The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  They settled down to eat. Bernie and her husband tried to find boring things to talk about in order to keep away from the subjects that bothered them most, to avoid upsetting Hercel. Bernie described a shawl she was weaving with a Navajo pattern. Although Barton loved his wife’s weaving, he found the subject so dull he nearly fell asleep, nearly tumbled forward with his forehead going splop into his eggs. Then he heard the coyotes, louder now. Gray jumped up and started barking.

  “They’re back again.” Barton struggled to his feet and pulled his walker into position. The Winchester leaned against the wall.

  Bernie tried, ineffectively, to hush the dog. “You’ll wake the kids.”

  Hercel ran to the window, shading his eyes to see through the glass. Barton hobbled to the door. “You stay here,” he told Hercel, but while Barton was keeping the dog from running out, Hercel slipped through the doorway. He stopped, and Barton joined him. Barton started to speak but only stared. He raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  The coyotes had crossed the wall and were attacking something at the gate, circling and lunging and then being thrown back. Maybe there were six of them. They made a lot of noise, yapping and growling. Then there would be a yelp. They were fighting an animal down on all fours, a much bigger animal that kept striking at them. But it wasn’t really an animal, not the four-footed kind.

  “It’s Mr. Krause,” said Hercel, and he took a step behind Barton.

  Carl crouched down a few yards from the gate. He knew where he was, but he no longer knew who he was; or, rather, he was a wolf, he’d always been a wolf, and he had a single sharp claw. It wasn’t a wolf’s business to be afraid. He growled from deep in his throat. He cut and sliced, and the coyotes were scared of him, but it didn’t stop them. Carl didn’t know who he had been before being a wolf. He had a memory of the town; he knew bad things had happened, but he had little memory of what had taken place before the convenience store and the fat woman’s popcorn. He remembered the Listy Cooler. He remembered loping through the dark, and then the coyotes showed up. First they loped along beside him, then they’d attacked, tried to catch him by his hind legs. One had felt his claw; then the others fell back to reconsider but soon came on again. Carl didn’t know what lay behind him, but he knew where he was going. He could see the faces of the two children. Thinking of them made his tongue thick and wet. Then he had reached the farm with the coyotes around him. He had jumped the fence and fallen.

  Barton held his rifle to his shoulder, but he was unsure whether to shoot. The coyotes and the man formed a tangle, a quickly moving spiral, as the coyotes jumped and the man spun to stab at them. Barton kept thinking, Coyotes aren’t supposed to act like this. The yapping and sudden yelping, and the growling of the man, made an awful chorus, a dark music. Whenever the man turned, the coyotes leapt, and at least one, for a second, hung from his jacket. Then the man shook himself free. Then another snatched at his leg. The man kicked out, but he lost his balance and fell.

  That’s when Barton fired, and the gunshot was the loudest noise in the forest. The Winchester was slow, relatively; it took a moment to operate the bolt and eject the shell, letting another shell rise up from the magazine. It meant taking his finger off the trigger. Barton resighted and fired again. He had missed the first time; now a coyote yelped and fell to the ground. The coyotes stopped attacking the man, who was on all fours. They began moving toward the wall. Barton fired again and missed. Then the coyotes disappeared. They were just gone. The man stayed down on all fours.

  “He must be hurt,” said Barton.

  Hercel couldn’t imagine Carl being hurt; he was too mean to be hurt.

  Barton hobbled forward. “Hey, Carl, you all right?” He wanted to tell Carl to put up his hands, but first he wanted to see how Carl responded.

  Abruptly, the man ran to the wall, still on all fours. It was the running on all fours that bothered Barton most. It startled him so that he didn’t think of shooting. The man disappeared over the wall.

  • • •

  It was half an hour before the patrol car showed up with Woody and Bobby, although Woody had called five minutes earlier. Bernie had just been going to bed. Barton had decided to sit up with his Winchester. Bernie was sick of arguing with him. Pushing his walker ahead of him, Barton had gone out to the wall and found a dead coyote. There was no sound from the woods. For all he knew Carl might have been only a few yards away.

  Barton reassured the two detectives that everyone was all right, but one of his dogs had been hurt earlier in the day. Bonaldo stared down at the dead coyote and nudged it with his shoe, almost expecting it to jump up. He thought that vicious coyotes weren’t what he had signed on for. It was a big jump from vicious coyotes to wearing his police uniform in the Memorial Day parade.

  Rocco Durante and Rainer, the German shepherd, as well as the troopers and Brewster police officers, showed up a little later. The dead coyote was a big distraction for the dog, but Durante pulled him away. In seconds, he picked up Carl’s scent where he’d gone over the wall.

  The German shepherd with the men in tow followed the trail into the swamp. It got more difficult as the trail grew muddier. The men weren’t wearing boots, nor did they have clothing to protect them from the brambles. Once the trail led into the water, Rainer lost the scent entirely.

  FIFTEEN

  WEDNESDAY EVENING, at about nine-thirty, Woody Potter, Detective Beth Lajoie, and two Brewster patrolmen had gone to the house of Benjamin Clouston, the pathology clinician identified by Peggy Summers. Clouston rented a small nineteenth-century house on Ballou Street, five blocks from the hospital. The shades were drawn and the house was dark. No car was in the driveway. Woody knocked and rang the bell and then knocked on the back door. The patrolmen tried to look through the windows. Woody knocked and rang the bell a few more times, and then he and Detective Lajoie went to talk to the neighbors on either side, waking one of them. They learned Clouston was friendly but kept to himself. He had lived there for about a year. Sometimes the music was a little loud, that was all.

  One neighbor remembered Clouston leaving on Tuesday morning. No, he wasn’t carrying any bags or a suitcase. Clouston drove a metallic silver 2008 Toyota Solara. After knocking on Clouston’s door one more time, the officers left. In the morning Woody meant to get a warrant to search the house. A plainclothes detective remained parked outside all night. Clouston’s Solara was registered in Rhode Island, and its plate number was sent out to the police.

  Woody then drove home, and by midnight he was asleep. At one-fifteen, he was awakened by a call from Bobby, who told him about Harriet’s murder. So he got dressed again, and soon he joined the hunt for Carl out at the farm and followed the tracking dog into the swamp. Even after the dog had lost the scent, they slogged along, trying to pick it up again. Around four-thirty, they quit for the night, meaning to begin again at eight, if Carl wasn’t found elsewhere. By five o’clock, Woody was home in bed.

  At six-thirty, his telephone rang. It was Jill Franklin. “Breakfast?” Her voice was chipper and affectionate.

  Woody grunted his way back to some facility with the English language. “Sure.”

  “Seven o’clock at the Brewster Brew?”

  “That’ll work. By the way, I’ve got bad news.” Woody paused; he dreaded what would come next. “Hercel McGarty’s mom was murdered last night.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath followed by silence. Then: “That poor child, I’m so sorry.”

  “It gets worse. His stepfather did it. Hercel saw it happen—his sister, too, for that matter.”

  “Mr. Krause? How awful.”

  “You still want to meet?”

  “Of course.” Even so, the cheer was gone from her voice. “Where’s Hercel now?”

  “Out at Bernie and Barton Wilcox’s; they’ve got the sheep . . .”

  “I know them both. I did a story on them for the Times and Advertiser.”

  Not long after, as Woody was nearing Brewster, he was passe
d overhead by a news helicopter. It didn’t bring out the best in him. Vultures, he thought. Actually, another had already landed, and five news trucks were parked outside police headquarters. Woody recalled seeing Baldo Bonaldo leaving the library on Tuesday wearing a mullet wig cap with dark bangs. Perhaps, thought Woody, I should borrow it so the reporters don’t recognize me.

  When Woody drove up Water Street, he saw a news truck parked outside the Brewster Brew, as well as five cars, which he guessed belonged to reporters. He didn’t want to go inside.

  But as he slowed down, a figure darted out from between parked cars and waved. It was Jill. Woody stopped the truck so quickly that Ajax slid onto the floor. He shoved open the door, and Jill jumped inside holding a paper bag.

  “Wow, they should call that the Brewster Zoo. I got two black coffees, cream cheese, and three bagels.”

  “Why three?”

  “One for Ajax. Let’s drive down to the beach. You look sleepy. The bags under your eyes have their own little bags.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I think they’re handsome.”

  He looked at her in surprise; she was smiling at him. Woody tried to smile back and felt his cheeks creak. I’ve got all the charm of a cement block, he thought; then he turned his attention to the road. On the way to the beach, he described what had happened the previous night, as well as what they had learned from Peggy Summers. Jill’s eyes narrowed, as if the bad news cast too bright a light. Her dismay increased as Woody drove, until, when he described Hercel, tears came to her eyes. He thought about how on their first meetings he’d tried to keep information from her; now he was dumping it in her lap. But it was worse than that, as he saw the hurt in her face; he felt his words were poison he was pumping into her system.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I should keep this to myself. I hate it, and I’m supposed to be used to it. I’m just sticking bad stuff in your head.”

  Jill wiped her eyes on the back of her hand and frowned. “I can decide myself what I can stand and what I can’t. Have you really gotten used to stuff like this?”

  Woody saw a movement at the side of the road. He turned quickly, thinking it was a coyote, but it was only a house cat on the prowl. I need a break, he thought.

  “Maybe I’ve developed calluses. You see a lot of bad stuff; it’s part of the job. I hope I never get completely used to it, but I worry that how it affects me can affect other people, the poison, I mean. That’s one thing that happened with Susie.” Woody gave a rueful laugh. “She stopped asking if I’d had a nice day.”

  Jill was scratching Ajax’s ears. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  Woody looked doubtful. The sun was still low in the sky and she was squinting into it, but it made her whole face bright and her blond hair shine. He wanted to put his hand on her hand, but he kept his hands on the wheel.

  Woody drove to the spot on the beach where he had been with Bobby Anderson on Tuesday morning. Then it had been gray and the waves had been high. This morning it was sunny and the water was flat, with the waves no more than a foot or so. Jill took out the cups of coffee and put them in the cup holders; then she spread cream cheese on a plain bagel and gave it to him. He was touched by the faint sense of domesticity; it filled his heart with generalized yearning. On the other hand, he was glad that drinking coffee and eating his bagel kept him from talking. He watched the seagulls pushing one another out of the way. Jill, too, was eating and looking at the water. Woody, in fact, would have liked to talk to her about what was going on, talk to her about Carl and the coyotes. But he still thought she didn’t need to hear the gruesome details.

  Instead, he approached the subject obliquely. “I used to think of confusion and ignorance as being about the same thing—that is, if I thought of it at all. But in the past day or two, I’ve been thinking that confusion can be a result of ignorance. It’s what this guy at You-You would call a modification.” Woody spoke briefly about Todd Chmielnicki, but he didn’t say how Chmielnicki had looked into his head. “Anyway, to deal with the ignorance, to see it clearly, you’ve got to get rid of the confusion, the modification. It’s like when you’re listening to a person, you can’t really hear them if you’re feeling anger or doubt, stuff like that. Those are also modifications. So I try to figure out what’s happening in Brewster, and all I see is confusion. It’s like a wall between me and my ignorance. I’ve got to get back to the ignorance by itself so I can do something about it. I might not figure anything out, but I’ll have a better chance.”

  Jill thought for a moment. “I don’t think I feel confused very often, but I’m sure that’s because my life’s not complicated enough.”

  Finishing their breakfast, Woody and Jill took Ajax for a short walk. Woody kept telling himself he had no time for a walk with a pretty girl, but he decided he could give it ten minutes.

  It was nearly high tide, so they had to walk on the loose sand. Their footing was unsure, and their shoulders bumped each other. They could have walked farther apart, but they didn’t. Ajax ran ahead, came back, and ran ahead again. Each time Woody brushed Jill’s shoulder it caused a quick sparkle in his brain.

  • • •

  Thursday morning, while Woody was walking on the beach, Bobby Anderson drove out to the Wilcox farm with Harriet’s miniature dachshund, Randy. The dog weighed less than ten pounds—a short-haired dachshund, mostly black but with tan paws and a tan muzzle. He stood on the seat with his front paws just reaching the dashboard, as if glad to go somewhere. When the police had finished their work in Carl and Harriet’s house early that morning, one of the patrolmen had taken the dog to police headquarters until the shelter opened. “It’s not like it’s a pit bull,” he kept saying. “We got lots of room.”

  When Bobby showed up at headquarters at seven-thirty—first running through the phalanx of reporters, photographers, and guys holding up little tape recorders—he found Randy in the detectives’ office being fed cheese crackers and potato chips.

  So he decided the dog needed liberating. He had wanted to see Hercel anyway, to see how he was doing. He also needed to meet up with the canine unit. A second dog had been brought in and would start at the entrance of Great Swamp, about three miles from the farm. And Bobby wanted to talk to Barton about coyotes and get them figured out. He wasn’t like Woody; he didn’t let this shit fuck up his mood. He didn’t get all existential about it. Woody had to learn to chill; at least that was how Bobby saw it. But the coyotes perplexed him.

  Barton had let the sheep back into the field—“They gotta eat, don’t they?”—and was sitting in his chair in front of the house with the Winchester across his knees and a blanket over his shoulders. Hercel sat on the ground nearby, sharpening a stick with a Swiss Army knife—“whittling,” Barton called it. The Bouvier circled the sheep, keeping them loosely together.

  When Bobby carried the miniature dachshund from the Z, Barton laughed. “Is that my new sheepdog?”

  But Hercel ran to the dog and grabbed him up in his arms. He didn’t weep, but he came close. His whole life had been blown to pieces, and this one thing had been saved. He ran to the house to show the dog to Lucy and Tig.

  “Nice of you to bring it,” said Barton.

  Bobby squatted down on his heels next to the old man, and looked out over the field. Tall trees lined the perimeter beyond the wall. The sheep—now twenty-nine of them—seemed to accept the Bouvier’s attentiveness. Half a dozen geese pecked at treats in the grass. It was quiet except for the sounds of birds—a crow, some blue jays, and a robin making a chirping-clicking noise, warning his pals about the marmalade cat sunning itself on the front step.

  “Pretty place you’ve got here,” said Bobby.

  A note of anxiety crept into Barton’s voice. “I don’t know how long I can keep it. I can’t get around on two legs, and one of my dogs is laid up. If the coyotes start coming over the wall, even a half-dozen dogs won’t be enough. The way they went after Krause last night, he could have been kille
d. They’re scared of the rifle, but I sure can’t keep guard every night, and what’s the point of keeping the sheep in the barn? I’m too old to be running Fort Apache.”

  “A DEM sergeant told me they’d been getting complaints—more pets disappearing, more people being threatened. You’ve any ideas what’s behind it?”

  Barton laughed. “Bernie’s got a few Wiccan friends who say it’s shape-shifting. There’re lots of spells and ways to turn yourself into a wolf, though I can’t say they work. On the other hand, Krause was growling and running around on all fours, but I figure that’s what’s called clinical lycanthropy. It’s a kind of schizophrenia. Frank Norris wrote a novel, Vandover and the Brute, about a man turning into a wolf. Krause reminded me of that. Central Asia has lots of myths of weredogs, but those were dog-headed men rather than anything like Gray or poor Rags. A German study of lycanthropy published a few years ago discussed more than thirty cases. Most of the subjects weren’t wolves, but tigers, birds, cats, even frogs and bees.”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “Only a little light Web reading during the night. But there’s one trouble about calling these coyote shape-shifters. Come with me and bring the rifle.”

  Barton heaved himself up onto his walker and made his way to the barn. Inside, on the floor, was a blue tarp covering a lumpy something.

  “Pull it off,” said Barton.

  Bobby grabbed a corner and pulled. Underneath was a dead coyote.

  “DEM’s supposed to pick it up this morning. The point is if you kill a werewolf or a shape-shifter it’s supposed go back to human form.” Barton nudged the coyote with the front foot of his walker. “This one’s all coyote, or almost.”

  The animal was a mixture of black, tan, and gray—doglike, but not a dog. “It’s big. What do you mean ‘almost’?”