Foodchain (23 page)

Nobody said anything. Sturm walked over and ripped open a box. “That’s it then. From now on, you listen to me. I’m goddamn running this show.” He started pulling bottles of Jack Daniels out of the box, all smiles now, as if black clouds had passed over the sun momentarily, but now the light was back, sizzling and brighter than ever. “This calls for a celebration.”

Everyone took a tiny, hesitant breath.

Sturm tossed bottles at the men. “We got ourselves a lot of hard work ahead, but you done good. Tonight, you earned yourselves a good time. Theo’s got a keg on ice in the back yard. Let’s go outside and have ourselves a drink.”

* * * * *

Two blocks east of the park in the middle of town, the First Lutheran Church of Whitewood stood guard over the corner of Fifth street and Elm, a heavy, rectangular building flanked by two strips of dead grass. It reminded Frank of a fortress; tiny stained-glass windows were sunk into the thick concrete walls and it didn’t take much imagination to picture rifles sticking out of the slits. Even the steeple was short and squat, plopped on the roof like a relative who’d had too much pork stuffing on Thanksgiving. The steeple was capped off by a wooden cross; the redwood timber, black from over a century in the sun, was two feet thick and over ten feet tall.

Four pickups congregated in the street below, headlights splashed against the granite steps and double oak doors. The men gathered on the steps, beer cups in hand. Pine and Chuck had thoughtfully loaded the keg into the back of Chuck’s pickup. Chuck drained his cup, belched, and started taking a leak against the wall of the church.

Sturm watched this silently for a moment from the open toolbox at the back of his truck. He spit, then jerked a crowbar from the toolbox.

Everyone flinched as the crowbar bounced off the concrete wall next to Chuck in a burst of burst of concrete chips and sparks. The stream of piss dried up and died.

“Show some respect, dammit,” Sturm shouted. “I was fucking baptized in this church.”

Chuck carefully zipped up, ashamed. The crowbar had landed in the puddle of urine, so Chuck wiped it off on his jeans before he handed it back to Sturm who was stomping up the steps. “Sorry, Mr. Sturm. Won’t happen again.”

Sturm took the crowbar. “You gotta take a leak so goddamn bad, do it on the fucking lawn. Christ Jesus.” He jammed the tip of the crowbar into the gap between the double doors and shoved the other end sideways. The wood split and cracked with a sound like bacon grease popping. Sturm swung the doors wide and tapped the blade of the crowbar on the steps, knocking off the splinters.

“Theo. Get my chainsaw.” Theo ran to the truck. Sturm eyed the men. “You wait here. Show a little respect, for God’s sake.” When Theo ran back, huffing and lugging the thirty-pound chainsaw, Sturm and his son melted into the darkness of the church.

There was an unspoken decision to wait down the steps at the back of Chuck’s truck. More beer was drained from the keg. Boots scuffed the asphalt. Sideways glances were cast at the church.

“Gotta say, I dunno ‘bout that fucking family helping us out,” Jack said softly, trying to salvage a little pride. “Didn’t think we needed any help. I wasn’t trying to start trouble. I just don’t fucking know about that family.”

“Me neither,” Chuck said, still smarting from the ass-chewing over taking a piss on the church. “Far as I’m concerned, they should have left town with everybody else. Hell, I got half a mind to go on over and burn their house down.”

Jack shook his head. “Mr. Sturm says shit, I say how much, that’s a given, but I honestly can’t see what the hell he’s thinking here.”

“They had their shit together, that’s for sure,” Frank said, and instantly wished he hadn’t. That was goddamn dumb. He should have paced his drinking better, shouldn’t have hit the Jack Daniels that hard. He should have saved it for later instead, like he’d been doing the other nights.

“Who had their shit together?” Jack demanded.

Frank shrugged. “We had dinner over there last night. Me and Mr. Sturm.”

“No shit?” Chuck asked.

“No shit.”

“Why?”

Frank shrugged again, wondering how the hell to climb out of this hole. “You could say it was an audition. A demonstration, I guess. Very professional.”

“Professional? Them? Bunch of fucking vermin.” Pine said.

“Well. Food was damn good.”

“So why weren’t we invited?” Chuck asked.

From deep inside the church, the muffled whine of the chainsaw growled to life.

“I can understand Mr. Sturm being there. But how’d you happen to get invited?” Jack asked, resentment slowly creeping into his voice like the sleepy spiders crawling up the vet office walls.

“Hell, I know,” Pine said. “It was Annie, wasn’t it?”

Frank could feel the dynamics of the clowns shifting slowly, as if they were squeezing their anger, their resentment, their confusion out of their minds and pushing it towards Frank. They couldn’t turn their emotions loose on Sturm, and so Frank became the target.

“’Course it was. Fuck me. Of course. She gave you one for free, didn’t she?” Jack said. His dry lips had split in three places. “Chuck told us all about it.”

Frank felt the anger rolling at him, just gentle nudges at first, like rising waves pushed before a storm, but growing stronger. The whiskey and beer in his head decided he should push back. Just a little. After all, he knew something about all of them. None of their dicks had ever touched Annie’s lips.

“Yeah. It was Annie. She invited me.”

“I fucking knew it,” Jack said, and drained his cup.

“Goddamn. You’ve been hitting that shit hard. Got any money left? Or she give you another one for free?” Chuck refilled Jack’s beer. “You ain’t gonna get all possessive and jealous on us now, are you? I mean, let’s not forget, she’s a working girl. Gotta let us have a piece, right?”

* * * * *

Frank had been practicing smiling in the mirror in the bathroom at the vet office. He’d get an image in his head, something disturbing, something awful, something like the animals trapped in their cages out in the desert zoo, or Sturm gutting the tiger on Main Street, or Theo fucking the lion, and work at forcing the muscles in his cheeks to stretch up and out. In the beginning, it looked like he was trying to shit a bowling ball. When he got better, it started to look like a truck had parked on his foot and he was too drunk to really notice. He’d refocus his eyes, shakes his head, clutch the sides of the pitted porcelain sink, and grin at the mirror again and again and again.

The practice paid off. The clowns bought it. They hooted and hollered. But Frank didn’t say anything; he let their imaginations do all the heavy lifting.

Sturm appeared in the church doorway, holding the chainsaw. “Damn thing’s sunk into the wall. They sure as hell knew how to build ’em back in the old days. I’d need a goddamn tow truck to get it out.”

“We can get you one,” Chuck called out, wanting to make up for pissing on the church.

“Nah. Ain’t worth it. I got a better idea. Watch your heads.” He ducked back into the darkness.

Everyone turned back to Frank.

“Still,” Pine pointed out. “What makes you so special?” He looked around the group. “I mean, it ain’t like he’s done anything half the fellas in town haven’t done. So why were you invited…and we weren’t?”

“Yeah, what is it makes you so special?” Jack asked.

The clowns clustered around Frank, pinning him against the church steps, watching his smile close, his eyes closer. The anger was back, stronger now, the waves nearly knocking Frank off his feet. The practiced smile wasn’t going to hold them off this time.

Again, instead of fear, Frank felt his own anger rise and crash into the waves like a clenched fist. He shrugged, one final time. “I dunno. All I can say is, she must of liked how I tasted. Well, that…and I made her come.”

“Whoa.” Jack’s voice had become the temperature of morgue steel. “You’re saying…you’re saying you touched her.”

The whiskey in Frank’s head said, “Yeah.”

A cracking, splintering noise made them all look up at the steeple. Sturm kicked out one of the louvered shutters and climbed out onto the roof, dragging the chainsaw behind him. “Anybody got any rope?” he shouted.

They shook their heads.

“We can go get some,” Chuck shouted.

“Hell with it,” Sturm yelled back. “Stand back.” He inched his way up the steep roof to the cross, fired up the chainsaw, and without hesitation, sank the spinning teeth deep into the wood. He sawed into the base horizontally, cutting about two-thirds of the way through, then again with a downward angle. He knocked out the pie shaped piece, then went at it from the other side. The immense cross shuddered and slowly toppled over to the right. It hit the steep roof, slid down it like an icicle, sliced off the edge of the roof, and soared off into empty space, arcing through the air upside down, until it hit the dead lawn with deep crack that the clowns felt in their bones. The bottom crashed down in an explosion of dry grass and dust.

“Good enough. We’ll bolt that sonofabitch back together,” Sturm hollered.

They waited until Sturm and Theo got back downstairs. It took all six of them to carry the cross.

* * * * *

Sturm tore open the bag of quick dry cement with his teeth and dumped the gray powder into the wheelbarrow. Frank grasped the handles of the wheelbarrow and jogged with Sturm along the walkway between the house and garden out into the back yard to the bare patch of dirt.

Jack unspooled the hose from the garden and started to gingerly spray the soft gray powder but Sturm snatched the hose away and sent a river of water full blast at the cement, working it up and down, giving the cement a quick soak, but not overdoing it.

Jack pushed Frank out of the way and attacked the cement with a long handled hoe, only this blade had two circles cut away in the middle, allowing the now liquid cement to seep through the holes. He swept the hoe back to him and shoved it way, over and over, as if trying to rip long jagged strips out of a pool table.

Sturm barked out something that sounded like he approved, but it was lost in the scraping of Jack’s hoe along the bottom of the wheelbarrow. Sturm turned the hose towards the grave and started soaking the ground. Frank found a shovel, the same one that Sturm had killed Fairfax with, and started digging as headlights appeared from around the house. Pine and Chuck carried the keg out to the grave.

The hole was four feet deep when Frank hit something soft. Black liquid dripped off the shovel blade in the flashlights. Frank figured that was deep enough and stopped digging.

Again, it took all of them to carry the cross out to the back yard and drop the bottom into the hole. Theo came out of the barn with several long two-by-fours, and used these to brace the cross upright while the men held it in place. Sturm feverishly shoveled wet cement into the hole.

One by one, they gradually let go of the cross, letting the two-by-fours maintain the balance. Sturm emptied the wheelbarrow, then got on his hands and knees and swept his palms over the wet, sticky cement, smoothing it out like with the dirt in the barn before. Frank saw a tear hang from Sturm’s nose for a brief second before splashing down into the cement. Frank turned away, giving the man some privacy.

He sank onto the steps of the deck, and surveyed the back yard. The cross dominated the landscape, overpowering everything. It was simply too big, like a walnut tree in a field of dwarf pines. But Sturm seemed satisfied. It showed true respect for his dog.

Frank yawned, shook his head. “Well, gentlemen. I gotta get back and feed everyone.” That, and finish the bottle of rum stashed under his cot. The bottle of Jack Daniels in Jack’s truck could wait until tomorrow. He stood. Jack, Pine, and Chuck watched him with blank, dull gazes.

“Hold on. Want you to take a look at something.” Sturm said in a thick voice. He led Frank through the garden again and back into the barn. But this time, he went straight down the aisle, past Sarah, and opened the back door.

* * * * *

Frank stepped out into a large, irregularly shaped cage. The ground was bare dirt, packed hard. A few bald tires were tossed in the corner; in the other corner was a crumpled, stained mattress. The sides of the cage were constructed of two layers of chicken wire, buried deep, bolted to steel anchors. The wire was stretched tight over a curiously curving and bulging framework. It took Frank a while for realize the bars were actually the bones of old playground equipment, lashed together with chains and padlocks. The whole thing was interlaced with razor wire. Frank figured out they must have raided both the hardware store and the elementary school.

“Boys worked hard on this, I tell you that.”

“Yeah. Looks like they locked this down tight.”

“Think it’ll hold?”

“Hold what?”

“Them two lionesses, back at your office.”

“I thought they were for the hunts tomorrow.”

Sturm laughed. “Shit, I got plans for them girls. Yessir. I would have shot them long time ago otherwise.”

“I thought, well, thought that they were gonna be shot out in the fields. The clients were gonna—”

“No rich peckerhead dipshit is gonna shoot my girls. Not while I’m around. Fuck no. The clients’ll have fun, don’t you worry. They won’t be complaining. They’ve got plenty to shoot at.” Sturm grabbed hold of one of the curved bars and shook it. “No. What I need to know is, is this going to hold ’em? Those cats. They’re not for the hunts. No sir. Those are my pets.”