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Authors note: This was the one interview where I had to get the most creative. Neil was not a very talkative man and what I did get out of him was tough to decipher due to him having one of the most severe stutters I have ever heard. I did not include it in the text, but I should note that in the original recording, Neil claims that the stutter only appeared after the events described in the interview.
BK: Please, come have a seat. It’s Neil, right?
Neil: Yes. Yes, that’s me. Neil.
BK: It’s a pleasure to meet you, Neil. Ursula tells me you might know something about the hit and run involving her girlfriend.
Neil: I don’t know who did it, if that if that’s what you are asking.
BK: Sorry, no. She said you might know something about the vehicle that was involved.
Neil: Um, yes, yes, that’s something I know about for sure.
BK: Great. Ursula didn’t really go into any detail about what you might know. Can you fill me in on some of the details? My guess, judging by how things are going so far, is that the vehicle in question was a Plymouth Barracuda. Is that right?
Neil: Yes, yes, a flame-red Barracuda. It was a 1973 model, one of the last years they made them. It was, she was probably the most beautiful car I have ever set eyes on. She almost glowed and didn’t have a mark on her when I got my hands on her. That was, that was a little surprising given that she had been used in a hit and run.
BK: How did...
Neil: Before we get into all this, I need to ask you a question. Did she, did Ursula tell you about the night she socked that dude at the bar?
BK: Yes, she did. Were you the guy she hit, Neil?
Neil: What? No. No, but I was there. I was one of the guys who blocked the path in and out. I didn’t, I wanted no part of it, but I was there with a bunch of guys from work. They were constantly picking on me, and I thought I might get on their good side and get them, get them all off my back a little if I played along. I had nothing against Ursula and her friend. They never did me any harm, so I had no, I didn’t have a grievance with either of them. After I saw what went down, I apologized to Ursula for my part in all of it. She was, Ursula was cool about it, probably because I was probably the only guy in Redfield who never tried to make a move on her. Thing is, the thing is that word got back to the guys at work about my apology, and they rode, and they were even harder on me from that point forward.
BK: Where did you work?
Neil: It was, I worked in the scrapyard. It was mostly old cars that we took in. If they were in decent shape, we would let folks come in and pick working parts. The cars that were trashed would get crushed and shipped out. Funnily, funnily enough, it was mostly cars that were broken down and abandoned that we got. Quite often, I could tinker with them and get them going again. The manager, the boss would take those cars and re-sell them, give me a little slice of the profits.
BK: Were you a trained mechanic?
Neil: No. No, but it was what I always wanted to be. When I, back when I was younger, I loved to mess around with old things to see how they worked. My dad was a bit of a collector of junk and would often pick up old radios and clocks and stuff and bring them home. It would drive my mom nuts because all that old junk would get piled up in the garage, with my dad promising to fix it or sell it at some point. He never, he didn’t ever get around to it though, and the pile just got bigger and bigger. I got, I started digging around in that stuff to find things to play with, and I remember coming across this cool old clock. It was a table clock that sat inside a glass dome, and it had a little device, like three brass balls on a column, on the bottom that was supposed to spin when the clock was working. I started messing with the insides of that clock, and before long I had it working. My mom loved it and put it on the shelf over the fireplace, which was where it stayed until, until the day she passed.
BK: Did you fix other stuff too?
Neil: Oh, yeah. I fixed, I fixed all sorts of different things. It just seemed to come to me naturally. Once I looked at the internal workings, my brain could figure out how it was all supposed to go. From there, it became, it was easy to settle on the problem and get it fixed. Clocks and watches were the easiest to repair, but I soon moved on to radios and some other stuff. My dad would see me repair all those things and got the idea to start selling them. He told me, he said that he would take what he called a finder’s fee and that he would put the rest of the money away for me. He said it was my college fund. It may not have seemed like much, but that, but his idea put a little fire under me. I studied hard at school and got my grades up real quick. It was, it was as though the smarter I got at school, the easier it became to fix all the junk that my dad would bring home. It wasn’t until I fixed his truck that I really got the idea, that I started to think about being a mechanic.
BK: So, did you manage to save enough for college, or at least for trade school?
Neil: I don’t, I never did find out. My dad took off when I was in high school. Mom, my mom said that he had taken all that money he had stashed away for me and used it to set himself and his fancy piece up in a nice place somewhere in Texas. I didn’t, I mean I never thought to ask how much I was making all that time. Whenever I brought it up, dad would slip me a few bucks and tell me to go see a movie or something. He was my dad, so it didn’t really occur to me that he might be messing with my money.
BK: How long ago did he leave, and did you ever hear from him?
Neil: It was years ago now. I’ve never, he never got in touch with me after that, and since he wasn’t making an effort, I didn’t see why I should bother either. By that time, by then, word was out that I was a regular fixer-upper, so I made myself a few dollars here and there, but never enough to even think about going to college. Besides, besides my mom needed some help with the bills, so most of my fix-it money went towards that.
BK: How did you end up landing the job at the scrapyard?
Neil: That was, that was through a friend of my mum’s, Mr. Bryce. I think they might have had more going on, but whatever the case, he took, he took a real shine to me. Whenever he stopped by the house, which was a lot, he would drop off items that he referred to as pet projects. It seems, it seems as though he had heard about my knack for fixing things, so he wanted to put it to the test. I was never able to fix everything I got my hands on, but, but I guess I did enough, as he gave me a job on the day I finished high school.
There were, he had five other guys working then when I started, so there really wasn’t a lot of money to go around, which meant I was on the low end of the totem pole when it came to payday. Still, Mr. Bryce was always very kind to me, which is what I think got the other guys going against me from the start. It got even worse when they learned that I had started making extra money from the fixing and re-selling deal. A couple of them tried to get in on the action, but they, but they were never any good at getting the junkers up and running.
BK: How would they pick on you?
Neil: It was, they would call me names and play practical jokes on me all the time. I became known as Bryce’s bitch around the workplace, but I would just laugh them off and try to ignore them. Craig Black and Alan Garland were the worst, as they were the ringleaders. The other three guys just sort of played along, but they really weren’t so bad. If you, if you got any of those three on their own, they were always friendly enough. It was the group mentality thing that made them play along; plus, they were all a little scared of Craig. Turned, it turned out that they were right to be, but I’m sure someone else will tell you all about his antics.
BK: Noted. Can you jump ahead to your story about the Barracuda?
Neil: Yes, yes I can. By the time she landed in the scrapyard, things had turned really sour. It was Craig who had been smacked by Ursula, and he was not well pleased about my apologizing to her. He went, he went out of his way to pick on me after that. The practical jokes became a little less jokey and a little more intimidating, to the point where a couple of the other guys started to spend less and less time around him. Not, not Ian, though. Those two remained thick as thieves.
It was almost a month after the hit and run that the Barracuda showed up in our yard. Like I, like I said before, she was in pristine condition. The police had gone over her with a fine tooth comb but never came up with any prints or anything that they could use as evidence against whoever was behind the wheel that night. If I had thought Craig could have gotten his hands on a car like that, I would not have been surprised to hear that he had gone after that poor girl, but I also knew he wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be smart enough not to leave any evidence behind.
BK: How did everyone react to the vehicle being dropped off?
Neil: We, we were all a little surprised, to be honest. I guess we all thought that it would end up in the impound until someone claimed it, which no-one was ever going to do. The cop who was there when it was dropped off told us that the guys at the impound lot demanded that it be taken away, said they were having nightmares and seeing things that shouldn’t rightly exist. Mr. Bryce told the cop that he would take care of it, but he called me into the office shortly after to let me in on his real plan.
He, Mr. Bryce didn’t like the idea of crushing that Barracuda without first making some money off it. He knew that he couldn’t sell it as is, but he, but he thought he could make a killing selling all the engine parts individually. He asked, he asked me if I would be willing to break it all down before it went in the crusher, quoting a ridiculous sum of money for the job. I didn’t feel quite right about doing it, but the money he was offering, along with what I had saved, would be enough to get me into trade school. I agreed, I decided that I would do it, but he suggested that I sleep in the break room while I was working on it, as he didn’t want the other guys to know what was going on. He said, he said he would make up some story to explain why I was staying there, just in case any of the guys caught wind that I was bunking down at the yard.
BK: What did he end up telling them?
Neil: He told, he told them that my mom was really sick and that what she had was contagious. He said that he couldn’t risk me losing any time at work given how busy things were, so that was why I was staying in the break room. None of the guys said anything in front of the boss, but the Bryce’s bitch name calling reached fever pitch for a few days.
That first night, things went off without much of a hitch. It was, it was tough breaking her down with not much light to work with, but I made good time and had some parts ready to go the next day. It was the second night when things started to get weird.
BK: Weird in what way?
Neil: The window, the window in the break room looked out over the yard, and a couple of times that second night I woke up with everything bathed in red. By the time I got up and got to the window, everything was black again, but I swear I saw the halo lights on the Barracuda glowing a little. I thought, I thought it was just a trick of the light, but it gave me the creeps. The next night, there was growling to go with that red light. One of the guys heard me telling Mr. Bryce about what I was seeing and how I thought it was coming from the car. They stopped, they stopped calling me Bryce’s bitch at that point, calling me Christine instead, like the, like the car in that Stephen King book.
I worked on that car two more nights and damn near, damn near reached my breaking point. I had removed the halo lights by then, but that thing kept on growling through the night, keeping me awake and afraid. I heard the lock rattling on the door to the main building a few times and what sounded like people whispering right in my ear.
BK: What were the voices saying?
Neil: I’m, I’m not entirely sure, but it sounded like they were saying ‘bone daddy’ over and over again. It could be my mind playing tricks, though, given what I found that last night.
BK: What was it?
Neil: It was, it was a big old piece of bone wedged right into the upper radiator hose. I heard that girl’s legs were all messed up when she was hit, so I don’t know if it came from her or if someone got wind of what I was up to and put it in there to mess with me. Either way, I gave it to Mr. Bryce and he said he would take care of it. He paid me the money he promised me right there and then and told me that we would be crushing the car in a couple of days.
It was, it was Craig Black who was in charge of working the crusher, and he seemed disappointed that we were finally going to put the girl to rest. He kept going on about how the car was serving God by killing queers, as well as a whole bunch of other hateful talk. Alan hadn’t shown up for work on the day of the crushing, and Craig wanted to wait, but Mr. Bryce insisted. I believe, I believe that the boss started feeling the heavy sensation that had fallen over the yard since the Barracuda arrived. It seemed to get thicker and harder to breathe with each passing day.
When he, when Craig was loading up the crusher with the car, I could hear him singing over the sound of the machinery. It was that same song that the girl used to play at the bar. I was going, going to say something to him when I heard the screaming start. It was, it was coming from inside the Barracuda. The windows were black as pitch, but the passenger window was open enough where we could see inside just enough to know that Alan was in there. He was, he was swinging an empty bottle of Jack Daniels at the window, trying to break it as he screamed at us to stop the crusher. Craig mashed down on the emergency stop button over and over, but the, but the crusher kept right on going.
BK: Good sweet Jesus.
Neil: That machine, that crusher was a slow mover. I seemed to take forever to put a dent in the roof of the car. As soon, as soon as it did, the windows all shattered. When they broke, Alan started to try and climb out, but it looked as though he, he got caught up in the seat-belt. I’m not, I’m not going to lie to you, it looked to me as though that belt was tugging him back in as opposed to simply holding him in place. He had just got his neck and shoulders out when the crusher finally caught up to him. Pieces of gore went flying this way and that, and while it may just have been an echo in my ears, it sounded like he was screaming all the way as his head fell to the ground.
I stayed on a little while longer after that, mostly because most of the other guys up and quit. Craig stayed on, but he, but he didn’t say much. I think something snapped inside him that day, although it took a little while longer for him to go right off the deep end. The scrapyard eventually closed down, but I was long gone by then. I finally became a, a fully qualified mechanic, just like I had always wanted. There are still some nights when I wake up and see red. I can, can hear the growls and whispers in my room, but they all vanish as soon as I switch on the bedside lamp. I don’t think that Barracuda is finished with me, and I know I’ll never be finished with her.
BK: What about...
Neil: Sorry, sir. No more, no more questions. My time is up. You have someone else waiting for you now.