The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Read online

  One day the hunchback came roaring up in his muscle car while we were shooting the humps. He leaned against the hood and watched us for awhile. We did our best to show off, pedaling like crazy to build up a good head up steam, pulling up on our butterfly handlebars as we launched ourselves, hitting the breaks and kicking up gravel with our fat “slick” back tires when we landed… and then topping it all off with the grand finale — letting our bikes slip out from under us while we held onto the handlebars as we came to a stop.

  That last bit really notched on our own personal coolness meter, but the hunchback wasn’t impressed. “Looks like a lot of fun,” he said after watching us for awhile. “But how’d you boys like to try a real thrill ride?”

  When you’re ten years old and you don’t want to look like a hopeless chicken, there was only one way to answer that question. We shouted out “sure thing” and the hunchback told us what he had in mind. By then there was no way we could back down even if we wanted to, and pretty soon we found ourselves lying on the hood of the hunchback’s car, painted flames beneath our chests warmed by a presently idle engine that had just recently been tearing up the highway on a hot summer day. The hunchback gave us one last chance, asking us if we were absolutely positively 100% sure we wanted to try his thrill ride, but there was no way we could chicken out now.

  “Okay,” he said. “You boys better grab onto those windshield wipers, though. I’d hate to see one of you take a tumble and end up with a bad case of road rash.”

  The hunchback climbed behind the wheel while I wondered what he was talking about. Road rash? I’d never heard the expression. He keyed the ignition, and the glass-pack muffler growled. I felt the big, spotless chrome and steel engine vibrating beneath me, and Chris and I exchanged what the hell are we doing? glances, and the hunchback floored it and the car’s rear wheels kicked up a spray of gravel and we were on our way.

  There were maybe ten rows of parking humps between the snack bar and the screen. The hunchback hit the gas as he crested every one of them, trying to get airborne like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. Of course, the humps were too close together to pick up much speed in between, but even a little speed turned out to be more than enough.

  See, it wasn’t the going up that was dangerous… it was the coming down. Every time the hunchback’s car landed, the front shocks screamed and Chris and I yelped, holding onto those windshield wipers for dear life.

  I should have closed my eyes, but I didn’t. I looked to my right and saw a sea of gravel waiting to chew me up and spit me out. I looked to my left and saw Chris beside me, trapped somewhere between a laugh and a scream. I looked straight ahead and saw the bug-splattered windshield, remembering the joke my dad told every time an insect ended it all in a kamikaze smear: “Well, he won’t have the guts to do that again.”

  I stared at the bugs, suddenly feeling that we shared a certain kinship. The hunchback eyed me from behind the steering wheel. He was laughing his head off, his stringy hair slashing his hornrimmed glasses as he bounced in the driver’s seat. His twisted spine prevented him from seeing more than a couple inches above the wheel under the best of circumstances, and I suddenly wondered if he could see over me at all when he wasn’t bouncing.

  Finally we crested the last hump. Okay, I thought. It’s almost over now. This crazy maniac will stop his car, and we’ll get off, and then we can all have a good laugh and lie about how much fun this was —

  But the hunchback didn’t stop his car. He kept going, following an access road that ran along the playground fence and looped around to the back of the lot.

  The hunchback hit the gas and headed in that direction.

  I stared through the windshield.

  I saw the look in his eyes.

  I knew exactly what he was going to do.

  Jesus Christ! I thought. This crazy asshole’s going around again!

  And he did just that, starting from the rear of the lot, hopping row after row as he headed for that big white Moby Dick screen. I held on for dear life, like a drowning Ishmael grabbing fistfuls of Queequeg’s coffin, the sharp back edges of the windshield wiper digging into my hands. But even if I managed to hold on, that didn’t mean the wiper itself would hold — after all, I knew kids who broke those off for fun, like automotive toothpicks.

  I wasn’t going to so much as look at that gravel now. I was too scared of what it could do to me. Road rash. Now I knew exactly what that meant. I didn’t want a terminal case. I closed my eyes, but that only tuned in my senses to The Hunchback’s Wild Ride soundtrack — gravel rattling in the car’s wheel wells like machine-gun fire, the shock absorbers screaming, and the radio blaring sixties rock. I don’t know what the song was, but it should have been the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out.”

  We shot another hump. My chin hit the hood. My eyes flashed open. The hunchback was still laughing, still having a great old time behind that bug-splattered windshield. Either he didn’t have a clue as to the level of our terror (I couldn’t believe he might actually think we were enjoying this), or something else was going on in his head —

  And that, dear reader, is when the budding writer in my brain kicked in. Suddenly I saw the hunchback’s wild ride as a story… like something that Robert Bloch would invent for one of his collections. And Bloch’s stories almost always had a twist. That scared me — remember, I’d begun to understand how horror stories worked — and suddenly I was absolutely certain that I knew what the twist in this story was going to be.

  After all, the driver was a hunchback. I’d known that all along — but you always had to know that all along for the twist to work. But it was the thing I didn’t know that really scared me — I had no idea how the hunchback had ended up being a hunchback. It wasn’t like I’d read the special origin issue of Teenage Hunchback comics. I knew nothing about the guy.

  Of course, I knew none of the cold hard clinical facts about scoliosis of the spine, either. But right then, I didn’t need to. Such mundane knowledge wouldn’t have satisfied my imagination. Because by then that most dangerous of animals had put the whole puzzle together for me, and I imagined that the hunchback had once been a kid just like me, a kid with a nice straight back who’d taken a dare to hold onto a windshield wiper while he rode a bucking hunk of Detroit steel around a parking lot …

  Suddenly I was certain that what was happening was locked up solid in the same kind of logic that I’d found in so many stories. Only this story wasn’t trapped between the covers of a book, and it wasn’t bordered by the four corners of the drive-in screen. No. It was happening down here on the ground, in the middle of a gravel lot speared with in-a-car speakers.

  And it was happening to me.

  As the muscle car charged toward the snack bar, I was quite certain that there was nothing I could do to defy the inevitable. After all, how could anyone escape the big twist? I’d never known any character in a story to manage that trick, and I didn’t figure I was going to do it now.

  All I could do was smile grimly as life turned the page for me.

  All I could do was watch as my imagination ran a grisly coming attractions trailer of a kid tumbling across a gravel lot at thirty miles per hour.

  All I could do was listen as that Ahab voice whispered in my ear: “Understand now, kid? That’s why they called this story ‘Road Rash’!”

  Well, here we are, arrived at the big cliffhanger moment. Only problem is, I can’t give you any kind of satisfying payoff.

  Because it turned out the story of the hunchback’s wild ride wasn’t called “Road Rash” after all. There was no big twist ending to this particular episode of my existence, and certainly no twist to my spine. Which is another way of saying that nothing bad happened. The hunchback simply stopped his car when he got to the snack bar, and both Chris and I breathed not-so-silent sighs of relief.

  The hunchback unlocked the snack bar. We helped ourselves to buckets of day-old popcorn—the hunchback even treated us to the concession-dispenser Cokes that were usua
lly denied us—and then we sat around and talked about what a blast we’d just had. It took awhile for things to sink in, but soon enough I realized that everything was actually okay.

  This wasn’t an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Twilight Zone. I was safe. I wasn’t going to open my eyes and find myself back on the hood of the hunchback’s street machine. And I wasn’t going to end up with my eyes bugging out of my head, either, the way that poor bastard in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” always did when he realized he hadn’t escaped the hangman’s noose after all. There were no twist endings here. No lightbulb-over-the-head moments of realization or just-desserts shocks brewing up to bite our young hero in the ass.

  This wasn’t a story, after all.

  This was just plain old everyday life.

  And if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that plain old everyday life wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d put up on a movie screen. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you’d put in a short story, either. Real life just didn’t work that way. It wasn’t as slick. It couldn’t be. It was just the kind of stuff that happened, and you got through it as best you could even though it was sure enough more than a little weird, and then you got back to thinking about the stuff that you really needed to think about if you wanted to grow up to be a writer of spooky stories — the vampires, the werewolves, the Frankenstein’s monsters.

  That’s what I thought back then, anyway. Now I know better.

  As the sixties wound down, my family didn’t make as many trips to the drive-in. Jack Kennedy had moved away, and my dad wasn’t much on the “new” stuff that Hollywood was turning out—to tell the truth, the coming of movies like Easy Rider drew a line in the sand that the old man refused to cross. Besides that, my brother was now a college student, I was into double-digits age-wise, and the drive-in just wasn’t the “let’s pack up the kids for a night out” kind of destination it once had been.

  Going out to dinner became the family activity of choice. Believe it or not, my brother and I had both learned to behave ourselves in public. On our own, that was something different. We each had our share of misadventures. But my brother was nine years older than me, and we didn’t exactly move in the same social circles. That didn’t mean that Larry wouldn’t take pity on me now and then. Sometimes he’d let his kid brother tag along with him… and sometimes that meant catching a movie at the drive-in.

  My brother owned a ’67 Mustang. I’d usually sit up front when we visited the drive-in (with a buddy of mine, if my brother was feeling really generous), and Larry would sit in back with Marian (his girlfriend, and later his wife). We saw American biker movies and action movies, but we also developed an international palate—spaghetti westerns, Japanese monster movies, Hammer horror movies from England.

  We saw lots of the latter. The Brits had revived the old Universal Studios monster franchises, but with a sexual technicolor twist. Picture Dracula and his buxom vampires. My brother would always say about the latter, “Now, don’t tell Mom or Dad about this part.” As far as our parents were concerned, Dracula meant Bela Lugosi. Dracula didn’t mean a bunch of chicks in lowcut gowns with British accents, dripping fangs, and startling cleavage.

  My buddies and I kept our mouths shut. We knew when we had it good. (And here, gentle reader, I will spare you the usual authorial meditations on preteen boys and the relationship between sex and death that you usually find in introductions of this kind.)

  Anyway, not every movie featured accents, fangs, and cleavage. Hammer hadn’t exactly cornered the horror market. But most of the American stuff was pretty low buck, and most of it was pretty awful. Sometimes it was two-or three-times awful, depending on whether we were catching a double-bill or an all-night-triple (lots of bad horror movies were released three-at-a-time in those days, as if quantity made up for the lack of quality). But hey, my friends and I never complained too much. At the very least we were out of the house, and chances were good that we’d be eating popcorn and drinking Cokes if we had any left-over allowance $$$$ to burn that week, so no night at the drive-in was a total loss.

  One night my brother took Marian, me, and my friend Darryl to a horror double-bill. The first movie was a dud — in truth I can’t even remember what it was — but it was enough of a yawner to convince us that we were in for one of those at least we get popcorn and Coke kind of nights.

  The second movie was something else indeed. It was called Night of the Living Dead, and I’d never seen a movie quite like it in my life. Watching NOTLD now, my writer’s eye can pick it apart and see how it works and why it still works after all these years. But then… well, I think part of the reason that it hit me — and everyone else in Larry’s Mustang — so hard was sheer surprise. We had no idea what to expect going in. No preconceived notions. We’d read no reviews, seen no previews. All we knew about the movie was the title, which we’d seen spelled out on the marquee with the same plastic letters that had spelled out the titles of a thousand other movies over the years.

  In short, we had nothing to prepare us, and I can’t imagine that there was any way possible to sit through a impromptu viewing of NOTLD without batting an eye. This wasn’t the recycled terror we found in Hammer movies. After all, you killed the Hammer Dracula the same way you killed the Universal Dracula — ram a stake through that sucker’s heart and you were good to go. But the old familiar fix-its weren’t going to fly this time out. No way. Director George Romero’s movie featured something new—armies of flesh-eating zombies that could only be destroyed by serious head trauma. Mix that with some late sixties we’re knee-deep in Vietnam and the world is going to hell in a handbasket attitude and a hyper-realistic style rarely used in horror movies, toss in a black “everyman” hero (Duane Jones), and you had yourself a real mindslammer. My brother, who usually amused himself by grabbing me from behind whenever a cinematic “boo” moment arrived, was actually the first one to jump the night we saw NOTLD. During one of the film’s few quiet moments, a zombie unexpectedly reaches through a window and paws at Duane Jones, and the shock jolted Larry so hard that he actually jumped up and hit his head on the car roof.

  Things got worse for old Duane as the movie progressed. You bet they did. Boarded up in an old Pennsylvanian farmhouse with a bunch of people who refused to listen to sense, he had no real chance of escape, and neither did I. I was sucked straight into his world, fending off an army of zombies who wanted Duane and his pals for dinner.

  Yeah. I was trapped… until I began to consider what waited in the moonlit shadows outside the corners of the drive-in screen. See, the drive-in in my hometown had not one… not two… but three cemeteries as neighbors. Realizing that, a nasty little idea began to nibble at the corners of my imagination. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the dead folks in those cemeteries clawed their way out of their graves and came shuffling across the road to pay us a little visit.

  I stared through the Mustang’s side window. A fence topped with barbed-wire bordered the drive-in, but I didn’t think it (or the retractable tire spikes at the exit) would slow down a determined army of the living dead. Across the road, the cemetery waited. This one was the oldest of the three, and it had the whole gothic atmosphere thing going—mausoleums with stained glass windows, marble funereal monuments, and granite statuary. My eyes studied silhouettes in the moonlight. A lot of cold black stone out there. None of it moved at all. Only the trees moved, branches swaying in the late night breeze.

  Well, that made sense, I told myself. Even if the dead were to return to life, the folks in the old cemetery had been dead a long time. I figured most of their coffins didn’t hold much more than a pile of bones… or maybe a couple fistfuls of dust. Even if the occupants of those coffins managed the Lazarus trick, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to get up and actually do anything.

  So I wasn’t too worried about the dead in the old cemetery. No. But the new cemeteries—which included the one behind us—were something else indeed.

 
They didn’t look nearly as scary as the old gothic cemetery. There were no imposing granite monuments or statuary. The new cemeteries had plain little bronze placards planted in the grass. Really, they weren’t very frightening at all.

  But when you’re talking living dead, I knew that what counted was under the ground, not above it… the same way I knew that there were lots of fresh graves in the cemetery behind us, and each one of them held a recently deceased corpse.

  I always avoided fresh graves when walking home through the cemetery. They creeped me right out, almost as much as seeing the gravediggers at work. I’d seen that a few times while hanging around with my buddy Chris. We’d be riding our bikes around the drive-in lot, and we’d happen to look across the road and see a couple of guys working with a backhoe, digging holes for people who’d been sucking wind just a couple days before.

  Up on the screen, the zombies got the crazy blonde girl. I sat there watching Duane Jones fight off the living dead, and I thought about that cemetery behind me, and I wondered what I’d do if the “fresh ones” in the new cemetery started coming out of the ground.

  I didn’t like thinking about that. I’d known more than a few people who were buried in that cemetery. My own grandfather was buried up there. So was the alcoholic barber who’d nearly sliced off my ear. And there were other people. Neighbors I’d liked and disliked, old ladies whose windows I’d soaped on Halloween —

  Imaginatively speaking, I knew that I was treading dangerous ground. I knew I should concentrate on the movie. Sure, it was scary, but it wasn’t as frightening as the things my imagination churned up. Those things couldn’t be contained between four corners on a drive-in screen. They had dimension, and strength, and a reality all their own —