Ken Douglas - Ragged Man

Home, she shut off the Jeep, went over to Judy’s front porch and sat on the front steps. It seemed too nice a day to waste it away inside. J.P. sat beside her and was unusually quiet for about a minute.

“ Wanna watch television?” he said

“ Not really.”

“ Wanna take a walk?”

“ Yeah,” she said, “it’s a good day for it.”

She had to do something, she couldn’t just sit on the porch with a seven-year-old boy on a nice day and expect him to be still, though it amazed her how little he’d been affected by what had happened earlier.

“ Let’s walk down to the park and back,” J.P. said.

“ My brother and I had pigeons when I was a kid,” Ann said, making conversation as they walked side by side down the shady road.

“ What kind?”

“ Tumblers, rollers, fantails, helmets.”

“ Wuss birds!”

“ Wuss birds?”

“ Show birds are wuss birds, you know pussy birds, real men have racers, my dad said.”

“ Well, I didn’t know.”

The half mile walk to the park took about fifteen minutes with J.P. blasting rapid fire questions the whole way, as usual, and Ann doing her best, as usual, to field them.

He seemed to run out of questions as they reached the park and turned left to cross Seaview Avenue and just as Ann thought she was going to get a breather, a stab of white hot pain ricocheted through the back of her head. A pain that had nothing to do with the cancer that was ravaging her body.

“ There’s something bad over there.” She pointed toward the dunes.

“ How do you know?” J.P. said.

“ I don’t know, but I know.”

“ The park,” J.P. said.

“ Okay.”

They turned, sprinted to the park and dropped in front of the backstop, sharing their hiding place with two empty bottles of Red Dog wine. Ann felt a little better once J.P. was shielded from what or whoever was over there.

“ Wait here, I’m going over to take a look.”

“ Don’t leave me here by myself,” J.P. said.

“ Don’t worry, I won’t leave your sight and I’ll be right back.” She got up and jogged across the street to the beach. At the sand, she crawled on her belly up the dune and peered over the top and saw him. It was the man from the bait shop, only now he reminded her of the Ragged Man from the outback and he was headed in her direction. She slid down the dune and ran back to the backstop.

“ Just in time,” J.P. said with his eye to a knot hole.

“ Let me see,” Ann said, replacing his eye with hers. “It’s the man from the store.”

The man sat on the dune and studied the beach.

“ It doesn’t look like he’s gonna move for awhile,” Ann said. Then she added, “He reminds me of the Ragged Man.”

“ What’s the Ragged Man?”

“ I met him once in Australia.”

“ Are you afraid of him?”

“ Yes. He’s very bad, very evil.”

“ The town,” J.P. said.

“ Let’s go.”

Keeping the backstop between them and the man across the street, Ann and J.P. walked across the baseball diamond, where the Tampico Pirates played, then the football field, where the Tampico Bullets played. Then they went into the Elm’s section of the park, where the high schoolers went to make out. Exiting the Elms, they found themselves at the corner of Kennedy and Second Avenue.

“ Let’s go by Ken and Dub’s Records and see if they got the new Dylan CD in yet,” J.P. said.

“ I don’t think it’s open.”

“ We could look in the window,” he said.

“ Since when did you start liking Dylan?”

“ I don’t, really,” J.P. said, “but I was gonna buy it for Rick. I’ve been saving up.”

Ann smiled and they started out for the used record store that catered to a diminishing group of people who still preferred vinyl, but they didn’t get far, because J.P. turned for a look behind.

“ Look, he’s coming,” he said. “Over there, by the corner. I don’t think he’s seen us.”

Ann grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into Susan Spencer’s Diner. The only other soul in the restaurant was Jesse Hernandez, the morning cook. He was dressed in kitchen whites, long hair in a bun under a cook’s hat and headphones, his back was facing the door and he was singing at the top of his lungs about being dazed and confused.

Like spies in the night, they walked through the diner, past booths with blood red Naugahyde and into the corridor that led to the back exit, past the women’s, past the men’s, past the pay phone, and out through the open door in back as Lola, the morning waitress, exited the woman’s restroom, never knowing that Ann and J.P. had passed by.

Ann looked left, then right. They were in the alley between First and Second Avenues. The east side was dotted with dumpsters and trash cans situated near the rear doors of Second Avenue’s merchants. The west side fronted on the garages and fenced backyards of the modest homes on First.

“ Is he still coming?” J.P. asked.

“ I think so,” Ann said.

Then they heard the front door of the diner crash open.

“ Is there anybody here?” Someone yelled in a raspy voice.

“ Nobody’s been here for the last half hour,” Lola answered.

“ Are you sure?” The raspy voice boomed loud.

“ We’re going over,” Ann whispered. She hoisted J.P. up to the top of a five foot brick fence. He grabbed on, rolled over the top and dropped into the yard on the other side with Ann right behind him.

Ann took J.P. by the hand and led him across the backyard to the back door of a two story house. Checking the door, she found it unlocked and they quietly went inside. Ann locked the door behind them. They heard the sound of a shower and a woman’s voice humming a tune Ann wasn’t familiar with. Putting her index finger to her lips, indicating to J.P. to be quiet, Ann looked through flower print curtains and saw the man coming over the fence.

“ He’s still coming,” she whispered, taking J.P.’s hand again and leading him through a modern kitchen, then a dining room, then a sitting room, then an entrance way and finally out the front door as they heard the man banging on the back.

Once they were out the front they turned left and sprinted down First. Without slowing, they crossed Kennedy, back into the Elms, back across the football field and the baseball diamond, back onto Seaview Avenue, and back up the hill toward home.

Once they were back at Judy’s Ann felt safe, at least for a few minutes, she told herself. She was exhausted, the cancer stealing her strength. She had to lay down, just for a few seconds. She literally fell on the sofa.

“ Are you all right?” J.P. asked.

“ I’m fine, I just need a little rest.”

“ Okay.

J.P. settled back in his mother’s favorite chair, remote in hand, and channel surfed, changing channels at least three times a minute, but he couldn’t get that Ragged Man out of his mind. How could Ann rest at a time like this? She must really be tired. He didn’t want to think about it, so he decided to get something to eat, but before he got to the refrigerator, he heard an animal sound from outside. He pulled a kitchen chair over to the sink, climbed up and looked out the window and saw the black shape of a big dog slide into the bushes that grew between the garage and the house.

J.P. loved to play in there.

Like a flash he was off the chair and through the kitchen to tell Ann. Halfway to the sofa he heard the scratching at the front door and screamed, “Annie, something’s outside!”

“ What?” she said, nerves taught.

“ Listen,” he whispered.

Ann heard the scratching at the door.

“ It’s the Ghost Dog,” she said. “It belongs to the Ragged Man.”