by Noreen Ayres
Her gray ponytail flicked around and she smiled widely. “How’d you guess?”
“Me too. I don’t want to wait in line. You go on, if you want, I’ll stand guard.”
“Don’t be taking my picture, now.”
“Then what’ll I have to bribe you with?” I said, and turned and framed my hands at the freeway off in the distance. I thought of Doug Forster snapping pictures off in Carbon Canyon all around Miranda Robertson’s charred car.
High cloud cover was drifting in. When it cut off the sun, the air was a lot cooler.
From where I stood I could see the back of the Avalos farm and the white geese strolling. I framed my hands again for a picture that would not take. I noticed for the first time a flat-roofed storage shed hunkered at the far end of the covered pens, the door of the shed slung open.
“Say, you wouldn’t have any Kleenex?” Marge called.
“‘Fraid not,” I said. Then: “I’ve got a lot of lint in my pocket.”
She laughed and said, “I don’t think that’ll work,” then was quiet behind the brush for a while, until I asked, “Where’s your friend?”
“Quillard? The shrimp?” She came out stirring her waistband with both thumbs. “Isn’t he cute? I knew him three weeks before I realized he was short.” Then she winked and said, “I saw him first.”
I said, heading toward the tree screen myself, “Jeez, am I really going to pee out here in front of God and everybody?”
“He’s the only one won’t be surprised,” Marge said. “Need some lint?”
“Don’t think so,” I called, thinking of how I could be friends with this woman easy. Thinking about how she and Quillard fit.
“Watch out for poison oak,” she called back. “Indians used to eat it to desensitize themselves so they could work with the branches, you know, make baskets. But I don’t think you want to be the first woman on record to try for whatever cure for whatever ails you in that direction. That location, I mean.”
“Good advice,” I said, and did indeed look around for red leaves. In back of the young sycamore I got busy, and while I was, I asked, “What does he do, your friend?”
“He’s unemployed. Aerospace laid him off.”
“A lot of that going around. What do you do?”
“I’m a potter. Out by Claremont College. My own shop.” When I was coming back up the slope, I stopped for a moment and watched the clouds acrobatting. Marge was watching too. “It can’t rain,” she said.
Brushing yellow deerweed off me, I looked back over my left shoulder and saw the storage shed door down by the animal pens buck open farther and some little commotion go on at the opening, with, it seemed, boots and legs and shirtbacks struggling to emerge. The sounds of bikes at start-off again dulled my hearing, but I thought I heard a human protest, or perhaps an argument at the shed. And I thought I saw the man with the silver hair, Quillard, shoot out backward and jerk back in.
I said, “Your friend is in the shed down there.”
“Quillard? What shed? Quillard Satterlee wouldn’t be in any shed. He’s got claustrophobia. He won’t even come in my potting house and it’s got a great big wide old door I hardly ever close.”
“I thought that was him.”
“Uh-uh. Not him.” Her sunburn looked so raw I wondered how she could still be smiling. Making small talk, we headed back to the assembly. But, curious about what I saw, when we drifted apart in the crowd, I swung back around toward the slope to have a second look at the shed. The door was closed by now, but I looked at the long animal stables, and the puffs of beige sheep in the open pen beyond them, and decided I needed a walk and a break from people. On the other side of the ranch house, near where the goat was tethered and the geese still bopped about, smoke was rising from a huge barbecue. The cool air and a new breeze felt exhilarating as I tramped over dried grasses in my silly blue boots with white flame insets. I was a million miles away from the lab, and just as many away from Monty and his minions.
I came to the first stable and was drawn in by little grunts. On either side of a dirt walkway were sties, the first one holding maybe twenty piglets all squished up near the automatic feeder, wasps circling at the water tube. A pig condo. It had a smell powerful enough to make me hold my breath. Farther down, though, among the dozing red and black hulks with giant ears over their eyes, there wasn’t much smell at all. Their pens were clean, only muddy along a sort of ditch where faucets dripped; thinking back to the first one, I guessed kids were pigs all over.
Crossing over to the second building, I looked ahead to my original destination, the shed, and saw no one. I stopped to stare at a boar worthy in his slit-eyed nap of at least one Kodak moment. I falsely framed, clicked my tongue like a shutter; he winked, and seemed to be grinning. But farther down the walkway, the pigs seemed restless. Maybe these were perturbed by the revving dirt bikes and Harleys or even by the change in weather. Maybe, like Monty’s pigs, they were in breeding season, and I shouldn’t be disturbing them. I proceeded toward the end to leave.
Nearer the exit, all of them were up and huffing. Some were chattering their teeth the way my guinea pig does when I make too much fuss stirring up his pine shavings. They stood stiff-legged, bristles raised on their necks like dogs. Their tails were whipping, and their lips were curled over their tusks in an evil grin. From the mouths of two black boars came low barking sounds. Foam dripped. They turned quickly at my approach, skewering me with a red-eyed stare. As I quickened my step, I wondered if the sideboards would hold against single-minded, pork-barreled purpose.
I was relieved to reach the end, and when I stepped out, into the fresher air, the sun burst through a cloud, increasing the brightness of the storage shed directly ahead of me. At the left quadrant of the shed there was a small window, a mere cutout of board. A gray lizard clung to the edge. I was going to pass right by and go back to the rally, but there was a movement in the dark recess of the window, and I paused, pulled back, and peeked in, not knowing what I was seeing.
Switchie’s light hair is what I recognized first in the shadows. Maybe he and Jolene were in there having a good time. I started to back away, and then I saw more movement by the door I’d seen open when I was looking down from the absent Porta Potti. Something like a long prod hung from Switchie’s hand. Then a big man’s back mid-distant in the shed blocked my view, and I realized Jolene was probably not there at all.
When the form turned, I saw the belly. And in the space between Paulie’s quarter profile and Switchie standing a few feet away, I saw Quillard, his ankles together, his arms behind his back, and in the hole of his mouth a dark plug. He was twisting slowly from the waist first one way and then the other, eyes wide and the whites shining like moons scraped out of raw ice; and sheets of blood pouring from under his silver beard like a vibrant fringed and tasseled prayer shawl.
21
I dropped down, chest on my knees, and looked wildly for a way of escape.
To my right was a three-strand wire fence with a tall row of wild artichoke thistle behind it. Should I dive for it, or make for the corridor where the pigs were still dancing on their toes? My whole body shook. I was afraid I couldn’t rise.
“He’s spillin’ all over the place. Goddamn it!”
“What do you want me to do about it? Next time we off a guy, you do it, you think you can do it better.”
Paulie again: “Over there. The feed bags. Get ’em. Jesus, I don’t want to clean this up.”
“Oh, you fat fart, nothin’ but whinin’.”
I heard a dull thud, maybe not even that—more like a soft whump—and I knew the body had fallen.
Darting toward the fence, I saw more room between it and the sties than I thought. About a third of the way down were three rusty fifty-five-gallon drums with blue plastic buckets nested on top of a short stack of deflated feed bags. I made for this small shelter, slipping in a muddy spot as I curled in, and landing hard on my hip.
My breath coming hard, I forced m
yself to quiet. Forced myself. Think, Smokey, think. You can do anything. You can take anything. Think it through. Off in the distance, on the playing ground for Monty’s fellow riders, motorcycles buzzed. I could continue running down the length of stable, but fear once again had me locked. I concentrated. My breathing slowed and the shaking began to still.
Once my mother had taken two wire coat hangers to the backs of my legs. Only seven, I hadn’t learned control: I wet the carpet where I stood; the tiny wool loops darkened, and my face burned with shame. Always I hated, when the memory would return, my lack of control, not the beating itself. Terror lasts until the day you simply run out of it, or it runs over you. They can kill me, but they cannot hurt me. That’s what I learned when a teacher read Uncle Tom’s Cabin to my class a few years later, some slave or other hopping over the ice floes with dogs at her heels, or someone else having the flesh flayed off his back.
You can do this, I told myself. You can ride over this fear.
Everything came into tight focus: the ribs on the rusty steel drums next to me; the Q-tip—sized knot of spider house attached under the barrel’s lip; the crevices of damp earth bearing my boot skid marks; the gray, splintered boards at my shoulder; and my own buffed nails as I touched the steel barrels with the hands Joe called beautiful.
Through the cracks of the stable boards I felt the heat and prickly bristle of a sow as she leaned in near me as if against a common foe. Huh, she said, huh.
Old girl, I whispered.
I tried to picture the geography of the farm. Was the road Monty and I had taken on the other side of the artichoke embankment? And if so, were there trees, any size, I could run between? When I heard a heavy noise in the shed where the killers were, I thought no more and just jumped for the clearest separation between the thorny plants. A low strand of wire tore into my ankle as I flew through, and I ripped my palm on a barb I hadn’t seen. I was afraid I’d made the wires move. I flattened myself and listened for any sound of pursuit, breathing dust and the scent of pale weed pressed beneath my cheek. Above my eye level, a strand of wire neatly bisected the purest of white cloud, and impaled on a barb about a yard down was the desiccated body of a lizard. On another barb bracketed by two purple thistles was a speared grasshopper, the ghoulish testimonial of the loggerhead strike, a predatory songbird called a murdering bird in England and a butcher-bird here.
Carefully, I crouched through the thistle. When the plants thinned out, I was relieved to see stands of pampas grass high as houses, and I knew that in this country that meant a wash, and on the other side, probably a road. Maybe I’d make it after all.
Breaking through the pampas stands, I thought for a moment I should simply hide among them until dusk. But one thing I learned on patrol in Oakland is that it works to run, the sheer determined brazenness of flight successful too often for the crims not to try it. As I pushed through, the thin, microscopically serrated leaves rustled like secrets and grabbed at my clothes like members of a hazing gauntlet.
I raced up an embankment to the road, flagged down a car driven by a geek wearing a white shirt and brush cut, and thanked his engineering soul very much.
Joe picked me up at a hamburger place in Anaheim Hills an hour later. It was almost six o’clock, and I was doing fine except for being cold even under the denim jacket. I’d been able to order and drink coffee. My hands hardly shook. Doing just fine, yes. Until I saw Joe’s solid form coming toward me, the silvery halo of hair, the caring eyes.
“Oh, baby,” he said. We leaned against a yellow pipe barrier outside. “I didn’t mean for you to get into anything like this. This shouldn’t have happened. Not at all, not at all.”
“It’s okay. I’m okay. You were right, Joe. What did I think I was doing?” My throat seemed to cramp and to burn from the cramping. When Joe pulled me to him and his hand cupped my head, it was as though he pressed a button there: I moaned.
“I should have stopped you from going,” he said. “We get comfortable, complacent. I should—”
I looked at him, saw there was water in his eyes. “How many units are out?”
“I want to talk to you about that.” He said it like a doctor preparing bad news.
“A man just had his throat cut. I saw it. What do you mean?”
“There’s something else going on. I’ll tell you as much as I know, in the car. First we get you out of here. Get you cleaned up, get some disinfectant on this.” He turned my hand palm-up.
“Lockjaw might be fun for a while. I haven’t done that yet,” I said, as I started walking to his car.
“Are we feeling sorry for ourselves?”
“Of course we’re feeling sorry for ourselves. What do you think?”
Opening the door, he said, “The captain’s waiting for us at the training center. It’s on his way home.”
“The captain’s waiting for me? Plunkett?”
“Hal Exner. Haven’t you seen an organization chart lately?”
“I don’t pay attention to those things.”
“He’s the new one in from Missouri.”
“What happened to Plunkett?”
“He got promoted, I guess.”
“Probably kicked upstairs for feeling up some new patrol,” I said.
Before Joe backed the car out, I gave a great shiver. He looked at me with a worried expression and turned up the heater.
“Let’s go over everything,” he said. “Sharpen everything in your mind before you get there. I won’t ask questions, you just talk.”
“Give me a moment,” I said.
As we ran the freeway, I watched strip malls drift by like boat lamps in a lake of darkness. Joe, his face awash in red from dozens of brake lights, reached over to hold my uninjured hand. When he did, hot tears fled down my cheeks. I didn’t even wipe them away.
Finally, I said, “The victim was maybe your age. White hair, white beard, kind of handsome.”
“Like me,” Joe said.
“Yeah, like you,” I said softly. “Only short. Think about that for a minute. Who’d we see lately who had white hair, was short, had dirt bikes in the bed of his truck?”
Joe flicked a glance at me, said nothing.
I went on: “The café, after the campground scene. The little guy with the holster. The killdeer. It was him, Joe. I looked over one time, I was standing with Monty, and the guy was looking back. It was him, I know it was. I think he recognized me. I thought, well, it’s a free country, the man can be anywhere he pleases. But it was weird, seeing him twice in a week. I should have trusted that.”
Joe said, “What would you have done? Go up to him and say what the hell are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. If I had, who knows what?” Anger rising, I said, “He almost had me fooled, that Monty. Talking about his dreams. Talking about his farm, about shooting stars at night.”
“Farm?” Joe asked.
And I kept on: “Shooting stars. Some dream girl with jewels in her belly. The creep.” I turned and looked at Joe, this man so good, so honest. “Joe, the old man out at the farm—Mr. Avalos—I figured he was a nice old man who’d probably had to put up with stupid, lazy children all his life. His wife is dying of cancer, and I liked him because he wouldn’t shake Jolene’s hand. But he’s got to be a bag of shit too. Or else how could all this go on on his farm, right under his nose? Creep. All creeps.”
“Are you worried about Jolene?”
“I’d worry for anyone hanging around a man who can murder as easy as making a sandwich. She’s a pisser, but that doesn’t mean she deserves someone like Switchie.”
“Earlier, were there any other acts of violence? Any fights . . . ?”
“Just a bunch of rubbie drunks with twenty-thousand-dollar bikes they spit on and shine with their shirtsleeves. A few were rowdy. You know—‘Show me your tits,’ like that.”
“Hm,” Joe said. “I should have been there. What kind of drunks you say?”
“Rubbies. Rich urban bikers. Weekend whee
lers. Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. So says Monty. But a lot of them looked like beer-bellied, tar-paper shack creeps to me.”
“Hey,” Joe protested, glancing down, sucking in his belly.
I rubbed it. “There were drugs. Some guy—”
“Tell me where there ain’t.”
“Monty says he’s not a doper. Who cares? He’s a piece of shit any way you cut it. Joe?”
“Yeah, babe?”
“The man?” I turned down the noisy heater, then sat back and looked out the side window, got my breath. “He, he, like just kept turning. They sliced him,” I said, making a motion at my neck, “and he just kept turning, this way and that, like for an audience to see. I wanted to run up and push it back in. I . . .”
When we reached the training center, Joe patched my palm out of a first aid kit from one of the training classrooms. I was sufficiently recovered to recite the details.
The captain was in a different classroom nearest the outdoor firing range. A two-pane window was open six inches top and bottom through which we could observe moths whipping through the bright funnels formed by the range lights; moths, not butterflies. Captain Exner sat at the desk, Joe and I side by side in folding chairs at its corner.
I told the captain how I saw Quillard Satterlee die, his hands and feet bound and something dark stuffed in his mouth, and as I told it, saw again a splash of scarlet hit his slackening knees, saw again the eyes, the eyes.
I told the captain how we’d seen this man in a café after coming from a scene investigation off Ortega Highway. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I told him, “There’s a weird wire at the Avalos ranch.” I could feel Joe looking at me, and when I didn’t get a response from the captain, I described the wire: barbs a couple inches apart, then up- and down-turned like a thin snake trying to find direction. “Not your regular barbed wire,” I said, “different. Joe and I, we found some strange wire, too. It was ten miles from the campground, but I don’t know, it caught my attention, and there was duct tape in the trash too, like on the victim, his hands and feet, and the victim had wire embedded in his neck, broken off. Dr. Schaffer-White said. I mean, this wire—”