Monsters Live Among Us

 

By Patrick Best

“We stopped checking for monsters under the bed when we realized they were inside of us.” –Stephen King

You should have done something, dammit. You should have ripped open his door, dragged him out into the street and punched him until the police came and arrested you both. You should have done something.

That’s the thought that's been echoing in my head since last Tuesday. Something happened on my ride home from work that night, and I can't seem to shake it.

I'm the editor of a small weekly newspaper, and we have to send our pages to the printer every Tuesday in order to hit the streets by Wednesday afternoon. This week was a rough one - our most popular columnist missed her deadline and a couple of advertisers dropped out at the last minute - so we didn't get everything done until after 11 p.m. My drive home takes about 40 minutes, so it was close to midnight by the time I rolled into Conyers. I was beat, and I had that little twitch I get in my shoulder when I’ve had too much caffeine and smoked too many cigarettes. I was stopped at the red light on West Avenue in front of the railroad tracks when it all started.

The Rush Limbaugh-wannabe I was listening to on one of the AM radio stations was ranting hysterically about welfare mothers when something caught my attention in the rearview mirror.  There was a beat up old Mustang idling behind me. The driver was a musclehead around my age who had a high-and-tight haircut that made him look like a Marine. He was yelling at someone about something, and his lips were peeled back in a way that reminded me of photograph I’d recently seen of a coyote in National Geographic.

The woman in the passenger seat next to him was staring forward, her head moving ever-so-slightly back and forth. Back and forth. Her eyes were puffy and her board straight bleach-blonde hair was stuck to her tear-soaked cheeks.

I couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but the look on his face told me everything I needed to know. He was angry as hell, and he wanted the world to know it. He was looking into his rearview mirror, too. As I watched, he lifted one of the big fists - that had been tightly wrapped around the steering wheel - and started bringing it down hard and fast onto something in the backseat. His arm was all over the backseat. Up. Down. Up. Down. He looked like he was playing that carnival game Whac-a-Mole. But instead of a soft black mallet, he was using his sledgehammer of an arm and fist to wop the moles back into their holes.

I hadn’t seen anyone else in the car, but, after watching for only a second or two, I caught a brief glimpse of the man’s target. For some reason, I’d figured it was some kind of animal - a yapping little dog that had peed on the backseat. It was a little boy. He was eight or nine and he was moving from one side of the car to the other to get out of the path of the man’s blows. He was fast, but this seemed to make his attacker even angrier because he turned more in his seat worked that hammer even harder. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.

The light changed to green and the bright color reflected off my hood and filled the cab of my truck. I reached for the door handle, my eyes still focused on the horror movie that was playing on mirror. I was ready to jump out and run to the boy’s rescue. I wanted to make that man – that piece of human garbage – pay for what he was doing. The crying woman dropped her face into her hands as I watched and started crying convulsively. This made the man turn his attention to her, moving his big blocky head right next to her ear as he screamed. She made no sudden movements. ‘She knows better,’ I thought. ‘She’s been down this road before.’

I put my car into Park, gripped the door handle and pulled it. Before I knew it, I was standing next to my truck, staring through the windshield of the Mustang at the man who looked like a pissed off drill sergeant. He must have felt me staring at him because he turned away from the weeping woman and looked at me. His eyes were as big and round as the silver dollars my grandfather gave me when I was a little boy. And while he pointed a thick finger at me and screamed soundlessly through the thick glass that separated us, I could see a hint of embarrassment on his face.

Visions of my own family filled my head – my wife, my son, my daughter. ‘What if he has a gun?’ I thought. ‘What if you try to be a hero and end up dead?’ I’m in the newspaper business, so I read stories like that all the time. Some sees a bad situation, tries to do the right thing, and he gets a bullet right between the eyes as his reward. I took one step toward the Mustang, then I froze. My hands were balled into fists, and I truly believed in my head and heart that I could take down that abusive bastard. ‘But what if he has a gun?’

The Mustang’s engine revved and inched closer to the bumper of my truck. Sgt. A-hole’s face was blood red and his square chin was pushed out over the steering wheel. I couldn't hear him, but I imagined he was saying something  a new recruit would hear on the first day of boot camp: "What are you looking at, maggot?! You think you can kick my ass?! Well, go ahead and try!"

‘Get his license plate number and call the police,' I thought. 'Get back in the truck and go home to your own family. Let the police handle it.’ I took a deep breath and I got back into my truck. When I looked back into my rearview mirror I could see that he had a big grin on his face. A "shit-eating grin" as my dad would say. I felt like I had acid in my stomach.

He inched closer to my bumper, flashed his headlights and punched his horn over and over. It sounded like a trumpet player who’s having a coughing attack. Hunh. Hunh-hunh. Hunh-hunh-hunh. I wanted to throw it into Reverse and silence that stupid instrument forever.

He must have been reading my mind because the next noise I heard was the Mustang’s squealing tires as the slammed on this accelerator and pulled around me. I tried to see his license plate, but he was moving fast and he took a left on the road just beyond the tracks before I could get a good look at it. I saw the top of the boy’s head through the side window and this filled me back up with some of the rage and courage that pushed me out onto the pavement a minute before.

I hit the gas and roared after him. He made a right turn a hundred yards down the road, so I took the street straight ahead because I knew would eventually be able to cut him off using the little side streets in the neighborhoods. My nerve had returned. My heart was back in charge. All I wanted to do was wipe that grin off his face once and for all.

When I got to the intersection where I figured we’d meet up, I quickly rolled down my windows and listened for the sound of his exhaust system and big muscle car engine. I heard nothing but the sounds of two dogs barking at each other through backyard fences. He must have turned off on another road. I missed my chance to stop him. He's still out there.

A shorter version of this story was published in Atlanta Press in April, 2000.