The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1)

by Moreau, Iza

  “Collateral damage,” he said. He paused, looking away, then added an afterthought. “It was a Tomahawk”.

  “What?” I felt dumb in so many ways and had no idea what he was talking about.

  “The cruise missile that took out the horses. It’s called a Tomahawk.”

  When I couldn’t find anything to reply, he said simply, “I want to go back home.”

  “Me too.”

  As we walked back to the hotel, the life seemed to go out of both of us. I suppose we talked about our future plans, what we would do when we got back home, although I’m sure I didn’t have a clue. I do remember one thing more before we parted in the lobby. I asked him if were possible for me to see the old cuneiform tablets with the inscribed breeding information that had been preserved so carefully for millennia.

  “Gone,” he said simply.

  “Gone? What do you mean gone?”

  “The museum was hit by another missile. Whatever wasn’t pulverized into dust was stolen by looters.”

  The next day I got my wish to go home. My mother had been bucked off her three-year-old filly and killed.

  Chapter 1

  By the looks of my bedroom, the last few weeks had been bad ones. Dirty sheets lay heaped up in a corner surrounded by almost a month’s worth of clothes. Against the wall, my blue iMac computer splattered with yellow stick-it notes sat on a small desk littered with flint arrowheads. A dozen tightly crumpled sheets of paper lay on the floor by the printer where I had dropped them in disgust. On a nightstand, an unopened bottle of tequila kept company with a digital alarm clock and a conch shell ashtray. An overhead fan created a slight draft that wafted marijuana smoke toward an open-curtained window. And below the fan blades, I was lying naked and damp on a rumpled queen-size bed.

  Almost eleven months had passed since my mother’s funeral, which I missed when the transport plane I was supposed to catch out of Amman had been grounded for two days because of a bomb scare. I still loved journalism, but was sick of reporting on war and death. After leaving Baghdad I quit my high-profile job with The Richmond Times-Dispatch, staged a fight with my boyfriend, and moved back to my home town of Pine Oak, a small city in the Florida panhandle, where there was not much else but forest, breeze, and a twice-weekly gossip sheet called The Pine Oak Courier. I got a job with The Courier, which paid almost nothing, and moved to my parents’ farm, empty now except for me. I had a boyfriend for a while but being with him had been too much like war.

  I reached out and placed my roach clip carefully in the conch shell. Marijuana is generally not my thing, but a supply of the stuff had recently dropped into my lap and I was languidly high. Not high enough to forget that I would be spending Friday night at home again, but high enough, if I concentrated, to slow down the fan blades to the point where I could read the letters that were scrawled in lipstick on each one: D-O-N-N-Y.

  Never trust guys with 5-letter names. They’ll write their names on your fan blades. Later, they’ll begin on your shoulder blades and work their way down and around until their names are inscribed throughout your whole body.

  But Donny was gone now. Was with Linda C now. Looking back on it, I realized that it was partly my illness that had driven him away. Breathlessness, fatigue, and general depression had crept over me so slowly that I at first assumed they were the effects of my mother’s death combined with the hopeless knowledge that I had uprooted myself from a situation I had worked all my life to attain, only to return to a place I had once vowed to escape from. But it had gone beyond that now and I often found myself staring at those dark fan blades, my heart drumming like galloping hooves. I was starting to think I had some kind of combat fatigue that was lingering far longer than it should. It was getting worse as the months went by.

  Getting high is for shit. I was reaching toward the whirring fan to smear out the letters when the harsh notes of a jangling phone cut through me like shards of glass. I grabbed blindly for the receiver, knocking the conch shell onto the bare wooden floor with a clunk, spewing ashes everywhere. The hooves were trying to kick through my chest. I let the phone ring once, twice, until I was calm enough to answer.

  “’Lo?”

  “Sue-Ann? Hey, it’s me, Mark.”

  “Hey, Memark,” I answered.

  “Listen, Sue-Ann. Are you busy right now?”

  “Busy?” I asked.

  “Mr. Dent just called me on my cell. There’s something going on down at Meekins’ Market. Can you get down there?”

  The shock of the ringing phone was wearing off and I tried to will myself alert. I failed. I was stoned and tired deep through to my bones. I looked at the digital clock. Nine twenty-five p.m. I stalled. “What is it?”

  “Not sure; something about a dead goat. But there are supposed to be cars from at least three law enforcement agencies.”

  “Cal Dent called to tell you about a dead goat?”

  “He heard it from Billy Dollar.”

  “Dilly called in another story?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why tell me, then? You’re the fair-haired boy.”

  “Come on, Sue-Ann,” he wheedled. “I can’t help it if the boss has been using a lot of my stuff lately. But I can’t do this one. I’m drunk.”

  “You don’t sound drunk to me. Besides, who isn’t?” In the silence that ensued, I heard voices in the background, the sound of cars on a highway. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Some little speakeasy in Forester. And listen, Sue-Ann, I’m not alone, do you know what I mean?”

  I propped my back against the cool headboard and tried to think it over. Billy Dollar—who drove the only night patrol car in Pine Oak—got ten bucks every time he tipped off Cal Dent that there was a story to be had. It was supposed to be a secret from the other officers but even the sheriff up in the county seat knew about it and used it as an unspoken excuse not to give Billy a raise. A few of his tips had been good ones, though, like the time an eighteen wheeler had jackknifed and scattered bricks of high-grade marijuana along both shoulders of the interstate. I was currently reaping the benefits of that story.

  “Okay, Mr. Hormone. Tell me about the goat.”

  “Thanks, Sue-Ann. Only thing I know is that the guy down at Meekins’ found a dead goat in his dumpster.”

  “Somebody murdered a goat?”

  “Right, that’s what I heard.”

  “And Cal wants you to go down there and find out why?”

  “Maybe there’s something to it.” His voice told me that he thought nothing of the kind.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Sure. I’ll get over there as soon as I can.”

  “I owe you.”

  I hung up.

  Right. I was going to rush out into the night and try to get an interview with the last person to see the goat alive. I thought about rolling another jay, but fell asleep instead.

  It was a fitful sleep, a few hours of unconsciousness followed by an hour of drowsy discomfort, trying to shape my pillow into a mass that fit my head, searching for a cool spot on the bed or a comfortable position. When the fluorescent numbers on the clock read 5 a.m, I gave it up for the night. The air was cool, made more so by the slowly spinning fan, but I was covered with sweat. Still, I felt surprisingly rested and alert. The marijuana seemed to have done some good after all. I flung on a terry-cloth robe and padded into the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker. Kitty Amin, my black shorthair, was asleep on a blanket on one edge of the sofa. The cat half raised his head as I passed, then settled back down into his nap.

  Waiting for coffee to brew is worse for me than waiting in line at a party for a bathroom to be free, but five interminable minutes later, I returned to the living room, coffee cup in hand. I switched on the radio, dial set all the way to the left, then sat down on the sofa next to Amin with the intention of going through a pile of mail that had been collecting for a few days. The voice on the radio was that of a young woman, giggly, maybe a little drunk or high. Probably the deejay who call
ed herself Gamma. She was giving a recipe for okra stew but her voice kept fading out, as if she were moving around in the booth and only occasionally talking directly into the microphone. I had discovered the pirate station while channel surfing a couple of months before and was fascinated. It had no set call letters, sometimes claiming to be W-O-R-M or W-F-U-K. Sometimes the number of letters didn’t seem to be important and I had heard W-E-I-R-D and W-I-C-K-E-D.

  Gamma was on the air again. “And if you don’t like it, you can always toss it in your mulch pile. Hey, I found an old Yma Sumac record in the Goodwill store yesterday for a dime. I mean, it was marked a dime, but I ripped it off.” She giggled again. “I’ll play a few cuts from it, then read you a poem I just wrote.”

  Abruptly, a series of needle pops came over the air followed by the highest pitched voice I have ever heard, scatting to a kind of Brazilian big-band beat. It was the kind of thing I had come to expect from the station—something totally unusual or outrageous. I was glad someone was on tonight—sometimes days went by without a peep and I worried that the FCC had closed in on the mysterious station. I listened with a kind of sensual tranquility as I leafed through a Dover Saddlery catalog, through junk circulars and credit card offers. My sweats had stopped and the coffee was working its spirited magic.

  I took up a letter from my insurance company and ripped open the side as the high voice in the song descended several octaves into a kind of bear growl. My rates were going up. I remembered the TV advertisement the company had used to entice me into buying it: “And if you buy your policy now, your rates will never go up.” Maybe it depended on your definition of “up” or maybe “never.” Either way, I was screwed. My savings were next to nothing and it was obvious that Cal Dent was easing me out of my job. Telling me to rest, take it easy, giving all my stories to Mark.

  Oho, a letter from my father, postmarked where? Italia. Me o my o. I slid it onto the coffee table to read later and trudged back into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. I glanced through the window; the full moon was just visible through the ridge of pines beyond the pasture. The faint popping of rifles passed through the window from hunters far out in the forest. It was a sound that always gave me a jolt, a phantom bullet passing through my heart.

  On the radio Gamma was reading her poem. It was way out there, as her stuff usually was; a flurry of adjectives descending on an idea that I couldn’t latch onto, although I had a vague suspicion that one existed.

  “It was whistly, grisly, blood on the moon

  a ripening tripening, diapered cartoon.”

  Gamma went on for a few more lines in that same vein, then, without stopping for effect, said, “And now, apropos of absolutely nothing here on eighty point oh the recipe station, is a whole side of Mick, Keith, and the boys doing their version of the album they call Goat’s Head Soup. Get your five-thirty a.m. asses out of bed and dig it.”

  I jerked my head up involuntarily. Goat?

  There was a dead goat at Meekins’ market. Coincidence? Maybe. Probably. Certainly. But Gamma—and most of the other nattering deejays at the pirate station—sometimes gave me the heebie jeebies. Maybe that’s why I tuned in. Five-thirty? Check out a goat in a dumpster at the edge of town?

  I didn’t have anything better to do.

  ~ ~ ~

  A dozen Styrofoam coffee containers were hip-hopping along my floorboards as I sped along the rutted dirt road. A dry few weeks had turned the road into a long washboard. When I first moved back to Pine Oak I had gotten mad at the young bucks for speeding down the rough road at double the posted limit; later I learned that the faster you went, the less you bounced. Tonight, my old Toyota pickup sailed over the ruts with just a little shimmy. The few houses out this way were still dark and my headlights showed the way clearly. No dust meant that no one was up and about yet. When I turned onto the highway I switched on the radio. The Stones were still playing. I like them okay, but I’d never heard of Goat’s Head Soup. It was all right, I guess, something to get through the couple of miles I had to drive. But I made a mental note to check on whether the Stones had ever actually made a record with that name.

  I had been shopping at Meekins’ Market pretty much all my life. Situated on the very edge of town, it was the last place to get groceries for most of the folks living in the rural areas—like me—and the first for people driving in from Forester. And its unusual two-part structure made it one of the strangest places in this part of the country. The front building was just a rectangular stall paralleling the highway, thrown together with two-by-fours and chicken wire. But as you entered, the walls gradually conformed themselves to fit into a Quonset hut that old man Meekins had bought off the Army for twenty-three cans of shoe polish right after World War II. I had gone to high school with the current Meekins—Clarence—who had been a talented athlete but turned down a football scholarship at Wabash College to run the family business. Hadn’t made many improvements in those sixteen years—the chicken wire was probably from the same roll that his granddad fished out of an abandoned construction site back in the forties; nevertheless, it had become the best place in Jasper County for pretty much whatever it carried on a given day. No one knew how Clarence was able to get the jump on the Piggly Wiggly, but the produce boxes crammed onto the old wooden shelves held the freshest fruit and vegetables in the area. Customers could also find various kinds of nuts, herbs, seeds, locally produced honey, even sugar cane in season. You could also buy azalea and boxwood plants for your front yard and a straw hat with a green sun visor to wear while you tucked them into the soil. Then there were the more unusual items: boxes of used harmonicas, containers of glass spools that formerly sat atop telephone poles, rows of vintage postcards, and issues of Look Magazine and TV Guide from the 1950s. People liked to browse the crowded aisles back in the darkened Quonset hut—it would be rare to find something you were actually looking for, but almost impossible to come out empty-handed.

  But if Clarence’s purchasing wizardry was a mystery, so was his strange habit of closing up shop for weeks at a time without a word. Anyone looking through the chicken wire would see every shelf completely empty. Yet when he opened back up—a week or a month later—everything would be as fresh and exotic as before, although maybe switched around some location wise. And somewhere in the burgeoning aisles would be a box or rack of items that was not there before.

  Thing is, though, Meekins’ didn’t sell goats, didn’t sell meat of any kind. I pulled off the road and stopped in front of the market. I switched off the ignition and the headlights. It was still dark, although the light haze of a rising sun could be discerned through the trees. The place would be opening up soon and I could ask some questions. In the meantime, I wanted to see the dumpster. I grabbed a flashlight from the glove box, got out of the truck, and began walking around the side of the stall toward the back of the Quonset hut. Halfway there I heard a harsh clatter like the heavy door of a dumpster being opened or closed. Had Clarence gotten there ahead of me? I hadn’t seen his car, but he lived just across the street and could have walked over. Or maybe his mom, who tended the register nearly every day from sunup to sundown. I walked faster.

  “That you, Clarence?” I shouted. “It’s Sue-Ann.” Another clatter and a hush of voices, then hurried footsteps. I rounded the aluminum building and cast the light from my flash at the square green dumpster sitting just inside the tree line. But no Clarence. I shone my light at the trees and caught what looked to be the shadow of running legs and I heard the crunch of heavy boots on dry leaves.

  “Wait!” I called loudly, and sprinted the last twenty yards to the treeline. I moved the light back and forth, lasering the trees and shrubs but caught no sign of the person I thought I had seen running away. I wanted to follow whoever it was—the flashlight revealed a faint trail through the high grass—but even that short run had tuckered me out and set my heart groaning. I had to go down on my haunches to rest. I went through a litany of curses—some in different languages—but non
e did any good.

  Clomping footsteps approached from the direction of the market and I heard a familiar voice shout, “Who’s back here?”

  I managed to stand up and compose myself. “It’s me, Clarence. Sue-Ann.”

  I clicked off my flashlight as Clarence came into view. Clarence was a big man, and he looked bigger in the semi-darkness. He was wearing his inevitable brogans and blue overalls and his hair was slicked back like he had just gotten out of the shower. The only odd thing about him was the shotgun he was toting. The stock was held in his right hand; the barrel lay loosely in the crook of his left elbow. “God’s balls, Sue-Ann. What are you doin back here?”

  “Working on a—” I had to stop and take a couple of breaths. “Working on a story about that goat,” I managed. “For The Courier. You figure on using that shotgun on me?”

  “Not if you ain’t killed no livestock and put em in my garbage.”

  I started to retort, but Clarence waved away my words. “Just kiddin, Sue-Ann. Saw your truck pull up just as I was ready to come over. Thought you were an early customer.” Clarence walked over to the dumpster and peered inside. Then he looked back at me. “You open the door?” he asked.

  “No, I . . . I was going to, but somebody was already here. I chased them for a while. . . .”

  “Wondered why you were huffin and puffin so. Did you see who it was?”

  “Too dark. And whoever it was heard me coming. Ran off into the woods right in there.”

  Clarence walked to the edge of the woods and peered into the darkness. When he turned back around he looked pensive. Holding the shotgun in his left hand he walked back to where I waited. “Still workin for The Courier, eh?” he asked.

  “Yeah. But if you want me to talk you’ve got to give me coffee.”

  His face brightened as more of the sun crept through the trees. “Got some fresh beans yesterday morning,” he told me. “Had to drive down to Panama City to get em. Got some ground and ready for the pot.”