FICTION BY JEFF STRAND

Jeff Strand is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of almost sixty books, most of them blending horror and humor.

THE BODY HIDIN’ SPOT
by Jeff Strand

Pa kicked open the screen door and stormed into the backyard. “What the hell is going on out here?” A moment later he saw the dead body on the lawn. He looked from the body to the bloody knife in my hand, then back at the body, then closed his eyes and shook his head and sighed.

“It was an accident,” I insisted.

“Boy, I can see from the number of stab wounds on his chest alone that it wasn’t an accident, unless you’re the clumsiest fourteen-year-old in all of Georgia. What’d you do, trip and fall and stab him a dozen times while you were trying to keep your footing?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, he’s clearly dead. Any fool can see that. So calling an ambulance won’t do any good. I need you to answer me one very important question, boy. Was this a thrill-kill?”

“No, sir.”

“Look me in the eye when you answer.”

I looked up at Pa. “No, sir. It wasn’t a thrill-kill. It was anger.”

Pa nodded. “What’d he do?”

“He was holding hands with my girlfriend. I mean, it wasn’t really my girlfriend. It was his girlfriend. But she should’ve been my girlfriend.”

“I see. And was he holding hands with her in our backyard?”

“No, sir.”

“So you lured him back here?”

“Yes, sir. I told him I had some weed. I don’t, I swear—weed is evil—but I knew he’d come over if I said I had some to share.”

“I need you to be honest with me,” said Pa. “When you were stabbing him to death, did you get a boner?”

My eyes widened. I couldn’t believe Pa had asked such a thing. “No!”

“No movement in your nether regions at all?”

“Of course not!”

“Good. I didn’t raise you to get sexual satisfaction out of taking a human life. That’s for depraved perverts and serial killers. But if he was trying to move in on a girl who was rightfully yours…well, then he got what was coming to him.”

“So you’re not mad?”

Pa shook his head. “I’d be a hypocrite if I was. I’ve killed in anger, and for revenge, and out of practical necessity. If I’d caught you smearing his blood all over your bare chest, that would’ve been a different story, but sometimes you have to kill somebody who did you wrong. It’s the southern way.”

“I just knew you’d understand, Pa,” I said.

“What was your plan for afterward?” Pa asked.

“I figured that with Jerry out of the way, Abigail would mourn for a couple of weeks, and then she’d let me hold her hand and maybe feel her up.”

Pa scowled at me. “I mean, what was your plan for the dead body? You had a plan, right? You didn’t just invite him over here with the promise of marijuana and then stab him to death without an exit strategy, did you?”

I looked at the ground.

“Jesus, boy! When did you become a simpleton? You committed premeditated murder without a plan to dispose of the evidence? Were you just going to leave him out here to rot? Surely you know that corpses have an aroma.”

“I was blind with rage, okay? I wasn’t thinking straight!”

“It doesn’t sound like you were thinking at all. You could be tried as an adult for this, you know. You could end up in big boy’s prison. The food is way worse there.”

I wanted to cry, but I knew Pa would get mad if I did. Now that he was saying all of these things out loud, I felt really silly for having stabbed Jerry to death without thinking ahead. This was like that one time I chucked a rock at the mailman without considering that he’d knock on my front door and tell Ma and Pa about it. “You’re not the sharpest crayon in the box,” my sister would often tell me, and I’d insist that I wasn’t a crayon at all, I was a boy, which didn’t seem to help my case.

“Will you help me?” I asked.

“Since this is your first killing, yeah, I will,” Pa told me. “We’re gonna take him to the body hidin’ spot.”

“We have a body hiding spot?”

“Drop your ‘g’ when you say that, boy. And you bet your ass we do. It’s been in our family for generations. I’ve hid bodies there, your grandpa hid bodies there, his dad hid bodies there, his dad hid bodies there…the body hidin’ spot goes all the way back. I’ll be happy to take you there to use it for the first time.”

“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t realize we killed so many people.”

“Always with cause,” said Pa. “We’re not out there hacking and slashing like we’ve gone feral. Have we killed more than our share of our fellow human beings? Yeah, I’d say so. But we’ve interacted with more folks who deserved it than the average family.”

“Do you think Ma will be proud of me?”

Pa shook his head. “Justifiable homicide should not be a source of pride for anybody.” He pointed to the bloody corpse on our lawn. “Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that what you did wasn’t drastic. You should’ve punched him in the face first. If that didn’t work, then stab him to death. In the future, work your way up to it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“First things first. Let’s halve the body.”

“Halve the body?”

“Repeating what I just said in the form of a question is no way to have a productive conversation. Can you carry an entire dead body six miles over rough terrain?”

“No, sir.”

“Then it makes sense that we’d each carry half. And every moment we spend standing around gabbing makes it more likely that a neighbor will see your victim, so let’s get him into the garage.”

I nodded. Pa went inside to put down some garbage bags. When he came back out, Dad took the arms and I took the legs and we carried the dripping body inside.

“Gently, now,” said Pa, as we eased the body down onto the bags. “I know he’s dead, but you don’t want any more blood to splatter than necessary. Many killers have been undone because of a stray bone chip.”

I really appreciated Pa’s wisdom. My inclination would’ve been to toss him onto the garbage bags and shout “How does that feel, bitch?” when his skull shattered.

“What are we gonna use to cut him in half?” I asked.

“A steak knife.”

“For real?”

Pa grinned. “Nah. That was a joke. One important thing to remember about taking a human life is that you run the risk of descending into madness over what you’ve done. So it’s important to make a joke every once in a while. I don’t mean a tasteless joke that downplays the serious nature of what you’ve done. That’s not appropriate. But when I said that we should use a steak knife, which is obviously impractical, it was amusing without being disrespectful. You still feel sane, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So it’s working. No, we’ll use a great big saw. Fetch me the biggest one from the saw wall.”

I took down the largest saw we had. It was about three feet long. Then I tried to hand it to Pa.

“Don’t give it to me,” he said. “I’m not the one who stabbed him to death. You killed him, you cut him. That’s the Georgia way.”

I frowned. “Oh.”

“You’re not squeamish, are you?”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“You stabbed him a dozen times. There’s blood all over. How can you be afraid to saw him in half?”

“There weren’t guts when I stabbed him,” I said. “I don’t mind seeing blood, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle seeing an intestine.”

“Well, if you saw a man in half at the waist, I’m sorry to say that you’re going to see some intestines. There’s no way around that. So now the question is whether you’re going to be a man and get over your intestine-viewing phobia, or if you’re going to be a scared little girl.”

“I’ll be a man,” I said, crouching down beside the body.

And I was. I sawed Jerry in half, and yeah, his intestine popped out along with other nasty stuff, but I kept right on sawing until the job was done. When I looked up at Pa, I could tell he was pleased.

“Let’s put these halves in bags,” he said. “And then I’ll tell Ma that we won’t be home for dinner because her son is about to hide his first dead body.”

We put the bags in the trunk of the car, and then we drove for about an hour. If we lived in Atlanta, we’d still be in Atlanta, not much further from where we started, but Pa hated big cities, so we traveled a reasonable distance for that amount of driving time and I didn’t have to listen to Pa calling Atlanta a hellhole for the entire hour.

Finally, he pulled off onto a dirt road. He drove for a while longer, going deeper and deeper into the woods, somehow knowing which way to go even though the road forked in seven or eight different spots, and then he parked when the road came to a dead end.

“Now we walk,” he said.

He opened the trunk and we each took a bag. A dead body, even half of one, was pretty heavy, but I didn’t want to disappoint Pa so I didn’t complain.

“The trail is there,” he said. “It’s hard to follow, so I’ll take the lead, but the next time this happens it’ll be up to you, so pay attention.”

We walked. And walked. And walked. They say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” but we had both, and every single sweat gland in my body was pumping out perspiration like I was trying to sell it by the gallon. Though the bag was unwieldy and the path was uneven,I only dropped Jerry’s upper half once. I wanted to ask if we could just veer off the trail about twenty or thirty feet and bury him there, but I knew Pa wouldn’t approve of that question. So we kept walking.

We did take the occasional rest break. Pa wasn’t a tyrant.

I had done everything in my power not to ask how much further, but finally I couldn’t take it anymore. My arms felt like they were going to break right off my body. I wish I’d killed Abigail instead—she would’ve been a lot lighter.

“How much further?” I asked.

“About ten more miles.”

“Ten?”

Pa grinned. “Nope. That was just some more sanity-preserving humor. Without it, you might be seeing things that aren’t there, or unconsciously doing bodily harm to yourself. We’ve only got about three miles left.”

“Was that another joke?”

“What?”

“To preserve my sanity?”

“What?”

“The ‘three more miles’ part. Is it really only half a mile?”

Pa frowned. “Are you too lazy to walk three more miles? No, it wasn’t a damned joke. You don’t do two jokes sequentially in a situation like this. You’ve got a lot to learn, boy.”

And so we walked three more miles. I was happy that my arms didn’t actually break off, but they had no feeling left in them. I was drenched in sweat and couldn’t remember ever having been so exhausted. I’d think twice before I stabbed anybody else to death.

“We’re almost there,” Pa told me. I hoped it wasn’t another joke.

But, no, we emerged from the woods…into a parking lot.

“Are we burying him in the Piggly Wiggly?” I asked.

“Son of a bitch,” said Pa. “They paved over the body hidin’ spot and put up this damned store. The modern world has no respect for tradition!” He threw down Jerry’s lower half in frustration. “People think their iPhones and Xboxes and GPSes and photocopy machines are so great, but look at what it’s cost us! Generations of use of the body hidin’ spot and now it’s a place for people to buy yogurt and avocados! It just ain’t right!”

“At least you know nobody will find the bodies now that there’s a store on top of them,” I said.

“That’s not the point. The old ways are fading, boy, and it makes me want to shed a tear. I won’t, but it makes me want to.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll just walk twenty, thirty feet off the trail and empty the bags. The wildlife will eat the evidence.”

Pa looked despondent as we began the long walk back through the forest. But you can’t hang onto the old ways forever, and to my way of thinking, that Piggly Wiggly was making a lot more people happy than the body hidin’ spot ever did.

Pa would get over it. Someday.

One last thing was eating away at me, and I wanted to clear my conscience. “Pa?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“I lied about the boner.”

“I know, boy. I saw the whole thing.”