Ray orders his parts—his claws and jawsets and tongues and tails, his flex eyes and pinpoints and standard pupils, his polyurethane forms for deer—from an online store that delivers via UPS a few times a month. But his chemicals come from a specialty company based out of Rochester. Dyes and resins. Adhesives and sealants and preservatives. A few times a year he drives there and back, the bed of his pickup sloshing with the buckets and bottles he buys in bulk. This morning, the morning after the boy fell in the pond, he peels open a bucket of formaldehyde, and the fumes that boil out of it make him weep. He will wipe at his face, wipe away with the heels of his hands the tears wetting his cheeks. This is the only time he cries. Not when his father died of a stroke. Not when he sent his mother to the nursing home after she lost her mind and ability to cook and clean. Not when his girlfriend of ten years—Tanya—said to hell with him if he didn’t want kids, didn’t want to get married, didn’t really want to spend time with her except the occasional buffet dinner followed by a quick and dirty screw. His sister had always called him cold.
He is cold now, in the pole barn, in the walk-in freezer. He is surrounded by shelves of animals, all packaged in plastic, their ID tags scrawled over with a Sharpie that identifies their owner, their date of entry, their order number. He stuffs deer mostly, but also bears, beavers, bobcats, turkeys, pheasant. He makes throw rugs, doeskin gloves, one time a pair of moccasins, though that was a pain in the ass and he would never do it again. He mounts fish on logs and antlers on stained oak and red velvet.
He comes in this morning to work on a dog, a pug owned by Ruth Gill, a square-shaped woman who teaches English at the local community college and always wears floral-patterned muumuus, her hair a frizzy red helmet. The dog was named Nosferatu, and she had euthanized it. “Cancer,” she said. “They all die of cancer. It’s the dog food that does it.” She would dress the dog up in tuxedos, sailor suits, tracksuits. Ray would often see them around town—at the mall, the farmers market—the pug bug-eyed and snorting at the end of a leash. Since dropping off the dog, Ruth has called daily to check in, often sobbing, always wanting to know when Ray will be done, when Nosferatu can come home. “Soon,” he tells her and means it, moving the dog up in his processing schedule so that he can put an end to her pestering.
When Ray is in the freezer, pawing through the stacks of bodies, thumbing their tags, searching for the pug, he comes across a crow. It is not packaged, not tagged. Some people have crows for pets. And sometimes the weirdos—the people with the powder-white faces and the black lipstick and the chains running from their lips to their earlobes—sometimes they drop off a carcass to stuff. But he has no idea where this crow came from. It is the size of his forearm, deeply black, its wings neatly folded against its sides. He picks it up, its feathers like brittle blades of obsidian, its beak open and decorated with hoarfrost that looks like lace or mold—and then drops it and wipes his hand on his jeans and locates the pug and carries its body into the shop, to the stainless steel table with the drain beneath it. Here he will skin it and set the fur aside to clean and dry and oil. The remains—a shrunken pod of bone and muscle—he will dip into plaster of Paris to equal the shape of its body. And then he will make a matching fiberglass mold to sew the skin around. Pluck from a shelf some glass eyes, teeth.
But that will come later. For now, the dog—such a hideous dog, some things should be buried and forgotten—must thaw. He plugs in a space heater. In a few minutes, he knows, the dog will appear to move, to breathe, as it softens. Gases will escape it. Joints will unspring.
He startles at a noise—a crunching and snapping—behind him. The boy sits on a folding chair, swinging his legs in a scissoring motion. Ray doesn’t like the boy’s eyes. The way they stare at him, unblinking. He would prefer to lock him in a bedroom or plant him in front of the television. But he knows he must keep him close. Earlier, Ray gave him a glass of Coke. The boy has since sucked it down and now chews on the ice, working the cubes around in his mouth, slowly crushing them with his teeth, making a noise like bones breaking.
Helen will be home soon. In two more days she will fly from Fort Lauderdale to Minneapolis and grumble up the driveway in her Grand Prix and crash through the door without knocking. Where’s my baby? she will say, fatter, tanner, grinning widely. Will she even notice any difference? Will the boy smile when he sees her, spring up from his place in front of the television and run into her arms? Will she mess his cheek with lipstick? Will he tell her what happened, how the ice opened up beneath him?
Ray hopes so. At least that would be something—right now the boy seems capable of nothing, seems to belong to another world. He cries constantly, though not out of pain or sadness, not as far as Ray can tell. It is as though he is leaking. Maybe melting. Spilling over as if some secret spring inside him has been tapped. Tears dribble down his cheeks. The damp impressions of his fingertips can be found throughout the house, on the windows, the kitchen table, the TV remote. And when he walks across the carpet—slowly now, and hunched over, like an old man whose muscles have gone flaccid, whose joints are clotted with rust—he leaves behind footprints, the carpet damp and decorated with half-moon designs.
He won’t eat anymore. Not even the open cartons of ice cream that Ray sets in front of him, a spoon thrust into them, Neapolitan, cookie dough, chocolate fudge triple chunk. “Come on,” Ray says. “Snap out of it.” The boy sleeps most of the day. Curled up on the living room floor or sprawled out on the futon. Ray finds it hard to focus on the boy’s face, his features seeming smeared over, as if seen through a rainy window.
There is a cold snap. On television weathermen swing their arms across maps of Minnesota like wizards conjuring winds. Their voices are high-pitched and hurried when they talk about changing pressure systems, plummeting temperatures. They frown when they say, “This is deadly weather, folks. Stay inside.” They talk about the bitterness of the air, as if wind had a flavor, the gusts making it feel like forty below. The footage cuts to a shot of a reporter out in a field. He throws a bucket of water into the air, and it transforms into a cloud of crystals. He hammers a nail into a board with a muffin left outside to freeze.
Ray’s sister called an hour ago, and he let the machine pick it up. “We’re here,” she said. “We landed. Waiting for our luggage now. And guess what? We’re going to book the next flight back to the Bahamas. Joking! But seriously, why do we live here? The weather is trying to kill us. See you soon! Can’t wait to see my sweet boy! Love you!”
Ray looks around the house. At the dead animals nailed to the walls. At the dishes piled up in the sink. At the mail stacked on the table. At the boy sitting in front of the television. He should do something to get ready for her. He picks up an empty ice cream carton off the floor and puts it in a trash can that is already heaped high. He isn’t sure when he last took a shower. That’s what he should do. A long hot shower and a shave. A fresh shirt. He should try to look like someone you would trust your child with.
Thirty minutes later, he climbs out of the shower and towels off and pulls on his clothes in a bathroom swirling with ghostly steam. A cold current of air streams under the door, and he doesn’t think much about it until he turns the knob and steps into the hall, where the wind grips him. His damp hair instantly freezes. He thuds down the hallway and rounds the corner and sees the front door open and swinging. From the walls comes a groaning as the pipes begin to seize up.
He shoves his feet into boots but doesn’t have time to find his coat. He runs into the day with an arm held out as if to ward off the cold. The sun shines, its light blurred by the blown snow that swirls all around him. With the lunar quality of winter light and the cratered snowscape of his property, he might as well be on the moon.
Ray cannot see far, visibility reduced to less than fifty yards one minute, ten the next, but he can see enough. A blur of color. The boy still in his pajamas, moving toward the pond. Ray tries to run. He lifts his knees high to trudge through the deep snow. Already his fin
gers and ears, the tip of his nose, have gone numb. A blackness darker than a shadow catches the corner of his eye. He glances down at it. A crow. Dead in the snow. By the time he registers it, he is already upon another, and then another, and another still. Dead crows litter the yard—killed by the cold. At that very moment another appears out of the white oblivion and strikes the ground before him with a thud. His boot crunches over it. More crows fall, one of them crashing painfully against his shoulder, where it will leave a bruise as if its color was contagious.
He can no longer feel his face. His hands are like weights swinging at the ends of his arms. He stumbles onto the pond now, the boy not so far away, ghosting in and out of view. He calls out, “Stop! Stop, dammit!” but the wind carries away his voice. He wonders if the boy will resist him, will lash out with his fingers curled over into bony claws. The thought is interrupted when he spots the hole in the ice and reels backward. Another step, and he would have fallen through.
He spins around in a circle. He is alone. The boy is gone. Swallowed by the pond or erased by the wind. Ray hugs his arms around his chest. His body shudders. His eyes water, the tear trails freezing on his cheeks. The snow is all around him, a white void, and he feels lost and overwhelmed in its changelessness. He knows he will vanish, too, if he doesn’t depart this place. He leans into the wind and follows the trail of footprints, the only means by which he can find his way home and the only indication that the boy ever existed. The way is so endlessly cold.
Suspect Zero
5:32 a.m.—November 20—Chippewa County, Wisconsin
People think they know, but they don’t. Maybe there was something romantic about a steam engine, but there was nothing romantic about a freight or passenger train. The horn sounded mournful for a reason. There was no place lonelier than an engine car at night. For thirty dollars an hour, sixty hours a week, Mike worked as a conductor, hauling everything but mostly grain, coal, oil. One- or two- or three-engine loads. Flatbeds. Boxcars. Reefers. Hoppers. Cattle cars. Well cars. Wagontops. Hazardous, perishable. It was all the same to him. Stopping every twenty miles, every hundred miles to drop off a load, secure a load, check the air brakes, and then off he went again, alone except for the engineer who snored in a cot and woke only to help him throw switches and uncouple cars, following the tracks, the tracks, the tracks. You see train tracks as fragmented—crossing a rural highway here, cutting through a soybean field there—but Mike understood the through line, the steel stitching that bound everything together. Tracks made most think of faraway places, but to Mike the tracks were a single place that the world scrolled by, unavailable to him.
That was his angle on the world. Separate, watching everything and everyone flash by. Sometimes, late at night, he would snap off the lights of the engine car to see more clearly. A shooting star streaked the sky. Teenagers gathered around a bonfire burning in a fallow cornfield. In a window a woman rubbed the back of her colicky baby. So many towns, so many lives, made it somehow harder to care about them all. People mattered less when you saw how many of them there were.
It hurt to blink. It hurt to sit. The doom-doom-doom of the train’s progress became his pulse. This night he had gone far enough, long enough, that no matter how much coffee he drank, his eyes crossed, so that one second it appeared the tracks split, and the next, they merged.
That had happened to him once. The tracks had merged in a snarl of metal outside Grand Forks. Some environmentalists protesting the North Dakota oil grab had sparked a load of C-4 beneath the tracks. His had been the first train to hit the mess it made. He came around a curve and spotted it. He threw the air brakes, the dynamic brakes, but it wasn’t enough. He had a three-man crew, and they leaped from the train and rolled down the gravel berm and watched helplessly when a hundred yards down the line the engine jumped and the rest of the cars accordioned after it. The shriek and boom and clank of warring steel made the air shake and his ears feel as though they might bleed.
That was the only time the tracks connected, when things got mangled.
At a grain elevator near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the train screeched to a stop, and Mike climbed out to take a piss, walk the load. A sodium arc lamp buzzed. The green hint of dawn edged the horizon. He snapped on his Maglite to throw a beam, maybe crack a skull. There were always stowaways.
That’s what he thought he was dealing with—another stowaway—when he spotted the leg. Jutting from the top of a coal car. A bare foot with a pronounced arch. A delicate ankle that rose into a thin calf. Like someone sleeping, a restless leg peeking out from under the sheets.
He called out, but no one responded. He climbed the ladder and discovered why. The body was already purpling along the edges. No clothes, no identification, no teeth, no hands. No idea where it came from except down the tracks.
..
1:00 a.m.—November 20—Steele County, Minnesota
The red lights flashed their warning, but no bar dropped to block his passage, so Ron considered risking it. At the last second he dropped his foot and the brakes chirped and the truck’s grille jerked to a stop a few feet short of the tracks.
The train blasted its horn, whether for him or for the town in the near distance, he didn’t know. A deep-bellied, woeful cry. The engine car’s one eye—halogen bright—cut through the dark and made Ron turn his head away as if he didn’t want to be seen. Then it was past him, and he could feel its progress in his body. The rattle and the chime and the doom-doom-doom as thousands of pounds of steel rolled dangerously forward.
He remembered, as a boy, laying down pennies on the tracks at night, coming back the next morning to find them warped and slivered. One time the tracks were slick as though oiled and he didn’t know why until he saw the man cloven in half. Flies buzzed in and out of his open mouth. Ron collected his pennies before walking home to share what he had seen. The paper later said the man was drunk and must have passed out or stumbled and knocked his head. His mother licked her finger when she turned the page to finish the article. “He wasn’t himself,” she said, looking hard at Ron to impart some lesson. “No one would a done a thing like that on purpose. It’s against nature.”
A phrase she had used on Ron twice. The first time she said it, when he was ten, he had cut open their cat to see what was inside it. The second time, when he was seventeen, the cops had come for him after a girl in the neighborhood had disappeared. They hadn’t been able to prove anything, but his mother knew. She told him she never wanted to see him again. She said he was an abomination. Of course she didn’t know what she was talking about. The hens in the coop sometimes ate their own eggs. The neighbor’s snake-bit horse raced off a cliff in a panic. The kudzu strangled the trees until they were nothing but gray twigs. Nature was always gobbling itself up.
And then the last car, an oil tank, bulleted by. The red lights stopped flashing. The drumming lingered for a time. He crossed the tracks and followed the county highway as it snaked past stubbled cornfields, leafless woods. He saw no other cars and didn’t expect to, not at this hour.
He clicked off his headlights and drove the truck past the two- and three-story homes cut back on forested lots. All of them dark. Everything silvered by the moon hanging low in the sky.
It was still another mile. As though the house was hiding. The asphalt lane terminated at a gravel road that ran off into an orchard. Here he parked, among the bare apple trees, at the edge of a hill that overlooked the train tracks. He killed the ignition. He studied his face in the rearview. The lights from the dash gave him the blue-green pallor of the drowned. He didn’t feel excited or nervous or anything really, only the same blank calm someone might experience when pouring milk over cereal or opening a drawer to fetch a pencil. That was the best way to feel in situations like this. Then you didn’t make mistakes.
Steam plumed from his mouth when he unfolded himself from the truck. The air tasted of the onset of winter, like an aspirin dissolving on your tongue. He left the door unlocked, the keys on the seat. They
would rattle in his pocket, which he had also emptied of coins. He had changed from his work clothes and now wore sneakers, jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, all of them dark colored so that he would appear as a shadow. Except for his gloves, which he pulled on now. Latex. They made his hands glow and appear separate from him.
His footsteps crunched on the gravel and then thudded the blacktop and then scritched the frost-stiffened grass as he returned to the house. He could make himself so quiet when he wanted. His body was slender enough that it sometimes felt like he could cut through the air.
He circled around back. The lawn ended and the stairs began, pea gravel boxed by railroad ties. They led to the deeper darkness behind the house. He took them delicately and slowed at their bottom. The back patio ran up against the walk-out basement. He didn’t want to risk tripping over an uneven pavestone, thudding a shin against a planter.
He checked each window—there were four—all of them locked. So he stood by the sliding glass door. There was a reason people so often used a broomstick to buttress these entries; their locks were the easiest to muscle open. He waited for the train. Ninety rolled through each day, so you never had to wait very long between them.
The cold crept into his fingers, and he shook them, flexed them, when the horn finally sounded ten minutes later. The air trembled with the train’s passage. The grumble veiled any noise he might make when he took the sliding door’s handle in both hands and braced a foot against the frame and leaned back. He strained so hard that his back popped and his veins throbbed and the tendons rose painfully from his neck. Then the casing gave, the lock untoothed from its mooring. The door slid open with a gasp.
Suicide Woods Page 2