If the school principal, or the teachers, or parents, or any of the other kids knew, they never mentioned it and probably wouldn’t be believed anyway. Judy and I know for a fact Jason the janitor lives in Tacoma’s Woodbrook Middle School basement. Not only that, his mother lives there, too. The janitor is really old, at least 40, so that makes his mother ancient.
My name is Kathy. My best friend, Judy and I are on the school football team. We’re the fastest runners in our class and the only girls on any gridiron team in our whole district. The other girls don’t have much to do with us, and the boys even less, since we always show them up. Who needs them?
Being the only females at school for football practice, we have the girl’s locker room to ourselves, totally unsupervised and able to explore on our own, which we do that evening a little after 6 o’clock.
Judy hears a noise and sees light shining through the crack around this blocked door in the back corner of the equipment storage room. Together we quietly slide the cardboard boxes out of the way and slowly open the unlocked door.
The old dusty woman jumps from her meal as if trying to hide what she’s been eating. First startled, then frightened, she seems very nervous and quickly backs from us in small shuffling steps while wiping her hands on the front of her once white smock. Her mouth is smeared with her messy meal from a large rubber paint bucket. It looks to be a mixture of sausage links, cottage cheese, cauliflower with slices of yellow Jell-O covered pork roast, all drenched with much too much ketchup.
The food or the room or the woman or all of it combined smells like a wet dead dog we once found in the trash dumpster by the school playground. Her skin is so pale it looks powdery, like ashes. As she slowly moves towards us she mouths a raspy whisper, her breath smelling like green teeth and mustard.
“Girls, I need help! I’m being held prisoner by my son. Please get out of here and give this to the police” handing me a brown plastic wallet.
“Hurry, go now! He’s coming!”
We run out the room as f ast as we can, frantically through the locker room, across the hall and burst into the coach’s office, both of us ranting at once.
The police arrive after the coach asks us over and over as he searches the locker room if we are sure, but he can tell we are not making it up.
The police can’t locate the now missing door, call it a school kid prank, too much imagination. They did take the brown plastic wallet, though, containing the library card of Ronnie Temple, the 7th grader missing since his birthday last month.
The principal, teachers, parents and students treat us as oddballs or crazies or just weird. It’s not a good feeling, and makes us feel really eerie thinking about what happened.
…but not as eerie as it made us feel as we just left the football field after practice a moment ago, headed to the girl’s locker room and meet Jason the janitor in the hallway with his mop casually looking at us smiling with his mother’s green smile. Pointing toward the two red smeared white rubber paint buckets in the corner,
“Happy Halloween, Girls. Trick or Treat?”
Carl “Papa” Palmer of Old Mill Road in Ridgeway, Virginia, lives in University Place, Washington. He is retired from the military and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), enjoying life as “Papa” to his descendants and being a Franciscan Hospice volunteer.
PAPA’s MOTTO: Long Weekends Forever!
Poetry awards include Sally-Sue Hughes Memorial Award, DAVA, State Dept. of Florida Award, Veterans Voices T.H. Horton Award and Gladys Feld Helzberg Award.
