Asylum Heights

by Austin R. Moody

  Glen instructed, “Get out of the car.” The man readily opened the door and stepped onto the road. Glen slid across the front seat and followed him out the passenger’s door of the car, the pistol trained directly at the man’s head. He then instructed, “Take your shoes off.” They were off in a moment and the man handed them to Glen.

  Glen spat in the man’s face, and struck him on his right cheek with the muzzle of the gun, then the other side of his face with his left clenched fist, summoning all the force that he possessed. The man sank to the ground clutching his own face. Now he understood to some degree the pain that he had recently inflicted upon the one now standing above him. Unlike his recent victim, however, he screamed out with abandon, and only heard his own voice echoing through the trees and emptiness of the woods.

  He thought frantically, though silently, “God save me! How totally stupid I was to have started all of this!” He knew that he was in grave jeopardy of imminent death.

  Glen spoke without emotion. “You little worm. Not only have you almost gotten us killed, you jeopardized everyone, and destroyed a New Year’s Eve party for all the paying customers at the Owl’s Nest, just for your own gratification. I should kill you right now!” He then placed the gun barrel upon the man’s right temple and clicked the hammer back again. He let it rest there for an interminable time as the man prayed and reviewed every moment of his life.

  Finally, Glen lowered the gun, picked him up and dragged him to the rear of the car. He opened the trunk and ordered, “Get in.”

  The man quickly complied and the trunk lid locked above him. Glen called to him again, saying, “If I hear anything, I mean the slightest little peep from you, I’ll stop and burn this car with you in it. It’s not worth much more than your little ass now after what you did to it!”

  Glen got back behind the steering wheel and started the car once more, engaged the clutch and shifted into gear. As he began to draw away into the narrow lane, he heard the man’s voice call out only once in the distance, “Please, please let me go!”

  Glen continued to maintain his close attention on the road ahead and kept on driving. They returned to the highway and moved south again. The contents of the trunk abruptly became silent.

  Sybil climbed over the seat back on the passenger’s side and took her place again beside Glen, and gasped when she saw the terrible gash in his face. She gently reached up and touched his cheek, and whispered, “Oh, my darling, what have I done to you?” then began to cry. She pulled her face closely to his, and cupped his chin with her hand, sitting quietly as they sped through the night.

  The dawn began to appear as they left Pachuta, emerging through the windshield and windows of the car then expanded its luminous presence incrementally a moment at a time, announcing the beginning of a new day; a New Year. They passed a sign that indicated the city limits of Laurel, and Glen slowed to the speed limit. He could not afford to be stopped by the law right now. He drove on downtown, to the front of the Greyhound bus station. There was no one outside and the streets were empty and quiet. Glen stopped, turned off the headlights and the ignition and left from the driver’s side as the engine died. He walked around the car and stood beside her door for a few moments then opened it making as little disturbance as possible.

  Sybil made no effort to respond to this courtesy, but rather sat passively in the car without looking at Glen or turning to get out. Glen waited for several moments then reached in to take her hand. Finally, Glen took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

  He quietly said, “I would give anything if that had not happened to us at the Owl’s Nest.” After a few moments had passed, he continued, “I am responsible for you, but I placed you in danger.”

  Sybil turned and touched his shoulder, looked into his eyes and said, “It was my idea to have that drink. You did what you had to do, and you did it very well. I could have been raped and we both could be dead right now.”

  Shortly afterwards, however, she thought, but did not speak. “I have just realized how precariously I have been living over the past two years. I can’t go any further. I just want to go home to my mother and father and live in the shelter and safety that they will provide. I do love him so much though, and I can’t hurt Glen any more tonight.”

  Finally, she asked, “What are you going to do with him?”

  Glen reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. He extracted five twenty-dollar bills and placed them in her hand. He replied quickly, “Go into the bus station, and buy a ticket back to New Orleans. There’s plenty here to get you back, to buy some breakfast, and get a cab home. It is going to be a long while before I see you again. I hope you will be there when I come for you.”

  She had no time to speak as he quickly covered her mouth with his lips. They lingered briefly then Glen straightened himself and escorted her into the empty waiting room of the bus station. He whispered, “Goodbye,” and turned without looking at her face or speaking further, and rapidly walked out the door from which they had entered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE RESTITUTION

  There was no vocal resistance from the man in the trunk as the car moved from the bus station and turned back north toward Clarke County. The semi-dawn darkness ingested them as they left Laurel, perforated by the Studebaker’s headlights as he passed Stafford Springs, the Heidelberg exit, and the Eddins place, moving along the highway and finding the sparse accretions of buildings that defined the tiny community of Pachuta once more.

  Glen knew that the first street that he would reach from the South would be a dead-end into the highway to the East, back toward Harmony, and to Hale. He arrived and turned right. McGill’s Cafe, on his left as he completed his turn, was quiet and dark. Glen moved to the east and considered his options.

  Glen had been hurt indescribably by this egregious little idiot at the Owl’s Nest. He was now totally Glen’s prisoner. He knew if allowed to remain alive that this fool would be back, either alone or with his many friends.

  It would be bad enough if they returned only to hurt him, but they might also seek recompense from Papa Hailes or even worse, his mother. They could easily discover the winery then summon the law. Even his own mother could be tried and convicted of felonious acts and imprisoned.

  He knew that he could take care of himself in any environment, and despite Papa Haile’s advanced years, that he also had the vitality to survive, but he could not bear to consider his mother’s possible prosecution. It sealed the man’s fate.

  Glen remembered a red clay escarpment that jutted upwards, thirty to forty feet on the left side of the road about a mile before the bridge over Souinlovey Creek. The narrow waterway had been named by the Choctaw Indians probably a thousand years before the white man had arrived. It would seal off any escape, allowing only one way for the man to leave the road. It was a favorite spot of the amorous, and he remembered seeing empty whiskey bottles and little rubber tubes that always contained a deposit of viscous, mucous whitish fluid at the sealed ends of them, that were scattered about the area. A Ford automobile had burned at that very spot when he was a child. He knew that the gravel on the roadway would impede any quick escape to the safety of the other side.

  Glen knew what he had to do now.

  The sun was occasionally visible through the blowing, early morning mist. Glen rounded the turn that brought the site into view. He proceeded into the middle of the red cliff, pulled off the road to the left and stopped, got out and proceeded to the trunk and opened the lid. The man was wide awake but very stiff as he emerged from the cavity of the trunk. He thought that he had finished his punishment and was hostile and resentful when his feet reached the gravel of the road.

  He glared at Glen and muttered, “You haven’t seen the last of me, you son-of-a bitch! When I get home, I know where we can find you, and I am going to pay you back for this! Now, give me my shoes, and I’ll be on my way!”

  Suddenly, as though in a mirror, he saw death as he looked into Glen
’s face, and immediately his voice faltered and his expression again became contrite. Glen moved back to the driver’s door and said, “You can’t have your shoes back. Just start walking.” Then he got in behind the wheel, started the engine and shifted into reverse. He turned the car around and began to retreat in the direction from whence they had come. He watched the man in the rear view mirror. He had begun to move in the opposite direction, but was impeded by stepping on the sharp rocks of the road.

  Glen preceded another fifty to a hundred yards. He stopped and turned around. The man thought he was coming back to get him, and he stopped and waited until the car began to approach him once more. It began to pick up speed, however, and to move to the right edge of the road, the side away from the cliffs, and then veered directly into his path.

  The man suddenly realized that the car was aimed directly at him and was beginning to bear down upon him at an increasing rate. He realized that he was now a target. He couldn’t move to the left because of the embankment. He couldn’t continue to stand where he was because the car would run him over. He couldn’t run quickly enough to the safety across the road because of the sharp gravel on his tender bare feet. He knew that he was going to die.

  The man screamed, then began to run over the gravel toward the only possible avenue of escape across the gauntlet. He no longer felt the soles of his feet as they were being torn and sliced by the rocks, thinking only of the safety of the woods just ahead. He felt a sudden lancinating pain in his right foot, unbearable this time, and he fell headlong onto the dust and red clay beneath him.

  Glen quickly pressed the accelerator to the floor, and the yellow roadster responded directly onto and over the man’s body. Glen felt the impact. He slammed the brakes, threw the gear into reverse, and backed over him again, then forward and backward repeatedly, until only a pool of almost unidentifiable flesh lay still on the roadway behind the car. He stopped and got out.

  The body of the vehicle, the grill, paint and wheels were crimson with blood. He walked to the rear of the car and gazed down upon the remains of this person that had needlessly hurt him, and had jeopardized the one person that meant more to him than all of life itself. He reached down, grasped the trousers belt and lifted the lower portion of the torso onto the deck of the trunk, then the remaining half, the head, neck and thorax, and placed all of it beside the rest.

  There was a small lane on the right just ahead that provided an entrance to a field that continued across the moist earth, beside the rows of cotton stalks that had not yet been plowed under. Recent rains had softened the ground and reduced the height of their peaks to almost the same level as that of the depressions created by the plow when preparing the field for planting. He started the car and moved down the lane beside the margin of the cultivation to the edge of Souinlovey Creek.

  Glen hadn’t a shovel nor other tool to bury or otherwise dispose of this flotsam. He knew that he was in a most precarious situation and that he had no time to waste in resolving this problem and removing himself from its possible consequences. He waded out into the water up to the nipple line on his chest. There was a large amount of ledge stone along the creek bank. He returned to the rear of the car, quickly removed the body from the trunk lid and pulled it to the water’s edge then floated it behind him to the middle of the creek and let it sink to the bottom.

  Glen moved back to the creek’s bank, gathered and piled a large number of rocks together, then placed them over the corpse in a mound, until he could no longer feel human flesh beneath his feet. The forest and the creek bed became hauntingly silent when Glen had finished the task, was satisfied, and ready to leave.

  He removed his undershirt, socks and shorts and used them to wash as much blood and flesh from the automobile as possible, returning to the creek repeatedly to rinse the saturated cloth until it was reasonably clean. He put his shirt and trousers back on, started the car and drove back to the field.

  He had to remove the rest of the detritus still clinging to the underbody of the vehicle as quickly as possible. He looked at the stalks of the recently harvested cotton crop. He backed up, depressed the clutch and shifted into first gear, then accelerated, pressing as fast as the car would go over the wet, dew saturated cotton stalks along the entire length of the row, not daring to slow or stop for fear of becoming stuck and being discovered. At the end of the first, he turned and ran over the stalks in the opposite direction, then the next, then another, and another, and another to the final row at the end of the field adjacent to the exit gate back at the road.

  He inspected the car’s exterior before he passed through the gate. There was no grossly visible evidence of the carnage that it had been recently delivered though Glen knew that it could not pass a close inspection without further cleansing. He latched the gate behind him, and turned onto the road. Thankfully, it was New Year’s morning and he encountered no one along the way, arriving back home in Hale within the next twenty minutes. He pulled alongside the house and drove as quietly as possible to the back yard, through the barn door and into its sheltering, protective darkness. Mama was instantly awake, but lay in her bed quietly awaiting the arrival of a new day, wondering about her son’s most unusual presentation.

  Glen’s left face throbbed with incessant pain and he was totally, physically exhausted. He found a water bucket by the well pump and removed all his clothing. He filled the bucket repeatedly and washed himself in the cold water, removing the blood from his face, hands and the rest of himself, and finally soaked his garments, squeezing them to remove the blood stains within the fabrics. He parted and spread the clothes out, hung them on the door to a stall in the barn hallway, then climbed up into the hayloft and was almost immediately asleep.

  Thirty-five miles away the Greyhound bus pulled into the station at Laurel, discharged two passengers and their sparse luggage, and several parcels of freight consignment into the depot. Fifteen minutes later after announcing their departure for New Orleans, a sole new person climbed aboard and proceeded down the aisle to a window seat on the right side midway toward the back of the bus. Sybil had nothing to bring with her, and she sat with only her purse that contained the balance of the hundred dollars that remained after her ticket purchase. A few minutes later the bus backed out of its loading dock and pulled into the now visible street, proceeding southward again to Hattiesburg and ultimately to home in New Orleans.

  Sybil watched the dim street lights as the bus passed the remainder of the town and listened to the monotonous, steady rhythm of the big diesel engine as it accelerated toward the darkness of the approaching countryside of Jones County, Mississippi. She slept before the city lights had faded. She awakened suddenly as the bus driver sounded his horn, responding to an errant, aggressive motorist. She sat up and looked outside her window, seeing a large body of water, with breaking crests of white tipped waves, created by a brisk southeasterly wind. She smiled to herself, and thought, “It’s Ponchartrain.” Then she whispered, “I’m home!”

  The sun had ascended as the bus arrived at the Greyhound station on Canal Street a few blocks west of the river. The passengers withdrew, all except Sybil.

  The driver moved down the aisle of the bus, and found her peacefully asleep. He gently nudged her, and she awakened but suddenly withdrew into a defensive, hostile position. The driver reassured, “Don’t be afraid, I just wanted to be sure that you were alright.”

  Sybil looked at him for a bit then gave him a tentative smile, “Thank you so much for your concern. I just need a cab to take me home. I’m very tired,”

  The bus driver quickly responded, “Just give me your address and you’ll be home in no time!” He reached for her hand and assisted her from the bus and motioned to a cab that was waiting in the queue. The cabby moved forward, got out of the vehicle and opened the rear door. She quickly entered. He could see that she had no luggage and he closed it behind her. “Do you know where you want me to take you?” he asked.

  Sybil nodded affirmatively then dir
ected the driver to the district, street, and number that she wanted so badly to see. The cab sped through the light morning traffic, and entered the wrought iron gates, proceeding to the house. He got out quickly from the vehicle and opened her door to safety and peace. She paid the fare along with a five dollar gratuity for his kindness and service. The cabby thanked her then turned into the exit from the porte cochere and drove down the driveway to the entrance to her home and out onto the street, disappearing into the gathering traffic.

  She removed the house key from her purse, unlocked the heavy door and entered the still dark house. She tip-toed as quietly as possible after removing her shoes, walking in stocking feet up the winding stairway to the second floor and her bedroom.

  Sybil was full of thought, wondering where Glen was, what he had encountered, and if he were all right. She was looking down at each step to avoid tripping and falling, and as she approached the top of the stairs to the second floor, she sensed the presence of another, then looked up and found a figure, her father, standing at the head of the staircase upon the landing above.

  She cried out, “Oh Daddy, I’m so glad to be home!”

  She paused and began weeping, “I’ve been so bad! I have been a humiliation and embarrassment to you, to Mama, and the boys. I’ll make it up to all of you, somehow!”

  He grasped her at the last step and pulled her up to him at the landing, enfolding her with his arms and compressed her to his body with such fervor that she could hardly breathe. He whispered, “I don’t know what all of this means. I know some of it, but you look as though you have just undergone a terrible experience.” He continued, “You look a mess. If that young man up in Mississippi has hurt or offended you in any way, I will repay him with punishment that he won’t forget!”