infrequent customer at my restaurant, but gossip travels through the air in small towns like the smell of burning leaves.
Bill Parker always had a lot on his mind. He was the kind of guy that seemed to relish his worries, and if he ever found that he only had two or three things in his life to worry about, that would worry him too. He’d go so far as to turn little things into life-or-death situations.
Let me relate to you my one dealing with him, and you’ll see what I mean. Bear in mind this was about a year before he died. One time he came into the restaurant and ordered a sandwich. Roast beef, perhaps, though I never really cared to remember what it was exactly. Details were never my strong point, me being a broad strokes kind of guy myself. Anyway, he ordered this sandwich and I figured, well, this here’s a man that deserves a damn good sandwich, seeing as how the team he coached had just scored yet another victory, so me being the kindly sonofabitch that I am, what did I do? I put the fancy mustard on the sandwich for him—the kind with all the little seeds and herbs and so on in there.
Bill Parker went and flipped his lid when he took a bite of that sandwich, like the balance of the universe had been shocked into an irreparable state. Like the Earth itself had been thrown off its axis and was now on an inevitable crash course with the sun.
“Jesus Christ,” he shrieked. “What are you trying to do to me?”
He acted like I’d put battery acid in the fucking thing.
I apologized, of course, and went on and made the man another sandwich. This time I used the regular mustard, the kind that looks like yellow paint but can sometimes smell like someone had pissed in their pants.
I thought nothing of this incident—it was like watching a woman fuss over a broken nail in a room full of amputees—because the fact of the matter is, if anyone on this stinking planet has anything to worry about, it’s me.
Fuck it, the point of it all is that Bill Parker was the kind of man that couldn’t sleep at night, and in some crazy way, driving a few times around Old Sherman Road like it was a goddamn racetrack when everyone else was sleeping made him feel like everything was going to be okay. That’s why he was driving that night.
He was not yet forty, but Father Time had not been kind to his face or his features. He’d lost most of his hair when he was still young enough to look like he couldn’t buy alcohol, but the missing hair from his head slowly resurfaced on different parts of his body, like his chest and back. Behind that hairy back he was called “the Pad” by a lot of the kids at the school. “The Pad” was short for “the Brillo Pad.”
When Parker would make one of his young charges run a few extra laps for some form of tardiness or other, the student would later remark to a friend of his, “The fucking Pad had another wild hair growing somewhere today.”
Bill Parker didn’t know the students had come up with a name for him until he heard his colleagues refer to him as “the Pad” in the teachers’ lounge one day. He pretended he didn’t hear them because that’s the kind of guy he was.
All that body hair must have kept him pretty warm, because he was always sweating at least a little. It was by the grace of God alone that a girl named Mary Beth had thought enough of the man to marry him and go through the pain and the grief of having his children.
His wife proved through the years that she had the strength and determination to keep the house up and running and the kids well-dressed and fed, but Bill Parker let it all go, and focused on his work at the school. Whereas Mary Beth fought hard to get her librarian’s figure back after giving birth to two chunky boys, Bill Parker put weight on and never lost it. In fact, it was as if the extra weight he’d put on was lonely, so he added to it now and then so it could have some company. At first he claimed the weight was from what he liked to call “sympathy pains,” but that stopped working as an excuse when Mary Beth got back into her old jeans, and the boys were old enough to carry on a meaningful conversation with the minister from the Lutheran church that Mary Beth always tried to drag her husband to. The fact was that Bill had gotten complacent in his marriage.
I digress, back to the picture: Bill Parker checked the time on his cheap watch. It was getting on to two o’clock in the morning. That made it Tuesday, exactly fourteen weeks since he came home from work one evening to find that his lovely wife had taken their two boys and moved to her parents’ house over in Edenburgh.
Bill sighed.
It didn’t feel like it had been that long, but enough had happened since then that he knew his calculations were correct, like his realization that he didn’t know how to operate the washing machine in his basement. Now that he was all alone, his wardrobe took on the appearance of ill-handled rags, or a collection of aging bathroom mats at a free clinic. The undershirt he was wearing was clean enough, but the daylight-blue pajama bottoms he had on reeked of meals he couldn’t remember eating.
He decided that he’d make one more loop around Evelyn on Old Sherman Road, and when he got home, he’d try to pick up all the beer cans that littered his two-story home like mouse droppings.
He’d at least try.
Bill Parker frowned, thinking about what he’d done, probably, and continued driving east. He’d just passed Larchmont Street. On his left were the blocks of little one-story homes, all wood and dust and ancient glass. On his right were the woods—deep and dense and always stirring. The woods pulsated and moved like the ocean at night. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel it, like something bad was about to happen.
On this night, the woods were blacker than the sky. As Bill Parker drove along, he looked up at the moon and smiled. Something about it made him feel at peace, I suppose. At that point he reached down with his right hand and turned on the radio. It was already set to KBTO—Evelyn’s classics station—and once he raised the volume, he knew he was listening to Johnny Cash’s “Daddy Sang Bass.”
That was fine with Bill.
Up ahead, something moved. Bill Parker put his eyes back on the road, and that’s when he saw it.
It sprang from the black woods like a mountain bird, as if that dark wall of leaves, branches, and limbs had rejected this thing and violently spat it out on the pavement. Bill Parker caught sight of it in the bright glare of his headlights and hit the brakes hard.
At first he thought it was a deer, but the creature didn’t look like any deer one would be familiar with. In the back of his mind, he wondered what the hell it was he was looking at, but there was no time to think of such things.
Bill made a noise like a woman as the car skidded along on melting rubber tires, and just when he thought he was going to make violent contact with this thing on the road, it leapt up and came down on the hood of his car. The sound of it was as if someone had dropped a piano. Bill Parker saw that this animal had two feet, not the four that he was expecting, even hoping for. Bill’s mouth fell open, not making a sound this time.
It was a look the beast had seen a thousand times. In another day and age it may have relished the fear it provoked, but now it was all business. The beast gave Bill Parker a look like he was a nail that needed hammering.
What Bill Parker saw wasn’t a man by any stretch of the word, but that’s all he could think of. The beast on the hood of his car was crouched down and leering in at him through the dirty windshield with bloodred eyes. Judging from the size of it, Bill figured it had to be about seven feet tall. It was backlit by the moon, so he couldn’t make out any fine details, but he could see that it was covered in hair, almost like it was an honest-to-God, look-it- up-in-the-dictionary kind of animal. He also saw that the beast had nails at the ends of its fingers that were so goddamn big they could cut through a tree.
Over the hum of the motor, Parker could hear the monster breathing. Deep, seething breaths. Like he owed the thing money.
The beast growled, raised one of its fur-lined arms, and punched a hole through the middle of the windshield. The tiny shards of broken glass pelted Bill Parker like raindrops. He let out a guttural cry. Before he could do anything one might call “useful,” the beast had dug its nails into the meat of Bill’s left shoulder and was making progress on separating the arm from the rest of the body. Bill screamed again. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but it soon dawned on him that his life was dangerously close to being a thing of the past. Thus, as he told his team, it was time to get busy.
He slid down in his seat and ducked to his right, trying to break the beast’s grip, but he couldn’t. Blood came out of him in spurts along the dash. Red waves caught the moonlight. Bill Parker could feel the heat of the blood as it rolled across his chest and neck in waves. All the while he screamed, and, little by little, the beast inched its head
