Careful With That Axe, Eugene

When I was a little kid, my dad told me a story. He used to tell me lots of stories, many of them reinterpretations of Twilight Zone episodes or science fiction or horror short stories he'd read as a kid. This story he told, though, was about a song. This was when we still lived in England, so I couldn’t have been older than six. That song was Careful With That Axe, Eugene from the Ummagumma album by Pink Floyd. This was back when people actually listened to albums, btw.

I don’t know where the hell he came up with this story, but I remember it pretty well. Obviously, in retelling it, I added a lot of my own to it. It wasn’t a first-person narrative when he told it, and I added the parts about where the voices came from. But most of it is pretty much the same as the story he told me. There was a guy and a girl and Eugene, a big bearded man who lived in the mountains and drove a dirty brown jeep and killed people with an axe.

Anyway, here’s the story. I recommend listening to the song at some point as well. Not only because the story is about the song, but because it’s a crazy song, and you should know it if you haven’t heard it before.

OH, and the story has some violence and language that isn't nice. Just a heads up.

The Star is Screaming

Once a month, Eugene’s dirty brown jeep makes the twenty-mile trek down the mountain. It’s the only time anyone in town sees him, as far as I know. Always the first Saturday of the month.

My uncle Dan told me once that Eugene was a war vet, though I couldn’t tell you of which war. Honesty, I’d be hard-pressed to guess how old he is. Could be Vietnam. Could be Korea. Hell, it could be WWII, I don’t know. All I know is he been coming down the mountain in that same jeep for as long as I’ve been alive and he always looked the same. And he always had that same gnarly looking half blind mutt in the back of his jeep.

It’s hard to guess his age because his face is buried under his beard. A big, ugly bush of twisted gray hair. What little you can see is scarred and beat down lookin’.  And he stank like nobodies business.. You could always tell when Eugene had been to town because Dottie’s General Store stank like shit the rest of the day.

He comes down the mountain to sell his meat at Dottie’s. He always got venison and elk. Occasionally, bear or moose. Always something big and dead. He sells his meat, and he buys three or four cartons of Marlboros and a case of Wild Turkey. He gasses up his jeep and picks up his mail. Then he’s gone, back up the mountain. He doesn’t talk to nobody and nobody tries to talk to him. They know better. There aint no point. Eugene don’t even look at anyone, much less strike up a conversation.

The only reason I know his name is cause I talked to Darla at the post office. Eugene Stanford. She said that till bout twelve years ago, he’d get letters and magazines. Hunting magazines mostly. The letters was from someone in the city named Emily Stanford. Could be a daughter or a sister or even a wife. She didn’t know and I couldn’t even begin to speculate. But then, like I said, ‘bout twelve years ago the letters stopped and now all he gets is hunting magazine and stroke books. And video tapes. Darla didn’t know what kind of tapes, because they didn’t have no return address. Just plain brown paper. She could tell they were videos by shaking the package though.

I’ve only been up to his place once before, and that was by accident. I took my girl, Clarice, with me on a call up in the mountains bout four or five years ago. I used to drive a tow-truck and I got a call to come pick up a car that’d driven off the side of the road and got itself stuck hanging off the side of the mountain. We’d get prolly three or four of those calls a month at least. Almost never that far up though. It was an old Chevy Caprice. One of them 80s models like they used to use for cop cars. Some dummy had slid off the side of the road and gotten hung up on a tree. She’s lucky she didn’t fall the fuck down the cliff.

Usually I didn’t take Clarice, but I knew it was gonna be a hell of a long drive and I didn’t want to go alone.

We got a little lost. Well, I got a little lost. It aint that I don’t know my way around up there, it’s just that it’s easy to get turned around on the wrong road and not have enough room to get turned back the way you need to be facing.

The half ounce of grass we were burning up didn’t help none either, to tell you the truth.

It started getting dark and we still hadn’t found that car yet. Usually you can find em pretty quick. But this time we were havin’ trouble. I found a couple places where it looked like it might have gone off. Where a fence had been busted down or a set of tire tracks in the mud, but when I stopped to look, there wasn’t no car. Eventually we turned up into this long driveway, hopin’ to find someone with a phone so I could call back down the mountain and see if the person had left another message.

We cruised down this drive way that seemed to go on for half a fuckin’ mile. We finally get to the house. There’s an old as shit barn that’s hardly standing and this ramshackle little shotgun shack. The one of the first things we noticed were the cars. There must have been twenty cars parked up here. Most of em was rotted and rusted and dead. But there was some halfway decent lookin’ rides there too. I remember a perfect lookin’ yellow Mach 1 that looked like it’d had more than a few grand dropped into it. I couldn’t make sense of it. But even the nice ones looked like they hadn’t been driven in years. They weren’t even parked in any sort of order either. Just kinda left wherever they stopped.

Then I seen that beat up brown jeep. It’s parked up next to the house. Sure as shit it’s Eugene’s jeep. Clarice started getting’ all worked up and telling me to turn around. She knew as well as I did whose house this was. It wasn’t that she was afraid of Eugene. Nobody was really. It was just that it felt kind of wrong to be up here, seein’ more than Eugene ever meant to show anyone. I have to say I kind of felt the same way.

But I also needed a phone and this was the first place we seen in a half hour of drivin’ around in the friggin mountains.

I pulled around to the front of the house, next to Eugene’s jeep. The sun was goin’ down by this point and I was startin’ to get a little pissed at myself for gettin’ turned around as I had. I’d told the dummy that I’d be about an hour and a half. We were getting onto three hours by this point. But fuck her anyway. What the hell was she doin’ way the fuck up in the mountains to begin with?

So yeah, I parked next to Eugene’s truck and I got out. Clarice grabs my arm and does her best scared puppy face. She asks me, practically begs me, to just stay in the truck and drive back down the mountain. I tell her not to be stupid. There’s a lady waiting for us and if we don’t find her by night, she could freeze up here.

I pull away from Clarice and tell her to wait in the truck. It was already starting to get cold, so I grabbed my coat from the back and walked up to the door. Nobody answered when I knocked, so I called out, asking if anyone was home. Still no answer. I look back at the truck and I see Clarice, pleading with her eyes. It kind of pisses me off to tell you the truth. Sometimes she just doesn’t understand ‘bout responsibility.

Around back, I hear the sound of somethin’ chewin’. Then I see that fuckin’ ugly dog. It’s layin’ on the back porch, gnawin’ away on a big ass hunk of bone. Must’ve been from a bear or something. Big ass shoulder chunk or something. The dog stops chewin’ when it sees me. For a minute I thought it was gonna come after me, but it just sat there, lookin’ at me with them beady little half blind eyes.

That’s when I seen Eugene.

He’s standin ‘bout a hundred feet from the house, bare ass naked. He’s just standin there, his back to me. His big ass hairy back. Then I realize that he’s holdin’ an axe. He’s not only holdin’ an axe, but he’s apparently in the middle of choppin’ wood. Naked.

He brings the axe over his head and brings it down, splittin’ a log. His rolls jiggling with the swing. I can see that he’s bleedin’ from a few different places on his legs, presumably from hunks of splintered wood.

That’s when I turn to go back to the truck. The cars in the yard was weird. This was just fuckin’ trippy. I turn around, hopin’ he didn’t hear me. Fuck the lady in the Caprice. This shit isn’t worth it.

Then I hear him talking. At first I think he’s talking to me. I turn around and he’s still standing there, his back to me. Sets up another log and splits it. More wood splinters off and cuts his calf. Then I hear him talkin’ again. I don’t hear what he’s sayin’ but it sounds like he’s havin’ a conversation with nobody.

Clarice calls my name and I know she’s coming around the house. Fucking dumb bitch was supposed to stay in the truck. If only she’d stayed in the fucking truck like she was supposed to.

Eugene turns around and looks right at me. But it feels like he’s looking through me. Like I aint even there. All I can see is those eyes peeking out from behind the scraggly gray beard. And they’re looking right through me, burning dark with some kind of animalistic hatred. I see his lips moving. He’s still talking, muttering either to himself or whatever invisible person he was talkin’ to.

Then he’s comin’ at me, his massive stomach swinging with each step. I hear Clarice say ‘oh my god!’ and I hear Eugene muttering to himself. He’s sayin’ somethin like ‘beneath the lies, the star is screaming.’

But I hear somethin’ else too. I hear somethin’ right before he hits me with that fuckin’ axe and Clarice starts screamin’ her head off. I hear another voice. It’s like a voice in my head but I heard it with my ears too. A woman’s voice. Almost like I heard it from the trees and the air. The voice said, 'Careful with that axe, Eugene.'

And then he hit me. Right in the side of my chest. I almost couldn’t feel it. It felt like when you get socked in the stomach and all the air runs out of you and you can’t pull any back in, except without the pain of gettin’ punched. I tried to yell but all that would come out was a wheeze. I’m pretty sure he popped one of my lungs or something. And then Clarice started screaming.

And she’s screaming. And screaming.

I tried to get up but Eugene put his foot on my chest and pulled the axe out. Immediately, I felt blood spewing up my throat, and I still couldn’t breathe. It started to pour out of my mouth and nose. I turned and watched as Eugene went after Clarice. It didn’t take much. She turned to run but he grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the ground. I knew it was done then. I blacked out as he put the axe into her head.

When I woke up things was different. Clarice was with me. Her face was a little messed up from the axe and I had a hard time talkin’ because of the wound in my chest. But we know our place now. It’s kind of funny, because before I came up here, I used to think that Eugene must be the loneliest guy in the world. Livin’ up in the mountains all by himself, never talkin’ to no one.

But now I know better. He’s got plenty of people to talk to. He’s got us and a bunch more too. We all keep him company up here in the mountains. Even that dumb broad with the Caprice is here. I didn’t even notice her car when I pulled the truck up. We still don’t know much about Eugene and we don’t care. All we know is what he’s done. Done to us and done to others before us. And we remind him. All night we remind him and eventually, hopefully, he’s gonna realize what’s waitin’ for him when he finally does what’s right. Until then, we scream and we whisper and we never let him forget.

When someone else finds their way up here we do our best warn them off, but they never hear us until it’s too late. They always end up here behind the light with us. Behind the light of the star, screaming at Eugene with us, reminding him of what he done.