Roadkill Alley

“What do you…do all day?”
The tabby looked up at me with one curious eye, the other being like a polished jewel—I could see myself within it, but I knew she couldn’t see me. I ran my fingers through the feline’s soft coat until they became ensnared in a matted clump of fur. The cat let out a little whimper before resuming its daily licking of itself.
“No, seriously—what do you actually do all day?” I said, both to the cat and myself. “Sit around, eat mice, lick your puss, screw…am I missing anything?”
The cat meowed an obvious ‘no’ as I nodded in agreement, still caressing the thing’s clumpy back as I watched its eyes tighten with each stroke.
“Where’s your boyfriend, huh? Haven’t seen him in a while- “
I looked up and squinted against the sun that was just beginning to set on Roadkill Alley—the highway just off the highway. The sign reads ‘55’ but no one around here would be caught dead traveling under ’80’. Nope—all the people caught dead around here were doing, at least, above that—85, 90…I can count.
Unfortunately, most of the claims that the Alley has made over the years weren’t the jackasses booking it 105 down a residential strip. Nope—it was all the critters that paid the toll.
Ssccrraappee! The sound of a snow shovel chafing the pavement only reaffirmed the aforementioned toll. There was no snow in Brackett County, but on Roadkill Alley there always seemed to be a fresh two inches of flattened fauna. And today, the type of precipitation was opossum—two to be exact—and they clearly weren’t faking it, either.
We liked to call him Roadkill Randy, the proud owner, and operator, of that dark red—once bright, metallic silver—snow shovel, wrapped in his right hand with a missing pinkie. Nobody ever got his actual name, but the nickname stuck as it quite suited him—both for his unusual pastime of collecting dead animals and because his hair, or hairpiece more likely, looked like a dead raccoon. He was an older man, maybe mid-50s to early 60s, and he seldom spoke. When he did, however, it was typically so thick and jargoned that it was hard to understand, so most of us just stuck to the niceties: smiling and waving, and maybe the occasional “great weather, huh?” My mom claims he’s hooked on pain meds or something, and that’s why his speech is so slurred. But no one knows for sure.
I’ve lived on Roadkill Alley my entire life. And Randy—well, whatever his real name was, has always been here. When I was six years old, it was Randy that knocked on our front door to tell my dad that he had found Grover, our German Shepard, stapled to the highway. Dad never told me that, of course, and instead fibbed the usual “he just ran away” to soften the blow.
It was my mom who told me a similar lie—that dad had gone into the military when I was eight. I believed her, for a while, but then one day—out of the blue—mom sat me down and told me the truth: dad was dead. The cops found his blood about a quarter mile down Roadkill Alley, but they never found a body. I like to think that he’s still out there, but I know he’s never coming home. Mom does too, and she’s not the same because of it.
“That’s why we’re strays, right?” I said, ticking the cat’s ear as it perked to the sound of the scraping shovel, scooping up the cooking entrails that caked the street. Randy looked up at me with a blank and curious look across his face—and it doesn’t take a high IQ to know what happens to curious cats, especially out here.
“Is…that your cat?” he said, a crack splitting his voice.
“No,” I simply said, “not yet.”
He flashed me a smile of yellowed teeth, about as genuinely as he ever had, pouring the contents of the shovel into a bucket that bordered the street and his yard’s grass.
“D-don’t let her wander off,” he said, wagging a finger at the feline, “the road’s not a safe place for a kitty cat.”
I nodded in understanding, hoping to dismiss the man who was now swaying from side to side by the arches in his boots, still eyeing me with that toothy grin. After a long and awkward silence between the two of us, Randy’s smile tucked away beneath his splotchy beard, and with a nod of his head, he began sauntering toward his pick-up, snatching the bucket filled with the opossum guts as he did. A flick of his wrist later, and the engine rumbled to a start, flashing a set of faded headlines against his garage door and throughout his darkened house.
And that’s the second time I noticed it: the figure. It was, what appeared to be, the outline of a person, standing somewhere within Randy’s house. The first time I saw it, I thought I was just seeing things. I was nine years old and trying to catch a rabbit in my backyard. The little hare bolted past me, and I scrambled to catch it but was too slow. It shot underneath our fence, and, despite my mother’s best wishes, I hopped it—not unlike a rabbit, myself.
I was in Randy’s backyard and, just as the sun was setting, the yellow glow from the horizon allowed me to make out the likeness of someone standing, ever so stilly, in his home. It could’ve been him, but it didn’t quite resemble Randy—the arch of his back. As soon as I saw it, the blinds were drawn shut, and Randy emerged from the backdoor with a wild look in his eyes. My mother scolded me harshly after he returned me to our home, insisting to nine-year-old me that Randy lived alone.
But I knew now that he didn’t.
The headlight beam that flashed into my eyes broke my concentration on the past as, presently, Randy was waving a silent ‘goodbye’ to me through the open window of his truck, putting it into drive and rumbling down the road of Roadkill Alley. I turned back to the house which, through the window, was bathed in nothing but sheer blackness where the figure once stood. I squinted, both to shift through those shadows in the window and to wonder—should I knock?
I clacked onto the rustic and wooden door three times; the feline at my feet rubbing against my jeans and purring. After each of my taps, only the reverberated knocking from within the dormant house answered me. I was about to attempt my fourth when I noticed my shadow begin to spread across the chipped paint. Headlights. I snapped into a ducking position, hearing the rumble of Randy’s truck approaching as I jabbed myself into a nearby thornbush, biting back a whimper and only praying its dense leaves might conceal me and the kitten.
But I knew what curiosity had in store for the both of us.
The engine rumbled as I watched Randy rush inside his home, only to, moments later, emerge with a brown paper sack, sopping with some unknown liquid like a mushy tea bag. He mumbled something to himself, put the truck in reverse, and high-tailed it out of the driveway once again.
Only, this time, he didn’t realize that he had two stragglers booking it behind him.
Screw curiosity.
I refused to give the cat a name after what happened to Grover all those years ago. But if I had to, I’d’ve called her Mittens, ‘cause of the cute little white tips on the ends of each of her paws. That cat, which sat plumply in the basket of my bike, didn’t so much as meow for the entirety of the ride, despite the herky-jerky terrain as I distantly followed Randy in his pick-up.
It was dark now, and all I had to follow was the disembodied trail of red brake lights that’d flash every now and again, and the smell of the festering animal carcasses that streamed from out of that bucket. Had the limit for these country roads been even ten miles an hour faster, I would’ve been left in Randy’s dust. Thankfully, he was a slowpoke, and the turn signal up ahead led me to the conclusion that he was almost at wherever he was headed—which must’ve been the place called Jim’s Body Shop, just up the road on the right.
All this way for a couple of truck repairs.
Randy hopped from the high-rise pick-up, still clutching that soppy bag in his hand, and, with the other, lifting the roadkill bucket from the bed, carrying it inside with a jingle of the front, glass door chime. I dismounted the bike and popped the kickstand for the cat, which followed me with its one-seeing eye as I snuck up to the hazy window of the auto shop, carefully positioning myself behind a sun-bleached window painting of Santa Claus.
It was June.
The little room that Randy entered was timber and dank. The walls were lined with rusty wrenches, sockets, and other tools. The carpet was stained and gritty. It seemed that, as he walked across it, Randy fit right in.
“H-how’re you, Jimmy?” I heard Randy’s muffled voice say through the glass, setting the bag on a similarly colored brown countertop and dropping the bucket to his feet. The man behind the counter, assumedly Jim, leaned forward and took a non-consensual noseful of the infectious stench, puckering his face as he looked out the glass windows probingly. When he saw no one and heard only crickets, he settled his eyes on Randy.
“Well, look who the cat dragged in,” Jim half-assedly smiled, biting a cigarette in his mouth but not smoking it. “It’s been a while, Arthur. How’re…things?”
‘Arthur’? Randy’s real name was Arthur?
‘Randy’ still suited him better.
“F-fine,” Randy smiled, “I got more shit for ya.”
“Yeah, I can smell it,” Jim said, looking less amused by the second. Randy leaned down and lifted the metal bucket with his four fingers, tipping it against the counter in order to show him its contents. Jim winced, nodding to tell Randy that he could lower it.
“Salvaged a small intestine,” Randy said, “maybe, uh…fifteen square inches of usable fur, ‘bout one eye- “
“About?”
“F-fine. One eye,” Randy grumbled.
“And, what’s in the brown bag? It’s leakin’ all over my counter,” Jim said, plucking the unsmoked cigarette from his lips and aggressively dipping it into a nearby ashtray. Randy nodded over at the bag as Jim uncrinkled the stained paper, squinting inside before scoffing a hot breath and closing it up again. “I, uh…’preciate it, Art. But, uh- we got people for kit’dy parts. You remember Sam?”
“The, uh, nurse fella, right?”
“Yep. He’s our supplier for this kinda stuff,” Jim said, scooting the bag toward Randy.
“So, you don’t want it?” Randy asked. Jim shook his head.
“We can give you the usual rate for the pelt and the guts. I dunno if I can sell a single eye.”
“I’ve bought single eyes before.”
“Not the kinda eyes you’re into. These’re…the hell’s in the bucket, anyways?”
“Opossum.”
“Yeah, exactly. Most people want the pair for those critters,” Jim said. Randy nodded in stupefied understanding, leaning down again to retrieve the bucket. Jim took it, apprehensively as hell, and handed a wad of cash over to Randy, which he quickly pocketed with a friendly gesture of a nod, turning to pick up the brown bag off the counter, and trudging through the glass door with another, waning, chime.
I pushed myself against the shadows that crept along the building. Randy didn’t see me. And after a flash of his headlights, once again, he rode down the road and into the night.
I didn’t follow him this time, however.
“Welcome to- “ Jim stopped midway through his nicety, noticing that I wasn’t his typical clientele. His face sagged in confusion before the innocent-enough demeanor curled into a predatory-like gleam. He continued to wipe the dark stain on the counter with a rag as I took a step back. “Well, what I can I help you with, sweetheart?”
“What were you just doing with Randy?”
“Who?”
“Arthur.”
“Oh, Arthur,” he said, studying my unchanging expression, “you saw all that?”
“Yeah. I did.”
Jim nodded, looking down at the bucket behind the counter with rucked nostrils and back up to me. I inched closer.
“How do you know ‘em?”
“Neighbor.”
He nodded again, biting on the inside of his cheek.
“Arthur’s harmless, I assure ya. A lotta guys we get in here are brash—real aggressive hunting types, mostly. But Arthur…he just scrapes up the scraps—roadkill.”
“I know,” I said, “Why does he do that? And why’re you buying it?”
“Y’know, you sure ask a lot of questions, girly. But here’s one for you: what’s he got?” Jim said as he lifted a finger to his temple, “up here, I mean. Some of the guys and I were making bets. Is he, uh…r’tarded?”
I swallowed as I noticed Jim’s eye contact dwindle beneath my eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said, "maybe drugs." Jim nodded, content with my answer.
“Jim’s is a body shop in every sense of the word, and we aren’t the only one around. Thankfully, competition is…pre’ty scarce- ”
“You sell body parts?” I asked, cutting him off. He nodded silently, both to confirm my suspicion, and to commend my keenness.
“Buy ‘em and sell ‘em. Arthur found us ‘cause he lost a finger in some accident years ago—somethin’ ‘bout him talkin’ to a birdhouse he was building or somethin’,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Probably power tools, we get fingers all the time. Anyway, one of our suppliers at the hospital told ‘em ‘bout us, and the rest is history. You’d be surprised at what a person would pay for a well-functioning heart, lungs, kidneys…whatever. Hell, even a finger.” He stopped midway through his nod. “Y’know how much your heart is worth?” I shook my head. “One million dollars. Now, a’ course, a lot of these fat sons of bitches walkin’ ‘round got a lot of shit clogging ‘em up, which only diminishes the buying price. Come to think of it, they don’t do much in terms of walkin’ anyways…but drivin’ only helps the shop, too, I suppose.” He clicked his tongue, drumming a crescendo of fingertips against the countertop. “Still, one…million…dollars,” he smiled, “Though, that’s for a heart—kinda important if you wanna spend that cash. Y’know how much skin’s worth?”
I shook my head.
“Ten dollars per square inch on the black market— ‘bout thirty grand a person, unless it’s a little person like you,” he said with a faint chuckle. “Though,” he drawled, “the nicer the skin, the higher the price.” His smile diminished as a new thought visibly took hold of him. “Act’lly, come to think of it…a young girl like you would probably be better off wholesale.”
I let out a hot puff from my nostrils, my legs shaking to firmness beneath me, as I narrowed my gaze at the perv.
“I’m not for sale.”
The man chuckled to himself, a bit louder than before, as he bit his lip.
“You young ladies are all the same—where’s your daddy right now, lettin’ his little girl wander into a place like this?”
“Dead,” I choked. The prick nodded as if expecting that answer.
“Figured.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Listen, girly…I know a young lady with daddy issues when I see ‘em—you’re all the same: rough and tough until you’re not.” His expression lifted from its narrowed gaze as he pulled away from me, “Hey, it’s no skin off my nose. I’m just sayin’ you young ladies lack the proper…esteem. But, hey…now you know…you’re worth more than you think.” His smile snapped shut. “Now, how ‘bout you go on home to your poor momma before things get real rough and tough, hmmm?”
I burned inside, curling my clammy fists and ready to hurl every type of insult I could at the disgusting display of a man before me but…I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
The road home felt longer than before. And hotter. The hungered meows from the kitten before me acted as a type of delayed metronome that paced my pedaling and thoughts. Should I tell my mom? Will she tell the police? Will they arrest Randy? And what about the person in Randy’s house?
Well, what about them? There were too many questions, and even more entered my mind as I reached Roadkill Alley and realized that Randy wasn’t home—his truck wasn’t there.
This was my chance to answer some of those burning questions.
I unmounted the bike and lifted the hissing cat to my chest, scurrying across the front lawn clouded in perpetual darkness. I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face, yet I knew every hill and hole—most of which I dug myself. When I reached the fence line, I dropped the kitty to the grass and heaved my tiny body over the wood, landing on my feet, as I heard the cat, from the other side, benedict me with a final, faint meow.
There was a little light shining through the blinded, glass windows of Randy’s house, perhaps the dimly lit one just above the stove. It was barely visible from where I was crouching, but a snapped and dangling blind allowed me to see into the murky house. When I finally reached the window, I shoved my face against the chilled glass, nervously sighing a warm breath that coated the pane with a foggy splotch.
I could see myself in that splotch—at least, a muddled version. I got lost in that sight of myself for a moment—I hadn’t really looked at my own face in some time.
I lifted my wrist and wiped away the breath stain with my sleeve, my own face along with it, and that’s when I saw it for the third time: the figure.
It was outlined, again, like a stencil against the obscurely veiled light. Yet, this time, because I was but feet from the figure, I began to trace its features. And the more I did, the deeper my heart sunk into my stomach—as the form within that house seemed all-too-familiar to me.
Dad.
I choked out a snivel, catching my breath as a stream of hot tears flooded my cheeks instantly. Without hesitation, I clutched the icy handle on the window's frame and lifted it. It let out a shrill squeak, and I pushed my form through it without thinking twice.
I landed on my feet, again, just as they thud against the tile flooring. The sound bounced off every wall, and as I looked toward the form of my dad standing in the middle of the dark room, I noticed the other figures that I hadn’t seen before:
A cat, a deer’s head, the body of a raccoon, a squirrel, a bluebird sticking its stuffed head out of a stained birdhouse, the form of a young girl, and my father—all taxidermized. Some were misshapen, crudely fastened together with wooden dowels and googly eyes. Others were more…perfected, though I use the term very loosely. My dad, who maintained the same shape as he once was, at least in my mind’s eye, simply looked…off when it came to the details—the contours of his face, now deteriorated and rotten, and plastered into an expression of a deer in headlights. And, thankfully, even what I could see was cast in shadow.
I swatted the flowing, salty tears from my eyes as I approached what remained of my dear ol’ dad. I lifted my hand, just to touch him once more, as a streak of light shone over his warped face. I turned my eyes at the sight of it and sniffled, now holding his hand in mine, and letting the pained tears wash over me.
But our reunion was cut short when I realized where that flash of light had come from.
Headlights.
I pulled back from my dad, nearly tripping over a stuffed turtle with a tiny top hat and fumbled into the corner where no light shone. I shot my glance behind me to the opened window, but seconds before I was about to scale the wall, a creaking noise interrupted the silence, before silence filled the house yet again and I froze, paralyzed, in my tracks—but feet from freedom.
The clacking of boots against the hard tile stopped when Randy entered the kitchen, blocking out the dim light and turning to face his morbid display of taxidermy. He let loose a toothy grin and placed a large brown bag atop the cutting board; a bag sopping with a dark, viscous liquid, not unlike the smaller one he brought to Jim’s.
“I’m home,” he said in a sheepish voice, petting the little squirrel perched on a log and turning to face the other still and silent members of his collection. He then hesitated, resting his eyes on the turtle that I had bumped. And reaching forward to drag it into its original position, Randy’s eyes lifted to scan the room of motionless faces. He scoffed at himself, turning back to the kitchen when the cat, whom I had hypothetically named Mittens, and who apparently snuck through the opened window, meowed from behind me.
Just once, but that was enough.
Randy snapped back to face the group of still bodies, focusing his attention now on the tiny cat whose googly eyes left a white stain in the otherwise black house.
“W-were you talkin’, Whiskey?” he said, leaning down to face the cat, but refusing to touch it with his trembling, pointing finger. I held Mittens back from the light and watched as Randy awaited an answer from the dead cat’s carcass. After an endless minute of silence between the two, he stood, scratched his head, and retreated to the kitchen once again, frequently looking over his shoulder at the cat.
And that’s when the one behind me hissed and dug its sharp, little claw into my calf, causing me to swat down at it angrily and part my lips into a single, careless, and hushed word:
“Stop.”
Randy’s body jolted as if he heard a gunshot, only it was the timid voice of a young girl that spooked him so badly. He locked eyes with the dead girl’s stuffed corpse that stood in the dark room and gasped in his typical, clumsy cadence.
“W-what? What’d you say?”
I held my breath.
“I s-said…w-what did you just say to me, dammit?”
The lifeless girl just stared ahead with dead eyes. Randy knelt down before her, reaching her eye level. I scooted, ever so silently, against the wall, still covered in darkness, until I was just behind her boney body. Randy leaned toward the girl, trying to listen for something…anything.
And that’s when I shoved her—the body of the girl cracking into Randy as he screeched, flailing backward, and shuffling to his feet. He caught a jagged series of breaths as he bolded to the front door, unlatched it, and ran into the night in less than a heartbeat—and mine were rapid, then.
I shot up, grasping the girl’s cold body before it could teeter and fall onto the floor. Her skin was taut and tight, and its leathery feel both disgusted and saddened me. I then heard wailing outside as Randy ran through the front lawn, scared out of his wits as if he had seen a ghost. I staggered over to the front door and poked my head beyond the doorframe. Randy was booking it across the grass and asphalt toward the tree line on the other side.
To my distant left, then, I heard a shrill gasp: my mother. She was still wrapped in her pajamas and had opened the front door to our house, probably because of Randy’s screams. But when she saw me, the pain in my eyes, even from hundreds of feet away, she knew that something was very wrong.
It was. I had to tell her about dad.
And in the stir of the moment, I guess we both didn’t notice the truck, nor hear its horn.
That semi tore through Randy in less than a second, showering Roadkill Alley in thirty-thousand dollars’ worth of mangled flesh. Not that he was worth that much.
The truck squealed to a halt about a mile down the road, whatever was left of Randy probably somewhere between its fender and grille. My mother let out a horrid scream as she rushed toward me, her eyes filled with tears and questions, to which I had no answers. And despite seeing the outside of the semi, as well as Roadkill Alley, coated in Randy’s insides, I couldn’t help but ask one more question, myself:
How much could I get for all that?
Category:Animals
Category:Dismemberment
Category:Disappearances
Category:MakRalston