Eating Memories (16 page)

Then a week later A.J.
Wallace disappeared.

By the time DeWitt made it out to Scharina’s place, her family had already started arriving. That, more than anything, was a sign they’d given up on A.J.
Black families gathered when someone was dead.

The men on the porch eyed the sheriff with sullen suspicion. He ran the gauntlet of their stares into the house.

The women were in the front room with Scharina. A side table was already piled high with food. When Scharina saw DeWitt her mouth opened in an O of anguish. She bent double at the waist and wailed.

“Get me Robert,” DeWitt told a woman he didn’t recognize. “Go get me Robert so he can tell me what’s going on.”

The younger boy came out of a back room and stood in a doorway. The sheriff put a hand to Robert’s shoulder and walked him out to the squad car. At his back he could feel the sharp resentment from the men.

“A.J. was out in a tree in the east pasture,” Robert told him.

“Yeah. Any sheep dead?”

“Three.”

DeWitt sighed and stared at his boot. “Let’s go out there.”

They found the three dead sheep. They found the tree, shotgun pellets embedded in the trunk. DeWitt followed a trail of blood and broken branches about four miles to where it ended in a thicket. He told Robert to stay back and then went in himself. A.J. was there. His throat had been tom out. The soft parts of his belly had been eaten.

DeWitt walked Robert back to the house.

“Sheriff?” Robert asked in a .mall voice. DeWitt had always felt the boy was either awed of or scared by his badge.

“Yeah?”

“Does dogs climb trees?”

DeWitt looked away quickly from the narrowed, dark eyes. “Mebbe it was a wildcat. Mebbe a puma.”

“But I seen those sheep, sheriff. Weren’t a claw mark on ’em.”

The Sheriff wrapped one arm about the boy’s thin shoulders. “Shhhh,” he whispered in what might have been construed as solace; what might have been interpreted as the safekeeping of secrets. “Shhhh.”

When Robert started to cry, DeWitt hugged him tight. Back to the house, the sheriff told Scharina the news himself and called for the coroner. Then he went to his trunk and exchanged his .38 for a .45 automatic. He filled two extra clips and stuck them into his pocket. He checked the barrel of the automatic for stray grease and slid the nine-round clip in. His hands were shaking.

* * *

Miss Murcheson was waiting for him, an over-and-under shotgun cradled in her arms like a baby. When he got out of the car, he drew his .45, but left it dangling at his side.

“You want to put that shotgun away, now,” he told her.

She didn’t put it down; but she didn’t point it at him, either. She just stood there.

“You didn’t kill them dogs, did you,” DeWitt said, watching her carefully. DeWitt was so scared he knew if she moved, if she even shifted her weight, he, was going to shoot her.

She must have read something in his face, because she didn’t even blink.

“They was purebreds. You wouldn’t of killed them dogs. You would of sold ’em. If they was in any shape to be sold.”

The sun slanted down across the porch, cutting the woman into half bright and half shadow.

“What kind of creature can kill a pit bull, Miz Murcheson?”

Her eyes darted to the right.

DeWitt froze where he stood, wondering if she was trying to draw his attention away. Then he wondered if there was something even worse than Miss Murcheson standing at his side.

“Go on, now,” Miss Murcheson spat.

The wind shifted a little, bringing the greenish stench of rot into the sheriff’s nostrils. Raising the .45 hip-high, not aiming, really, but prepared, DeWitt turned his head.

The boy stood in the yard, his thick neck strung with baling wire. The lump that had been Mrs. Dentwilder nestled its swollen, blue lips into the hollow of the boy’s neck. Her platinum hair, in tangled disarray, spread down the flayed ruins of her shoulders. The corpse had been chewed apart from the waist down.

“Go on, now, honey,” Miss Murcheson cajoled. Her voice was soft with a sort of maudlin, despairing love. “You go on round back.”

Looking
right at DeWitt, the boy licked his lips.

“Only way to break ’em, “ Miss Murcheson was saying. “He tore her off and buried her three times already. Another week should do him. He’ll be all right, then. Won’t do it no more.”

DeWitt’s right arm twitched, bringing the .45 up into position. Out of the corner of his eye DeWitt saw a quick metallic glint as she wrestled the heavy shotgun to her shoulder.

The sharp clap of the .45 was as sudden and bewildering as thunder from a clear sky. It was so unexpected that for a moment DeWitt was sure it was her that had done the shooting, not him. He would have stopped and checked himself for pellet holes if the kick from the automatic hadn’t jerked his arm over his shoulder. Across the blue-white fog of cordite, he saw Miss Murcheson fly backwards. Droplets of blood spray-painted the weathered wall behind her.

“Jesus wept!” he shouted in terror.

He’d never shot anyone before, but he had seen the effects of bullets. DeWitt felt amazement and then a weak-kneed sort of relief when Miss Murcheson pulled herself up from the porch.

“Don’t you hurt him, DeWitt,” she was saying. Her left arm was waving frantically for his attention. Her right hung heavily at her bloodied side.

Across the yard the boy was sniffing the air, his nostrils wide and quivering. His pale eyes were alert and steady the way a dog’s are before the kill. He was staring right at Miss Murcheson’s bleeding shoulder.

“Don’t you hurt him, now,” she was still saying when the boy leapt.

Miss Murcheson saw the boy coming and uttered a short cry of anguish. Still screaming, she sprinted towards the trees. The boy bounded after her with his long, leaping strides. It would have been smarter for her to have picked up the shotgun. It was the running away that killed her. Shouldn’t ever run from a wild animal. Miss Murcheson knew that. But the sheriff also knew that there were some people you couldn’t bring yourself to shoot. Not ever. No matter what they had done. There were some people you’d just rather die than kill.

DeWitt’s first bullet took a chunk out of the porch railing. His next hit the platinum head of the rotting corpse, sending bits of flesh up in a pink and gray explosion.

It took DeWitt fifteen minutes to track them through the pines. By the time he found them, Miss Murcheson was pretty well dead. Her eyes were still moving and her hands still twitched, but the boy had already started feeding.

DeWitt took slow aim, holding the gun with both hands, and pumped six quick rounds into them. Some bullets hit the boy’s knotted face; some hit the woman under him. DeWitt would later excuse himself by thinking he couldn’t have helped that.

But he could have helped the next thing he did. When the automatic was empty, he put another clip in. He fired until that one was gone. He pumped every bullet he had into both bodies, partly out of his own fear; and partly out of his own disgust.

Then he buried them. All three of them. He didn’t know quite why he did that, either, except he really didn’t want to know what that boy was or where he had come from. He was tired and really didn’t feel like telling Scharina or anybody else the story. His job was to protect people, after all.

He went back to the house, cleaned up the blood, wiped the shotgun free of prints and put it into its place above Miss Murcheson’s mantle. She had a pot of beans going, and he turned the gas off under them. When he left he locked the door.

He drove back to town and got another group of volunteers together. Under DeWitt’s direction, they shot every coyote and feral dog in the county. They celebrated when the predation stopped.

Author’s Note:
Most men and most childless women idealize the maternal instinct. It has little to do with love. It is fashioned, instead, of responsibility: a crushing, suffocating, maddening responsibility
—
one which makes moms at once overly protective and resentful of that very protectiveness.

There are times that you want to kill your kids (and some moms actually do); times you want to run away from home and leave no forwarding address. But you don’t. You stick it out. You go on changing diapers and settling sibling arguments and putting up with the God-awful noise and mess of it until the kids are grown. And if there was a house fire, you know you’d go back into the flames just like that mother cat who saved every last damned kitten in her litter. You’d do it not for love, but because you’d have no choice.

Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.

The ubiquitous sound comes to him through his open study window. He hears it in his sleep. It is the sound of nightmare, not the heart-racing, cold sweat kind, but the grueling sort, the sort from which you fear you’ll never awaken.

Chuck.

The gritting of the metal trowel against the sand makes his teeth ache, and he wants to run to the window and scream to her to stop. But he is a quiet man who has always been generous to the people around him, so he goes back to his papers.

In a little while a young lieutenant enters the room. “Governor,” the lieutenant says with a snappy salute that makes the governor think the soldier has not yet understood their predicament. “Mrs. Leeds is out in the garden, and it’s raining.”

Now the governor is sure the boy’s comprehension is limited. Leeds nods as he scans the daily list of the dead.

“It’s against your direct orders, sir. We’ve told her to stop, but she won’t listen.”

“I see,” the governor says. At last he gets up, but only because it appears that the boy expects him to. His back is stiff from sitting. “I’ll take care of it.”

He walks out to the porch where the young lieutenant hands him an umbrella. In the yard an embarrassed, officious sergeant with a Geiger counter stands over the bent form of the governor’s wife, a colorful, striped golf umbrella held over the both of them.

The umbrella is brighter than the day. The dark sheets of rain smell of oil. The low clouds are greasy. Holding his own umbrella up, the governor splashes across to where the sergeant is standing and can hear the slow, unsteady popcorn-maker excitement of the boxy counter.

“I’ll take over now, sergeant. Thank you.”

“Thank you, sir,” the soldier says gratefully.

They exchange umbrellas and the sergeant trots back to the house.

Chuck.

At his feet his wife digs diligently with the trowel. The yard is a dense pattern of holes, as if squirrels have been at war with tiny mortars.

“It’s raining, Mary,” he says. “Come on into the house.”

Chuck.

She does not look up. He has not expected her to. Across the yard the old holes she has so painfully dug are dissolving in the rain. Under the cover of the umbrella, she digs more. Penelope at her loom.

“Come on,” he says. He takes her arm. With his help, she rises, but she won’t trust him enough to hand him the trowel. He doesn’t insist.

Her blank face gives no hint of emotion. Only her scarred hands do. No one but the governor knows that they speak of guilt, not grief.

She never really loved the children. There were always too many quarrels, too many complaints. An entire card catalogue of “Can’t yous.”

GODDAMN, CAN’T YOU TURN THAT MUSIC OFF? CAN’T YOU CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF? WOULD IT KILL YOU TO WASH A DISH?

And then the “I can’ts”: “I can’t stand it much longer. I can’t put up with them. Let’s just take a few days to ourselves and go up to the mountain cabin.”

She jerks his arm as if she wants to go back and dig some more. Her protest comes six months too late. He pulls her, stumbling, along. “I left them behind, and they were my responsibility, too,” he whispers.

She doesn’t speak, but her quick look says,
Not like my responsibility. I was their goddamned mother. Your part was easy.

As she turns away he wonders if cats who eat their young mourn for their kittens. No one should outlive her children.

They walk up the porch steps and pass the young lieutenant. Leeds can see the bewilderment in the boy’s face. He, in his limited understanding, thinks Mary digs because she has gone insane, but the governor knows the truth. Given time, given a trowel, he would dig, too.

The governor leads his wife to the bathroom and draws a bath. He undresses her and puts her in the tub. They have a small tug-of-war with the trowel, and finally he has to put it within her reach so she won’t be frantic.

She sits passive as a child and lets him bathe her. He idly notices the loose skin on her arms, her thighs, the blue veins in her breasts. He cleans her as he might clean a kitchen, taking pains with the most important places: the exposed hands, the face, the hair.

When he is finished he dresses her in a robe. She takes up the trowel again. When he walks her out of the room, he sees that Colonel Glick is waiting. Glick has tracked mud on the clean hardwood floor. Leeds hates him for that.

Glick’s face is a slick, mahogany-colored, human-shaped mask. Only the eyes move. He salutes wearily the way most of the guardsmen do.

“Go to your room, Mary,” Leeds says, and watches as his wife obeys him.

“Rain’s surprisingly clean, sir,” Glick tells him as Mary disappears down the hall. “Not enough rads to concern ourselves with.”

“Ah,” says Leeds. “At least not for another twenty years of exposure, you mean.”

The colonel’s eyes shift behind the dark lids. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I’ve been asked to inform you that a triage crisis has arisen. There are too many Stage 2 survivors for the medication we have, so that even some of our Stage 3s are dying. Any orders on this, sir?”

“Tell the doctors to start treating by age, youngest first. Any Stage 2 over forty should be considered a Stage 1, understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

“Just let them die.” Leeds studies the colonel carefully, but there is no indication of criticism in Glick’s face. “Any news from outside, Colonel?”

“Sir?”

“Maybe something about how the enemy is doing?”

The colonel blinks rapidly. He looks like a robot whose program has just gone awry. “Enemy, sir?” Glick seems as if he’s wrestling with a problem, an odd problem for a soldier. That is because, unlike his young lieutenant, Glick is perceptive. He knows he is the enemy. All the survivors are.

“The Russians,” Leeds explains patiently.

The colonel’s composure splinters for an instant so that, very briefly, Leeds can see the man behind it. “We have no information that it was the Russians. A lot of countries had nuclear arsenals, sir.”

“Well, I think it was the Russians. And I think they’re afraid to invade. They should be. Nuclear war doesn’t count on invasion. You never spoil your nest, Colonel Glick.”

They walk out the door together. Leeds passes the muddy footprints Glick has left. He is not so annoyed with the colonel now that he knows the mud is simply mud and not slow death.

On the porch they pause. Across the lawn Leeds can see the small, empty graves his wife has dug. Mary, wanting so badly to bury her dead.

“Will anyone come to help us, Colonel?”

“It’s doubtful, sir. Everyone has problems, and we’re stuck with blasts on three sides. I have to assume they’ve given us up for lost, sir.”

In fact they
are
lost, Leeds thinks. Perhaps the graves his wife digs are not graves after the fact, but preparatory.

“What were you before?” Leeds asks.

The colonel turns to him, a smooth dimple of puzzlement between the eyebrows on the mask. “Sir?”

“Part-time warrior and full-time what?” Leeds tags the colonel as a high-school biology teacher, an engineer, perhaps. Some job where his hands never got dirty.

“Computer sales rep, sir.”

Leeds’s lips turn up at one side and, for the first time in six months, he nearly laughs. But the humor isn’t quite strong enough, and the slack muscles of his face care too heavy.

“Sales,” he says.

“Yes, sir. Government contract stuff was a lot of it, sir. Component parts and .things.”

Leeds nods. “Computers. The Russians should have had our computers. Maybe more of their rockets would have hit the targets. Wasteful that they fused two ten-mile patches of desert. A great coyote kill, I would imagine.”

“Yes, sir. If you insist on Russians, sir. But then Phoenix was hit.”

“Yes,” Leeds says quietly. How could he forget Phoenix?

“Whichever country struck us, that must have been an intended target, sir.”

“None of it makes any sense, does it, Colonel? I suppose we’ll know who struck us and why when everything is back to normal.”

Back to normal.
Glick looks at him so strangely that Leeds picks up on his mistake.

Finally the colonel shrugs. “I suppose the worst part is not knowing. It was like walking to work, minding your own business, and suddenly being mugged from behind.”

Leeds watches as the colonel unfurls his umbrella and walks out into the gray, oily rain. But Glick has made a mistake, too. The worst part isn’t the not knowing. No, the worst part is living through it.

When the colonel drives away, Leeds goes back to his office. In emergencies, even long-term ones, there is always paperwork. With the overcast skies, the nights come faster now. In an hour he lights a candle and reads until he falls asleep in his leather chair, his head nodding to his chest.

The ring of the phone awakens him. The candle has burnt down. He gropes out in the darkness of the desk and, on the second ring, finds the receiver.

“Hello.”

He’s greeted by an electronic howl and a burst of static, the call sign of the jury-rigged local service.

“Hello,” he says again.

On the other side of the tempest of noise he hears a faint voice. “ . . . nor Leeds.”

“This is the governor.”

There is a squeal which makes him jerk his ear away from the receiver, but he has caught the worst of it. His ear canal hurts. “ . . . wife, sir. Could you go check?”

He doesn’t need to hear the rest of the message. He understands all too well. Putting the phone down, he lights a candle and walks down the hall to his wife’s room. The robe is on the bed, and the bed is empty.

When he comes back he finds that the static is gone, disappeared as stealthily as his wife, and the phone connection is clear. “No. She’s not here. Do you have her down there?”

“Yes, sir. We think this is her. Sorry to disturb you, sir, but she just wouldn’t answer our questions. She was very determined to get through the roadblock, governor.”

It would be so easy, he thinks, for him to give the order to let her go. No muss, no fuss, no body. She could walk down the highway into the grey limbo where the children wait.

But Leeds is experienced enough to know that recriminations breed in uncertainty. Responsibility ends with a corpse.

“Bring her back, please,” he says to the boy with the unfamiliar voice. He has become used to giving orders to people he doesn’t know; and he has become used to trusting them utterly.

“Right away, sir,” the boy says. The line goes dead. The one thing Leeds will never get used to is that emptiness. He holds the receiver cradled against his ear for a moment as if he can wish back into existence the old AT&T hum.

When the driver arrives with Mary, Leeds takes her in and gives her another bath. When she is asleep, he pries the trowel from her hand and places it on the night table where she can find it in the morning.

Then he goes to Jerry’s room to sleep. Each night is a different vigil in each of the three rooms. The rooms have been left the same as when they vacationed there as a family. Jerry’s room is quintessentially him: rock posters and a star map. Even though the night is cold, the governor stretches out on top of the cheap plaid comforter. He doesn’t want to disturb anything, in case the boy, or the ghost of the boy, should come home.

He doesn’t expect to sleep, but he does. He dreams that he is making mud castles at the beach. And he dreams that Mary is smashing them.

The
chuck-chuck-chuck
nudges him awake. He opens his eyes to stare at the pine ceiling. For a long time he lies there as if he were ten years old again on a school day, pretending to his mother that he is asleep.

When his body becomes sore and stiff from the mattress, he gets up, showers, and goes out to his wife. She has already dug four square yards of shallow holes and her hands are bleeding.

“Breakfast, Mary,” he says. He leads her into the house and scrubs her hands and face. They eat fried Spam with slices of canned pineapple. Leeds thinks of toast. He remembers the smell of the hot bread, the greasy, salty taste of the butter. He remembers the crispness in his mouth. The Spam feels like mush. The pineapple feels like nothing.

While they are eating, Colonel Glick knocks at the kitchen door. Leeds tells him to come in. “Some breakfast, colonel?”