone?” he managed between gasps for air.
We nodded.
“She went in right after you two ran,” Erin said.
“Where’d Jason go?” Adam asked. “He ran right by.”
Kevin sat up, catching his breath, and laughed nervously, still obviously shaken from the woman’s appearance.
“He...pissed himself. I guess…he went home…to change.” he said.
Only Adam laughed. Kevin leaned over to him and said, “Hang on to this one. You might need it one day.” Adam smiled.
We went home early that day. No one asked what was spoken between the boys and the lawn man until the next morning when the group was back together. I think we were scared…I know I was…and nobody made fun of Jason.
