by Michael Dunn
A voice called out, “JP!”
He turned his head slowly, and asked with a slow, annoyed, “What?”
His voice was dripping with venom as he focused on the approaching Benny and Larry.
Larry jumped as those pale blue eyes rested on him for a moment, slumping a little and fell back a step.
“Uh… Benny?” Larry asked, as if saying, ‘you go on and tell him, Benny.’
Narrowing his eyes, the blond boy turned his attention to Benny, tapping his foot as he waited to hear what was important enough to interrupt him. JP was also covering up being caught doing something he wished they hadn’t seen.
Benny said, “Apparently, Albert’s dad and his friends from the Moose Lodge are going into the woods this Saturday night.”
JP’s jaw dropped, and his eyes widened as his arms slipped from his chest.
Benny told JP what he and Larry had heard from Albert Mullins.
“Our woods?” JP asked.
Benny and Larry nodded in unison.
“They’ll be killed!” JP said.
“So, what are we going to do?” Benny asked.
“I… I… Let’s go talk to Tony,” JP said as ideas were forming in his head.
The three walked through the parking lot to where Tony usually parked his car, but the car was gone.
“So, he left without us after the assembly?” Benny asked.
“No, numb nuts,” JP said, as he lit a cigarette. “He wouldn’t dare. He’s with his first girlfriend at his second home.”
“First girlfriend?” Larry asked. “You mean, Suzie?”
JP scoffed and shook his head. “His car, duh. C’mon, let’s go.”
The boys entered the auto shop finding Tony cleaning up and putting away his tools while absently singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” along with the radio.
“Hey, guys,” Tony said, closing the hood on his beater of a ’57 Chevy Bel-Air. “While you guys were still fawning over the recruiters at the assembly, I brought my car in here. I thought I heard it making a funny noise, but I can’t find the damn problem.” Tony shrugged. “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but sometimes I think this car has a mind of its own.”
“Tony, we gotta talk.” JP said.
“About what?” Tony asked, as he drank from his Coke bottle.
“Benny, tell him,” JP said.
As the other kids were filing out of the auto shop for the day and heading home, paying little attention to Tony and his friends, Benny told his tale for the second time.
“Wow,” Tony said, astonished and trying to wipe the practically indelible grease off his hands. He gave up trying since he had to work at Ed Tallfeather’s garage later that afternoon and would ask the guys in the shop about that peculiar and mysterious noise.
“What do you think?” JP asked.
Tony shrugged, and said, “I think we should tell Bordeaux.”
“Why?”
“‘Why?’ What do you mean ‘why?’” Tony asked JP. “Because he should know, that’s why. People could get killed.”
“Maybe we could do something about it.” JP suggested.
“Like what?” Tony asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Something that will…”
“There you guys are,” Suzie Keaton said, as she entered the auto shop.
JP closed his mouth when the red-head walked toward them.
“Hi, hun,” Suzie said to Tony. “Long time, no see.” Then she giggled.
Suzie and Tony each made an awkward hesitating motion to embrace because Tony was covered in grease and oil. Instead, the two ended up ducking away clumsily at the last second, laughing softly at their own private joke. Tony she loved, but the mess that came with his job and his class, not so much.
JP rolled his eyes. “Can we go now?” JP groaned.
“What’s your rush?” Tony grinned as he opened the passenger side door. Suzie got in the front passenger seat. The three boys piled in the back.
“Larry, get in first.” JP barked. “I’m not riding bitch.”
Larry obeyed.
The ten-minute drive felt like an hour to the three boys in the back. Tony pulled into Suzie’s driveway, got out of the car, and opened the passenger side for Suzie as Suzie got out.
JP whispered to Benny and Larry, “And we’ll be here for another hour.” Then he got out of the back and into the front passenger seat.
Tony said to Suzie, “Bye, sweetheart.”
“Call me later?” Suzie asked.
“After work, sure,” Tony said as he gazed in her eyes.
JP honked the horn, and shouted out the passenger window, “While we’re still young, okay?”
Tony glared at this friend, letting JP know to knock it off.
“Anyway, I had better go,” Tony said, motioning to his car. “Looks like the animals are getting restless.”
Suzie laughed. “Sounds like it. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”
She was about to open the front door at the same moment as her father, Jack Keaton, opened it for her.
“Suzie, get in here now!” Jack barked, almost snarling. Seething at his daughter’s boyfriend and his infernal death machine of a car, Jack looked like he wanted to shoot them both.
Jack Keaton was forty-one, but looked fifty-one. He was a small, slender man with thick, black rimmed glasses that seemed as though they were almost glued to his face. His once auburn hair was rapidly thinning, changing to a silvery shade while his moustache was graying even faster. His back and neck were a hunched from many years spent hovered over a desk crunching numbers, and there was a small paunch belly from neglected physical fitness program over the past twenty years.
“Uh, hi, Mr. Keaton,” Tony waved.
Jack Keaton gave the boy the facial equivalent of the middle finger as he slammed the door behind him and his daughter.
Tony got back in the car and backed out of the driveway. Once out of Suzie’s neighborhood, JP broke the silence.
“Have you thought about it anymore?”
“Thought about what?” Tony asked.
“What we’re going to do about the vets’ little hunting invasion into our homeland.”
“Yeah, we’re going to tell Bordeaux.”
“No, no, no, you can’t tell him.” JP protested.
“Why not?”
“Because you know how the old man gets.”
“Yes, and if we screw this up, he’ll kill us,” Tony said and he was serious. “You heard what he did to Creighton DeLuca before we were born?”
Unlike the Beast of Bestiavir, which scared everyone in town, except the residents of the Paradise Trailer Park, the story of Creighton DeLuca was their spook story meant to keep them in line.
JP dismissed that and said, “We can take care of this ourselves, and we can show the old man we’re not kids anymore and we can handle this responsibility.”
Tony sighed and shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Chapter Three: The Woods
April 6th, 1971
Tony watched as the waxing moon rose over the New Mexico skyline shining a bright yellow hue. The waxing moon was emerging in the sky, which made the sky a thick navy blue and the canyons below a dark red.
He was lying naked next to Suzie, in the spacious backseat of his ’57 Chevy, enjoying the afterglow of post-coital euphoria. The car smelled of faded vinyl, sweat, and that new sex smell. Suzie’s kisses were warm, sensual, and tasted like Coca-Cola.
Their date had been ordinary enough. They went to see The Andromeda Strain at the Silver Dust drive-in movie theater (named for a time when Bestiavir was a prosperous silver mining town, but that time had long since passed). They had burgers at the local Tastee Freeze before finding their way to their private getaway in the north woods beyond the town limits, behind a large oak tree.
Softly over the car radio, The Bells’ eerily saccharine “Stay Awhile” played.
The song made Tony wonde
r how long he and Suzie would last. It had been a good, no, great nine months so far, and he wanted to think it would be forever, but that wasn’t always the case. In a few months, Suzie was planning on going to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, probably studying to be an accountant like her father, while Tony stayed in Bestiavir. He was no Joe College. Would she move on without him? Possibly. Although Albuquerque was a mere half-hour away, it might as well be as far apart as the Earth to the moon. However, by summer, this might not be a problem, because Tony’s mother had arranged for a girl from her old neighborhood to see him in June. Tony was still trying to get out of that one.
“I can’t wait to get that dress tomorrow,” Suzie said.
“Huh?”
“Prom. Y’know, that big dance in a couple weeks?” Suzie asked and giggled. “Happens in almost every high school in America. Kind of an annual ritual?”
Tony smiled too. “I know what it is, smart ass.”
“You didn’t forget, did you?”
“No, I didn’t forget,” Tony scoffed. That was true. He didn’t forget, but it also wasn’t on his mind, and he was far less excited about prom than Suzie.
“My mom and I are going to Albuquerque tomorrow to get it. It’s so cute. It’s red with spaghetti straps and you’re gonna love it.”
Tony smiled. “I’m sure I will.”
Suzie stretched lazily, yawned, and then groaned with the thought of having to return home again soon.
“I’m glad you got me out of my house. This was fun. I needed this.”
Tony knew life at the Keaton household was not the easiest these days, thanks to a stressed out and frustrated Jack, whose new hobby was yelling at his daughter about her boyfriend. If Jack knew what they had been up to that evening, he probably would have killed them both.
“I don’t think I could have taken another night of listening to my mom and dad argue about us again.”
“Oh?”
Suzie sighed. “That’s all he talks about and then leaves the house and goes to the Water Buffalo Lodge…”
“The what?”
“Moose Lodge, Water Buffalo Lodge, you know, The Flintstones?”
“Ah, right,” Tony nodded.
Suzie gave a squiggly, Charlie Brown-type smile because her joke didn’t work.
“Anyway,” Suzie began. “One of the guys there claims to have seen the monster from the woods. Y’know, the one that’s supposedly making the dogs in the area disappear?”
“Yeah,” Tony nodded. “I’ve heard.”
“Since you live by those woods, haven’t you ever seen anything?”
“Seen what?”
Suzie giggled. “The Beast of Bestiavir? My dad used to say, ‘Suzie, if you’re not good, the Beast of Bestiavir is going to get you.’”
Tony forced a smile and thought that sounded like something Jack would say. He was a real mongrel sometimes. Tony wondered how many children in this town imagined the legendary local monster living in their closets or under their beds waiting for them to fall asleep, and Tony thought Suzie’s grandfather must have put little Jackie Keaton to sleep with the same nightmarish tale that was passed down like a genetic family curse. He had heard the stories himself, not from his parents, but from the kids at school. At six-years-old, another first grader asked him and JP if their parents had told them about the Beast of Bestiavir.
JP said, “No, our parents love us.”
Tony and JP had been asked many times over the years by curious and somewhat braver classmates whether they or anybody else in their trailer park fed the Beast of Bestiavir like the legend said. The boys’ response was always the same: “Don’t be stupid. There is no Beast of Bestiavir.”
It was a legend, and legends were hard to kill, and a legend people wanted to believe was practically indestructible.
Tony laughed and shook his head. “No, it’s just a legend, that’s it, a spook story told to keep kids away from those woods. It might’ve been a big deal a long time ago, but not anymore. I guess it takes more than a few generations for a legend like that to lie down and die.”
Suzie laughed, lightly tapped Tony on the chest and said, “No, I guess not.”
“There is also a story Billy the Kid once rode through Bestiavir, but no historian can back that claim.”
“That’s true. I guess you’re right,” Suzie said, rolling on her back, staring up at Tony. “Still, there had to be some truth to the legend. People go missing in those woods, sometimes found partially eaten. Cattle are sometimes found mutilated, which means it could be aliens. This is New Mexico, you know, and it happens regularly. Well, not regularly, but every so often.”
“Like once in a blue moon?” Tony asked and laughed at his own joke.
“Funny, smart ass.” Suzie playfully slapped Tony’s arm. “Now, whatever it is out there is targeting the dogs in the area. Any idea what could be doing that?”
Tony shrugged. “Probably some sicko like that Charlie Starkweather guy. I’d sooner believe it’s a human monster out there before a fairy tale one.”
Tony yawned and stared at his naked girlfriend. Her legs were partially covered in an old sheet Tony kept in his car because naked, sweaty flesh sometimes felt painfully glued to the vinyl upholstery.
“Why are you so interested in those woods all of a sudden?” Tony asked.
Suzie rolled over onto her stomach and sighed.
“Because of my dad’s hunting trip… I heard him talking on the phone about going to the woods and your trailer park to find the Beast of Bestiavir. I think they are going to be at your trailer park tomorrow night.”
“Oh, dear,” Tony said and his eyes got wide.
2
As the sun set, Tony and Suzie put on their clothes and Tony drove her home.
When Tony got back to the trailer park, he found JP and Jenny Roulet shooting hoops under the street light. Since JP did not have a sister, or any other family except his mother, he adopted the ten-year-old girl as his little sister. JP stopped mid-dribble when he saw Tony approaching, long enough for Jenny to steal the ball away and make her shot. JP didn’t even notice.
“Hey,” JP said, lighting a cigarette.
“Hi, Tony,” Jenny said and blushed.
“Hi, Jenny, could you give JP and me a minute?”
Jenny took the ball and ran home. Tony looked at JP with renewed determination.
“I just got word from Suzie that… they are coming. Do you have a plan?”
JP nodded. “Oh yeah. I sure do.”
“I’m in.”
JP smiled and exhaled smoke.
Chapter Four: Hunting Grounds
April 10th, 1971
The fat, bright moon loomed high above Bestiavir, New Mexico.
For all who attended the meeting at the lodge that evening, the VFW was their home, their sanctuary, and their community. The lodge was an old one-story building, built as a refuge and a place to congregate for the returning combat vets. It was also where the fraternal order of the Moose Lodge held their meetings, and because many of the old vets were members of both, it made more sense to combine the two groups into one building. The lodge was big enough to stage large parties, wedding receptions, and town hall meetings, but the old vets mostly stayed in their own one-room bar area in the back. It was their den. False wooden paneling lined the walls and the smell of stagnant cigarette smoke and stale beer was so pungent and had been there for so long, most people thought it was part of the design.
Along the south wall was the back door, a jukebox, and two windows that looked out onto a construction site where a Burger King was being built next door. Mounted dead fish caught by past members decorated the walls above while neon beer signs flashed in the windows.
Above the west wall hung a large moose head looking down as if it was presiding over the group. There was a common misconception the Moose Lodge was named because of this decoration, and another misconception was a former member had shot it during a hunting trip. The moose head
had been purchased from Canada.
In the west corner of the north wall was an eight-foot-tall wooden totem carved in the shape of a grizzly bear by members of the local Navajo tribe. Once it had been a ferocious addition to the décor until someone put a John Deere trucker hat on it; now, it was comical.
The north wall was a repeat of the south wall, minus the jukebox, and outside its windows was brush and desert and the parking lot where the vets parked their cars. The north wall held the door to the other rooms of the lodge, including the bathrooms. The east wall contained the well-stocked and well-managed bar, where the twelve middle-aged vets waited for the clock to strike ten.
There were a few tables lined up in the middle and the hunters sat quietly, smoking, drinking, and waiting. Once Jack Keaton arrived, or the clock struck ten, whichever came first, they were going hunting, and tonight, their game was far beyond a prized buck or coyote… and it was far more terrible.
Ralph Mullins sat at a small, circular table in the middle nursing his third Scotch and soda of the evening. He held the drink for a long moment before the hand holding the glass began to shake, and he had to concentrate to force it to stop. It was so quiet in the lodge the rattling of the melting ice in his glass rang like wind chimes.
Ralph was forty-seven, had a wife, two kids in the local high school, and a mortgage that ate his paycheck like a starving animal. He was still in fairly good shape and hoped that would come in handy tonight if necessary. The well-worn Texas Rangers baseball cap covering his balding pate was now soaked with perspiration, as was his faded, green Army coat. He wiped the sweat off his brow, then off his dark brown walrus moustache. A cigarette dangled from his trembling lips.
His double-barreled Winchester shotgun lay across his lap, loaded with the new, special shells that contained silver pellets inside purchased from Tank Bolin an hour ago. The rest of the men had their weapons with them instead of safely packed in the trunks of their respective cars because this was where Tank Bolin brought in their specially ordered ammo and did business.
Ralph had taken his wife’s good silverware without her knowing, the ones she had inherited from her grandmother. He had them melted down to make the silver bullets in Terrance Bolin’s gun shop. Ralph was not absolutely sure the shells would work, but according to those Lon Chaney Jr. movies he had seen as a teenager, silver was what they needed.