From Reggie Parks’s back porch, the day looked like a painting of autumn. The chilly air was misty-gray with the smoke of neighborhood chimneys, the azure sky bright through the skeletal tree branches to which a few desperate leaves still clung. The ground was dappled with the bright oranges and muted yellows that had fallen from the two maples, the elm and the royal empress. Children’s laughter came from the backyard on Reggie’s right, and to the left, smoke rose from the other side of the tall, slatted chain-link fence where, he guessed, Ollie Dumont was burning leaves in his backyard.
Reggie had always hated that ugly fence—it was old and more slats broke away every year, giving him the creepy impression of a long row of big jagged teeth along one side of the yard—but he could say nothing about it because it was Ollie’s fence. He knew it would be a waste of time to bring it up with the Ollie. He would chuckle and say, “Sure, I’ll get to work on replacing that fence, uh, let’s see—” take a look at his watch, then say, “How about the day after my funeral? That work for you?” and chuckle again.
Ollie was a cranky old fart. He was a Vietnam vet and a retired carpenter, and he was married to June, one of the sweetest women Reggie had ever known, right up there with his own mother. Silver-haired and apple-cheeked, she looked like a grandmother who had just stepped off of a Norman Rockwell canvas. They had four children and enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to make their house sound like a bus station every year at Christmas time.
Reggie was willing to cut Ollie some slack because he was about seventy, give or take a couple of years—he refused to tell anyone his true age—and Reggie, who would turn fifty-one in January and already suffered from more aches and pains than he’d ever experienced in his life, found that he had a lot more respect for old people than he’d had in his giddy, invincible youth. By seventy—or whatever age he was—Ollie had plenty of reasons to be cranky, whatever they might be. Even so, he could be a genuine pain in the ass.
Reggie and Kimberly had lived next door to the Dumonts for twenty years. Ollie had always been loud, irascible and opinionated, but age, while dulling and dimming so much of him, only magnified some of Ollie’s worst traits. All of his filters, the functionality of which had long been in question, were collapsing, and he said whatever popped into his head, and if he was angry, he said it very loudly. June, being the human equivalent of a batch of sugar cookies fresh out of the oven that she was, took his shouting in stride. More than a few times, while Ollie bellowed on about something, June had turned to Reggie and silently rolled her eyes.
At the rear of the long backyard was an eight-foot tall fence that Reggie had installed shortly after they moved in, and on the other side, a deep, dense grove of oak trees separated it from a large complex of storage rentals. That same fence continued up the other side of the backyard and nearly all the way to the front of the house before it ended at a gate. On the other side of the fence, the Goldman children and some of their friends were on the large trampoline, and, from the sound of their laughter and shrieks, were having a grand time. That was fine with Reggie. It was a nice sound and usually cheered him up.
When he and Kimberly moved in, that house had been occupied by Morris and Felicia Goldman and their three children. Morris owned a small jewelry store in the mall at the time, but in fifteen years he had a chain of stores that was so successful, he and Tonya decided to move to Palm Springs. Their oldest son Aaron, his wife Sarah, and their three children, soon to be four, now lived in the house. They were not exactly standoffish, but neither did they encourage interaction. They exchanged smiles and greetings, but little more.
Reggie’s right hand clutched the handle of a rake as he went down the steps and onto the back lawn. It was a bigger yard than he and Kimberly needed now that the kids were out of the house, but it got a lot of use when they visited.
Through slats in the chain-link fence, Reggie saw movement and the orange flash of flames in milky smoke. He recognized Ollie’s hooded green raincoat.
“Hey, Ollie!” he called. “Nice day.”
Movement continued over there for a moment, then he saw the olive green of the coat move across the gaps in the slatted fence and go into the house through the back door.
Maybe Ollie was simply too preoccupied with burning leaves to notice anything else. Deciding to count his blessings, Reggie started raking, and a couple of minutes later he began whistling a tune. Something by Elton John, a song from early in his career, but Reggie couldn’t remember the title or the lyric, only the tune. Something from the old days, when he and Kimberly were in high school.
Why do we call them the “old days?” he wondered. The days aren’t old. The person remembering them is old!
His whistling was interrupted by a couple of loud, barked laughs at his own little joke. He stopped raking and looked at the back door, then at the kitchen window. No sign of Kimberly. He wanted to share that thought with someone, mostly because if he didn’t say it out loud, he was afraid it would dissolve in his head like an Alka-Seltzer tablet.
He muttered the thought to himself a few times under his breath as he continued raking.
The kids playing on the trampoline went on laughing and squealing. When he looked in that direction, Reggie saw them bob into view above the fence as they bounced.
He recited that thought a few more times. It might be useful at parties. Of course, he and Kimberly seldom went to parties anymore, mostly because so few people they knew threw them. With such a bad economy, terrorists blowing things up all over the world and just about everything in civilization seemingly failing or collapsing, nobody, as of late, was in a celebratory mood.
Reggie made a mental note to suggest to Kimberly that they throw a little party, have some friends over, maybe brighten everybody’s mood a little. Soon, before he forgot his joke.
He heard a sound from Ollie’s backyard, stopped raking, and turned to the fence. More movement flashed beyond those open slots and more smoke rose in a column from Ollie’s yard.
Bending down slightly, he peered through one of the slots. Ollie was hunched over and appeared to be fussing with his fire, grumbling to himself.
Reggie went back to his raking.
He often marveled at June’s ability to maintain such a sunny disposition after living with Ollie for so long. Most women would have left him decades ago, and some would have killed him in his sleep. He complained about everything and argued almost every point. And he never stopped nagging June, blaming her for petty little mishaps, criticizing her every action and comment, and he was always telling jokes at her expense, making cracks about the miseries of married life like a sitcom husband.
“You just wait,” he sometimes said, pointing a knobby finger at Reggie. “When you get to be my age, you’ll realize one day that I was right.”
Ollie’s crankiness could be quite funny and charming in small doses, but it quickly became annoying and tedious. Every year, he complained that their Christmas tree wasn’t good enough, even though he’d picked it out. Every summer was too hot, every winter was too cold and nothing was as it should be, as far as Ollie was concerned. And yet, June always had a ready smile, a pleasant word, a moment to chat, and never seemed to be darkened by bad moods or periods of frustration. She remained bright and unchanging, never giving the impression of a woman trapped in a miserable marriage to a human wart.
Reggie had quite a pile of leaves growing in the corner where Ollie’s fence met the raised bed where Kimberly tended a vegetable garden every year. It ran along the side of a long storage shed that backed up to Ollie’s fence. Beyond the shed, the lawn went all the way to the back fence, so Reggie had plenty of ground to cover. He’d only just begun, as Karen Carpenter would assure him if she hadn’t starved herself to death.
Reggie began to whistle “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
Ollie’s voice rose in a growl. “The hell is that racket?”
Reggie stopped raking, turned to the fence and called, “Hey, Ollie.”
“You got a goddamned trained bird over there, or something?”
He chuckled as he put the rake down on the grass and walked over to the fence. “I was just whistling as I raked the leaves, that’s all.”
“That’s all? Isn’t that enough? Sounds like more than enough to me. Not enough aspirin in the world to treat the headache that racket will create. You’d have to get a prescription. You hear me? A goddamned prescription!” he shouted.
In spite of the fact that it was a heartbreakingly beautiful fall day, Ollie sounded even angrier than usual.
Reggie wanted to say, Who crapped in your oatmeal, Ollie? But he knew that would make the old man’s dark mood even worse. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and put his eye to one of the open slots in the fence.
Still wearing his hooded raincoat—Why is he wearing a raincoat on such a clear day? Reggie wondered—Ollie was bent over, tossing what looked like small, squat logs onto the pile of leaves.
“What are you doing, Ollie?”
He stood and turned toward Reggie. He wore a dark, reddish-brown shirt and dark blue sweat pants under the coat. The raincoat’s hood was up around his head, and the pale features of his face were partially obscured in its dark oval. “What? Doing? Burning leaves. That’s all. Just burning some leaves.”
The dark pieces of wood were on the ground around Ollie’s feet, on which he wore brown slippers.
“Are you putting wood on the fire, too?” Reggie asked.
“What? Just never mind and leave me alone, goddammit!”
Reggie turned away from the fence and picked up the rake, but he was disturbed. Something wasn’t right. Ollie was wearing a raincoat on a clear day and throwing what looked like firewood on a pile of burning leaves. Still holding the rake, he went back to the fence.
“You want some help, Ollie?” he asked, peering through a gap in the slats.
“Help? Burning leaves? Do I look like I need help? Mind your own business, Parks! You’re too goddamned nosy. Always have been. You want me to come over there and stick my nose in your business? Huh, Parks? That what you want? ‘Cause I’ll do it! See if you like it!”
“Fine,” Reggie muttered, walking away from the fence. He raked with a little more vigor and speed, angered by the old man’s behavior. Ollie always had a pebble in his shoe about something, but he seemed more on edge than usual. Fine, let him stew in his juices and set his backyard on fire, for all Reggie cared.
He raked his way across the lawn to the fence bordering the Goldman yard where children still laughed and shrieked and bounced. It seemed to Reggie that it hadn’t been all that long ago when his own backyard was filled with the same sounds, and Kimberly spent her days driving kids around and making sandwiches and cleaning up messes, and he spent his weekends doing things like building a tree house, or a dollhouse, or just playing with the kids. And what weekends they’d been, what wonderful weekends.
But those days were well behind all of them, and Reggie didn’t mind. He wasn’t the kind of person who spent much time looking backward, pouring over family albums, thinking about the way things used to be. He preferred to enjoy things as they were, and right now things were pretty damned good. He could not think of a single thing to complain about.
He and Kimberly were healthy, and they were happier than ever. After all three of their children had moved out, they had taken advantage of the empty nest. First of all, they’d had sex in every single room in the house, in broad daylight. Not all in one day, of course, but on their own schedule, which worked out to whenever the hell they felt like it. And as loudly as they wanted. They had also renovated the kids’ old rooms, but as far as Reggie was concerned, sex in any room, whenever they felt like it? That was the pure gold part of the golden years.
“You know what I just decided?” Kimberly had said one day as they lay on the kitchen floor, panting and sweating from the orgasms they’d just had.
“I hope you don’t want to carpet the kitchen.”
“Oh, no, that’s disgusting. No. You know how we’re going to spend our old age? I’ve decided.”
“How are we going spend our old age?”
She rolled toward him with a big grin. “Fucking.”
The kids were well—all of them, children, grandchildren, the whole brood—and quite successful. In addition to being healthy, Reggie and Kimberly were having more sex—more often, and with greater variety and experimentation—than they’d ever had in their entire marriage.
No, Reggie had no complaints. What was there to complain about? He felt extremely fortunate to have such a good life, such a healthy and loving family, that complaining would be—
“Still got that goddamned bird over there, Parks?”
Well, warm, friendly neighbors might be a nice change. But he wasn’t going to quibble.
Reggie hadn’t realized he was whistling again, and he stopped the second he heard Ollie’s voice, well behind him now, on the other side of the yard and beyond the slatted fence. Ollie sounded different this time, though. Reggie couldn’t identify exactly how, but the quality of his voice had changed. He sounded, perhaps, more relaxed?
Turning to look back at the fence, Reggie watched the gaps in the slats for a moment. Maybe Ollie hadn’t sounded more relaxed, maybe he’d sounded…happy? Clutching the rake’s handle in his left hand, he walked back to the fence and looked through one of the gaps, then another, and finally, a third.
He saw nothing, heard nothing. There was no sign of Ollie except the fire he’d started, and even that appeared to be dying. Tendrils of smoke rose from the partially-blackened pile of leaves and the lumps of firewood Ollie had thrown onto it.
As his oldest son Donald was fond of saying, with a smirk and a dismissive wave of his hand, “Fuck him, Dad.”
The kids had never liked Ollie. They’d adored June, of course, but had avoided Ollie like poison oak.
In no hurry, taking his time, enjoying the day, Reggie raked the length of the yard all the way to the back fence, gathering the leaves in piles that he would then scoop into big plastic yard bags for the garbage man to haul away.
“You care too much,” Kimberly had said to him one day.
“About what?”
“About the things Ollie says. I don’t pay attention to anything that comes out of that man’s mouth.”
“But the things he says about their marriage, about June—and right in front of her!”
“They’ve been together for half a century, so I don’t think June hears a thing he says, either. If she did, Ollie would be dead and she’d be doing time. I have no idea why she’s stayed with him this long, but that’s her business. What we think doesn’t matter. I just want to be a good friend to June. Obviously she needs one because she’s practically held hostage by Ollie. As far as I’m concerned, though, he is nothing but a hot gust of wind. I wish you felt the same way.”
“I do, I really do.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t be bothered by the things he says.”
“That’s only because it’s so insulting and unfair to June. And to you, because sometimes he insults women and wives in general.”
“Oh, please. Let June and me take care of ourselves, okay? We’re fine. Just don’t let the old fart get to you, honey.”
She was right, of course. As usual. Ollie wasn’t worth the aggravation.
As he raked, Reggie caught a whiff of a new aroma in the chilly fall air, something that had joined the smell of wood smoke. It was familiar but also disorienting because it was strictly a summer smell, associated with long, hot days and the fresh, green scent of recently mowed grass—and Reggie was smelling it in the middle of autumn.
Someone was cooking meat on an open grill.
It was odd, but he conceded that there were no laws prohibiting the cooking of meat outdoors during the fall. Reggie smiled and told himself that life was short. If someone wanted a freshly-grilled hamburger with his hot apple cider—hey, why the hell not?
A sharp sound cut through the sweep of his rake and he stopped to listen. The sound came again, longer this time, a cry of distress, pain. It sounded like Ollie.
Reggie dropped his rake and hurried across the wide expanse of his lawn to Ollie’s fence. He peered through one of the gaps, then another, and another. He couldn’t see Ollie, but he heard another abrupt cry. He called Ollie’s name a few times but got no response.
He walked along the fence, peering through gaps until he found one that gave him a view of the burning leaves again. There he saw Ollie, lying facedown on the ground, arms splayed.
“Oh, damn,” Reggie said as he turned and broke into a run. He crossed the lawn, went along the side of the house and through the gate. He hurried down the driveway and along the sidewalk to Ollie’s house.
He kept a cell phone in his car, as did Kimberly, but Reggie did not carry one with him. The idea of people being able to call him on the phone no matter where he was made him shudder and he didn’t think he would ever warm to it.
He hurried across Ollie’s front yard and along the side of the house. The gate stood open a few inches, so Reggie pushed through and continued to the backyard, past the covered patio. Ollie had not moved in the time it had taken Reggie to get there. He lay sprawled on the ground a few feet away from the smoking pile of leaves, sobbing and muttering.
“Ollie, what happened? Did you fall?”
As Reggie knelt down beside him, Ollie rose on hands and knees and slowly turned his head toward him. When he saw Reggie, his eyes widened and he began to crawl away, shouting, “No! What are you doing here? Go away, goddammit!”
Reggie sighed as he stood and watched Ollie crawl toward the pile of leaves. The fire was somewhat revived, and flames flickered among the rising smoke. He saw one of the pieces of firewood and his eyes, confused, squinted.
It was not firewood.
He moved a few steps toward the fire, eyes locked on that dark chunk of…of…it looked like…blackened, cooked meat. It was a couple of feet long and bent at one end, almost like it had a joint of some kind, a…knee. It was a charred thigh above a knee, and below that, it was severed. A few feet away were two more pieces. One had a foot attached and the other had a face. June’s face, black and distorted, a tuft of her shiny silver hair rising out of the burnt flesh of her severed head. There were other pieces and none of them were firewood.
“You just get the hell outta here!” Ollie shouted. He clumsily got to his feet on the other side of the smoking pile of leaves. “You hear me? Nobody called you over here, goddammit!”
It took a moment for Reggie to understand that the groaning sound he was hearing was his own voice, his own horror, his own sickness coming out of him in a cry of pain.
“Quit your whining, Parks! She earned it. You hear me? Earned it.” He waved his arms as he shouted, and Reggie noticed that his right hand clutched a meat cleaver with dark smears on the blade. Beneath the raincoat he was not wearing a reddish-brown shirt. He was not wearing a shirt at all. He was bare from the waist up and covered with blood. He wasn’t wearing his teeth, and his rubbery lips collapsed inward when he closed his mouth. “All the years I put up with that simpering smile, that happy disposition, that…that…” He suddenly pointed a finger at Reggie. “You, though, you won’t have to.” A high, jittery laugh escaped him, like air escaping a balloon. “You won’t have to put up with it. Not now, not anymore.” He smiled and that jittery laugh came again. “I did what you never would have because—” That laugh again. It was awful. “—you’re a goddamned spineless pussy!”
Reggie staggered backward and turned so suddenly that the force almost knocked him over. He had to get home. That was all he wanted. To get away from that smell of cooking meat and the insanity in Ollie’s wide, round eyes and go home to Kimberly.
He hurried at a staggered run out of Ollie’s backyard, across his lawn, along the sidewalk. Had it occurred to him to enter the house through the front door, he would have noticed that it was wide open. But he kept his eyes front as he went up the driveway, through the gate, and into the backyard, the last place he’d been before the world had become so ugly. Stumbling up the back steps, he went into the house and through the kitchen.
“Kimberly!” His voice was shrill and hoarse, but he didn’t notice as he went through the dining room and into the living room. “Kimberly!”
The front door was open and the small table beside it had been knocked over.
“Kimberly, where are you?” He stood in the living room and listened to the silence of the house. He rounded the corner and entered the hall and lurched to a halt.
Halfway down the hall, she lay in three pieces in the middle of a great splash of red on the floor and walls.
Something inside Reggie blinked out and he did not hear himself scream.
* * *
Two police officers answered the call made by one Reggie Parks, a distressed male reporting a murder. They found the front door open, and when they received no response, they went inside.
They discovered the bloody scene in the hallway. Upon finding the back door wide open, they went outside and found a man raking the lawn. It had already been raked and leaves were in neat piles around the yard, but the man slowly dragged the rake over the grass as if gathering more fallen leaves into a pile.
“Are you Mr. Parks?” one of the officers asked.
He kept raking.
The officer reached out and touched his shoulder.
Reggie turned to him slowly, and his eyes seemed to look through the officer for a moment. Then he smiled pleasantly.
“It’s a beautiful autumn day, isn’t it?” he said.
The Bram Stoker Award®-nominated Ray Garton is the prolific author of more than sixty novels, novellas, short story collections, movie novelizations and TV tie-ins. Garton’s exceptional portfolio of work spans the genres of horror, crime, and suspense.
His 1987 erotic vampire novel Live Girls was called “artful” by the New York Times and was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. In 2006, he received the Grand Master of Horror Award at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco. His 2001 comedy thriller Sex and Violence in Hollywood is being developed for the screen.
His novels Trailer Park Noir and Meds (a thriller with deadly side effects), are available in paperback and as ebooks from E-Reads. And his seventh collection, Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth, was recently published by Cemetery Dance Publications.
He lives in northern California with his wife Dawn.