Jackalope Wives And Other Stories

by T. Kingfisher

  And that poor possum! Possums were no real trouble to anyone, as long as you made sure the lids on your trashcans were down tight. They were slow waddling beasts. You wouldn’t want one as a pet, but why kill one?

  Sonny threw the beer bottle at the garden gate before she reached it. The smash of glass was enough to bring her up short. In the sudden silence, she could hear the tinkle of tiny shards falling.

  “You just better watch yourself,” said Sonny, still beet red. “You just better watch what you say.”

  Then don’t stick any more possums in my mailbox, Louise thought, but the words stuck in her throat. She would never in her life have thrown a beer bottle at someone. It would never have occurred to her to do so. She’d heard of couples who had screaming fights where they threw toasters at each other, and it always seemed like a waste of a perfectly good toaster.

  Sonny turned and stalked away. Louise waited until she heard the screen door slam next door before stumbling back to the deck.

  The grass was slick underfoot. She almost fell. Her stomach lurched as she lost her balance, and even when she caught herself heavily on the railing, she felt queasy and lightheaded.

  That was the problem with getting old. You learned to be afraid of falling. The bones of an old woman were as brittle as the bones of a bird, without being given the gift of flight in exchange.

  The wren landed on the railpost and chirped at her worriedly.

  “I’m fine,” she muttered. “Old and stupid, but fine.”

  The wren waited until she was at the sliding glass door before spreading its wings and zipping into the trees. Louise saw that the other birds had already vanished.

  Smart birds, she thought, they’ve learned to be afraid of Sonny. Smarter than me.

  She blew out the candle and went inside. It wasn’t until the next morning that she realized the book of matches had vanished.

  When Louise went into the garden the next morning, she peered through a crack in the blinds first, to see if Sonny had done something horrible. Then she was angry at herself for being fearful, and slammed the screen door back on its rollers so that it jumped the track at the bottom, and it took her five minutes and a lot of swearing to get it back in place. The Garden Club hadn’t heard such language since Mr. Coolidge saw what the neighbor’s lawn service had done to his prize Damask roses.

  She took two steps out on the porch, armed with her morning cup of coffee, and her first thought was that Sonny had come back and dumped trash bags all over her yard.

  Then one of the trash bags lifted its head and she realized that there was a flock of Canada geese in her garden.

  “Oh lord!” said Louise. She liked birds, but Canada geese didn’t really fall into that category, did they? They were more like airborne sheep. She could already see messy green droppings in the flowerbeds, and one of them had quite crushed a clump of spiderwort.

  “Oh, must you?” she asked, going down the steps. “Not the spiderwort, please! Shoo! Go on!”

  The goose heaved itself to its feet, but far from shooing, it glared at her and took a step forward. Its beak opened in a hiss.

  It occurred to Louise that there were seven—no, eight—geese in the yard, and while she probably weighed more than all of them put together, the geese were nothing but bad temper and muscle. She took a step back toward the deck.

  Three geese advanced in a wedge. One dropped its head and stretched its neck out, still hissing.

  “Shoo?” she said again, but without much conviction. “Oh please, shoo!”

  Hisssss….

  Louise was wondering if she should throw the coffee cup at the leader and make a run for it, when the wren landed in the grass in front of the lead goose.

  “Teakettle-teakettle-teakettle!” it shrilled, and then proceeded to read the goose the riot act (or so Louise guessed from the sound.) It chirped, it squawked, it paced back and forth and hopped up and down in apparent fury.

  The Canada goose, abashed, snapped its beak shut and made a weak honking sound.

  The wren gave another gruff chirp, puffing out its breast feathers. The Canada goose dropped its head back to its chest feathers and waddled slowly toward Louise.

  “Honk,” it said.

  “It’s okay,” said Louise. “I—err—you just startled me is all.”

  “Honk.” It bobbed its head at her several times, then turned and lurched across the grass into the flowerbeds. Louise sighed.

  “Friends of yours?” she asked the wren.

  “Chirr.”

  “My garden really isn’t cut out for geese, you know. I mean, I don’t mind, I guess—although I do, sort of—but—I don’t even have a pond. The birdbath will fall over if they try to—oh, it already has. I see.”

  The wren flipped its tail and began preening under one wing.

  Louise went back into her house to add a shot of whiskey to her coffee. Perhaps if she simply bookended the day with drinks, it would all work out. She found the remains of a loaf of bread, which she had planned to make into croutons, but which would probably do okay for feeding geese. She brought it out, tearing it into small chunks.

  The geese lined up politely, single file, and marched toward her. The first goose reached out and plucked the bread from her fingers with incredible delicacy, bobbed its head at her, then stepped aside and went to the back of the line. The next one stepped forward for its share.

  Louise began, for the first time, to really feel as if she might have lost her mind. This was not goose behavior in any world that she understood.

  Each goose got at least two pieces of bread. When she was done, there was a chorus of polite honks, and the geese dispersed back into the garden, settling themselves in brown and cream lumps. The spiderwort got trampled again. Louise didn’t feel the need to comment on it.

  Sonny Gothaway opened the gate to that interfering old cow’s garden at about eleven that night. The moon was bright enough that he didn’t need a flashlight, even though he’d brought one just in case. He wasn’t real worried about the old lady being up to see him. She was—what, a hundred or so? She probably fell asleep right after Matlock.

  He was pissed. The cops had been poking around for two days now, and Dan said that they’d driven right by the shed. They hadn’t stopped, but they’d slowed down, like they were thinking about it. It was that stupid old lady’s fault, calling them out just because of a possum in her mailbox, when she ought to have known it was there to keep her damn mouth shut.

  Sonny was not by any measure intelligent. He got an idea in his head about how something would go, and if things did not proceed as he expected—due to unforeseen entities like mailmen or police—his tendency was to become enraged at the people who failed to behave in the way that that they were supposed to.

  Since the mailman generally did his rounds before Sonny even got up in the morning, the other two principles in this drama were the police and the old lady. Sonny couldn’t hate the police any more than he did, but since it was old Louise that brought the police down on him—well, he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d told them all about his operation back in the woods. Nosy old bitch. It was pure spite, too—it wasn’t like he was running a meth lab in her yard. Some people just couldn’t let the small businessman well enough alone.

  “Bad move, Missus C,” he muttered under his breath. “Bad-fucking-move.”

  Well, he’d fix her up. She was like a million years old, and nobody’d be surprised when she turned up dead. They wouldn’t even find the body for a week. Probably the cat would eat her.

  This thought pleased him. Ordinarily he might have thrown her cat down the stairs just on principle, but if the cat ate the body, well, that was one more thing to keep the police from thinking it might be a murder. He’d planned to just put a pillow over her face and hold her down, but maybe he ought to cut her up a bit afterwards, just to get the cat interested. It’d probably make the news as one of those gruesome stories about why old people should be in homes, not dying and ro
tting in the house alone. Lord, Dan would laugh.

  He climbed the back stairs to the deck—one creaked a bit, but who could tell, with the frogs and the crickets making so much racket?—and slipped a hand in the pocket of his jeans. Sliding glass doors were easy as hell to jimmy. You just needed a flat bit of metal, and of course the old lady hadn’t put a dowel in the bottom to wedge it closed. Bending over like that probably hurt her hip.

  Sonny had just gotten the glass door open when he heard something behind him, shockingly loud.

  “Teakettle-teakettle-teakettle!”

  He spun around, fist raised—and saw a bird.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake…”

  It wasn’t even a big bird. It was a little scrawny thing with a sticky-up tail, standing on the post and yelling at him.

  It cocked its head and let out that clattery yell again. Even a deaf old lady could probably hear that.

  Sonny took a step towards it, waving his hand. “Get out of here!” he hissed. “Shut up, you little bastard!”

  He swung at the bird. It leapt out of the way and landed farther down on the railing.

  “Teakettle-teakettle-teakettle!”

  “Stupid bird…” He took another step forward, coming out from under the overhang of the roof.

  Hot pain scalded the back of his head, as sudden and shocking as a snakebite. Sonny let out a yelp and jerked back, actually hitting his head on the wall, which shocked him all over again.

  He had to turn the flashlight on to be sure, but the darkness on his fingers was blood. Blood! Something had hit him and vanished again!

  He looked around wildly—was it the old lady? Had she cracked him over the back of the head somehow? No, the glass door was only cracked open a half inch, and the house was dark and silent. What the fuck…?

  Something honked at him from the garden.

  He swept the flashlight over the ground and saw a goose.

  Sonny Gothaway was neither intelligent nor a birdwatcher, and so did not stop to think that a goose was not nearly maneuverable enough to attack him from the air, and did not have much in the way of talons anyway. The goose was alive, it was there, and Sonny was mad and in pain.

  He charged down the stairs and after the goose. It waddled away frantically, skidding through the garden gate barely ahead of him, and he lost sight of it for a moment. A honk from the gravel road alerted him, and he saw it, waddling foolishly down the drive, its tail waggling from side to side.

  Louise and the glass door were briefly forgotten. At the moment, all Sonny Gothaway could think of was charging up behind the goose and drop-kicking it.

  He took three long strides and was practically on top of the stupid bird when something went for his face again. Sonny staggered hard to one side—god, did it have knives? What the hell was going on?

  He caught a glimpse of his attacker this time, winging away into the darkness. It wasn’t a goose. It was one of those freaky owls with a face like a deformed monkey. His head was hot and sticky, and there was a big flap of skin waggling back and forth over his right ear.

  The bastard had practically scalped him! What was wrong with it?

  Honking caught his attention again, but he was no longer interested in the goose. He waved his flashlight through the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of the owl again. If it came for him again, he’d twist its freaky deformed neck.

  “Teakettle-teakettle!” called the little brown bird, from somewhere in the trees.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that the birds were working together. Were they some kind of pack, like dogs? Did birds even do that?

  His shed was another few hundred yards down the road. Maybe he should go there. The birds sure couldn’t get inside, and maybe a little meth would clear his head. Besides, if he came in covered in blood, his mom would freak the fuck out, start demanding he go to a hospital or some shit, and that never went well. Sonny didn’t think there were any outstanding warrants for his arrest, but you never knew when the cops would pull something up out of spite.

  He was partway down the road when the owl hit him again. This time he was ready. He swung the flashlight up toward the bird, and it veered off with a clawful of hair.

  Stupid bird, ought to know better than—

  The second owl got him in the side of the head, driving him off the road and taking most of his left ear with it.

  Sonny Gothaway went to his knees, dropping the flashlight. He began to crawl away from the road. There was no thought in his head except to get away from those insane owls who’d lost their mind and had bird-rabies or some shit, and looked to kill him before he’d gotten back to the shed.

  He’d made a couple of yards when he heard it again—“Teakettle-teakettle-teakettle!” and ran into something with his shoulder. It was twigs—branches—some kind of brush pile or something. Maybe he could put his back to it and keep those fucking owls from hitting him from behind.

  A match struck, and he looked up.

  The flame went out almost at once, but in that brief instant, he saw an outline over his head, a stylized shape with an enormous arching neck and a sharp beak.

  A giant bird? What the fuck…?

  A hot weight hit the back of his neck, and then two bands of shadow swept in on the sides of his peripheral vision, slamming into the sides of his head, and Sonny Gothaway lost consciousness immediately.

  “Ma’am?” said Officer Daltry. “I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to know if you’d seen any smoke in the last few days?”

  “Smoke?” Louise leaned her cheek against the doorframe. “Smoke…sorry, young man, no. Somebody’s always burning leaves or having a bonfire somewhere, so I wouldn’t have noticed unless there was a lot of it. Why?”

  If Officer Daltry objected to being called “young man,” he didn’t show it. “I’m sorry, ma’am, this may come as a bit of shock to you. We’re investigating a murder.”

  “A murder,” said Louise blankly.

  “Have you seen a man named Sonny Gothaway recently?”

  “Not for a few days,” she said cautiously. “Did he murder somebody?” She grimaced. “He’s always been a bad sort, I’m afraid, and I can’t say it would surprise me—”

  “No, ma’am,” said Officer Daltry. “I’m afraid he’s the one’s been murdered.” He rubbed his forehead and Louise felt suddenly sorry for him. He was so young.

  “Would you like some coffee, officer? You look about done in.”

  He smiled faintly. “I’d be glad of it, ma’am. It’s a nasty mess out there, and we’re going to have people from the FBI all over the place, and probably reporters as well, so I have to come and tell everybody in the area what to expect.”

  “Of course you do,” said Louise. She opened the door for him. “You come sit down a minute, and tell me whatever you can tell me. Although—” she added, over her shoulder, “I have to tell you that I never liked Sonny, and I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead.”

  Daltry gave a short little laugh. “You’re not the first person to say so, ma’am.”

  “Was it something with—whatever that business was that had people driving back there at all hours?” asked Louise, pouring them both a cup of coffee. “And do you take cream or sugar?”

  “Black, ma’am, and thank you. We don’t know, I’m afraid. He had a meth lab back there—I’m sorry, do you know meth labs? They’re—”

  “Young man,” said Louise, with some asperity, “I may be old, but I still watch the news. I have heard of meth labs! Nasty things, aren’t they? Don’t they explode?”

  “They can,” Officer Daltry allowed.

  “So that’s what Sonny was doing. Well, I’m not surprised.” She sat down. “No, that’s not true. I’m surprised he was smart enough to do that. He never seemed bright enough to fool about with chemicals. So did his meth lab explode?”

  “I’m afraid it was stranger than that,” said Daltry. “Someone built a kind of structure—looks almost like wicker, or a bird’s nest or something—in the
shape of a bird, and stuffed him inside it, and then set fire to it. It didn’t burn very well, but the coroner says he was unconscious and the smoke got him. We were hoping someone saw the smoke, but…well…”

  Louise put a hand over her mouth. “How awful!”

  Daltry took a slug of coffee. “We can’t give out any details, of course, but it’ll be all over the news in a few hours. The FBI will probably come by in a day or two to get a statement from you.”

  “Of course,” said Louise. “The FBI—oh dear! How awful to have happen here!” She stared into her coffee. “Poor Mrs. Gothaway. She’s not worth much, you know, but she did love him, I think.”

  Officer Daltry nodded.

  “Did he—did he suffer much?”

  “No, ma’am. Somebody hit him over the head first, and he probably never woke up at all.”

  “Oh,” said Louise faintly. “That’s good.” She thought she should probably care more than she did, but all she could think of was the pitiful little body of the female cardinal.

  Officer Daltry misread her concern. “Ma’am, I wouldn’t worry too much. Most of the time with things like this, it was a bad drug deal, and the other guy tried to make the crime scene look like some kind of Satanist crap to throw us off the scent. They watch too much TV. We’ll have a patrol car in the area, but we don’t think anybody local is in danger.”

  “That’s good to know,” said Louise.

  “Anyway, ma’am, I should be going. Are you going to be available for the FBI?”

  “Oh, of course! I wasn’t going anywhere.” Louise paused, suddenly alarmed. “I’m not—oh dear, not a suspect, am I?”

  Daltry laughed at that. “No, ma’am. Whoever hit him cracked him on both sides of the head, and gave him a one hell of a concuss—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Well, anyway, ma’am, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, we’re looking for someone who could overpower Gothaway, and I don’t think you’re high on our list of suspects for that.”

  Louise smiled. “No offense taken, young man. Do you need a warm-up on your coffee? No? All right. Please come back any time—if you’re tramping around in those nasty woods at all hours and getting chilled, I’ll leave the pot on for you.”