by Laird Barron
Our merry band rolled into town after dark and, since Sequim was the kind of place that locked its doors at sundown, we proceeded directly to the bed and breakfast—a cute two-story farmhouse—where Glenn had rented our rooms. The proprietors were an elderly couple named Leland and Portia Teller. Mrs. Teller fixed us a nice dinner despite our being three hours late. Baked salmon, steamed carrots, sourdough bread, and ice cream and black coffee for dessert. After dinner, we sat on the front porch in a collection of rockers and a swing, and smoked cigarettes. Glenn shared one with Dane. They reclined on the swing and giggled like teenagers. The night was muggy and overcast. Lights were off all over town except for the neon flicker of a bar several blocks down and across the parking lot of a community baseball diamond.
It was a good thing I hadn’t been drinking because watching Glenn casually indulge in a habit we’d mutually conquered at great physical and mental anguish ignited a slow burn in my chest. Were I drunk and vulnerable, God knows what I’d have done—wept, cursed him, slapped him, walked away into the night and disappeared. A half-dozen times I opened my mouth to say something sharp and ill-tempered. I mastered the impulse. I knew how Glenn would react if I confronted him. He’d laugh and play it as a joke. Then we wouldn’t talk for the rest of the trip.
I bit my tongue and moved to the opposite end of the porch and counted lights. Small towns disquieted me with their clannishness, their secretiveness, how everybody interacted as an extended, dirt-beneath-the fingernails family, how they scurried into their modernized huts as the sun set. A city boy was always a stranger, no matter how much money he spent, or how much he smiled. Being gay and from the wicked metropolis wasn’t a winning combination with country folk.
Later, tucked as near the edge of the bed as possible, I studied the cover of the Black Guide, entranced by the broken ring. What was the significance? Its thickness, the suggestion of whorls, brought to mind images of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its tail. This wasn’t the Ouroboros. This was more wormlike, leechlike, and it disturbed me that it wasn’t eating its tail. The jaws, the proboscis, the shearing appendage, were free to devour other, weaker delicacies.
8.
The next day marked the opening celebrations of the Lavender Festival, an event that included a downtown farmers’ market and fair, and a bus tour of the seven major lavender farms in the area. None of us were lavender aficionados, yet we’d all enjoyed the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, while Victor and I had also read the novel by Süskind.
There were two buses ready to ferry us around the area. I was grateful for the tinted windows and air conditioning as the temperature had already climbed into the nineties by eleven a.m. The sun hung low and blazed hellishly, but, secure in our plush seats behind dim glass, we laughed. Glenn surprised me by holding my hand. The bus was crowded with senior citizens and a smattering of sunburned couples and their raucous children. Nobody paid us any mind, nor did I think they would; however, his lack of customary reserve took me off guard. I accepted his overture as further rapprochement for hurting my feelings by smoking with Dane. Obviously he wished to appease my jealousy by jumping at the idea of the farm tour.
The tour was organized in the manner of a wine-tasting. We spent the long, insufferably hot day visiting restaurants and observing demonstrations of lavender’s multifarious uses in the culinary arts. The traveling show wound down late in the afternoon and we loaded into the Land Rover and sped off in search of booze. The Sarcobatus Tavern was closest, and not too crowded despite the numerous tourists wandering the streets.
A half-dozen college-aged guys occupied a table near the bar. Clean-shaven, muscular, decked in regulation fraternity field attire—baseball caps, sweaters, cargo pants, and athletic shoes. There were a lot of empty bottles on the table. Clearly out of their element and heat-maddened, a couple of the kids gave us hard, bleary stares. “Damn it,” I said. “What?” Glenn said, although he apparently noticed them too because he squeezed my elbow, then stepped away from me. Dane actually said hello to the group in a loud, gregarious tone. A burly kid wearing a Washington State University Cougars cap said something unfriendly and his friends clapped and jeered. Dane winked and flipped the double bird to each of them (“—and you, and you, and you, and you too, cutie pie!”) with exaggerated gusto, and while the college boys fumed and sulked, he ordered a round of beers that we carried to the opposite corner of the tavern near a pinball machine with its cord pulled out of the wall.
“Great Scott,” Glenn said a few moments after picking up a stray newspaper and scanning the headlines. It still amazed me that my lover seldom actually swore by means of shit, or asshole, or that hoary crowd-pleaser, fuck. No, with Glenn it was always hell, damn, holy cow, and Great Scott, and, on special occasions, jeepers and Zounds. I wasn’t fully privy to the origin of this eccentricity, except to note it had to do with a fondness of Golden Age comics and an aversion to his father’s egregious addiction to cursing, which I gather had been a subject of lifelong embarrassment. “Ten shot dead at a cantina in Ciudad Juarez. Two guys in motorcycle helmets ran in and opened fire with submachine guns. No leads. Police suspect it’s connected to drugs…” We all snorted derisive laughter at his humor. Dane said, “Man, I really liked vacationing in Mexico. No way, Jose. That isn’t any place for a gringo these days.”
“It’s not any place for Mexicans,” Glenn said. “Eleven thousand people killed since 2006 via drug violence. I think you might be safer signing up for Iraq.”
“Nonsense— Cancun is safe as houses, as the Brits say,” Victor said. “Um, sure, of course Cancun is safe,” Glenn said, “but Cancun isn’t Mexico. It’s an American college resort. Home away from home of damn fool tourists and yon Neanderthals.”
“The hell you say!”
“Cancun’s technically Mexico, just not the real Mexico.”
“What about Cabo?”
“Fake Mexico.”
“I wanna Corona,” Dane said. “Hey, barkeep, four Coronas. A ripe lemon wedge this time, for the love of Baby Jesus. Now, friends, let us weep for poor old May-he-co.”
We drank our beers and decided the hour had come to mosey out of town. I went into the restroom and pissed and when I returned only three of the frat brothers were still hanging around the tavern. Music from outside throbbed through the window glass. I found everybody else in the parking lot, a fist-fight already in progress. Dane was on one knee, pressed against the wheel well of a truck tricked out with oversized tires and radio antenna. The truck’s headlights were on, its door was open and radio speakers boomed “Four Kicks” by The Kings of Leon. Cougars-cap and two of the other guys stood in a semicircle and were punching him in the head. His scalp and nose ran with blood. Darkness had fallen and his blood flowed black in the neon lighting.
I lunged and Glenn caught my arm. “Don’t get in his way, baby.” Dane bellowed and surged to his feet, scattering his opponents. He slapped Cougars-cap on the ear. While the kid held his ear and shrieked, Dane snatched the antenna off the truck and began whipping all three of them. He grinned through a mask of gore, cocking his forearm behind his neck and then slashing in an elegant diamond pattern. The dying sun limned him in gold. He was a Viking god exacting retribution on his foes. The hair on my arms prickled and I gaped in awe. Then Glenn yelled and I turned and partially blocked a golf club swung at my head. The other three frat boys had followed us—Glenn rolled around on the ground with the guy who’d tackled him. Another went after Victor, who adroitly fled behind the Land Rover. I had a moment to admire at the lightness of his step. The golf club made a thwock! as it struck my upraised arm. The pain cranked a rotor in my brain and turned operation over to the lizard. I laughed with rage and joy and impending lunacy.
I caught the golf club as my attacker—a J. Crew pretty boy—readied for another crack at me, and wrenched him off balance. I kneed him in the balls. He vomited and slumped on all fours and I grabbed his hair and kneed him in the jaw, twice, with enthusiasm. His nose and jaw
squished nicely. He crawled away spewing blood and teeth as he shrieked. The other punk sat astride Glenn’s chest and they were choking one another. I drove the toe of my steel-toed boot into the frat boy’s kidney and he recoiled like a worm zapped by an electrode. He went purple almost instantly as his throat shut, paralyzed. Glenn rolled him over and proceeded to smash his face. The notion that someone might actually die in the fracas flickered through my mind, but my will to put the brakes on melted fast as the ultra violence swept me along.
Pivoting again, I saw Victor had scooted up onto the windshield of the Land Rover, kicking wildly. His opponent belly-flopped across the hood, intent on clambering atop him. I grabbed the kid’s ankles and jerked him backward, dragged him over the jaggedy hood ornament, hoisting his legs as in a game of wheelbarrow so his face slid down the grille, clunked off the bumper and slammed into the asphalt. I dropped his legs. He didn’t move as blood seeped in a puddle around his head. A shadow passed through my peripheral vision. Dane seized one of the poor bastards by the crotch and neck and gorilla pressed him overhead. I’d not seen anything like that in my entire life, but there it was, Dane raising him up in a Frazetta pose from the cover of a Conan novel. Dane tossed him against the side of the truck. The frat boy bounced and landed on his shoulder and neck and Dane methodically lined up and drop-kicked him in the ribs. Like me, Dane wore heavy-duty boots, although his didn’t have any metal reinforcement. It sounded like an axe whacking into a log. Magnificent.
The bartender stood in the doorway of the tavern. I waved at her and the kid whose jaw I’d certainly broken chucked a loose piece of concrete at me and it caromed off my temple. I was still flattened on the ground trying to shake free of the red haze as Cougars-cap wrapped himself around Dane’s leg and bit him in the thigh. Somebody’s boot thumped my left butt cheek. Victor came swooping in and snatched up the concrete chunk and hurled it, chasing away whomever was trying to punt my ass up around my shoulders. He helped me to my feet, and in the nick of time—Glenn went to the Land Rover and rummaged around under the front seat. He came around with a shiny, tiny automatic. Me and Victor got hold of him and I took the pistol away and stuck it in my pocket. Meanwhile, Dane elbowed poor Cougars-cap (the cap had flown off long since) on the crown of his skull until the frat boy stopped gnawing his leg and curled into a fetal position. The rest—the ones still ambulatory— had fled at the appearance of the gun.
“Jesus jumping Christ!” Victor said. “We gotta bail before the heat gets here and guns us down like dogs!”
“Shit, where’d you get the piece? Do you even have a permit?” I said to Glenn. His eyes were wild. “That time those gang-bangers cornered us in Rainier,” he said. “I went to a pawn shop the next day.” I said, “Oh, for the love of…nothing happened. They were just screwing with us.” It scared and hurt me he’d gone to such an extreme and then successfully kept a secret for this long. The bus incident was two years gone and I’d not suspected it affected him so deeply. This trip was proving to be painfully educational. He looked away. “Not going to ever take chances again. Say what you like.” I wanted to grab his collar and shake some sense into him. Things were moving too fast, my emotional equilibrium, my sense of security in our private little world together, was sliding from under my feet.
“So long, fuckers!” Dane said, vaunting as Achilles had after wreaking havoc among his foes before the walls of Troy. He stomped Cougars-cap’s splayed hand. We piled into the truck. I shouldn’t have been driving with what was a probable concussion and all the blood dripping into my eyes, but nobody else volunteered. I smoked rubber.
9.
I pulled into a Rite Aid and killed the engine. Victor was the only one of us who didn’t look as if somebody had dumped a bucket of pig’s blood over his head. He ran in and bought bandages, dental floss, cotton balls, Ibuprofen, medicinal alcohol, and two cases of Natty Ice.
Dane draped a towel over his face and it turned red. “Now this takes me back to the good ol’ days,” he said. His voice sounded nasally because his nose was smashed to a pulp. “We should get to an emergency room,” Glenn said. His eye was blackened and he’d ruined his shirt on the asphalt. Otherwise, he’d escaped the battle relatively unscathed. He checked my scalp. The bleeding had mostly stopped. My left arm was swollen and purple from where the golf club had caught me. Sharp pains radiated from my foot. I figured it got stepped on in the confusion. “No hospital,” I said. “If the cops are looking for us, we’ll get nailed. Dane, I hope to God you didn’t pay with a credit card back there.”
“What? No, man, I paid cash. I always pay cash if I think there’s gonna be a rumble.”
“You thought there was going to be a fight?”
“Actually, I knew there’d be one. I decided to beat the hell out of those punks the minute we walked in. They rubbed me the wrong way.”
“That lady bartender probably got our plates anyhow,” Victor said. He cracked beers and handed them around. “Oh, man. Warm Natty sucks. Might as well gimme a can of watery cream corn,” Dane said. “Guess if you’re going to keep tangling with gangs of frat boys half your age you’d best cultivate a taste for creamed food in general, eh?” I said. Dane hissed in pain. “Yep, yep. Busted tooth. One of those assholes knocked it loose and I just swallowed the damn thing. Ha, Glenn tell you about the bikers we thrashed at a Willie Nelson concert? That’s why I’ve got so much gold in my grill.”
“Willie Nelson?”
“Everybody loves Willie,” Glenn said. “Vicky, are you serious? You going to stitch the Danester’s scalp with dental floss?”
Victor poured a capful of alcohol across a needle. “I can do it. Willem says no hospital. I am confident Hagar the Horrible is with Willem on this one—right sweetie?”
“Right,” Dane said in his rusty, honking voice. “Besides, we still got some camping to do. That park is what, an hour from here? Let’s make ourselves scarce in case Johnny Law comes round.” Glenn said, “Look, boys. I’m not exactly high on roughing it in the boonies at the moment. I think we should get back to Seattle and soak away our misery in the hot tub. Willem?”
The adrenaline hadn’t completely worn off, nor the rush from the sense of admiration I’d received from my comrades. I wasn’t about to let Dane out-tough me. “I’m game for the park. Another case of beer and some ice for the cooler and we’re good to go.” Glenn took my face in his hands. He said in a whisper, “You look like you got hit in the head with a rock, my dear.”
“Is that what it was?” I said. He kissed my nose. “You are such a Billy badass.”
“Yee-haw!” I cheered sotto voce. Victor finished stitching Dane’s lacerated scalp. He washed his hands in the alcohol, then returned to the store for bags of ice and more beer. I drove east from Sequim along the Old Mystery Mountain Highway, a two-lane blacktop in major decline. It carried us up from the valley floor into big timber along the flank of Mystery Mountain. I dodged potholes while keeping an eye on the rearview mirror for police flashers. Occasionally, deer froze in the sweep of the headlights, eyes glittering from the brush and ferns at the road’s edge. I’d expected heavy July traffic, but there weren’t any other cars in sight. Glenn said, “Jeepers, kinda creepy through here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Fred,” Victor said. “You should paint the pimp-mobile green and slap a flower on the door.”
“Don’t forget to recruit a hot, clueless Catholic school dropout and a not so hot dyke,” Dane said. But Glenn was right—the woods were spooky. Mist thickened and clung to the bushes. Cold air rushed across my feet. I turned on the heater. Glenn explained that this road once served as the main access for several towns. A railroad line ran parallel, lost somewhere in the dark. A lot of timber was hacked down in the days of yore, although from my vantage the wilderness had recovered and then some.
Glenn unfolded a road atlas and studied it by flashlight. Victor told the story about the couple driving through woods—just like these!—while a radio broadcast reports the escape of inmat
es from a local asylum. Of course the car breaks down and the boyfriend leaves his girl locked up while he goes for help and all through the night she hears noises. She cowers on the floorboard as someone tries the door handles. The wind rises and branches scrape the roof. She wakes in broad daylight to the police rapping on the window. Upon exiting the car she glances back and witnesses her boyfriend hanging upside down from a tree limb, his bloody fingernails scratching the roof as his corpse sways in the breeze…
“No asylums in these parts,” I said. “On the other hand, there might be ghouls and goblins. The Klallam peoples spoke of demons that dwelt among the trees and in the earth. The white pioneers sure came to believe some of the tales.” I’d read about this and other eerie factoids in the guide. Victor pressed another beer into my hand. Even though I didn’t dare lift my gaze from the twisting road, I felt my companions’ attention focused on me. This convinced me Victor wasn’t kidding when he said they were all way into the supernatural during college. Were circumstances otherwise I would’ve changed the subject, but I felt like a piece of meat tenderized by a mallet; the fight had drained from me, replaced by the fatalistic urge to confess or pontificate, which was an indicator I’d breached my alcohol threshold.
To distract myself from the excruciating pain in my foot, arm, and skull, I dredged up my research from the pages of the Black Guide and explained how according to local legends, diabolical spirits lurked in fissures and caverns of the mountains and the rivers and lakes and assumed the guise of loved ones, or beautiful strangers, and lured hunters and fishermen to their doom. There was even a tale of the Slango logging camp that vanished during the 1920s. The spirits seized unwary men and dragged them into the depths and feasted upon them, or worse. Victor wondered what “worse” meant. I assumed worse meant torture or transformation. The demons might lobotomize their victims and change them into something inhuman. As it was a cautionary branch of native mythology, it was doubtless left vague as storytellers couldn’t hope to match whatever horrors were conjured by the imaginations of their audiences. “Maybe the monsters enslave the ones they don’t eat,” he said in a half-serious manner. I flashed to dead Tom lying in an unmarked tomb and wondered if Victor was sharing that unwholesome thought. I drained my beer and gestured for another.