In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  The old man snatched the bill.

  Reader entered the house through the back door, which had been forced, the frame broken. Inside, the stench of waste was overpowering. Reader put his arm over his nose and moved into the gloom. He lingered in the doorway of what had once been the bedroom of a child, the bed and bureau and nightstand still in place, a few sun-faded posters of dinosaurs still tacked up on the wall. Someone had spray-painted a bright green cock jutting from a Tyrannosaurus on one of the posters, so large it extended across the wall. The roof in the far corner had leaked, and the ceiling and much of the pine paneling were black with mold.

  In the center of the child-sized mattress was an almost tidy pile of human shit.

  In the bedroom across the hall, there were empty aerosol cans and used condoms on the floor. A full-sized mattress was shoved in one corner, ripped across the center. Reader looked into the closet in this room, where a single black leather belt hung from a wire hanger. He reached out, touched the buckle.

  “Trespasser,” someone hissed behind him.

  He turned, hand moving to his hip.

  The old vagrant glared at Reader from the bedroom doorway before shuffling down the hall and into the bathroom, where he slammed the door. “Goddamn trespasser,” he said, voice muffled. Reader heard the loud sound of the old man pissing.

  He stepped out of the ruined house into the sunshine, sweat dripping beneath the brim of his Stetson. He took the hat off, wiped his head. He put his hat back on and spat. He took out his makings. He was licking the paper to seal it around the tobacco when he saw the little dog go trotting across the yard and disappear into a hole under the toolshed wall.

  Reader lit his cigarette and smoked and watched the shed.

  Directly, the little dog appeared from under it. It turned and put its head back into the hole and worked at dragging out a large bone. The little dog brought the bone to Reader and dropped it at his boots, nub of a tail wagging.

  The bone—longer than the dog itself, one end gnawed away—was unmistakably a human femur.

  Ants crawled on the knob.

  When Reader opened the shed door, he was struck by the smell, strong and ripe.

  The dog stood in back of him, barking.

  The corpse was half buried in the dirt. The dog had exhumed most of the head, torso, and legs. Green mold grew over what was left of the fingers and hung in a beard from the rotted jaw. There were holes all around where the little dog had been at work.

  Reader stepped away into the sun-dappled grass.

  The dog kept barking.

  Night had fallen by the time the rangers and the state police had their crime scene established. Forensics worked the shed with Cecil, thousand-watt lights blazing around the yard’s perimeter. Red and blue strobes lit the woods, casting the trees into weird relief. Reader stood over by the edge of the house, eyeing the Cole County deputies who crowded the scene like buzzards at a feast, all of them broad-shouldered bucks with cowboy hats pulled low. Their sheriff was among them, a bow-legged man in a brown suit and bolo tie. A chaw stuck in his cheek. He spat in the grass and glared at Reader, and Reader did not look away. Cecil emerged from the tool shed, a white respirator covering his face, his green tackle box in hand. A camera hung from his neck. He took the respirator off, along with his rubber gloves, and tossed them in a trash bag a state cop held out to him. He joined Reader near the back steps of the house.

  “It’s definitely male,” he said. “Could be a derelict. Some weird coincidence.”

  “You believe that?” Reader said.

  “No. No, I guess I don’t. You ever eat hoop cheese?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Well, that’s what it smells like in there.”

  “Won’t eat it now,” Reader said. “You make a time frame?”

  “Little over a month. He ain’t too fresh, but there’s still bugs in the dirt.”

  “Talked to Mary while you were in there,” Reader said, nodding at the shed. “Seems there was a letter in Travis Stillwell’s DPS file, endorsing his application for a driver’s license renewal back in July. Return address on the letter was the state asylum up in Wichita Falls.”

  “He’s a patient?”

  “Would appear so. Not much of a letter. Mary read it to me over the radio. No registered vehicle. No other known addresses. No NCIC hits.”

  “Who wrote that letter?”

  “Head-shrinker.”

  “Reckon he’s our next conversation.”

  “Any luck with the neighbor?”

  “Old man said he hadn’t seen Stillwell Senior in years. Said a passel of teenagers came through in two weeks back, trashed the place. Said he called these boys about it.” Cecil hooked a thumb at the deputies. “Said they never showed.”

  “Imagine that. Anything else? He lay eyes on any vehicles?”

  “No, but he did say he was in the hospital with a colon scare for a stretch.”

  “When?”

  Cecil sighed. “Little over a month back.”

  “Well,” Reader said. He sucked his teeth. “He know anything about the family?”

  “Said it used to be a boy, Stillwell Senior, and the wife lived here. Said the wife ran off bout thirty years back. They fought a good bit, apparently.”

  “Neighbor actually see the wife leave?”

  “Didn’t say. Said one day she’s just gone.”

  “She may yet be planted here, too,” Reader said. “Or she may be in Timbuktu. Best run the name we got for her from the boy’s birth certificate. This place may keep us busy a while, we don’t locate her. Might have to dig up the whole damn yard.”

  “So you figure our boy for this one, too?”

  “Seems the likeliest answer.”

  “Not exactly his modus operandi.”

  “They all start somehow,” Reader said.

  “You boys shore put on a circus,” the Cole County sheriff said loudly. He stood a stone’s throw away with several of his men, hands clamped on his belt. “Quite a ruckus.”

  Reader felt his jaw tighten. He heard the vagrant’s voice. He turned and saw a state cop trying to wrangle a blanket around the old man’s shoulders. The vagrant staggered about in the midst of the lights. “Where’d they take my dog?” he cried. “Where’s my dog, you heartless motherfuckers?”

  “It’s a peril, these dope fiends,” the sheriff said. He spat a brown stream. “Trains bring em.” He said to his deputies: “They a scourge, ain’t they, boys.”

  The deputies stared at Reader and Cecil, faces dark and threatening.

  Reader and Cecil stared back.

  The sheriff dropped his head. He shook it, laughed to himself. He reached into his lip and drew out his chaw and threw it on the ranger’s boot as he walked by. “Come on, boys,” he called to his deputies. “Let’s leave em to it.”

  Reader and Cecil watched them go.

  The old vagrant threw off his blanket and fell to his knees and began to howl.

  Wednesday

  October 15

  Annabelle had not spoken to Stillwell or seen much of him for three days when she went down to the camper at dusk and knocked. He answered the door without shirt or boots or hat, wearing only jeans. He looked less wan. His split lip had mended, and the rough, red patches on his forehead and chin were fading. She was glad to see it. Sunday’s sermon at the Little House of God had been about small kindnesses done for others, and in spite of her own reservations about the redemptive power of the Blood of the Lamb, there had been truth in the old minister’s words about humility and good will, and she had felt bad for the rebuke she had leveled at Stillwell on Saturday. She told him all of this and said it quickly as he stood in his door, all the words tumbling out, and afterward she fell quiet, long enough for the wind to blow her words away and leave a fresh, ready silence between them. “I meant to come and say all this sooner,” she said, “but I’ve had a time of it with Sandy, after he lost those rabbits.”

  Stillwell looked up at
the farmhouse. He scratched his arm and came out onto his stoop and closed the door, then stepped down into the short dead grass. He pointed up to the house, to the field beyond. “Saw you and the boy searching the scrub the other day.”

  “Don’t reckon you saw any signs around here.”

  He shook his head. He looked down at the earth. His hair was long and matted and tangled. He reached up and pulled a lock of it, but dropped his hand, suddenly, as if realizing he had done something no woman should see him do. Annabelle crossed her arms and looked to where the hills made a line against the sky and shifted her weight on her feet. Stillwell saw this and cast about for something, then bent and dragged a cinder block over and gestured at it, as if he had pulled up a chair. He sat on the step of his cabover. She sat on the block.

  “I don’t want anything to take him from me,” she said. “I get afraid of that sometimes. I don’t know why.”

  The wind moaned through the motel breezeway.

  Up the hill, the windmill was screeching.

  “It’s a lonely world out here,” Stillwell said. “Takes things right and left.”

  Annabelle pushed her hair out of her face and looked up and saw the orange cat curled on the hood of his pickup, fast asleep. “Well, look at that,” she said.

  Stillwell laughed, softly. The sound made him bright and winning. It faded quickly.

  “That damn cat won’t come near me.”

  “He won’t me neither,” Stillwell said. “I turn on the motor when the sun starts down. Let it run a while and cut it off. He likes it warm.”

  “He just showed up here one day,” Annabelle said. “We took to feeding him.”

  Stillwell didn’t look at her, but she saw the smile that curled at the edge of his mouth. “Reckon that’s why he likes me,” he said.

  Annabelle laughed.

  Another silence passed between them, and at the end of it, when it had stretched to a point that Annabelle could no longer ignore, she got up and dusted the seat of her jeans and said she and the boy, when they ate up at the house, usually ate after sundown. “You could join us tomorrow night, if you like,” she said. He stood and thanked her. Said he would.

  Annabelle went back up to the farmhouse. She turned at the top of the hill and saw him standing still, watching her. She went inside.

  Thursday

  October 16

  Reader stepped out of the psychiatrist’s office to roll a cigarette. The hallway was dim and cool. It opened onto a lobby of Spanish tile that was cracked and dirty. The front doors, great slabs of oak and iron, stood propped open, and Reader could see a bald man in a bathrobe hobbling around out on the lawn, where the shadows of clouds were passing. The bald man leaned on a metal walker and swatted at flies. The day was hot, and the flies were hungry. Reader licked his paper and sealed it. Through the office door, he could hear Cecil speaking a few last words to the fat, sweating doctor, who was all too eager to turn over his case notes after the rangers had showed him a picture of what they’d found in the shed in Grandview.

  Reader moseyed down the hall and stopped in front of a bulletin board, die-cut letters stapled in blue over orange paper across the top: All’s Well That Ends Well! He scanned the board and saw Polaroids of patients who had been discharged, each one taken in the same spot, the gravel driveway outside the main building, where even now the bald man in his robe had caught a fly between his cupped hands and was shaking it next to his ear.

  Reader leaned in and stared at one Polaroid in the upper right corner. It was a photograph of a man in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt and cowboy hat, standing by the front left fender of a Ford F-150 and Roadrunner cabover camper. The young man’s expression was solemn, and his was the long, mysterious face of Travis Stillwell.

  Reader tucked his cigarette into his shirt pocket and plucked the photograph from the board. “What is it, son?” he said, softly to the picture. “What do they see when they see you?”

  A nurse came passing, heavyset, gray hair. A sour expression behind cat-eye glasses. She carried a tray of pink and blue pills in little white paper cups.

  He let her pass.

  Another nurse—young, dark-haired, pretty, so like the women pinned in columns to the roll-away board in the ranger’s office—came around the corner with a clipboard, and this one he stopped. “Miss,” he said.

  She slowed up. “Yes, officer?”

  “Did you know this man?”

  “If he was a patient here I reckon I knew him better than most,” she said with a laugh. She took the picture in hand. “Sure,” she said. “That’s Travis. He left about a month ago, I think it was. You get that from the board there?”

  “What can you tell him me about him?”

  “A little,” she said, “but you really oughta talk with the doctor.”

  “I talked to him already.” Reader smiled. “I’d like to get me a second opinion.”

  “Well,” she said, hesitation creeping into her voice. “He was quiet, kept to himself. But awfully sweet. Seemed a little like a stray dog, you know? Like he needed someone to take him in and feed him. Just love him.”

  “Is this his vehicle?”

  “I believe it is. Come to think of it, I think it was sold to him by one of the custodians here on staff.”

  “Do you know that person’s name? I’d like to speak with him.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I’m not sure who it was, really. Is there some trouble?”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Reader said. He tipped his hat and walked outside to smoke beneath the portico. He took the Polaroid with him.

  When Cecil joined Reader in the shade, he carried a thick manila folder. “Case notes and psychiatric evals, February to August. That’s the boy’s whole stay.”

  Reader took the folder, leafed through it. He looked up and saw the fat doctor in his white coat and tie staring at them from the gloom of the lobby. The young nurse Reader had stopped walked up and they spoke quietly and both cast glances out the doors at the rangers.

  “Can’t say I buy the diagnosis,” Cecil said. “Ever man went to war done things no man ought. Don’t mean we all come back murderers and perverts.”

  “Cecil, you ever check yourself into a state lunatic asylum?”

  “No, sir. Can’t say as I have.”

  “Well, Travis Stillwell was here almost six months of his own volition. I wouldn’t take that lightly.”

  Cecil spat. “Some men’s just born wrong, you ask me.”

  Out on the lawn, the bald man in the bathrobe smacked his neck and cried: “Fuckin horseflies!”

  Reader closed the file and tossed his butt in the gravel. “We’re all born wrong, Cecil. Some of us just don’t know it. Places like this—” He waved his hand at the asylum. “They call it crazy.” He walked out from beneath the portico into the sun, headed for the cruiser where it was parked parallel to the grass.

  Reader opened the door on the passenger’s side. “We’ve got our all-points, by the way,” he called. He flapped the Polaroid in the air. “Won’t be long now.” He got into the car and shut the door.

  “Well,” Cecil said. “I guess I’m drivin.”

  Thank you, Jesus, for this food,” the boy said. “Watch over us and protect us. Amen.”

  “Amen,” his mother said.

  Travis felt Annabelle’s and Sandy’s warm hands slip his, and he opened his eyes and saw Annabelle squeeze the boy’s hand then let it go, and all three picked up their forks and set to eating quietly.

  Mid-meal, he excused himself and went to the bathroom and latched the door and knelt over the bowl and vomited. He did it quietly. He flushed, and while he waited to make sure it all went down, he glanced at himself in the mirror. A string of red vomit ran from his mouth down his chin and dripped on the porcelain sink. The thing staring back at him smiled a crooked, tombstone smile. Travis did not return the smile. Instead, he ran his hands under the tap and splashed the mess from his face.

  After dinner they all sat on the
porch with plastic cups of ice cream in hand and watched a storm roll in from the west, lightning flickering behind the low hills like a promise. Down by the motel, a roadrunner darted and leapt at bugs in the fluorescent blue light. The wind rustled chimes that hung from the eaves. Travis and Annabelle sat in the swing and the boy sat on the steps. Travis looked at his cup of ice cream and thought that he might vomit all over again if the stuff touched his lips.

  It wasn’t long after the roadrunner streaked away into the dark that the boy asked about the knife.

  “What kind of bird is that?”

  Travis ran his finger along the Ka-Bar’s hilt. He took it out and held it, handle first, toward the boy. “American Bald Eagle,” he said.

  The boy got up and held the knife.

  His mother shifted nervously in the swing, and the chain creaked in the eyebolts overhead.

  The knife gleamed in the light from the pull-string porch bulb.

  Thunder rumbled.

  “Bedtime, mister,” Annabelle said.

  “Aw, Momma, can’t I stay up a little while longer?”

  “No, sir, you may not. Now give Mr. Stillwell back his knife.”

  The boy looked down at the blade, and it seemed, for an instant, that he might not hand it over. Travis remembered how Sandy had swung the stick at the rocks in back of the motel, each rock popping closer and closer to a window. But Sandy gave the knife back and went as told, dragging his feet across the porch and letting the screen door bang shut behind him.

  In a bit, Annabelle got up and went to the screen and opened the door quietly. From down the hall in the bathroom came the sound of the boy brushing his teeth. An antique table stood just inside the door, on top of it a globed lamp. She opened the table’s narrow drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She brought these back to the swing, where she took out a cigarette and offered one to Travis.

  He took a cigarette from the pack and let her light it for him. He held it with the six new teeth that had come in after the rabbits. He had stayed in his berth and slept long hours, and the sleep had been good and dreamless, restful. Days became nights, nights days. The hunger subsided. The teeth grew. Patches of skin re-knitted. On the first night he had awakened to find Rue hunkered at the end of his berth, shivering, blood on her lips. The gash in his leg where she had first slit him, freshly red and wet, the skin around it bruised and bitten all over again.