Edward Lee - Creekers

Once the money was had, their joys remained. “Razzin’,” Scott-Boy liked to call it. “What say let’s razz up some splittails tonight, ya reckon,” he’d suggest. Hitchhikers provided prime razzin’. Lordy Jeez, in this day and age you’d think gals’d be a tad smarter than to get into a vehicle with a perfect stranger. Just the same, if you cruised around long enough, there she’d be, skippin’ along some road darker than the devil’s buttcrack. She’d be pretty more times than not, and she’d always be alone. And Gut would just pull the pickup right on over. Scott-Boy always did the talkin’, in his laid back, farm boy sort of way. “Hey there, purdy lady, where you headed this fine night? Well ain’t that just plumb dandy, see, ’cos it just so happens me and my buddy here, we’se headed fer the ’zact same place. Just slide right on in, and we’ll git ya where you’re goin’ safe an’ sound.”

Safe an’ sound, indeed.

Scott-Boy and Gut knew every dell, grove, hillock, and backwood hideyhole anywhere they might happen to be at any given time.

All’s it took was one turnoff, and the unsuspecting gal realized that something wasn’t right, but of course by the time this realization had been made, it was already too late. Way too late. Way on back deep in the woods, no one could hear them scream, and scream they did—like holy everlivin’ heck. Diversity proved requisite to any venture of uniqueness, and Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton was a very diverse young man. He liked to hear them scream, and his powers of imagination spared no possibility through which they might do so. Ol’ Scott-Boy, yeah, he had himself a headful of visions that would make Ivan the Terrible look like fuckin’ Bambi.

Gut supposed they’d killed at least a dozen people. They’d never really set out to, it just happened once by accident. One night they’d been jacking drunks as usual, and Scott-Boy had cracked one poor fucker a tad too hard upside the head with the brass knucks. Exit muggers, enter killers. The poor fucker’s head had split, showing pink brains. “Well, hail, would ya look what I just up and done?” Scott-Boy remarked with dull fascination. Like they say, accidents will happen. But for Scott, murder was like potato chips; ya couldn’t eat just one. That same night, Scott had sliced open a bar whore’s throat after she’d fellated him in the truck. “Jesus ta Pete, Scott-Boy!” Gut exclaimed. “What you go and do that fer?” “Dunno,” Scott chuckled his remorse. “Dag good thang we got the vinyl pole-stree.” He scratched his head. “Gals shore do got theirselfs a lotta blood in ’em, huh?”

Gut pretty much just helped out or watched. It was Scott who was the virtuoso. He had a thing for slowly stranglin’ gals during coitus, fashioning a tourniquet around their necks with sisal twine and a dowel rod. He had also buggered, then beaten to death, a hippie boy he’d first thought was a hippie girl; he’d carved up a yuppie couple he’d found camping in the woods; and then there was that redheaded hitchhiker who must have been at least eight months and twenty-nine days pregnant…

But, never mind what they did to her.

— | — | —

Three

Home, sweet home, Phil thought as mordantly as he could. Was it shame? How would it look? Christ, a Master’s degree and over ten years on a major metropolitan department, and now I’m coming right back to where I started, back to good old Crick City, the moron mecca of the world.

A few minutes after exiting the interstate, the road funneled down, plummeting with his spirits. This was State Route 154, known to locals simply as “The Route,” a winding 30-mile patchjob of asphalt that cut a swath through south county’s rolling hills and forest belts. It also cut a swatch through some of the poorest and least developed townships in the state: Luntville, Tylersville, Waynesville, and Crick City. Soon the massive scape of the metropolis faded behind him, only to be replaced by bridged ravines, famished tracks of farmland, trailer parks, and one rundown shack after another. The pits, Phil reflected. Waynesville, Luntville, Crick City—it didn’t matter what these towns were called; to him, they were all the same. Bustedville. Even the woods looked destitute—sickly vegetation and ancient garbage clotted between dense masses of trees, some scrawny and skeletally thin, others stout as sewer pipes and hundreds of feet high. Rampant fungus shined like green-white snot over diseased and grossly knotted tree trunks. Most of the road signs could no longer be read thanks to the pockmarks of midnight shotguns; shattered glass littered the shoulders like halite, along with the innumerable carcasses of small animals—“Road Pizza” in police parlance. “Possum Pie”—which were forever being run down by motorists to be scavenged of course by still more small animals, which were then promptly run down by still more motorists. Cyclic carnage.

The easterly ridge loomed to Phil’s right, a great wall that seemed to keep the entire Route in perpetual darkness. He passed one town called Lockwood where, several years ago, most of the tiny population had disappeared seemingly overnight, and another, Prospect Hill, where dozens of residents had died or gone blind all on the same weekend from bad hootch. Yes, hootch, moonshine, panther piss—some of these communities made the stuff like it was the Prohibition era, from stills back in the woods. Phil had tried it once, and one sip had about knocked him on his ass.

Abrupt turnoffs periodically marked the Route, roads with absurdly redneck names. Turkey Neck Road, Furnace Branch Road, Old Mill Road—there was even a Tick Neck Road, and as far as Phil knew, ticks didn’t even have necks. Ah, sophistication, he thought. A used car dealer’s called Lucky Lee’s, Fast Eddie’s Pool Hall, and a roadside diner that seriously sported a sign: GOOD EATS.

In between the towns, Phil knew, were even more remote communities—actually sub-communities—that existed in complete obscurity, loosely knit hamlets known as “hill towns,” where the populace remained unknown to public record. “Hill folk,” they were called, and “hill squatters.” There were more conventional names, too.

White trash. Crackers. Uncensused settlements of the catastrophically poor. People who lived off the land and had never had a real job, never been to the doctor’s, had never owned a television. Children who’d never been to school. The Third World of America the Beautiful. They lived in lean-tos, tarpaper shacks, and abandoned trailers with no running water and no electricity. A cliché to the average person, but all too real in these parts. But Phil knew that all states had their rural poor, and all states had their hillfolk, tiny flecks of humanity swept aside by the world. For cash they sold scrap metal and moonshine; for food they took to the woods. It was hard to believe that in a society of computer chips, banana chips, and anti-lock brakes, of sitcoms, Home Shopping Clubs, and pay-per-view, and of surround-sound stereos and microwave ovens—it was hard to believe that such destitution could exist at all, much less under the very nose of the same society…

He’d see them all the time as a kid, picking through garbage bags dumped in the woods, or wandering down the Route in ragpatch clothes and homemade fishing rods slung over their shoulders. Sometimes the children, filthy and smudge-faced, would beg for pocket change in front of the Qwik-Stops and general stores, until the proprietors ran them off. Yes, he’d seen them many times.

And maybe that explained Phil’s unease about returning to Crick City. The hand of fate often dealt from a bad deck. How close had Phil come himself to being one of these people?

Christ, he thought.

The Malibu’s corroded ball-joints shimmied through the next long, winding turn. To his right, up on the hill, stood the Fletcher place, a bedraggled old antebellum house that was leaning with its own weight. There were holes in the roof, but the Fletchers still lived there—they refused to move. And to Phil’s left sat a trailer on blocks at the edge of Hockley’s pond; it had been there for as long as he could remember, and during heavy rains the creeks would fill and the water would rise up past the trailer’s floor. Yet the inhabitants never moved.