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 ~: FICTION / MODERN :~  Deep in the Woods by Brentley Frazer During one of those rubber limbed summers the Authorities were hunting a killer. All over the city hung posters stating a bounty and the 150 thousand made my mouth water. I was living in one room with a fashion designer and a bass guitarist. She shared my bed, or I shared her bed, but I think they were fucking. Anyway, we all hung out together and were sort of inseparable. Until I decided that I was going to get myself a slice of that bounty. I spent a months' rent on supplies, a knife and a machete and another week convincing the bass player to join me. Our girlfriend said I couldn't go unless I bought her a new pair of doctor marten 8 holes, cherry bump toe, which I promised to do with the reward money, just as soon as I returned. She was skeptical. I think she was having a lesbian affair with a girl named Brigitte who lived upstairs. They way they both waved as we departed for the hunt.... * * * * * The plan was to catch the city train south as far as possible and then hitch into the state forest where the killer sought his prey. Mainly he murdered tourists and travelers as they made their way through the woods. We agreed, just as soon as our lift acted weird or crazy, that we would promptly stab him, just to be safe. We stood by the highway for about 9000 hours until anyone stopped to offer us a lift. Two inbred looking boys who stole sunglasses from gas stations and sold them at school fetes for a living, driving a completely beaten to shit blue van that had been stripped of its interior insulation. The bass player and I rolled around in the back fingering our machetes as the van weaved hell-bent-for-leather through the freeway traffic. Besides this, no incident, and soon we stood at the edge of the forest high with anticipation. The bass player never said much. I didn't trust him. He had pictures of starving children in his diary and a fetish for reading disturbing books on public buses. His favorite, which he always carried, The Anatomy of Astral Rape. We were sitting in a clearing right on the edge of the woods and he said; "why are we friends?" I replied, "I don't know, convenience." It's probably all circumstance. Life I mean. How else do you explain couples from small towns who claim to be soul mates. Everything is convenience, for instance, said couple just happen to have a mutual distaste for travel. I read a book about a serial killer couple. It explained a lot, went into depth about their dominant/submissive relationships. It never mentioned how it happened though. Were they sitting around watching telly of an evening when one casually suggested they go murder a nurse? I saw a documentary made by a girl who was starving herself to death. Not as an artistic statement, which would have made it okay, but because she wanted to be a model. "One day I will be thin enough" she whispered, "just bones, no disgusting flesh". * * * * * That's how the German backpacker must have looked when they dug her up. We found the site. It looked so serene, crime scene tape still flapping in the breeze. I slept with an anorexic woman once. It was like fucking a granny. Her spine all fused together and her knees creaked. She didn't get out of bed for three days. I thought she was lazy, or probably too weak. Later I learned that I had broken her. Her limbs looked like that of a teacher I had in school. His name was Oswald and he dragged around behind him this horribly molested looking leg. He was formerly a postman and a dog had torn out his calf muscle one morning. He told me while in detention that when travelling in the Sudan as a young man, he had, at a market one afternoon, come across a stall that sold tins of human meat in gravy. I'm not sure that I really believed him, though his eyes were convincing. * * * * * So we spent three days trekking through the forest. Once upon a time little creeks bubbling through ferns deep in the woods would have made a peaceful photograph, but these days, away from the surveillance cameras, they just seem sinister. We passed by abandoned picnic rest stops where ageing yellow umbrellas had blown off the tables, found an old hamburger sign that had sprouted green reeds where the lettuce once was, floating on a pond. A pair of discarded panties by a cliff in the middle of nowhere. One night, how close, impossible to tell in the dark, we heard whistling among the trees, and then screaming. The next evening, full moon, dead on midnight by the light of my wristwatch, a single howl rolled down through the valley. By this time we had run out of cigarettes. Time to head back, without our catch. Our girlfriend had left town with Brigitte, so I no longer had to buy those cherry Docs. The Police eventually caught the killer. He walked with a limp. I read somewhere that he was a postman once, or maybe a teacher. The bass player joined a black metal group called Scrofula and he went on the road. Occasionally, when he was in town and because it was convenient, he slept on my couch. |
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