August 31st, 1968
Police interview with Mr. Clockman
See, I don’t see what the big problem is. Sure, Johnny was an odd kid, but-
Johnny may, tragically, be a serial killer, Mr. Clockman.
Well, not when he was a kid. He never expressed a lot of emotional availability, if that’s what you’re asking.
I haven’t asked you that. Only if Johnny showed a tendency to violence throughout his childhood.
Well, like I said, there was just something a little bit funny about that kid. You know, he did a lot of typical weird little boy stuff, the sort of things grown-ups get called psychos for doing. See, if I did any of those things, I’d be arrested!
Can you describe some of those behaviors for me?
Now, don’t get a bee in your behind, I’m getting to it. He used to find trails of ants in the forest and get his magnifying glass. Sometimes the next-door neighbor’s reading glasses, and he’d put them under the glass and burn ‘em up. He stomped on bugs, too. I suppose he just had a natural passion for that sort of thing, he just… graduated to people.
…
Thank you for your time, Mr. Clockman.
. . .
COMMUNITY LEADER, MARION CLOCKMAN, GONE MISSING
DO YOU HAVE AN ANSWER?
Dr. Lewis Schwartz
On August 23rd, Marion Clockman was reported missing by her husband, Mr. Clockman, when he woke up to an empty house and a trail of blood leading out the back door.
Marion Gates, a long-time resident of Backwater City and a loyal employee of Some Office Building, has had her absence felt. Several search parties have been organized for Marion. According to the Greeley Tribune (August 25th, section b.4), she had contacted her sister just before her disappearance and requested temporary housing while she attempted to leave her violent husband.
Detective Bradshaw requests that any and all civilians with information relating to the case must phone this number:
966-266
. . .
August 22nd
The Ordinary Man wakes up in the morning and stares at his reflection in the mirror for twenty minutes, wondering what configuration of his features could reign in an impending divorce from his wife, who has begun to spend an extra hour of her day at ‘book club.’
It’s gearing up to be another miserable day. Off I go, he thinks to himself, and scrubs at his face with the cold tap water until his skin stings.
He travels to work, and runs his tires over a broken beer bottle on Main Street.
“It’s to be expected,” sighs Ordinary Man, and removes his Ordinary Tire from the Ordinary Trunk and walks down to the nearest gas station to call a tow truck.
The Ordinary Man sits on the curb to call his boss, who eliminates him from the daily quota of tired men in coffee-stained ties who come in, Monday through Friday, to do Ordinary Paperwork that will eventually be shuttled off to several bosses, before it is thrown in a paper shredder by Elias McDonald, the CEO of Ordinary Office Supplies.
The Ordinary Man sits on the curb and watches the cars pass by. His face is weathered and leathery from years gone by in his stuffy, Ordinary Cubicle. Though he has long daydreamed of just one vacation, now that he has one, Ordinary Man simply has no idea what to do. He sits on his curb, stares at the pollution-streaked sky, and thinks.
He could go to the beach, but has no car to take him there. But he’s never liked the beach, anyway.
The gritty sand between your toes, the unpleasant moistness and the briny smell of the ocean, serving as a sewer and a grave for millions of years of prehistoric sea creatures… the sour smell of sunscreen and the fisherman’s wharf… he shudders. And just imagine the mess in his car.
The Ordinary Man waits for the tow truck. He digs as much pocket change out of the corners of his beige Toyota as he can. He shakes hands with the woman who charges him $255 to his credit card, and tells her to have a very pleasant day.
The starched pockets of his second-grayest-suit jingle with coins as he walks down to the bus station, and sits by a smudged window. He gives up his seat by the front window to a gnarled old woman. Consequentially, he finds himself sandwiched between his cloudy view of the second-grayest city in California and a five-year-old, who is currently spreading boogers on the underside of the cracked blue bus seats. He tips his hat to the bus driver, who stares straight ahead and maliciously murders stray beetles on the windshield with his wipers.
The Ordinary Man wanders around downtown. He has five dollars in his pocket, and takes it to the ice cream shop. He buys a sugar cone with a single scoop of strawberry ice cream. Out of the multitude of options, he has only tried vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry throughout his 52 and ⅕ years on the planet. He watches as the pink goop melts over the edge of his sausage-shaped fingers and onto the burning pavement below. His mouth feels coated in sugary wax.
He gives $3.75 to the homeless man on the corner. “I recommend you try Freddie’s Ice Cream Parlor,” he tells the tired-looking man. “Don’t buy the strawberry.” And with a smile and a practiced polite handshake, Ordinary Man returns to the bus. Craving routine, any routine, he takes the same seat on Route 76. He scratches a large OM in the condensation on the window, born from the humid, overcast weather. He extracts a sterilized Lysol wipe from the package in the left pocket of his suit, and neatly wipes it off.
He performs no feats of greatness that day, and trips once on the way home. “Typical,” he sighs, and pats new dirt around the daffodils he stumbled through. He knocks on the door to apologize to the neighbor.
Mr. Smith answers the door. He smells of Brylcreem and wart-preventative powder. His checkered pants have a hole in the knee. Ordinary Man notices pink high heels on the floor, neatly lined up just an inch apart from the assembly line of tennis shoes and loafers from Mr. Smith’s family. They are the same model he bought his wife for her birthday, which she received with a hollow smile and the remark, “They’re nice shoes.”
Ordinary Man is so crippled with guilt, he hands Mr. Smith a twenty-dollar bill recovered from his glove compartment. “I tripped over your daffodils,” he says, and returns home to sit in front of the television and wait for Tuesday.
The Ordinary Man may smell like Mary Ellen’s Ironing Spray, and he may be the physical embodiment of a bowl of bran cereal, a golf tournament, and the color Pantone 488 C, and his wife may be cheating on him. But he is still perhaps the dangerous man you will ever meet, and promptly forget.
. . .
August 27th, 1968
Interview with Det. Montgomery Bradshaw
I, personally, smell something up here. Johnny Boy just ain’t seem the type to kill someone just like that. Knew ‘em since we were lil’ tykes, and I don’t think I heard ‘im say three durn words the whole time.
Is Johnny a suspect?
We ain’t got enough crap in the hole to make an arrest. But with this sorta thing, what with the typical placement of the body, angle of th’ knife… it was probably a crime o’ passion, and that’s cause of a family member mosta the time.
. . .
Testimonies From Marion’s Colleagues
August 31st, 1968
I’ll say she was some *******. That’s right! Yessiree, Marion sure did make a few enemies while working here. Since September of ‘66, I think? Lo from Town Statistics wasn’t a fan, and neither was Shirley. Secretary, of course. Poor woman had to share a desk with Marion, the old bag. Oh, and Richard. They weren’t fans of each other.
-Robert Arnold, PhD
I didn’t have no goddamn problem with the broad, you hear! Robert’s just a ******’ *******! So kiss my ***! I didn’t think much of her, sure, ‘cause she was always runnin’ her mouth about how goddamn ******’ great she was. Never bothered me all that much, though. And I was at my ma’s house for her birthday when she, uh, passed! So you tell them coppers that if they come knockin’ at yer door.
-Richard Bixby
She was fine at filing paperwork, I guess.
-William Maxton, CEO
I think Marion was never particularly unpleasant; maybe a bit disagreeable, but all in all, a fairly decent woman. Of course, she and I never worked very closely. I’m in the thanatological statistics department, and she worked in the secretarial wing of population statistics.
-Lo Warner, PhD
. . .
August 26th
Blood darkened the doorstep of the Ordinary Man’s home after the night he couldn’t remember. It dripped from the walls and stained the carpets with blooms of deep rose red.
“That’s odd,” he said, and went to work.
For two days, his wife had been missing. He filed a short report with the police, and assumed that she had run away after many days of threatening impending divorce. And so he left a box of her possessions on the neighbor’s doorway at approximately 2:46 in the morning after a regrettable night of drinking approximately 2.15 ‘party-size’ bottles of wine, and waited for the divorce papers to arrive.
His wife then showed up, limp and dead as a doornail, on the carpet of his entryway. A knife stuck out of her heart. A sickening gurgle of blood protruded from her mouth, once, twice, and dribbled to the ground.
The Ordinary Man had yet to clean it up. Based on the angle of the blade, he assumed a suicide, and shrugged the shoulders of his Third-Cleanest Suit. He called the police, requested that the body be moved, and waited for a hazmat crew. Nothing. By the end of the day, the blood only thickened on the floor and dried the fibers together, and the Ordinary Man began to consider the negative emotional aspects of coming home after a long day of punching holes in paperwork to a room soaked in blood. It was most dispiriting.
He waited all night for the police officers.
Nothing.
He waited in the morning for five minutes, until the sweat under his armpits grew too pungent to allow himself to stare at the gape-mouthed face of his wife for another minute. Once so beautiful, now nauseating.
That evening, he began to feel panic settle over his chest; which had been numb for so many years, he had nearly forgotten what it was to feel beyond a dull thrum of regret. He realized how quickly he could be made a suspect. He pictured, with growing anxiety, the gaunt face of Montomery Bradshaw, the pasty face like candle wax of Detective Marshall, and the click of metal handcuffs. “Who knew? That ol’ rascal - Johnny Boy, I never did peg ya for a criminal!”
He dragged the body to his Toyota, now more beige than it seemed it had been, and drove with white knuckles past each flower-lined white house on the block. Cookie-cutter, cookie-cutter, each one more colorless than the last.
He drove to the river. Ever so quietly, he listened, with his Ordinary Ears poked up, for the whooping sounds of teenagers. He glanced around with bags as large as his Ordinary Eyes, watching for headlights.
And into the river went Marion.
. . .
TRAGIC AND MADNESS IN COLORADO- LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS STRUCK DEAD!
DO YOU HAVE AN ANSWER?
Dr. Lewis Schwartz
The cold, icy hand of death struck Backwater City, CA on the evening of August 26th, 1968. Marion Gates, missing for three days, was found dead at the bottom of the Colorado River. “I coulda sworn my water tasted funny,” testifies Tessa Burns, a housewife who lives nearby the scene of the crime.
The gory details of the case have not been released by the police. According to the Backwater Tribune (August 25th, section b.4), Marion had contacted her sister and requested temporary housing while she attempted to leave her husband, who she claimed was prone to violent fits of rage. This description does not match Johnny Clockman, the quiet man from the paper factory born and raised in Backwater City.
Bradshaw requests that any and all civilians with information relating to the case must phone this number:
966-266
. . .
August 27th
No birds twittered down the street.
This was the Ordinary’s Man first feeling in the pit of his stomach (which had begun to bulge with middle age; tragically only for his wife, since, after all, Ordinary Man felt almost nothing) that something was very wrong.
The paperboy arrived exactly 16 seconds off his average time. The Ordinary Man tasked disapprovingly, wondered when the rest of the world would succumb to a soulless schedule and stop struggling for a ‘purpose,’ and strolled out to collect the newspaper. The stale smell of freshly cut grass, car exhaust, and dust greeted him. Excellent. Just the way he liked it.
He saw the newspaper clipping.
It’s to be expected, he thought. When this did nothing to dull the anxiety that gnawed at his stomach, he continued to comfort himself: They have Detective Bradshaw on the case. He’s a guldurn numbskull. They’ll make a halfhearted attempt and close the case within a week. But not even the cold comfort of logic could ease his worries.
A deep, dark stormcloud rolled over the matching angular rooftops that sat in rows like gravestones across Backwater City. Sometimes, the Ordinary Man sat and watched each even row of triangles until his eyes burned with the image wherever he looked and was sure that he would go insane.
The Ordinary Man sighed and turned to walk back inside. Just next door, standing by his mailbox with his stomach bulging through a thin dresshirt, Mr. Smith was placing a package out for delivery. In his right hand, he cradled a pair of pink high heels.
“Ho there, neighbor!” he waved jubilantly. The shoes dangled limply from his sausage-like fingers. “I meant to ask - these are your wife’s shoes, aren’t they?”
Slowly, the Ordinary Man nodded.
“Yes. Well. Curious.” Mr. Smith scrutinized the high heels with bushy eyebrows pushed together. “I found them just outside my house today. No explanation why, and no note either, from what I could see. They were on the sidewalk, pointed-” he stuck out a finger, rigidly angled towards the Ordinary Man’s front door “-that way.”
After work, the Ordinary Man raced home, showing more emotion in the fearful click-clack-click-clack of his loafers on the driveway than he had on his wedding day. Briefcase and hat gone flying from the force, he skidded to a stop on the sidewalk, ten feet before the innocent pair of shoes that sat, curled upwards at the ends and pointed towards the Ordinary Man’s front door.
It was quiet in the neighborhood. No one was around to see…
The odder sort of things that happened in the world.
But there it was, plain as can be. The high heels, after having been returned to the Ordinary Man by Mr. Smith, tossed in the garbage can, and the lid duct taped shut, had moved three cracks in the sidewalk closer to the house.
. . .
That evening, the Ordinary Man had one beer and listened to the radio on his porch. The Cardinals were losing. He had not realized that he’d crushed the can until he felt liquid dripping onto his hands from the cinch in the plastic.
Sighing, he shuffled to the bathroom. The light fixture above the bathroom sink swung gently, though no breeze blew through the small, stale house. Red-rimmed eyes, saggy face, just enough pudge to reciprocate self-loathing, but not quite enough to make him noticeable. The Ordinary Man sighed, wading just below water in a gray pool of melancholy, and dunked his hands in the tap water to wash his face.
The faucet, whose water source came from the Backwater City River, ran red.
. . .
Detective Montgomery Bradshaw, third of his name, second of his title, was admiring his reflection in the glass doors of Willy’s Food & Drug, smudgy with smashed bug carcasses.
Goddamn, he thought smuggly, and smoothed the coiffe of thin, graying hair on his scalp.
He finger-gunned the lipstick-encased woman at the front counter, patted the janitor on the back, and glanced inconspicuously at his own reflection whenever the opportunity arose. He strolled around the back in search of the cigarette rack - and there he found Johnny.
Good ol’ Johnny Boy. What a little goody-two-shoes. Throughout many years of schooling together and thirty-odd years of running into each other at neighborhood barbeque’s, as well as Johnny Jr.’s frequent run-ins with law enforcement, Monty’s most prominent memory of Johnny was squealing on him for leaving a thumbtack on the Principal’s chair.
Johnny stood in front of the refrigerator, lugging a pack of water bottles over his shoulder. He nodded a bleak hello to Monty. He was oddly disheveled for a Tuesday night, with a scruffy face and a stain of indeterminable origin on his dress suit.
“Johnny boy!” Detective Montgomery, so damn cool, as he was, clapped Johnny on the back and stopped midway into an awkward hug to straighten his hair. Absolutely flawless. A goddamn miracle on Earth. This, fellas, is what the good God intended. “How are you?”
“Getting by.” He then considered this. Monty watched as he mentally buttoned his lip. “Doing quite well,” he corrected mechanically, as sense of duty overrode him.
“So sorry to hear about Marion.” Johnny reeked of cheap beer and poorly masked sweat. He nodded robotically. “Me’n the guys down at the station have been doing all we can to find out which bastard did it.”
“Wonderful,” he said hollowly.
“Well.”
“Have a pleasant evening, Montgomery.”
“‘Pleasant evening,’” he mocked, and cackled, slapping Johnny roughly on the back. He winced at the force.
. . .
August 30th
The Ordinary Man felt sweat running down the back of his neck.
Marion had - someone - Marion’s shoes had been moving approximately two concrete squares per day. They grew closer to the front porch. Slowly, slowly, though no wind, rain, and hail tore through Backwater City, the pink satin began to peel from the tough skeleton of the shoe, and Marion’s shoes curled up more at the ends. Surely, no vandalism had come to pass. This was, after all, Backwater City - where the sun always shone like a prop in the sky, and the people seemed to pick their clothes from dollhouses.
Sometimes, the Ordinary Man felt himself questioning why. Why this horrible little hole, where even nature managed to grow in a cutesy pattern? Why this house, this family, this job, these decisions? Why, why, why?
It drove him mad sometimes.
He had measured the distance from the shoes now and the front door. Tonight, according to his calculations, was the night that Marion would cross just one inch over the threshold of 123 Pleasant St.
He feared a great many things.
He stood against the front door with a butcher knife clutched in his hands. He waited for a sign - knocking at the door, footsteps, Marion’s sharp, nagging voice back to torment him again - and heard nothing.
In time, his grip relaxed on the knife. Of course, there was nothing. This was, after all, Backwater City - where nothing new ever grew, where nobody came and nobody left.
Unfortunately, neither had Marion.
Tap… tap… tap.
The Ordinary Man had been preparing for this moment in his nightmares. He swung open the door, cinched his eyes shut until they burned from the pressure, and blindly stabbed at the air. A scream, a thump, and once again, Marion was no more. Only faint groaning in pain.
He relaxed, dropped the knife, and opened his eyes.
Two glassy, cold eyeballs stared back at him; those of the paperboy.
. . .
“THIS SORT OF THING… DOES NOT HAPPEN IN BACKWATER CITY.”
By Louis Schwartz
On the evening of August 30th, 1968, Elias Micheal Brown (13) was discovered dead in the local river after he was reported missing by his mother at 8:59 a.m.
The young boy’s body was left in similar circumstances as that of the recently deceased Marion Clockman. He had been brutally stabbed to death and left in a riverbank. Several suspects have been observed due to footprints left in the mud at the crime scene, as well as a single glove. The most prominent suspect, who has been seen with this article of clothing, is local pencil salesman Johnny Clockman.
. . .
The Ordinary Man sat in his car. He stared down the road, with cars zooming past and pedestrians waving hello. His suit and tie were rumpled. He remembered… yes, now he remembered.
Two and some-fraction bottles of wine, a knife, and one time too many he was told to pick up his socks, unload the dishwasher… something. The Ordinary Man, for the first time in a 27-year marriage (with each minute more miserable and racked with regret than the last) snapped.
Marion was dead, as was the paperboy.
It was time to go to work.
. . .
Goddamn flawless, thought Montgomery for the 773rd time that year. He nodded his approval at his dreadfully adequate reflection in the rearview mirror, and slammed the door shut with some goddamn style.
“Let’s get the bastard, fellas,” he said to the two other cops, neither of which were under his command. Sunglasses in one hand and handcuffs in the other, he burst through the door with his arms spread wide for the applause that never came. He was met with a pleasant wave from one secretary, and the retraction of the second secretary’s neck and a reproachful look. Montgomery, a self-proclaimed ‘1968 official ladies’ choice,’ tended to have that effect on people.
As he burst through the second set of doors, Montgomery held out the handcuffs and shook them threateningly. “JOHNNY BOY!!” he bellowed.
The man’s head snapped up, and he met his fate at first with bloodshot eyes and pasty skin, and then with a look of acceptance. He held out his hands as his coworkers began to whisper. The chink of metal, the panicked conversations, and the sound of Johnny’s shabby shoes rubbing across the carpet broke the quiet.
“What on Earth is going on?” asked Mr. Williams. No one answered, except to shush him.
Detective Montgomery nodded triumphantly as Johnny’s rights were read aloud. He set his foot on the desk, and, imagining a supersized cape billowing out behind him. Goddamn, they love me, he thought, grinning sleazily at the horrified citizens around him. Another crime solved. Goddamn, Monty, you deserve a raise, you handsome sunuvagun.
Johnny glared as he walked away. Montgomery, standing as he was, took no notice.
Thanks so much for reading, guys! Gimme some upvotes and constructive criticism in the comments :)