by Ronald Kelly
Tony didn’t seem to care much, though. His ability to care about how his life had turned out had been wrestled from his grasp months ago. His fellow teammates had suffered similar fates…or worse. Bubba Stewart was in the Tennessee state pen for grand theft auto and Rickey Nolan had driven his pickup truck into the muddy depths of the Harpeth River only a few days ago. Rickey had, at least for himself, put an end to the apathy that seemed to curse the majority of the menfolk in Bedloe County.
Tony didn’t realize that it was the anniversary of his emotional gelding until the big yellow school bus pulled up outside the Lunch & Munch. The jangle of the cowbell over the door sounded and he turned to find Coach Winters crossing the dining room to the front counter. He held a brown paper bag in his hand.
“How’s it going, Frazier?” greeted the coach, smiling around the stub of his cigar.
“Same as usual,” replied Tony with a shrug. He glanced through the plate glass of the cafe and saw the excited faces of that year’s team grinning from the windows of the school bus. “Another winning season?” he asked blandly.
“Of course,” said Winters. “Are you surprised?”
Tony remembered the promise the coach had made him and his friends scarcely over a year ago. “No,” he said. “Can’t say that I am.”
The coach’s tiny eyes glinted beneath his bushy brows. “I heard your wife just had a kid. A baby boy.”
Tony nodded. “You heard right.”
“Well, it’s not much, but I bought him a little present,” said Winters. He handed Tony the paper bag. “Could you see that he gets it?”
“Sure,” said Tony. Reluctantly, he took the gift. “Thanks.”
“I’d like to stick around and talk about old times, but I gotta go,” said Coach Winters, heading for the front door. “Can’t keep those ladies down in the Hollow waiting, you know.”
Tony said nothing. He simply nodded and watched as the elderly man left the restaurant and climbed back onto the bus. Soon, the diesel was on its way, first to the tavern for a couple cases of beer, then farther southward along Highway 70.
When the bus was out of sight, Tony stared down at the sack in his hand, afraid to open it. Finally, he gathered the nerve to do so. For some reason he wasn’t at all surprised to see the article of clothing that Coach Winters had bought for Tony’s firstborn son.
It was a tiny football jersey. Red and white, with the emblem of the Bedloe County Bears on the front and the word QUARTERBACK stenciled across the back.
DEPRAVITY ROAD
This is one of the few stories I’ve written that wasn’t set in the South, which makes it a rarity of sorts. Fiction-wise, I don’t normally stray past the Mason-Dixon Line.
Oddly enough, this tale is set in the heart of the Midwest, but for a good reason…mainly because it touches on an infamous—and particularly gruesome—case of murder and grave-robbery that came to light in the 1950s. One that still haunts the folks of that area to this day.
We’re lost.”
Fred Barnett didn’t want to admit it, not out loud, not in front of her. But there was simply no denying it. They had been on that lonely stretch of rural road for quite some time now, driving mile upon mile without seeing any signs of civilization other than a few dilapidated farmhouses and their equally ramshackle outbuildings.
“I told you that an hour ago,” huffed Agnes from the passenger side of the ’51 Chevrolet. “I shouldn’t be surprised, though. Leave it to you to turn a simple ninety-mile road trip into some rambling exodus into the unknown. I swear, Fred, you couldn’t find your own butt if you had a compass and a roadmap.”
Fred’s thin face flushed red with embarrassment. “Please, Agnes…not in front of the kids.”
But his wife wouldn’t leave it alone. “And why not in front of the kids?” she asked. “They have as much a right as anyone else to know what a total idiot their father is.”
As usual, Fred said nothing in rebuttal. He avoided looking at the woman seated next to him, the woman he had once seriously thought of in terms of love, devotion, and, God help him, even lust. He didn’t want to see her hefty, thick-limbed frame perched there, punishing the springs of the Chevy’s two-toned bench seat. Neither did he want to see the look of smug disapproval on her plump, bovine face. Instead he directed his nervous gaze at the rearview mirror. The children, two boys named Teddy and Roger, sat immersed in their comic books, oblivious to the humiliation their old man was suffering at the razor tongue of their overbearing mother. Or maybe they did hear what was being said and were just ignoring it. They had heard it all many times before. Perhaps burying their noses in pulp pages of ballooned dialogue and brightly inked panels was a way out for them. A method of psychological escape to keep themselves from going totally nuts.
Fred wished he possessed such a haven. But he did not. Since marrying Agnes eight years ago, this shoe salesman had been unable to find one. Every waking hour was spent on the battle line, bitterly swallowing one complaint after another: dissatisfaction over the meager wage Fred was making, putting down the Eisenhower administration (Agnes did not “like Ike”), and griping because the boys were turning out to be a couple of “weird deadbeats” like their father. Of course, Fred simply nodded obediently to every harsh word, uttered a much practiced “Yes, dear,” and cowered beneath her contemptuous glare, which was set in her massive face like two, tiny black marbles sunk deep into a tub of lard.
Now he was under the oppressive weight of her wrath once again as he wandered the wintry back roads with no idea where they were. “Got any suggestions?” he asked her, trying desperately hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “You know I’ve never been to your brother Ben’s place before. I’ve never even been this far north in the state before.”
Agnes seemed to settle down a bit, accepting her husband’s shortcomings as a burden that must be endured, at least on that Thanksgiving Day of 1954. “Just keep on going and, the next house you see, stop and ask for directions.”
“Yes, dear.” There was no feeling to his words. They were just a reflex action now, like flinching beneath the fist of a bully.
Fred drove on. Miles of desolate farmland passed on either side of the narrow, dirt road. Some of it was vacant fields already past the time of harvest, some of it dense pine wood and marsh. There was such an air of despair and hopelessness about the area. It was a land that knew no prosperity, no joy, and no fighting chance of being anything but what it was forever destined to be…a bleak and colorless wasteland.
A land as lifeless as the territory of Fred’s own floundering spirit.
Agnes sucked on the lemon drops she had bought before leaving Milwaukee and fiddled with the knobs on the radio until a Hank Williams song blared from the speaker. Teddy and Roger giggled and gasped over their comics and slurped from near empty bottles of Nehi Grape bought at a little mom and pop grocery thirty miles back.
And Fred drove…and drove and drove.
Finally, something showed itself amid the snow-speckled fields and rampant forest. A lonely farmhouse stood a hundred yards from the edge of the roadway, along with a scattering of rickety buildings: a barn, chicken coop and outhouse. He didn’t slow down at first, though, simply for the reason that the place looked totally abandoned. No vehicles sat in the weedy drive, the windows of the house looked dark and curtained, and what few pieces of farm machinery remained in the yard looked as though they had rusted into uselessness long ago.
But Agnes wasn’t so easily convinced. “Stop,” she demanded, placing a meaty hand on his slender arm.
“Looks like the place is deserted, dear. I don’t think anyone lives there.”
“Well, check anyway,” she insisted. Her fingers dug into what little muscle he possessed, sending spikes of pain through his upper arm. “I’m tired of wandering around this godforsaken country.”
He nodded, said “Yes, dear,” and pulled off the road into the driveway of the isolated farmstead.
The boys in the back discar
ded their comics, craning their necks to see where their sudden detour was taking them. “Neat-O!” said Roger. “A haunted house!”
Yes, thought Fred. That was exactly what it looked like. A house occupied only by ghosts, by the spiritual remnants of the unliving. As he parked a short distance from the building and cut the Chevy’s engine, Fred examined it from the warmth and safety of the automobile. It was a typical example of the mid-western farmhouse: two-storied, white clapboarded, its pitched roof and the overhang of the porch covered with a blanket of new November snow. He regarded the windows from his vantage point. A few were boarded over or covered with sheets of curling tarpaper, while others were merely shuttered or sealed off with blinds. The narrow porch was barren. No picturesque rocking chairs or romantic hanging swing adorned it; just naked floorboards and a weathered front door with no screen.
Agnes nudged him in the ribs with a fleshy elbow. “Well, what are you waiting for? Get out and ask.”
“I really don’t think there’s anyone here,” he told her, knowing there was no use in arguing about it.”
“Humor me,” said Agnes in a voice that told him that she very much needed to be humored.
Fred shrugged and, opening the door, stepped into the cold November afternoon.
“Can we go with him, Mom?” asked Teddy. “I gotta pee.”
“Me, too.” Roger tugged on his coat, as well as his genuine Davy Crockett coonskin cap. “Real bad.”
Agnes frowned, partly out of disgust and partly from an overly sour lemon drop. “Okay, go on. But you’d better do your business and do it right. This is definitely the last pit-stop we’re making until we get to your Uncle Ben’s.”
The boys piled out of the back of the car and joined their father, who was stepping through the slushy snow and making a slow trek to the front porch of the house.
“Betcha there’s a ghost in there,” said Teddy. “A headless man who carries around a bloody axe, looking for another noggin to replace his lost one.”
Roger giggled with delight. “Naw, even better…a flesh-eating ghoul who digs up graveyards and breaks into tombs.”
Fred looked around at the youngsters as they ran across the yard and hopped up on the porch. “You boys should’ve stayed in the car.”
“We gotta pee.”
“All right. There’s an outhouse around back. But you boys be careful. Don’t go falling into the hole.”
The brothers thought that was hilarious. Their laughter rang through the rural silence like a jarring intrusion as they disappeared around the side of the house, sending clods of snow and mud flying beneath their churning feet.
Fred knocked on the top panel of the front door. The sound of his knuckles on the bare wood echoed through the old house. He stood there for a long moment, listening, hearing nothing within. He tried again, putting more force into it this time. Still no answer.
He turned back to the car. Agnes scowled through the Chevy’s windshield, motioning for him to try around back.
Fred knew he would get no peace until he did as she said, so he left the empty porch and walked around the right side of the house.
When he made it around back, he noticed that the outhouse door was open, but that there was no one inside. “Maybe they did fall in,” he told himself. But his sudden fear faded when he spotted their tracks in the snow, leading both to the privy and then back again to the rear of the old house.
“Teddy, Roger…are you in there?” He went to the screen door and found the inside door open, revealing the shadowy interior of a summer kitchen. Reluctantly, he stepped inside.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the murky surroundings. The summer kitchen was nearly empty. Only a few crates and heaps of trash and old newspaper furnished the cramped room. He walked to a dark corner where a rope was slung over a ceiling beam. At the end of the rope was a crude, wooden crossbar.
Fred crouched and examined the dusty planks of the floor, directly beneath the block-and-tackle. A broad, tacky stain dyed the boards a rusty reddish-brown. Blood. Obviously, the owner of this place was a hunter and used the summer kitchen to dress out his game. The crossbar would have been strong enough to suspend a good-sized deer by its hind feet.
He stood there and stared at the contraption for a long moment. Soon, his imagination played out a grisly scene. He could see Agnes hanging from the crossbar by her heels, naked and submissive…the hunted. And he was a hunter, standing before her, long-bladed knife firmly in hand, ready to butcher her like a hog.
Fred turned his eyes from the crossbar and cleared his head of the disturbing tableau. At first, he was appalled at having conjured such a thought. But then again, he couldn’t help but admit a lingering satisfaction. He was sure some psychiatrist would have had an appropriate term for his gruesome, little fantasy, maybe some high-browed explanation about a passive husband’s underlying hatred for his domineering wife. Not that Fred would have ever thought of actually telling a shrink about his daydreams. In that day and time, revealing such things about one’s psyche could land you in a rubber room.
A noise from somewhere inside the house drew Fred’s attention and he stepped into the household’s working kitchen. Once again he called out “Hello, anybody home?” The rafters creaked overhead, as if someone walked across the upstairs floor. “Teddy? Roger? Are you boys up there?”
He received no reply.
The regular kitchen was even more cluttered than the adjoining room. There were the usual furnishings: a cupboard, an old iron cook stove, and a kitchen table with four straight-back chairs. He had to climb over a heap of refuse in the floor. Junk was everywhere. Burlap bags, cardboard boxes full of yellowed newspaper and old detective magazines, and empty tin cans and bottles with remnants of food still clinging to the insides. The kitchen windows were shuttered, allowing only a few slashes of pale gray light through the wooden slats.
He was stepping over a carton of Startling Detective and True Crime magazines, when muffled laughter echoed from the upper floor. His heart leapt to his throat, for he couldn’t determine whether the sound was that of a child or an adult.
Fred lost his balance and bumped against the edge of the table. Among the clutter of empty packages and dirty dishes, was an oddly-shaped soup bowl made of hard pottery or plaster. His agitation at the unexpected noise upset the bowl, causing it to rock on its uneven base and spill the dregs of chicken noodle soup on the tabletop.
He began to notice some strange things then. A couple of books lay next to the soup bowl. One was the Holy Bible, while the other was a volume called Peckney’s Science of Embalming. And the wicker upholstery of the kitchen chairs seemed to have been refurbished with narrow strips of supple leather. He laid his hand on the interlaced seat of the chair nearest him. It was the finest example of hide tanning he had ever come across.
In fact, it was almost as soft as Agnes’ skin…and nearly as repulsive to the touch.
The spell of creepiness conjured by the isolated house broke when the drumming of feet descended the staircase of the outer hallway. Teddy and Roger burst into the kitchen, giggling, their eyes bright with excitement. They grabbed their father’s hands and began to drag him to the stairway. “Come with us, Dad,” they urged. “You gotta see all the neat stuff that’s upstairs!”
Fred didn’t want to go upstairs, though. “We’re trespassing here, boys,” he said with as much parental authority as he could muster. “If the owner came back and found us, we’d be in a lot of trouble.”
“Aw, come on, Dad! Please?”
Fred was firm. “No. Now let’s get back to the car.”
When they got to the car, Agnes was waiting. “Well?”
“Like I said, there was no one home.” Fred started up the Chevy and began to back out of the driveway.
The boys’ excitement hadn’t abated since leaving the house. “You oughta have seen all the great stuff that was stashed upstairs!” piped Teddy with a grin.
“Oh, really?” asked their mothe
r absently, more interested in lemon drops and finding something other than a “hick station” on the radio than anything the children might have to say.
“Yeah! In one bedroom there were masks made out of real human faces hanging on the walls and bleached skulls sticking on the bedposts.”
“And that wasn’t all!” added Roger. “In the closet there was a woman’s skin hanging up like a suit of clothes, with bosoms and everything, and there was a Quaker Oats box full of noses. And in a shoebox there were a bunch of funny-looking things that kinda looked like hairy, little mouths…”
Agnes’s face loomed over the edge of the front seat, beet-red and furious. “All right, that’s quite enough! Hand them over, right this moment!”
The boys stared at her with a mixture of innocence and fear. “Hand what over?”
“You know what I mean! Those blasted comic books!”
Glumly, Teddy and Roger surrendered their copies of Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. With an angry flourish, their mother snatched the EC comics from them and tossed them in the floorboard at her feet.
“I’ve had enough of this garbage! I won’t have my children turning into weirdoes or juvenile delinquents!”
“I think you’re overreacting, dear,” said Fred as he steered the car back onto the road. “I grew up with monsters and ghosts when I was a kid. It’s just harmless fun, that’s all.”
Agnes was unswayed in her opinion however. “Frankenstein and Dracula are one thing. Mutilation, walking corpses, and cannibalism are quite another. Just like that Senate subcommittee says, these confounded horror comics are ruining our children’s moral values and leading them down the road to depravity!”