The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Read online

  I imagined what I’d do if the zombies came stumbling across the road. I was just a kid. I couldn’t drive (just like the crazy blonde girl in the movie)… but for some reason I was the one sitting behind the steering wheel, so I’d have to get out of the front seat and switch places with my brother. Who knew how long that would take. It didn’t seem like the zombies in the movie were very fast, but there were a lot of them, the same way there were a lot of people buried in the cemetery. And once they got hold of you—

  I could almost see them coming.

  The dead neighbors who didn’t like me…

  That crazy barber, a rusty razor in his hand…

  The husks of withered old ladies who’d dropped Halloween candy in my trick-or-treat bag, leering like Graham Ingels characters in some old E. C. comic…

  “You soaped our windows, Norman! And now you’ll die!”

  For years after that night, I had NOTLD dreams in which I’d wake up, open my bedroom drapes, and see the streets teaming with zombies. Sometimes I’d try to barricade myself in the house, boarding up the windows and the doors. Sometimes I’d escape on my bicycle, pedaling as fast as I could, and I’d head for a friend’s house… preferably one whose parents owned lots of guns.

  But no matter what I did, I was never safe when those dreams ended.

  They weren’t the kind of dreams that ended that way.

  My buddy Chris moved away before I started sixth grade. By the time I entered junior high school, my brother had transferred to a college in Oregon. I looked around and figured out that I’d lost both my “in’s” at the drive-in. I still wanted to see a lot of the movies that played there, but they weren’t the kind of movies my parents were likely to take me to see. And, needless to say, I was a long way from having a driver’s license.

  But necessity is the mother of invention and all that. The drive-in was only about a mile from my house. So was that new cemetery I’d worried about while watching NOTLD. Along with some of the other kids in my neighborhood, I began to put two and two together. Pretty soon we hatched a plan — we could sneak over to the cemetery at night, hunt up a spot where we could see the drive-in screen, and catch at least one movie before the eleven o’clock curfew most of our parents imposed.

  It seemed like we could pull it off. It was summertime. The weather was California perfect. At night, our parents were happy to turn us loose so they could relax in peace after a hot day. Usually we’d play street football, tear around on our bikes and skateboards, or head over to someone’s house and watch television reruns if we got bored. We weren’t exactly missed if we didn’t show up for two or three hours.

  I remember a lot of things about those summer nights. I remember the scent of anise, a hot licorice smell that drifted from plants we called “skunk cabbage.” I remember the buzz of mosquitoes and street lights, and the one-speaker backbeat of A. M. radio rock on KFRC and KYA out of San Francisco. I remember arguing about the real identity of the Zodiac Killer (who’d begun his murderous spree in my hometown), and whether Paul McCartney was really dead or not, and how many gunmen were on that grassy knoll in Dallas. And I remember our walks to the cemetery.

  We’d start at the edge of our housing tract, where the street dead-ended. There was a marsh on the other side of the bent guardrail that marked the boundary of our neighborhood, and we had to be careful there… one slip and you’d end up with a swamped tennis shoe that would squeak all night. But if we were careful, and if there was a good moon, we could make it across the marsh easily. Usually we didn’t even need a flashlight.

  At the other side of the marsh, we’d work our way through stands of cattails to the music of croaking bullfrogs, and when we left the cattails behind we’d find ourselves at the edge of the cemetery. There wasn’t even a fence around the place. No kind of boundary at all. Just a wall of cattails, and then a well-manicured lawn.

  The cemetery sloped up a hill. A paved road wound through the place, but we never followed that. We’d cross the grass, picking our way around the grave markers—my own grandfather’s, the alcoholic barber’s, the neighbors we’d liked and disliked—and we’d climb to a little ridge that overlooked the road… and the drive-in screen.

  There was a little shade tree with a canopy of low branches at the top of the hill. That’s where we’d get comfortable, lying flat on the cool grass where no one was likely to notice us. After the first movie started, one of us would sneak across the road and slip into the drive-in (there were a few holes in the fence, and I knew where they were courtesy of my friend Chris). Usually the last few parking rows were empty unless the place was really packed, and we’d turn up as many speakers as we could. This way we could hear the movie as well as see it, even from our vantage point across the road.

  Sitting on that hill as one summer blended into the next, I was introduced to Count Yorga, the abominable Dr. Phibes, and Blacula. They left their marks on me, but they didn’t really scare me. Not the way the caretaker did.

  All the kids in my neighborhood had heard stories about him. They said that the caretaker worked for the cemetery as kind of a night-watchman—he kept an eye out for vandals, or kids who might park in the cemetery to neck, or kids (like us) who might sneak up on the hill to watch drive-in movies for free. We’d all heard that he had a horribly scarred face, and that his face was the reason he worked nights at the cemetery—he was far too ugly to work a job where people might get a look at him in the daylight.

  I’d heard that he was stone-cold crazy, too. That he did horrible things to the kids he caught. Chris’ older brother had told us stories about the caretaker dragging trespassers into the mortuary, where he’d lock them up in a pitch-black viewing room with only a corpse for company. And if part of the evening’s business was a cremation, I’d heard that the caretaker would force trespassers to watch his coworkers feed the dear departed to the crematorium oven’s flames.

  Of course, I didn’t believe any of those stories. Not really. Though I didn’t know anything about “urban legends” at the time, I knew that the stories about the caretaker probably weren’t true. They couldn’t be, because they always involved “a friend of a friend,” and they never ended with the caretaker getting fired or arrested for the crazy things he did. But there was something about those stories that sent a chill up my spine, even so. They made me want to believe that they were true, even though I knew I shouldn’t. They were the kind of stories the human race had been telling since the first cavemen gathered around a fire, not much different from the stories my dad told about bloody footprints or the Green Man, or the stories my friends told about phantom hitchhikers or that ghostly haunter-of-bathroom-mirrors, Mary Worth.

  So I didn’t really believe the stories about the caretaker, but that didn’t stop me from being afraid of him. I spent a good portion of my time at the cemetery looking over my shoulder, or listening for a quiet footfall on the well-manicured lawn.

  But no one ever got close to us at the cemetery. Every once in awhile we’d hear a sound, or we’d see someone on the far side of the grounds walking around with a flashlight. And every now and then our eyes would follow the little road that wound through the grave-markers and we’d notice the mortuary door standing open in the middle of the night. Maybe someone would be standing there smoking a cigarette, and we’d glance at each other and we wouldn’t have to say a word, because we all knew that the only smart thing to do was run.

  At moments like that, whatever was on the screen was instantly forgotten. Count Yorga, or Blacula, or Dr. Phibes… it didn’t matter. We’d run from the caretaker, hoping that we wouldn’t be locked up in a pitch-black room with a corpse for company, praying that we’d never find out what a dead body smelled like when it hit the crematorium flames. And when we reached the marsh, when we charged through the cattails and made it to the dead-end street beyond and the safety of its streetlight glow, we’d look back into the darkness and find that no one had followed us at all.

  I’m sure there was no
one to follow us.

  I’m sure there never was a caretaker.

  But that didn’t stop us from talking about him. When we were sure that we were safe, we’d sit there at the end of the street and tell all the caretaker stories one more time. It didn’t matter how many times I heard them. They always made me shiver.

  I loved hearing those stories. I loved telling them, too.

  And now I’ve told them to you.

  I never really wrote about any of these things, until now.

  I did write about the drive-in and the cemetery across the street. Much of the action in my first novel, Slippin’ into Darkness, took place there. But there weren’t any buxom vampires in that book. No George Romero zombies. No Frankenstein or Dracula, no Dr. Phibes or Count Yorga or Blacula. There weren’t any monsters at all.

  Of course, there weren’t any hunchbacks with muscle cars, either. No dads nearly lighting the projection booth on fire with their friends. No kids eating buckets of day-old popcorn or drinking forbidden concession-dispenser Cokes. There was a cemetery caretaker, but he was a harmless old guy. He didn’t have a hideously scarred face, and he didn’t lock up anyone in a mortuary viewing room or crematorium.

  None of those things happened in my first novel.

  None of those characters appeared.

  But in a way, they were all there. Every one of them. Because they were inside me. If they hadn’t been, I never would have written that book… or anything else.

  I could go on, dear reader, but I think that’s where I’ll leave you. I feel myself straining to make a point, to make connections that aren’t really there. But this isn’t a game of connect the dots, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that real life rarely has the clarity of fiction. I learned that while riding a bucking muscle car when I was only ten years old.

  I still visit the cemetery now and then. My dad’s buried there, close to that tree my friends and I used to sit under when we sneaked out to watch drive-in movies. The old man’s gone and I miss him more than I can every say, but I still remember his stories about bloody footprints and the Green Man, and I still tell them, the same way I tell my own stories.

  The drive-in remains, too. It’s still right there, across the road from the cemetery. It’s been closed for many years, but no one has tom it down. These days the screen is in horrible shape. Several of the garage-door-sized panels are missing and it’s more gray than white—like the picked-over carcass of Moby Dick.

  I still get a funny feeling looking up at that screen. Sometimes I can still see Gregory Peck pinned up there, beckoning with his dead Ahab arm… and I’m reminded of things I set out to do a long time ago, and things I’ve done, and things I still want to accomplish.

  But I’m reminded of other things, too.

  Things I saw outside the screen’s four corners.

  Some of those things I saw clearly. Some of them I’m still trying to recognize.

  I like to think that those are the things I write about.

  I hope you’ll find some of them in these stories.

  Norman Partridge

  Lafayette, California

  March 1, 2001

  RED RIGHT HAND

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  — Shakespeare

  Macbeth, II.2

  Claire held the gun in her left hand, the blood in her right.

  “You ready?” Arson wanted to know.

  She just sat there. Arson was always like that. Impatient. He never stopped moving. Like now his fingers tap-tap-tapping against the steering wheel of the Ford Roadster he’d stolen up in Bakersfield, gun-oil gleaming on fingernails that danced in the afternoon sunlight.

  Arson’s fingers were scarred. He wasn’t worried about any blood. As far as he was concerned, any blood spilled today would belong to someone else.

  And that seemed more than a likely possibility. They’d stopped to talk about the job one last time before they pulled it. There was a little town up ahead called Fiddler, and in that town was a bank that Arson had cased a couple days ago. He said it would be easy pickings, because the town didn’t have any law worth worrying about.

  But Claire wasn’t worried about the law.

  She was worried about something else.

  Something that was worth worrying about. Something red, and wet, and hot. Something she couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how many times she snaked the needle through her flesh, no matter how tight she drew the stitches —

  “Claire?” Arson said. “You ready, hon?”

  The idling Ford purred like a kitten. A cricket sang among the withered cornstalks. But Claire didn’t say a word.

  In the backseat, Arson’s brother and sister-in-law picked up the slack.

  “I don’t think she’s ready at all,” Hank said.

  “Yeah,” Pearl chimed in. “If you ask me, we oughta left her behind. She ain’t up to snuff.”

  ‘You two shut up,” Arson said, and he didn’t have to tell them twice.

  Arson’s right hand closed over Claire’s left. She thought about that. The gun in her left hand, and Arson’s strong scarred fingers wrapped around both. It felt so good, so safe.

  “That’s better.” Arson gave Claire’s gun hand a gentle squeeze. “I promise you, hon — it’ll be a piece of cake.”

  Claire’s eyes found his. “It’ll be okay?”

  ‘Yeah.”

  “You’ll be with me?”

  “Every step of the way.”

  “Always?”

  Arson’s gaze was sharp, unflinching.

  “Until they put one of us in the ground,” he said.

  Claire’s breath caught in her throat. She clenched her right hand, fingers closing around the gash. Every muscle, every tendon, every bone ached.

  If only the her skin would scab over, and scar, everything would be okay —

  The stitches popped one by one, threads slipping through the tiny holes the needle had made. A thin trickle of blood snaked between her fingers. It was quiet in the car, so quiet that she was sure she’d hear the first red drop as it rolled off her knuckles and pattered against the leather upholstery.

  She prayed that Arson wouldn’t notice the blood.

  He didn’t. He gave her other hand a pat as he let it go. “That’s my girl,” he said, and his voice was warm as summer sunshine.

  And then Claire heard that first drop of blood fall, pattering the leather upholstery like a tear raining down on the cold face of a corpse.

  She shivered. She couldn’t help it. Another drop of blood welled up in her palm and traveled the trench of her lifeline. Another drop of blood rolled across her knuckles. Another drop, and then another.

  Claire almost started crying.

  Instead, she bolted from the car.

  Into the cornfield.

  Thunderheads bumped around up in the mountains, threatening rain. Officer Tate Winters sure enough wished the clouds would blow his way. Without them there was only the unbearably muggy heat, sandwiched between the parched summer earth and the unblinking sun above.

  Tate sat on his motorbike. As far as he was concerned, it was too hot to be sitting on a motorbike. Too hot to be wearing a highway patrolman’s uniform, too. Too hot to be doing anything that didn’t involve a tall glass of cold lemonade.

  Besides that, Tate should have been off an hour ago. But the couple had flagged him down, and then the boy started talking, and now Tate was stuck.

  Stuck under the California sun, in a uniform, on a hot and muggy afternoon.

  The couple, they weren’t quite so hot. That was because they were damn near naked. The boy didn’t have any pants. And the girl wasn’t wearing nothing but a little bit of a slip. It was black and it was silk. Hell, the girls Tate knew wouldn’t wear anything like that, not even under their clothes where other folks couldn’t se
e it.

  The boy wasn’t at all embarrassed, though. His name was John Wallace Johnson. Pants or no pants, he was obviously the type of young man who felt that accompanying a girl in a black slip reflected well on his manhood.

  Which, truth be told, wasn’t much to reflect on at all.

  But reflection seemed to be John Wallace Johnson’s game. Meaning the kid was a talker, even on a hot afternoon devoid of lemonade. The kid talked in a voice that pinched like a fat man’s shoe. Without prompting, he started telling Tate the story for the third time, how he and his girl had been down by Fiddler Creek having a little picnic when these folks came out of nowhere toting guns like they were ready to take on a phalanx of G-men or something, and then the bandits made John Wallace Johnson and his girl strip damn near naked, and pretty soon John Wallace Johnson and his girl were standing there watching his Ford Roadster disappear down Old Howard Road without John Wallace Johnson behind the wheel.

  If it was crisp cool February instead of cotton-mouthed July, Tate might have worked up some sarcasm, asked why in the world a bandit gang would want to steal a fellow’s pants along with his car. But it was too damn hot for sarcasm. Tate didn’t have to ask any such questions anyhow. He knew what kind of picnic these two were having down by the creek. He wasn’t that old.

  Yeah, he knew, all right. Hell, any idiot would know. What had happened was that the boy had left his pants in the back seat of the car. Him with his damn Clark Gable moustache and his ten dollar mouthful of a name. He’d left his pants in the back seat because that was where the girl pulled them off. And her with that black slip… who the hell knew what had happened to her dress. Could be it was flying from the flagpole in the town square, for all Tate knew.

  Why, if this gal wasn’t a flapper then Tate Winters had never seen the like. Still, he kind of liked the way she looked at him. He’d never had a woman look at him quite that way, especially not a woman in a black slip. He didn’t know what the look was, exactly, but he knew it was the kind of look that made a man stand tall on a hot day when he really wanted to crawl under the porch and catch a nap with old Rover.