Seeing Red, page 28
"I heard him barking." He looked down and away. "Saw you kick the slats out." His words billowed toward me in minty clouds; he was tying on a nice, out-of-focus afternoon drunk. "You said you didn't have no pets."
It was an accusation: If you hadn't lied, this would not have happened.
I felt obligated to be pissed off, but my soul wasn't really in it. My need to know was stronger. "Sorry but look, you mentioned wildcats coming out of the hills. Or bears. Maybe I'm no authority on wildlife feeding habits, but what happened was ... " I flashed on Brix's corpse again and my voice hitched. "That was far beyond killing for food."
"I didn't see it." His voice wasn't a full slur. Not yet, but soon. "Woke me up. But I didn't see it. I'm glad I didn't. That part I don't fancy, sir." He scratched an eyebrow. "I think y'all should leave. Go."
"You mean leave Point Pitt?"
"Move elsewhere. Don't live here." He took a long drag on his glass and grimaced, as though choking down cough medicine. "See what happens? This ain't for boys like you, with your fag hairdos and your little Japanese cars and your satellite TV ... aahhh, Christ..."
Ormly loomed behind him, recording all the pain with oddly sad eyes, so much like a dog himself.
A cloudy tear slipped down Dunwoody's face, but his own eyes were clear and decisive as they looked from me to the north. "Go home," he said. "Just go home, please." Then he shut the door in my face.
Dinner was flavorless, by rote. Suzanne had tried to nap and only gotten haggard. July told me she missed Brix.
After bestowing my customary bedtime smackeroo, lilly asked again about getting another pet right now. Her mom had run the same idea past me downstairs. Between them I'd finally be goaded into some reparation.
Suzanne reached for me as soon as I hit my side of the bed. She had already divested herself of clothing, and her movements were brazen and urgent. She wanted to outrun the last twenty-four hours in a steambath of good therapeutic fucking. Her nerves were rawed, and close to the surface; she climaxed with very little effort and kept me inside her for a long, comforting while. Then she kissed me very tenderly, ate two sleeping pills, and chased oblivion in another direction.
My foot felt as if I had stomped on a sharpened pencil. I hobbled to the bathroom, pretending I was Chester in Gunsmoke. The dressing was yellowed from drainage and shadowed with dry brown blood. It gave off a carrion odor. I took my time washing and swabbing and winding on new gauze. I was still pleasantly numb everywhere else.
There was a low thrumming, like that of a large truck idling on the street outside. I felt it before I actually heard it. I checked the window across from the bathroom door, but there was nothing, not even Ormly making his uniformless predawn rounds. With my Bay City paranoid's devotion to ritual, I hobbled downstairs and jiggled all the locked doors. The boarded-up plant nook was secure. I sneaked a couple of slugs of milk straight from the carton. Ulcer maintenance.
July's room was on the far side of the bathroom. When I peeked stealthily in, the vibrational noise got noticeably louder.
Triplechecking everything constantly was as much a habit of new parenthood as my "security insecurity." July was wound up in her Sesame Street sheets. I decided to shut the window, which was curtained but half-open.
The sheet-shape was grotesque enough to suggest that July's entire platoon of stuffed animals was bunking with her tonight. I'd tucked in Wile E. Coyote myself. No more Brix. My throat started to close up with self-pity. I crept closer to plant a sleeptime kiss on July's temple—another parental privilege, so Suzanne told me. lilly's hair was just beginning to shade closer to the coloring of my own.
The low, fluttering noise was coming from beneath her sheets. And something smelled bad in the room. Perhaps she had soiled herself in sleep.
Hunched into July's back was a mass of oily black fur as big as she was. At first my brain rang with a replay of Brix's horrifying inside-out death. The thing spooning with my daughter had one fat paw draped over her sleeping shoulder, and was alive. And purring.
I had the sheet peeled halfway down to reveal more of it when it twisted around and bit me on the wrist.
I took one panicked backward step, jerking away. Ally's plush brontosaurus was feet-up on the floor; I stumbled over it, savaging my injured foot and crashing, sprawl-assed, down on Brix's rug, which smelled doggish and was dusted with his red hair. I had to get up, fast, tear the thing from her back, get the shotgun, to -
I tried to chock my good leg under me and could not. Both had gone thick and unresponsively numb. Then, shockingly, warmth spread at my crotch as my belly was seized by a sudden and powerful orgasm. My arms became as stupid as my legs. Then even my neck muscles lost it, and my forehead thunked into Brix's rug. And I came again.
And again.
Within seconds it was like receiving a thorough professional battering. I was having one orgasm for every three beats of my heart. My useless legs twitched. Saliva ran from the corner of my mouth to pool in my ear; even my vocal cords were iced into nonfunction. And while I lay curled up on the floor, coming and shuddering and coming, the creature that had been in bed with my daughter climbed down to watch.
Its eyes were bronze coins, reflecting candlefire. I thought of the thing I had seen monitoring me from the tree on my first day as a Point Pitt resident.
It was bigger than a bobcat, stockier, low-slung. The fur or hair was backswept, spiky-stiff and glistening, as though heavily lubricated. Thick legs sprouted out from the body rather than down, making its carriage ground-gripping and reptilian. I heard hard leather pads scuff the floor as it neared; saw hooked claws, hooded in pink ligatures, close in on my face.
It was still purring. The head was a cat's, all golden eyes and pointed felt ears, but the snout was elongated into a canine coffin shape. The chatoyant pupils were X-shaped, deep-glowing crosscuts in the iris of each eye, and they widened like opening wounds to drink me in. It yawned. Less than a foot from my face I saw two bent needle fangs, backed by triangular sharkish teeth in double rows. Its breath was worse than the stink of the congealed bandage I had stripped from my foot.
One galvanic sexual climax after another wrenched my insides apart. I was dry-coming; about to ejaculate blood. The creature dipped its head to lick some spittle from my cheek. Its tongue was sandpapery.
I had to kill it, bludgeon its monster skull to mush, blast it again and again until its carcass could hold no more shot. I orgasmed again. I could barely breathe.
It ceased tasting me and the hideous eyes sparked alive, hot yellow now. It padded back to the bed and leaped silently up. July remained limp. I didn't even know if she was already dead or not.
It looked, to make sure I could see. Then it settled in, gripping lilly's shoulders from above with its claws and licking her hair. It opened its mouth. Cartilage cracked softly as its jawbones separated, and the elastic black lips stretched taut to engulf the top of her head.
It sensed how much I hated it. Hate glittered back at me from those molten gash-eyes—my own hate, absorbed, made primal and total, and sent back to me.
Of hate, it knew.
My traitorous body continued its knifing spasms, and tears of pain blurred the view that I was incapable of commanding my eyelids to block out. The lips wormed forward, side-to-side, the slanted teeth seating, then pulling backward. The mouth elongated to full bore and the eyes fixed in a forward stare, glazed as though intoxicated by this meal.
With a mindless alien malice, it looked like it was smiling.
Blackness sucked me down before I could hear the abrasive, porcelain sound of those teeth grinding together, meeting at last through the pale flesh of my little girl's throat.
Moonlight delineated the window in blue-white.
I tried to sit up and rub my face. I was sweat-soaked, and lacquered in scales of dry semen. My balls were crushed grapes. Half my mind tried to wheedle me back into unconsciousness, begging to flee from what it had recorded. The less craven half had kicked me until I awoke, feeling like a frayed net loaded with broken bones, unable to stand or walk. I crawled on my belly to July's bed. Lowering groans slipped from my throat.
I've seen snakes eat their prey. I didn't have to see what was left in July's bed to know what had happened. But to get my legs back, and finish the work begun this night, I forced myself to look.
I took it all in without even a gasp. Only the drapes whispered furtively together, unable to remain still or quiet.
So much blood, blackening the Sesame Street sheets. Her tiny outthrust hand was speckled with it, and cold to the touch. Her pillow was a saturated dark sponge.
I slumped and vomited into my own lap. Nothing much came up as my guts were rent, the sore muscles pulling themselves to tatters. My hand went out and skidded into something like warm gelatin next to the bedpost.
It was the skin of our visitor, piled there like an enormous scalp, greasy black spines rooted in an opaque membrane. It reminded me of Brix's empty pelt. Here was the broad, flat sheath of the back; here, the sleeve of each leg. The reversed tissue was coated with a kind of thick, veined afterbirth that smelled like shit and rotten hamburger. My stomach clenched at the hot stink, and the pain almost put me under again. [swallowed a surge of bile and held.
It was slippery, as heavy as a waterlogged throw rug when I dragged it out of the room.
I knew there was a handful of speed and painkillers waiting for me in the bathroom. I filled the basin from the cold tap and immersed my head. I stared into the clean white gorge of the toilet and decided not to heave.
Suzanne was still safe in the depths of drugged sleep, where there are no true nightmares. On wobbly wino's feet I locked the balcony doors. The bedroom door had a two-way skeleton-key lock that could be engaged from the outside.
My Levi's jacket and shoes were downstairs on the sofa. And the shotgun was where it had been patiently waiting since the day we moved in.
Dunwoody's house was just up the hill.
My shoulder stung as the Remington's recoil pad kicked it, and the works on Dunwoody's back door, mostly shit, blew away to floating wood chaff and fused shrapnel. The door skewed open on its upper hinge, and the inside knob rebounded from the kitchen wall with a clacking cueball noise. It spun madly in place until its energy was used up. The echo of the blast returned softly from the hills.
Two rooms down a narrow hallway, Dunwoody sat watching a black-and-white television that displayed only test-pattern bars. The screen bounced rectangles of light off his wire-rim glasses and made his old-fashioned undershirt glow blue in the darkness. He turned to look at the intruder stepping through the hanging wreckage of his back door, his gaze settling with resigned indifference on the twelve-gauge in my hand. He sighed.
My right wrist was throbbing as though fractured; mean red coronas of inflammation had blossomed around the twin punctures there, and I didn't know how many more gunshots it could stand before breaking. The smell of dry puke swam richly through my head, chased by the fetor of my prize. My eyes were pinpricks; the black capsules were doing their dirty work in the solvents of my stomach. It was the dope as much as the backwash of nausea that made me giddy—dark, toxic waves slopping up on a polluted beach, then receding.
Stiff-legged, lead-footed, I moved into the house. I knew where I was going and what to do when I arrived. My life had a purpose.
I jacked back the slide to reload, retrieved the reeking mess of shed skin with my free hand, and clumped forward. I was going to nestle the barrel right on the bridge of Dunwoody's thin hickory nose. He just sat there, watching my approach. There were no hidey-holes, and Ormly was probably out cruising at this time of night.
"You look foolish with that pumpgun, city boy."
"Foolish enough to spread your reedy old ass all over the wallpaper" My voice was dry and coarse, a rusted thing.
"You want all kind of answers." He spoke like the keeper of knowledge and wisdom, shifting in his easy chair with a snort of contempt. "Big-city know-it-all finds out he don't know it all. Don't know shit." He gulped schnapps from a fingerprinty glass.
I couldn't buy his casual disdain for the gun. Perhaps he thought I wouldn't use it. To dash that little misconception from his mind, I stepped into the room and brought the shotgun to bear.
It tore violently out of my grasp like a runaway rocket, skinning my index finger on the trigger guard. Momentum yanked me the rest of the way into the room, and I got my crippled foot down to keep from falling. It wasn't worth it.
Ormly had been stationed in ambush behind the doorway and had acted with a speed startling for his bulk and presumed intellect. He stood there with the shotgun locked upside down in his bulldozer grip, while Dunwoody watched drops of blood from my hand speckle the floor like small change.
"Get Mister Taske a cloth for his hand, Ormly." Each order was slow, metered, portioned out at rural speed. "Take care of his pumpgun; I'm sure he paid a lot of money for it. And bring me my bottle. You might as well have a seat, Mister Taske. And we'll talk."
The tar-colored pelt had slithered from my grasp and piled up in an oily heap on the floor. It slid around itself, never settling, as if it refused to give up the life it once contained. Dunwoody looked at it.
"It's stronger now, quicker. At its best, since it dropped a hide. Don't gawk at me like I'm nuts. You saw it the first day you was here, and you didn't pay it no mind."
"I thought it was ... some kind of cat' I stammered lamely. "Mountain lion, or
"Yeah, well, you know so goddamn much about mountain cats, now don't you?" he said with derision. "You said you didn't have no pets, no guns. See what happens? It ain't no cat."
Jesus. Anybody with two dendrites of intelligence could see that it weren't no cat. Arguing that now would only keep the old man off the
track. I decided to shut up, and he seemed satisfied that I was going to let him talk without any know-it-all city-boy interruptions. Ormly lumbered back with the schnapps, which Dunwoody offered to me perfunctorily. Let's retch! my stomach announced, and I waved the bottle away.
Ormly backed into his corner like the world's largest Saint Bernard sentry, keeping his eyes on me.
"Ormly was whip-smart." Dunwoody began. "He was my Primmy's favorite. Then she had Sarah. Little Sarah. You'da seen that baby girl, Mister Taske, she woulda busted your heart left and right, she was so perfect. Like your little girl."
"July's dead." It was shockingly easy to say it so soon. "It that
thing, it -"
"I know. And I know you think me and Ormly is up to something, squirreled away up here, that we're somehow responsible. We ain't. I'd never hurt a little girl, and Ormly's never harmed no person nor animal. It's just ... there's a certain order of things, here?"
I had begun watching the ugly shed skin, still yielding, relaxing. It might reinflate and attack.
"Primmy and I kept a henhouse. We loved fryers and fresh eggs.
One day I went out and all our chickens had been killed." The drama replayed behind his eyes. "You know how chickens run around after you cut off their heads, too dumb to know they're dead? Christ almighty. Twenty chickens, and half of them still strutting around when I got there. Without heads. It came down that night to eat the heads. And left the chickens. We'd been living in Point Pitt for two months."
My brain dipped sickeningly toward blackout. It was an almost pleasing sensation. Ebb tide of the mind; time to go to sleep. I sat down hard in the chair next to Dunwoody's and swallowed some schnapps without even tasting it.
"I had two hounds, Homer and Jethro, and an old Savage and Fox double-barrel, not as fancy as that pumpgun you got, but mean enough to stop a runaway truck dead. I laid up in the chicken coop the next night. 'Long about two in the morning, it stuck its head in and I let it have both barrels in the face. It was as close as you are to me. It yowled and ran off into the woods, and I set Homer and Jethro on it. Next morning. I found them. That thing took two loads of double-ought buckshot in the face and still gutted both my dogs. Ormly loved them old mutts."
I remembered the sound it made, the ground-glass screech. I didn't have to ask whether Dunwoody's dogs had been found with their heads intact.
Dunwoody cleared his throat phlegmatically and hefted himself out of the chair, to pry open a stuck bureau drawer behind the TV set. "Next night, it came back again. Walked into my home bold as you please and took my baby Sarah. It was slow getting out the window. Sluggish, with its belly full. I shot it again like a fool. Didn't do no good. Let me show you something."
He handed across a brown-edged, fuzzy piece of sketchbook paper. "Careful with it. It's real old"
It was a pencil rendering of the Dunwoody house, done in a stark and very sophisticated woodcut style. The trim and moldings stood out in relief. The building was done in calm earth tones, complimented by trees in full bloom. The forest shaded up the hillside in diminishing perspective. The strokes and chiaroscuro were assured. The drawing deserved a good matte and frame. I tilted it toward the light of the television and made out a faded signature in the lower right, done with a modest but not egocentric flourish.
0. Dunwoody.
He handed me a photograph, also slightly foxed, in black-andwhite with waffled snapshot borders. A furry diagonal crease bisected a robustly pregnant woman packed into a paisley maternity dress. She had the bun hairdo and slight bulb nose that had always evoked the 1940S for me—World War II wives, the Andrews Sisters, all of that. Hugging her ferociously was a slim, dark-haired boy of nine or so, smiling wide and unselfconsciously. He had his father's eyes, and they blazed with what Dunwoody would call the smarts.
I tried to equate the boy in the photo with Ormly's overgrown, cartoonish body, or to the imbecilic expression on his face as he stood placidly in his corner. No match.
"Night after it took baby Sarah, it came back. We were laying to bushwhack it outside. It flanked us. Ormly came in for a drink of water, and there it was, all black and bristly and eating away on his mamma. He couldn't do nothing but stand there and scream; all the starch had run right out of him. He looked kinda like you do right now. I ran back in. That was the first time it bit me."
