The Tennis Shoe Man

The Tennis Shoe Man

First printed in The Horror Show, Fall 1985

I never thought he was real. Even when I was a small child and my mother dressed me up in all manner of costumes to torment the neighborhood on Halloween, I didn’t believe in him.

My friends all believed (or told me they believed), but I refused to be sucked into their fantasies and I would fight to defend my right to disbelieve. I told anyone who would listen that it was a crock.

Even after tiny Jennifer Gonzalez was discovered on All Saint’s Day fifteen years ago with her pretty, little throat ripped jaggedly open and a hole in her chest the size of a grapefruit, I didn’t believe in the Tennis Shoe Man.

The nuns at school didn’t tell us much about what happened to Jenny, but even if they had, it would have been bullshit. They were all so full of it sometimes it ran out their ears. If I hadn’t known what happened, none of my classmates would ever have found out. I remember reading about Jenny in the paper even though my mother tried to hide it from me.

See, Dad didn’t really buy into my mother’s idea of “hiding things from his innocent eyes” so he purposely (I think), left the paper wide open in front of me in the den one night and went into the kitchen to get another beer. Dad didn’t give two farts in a rain barrel about my innocent eyes.

I devoured the article on Jenny’s murder and also every subsequent article published about it for the next three months. I uncovered all of what they thought were the gory details until the police finally abandoned their investigation and things settled back into normalcy.

They thought the guy who got Jenny was just some wandering pervert bent on getting his rocks off by murdering a pretty, little girl. Officer Dunlap of the Pitkin Police Department discovered at Jenny around 7 AM, the day after Halloween. Her parents had called the police the night before when Jenny didn’t come home at a reasonable time after trick or treating.

Officer Dunlap was a pretty good guy, I guess, except that he had a really huge wart on his forehead that looked like it was growing into a third ear. He died about ten years ago.

Oh, by the way… Jenny was killed about fifteen years ago when I was only eleven years old.

I was really full of hell back then. No only didn’t Jenny’s murder fail to put any fear in me, but the rest of them didn’t bother me much, either.

After Jenny, it seems like there was a kid killed each year on Halloween.

The year after Jenny bought it, Georgie Allen was knifed in the left eye and the blade tip broke off right in his brain. Poor, old Georgie didn’t last two seconds.

Then it was Susan Yelton. She was strangled with her own white, cotton panties. All of the girls at St. Vincent’s wore white, cotton panties. One of my friends, Jim Teplar, told me it was so you couldn’t see their teeth.

After Susan, it was Angel Patton and then a long line of kids. I lost track of a lot of the names when I finally made it to high school, but in every case, the kids all claimed it was the Tennis Shoe Man.

The Tennis Shoe Man got quite a reputation around Pitkin. Mothers and fathers raised holy hell every year for about a week before Halloween and then, sure as the world, some kid would be planted in the ground at Memorial Gardens a few days after. One year, they even managed to get Halloween cancelled; a feat that truly impressed me since I had no idea that city governments could take things off the calendar just because they wanted to.

Anyway, that didn’t last long since a kid got it that year, too, Halloween or no Halloween. The Tennis Shoe Man didn’t play favorites when it came to changes in the calendar. The year without Halloween, it was some grubby, little redheaded girl from the projects who put up one hell of a fight according to the police. They thought she had hurt the Tennis Shoe Man pretty badly, but it didn’t matter much in the end. The way I figure it, the only one who got hurt pretty badly in the end was the redheaded girl. She got her head whacked off at the roots. After a few years, I stopped reading what the newspapers had to say about the “grisly string of Halloween murders”. I wouldn’t even watch television news for at least two weeks after Halloween because the newscasters would always try to psychoanalyze the Tennis Shoe Man and make him out to be either a banker with a screw loose or a moron with a little bit of sense. The TV people never thought he might be a newscaster and the newspaper people never thought he might be a reporter.

Sometimes I think about how full of shit they all are and it reminds me of the nuns from St. Vincent’s. It drives me nuts.

I remember last year’s incident because the kid who got it was a classmate of my daughter’s and also because it was a strange deviation from the pattern.

Jere McDonald was the kid’s name and he was actually a year ahead of my Melanie at St. Vincent’s School. His father, Charlie McDonald, has a real estate brokerage in Pitkin; in fact, he sold me the house I live in now. It damn near killed him when Jere got it. There for a while, I felt pretty bad for old Charlie…until I remembered how I had to get the septic tank pumped two months after he sold me this house.

Anyway, Jere left his house on Sutton Street at about 6 PM on Halloween dressed as Michael Jackson. Why any kid would want to dress like that guy is a mystery to me, but Jere evidently thought he looked like a million dollars in gold bouillon with his sequined glove and pancake make-up. He had already candy-burglarized about half the houses in the neighborhood when someone wearing a pair of white, high-topped Converse sneakers led him off the beaten path.

When they found Jere the next morning, he had been beaten to a bloody pulp. One of his eyes had been ripped clean out of its socket and lay next to his head. The sequined glove was jammed into his mouth and a lot of the make-up had been rubbed off. He was lying with his head on the belly of a second body.

The second body belonged to Charlotte Phelan, a ninth-grader at Pitkin Junior High School who had chosen the wrong night to walk to her girlfriend’s house to study for an English test the next morning. Charlene hadn’t been disfigured at all. Unless you consider a broken neck a disfigurement.

For the first time in the history of this shitty, little town, the Tennis Shoe Man had hit the daily double. The police went berserk.

Instead of a weeks worth of their usual folderol, they didn’t calm down for almost a month. It was December before things got around to being almost normal and I was really getting pretty sick of all the hoopla going on around town.

And so, well, it’s Halloween night again and my Melanie will be going trick or treating for the first time. And I don’t mind telling you that I’m a little scared for her. She’s a very pretty, little girl and she’s going to be dressed as a princess (a costume I think is appropriate).

Anyway, I’m actually more than a little scared for her.

As a matter of fact, I’m so scared that I’m going to follow her around at a distance so she can’t see me.

Melanie’s just about ready to go now. She and two of her girlfriends are going to try to scare up a couple of Snickers bars around the neighborhood. Hopefully, nothing will go wrong. Maybe this year will be different, but somehow I doubt it.

There’s no sense fooling myself about that. As I sit here lacing up my white, high-topped Converse sneakers, I know that things haven’t changed around here in fifteen years.