by Edward Lee
Brice turned to give them both the finger but never finished the gesture when his eyes caught the hacking, gasping Milton Waller dredging up another mouthful of gritty black phlegm and—
“Seventy!”
—dropping it right onto Dora’s tongue.
“Best one I swallered all night!” the old woman railed. “Nice’n meaty! Kind’a smoky flavored too!”
Brice half-jogged out of the heinous backyard. It took awhile to recover from his outrage and disgust; he scarcely saw the people milling about him, had to stop several times to get his bearings and make sure he was heading in the right direction. Closer to the end of the main drag, he passed a loud trailer, evidently housing a poker game, and heard, or thought he heard a guffawing redneck voice say, “Well, good gawd dang, Farler! If you don’t lose a hand soon, why, we’se just might have ta throw a header on ya!”
More laughter followed this as Brice peered at the rickety abode. Did he just say… but then he shrugged it off. He didn’t care; he just wanted to be out of here.
Finally he made his way out of the official perimeter of Backtown. Thank God. The winding road out seemed well-lit by the moon, and he knew it shouldn’t take long to walk back to the motel but before he could embark…
Damn, I gotta piss like a racehorse.
Why he should be so discriminating he couldn’t tell—I can piss anywhere. This entire TOWN is a toilet—but his Harvard Yard culture at least insisted he not do it right in the road. He took a few crunching steps into the woods and found a suitable tree.
What’s that? he wondered, squinting into the moon-drenched woods.
“That” was nothing more than a teetering, ancient wooden shack. Tin shingles arranged haphazardly seemed to cover the sagging roof; the structure’s few windows had long since been divorced of their glass. Brice stared, as if fascinated, but why he should feel that way was a mystery. He stepped closer, ignoring a throbbing bladder. It must’ve been some trick of the moonlight, but the shack’s warped, unpainted oak boards seemed to exude the faintest gray luminescence. What am I doing? he asked himself with some alarm.
Next, he was about to walk into the shack.
The front, if it could be called that, was closed, comprised of more rickety oak boards. Mounted in the door’s center stile was an oval of tarnished bronze depicting a half-formed face. Just two eyes, no mouth, no other features. It seemed morose, even foreboding.
But that was silly. It was just a door knocker.
A morbid muse seeped into him: I knock on the door…and someone answers…
More silliness. It’s just an old piece-of-shit shack that’s been rotting in the woods for years, he knew. Entering, though, might be another story altogether, and his metropolitan sensibilities threw up some red flags: untold dangers could lie in wait. Crack addicts, meth-heads, psychotic hillbilly bums, yet Brice paid no conscious mind to any mode of common sense. Why don’t I just take a piss and get out of here? Again, though, his actions were a mystery. It felt less like curiosity than an irresistible compulsion.
He pushed open the teetering door and entered.
The tiny LED penlight on his keys filled the shack’s interior with preternatural illumination. Suddenly he wondered if he was hallucinating. Had someone back at the trailer park slipped LSD or something into his drink? But, no, he hadn’t had anything to drink.
What the hell is it? Marsh gas?
But this was just woods, wasn’t it? Not wetlands.
The rotten-wood stench—and other less definable odors—flared his nostrils. As his light swept up and down, his eyes found every corner rounded by cobwebs thick as cheesecloth. Old dead wasp nests, large as footballs, clung to the walls; it was a decent bet, too, that they weren’t all dead. The wood floor creaked for several full seconds at a single step forward. On one bare-plank wall hung a vermiculated scrap of something like paper. He leaned close with the light: yes, it was paper, part of which had adhered to the wall by mold, but he could just read 1994 Penthouse Pet of the Year. Gina Something, her name was, and all that 20 years of hanging on the wall had left of her was a vague ghostlike image pocked with white splotches. The impressive implants were only just visible, and the overflowing head of hair seemed tinged red. Only her eyes remained in any clarity: dark pinpoints. But a hitch caught in Brice’s chest when he moved the light just above those piercing eyes.
No way…
In the center of her forehead, obviously drawn with ball-point pen, was a crude circular sketch filled in with black squiggles. The artist had clearly been suggesting a hole in the pinup’s forehead.
My God…
Brice turned away quickly, then shined the tiny yet powerful beam of light down at a waist-high oblong object: a table. Eight feet long, sturdy, and not a quarter-inch of play when he pushed an edge. It was built to last.
But what was it built for?
The table took up most of the space in this main front room. Why not a couch? he wondered. Why put a big-ass table like this in the middle of the main room?
Then Brice looked closer at the table in the crisp white light…
One end appeared to be corroded by something long ago. If someone, for instance, were lying down on the table (but why ever would they do that?), the edge where the head rested was queerly darkened and slightly indented, as if eroded by acid or something.
Why would I think it was blood?
Brice continued to be assailed by notions he couldn’t fathom. Yes, the place was foreboding, and, yes, it stank, but why should he be drowned by such an unrelenting and blade-sharp intimation of horror?
It’s just a fuckin’ old shack, his thoughts tried to steady themselves. And there’s no reason in the world to think that the stuff on the end of that table is old blood…
But level-headedness did not prevail. Brice grimaced as he propelled himself out of the shack and back into the woods. He stopped instantly as if he’d struck an invisible wall when he saw a figure standing right in front of him.
“Fuck!” he bellowed, surprised words could get past the heart lodged in his throat.
“Aw, dang, man, it’s you,” a strangely familiar voice issued. “Didn’t mean ta scare the bejesus out’a ya—”
Brice leaned against a tree, his chest tight as a gunpowder keg about to explode. Then he relaxed. “Well, you sure as hell did.” The figure was the guy he’d talked to earlier. Stewy? No, Stoody.
The scrawny long-haired man scuffed his feet. “Yeah, these woods is pretty scary at night, but they’se a good short-cut back to town.”
“Good, that’s where I’m heading.”
“I take it you’n yer friends found your way to Backtown?”
“Yeah, and now I’m finding my way out. My pals are still there, whooping it up. But me? The Hock Party was all I could take.”
Stoody chuckled. “Yeah, boys’ll be boys I guess. That Dora’s tough to beat, be it words or spit. Anyway, I was just leavin’ myself when I walk down here and find you. I could’a sworn I heard someone in the shack but then I couldn’t imagine anyone bein’ in there, no, sir, not this shack.”
Brice squinted through a shaft of moonlight throwing a bar over Stoody’s face. “By the way you said that, it sounds like this is no ordinary shack?”
Another chuckle. “Naw, no, it ain’t. ’Tis haunted, plenty of folks say, and I can believe it, even though I never seen nothin’ here myself. But, yeah, there’s some stories ’bout it, all right.”
Brice was riveted. “What stories?”
“Well, see, fifteen years back, er, I guess more like twenty…” but a sudden recollection severed the rest of his recital. “Oh, before I forget, here’s that ten-spot ya loaned me. Told ya I’d pay ya back!”
Brice never expected to see the money, nor Stoody, ever again. It was with some dejection that Brice took the ten-dollar bill from the man. I don’t care about the money, I want to hear about—
Stoody went on, “Yeah, I had me one beer at Sallee’s, then took the change
ta Marley’s and won me fifty in craps.”
“Congratulations,” Brice said. “You’ve got better luck than me. But you were saying a minute ago—”
Stoody seemed to retrieve the memory. “Aw, yeah, the shack.”
“The haunted shack,” Brice said. “Why’s it thought to be haunted? Does it have anything to do with this header business?”
Stoody’s perpetually lackadaisical demeanor stiffened. He looked very surprised in the crisp moonlight. “Matter’a fact, it does. What made ya guess that?”
Brice didn’t bother retelling his observations: the tattoo, the comment from the gambling trailer, the Penthouse poster, etc. “Let’s just say I had a bad feeling.”
Stoody leaned against a tree and crossed his arms. He seemed amused by Brice’s interest in the macabre subject. “Well, since ya asked, that shack once belonged to a crackly old fella named Jake Martin. I weren’t but ten ’er so when all this went down, but I gotta say the old guy was always nice ta me. Poor ole fucker—he was a shoemaker but he had some disease that make it so they had to cut his feet off or he’d die.”
Brice stared at the twisted observation. Shit. A shoemaker…with no feet…
“Anyways, what it git down to was this: ole Jake and his grand kid, Travis Tuckton. Their lives were shit, piss-poor crackers, and I guess one day they both got ta thinkin’ on that and it muss ’em up in the head bigtime. Just about every damn family in the county done the Martins and the Tucktons wrong, and I mean goin’ way back fer decades or more. Stealin’ from ’em, lyin’ to ’em, cheatin’ ’em. Hell, they even got a big parcel’a land ripped off from ’em.”
“Yeah?” Brice urged. “And?”
Stoody shrugged. “And one day they both of ’em just said fuck it and decided ta git some payback.”
“Headers,” Brice intoned.
“Mm-hmm. And this were bigtime payback they got goin’. Jake Martin’n Travis Tuckton pulled dozens’a headers right here in this here shack—er, probably more like hundreds.”
Dozens? Hundreds? Brice couldn’t even conceive of what he was listening to. This is madness. I should be in Manhattan, watching my 72-inch screen in my million-dollar condo. Instead, I’m here, listening to some washout tell me about how if you slight the wrong redneck, they’ll fuck you in the head…
Yes. Madness.
“Somethin’ wrong, man?” Stoody asked.
Brice had been staring off in a daze. Then he broke from that. “Yeah, yeah there is. Earlier, you said that for a hundred dollars you’d…”
Stoody smiled, subdued. “Yeah, I said I could prove ta you that headers was real…”
Brice snapped a $100 bill in front of Stoody’s face. “Let’s go, Stoody.”
Stoody took the bill and gave Brice a narrowed look. “Man, you got some burnin’ curiosity ’bout all this, don’t ya?”
“Yeah.”
“Now, I’ll take your money, and I’ll show ya what ya wanna see, just ’member what they say about curiosity.”
“I’m not superstitious, and I hate cats.” Brice was losing patience. He stuffed another $100 bill into Stoody’s shirt pocket. “We got a deal, so let’s get on with it. I haven’t got all night.”
Stoody detached himself from the tree. ’S’right, friend. Foller me…”
Much of the fog of Brice’s disillusion kept close as he tramped behind his unlikely tour guide. The trek took them directly through dense, primeval woods. He shrugged off the chilling notion that someone in the shack was watching after him. Who could be watching? Ghosts? “What happened to the two guys? Travis and Jake What’s His Name?”
“Died, both of ’em. Cop killed ’em right in that shack we just left; he caught ’em red-handed, humpin’ the holy hell out’a Thibald Caudill’s head. You’d think that’d be the end of it but…” Stoody kept tramping with ease over the brambles. For Brice, however, it was not so easy. Stumps nearly tripped him and vines caught his shoes every few steps. In a ludicrous moment of abstraction, he considered that the woods themselves were warning him not to go on…
“But?” Brice urged. “But what?”
“But ever now’n then they’ll be another one here, another one there. Mostly low-lifes, bums’n what not. Druggers. So someone up’n snatch ’em, then—” Stoody shrugged carelessly. “Then they fuck ’em in their heads. Ain’t no better way ta send a message.”
The humidity only flustered Brice more. “So what exactly is this we’re walking to now.”
“Proof, friend. That’s what ya said ya wanted. Only reason I saw it myself is ’cos I was cuttin’ through the woods from town.”
“You saw a header?”
“Well, no, but I saw the Larkins Brothers buryin’ one.”
“Burying one…what?”
“A splittail they pulled a header on. Her boyfriend, too, but all they done ta him is pig-drag all his skin off.”
Brice winced. “They skinned him?”
“Well, yeah, they do gnarly shit like that all the time, skinnin’, raw-ballin’, tractor jobs, but only ta scum bags they catch sellin’ dope’n kiddie diddlers and such.”
Raw ballin’? Tractor jobs? It’s another fucking world down here.
Brice mused over Stoody’s history lesson. “The Larkins Brothers,” he muttered to himself.
Stoody stopped and whirled around, to point a warning finger. This was the first time Brice had seen the man serious, and by his gesture and tone, he was very serious.
“But don’t you be askin’ no one ’bout headers, and don’t say nothin’ ’bout the Larkins Brothers. You do that? You can bet’cher balls we’ll both wind up in the ground. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear. So…they kill drug dealers? That’s fine with me if you wanna know the truth. But what about the police?”
Stoody chuckled. “We don’t need no police to handle our goings-on, man. Better ta take care’a our own. Larkins Brothers is all the police we need, and one thing they won’t put up with is drugs. They catch anyone buyin’ it or anyone sellin’ it? They’se never seen again. State cops come through ever now’n again but they don’t wanna mess with folks from here. They leave us be. They shore as shit don’t wanna be pryin’ inta stuff here. Ain’t worth it. They all on the take anyway.”
Brice was trying to reckon all of this. “Okay. So. To punish drug dealers, they fuck their brains?”
“Yeah,” Stoody said matter-of-factly.
Well, if the prospect of having some backwoods psychopath ejaculate into your skull doesn’t make you say no to drugs, nothing will.
Crickets seemed to trill in greater numbers as they marched on, and the sounds of their footfalls crunched louder. The macabre journey and even more macabre conversation completely effaced Brice of his geographical bearings. Just when he began to think he might be getting baited to some remote spot a mugging awaited…
Stoody stopped. “Here it is, friend.”
They stood in a clearing, and in the moonlight, Brice noticed a sickly ground fog; he also noticed a very faint stench.
Stoody kicked some leaves off the ground at a particular spot. He peered down inquisitively, then lowered to his knees. A wave of his hand gestured for Brice to do the same.
When Brice knelt beside him. “You mean…we’re going to…”
“Dig, brother. If’n ya wanna see it.” A long pause was accompanied by one of Stoody’s lackadaisical smiles. “You shore ya do? Ain’t nothin’ ta be ashamed of if ya change your mind.”
Of course I’m not going to dig up somebody’s fucking grave just to find out if somebody stuck a dick in their head, Brice thought. That’s crazy. So what if they did? This isn’t CSI: Luntville. I’m going to huff it back to the “Due Drop In” and forget all about headers. Besides, if there really are bodies, the people who put them here won’t think twice about adding to the grave if they find us snooping around.
It was the sanest course of action to throw in the towel. This had gone too far as it was. In his mind he formulated hi
s apology to Stoody for wasting his time dragging them out here…
But what he did was reach down and begin to dig. It was dangerous and twisted and disturbing, but he had to know. He had to see for himself that all the graffiti and carvings and tattoos were for real. He’d always be able to talk himself out of believing in this lunacy otherwise.
Soon both men were scooping out handfuls of leafy earth. All the while, that ever-so-faint stench haunted Brice.
“See,” Stoody said amid the task. “This place ain’t so much a forest as it is a graveyard. Hate ta think how many druggers is planted here, and I reckon most of ’em was killed by gettin’ headers, ’specially them’s that was gals. Only fittin’, I say. Them low-down pieces’a shit sell that crap ta kids on purpose, so’s ta get ’em hooked. Then they’se got ’em turnin’ tricks ’fer the drugs while the dealers take the cash.” Stoody looked over to Brice. “Can you ’magine that, man? Have a little daughter of your own then some motherfuckin’ drug dealer gets her fired up on the dope, and next thing ya know, he’s sellin’ her ta diaper snipers and she ain’t even high school age yet. Enough ta make decent folks sick. Evil business, drugs is.”
Brice was clammy with sweat and irritable, and Stoody’s societal disquisition only made him more irritable. After several minutes of digging, he stopped to wipe his brow. “You sure this is the right place? I don’t think there’s anything under here.”
“Yeah?” Stoody said. “See that?”
See what? Brice squinted down. He took one more swipe out of the hole and immediately felt something…not right. Something cold and clammy,
He flashed his tiny LED light, and froze.
“Nothin’ under here, huh?” Stoody joked.
There was something under there, all right: a face, a moon-white face beneath a sheen of dirt.
“Oh, fuck,” Brice said.
“It’s the chick, the blondie I was tellin’ ya about.” Stoody hunkered down, wedging his hands under the corpse’s bare shoulders. “Come on, man,” he whispered, grinning to Brice. “Help me pull her out…”
CHAPTER SIX
