by Newman,James
Several long, quiet minutes passed, ticking by with each clamorous beat of my heart. The shrill chirping of crickets and the steady hiss of the midnight rain around me seemed deafening now, yet neither could drown out the sounds of heavy footsteps on the Old Shack’s wooden floor, or the intermittent thumps and scrapes against its interior walls. Every few seconds I heard a labored grunt, as if the two men were moving stuff around in there.
At last I took another cautious step forward, and I could feel the vibrations of their movements beneath my feet, through the muddy ground.
My heartbeat grew more frantic with every passing minute. My brow was slick with sweat.
“This is bad, Henry,” came the deeper voice again. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”
“I know, Dad.” The younger man sounded like he might start crying. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“We’ll have to burn her clothes. Everything. Clean all this shit up till there ain’t even a pussy hair left.”
That cinched it. No way could I leave without knowing who they were. What they were doing in there. But even at a distance of just several feet from the cabin, I was too short to view more than the tops of the two men’s heads through the windows.
Still moving as tentatively as my Great Snail might have once moved, I sneaked around toward the rear of my Old Shack and began searching for something to stand on so I could see inside its filthy windows. In the thick black shadows behind the Old Shack lay several plastic milk crates…an ancient toilet, cracked and yellow…a couple busted Mason jars…and an old red dog food bowl (BOO, read the name on the side) filled with dead brown pine needles floating in stagnant green water. But then, further back, I spotted exactly what I needed. A small homemade table constructed from what looked like a tree-stump base and a flat cross-section of a larger stump for its surface. Perfect. If I dragged it over to one of the windows—without making too much noise in the process, of course—I could climb atop it for a perfect view inside my Old Shack.
I grunted as I sat the table upright, bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood. Beneath the scarce light of the night’s yellow half-moon I winced at the sight of thousands of earthworms and centipedes and what we used to call gray “roly-poly bugs” churning in the soft ground where the table had lain for years. I tried not to think about black widows and the sorts of places they liked to hide.
I wiped my hands on my shorts, carried the thing with great effort to the side of my Old Shack, careful not to drag it through the leaves.
Several more hoarse curses drifted out of the Old Shack and into the woods. The continuous din of heavy footsteps inside kept a sort of counter-rhythm to the furious beat of my heart. I flinched when something slammed into the wall closest to me so hard the whole cabin seemed to shake.
Slowly I crawled atop my makeshift ladder, making sure I was properly balanced before trusting the stump-table with all my weight.
I ran one hand through my rain-damp hair, leaned forward to peer through the window…
And I gasped.
Though I had expected to recognize the men inside, suspected that what they were doing was something far more sinister than playing a friendly game of poker, my jaw dropped as I stared through the spider-web pattern of cracks in that dirty window…
I could see everything now. Much more than I really wanted.
The two men in my Old Shack I did know. They were local men.
Sheriff Burt Baker. And his son, Henry.
I recognized Henry from the Big Pig Grocery on Brady Boulevard, where he worked part-time as a bagboy. He looked about twenty years old, give or take, and I suppose the girls his age might have considered him handsome if a tad awkward. His lips were full, red, almost feminine. He had been trying to grow a moustache, apparently, but had experienced scant luck with it so far. He wore his dark brown hair just shy of his shoulders, like Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter. Henry suffered from a slight case of Tourette’s Syndrome, I noticed as I stood there watching the men, and though I did not know the name of his affliction at the time I did recognize that his nervous tics—a twitchy clenching-and-unclenching of his fists every few minutes followed by a quick upward jerk of his head—weren’t normal. By no means was his problem severe, yet he could not have hidden his occasional fidgeting even if he tried.
On the night this all happened, Henry Baker wore a faded Bruce Springsteen Born To Run T-shirt, jeans so tight they looked painful, and a pair of powdery-looking latex gloves.
They both wore gloves, I noticed, as the two men in my Old Shack went about their morbid business…
Sheriff Burt Baker was a tall, stocky man in his mid-forties, a fellow whose khaki uniforms never seemed to fit quite right especially around his gut. His hair was short, black, always looked as if weeks had passed since he last washed it. Though he was Caucasian, far as I knew, his skin was so dark I often wondered if the sheriff’s family tree might have branched off at some point from Native American lineage. Baker’s cheeks were pock-marked with bad acne scars, his lips were large and almost pouty-looking, and as crude as this may sound I must admit I considered the sheriff to be one of the most unattractive folks I’d ever met. This opinion grew tenfold, of course, when I saw what ugly things he and his son were up to inside my Old Shack…
They were hard at work moving the body of a young woman. A girl. She could have been no older than fifteen or sixteen, at most. I figured she might have been pretty by the dim light of a kerosene lantern in the middle of the room, her hair long and straight and blond, her figure trim…but I couldn’t be sure.
Because her face had been battered beyond recognition.
My stomach churned as I gazed upon her ruined features, a pulpy mess of swollen flesh and crimson smears and awful purple bruises. That poor, poor girl. Her breasts were small, nipples very pink against her pale skin, and I saw faint purple bruises around her areoles, along her neck and collarbone, even on the inside of her thighs like dark blotchy fingerprints.
Although I had done nothing wrong here I felt a sudden pang of gut-wrenching shame. And something else. At the sight of the naked girl I felt a mysterious growing warmth below my belt that I could not explain. It made me sick. And ashamed.
My God, what had they done to her?
The sheriff held the dead girl by her arms, Henry by her legs. Her head rolled limply to one side as they propped her up in one corner of the room next to a small battery-powered radio with a bent antenna. In the same corner sat a single kerosene lantern and a scuffed leather jacket I assumed belonged to Henry. Beside the jacket lay a pile of what must have been the dead girl’s clothes: a pink skirt with lavender piping, orange blouse, a pair of Keds, panties and a small lace bra. The panties, I noticed, were ripped down one side.
The dead girl’s eyes were closed, but I couldn’t help but notice how her mouth fell open as the two men plopped her down. Just enough to give me a glimpse of her perfect white teeth and too pink tongue. When they let her go and she hit the floor, her body made a low farting sound.
I covered my mouth with one hand, swallowed back the bitter taste of bile rising in the back of my throat.
Henry Baker stepped away from the body, grimacing. “Aghh, Jesus—”
“It happens,” the sheriff grunted, without batting an eye. “Don’t worry about it.”
For the first time, I noticed the hot-pink scratches that ran from just under Henry Baker’s left eye down to his jaw line. Three long, nasty gashes like claw-marks from one very pissed-off cat. I touched my own cheek when I saw them, made a low hissing noise through my teeth.
She hadn’t gone down without a fight.
The sheriff cleared his throat, made a sound like hawking up phlegm though he never expelled it from his mouth. “Son-of-a-bitch. Did you ever fuck up this time, Henry…”
Henry turned to look at his father, but when he found himself facing the dead girl again his gaze quickly averted to his shoes.
Sheriff Baker’s hands
went to his hips as he stared at his son accusingly. I knew that pose well—it was the sheriff’s authoritarian pose, the one he took when watching out-of-town drunks do their clumsy walks along the white line, the getting-down-to-business stance he assumed while standing over the loser of a scuffle down at Lou’s Tavern. It was the posture of a well-respected man, Polk County’s elected keeper-of-the-peace.
“Please just tell me you didn’t take her to the Gala,” he said. His voice sounded as if he were in pain. “Tell me nobody saw you two together.”
“Just that black guy, with the wagon,” Henry said.
“What black guy?”
“One they call Rooster.”
“You talkin’ about that retard, walks around collectin’ cans?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit!” Sheriff Baker’s hands balled into fists. He covered his mouth with one, gnashed his teeth, looked as if the world had just dropped out from under him. “Goddammit, Henry!”
“It’s okay, Dad. He ain’t gonna say anything. It was dark. I don’t know if he even saw us. You know that nigger’s always in his own little world anyway.” Henry risked a self-conscious giggle at that, but then covered his mouth as if to force it back in should his quip rekindle the flames of his father’s rage.
The sheriff pointed one fat finger at his son, looked like he might scold the boy some more, but didn’t. He arched his back till his bones popped like kernels of popcorn, shook his head slowly before eyeing the long furrows in Henry’s raw red cheek. A cruel smile crept through his stern expression.
“Got you good, didn’t she?”
Henry’s hand went to his wounded face. He winced.
The sheriff’s chuckle was so deep it was nearly inaudible.
Suddenly lightning lit up the forest, and for a moment everything around me seemed basked in daylight. Thunder rumbled a few seconds later like the sonic boom of an invisible airplane hitting Mach 1 above the woods, and the rain began to pick up, harder. I flinched beneath Mother Nature’s fury, tensed as I saw the two men inside do the same.
The sheriff turned toward the window through which I peered, his cold blue eyes narrowed.
I froze, my teeth clenched like those of a stray dog kicked in the ribs. My heart slammed in my chest. The scent of ozone tickled my nostrils, making me want to sneeze. For a second I could have sworn Sheriff Baker looked right at me. Right through me. His bad complexion appeared rougher than ever during that moment, the way the light struck those old acne scars on his cheeks and the shadows of his surroundings danced about his pitted flesh. His face resembled something carved from thick red clay with a blunt tool, all blotchy and coarse and hard.
Finally he turned back to his son, though, and I could breathe again.
“Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?” The sheriff’s voice cracked a bit, as if he were so disappointed in this child he had raised to do the right thing. “I mean, after what happened…for Chrissake, you’d think…”
He trailed off, shaking his head.
Henry said nothing, just kept staring at the floor. He gave a little shrug. His right hand clenched and unclenched three times fast within its rubber glove. Then his left, once.
“You’re absolutely positive no one saw you two together?” his father asked him.
“Swear to God.”
“Just the nigger?”
“Just the nigger.”
“Where’s the Ford?”
“What?”
“Your fuckin’ truck, Henry! We ain’t got all night.”
“That vacant lot across from the ABC Store,” Henry replied, sounding so fatigued, and he followed this with some unintelligible mumble I couldn’t make out.
Sheriff Baker stood there scratching at his bumpy brown chin for the next few minutes, thinking over every detail of his scheme.
The rain tapped hard at the shack’s cheap tin roof like someone dropping ten-penny nails from the heavens. I strained to listen to the goings-on inside my Old Shack, but the rain began to fall harder. Louder.
“We’re gonna fix this, Henry,” said Sheriff Baker. “We’re gonna fix this, and it’s gonna be okay.”
Henry watched his father move across the room. Tears glistened in his eyes. But he said nothing.
“I got an idea. I think it’ll work. But we gotta move fast. Come on. Grab her legs again. We’re gonna take her to my patrol car.”
On weak knees, Henry moved to obey.
They hefted the body between them.
And that’s when it happened, as if on cue.
That’s when the dead girl came alive.
CHAPTER FOUR
She sat up with a blood-curdling shriek so horrendous I not only heard it, I felt it in my bones as well. It was the most terrible thing I had ever heard, the scream of every victim in every horror movie I ever watched with Dan at the Lansdale Drive-In on Forster Boulevard. The girl’s arms flailed about, groping for nothing and everything at once as she shot to her feet and flew across the room, heading for the door, her limbs jerking madly and her naked breasts jiggling and her hellish wail never abating, while Burt and Henry Baker stood frozen in shock. I suppose it would have been quite comical had the situation been different, those two evil men in my Old Shack looking like they had dropped huge brown loads in their pants. Henry backed away from the screaming dead girl in short, stiff little steps until he slammed against the far wall of the shed with a pained grunt. He babbled something that sounded like “OhmyGodohJesusshe’sstilla-fuckin’-live,” and I saw a dark wet patch in the crotch of the teenager’s jeans that had not been there seconds before.
“Fuck me!” Sheriff Baker spat, whirling toward the girl. “FUCK!”
And then, before I realized what was happening, she was in the sheriff’s burly arms. God, how fast he moved for such a big man. He jerked the girl up like a lifeguard grasping hold of a drowning victim, as if he only meant to help her, and he whispered something to her as he moved, something like “no, no, come here, honey, don’t fight it now, it’s gonna be okay.” She fought bravely, her bruise-mottled legs kicking and thrashing in the air as he hoisted her several feet off the ground, her arms slapping at him even though she could not see him behind her with her dirty blond hair in her eyes, and all the while that horrible shriek continued.
“Fuckin’-A, Henry!” Sheriff Baker barked between labored breaths as he fought to keep the girl in his arms. “I thought you said she was fuckin’ dead!”
I could barely hear Henry’s replies beneath the girl’s banshee screams, his hissing spit-wet stammer: “I th-thought she was…J-Jesus, Daddy…I thought she wasss…”
As fast as it all began, it was over. Suddenly over, just like that…as if the girl had never gotten up at all from her place in the Old Shack’s corner. I barely noticed my clothes dampening with every passing second, never noticed the rain growing stronger all around me or the constant strobe-flicker of the lightning looming so close, as Sheriff Baker gave his son a disgusted look, a cock-eyed expression that seemed to say if-you-want-something-done-right-you-might-as-well-do-it-yourself…and then he gripped the screeching girl’s head between his huge hands and jerked it violently to one side, back toward him and all the way up to his left. I will never forget the sickening CRACK! that seemed to fill the woods when he broke her neck—I could feel it in my teeth! One second that poor girl was alive, screaming and twitching like a marionette on some insane puppeteer’s invisible strings…and then she was gone. Her body went limp again, a stream of bright-yellow piss ran down the inside of one naked leg, and her eyes went empty as her life was taken—sweet Christ, it had been stolen—by the Sheriff of our town. By Sheriff Burt Baker.
My knees didn’t go weak, they instantly seemed to not exist. Vomit rushed up the back of my throat and maybe a little even escaped from between my lips as my legs did their own thing below, falling out from under me like two weak little twigs unable to hold my weight. I stumbled backwards, sliding on the rain-slick face of that stump-table ben
eath me. I heard myself, an almost disembodied sound that seemed to come from someone else, gasping “Ohhh!” as my makeshift ladder was thrown off-balance, and with the center of gravity—me—no longer where it should have been, the table tipped over, onto the ground, taking me with it. NonononononoNO, is all I remember going through my head—a hundred, a million times—as I seemed to fall forever away from the window. I watched it recede from my desperately clutching fingertips as if the shed were moving instead of me, before my ass finally hit a patch of wet leaves and the bottom of the table thumped up hard—so horribly loud—against the wall of the Old Shack.
A muddy earthworm smell assaulted my nostrils. I gagged, coughed. Cold drops of rain struck me in the face as I struggled to get up.
“What the fuck was that?”
Sheriff Baker. He had heard me.
“Holy shit, Henry! Somebody’s out there!”
The air grew thick with not only the crackling ozone smell of lightning, with the earthy smell of rain and mud, but also the sweaty stench of my own terror.
“Goddammit, boy, don’t just sit there! Go!”
“OhJesusohJesusohJesus,” I whispered again and again as I got up, and I could hear Henry Baker stammering the same thing inside.
I tried to get up. I tried to run. I could already hear their boots inside, heading for the door, Sheriff Baker’s heavier footsteps a split-second behind those of his son as they tossed the girl’s body aside and commenced the chase.
I stumbled, fell, slipped again and again in the wet leaves, sliding every which way. The midnight rain began to fall harder than ever.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. And it was real. I was praying. “Oh, God…don’t let them get me…”
And at last I was up, up…on my feet…running to beat the devil as the rain pelted down on me in great dime-sized drops, slashing through the overhead canopy of trees and upon my flesh like hail…
“Who is that?!” I heard the sheriff cry out behind me. He might have been mere inches from grabbing my shoulder with one of those massive, murderous hands. “Hey! You! Who the fuck is that?!”
