The Radar Man

It's easy for adults to forget how stressful it is to be a kid. The world of a child is littered with tricky societal landmines, and unending humiliation awaits any who detonates them. Back when Dustin was a kid, he faced all of the normal problems, such as the time he got a hilariously bad haircut the night before class picture day, or the time that Jay Perkins didn't invite him to his big end-of-the-school-year sleepover.

But Dustin had real problems too. His parents were rarely at home after he got home from school, sometimes not coming home until he was already asleep. They seemed to think, at twelve years old, he was old enough to use the phone and make his own dinner, so Dustin spent most days and many nights looking after himself. When the pattern first developed, he fought against it, but he eventually got used to being alone.

He felt unafraid for the most part, but that changed the summer that Dustin met the Radar Man.

The kids in Dustin's neighborhood called him the Radar Man because he always seemed to know exactly when and where to find kids at their most vulnerable. That's how the stories went, anyway. Between rounds of "Hide and Go Seek", Dustin's friends would sit in a circle on random Ninebark Street driveways and discuss Raleigh's resident madman.

The Radar Man was a kidnapper, the neighborhood kids all agreed on that much, but his purpose remained a point of contention. Any semblance of real world terror was still unknown to Dustin and his friends, so they derived explanations from the books and movies that scared them the most. The threat of devil worshipers and cannibals loomed large in their young imaginations, so the most popular theories fated the stolen children to satanic rituals or as the main course in horrible culinary extremities.

Nobody knew the Radar Man's real name. Dustin's friend Mike had an older brother who said the mysterious drifter had escaped from a mental asylum. The Radar Man wasn't very old, but he was old enough to have lived through a gruesome past...and old enough to pick up and disappear if things got bad again. Mike's brother laughed after he told them that, but Dustin and Mike later agreed that it was all true. They didn't know how else to put it except that things were sure to go bad for at least one unlucky kid that summer.

Neither Dustin or any of his friends knew anybody that had actually come face to face with the Radar Man, but everyone seemed to know what he looked like: thin and weathered, dirty blond hair. He wore a brown cowhide jacket all the time, even if it was a hundred degrees outside. The Radar Man drove a white pickup truck, a popular vehicle in those days, and seemed to know the streets of Raleigh better than any of the kids' parents or even the cops. All summer long, a white truck driving down Ninebark St. would cause them to bolt into their houses or scale backyard fences with an intensity not mustered even for royal battle bouts of "Capture the Flag".

However, as you can imagine, they began to slow after a few weeks of jumping at shadows, shoulders began to relax, and the never-ending discussion about the Radar Man was replaced by idle thoughts and playground gossip. Also, as the summer sun swelled, the unrelenting heat had become nearly unbearable. Most of the kids did their best to stay cool with daily trips to the YMCA's swimming pool, others found air conditioned comfort at the movies. For Dustin's part, heat never bothered him much, and he would ride his bike out to Brier Creek whenever cabin fever itched under his skin. Quite often, in other words.

Today, Brier Creek is nothing more than a tiny stream surrounded by gated communities and luxury shopping centers, but in those days it was still dense with trees and wildlife. Dustin often rode his bike through the woods for miles without seeing a single sign of humanity. However, he was careful to watch out for other signs of life, such as poisonous snakes or those thick, gigantic spider webs that disgusted him like nothing else.

It was on an especially hot day, there in the woods, that Dustin saw the white pickup truck just as he had in his nightmares. It was parked in a clearing no more than a football toss away. Dustin gasped and his heart climbed into his throat.