In the morning after breakfast we found a dead man sprawled on our front lawn. I peered out through the venetian blinds, aghast at the thing. It was a man all right: burly, hairy, naked. His head had been caved in, blood bone and brains a beautiful Pollock display on our front lawn, on the grass, the fresh newly-cut grass.
“Hey, Eileen, there’s a dead man out on our front lawn,” I called out to my wife.
“A what?” she called down from the nursery. I could hear the baby’s soft cooing.
“A dead man.”
“How do you know it’s a man?”
“I dunno. He’s…burly. And he’s got hair everywhere.”
“Women can have hair everywhere, too. Ever heard of PCOS? Ever heard of the Bearded Lady? Remember Freaks?”
“It’s nothing like that, Eileen. It’s a man, a burly, hairy man.”
I stared at the lifeless body, face-down on the fresh dewy grass. Gore spilled out of its smashed head like ground beef out of a mechanical grounder. His bare ass shone green in the sun. Feces smeared the lower buttocks and upper thighs. Probably happened when they smashed his head in, I guessed.
“What should we do?” I asked her.
“Call someone, for God’s sake.”
I grabbed the phone that was affixed to the kitchen wall. The cord stretched all the way to the venetian blinds. I dialed the Burr’s phone number. They lived diagonally across from our house in the cul-de-sac. The other houses in the cul-de-sac stood quiet in the early morning sun. I pulled the venetians aside and peered at the Burr’s residence, a Sears & Roebuck American foursquare style kit home: pyramidal roof, protruding dormer, porch wrapping around the entire cube-like structure of the house. You know, the works.
The other end of the line rang loudly.
“Why dontcha go out and see who it is? Maybe it’s someone we know,” Eileen yelled from the nursery upstairs.
“I’m NOT going out there…” I said.
“What? Why not?”
“What if they’re still out there…?”
“Who? The tax collector, for all that’s holy…?”
“The people who did this.”
“Oh, Frank. Please…”
“They might still be out there, watching, waiting for someone to come out so they can bash their heads in, too.”
“Oh, Frank. Really, now.”
A blare on the other end of the line.
“Hiya, Frank, how’r’ya?”
“John, hey buddy,” I said, trying to keep it cool, “how’s business goin’?”
“Ah, you know, life as a real estate agent has its ups and downs, its peaks and troughs. All houses start to look the same after a while.”
“Yeah, listen, John. Do me a favor, willya?”
“What is it? Tell me quick—I gotta head out.”
“Well, that’s the thing. Okay, listen, look out your front window at my lawn.”
I heard John scrambling to get to his front window. I heard his hands fling the blinds aside with a sweeping gesture of his hand.
“Okay, what is it?”
“Dontcha see, John… There’s a dead body in my front lawn…”
“Which dead body? I don’t see it?”
“John, look at my front…”
“Oh, wait. There it is—Jesus H. Christ.”
“Yeah, yeah buddy.”
“Did you kill him?”
“What? No! Of course not.”
“What the hell’r’ya gonna do?”
“I dunno. But please, please don’t leave your house.”
“Think they might still be out there?”
“Yeah, they might be…”
From upstairs, Eileen yelled, “No, they’re not!”
“Are you sure you didn’t kill the poor bugger?”
“John, seriously now!”
“Well, why the hell’r’ya calling me for?”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Call the cops, damnit! Call someone. I can’t do anything. I’m a real estate agent, and by the looks of it, Mr. Corpse don’t need no Mediterranean-style home.”
“Don’t go anywhere, John. Stay home.”
“Are you nuts? I’m not going anywhere with that thing laying around… I’ll phone the office and cancel my appointments for today.”
“You do that, John.”
“This is the most action we’ve had in the neighborhood since those loud spics moved in a few years back.”
I hung up and dialed 9-1-1. Eileen scrambled downstairs and joined me in the front hallway. She cradled the baby in her arms. Peering through the venetian blinds, she glared at the dead man. Then she looked around, staring at the vicinity of the cul-de-sac. The early morning was crisp, clear, without a single cloud in the sky.
“It’s so calm out there,” she said, staring through the blinds. “So…still.”
The sound of a train leaving the depot a mile away blared through the calm, still morning.
“Yes, good morning,” I told the dispatcher. “Listen, uh, my wife and I, we woke up this morning and found a dead man on our front lawn.”
“How do you know he’s dead?” the dispatcher asked.
“W-well, his head’s caved in. He’s decomposing. I can see flies crawling in every orifice in his…”
“Okay, sir. What’s your address?”
“1715 Elmore Drive.”
“Elmore Drive? I’ve never heard of that road before.”
“…”
“That’s okay, I’ll figure it out. I’ll put in the dispatch, but I’m not sure how long they’ll take to respond.”
“Whaddya mean? This is an emergency. How long before they get here, then?” I asked.
“Who can say. The morning’s been a little crazy around town. There’s campus unrest in the college nearby, protests all over the city, attempted domestic terrorism, a mass shooting in a high school, nearby power plant’s acting up, murders, attempted robbery, a manhunt for escaped prisoners, and an old lady who refuses to give up her parking spot. We’re booked.”
“Yes, but…”
“I’ll put in the dispatch but it’ll take a while. Could you please stay with the body until further notice?”
“Stay with the body? Sure, we’ll have a couple of beers. I’ll just take the cooler out.”
“Thank you, sir. The lead detective will call you back…”
I hung up the phone.
“What did they say?”
“Told me to babysit the corpse until they get here.”
By the afternoon everyone in the cul-de-sac knew about the dead body. Every house had its front-window blinds drawn, the residents ogling at the body in my front lawn. We spoke to our neighbors over the phone. No one dared to leave their home.
In the late afternoon, as the sun dipped into the western vanishing point, we started to worry.
“Didn’t Guillermo install one of those security cameras a while back?” Eileen asked. “His camera faces our front yard,” she added.
I phoned Guillermo.
“I already checked it,” he said.
“And?”
“It’s too dark; it all looks pixelated. You know how it is with these security cameras in the dark. Maybe in the future they’ll have better resolution, but as of…”
“So, there’s nothing?”
“Nada. Well, actually…”
“What?”
“At around 3:52am there’s some kind of weird movement. But… I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like, a darkness moving in the dark. A black mass that suddenly moves in your front lawn. And then, nothing else.”
“You said 3:52am?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
I hung up the phone, placing it back on the receiver against the kitchen wall.
“Damndest thing,” I said.
“What?” Eileen asked.
“I just remembered something. I woke up last night from a strange nightmare. A night terror, more like it. When I looked over at the alarm clock, it was 3:52am.”
“So?”
“I dunno. It’s strange. Guillermo said he saw something at 3:52am. But he really couldn’t make it out cause it was so dark.”
From the coziness of their homes, entire families peered out at my front lawn, at the spectacle of decomposing mass fertilizing the ground underneath.
Eileen went up to try and put the baby to sleep.
Damndest thing, I repeated in my head.
The detective phoned at 7pm.
“I can’t find Elmore Drive.”
“It’s near Elks. Ends in a cul-de-sac.”
“Elks?” the detective asked.
“Yeah. Dead-end street.”
“Listen, are you egging me on? I don’t know no Elmore Drive, no Elks. If this is a hoax, you’re in for a treat. It’s been a day full of activity and unrest. So, if you’re telling me there’s a mutilated killing in your front lawn, but you give me a bogus address, there’s not much I can do for ya, bud.”
“Bogus what? Are ya crazy?”
“Are you calling me ‘crazy’? That kinda speech is likely to incite violence, in which case I’ll book you for disorderly conduct. Is that what you want? For me to book you for disorderly conduct…”
“Officer, I…”
“Detective.”
“Sorry. Detective, listen, I know it’s been a rough day, but… Oh, Jesus H. Christ!”
“What? What’s happening…”
I dropped the phone; it clattered on the floor.
The body fidgeted on the grass. Its arms shook in a spasm, its legs trembling compulsively.
I reeled in the phone by the cord and dialed the Burrs again.
“Hey, John, do you see that?”
“See what?”
“Whaddya mean, ‘see what’?” I asked all flabbergasted.
The body convulsed in an uncontrollable seizure.
“The body…it’s shaking all over like a chicken after its head’s cut off.”
“Dooyah think maybe he’s still alive?”
“Alive? What the hell, he’s greener than the creature from the black lagoon. And his head’s gone.”
“Maybe it’s one of those postmortem spasms…you know.”
“It gives me the creeps.”
Everyone stared at the moving body in my front lawn, and I could almost hear the gasps and oooos and aaaahs.
“I just thought of something,” Eileen said.
Just then, a group of kids—we called them the Slugs Five, cause there was five of them and because all they did all day long was smoke pot and laze around. Anyway, they left their house on the edge of the cul-de-sac, in their Dyno bicycles, and slowly, very very slowly, approached the front lawn.
“If Guillermo said he saw movement at 3:52am, then maybe that’s the time the man died, or was killed, or whatever.”
“Uh huh.”
The Slugs Five neared the driveway, a few yards away from the body.
“And you woke up at 3:52am, at exactly the same time, from a nightmare…”
“Night terror. What’s your point, Eileen?”
“Frank, do you see the Slugs Five?” John blared over the phone.
“I see ‘em, John,” I said. The kids assembled together on the fresh newly-cut grass and schemed among each other.
“My point is, Frank, that maybe you’re still dreaming. Y’know, a lucid dream?”
“Frank, do you think it was the beaners who did this? Everything was fine in the neighborhood until they moved in.”
“I dunno, John,” I said, not really paying attention, “I don’t know.”
The Slugs approached the body and started poking it with a stick. The body ceased fidgeting. They pinched their nostrils, and one of them threw up on the fresh crisp lawn.
“It must’ve been them,” John Burr said on the other end of the line, “who else if not the spics?”
“I dunno, John, but that’s a pretty bold claim.”
“John, look down at your watch,” Eileen injuncted.
I stared at my wristwatch. 3:52am. “B-but…” I stammered.
“I’m calling out Guillermo. It must’ve been those goddamn Mexicans!”
“They’re Guatemalan, I think…”
“It doesn’t make any difference, Frank! They’re all spics and beaners…”
The Slugs Five poked the body, and when the body answered back with a spasmodic twitch, they screamed at the top of their lungs and bicycled back home.
“Look at your watch, Frank.”
“I did! It’s broken. Must’ve broken when I woke up abruptly. Maybe I swung my arms around too heavily and screwed up the internal mechanism.”
The body stood there for days, skin loosening like meat off a rib bone. In that time, the racoons had come, and the turkey buzzards, and the rats, too. It was like finger eating at a potluck.
In the ensuing days, the body turned redder.
We dared not leave our homes.
“Frank,” my wife kept yelling down at me from the upstairs bedroom. “You need to WAKE UP!”
“Hey, come down here for a minute. I think I know what it is. You probably won’t like it, but I think I know who the dead burly man is.”
She came down with the baby cooing in her cradled arms.
“See there…” I pointed.
“What?”
“There! Jesus, Eileen. I told you to go see that ophthalmologist about…”
“Okay, damnit. I’m staring, but at what exactly?”
“Look at his feet, at the soles of his feet.”
“Jesus, is this some weird necro-foot fetish sorta deal?”
“Eileen, seriously now!”
She stared out through the blinds at the dead man’s feet. “What about his feet?”
“Don’t you see, Eileen? There’s a scar on the bottom of his foot, see?”
“And? Can’t the poor dead man have a scar on his foot?”
“Eileen, you don’t understand. I HAVE THAT SAME SCAR! It was from that huge plantar wart I got the year before last. Remember? Big as a lunar crate. Had to burn it off, and it left a scar.”
“Wait, you mean to tell me…?”
“Eileen, that dead burly man out there has the same exact scar due to a vicious plantar wart, same as I do. It’s too much of a coincidence. Too much.”
“Oh, Frank, please.”
“That’s why I don’t want to, to put it in your own words, ‘wake up’. I’m afraid that I might wake up dead. That that’s me out there in the front yard. I just know it.”
I picked up the phone.
“Waitaminute!” Eileen exclaimed. “I swear if you call that John Burr again, I’m divorcing the hell outta you. That man’s a hardlining racist pig. If he even mentions the word beaner or spic one more time, I’ll cave his head in.”
“C’mon, he’s not that bad.”
“Does he know my parents are South American? I bet he doesn’t.”
I start dialing his number, watching Eileen in my peripheral.
“Okay, fine!” I hang up the phone. After a moment, I pick up the receiver again.
“Guillermo, hey buddy. How’s it going?”
“Not so good.”
“What? What’s going on, now?”
“What’s he saying?” Eileen says, rocking the baby a little too fervently. The baby wakes and starts to cry.
“Hold on, Eileen.”
“What?” Guillermo asks.
“What’s going on, now?”
“It’s your neighbor, John. He’s pitted the entire cool-day-sack against me. Says the dead body is my fault, and that their staying cooped up in their homes without necessities is my fault, too.”
“What? He said all that?” I say.
“What? What’s going on?” Eileen interjects. “What’s that John up to now?”
The baby cries louder and louder.
“Eileen, hold on! Stop that baby’s crying.”
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“No, Guillermo, I was talking to my wife.”
“Who?”
“I’m—Eileen, goddamnit, take the baby upstairs!”
“What’s that John doing to poor Guillermo?”
“Guillermo, what the hell’s going on?”
The line drops suddenly, so I look out the window and see the whole neighborhood gathered in front of John’s house. The phone rings.
“Hello,” I say nervously.
“We’re taking arms against a sea of troubles!” John Burr blares on the other end. “Beaners, spics, wetbacks! We’re getting rid of ‘em. They’re the ones to blame. They’re intoxicating and putrefying the neighborhood. It’s now or never. The horsemen are coming. Ring the trumpets, scale the walls. In we go for the kill. Come, Frank. Come. It’s Judgement Day!”
The line hangs up.
“He’s gone apeshit.”
Eileen looks out the window. The baby’s crying intensely now.
The throng flocks from John’s place over to Guillermo’s, a two-story Italian Renaissance home flipped before they bought it a couple of years back.
“They’re carrying shovels and knives, and I think I see a gun or two,” Eileen reports, watching through the blinds. “John, you need to wake up.”
“What? That’s nonsense. I’ll call the cops. They’ll know w-what t-to do…”
“They can’t find Elmore Drive, remember?”
The throng settles in Guillermo’s front lawn. They holler and shout obscenities at the front porch. In my lawn, the body lies peacefully decomposing.
“John, WAKE UP NOW!”
“I can’t, Eileen. What if I’m dead?”
“But what about Guillermo? He’s got a family, you know?”
“What about me?”
“If you really are dead, then it won’t make a difference, will it? We’ll mourn for you and bury you and then go on with our lives.”
“But…what about us, the baby?”
The posse commences to throw stones at the windows of Guillermo’s home. They smash the windows and demolish the camera, stones cutting through the air like missiles to land on the roof, upper windows, on the walls, front porch, front door, everywhere.
The throng gives one final battle cry before bursting through the front door.
“Frank, now! Now! Do it! Wake up…”
“No, I can’t.”
“Wake up! WAKE UP!!!”
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
3:52a.m. I startle myself awake in a heated frenzy. My body is damp, the sheets beneath me wet with my sweat. I look over at the alarm clock and mark the time. My head falls back gently on the pillowcase, and I fall back asleep. Some weird, lurid dream I can’t even remember…
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
In the morning after breakfast we found a dead man sprawled on our front lawn. I peered out through the venetian blinds, aghast at the thing. It was a man all right: burly, hairy, naked. His head had been caved in, blood bone and brains a beautiful Pollock display on our front lawn, on the grass, the fresh newly-cut grass.