Back in the USSA

by Kim Newman

  The whole town turned out for her funeral. The Party Committee, in full uniform, arranged for a Junior Pioneer Corps team to fire a salute over the grave. Ed insisted he be among their number; some say he brought down a duck with his shot, and gave it to a poor family.

  I was there, in my new Deputy's uniform with the shirt that almost fit and the tin star. When the volley was fired, I threw myself behind a

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  couple of grave-markers and had to be restrained. I was trying to pull my piece and return fire. The rifle-cracks took me back to Yurrup.

  I was embarrassed, but Ed gave out a grin that was creepily friendly. His whole world had died with Augusta, but he didn't seem upset by my foolishness at the funeral. Though I was having my own fit, or maybe because I was off my mind, I saw then that he was a crazy person. I could have sworn that he was still with Augusta, looking around for her approval. Maybe he was nice to me because he saw and heard things that weren't there too.

  After the funeral, he laid on a barbecue and everyone in town had at least a taste of meat. For some of the kids, it was the first time. He talked about Ma as though she was just inside the house and would be out in a minute. She was, he said, "a good person", and always came to chat with him in the evening as he was going to sleep. He went around playing up to his Mama's cronies on the Party Ladies' Committee, insisting that they eat up, have second helpings.

  "Ayup," he kept saying, "put some meat on your bones."

  The desecrations started in 1947. They were never a mystery. Every time some grave was dug up and bits of a corpse went missing, Ed Gein had just been visiting his mother. He always had a shovel with him in his pick-up.

  Sheriff Truman and I went out to the cemetery a couple of times, mostly at the request of grieving relatives. The caretaker knew better than to call the Sheriff's office.

  The job almost never called for what you might think of as detective work. You know, if there was a fight in a shebeen and someone got stabbed, it was a question of finding out which one of the brawlers was a Party member and letting him off for defending himself against an unprovoked attack or nailing the other guy for hooliganism. In the case of missing foodstuffs from the Party store, Harry Truman always assumed someone who needed to eat pretty badly was doing so and shifted reports around until the matter was dropped. If an official really put pepper on his ass, he'd throw Elmer, the town parasite, into the pokey for a few weeks and write him up as the pilferer. Elmer kinda liked getting two square meals a day for nothing, so everyone was happy.

  Out at the cemetery, we didn't need Sherlock Holmes. There were the dug-up graves. There were the empty coffins. And there were the tire-tracks.

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  Back in the USSA

  Several times, we had this conversation with angry relatives.

  "Mama," or "Grandma" sometimes, "she's gone. Someone took her."

  "There's evidence of grave-tampering, certainly. And there are tire tracks."

  That would bring them up short.

  "Yes," Sheriff Truman would say, slowly in case they were too preoccupied to think it through, "whoever did this certainly had a truck."

  Back then, most folks got around by horse and buggy. Gasoline was harder to come by than Pope's piss. Anybody who had a car on the road was connected. And anybody who had a truck was a made man!

  Usually, about then, the complaint would be dropped.

  After a couple of years, and some really bad ones-—just-dead folks missing, or worse still, found with holes in them, holes full of semen—it got so my shoulder nagged me so badly that I had to do something. The worse things got, the worse my wound played up.

  One day Harry Truman just upped and disappeared.

  Since he had not officially been discharged from office and no one wanted to ask where he had gone, Truman had to remain Sheriff. But I had to do his job.

  About this time, someone dug up the corpse of my Great Aunt Effie, put a ballgown on it and wired it to the statue of Plainfield's lone Socialist Hero like the pair of them were dancing. The monument was our sole civic ornament, to a local boy named Jim Boon who'd been wounded in the Spanish war of 1898 and who'd been sweet on Effie. One day, he shot the no-good son of one of the local plutocrats for bothering Effie. He was hanged for it. When the town was looking around for a Revolutionary hero, someone remembered Jim Boon and the local party committee bought the statue from a monument dealer over Madison way. The statue was actually a representation of Joe Hill, but that line was discontinued after Hill was purged, so they got it for a couple of dozen eggs and the price of the rail freight.

  I don't recall as any of this bothered Aunt Effie, who remained a spinster all her life, but now here she was doing the fandango with Jim/ Joe, and she was family, dammit.

  My shoulder hurt so badly I had to grip my belt for two hours to keep from screaming. People thought I was about to pull my gun.

  I knew I had to pay a call on Comrade Gein, Butcher.

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  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  The other deputy, Lou Ford, was a Party snitch, so I went out to the Gein Place on my own. The gas ration had run low, so I couldn't use the Sheriff's vehicle, but I had a horse handy. I always figured Champion would be a lot more use in a crisis than Lou Ford.

  Out in the woods, alone on a horse, occasionally startling a deer, your breath frosting the air, you can sometimes forget the shitpit. That's why you still find so many people living alone in log-cabins all over the boonies. America could be a hell of a country if enough people were shot dead.

  I could sense Champion didn't want to go near the Gein Place. He dragged hooves for the last two miles, ankle-dredging through the fallen leaves. I guess animals talk to each other, and Champ knew that very few things of the four-footed persuasion ever got to come back from Eddie Gein's back-barn.

  Usually, you can tell if a farmer is high in the Party. Their places are newly-painted and have shining machinery, like you see in the movies, around the yard, with the lesser members of the "collective" there to do all the work. The Gein Place wasn't like that. When you first came on it, you thought "well, this is where the Gein Dump is, but where does he keep the farm?" And he worked alone, getting bloody all by himself. This was a collective of one.

  He could have used his position to second workers from the other collectives, and sat back on the porch getting fat on jerky, fiddling his quotas. Instead, he spent so much time on his slaughter that he didn't bother much with tidying up.

  Of course, the place stank like a week-old battlefield in August. There were bones—mostly animal—all over the place, like a crunchy carpet, and hides nailed up on the walls. Everything was streaked with dried blood. There was a pile of cow skulls on the porch, heaped around a cheap concrete statue of Eugene V. Debs. A side of rotting meat was arranged before it, like an offering at an altar. First, my stomach heaved, but then I was thinking, "what a waste!"

  Champion whinnied and reared as I hitched him to the rail on the porch. Somewhere, a mechanical saw was hacking through something. It wasn't the high whine of a buzz-saw through timber. I figured it for one of those newfangled chain affairs, and it was encountering different levels of resistance all the time. Something hard here, something sinewy there, something soft further along...

  My shoulder jolted like I'd been shot.

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  Back in the USSA

  I called out for Ed. The sawing continued. I thought about taking out my gun and executing the bastard child there and then. If he hadn't been Farmer-Labor, I might have been able to cover it. Blamed counter-revolutionary elements. But fat folks in Chicago would miss their Sunday joints, and the goddamn Federal Bureau of Ideology would be all over the show.

  I walked over the bones to Ed's barn.

  It hadn't been a barn for decades. But people didn't like to call it by its right name. It was the Killing House.

  Inside, something screamed as a saw cut into guts.

  Mama Gein wa
s dressing a live deer with a chainsaw. Charlie Marx only knows how Ed had roped a fourteen-point buck, hog-tied it and hauled it up on a meathook. Now, his dead mother was standing under the screeching beast, scraping at its sides with a chainsaw like a Mexican child battering a pinata. If you've never heard a deer screech, you don't want to. Instead of candies, the deer was dropping apple-sized gobbets of flesh and arcing squirts of blood.

  Augusta Gein, you will recall, was dead. But here she was. I recognised the dress she was buried in, under the red sunflowers of drying deer blood, and her leathery face was unmistakable, despite the heavy stitches holding it together where the cheeks had split. Her hair was unbound and hung down her back.

  I drew my Colt and shot the ceiling. I wasn't firing a warning; I was trying to get the dead woman's attention.

  She turned away from the deer and let the saw choke down.

  Her cheeks cracked again and she tried to smile.

  My gun was poked up in the air. My shoulder was on fire. My phantom toe, the one that had been frozen off in Europe, was a white-hot knot of pain.

  Augusta's face broke across like a mask. The underside of her skin was raw and red.

  Under Mrs. Gein's face was her son, Ed.

  It wouldn't have been so bad if it was just the face and dress, but Ed was wearing more of his Mama. He had skinned her, and fit himself inside. She had been a big woman, so he fit easily. There was rough stitchwork down the backs of her legs like stocking seams, and down her arms.

  He had turned his mother into an all-over suit.

  "Ed," I said. "I think we've got a problem here."

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  The deer kicked and died, a gush of blood bursting from its throat, pouring onto Ed's jubilant, radiant face like gentle rain. His teeth gleamed red.

  He stepped towards me, and I tried to level my gun. The pain was too much. I stood like a fool, gun aimed at the sky, as the man-woman-thing advanced, revving the chainsaw in smoky bursts.

  It occurred to me that, as a Party member, Ed Gein would have no trouble getting gasoline to run his chainsaw.

  Almost with reverence, he hung the chainsaw up on hooks, and considered an array of butcher knives, hooks, cleavers and choppers. Bloodied blades chinked against each other as he ran his humanskin-gloved fingers over them.

  "Ayup," he said, "gotta have the right tools for the job."

  I was backing away. I tripped on something I figured was a hay bale and reached out to grab something. I found myself hanging onto a dangling, greasy chain. I had dropped my gun.

  Looking down, I saw that under a thin heaping of straw was Sheriff Truman. His face had been ripped off and put back upside-down, so his bloody nose-bone poked out through an open mouth and his eyeholes showed glints of jawbone.

  Obviously, Harry had finally decided to do something.

  "Ed," I said, trying to find the guts that had got those Ivans out of the crushed house, "I'm going to have to take you in."

  "Ayup, Deputy Costa," he agreed.

  In his hand, he held something small and shiny. It was Truman's tin star, filed to a razor-edge.

  Ed just flicked the star at me, like those things the Japanese kids used to throw at the GIs in the army of occupation after the War. I felt as if I'd been punched in the eye. The shiny edge lodged in my socket like a sliver of ice. Hot blood exploded out of my face.

  I didn't panic. The combat-instinct took over. I levelled my pistol and took aim. I had one good eye, and could still sort of see out of the injured one. Ed was too quick, though. He hitched up his skirts and came at me. There was a blur of petticoats, a glimpse of an enormous pair of flower-patterned drawers and the gun the been kicked from my hand. He jabbed a vicious rabbit-pinch to my throat and I fell backwards.

  I must have hit my head on something hard as I fell and passed out briefly, because the next thing I knew, Ed was standing over me, trying to start up his chainsaw.

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  Back in the USSA

  "Ayup," he said to himself, "just finish this critter and it'll be time for lunch."

  That's when Lou Ford, bless his snitching little heart, showed up.

  To recap, by this date, Ed Gein had committed wholesale grave-robbery, compounded by necrophilia and mutilation of corpses. On top of that, he had murdered the Sheriff and committed a felonious assault on a Deputy, to wit, me, resulting in said Deputy losing the sight of one of his eyes. That's not even considering exhuming, skinning and wearing his mother. Or unauthorised use of government-issue gasoline and countless violations of slaughterhouse hygiene regulations.

  You would think that there was some possibility of him facing criminal prosecution. But Ed Gein was a Party member in Good Standing. He had just been commended for increasing slaughter production by 20% per annum for three years running, and awarded the Meritorious Order of Debs.

  As soon as I got fitted with an eye-patch, I was determined to do something. This time, we couldn't let it slide.

  I made a full report to the Waushara County Party Committee. The Committee was composed of Martha and Abby Brewster, two members of Augusta Gein's sewing circle; Norm Bates, Ed's twice-removed cousin; Bruno Anthony, a time-server from the state capitol who never set foot inside the county; Randall Flagg, the local ideologue; and Kaspar Gutman, manager of the Party Stores. Gutman had the fattest belly in town, closely followed by the bellies of his wife and kids, because Ed kept his table well-supplied with choice cuts.

  Naturally, Lou Ford failed to corroborate my story in public. Without supporting evidence, the Committee were reluctant to pursue any action against a valued servant of the state like Edward Gein.

  "But he's a homicidal maniac," I protested.

  "Under socialism, there is no serious mental illness," explained the ideologue. "Only in the capitalist countries do such conditions exist. Homicidal or psychotic behaviour results from injustice or from alienation in a society which treats the individual as a mere machine for the enrichment of plutocrats. It is a well-known fact that alienation from the means of production can also lead to schizophrenic tendencies. These conditions do not exist in Waushara County, or anywhere else in the USSA, Comrade Deputy."

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  That was the Party Line. Hannibal Lecter, the USSA's leading psychiatric theorist, had won a Frank Norris prize for his book-length argument on the subject, It Doesrit Happen Here.

  "That's as may be, Mr. Flagg. But Gein killed Sheriff Truman. That has to suggest something is wrong."

  "Deputy Costa, did you see Eddie actually commit this dreadful crime?" asked Martha Brewster.

  I had to admit that I did not.

  "Well, it seems likely to me the Sheriff was assassinated by counter-revolutionary elements operating in the area."

  "Martha, you're so right," put in Abby, without dropping a stitch. She was knitting what looked like a noose, and I had an itchy sensation in my neck. "There are counter-revolutionaries everywhere. I do believe they hide under my bed some nights. I can hear them plotting."

  "What this town needs is a Drive to Rid Ourselves of Counter-Revolutionary Elements," declared Gutman. He had gravy stains on his shirt and tie. "I propose that Sheriff Costa be put in charge of the Drive. I do so like a man who can take firm action against counter-revolutionaries."

  It was news to me that I was the new Sheriff. I later learned Lou Ford had turned it down. He didn't want to be in a position where he could publicly foul up.

  I tried to bring up the fact that Ed Gein, Socialist Hero, was prancing about his farm dressed up in his Mama's desiccated skin, but they were all so excited about their Drive Against Counter-Revolution that they didn't listen.

  "Round up all the subversives," I was told, "and we'll have the Federal Bureau of Ideology down here. No one kills our Sheriff and gets away with it."

  When I got back to the office, Lou Ford had already worked up a list of subversives. It included a nine-year-old boy Abby Brewster had reported was given to loitering
outside her house and whom she suspected of pelting her cat with stones. Otherwise, the best our fearless defender of state socialism could come up with were a few citizens who had been overheard complaining about shortages or voicing criticism of the Party. Oh, and Elmer, the town parasite.

  "Okay, genius," I said. "Which of these killed Harry?"

  Lou Ford thought about it, and suggested Elmer.

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  Back in the USSA

  "Do you happen to remember Ed Gein dressed up in his Mama's bloody carcass fishing out my eye with Harry Truman's sharpened badge? Or him standing over me pulling at the starter on his chainsaw?"

  "That's not how it looked to me, Joe," Lou Ford mumbled. "Could be you got hurt discoverin' the old Sheriff's body, and Ed was just tryin' to help out."

  "Yeah, he's real helpful."

  "Maybe we should put him in for a commendation."

  I looked hard at Lou Ford. So far as I could tell, he was serious.

  The pain in my shoulder bugged me really bad over the next few days, and the eye-injury added a terrible headache. Only thing I could do to deaden the pain was drink. On the morning of the third hangover I'd come up with a strategy.

  I went and told Lou Ford that if anyone asked, he and I had spent the day in my office catching up on the paperwork. If he ever told anyone any different, I said, I'd see to it he didn't live another year. I'd written to a few old Army buddies saying that if anything happened to me, they were to waste him. It was all moonshine, of course, but it got me my alibi.

  Next, me, Champion and my Ml went out to the Gein Place with a few sticks of dynamite in the saddlebags to carry out a little Counter-Revolutionary action of our own. I tethered the horse in the woods a good way off and snuck over.

  I found Ed in the barn wearing his Mom and butchering a hog with his chainsaw. He never heard the hiss of the fuse, or the clink of the top being flipped back on my lighter, or the thump of the bundle of dynamite on the blood-soaked dirt floor behind him, or the patter of my feet vamoosing to behind a nice big tree two hundred yards away. And he certainly wouldn't have heard the sound of my hands covering my ears. Nope, sound didn't come into it.