Monster

What a witness heard was this: Wheels screeching. Then a momentary silence. Then tree branches cracking. From her apartment window she could see car headlights down by the river. A small creek, not much of one, but one that many years ago housed a dead man. His body stuck in the sand, he had one hand reaching out from the murky water and onto the bank.

He had a bullet hole in the center of his back. Rumor was the shooter was the husband of the dead man’s girlfriend. He’d been missing for three days before he was found by a kid looking for frogs.

* * *

The witness saw a figure cut in front of the headlights and out of sight. She could hear music coming from the river. The cops arrived and found a car with a man in the passenger seat. His face was torn up but he was still breathing. His wrist was snapped and the hand was laying flush on the top of his arm. He was young, somewhere in his twenties. An empty bottle of brandy was found in the backseat. A plastic container of pills was found by the car.

His state I.D read: Jamal King

But where was the driver of the car? the cops wondered. They found shoe prints but there were numerous shoe prints for the river was not only home to spring peepers and possums but also to vagrants. The witness watched the ambulance arrive and retrieve a body.

* * *

Percy Bate, the mother of the driver, said her son had “gone the bad way” long ago. Selling dope. Doing dope. Drinking. He didn’t believe in god. He changed his name from James to Monster—got it from an infamous LA Crip.

Monster was a monster, shadowing the way the L.A gangster earned his name: for being a merciless fighter, hunting for humans and beating them down until they were done. Busted jaws. Knocked out teeth. Opening up fleshy gashes over the eyes, under the eyes.

The night Monster lost control of his car and sent it sailing into the river he was drunk and high on vicodin. The vicodin was Jamal’s who always had his pockets full of colorful pills. Some got him going fast. Some got him going slow. He liked vicodin. Brandy and vicodin.

Monster didn’t know the skinny two-lane road that zigzagged its way to South Carolina. Tall pine trees flanked both sides of the road. It was dark and even the car’s high-beams weren’t enough to cut through the black of the woods.

The music was playing loudly. That last vicodin severed Monster’s reactions completely. They went off the road going forty-six miles per hour. The car hit the water with heavy thud that sent Jamal’s face into the dashboard. He snapped his wrist trying to brace himself. His hand stood up and then slowly fell back and settled down on the top of his arm, his palm parallel with the roof.

Before he lost consciousness he reached in his pocket and tossed out some pills. Monster pulled his body from the steering wheel. His torso was crushed on its right side. Monster ran his hand over his dented body which now resembled a spoon. He looked over and saw Jamal’s bloody face, the hand that was in an impossible position.

Monster got out of the car and started running up the creek threading through the water. He followed the river for almost a mile before he fell dead in the back yard of a minister of a ramshackle Protestant church of one hundred and twenty-one members.

James Bate, aka Monster, dead at twenty-six.

One creek. Two people dead. A gunshot. A godless man dying on the property of a minister. This is the stuff of urban legends. Ghosts seen by the creek. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Giants alligators in the sewer.