Eating Memories (15 page)

At last the invicta stopped, its antennae weaving questions. Morgan came forward slowly. The ant froze.

Putting his metal antennae towards the translucent red ones, Morgan touched it.

My wife left me, he thought.

The invicta stroked him back, not understanding, but talking of hives, of queens, of satisfaction. Morgan knew what it was really saying, that it knew Morgan was invincible. The invicta couldn’t stop him from killing for no reason; so it was giving him a reason not to kill.

To survive, the invicta had first learned not to wage war among themselves. The queens had learned to share hives. And now they had finally learned the difficult lesson of how to live with others.

Morgan caressed the slick, blank face so carefully that the metal never made a sound against the chitinous armor.

If he could tell the ant anything, it would be that he understood the pain of dead queens, barren nests.

The ant’s antennae fluttered, making scented, soft peace.

* * *

When Morgan maneuvered the robot to the exit where the recovery tools were waiting, Novotny took the control helmet off. “You didn’t get the queens.”

“No,” he said. He stood up and wiped the tear from his eyes. The front of his shirt was wet with them.

“I saw every thing,” Shirley told him. “You didn’t kill the queens!”

Morgan raised his voice. “I’ll get them tomorrow, okay?” He hurried out of the room towards the showers, Shirley tagging at his heels. “Goddamn it. I can see it in your face. You won’t be back tomorrow.”

“I’ll be back.”

She whipped out her hand, caught him by the arm and pulled him around. Her face was close, soft and pink. “You motherfucking liar.”

He started to laugh.

* * *

Back at the apartment, he closed the shades and then walked into the twilight kitchen, running his hands along the microwave, the toaster. He didn’t understand why Donna had left; he’d worked so hard to make the chamber right. Unlike the Blues, there were no friendly Yellows to take Morgan in. He would stay in his abandoned nest until the food ran out.

On the shadowed surface of the formica, small dots milled happily around a spill of grease. Ants. He brought his face down closer to see them.

Pharaohs.

Somewhere in the dark, below the apartment foundation, were cool acidic tunnels with moist walls. There the bloated queens waited. And there, perhaps, the invictas would come with their deadly jaws, their bladders swollen with alkaloid poison.

If invicta came, they’d kill them all. They’d conquer the Pharaoh’s nest. As the invicta had recently learned, and the humans had learned centuries ago, that was the right of intelligence; the demand of civilization. A shudder started from the back of his brain and worked its way through his body.

He turned to the sink, ran water over a sponge, and took it to where the ants were gathered. Pushing each gently back, he wiped the grease spot away.

For a little while the Pharaohs lingered, confused that the food had suddenly gone.

“My wife left me,” he whispered, but the ants didn’t understand. Pharaohs had never been very smart, had never learned the tricks of sleight-of-hand, of warfare, of diplomacy, of evolution. Finally, one by one, still apparently content, they wandered down the crack between the stove and the cabinet to home.

Author’s Note:
I worked for a time with one of those raw-boned, wry-humored, savvy Good Old Girls who grow best in Texas. One day we’d been talking about pets, and I told her about the egg-sucking dog I had in Brazil who was cured of the habit when I tossed a hot hard-boiled egg into the yard. Well, naturally that led to discussions of training farm animals, like how to make chickens sit a nest and how to deal with blowflies. She topped my lore with the information which became the basis of this short story. Good God. I don’t think I’d have the stomach to try this.

In the tarry blood on the chicken wire white, delicate feathers were stuck. They trembled in the wind that soughed through the pines. On the sandy floor of the coop were whole hens, looking somehow deflated in the first stages of death. Around the bodies were pieces of chickens, which looked worse.

It was near ten of a hot May morning, but the coop had trapped a shaded twilight. The air was claustrophobic; rancid with the rusted iron stench of blood and the ammonia-reek of chickens.

“So whatcha gonna do, DeWitt?” Hody Knight asked as he turned his pale moon face towards the sheriff. He stood, his prissy bow mouth slightly ajar, his doughy hands stuck into the ragged pockets of his overalls.

DeWitt looked away from him and kicked at the severed, beady-eyed head of a leghorn. The head was easier to look at than the man. Hody had been a snot-nosed kid who had grown up into a snot-nosed adult. There was always something green and moist lying on Hody’s upper lip. In the quiet of the henhouse the sheriff could hear the man’s heavy liquid breathing. “Shit, Hody, what do you want me to do? We ain’t got no proof it was them Murcheson dogs.”

Hody hawked pensively into a stained handkerchief. “Seen ’em run off that way.”

The sheriff bent and fingered the hole in the wire where something had burst, not tom, through. “You told me it was a dark night, Hody. Don’t see as how you could spot a thing.”

“Might find some chicken blood on them dogs still, if you wasn’t too afraid to run over there.”

Straightening, DeWitt felt the beginnings of a kink in his back. The humid air in the hen house had given him the queasy start of a headache. “Let’s go look outside,” he said.

Swiveling, he strode through the coop door and out into the yard. A fat laying hen, one of the few survivors, made a warm thock-thock sound in her throat and hurried away like a windup toy.

“What was your dogs doing?” The sheriff glanced up fast in time to see Hody’s consternation. The big man looked marshmallowy, as if he contained more air than meat; and his two blank blue eyes sat in a balloon face that was empty of expression. Hody was a child’s drawing of a man.

“They was barking.”

“Uh huh.” DeWitt stopped to inspect broken twigs. Something big, strong and determined had crashed its way through the brush.

“But they didn’t go out. Don’t blame ’em any. Them Murcheson dogs is pit bulls.”

“Don’t have to be dogs, Hody. Could’ve been a bobcat.”

Hody hawked and spat, perilously near DeWitt’s shined boots. The sheriff moved out of range.

“Ain’t seen a bobcat round here since ’sixty-eight. Seen a lot of them Murcheson pit bulls, though.”

“Uh huh.” Hands on his thick belt, DeWitt ambled over to his squad car. Out of the relative cool of the shade, the late morning sun made DeWitt squint and his latent headache blossom into full-grown pain. The metal of the car latch was hot to the touch.

“You gonna arrest her?” Hody asked with a wide, idiot’s grin.

“Yeah, Hody. I’m gonna arrest her: accessory to chicken murder. Vet’ll have to give her a lethal injection.”

“No need to make fun, DeWitt,” Hody said as the sheriff gunned his engine and put the squad car into reverse. “Weren’t your chickens.”

“Right,” DeWitt called back. The wind tore his reply away as he negotiated a fast three-point turn in Hody’s yard, splattering gravel.

DeWitt drove down the farm-to-market road a mile, turning in at the next mailbox. Above the clay road to the Murcheson house red oaks and pecans had interlaced their branches into an evening quiet tangle of green. The ruts in the weed choked path jarred DeWitt’s teeth together, punctuating his headache.

When he drove up he saw Miss Murcheson already standing on her porch, her hands to either side of her wide hips. She’d apparently heard the car coming.

“Sheriff,” she said simply.

DeWitt waited a few cautious minutes before unfolding himself from the front seat. Leaving the door open, he touched the brim of his hat and glanced around the yard for signs of her dogs. His right hand never strayed far from the reassuring weight of his service revolver.

“Been some trouble up to Hody Knight’s place,” he began.

“Come on up in the shade, DeWittless. No sense you and me yelling across the yard at each other.”

“Yes’m.” His suspicious eyes took in the empty yard. A rusting chair led from a pine to a naked scar in the grass that was as perfectly circular as if made by a compass. The studded leather collar was still fastened at the end, but her male dog was gone. “Dogs run off?” he asked. He stopped in the shade of the stairs’ overhang and propped one foot on a riser.

When Miss Murcheson didn’t answer, DeWitt dared a glance in her direction.

With her granite-gray hair and dry-leaf skin, she seemed like the wrong end of an Earth Mother. Her print housedress was faded into a non-color, the exact hue of bones.

“I said, them dogs run off?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I do. I want to know bad. Could be them dogs is off running in a pack. Most of the feral dogs round here is farm mutts; but if we got a pack of pit bulls
—
could be real dangerous. Once they has a taste of blood, cain’t never train ’em not to kill.”

Talking to Miss Murcheson was like talking to a mountain. The words sort of settled around her oblivious shoulders and soaked in for a while until she percolated up an answer. “My dogs is dead.”

“All of ’em?”

“All of ’em.”

“Uh huh. How they die?”

“I shot ’em.”

DeWitt squinted up at her She looked uncompromisingly solid, as empty of moisture as a dead tree. “Why?”

“Got tired of feeding ’em.”

He didn’t like the answer, but it made some sense. He could see Miss Murcheson killing dogs for that. He could picture her killing a person for a lot less. “Uh huh.”

Some movement out of the comer of his eye caused DeWitt to swivel. He crouched. His fingers fumbled for the snap on his holster.

“Just the boy,” Miss Murcheson said.

There was a child standing hunched in the dust of the yard. Two deep-set eyes were punched into the brown clay of his face as if they had been put there by a careless, inattentive workman. His clothes were torn and streaked. At the end of his long arms hung huge hands: a man’s hands.

DeWitt’s own hand trembled on the diamond-patterned gun butt.

“Just the boy,” Miss Murcheson said again.

There was something wrong with that boy.

She whistled and the boy lifted his head, staring at her from under the deep shadow of his brow. When she whistled again the boy came to her in a shuffling, crab-like walk. He climbed the stairs using his hands and feet both, as naturally as a monkey

DeWitt backed away and stood in the sun, staring at them. The boy wrapped his long arms around Miss Murcheson’ s thighs and returned the sheriff’s gaze. Something about the boy’s eyes made DeWitt’s stomach contract with cold, even in the East Texas noon heat.

“Your boy?” DeWitt had to swallow before he spoke.

“My boy, now.”

There was, the sheriff decided, some family resemblance, but it had more to do with expressions than the shape of the boy’s lumpy face. Together the two looked like an American Gothic gone wrong.

“You . . .” DeWitt hesitated, wondering how to phrase the next question. He wanted to phrase it right because fear had made his sweat freeze down his spine and across his palms, so chilly he expected his skin to be brittle.

He was as afraid of the two people-shaped things on the porch as he was of himself. He was afraid he’d draw his gun and shoot them dead, not because they were doing anything particularly wrong or particularly illegal; but he’d shoot them out of disgust, like he might kill a rattler.

The look on Miss Murcheson’s face went beyond an Indian’s stoicism. Her patience was more like the patience of a rock. The boy’s knotted, greasy hair fell down over his low forehead and hung in an unspeakable waterfall of black over the caves of his eyes.

“Where’d you get him?”

“From my sister’s people.”

DeWitt had heard enough lies to recognize one. “So if I was to go back to the station and enquire about a missing kid, I wouldn’t find him on the list.”

Miss Murcheson did an eerie thing: She laughed. He’d never heard her laugh before and didn’t want to hear it again.

The laugh ended as suddenly as if she had been strangled. “That chicken killing. Was probably Hody’s own dogs, like as not. Or maybe Tanner’s dogs to the other side.”

“The Tanner’ve got chihuahuas, Miz Murcheson. Don’t seem likely.”

“You tell Hody Knight for me. You tell him there’s one way to teach his dogs, if he’s got the balls to do it. Tell him to take baling wire and tie a chicken carcass round that dog’s neck. That dog’s gonna paw it off and bury it, but tell Hody just to dig that carcass up and tie it on again. Tell him to tie it real good, ’cause that carcass’s gotta stay on two weeks till that chicken’s real ripe. Dog won’t eat nor sleep. It’ll drive him crazy. But when that two weeks is up, he won’t go killing chickens no more.”

DeWitt backed up until his hip hit the fender of his squad car. He felt his way around the fender until he was at the door.

“You tell Hody Knight that for me,” she said. “See if he’s got the stomach for it.”

* * *

It was the height of August when the first of the sheep was killed. DeWitt stood next to Scharina Wallace and looked down at the carcass at his feet. The sheep’s eyes were gone, plucked out after death by either a turtle or a blackbird, and its empty blind gaze was riveted towards a far line of trees. Its mouth was open, and the overall expression on the face was that of bovine amazement.

“Be dogs,” Scharina said.

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Not as surprised as the sheep, DeWitt thought as he glanced down. The wound to the throat had killed, but it was the soft parts, the anus, the guts, that had been eaten. The pelt had been ripped from its ribs. The flesh stretched across them was dry and hung like gruesome papier mache to the barrel-stave bones.

“A.J. be out in the pasture tonight,” Scharina told him. Her mahogany cheeks glistened with sweat. Her tight black curls wore a sprinkling of moist diamonds. “Got him a shotgun. Gonna kill me some dogs.”

“Yeah. You tell A.J. to be careful.” As DeWitt walked away he thought about the Murchesons’ pit bulls. Then he thought about that Murcheson boy. DeWitt remembered the way the child had knuckle-walked up the stairs. He remembered the size of his hands and the flat look in the sunken eyes.

“Was a real messy kill,” Scharina said as she walked beside him. Her head was down. “Messier than coyotes.”

“Yeah,” the sheriff said. He didn’t like the look of the kill.

He didn’t like the look of that Murcheson boy, either. It was less like the boy had been born deformed than it was as if he hadn’t quite made it to human.

DeWitt swiveled to look into Scharina’s dark eyes. “You tell A.J. be careful, hear? You tell A.J. don’t take no chances.”

“Say he hide in a tree.”

“Yeah;” DeWitt said doubtfully as he cast his gaze up to the sky where vultures were already circling for a landing. “Yeah. Tell him not to take no chances.”

From August to early October, the Sheriffs Department was quiet. Then, within a week, all Hell broke loose. Three of the Tylers’ heifers were torn apart and the Andersons lost five sheep. DeWitt gathered some volunteers from the town to hunt predators; and while the men were out sipping beer, cheap heroism on their minds and their .30.06s on their shoulders, Forgey Dentwilder’s wife left him. Forgey came back, found her gone, got drunk, and shot out the Main Street signal light.

At three-thirty in the morning when he would have been better off asleep, DeWitt stood in jail and listened to Forgey cry. “She left all her stuff, too. All the stuff I give her, like it wasn’t worth nothing. Shit!” Forgey shouted suddenly and slammed his hand against the unlocked bars of the cell. As quickly as his rage had come on, it disappeared. He was weeping again.

In the harsh overhead light Forgey looked bad. His eyes were swollen and puffy. His shoulder-length hair fell in greasy ribbons down his neck.

“Went off with that tractor salesman she was eying.”

“Yeah. Like as not,” DeWitt said, feeling badly that the wife had left while Forgey was out with the volunteers.

Because he felt guilty, DeWitt released Forgey the next day on his own recognizance. After that atonement, he began to worry about the dead livestock and forgot about the missing woman.