In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

The hunger came on: an absence eating at him, like teeth with nothing but their own mouth to chew or the mechanism of some great engine turning over inside him only to sputter. With the hunger came new pains in his side and leg, a familiar stiffness in his joints, the dryness of his skin. Itching. From the campsites around him he could hear the sounds of people cooking dinner. He smelled beans and bacon, hot dogs, and saw marshmallows catching flame at the ends of sticks. He sat and smoked and watched and listened, and all the while his stomach growled, but it was not for beans and bacon.

  No, he thought. No. Just wait. Hold out. See if it will pass.

  He knew better, of course, but it tortured Rue just to hear him think it.

  It won’t, she warned. It does not pass. Am I not proof of that? I need you, Travis. I need you to be the thing you are. The thing I have made you.

  But Travis ignored her. He sat and smoked and shook with the hunger and ignored her, and soon the campsites around him quieted, and lights were extinguished.

  He smoked the last of his cigarettes and got up and stumbled inside.

  Into his cave.

  Into his coffin.

  Sunday

  October 19

  After church, Annabelle got six strands of colored Christmas lights down out of storage from the farmhouse attic and strung them along the chain-link fence out by the pool. Sandy helped. He wore the lights like a bandolier and fed his mother lengths as she needed them. They worked their way around the fence, Annabelle weaving the cord through the links in the quiet, patient way she had once seen her grandmother work a quilt. They worked mostly in silence. The boy had been quiet all morning. He had not said much over his cereal and had not sung hymns at church, which was strange. Annabelle may have hated the sound of her own voice singing church music, but she liked to hear Sandy sing and it had made her sad that morning when he had not.

  “What’s on your mind, birthday boy?” she asked now.

  His answer was slow in coming, and it was, as usual, a question. Sandy preferred questions to answers. One of his finer qualities, she had always thought. “He won’t be back, will he.”

  He. The cowboy. But he was not a cowboy, was he? Not really. How strange. Annabelle was surprised that she could not remember his name. It was on the tip of her tongue, and that’s when she realized she had not thought about Travis—Stillwell, Travis Stillwell—all morning. Her heart quickened, and when she opened her mouth to answer the boy’s question—

  No, because I told him to go. Because he was trouble. Bad trouble.

  —she found she couldn’t remember this either.

  Red, she thought, but this made no sense to her.

  Skin and board and camper and cake.

  Suddenly she was sweating beneath her denim blouse. Her mind was empty, like the bleached pool behind her, and she was terrified of falling in. She remembered one thing: the morning she had found Stillwell out in the field, watching the sun come up. She kept stringing lights and gave the only answer she knew to be true. She gave it as calmly as she could: “I don’t expect he will.”

  To her surprise, the boy said, “Maybe it’s best.”

  She stopped stringing lights. “What makes you say that, baby?”

  He did not answer right away. The face he made, the slight furrow between his eyes, the tight lips, this was the face he made when he was deciding how much of the truth to tell. She had seen it the day she had been called to his school, the day he and Roscoe Jenkins had fought.

  “There was something bad,” the boy finally said. “In that camper with him.”

  Annabelle felt gooseflesh break along her arms and neck.

  Sandy kept working lights through the chain link.

  “What something, baby?”

  “Nothing,” he said, finally. “Maybe I just had a bad dream.”

  Something, she thought. Something bad. But she didn’t press it. Better, she thought, for it all to have been just that: a bad dream. “Well,” she said. “He’s gone. And we’ve got a party to get ready for.”

  The boy nodded, but he did not smile.

  When they had finished stringing lights, Annabelle ran an extension cord from the pool to the socket in the laundry portico. She plugged in the lights and was pleased that at least half of them worked. While the boy went from bulb to bulb, wiggling them as if checking for loose teeth, Annabelle walked to the back of the motel and looked at the empty space where the cowboy’s truck and camper had been parked. Later, Diego and Rosendo would bring their grill in the back of Diego’s El Camino. Diego had offered to cook burgers and sausages for the party. Jack Mooney was set to come in his truck at two to fill the pool and sort the pump and chemicals and make everything right. She stood in the vacant RV lot and looked around at the great empty space of Texas, the scrubland stretching up to the hills where the faded blue sky began. People would be coming here in a few hours, but for now she and her boy were alone.

  And sometimes, she thought, it feels good to be alone.

  It felt safe.

  The examination room was cold, despite the heavy sheepskin coat Reader had brought from Waco. He took off his hat and set it on a nearby stool as the medical examiner, a man named Alvarez, turned down the sheet, revealing the dead girl where she lay upon the table. Her face and a portion of her neck were blackened, charred. The flesh of her lips had fused with her teeth. One eye was missing, the socket empty.

  “Probably chasing the proverbial wild goose on this one,” Reader had told Cecil that morning, staring down at the faxed photograph of the dead girl, sent to their office early in the a.m.

  “She fits the profile,” Cecil said. “Last seen in a honky-tonk.”

  “It’s too grisly,” Reader said. “Monstrous, even.”

  The photograph—grainy, black and white—was a studio portrait, a senior picture: a smiling girl pressed up against a tree.

  “No need for both of us to go,” Reader said. “Division’s lost patience. Best start on what’s been stackin up. Besides, you’ll just get airsick for nothing.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice, boss.”

  Alvarez turned the sheet all the way down to the girl’s feet. Her legs from the knees down were also burned, muscle, flesh, and bone melded. Above the knees: a demarcation where the burns stopped, sharp as a tan line. About where a skirt would have fallen, Reader thought.

  “Parents made a positive ID?” he asked.

  “Hour before you got here,” Alvarez said. “When I folded back the sheet, the mother—” He shook his head.

  “Fax you sent said she went missing Friday?”

  “Reported Friday afternoon,” Alvarez said. “She went out honky-tonkin Thursday night after a fight with her parents. Border patrol found her yesterday morning, out on some ranch road, just inside our line of jurisdiction. Swamped with buzzards. She one of yours?”

  “Don’t much look like it,” Reader said. He bent down and eyed the dead girl’s throat. He could see no shapes or marks, no letters, but there was so little flesh above the collarbone to see. He kept his hands in his coat pockets. He looked all along the rest of her, saw the knife wound in her leg, the artery inside like rubber tubing. He pointed to another mark, near the knee. “This here, that’s a buzzard?”

  “Think so. There were coyotes skulking around, too, when they found her.”

  “And these?” Reader pointed to a small ring of punctures below the knife wound.

  “Human teeth.”

  “Cause of death the severed femoral?”

  “Not sure,” Alvarez said. “You want some tea or coffee? I’ve got Sanka.”

  “No thank-ya.”

  Alvarez did not smile. He only nodded.

  “How come not sure?” Reader walked slowly around the table.

  “Well.” Alvarez bit his lip. “There’s a lot going on here, ranger.”

  He took a pair of blue rubber gloves from a nearby wall dispenser and snapped them on. He picked up the dead girl’s left hand and turned it over. “Looks like
she crawled over a stretch of rough ground. You can tell from the sand and quartz in the cuts on her palms and knees, consistent with the terrain where she was found. She has bruises on her back I’m betting are tire treads, which means she was most likely run over at the site. The crushed pelvis and shattered spine corroborate that theory. You can see where the bone’s protruding here—”

  “Don’t look like she’s burned but on one side,” Reader said. He crouched down and looked up at the underside of the girl’s right leg below the knee, which was smooth, unblemished.

  “That’s right. My theory is the burns happened after death.”

  Reader stood up. “Any chemical residue, accelerants?”

  Alvarez shook his head. “She was clothed when we found her. No fire damage to the garments. You could almost figure it for one hell of a sunburn.”

  Reader grunted.

  The men’s eyes moved over the corpse.

  “Truth is, I don’t know what killed her,” Alvarez said. “Blood loss from the artery should have done it. But I don’t think she bled to death. It’s the weirdest damn thing, but she’s still got blood in her. Not a full tank, but some. Maybe the complete autopsy’ll make more sense of that.” Alvarez reached out and took the dead girl’s hand, gently, as if to ask her for a dance. “One of her fingernails is split,” he said quietly. “I didn’t notice that before.”

  Water dripped into a metal sink.

  “You okay, doc?”

  “Sorry.” Alvarez shook his head. “I didn’t sleep much last night.” He lapsed into another silence.

  Reader waited. It looked as if great and ancient wheels were turning in the medical examiner’s head, two thoughts warring, one against the other.

  “It’s just—” Alvarez ran a hand through his hair, scratched the crown of his head. “The burning, the severed artery, the human bite marks on the leg, the lack of blood loss, these are all weird enough. But when a body isn’t moved for a period of time, say ten, twenty hours, you know what happens?”

  “The blood settles to the lowest point,” Reader said.

  “Yes. Gravity pulls it down, and there it thickens. Turns to jelly. When this happens, there’s discoloration in the skin, bruising. Now, keep in mind, they found her faceup in the middle of the road, right?” Alvarez plucked a fresh pair of gloves from the wall dispenser and handed them to Reader. “Have a look yourself.”

  Reader pulled on the gloves and took a step toward the table. He put his right hand gently on the girl’s right hip, beneath the knob of white bone that jutted through the pale skin. The other hand he tucked beneath her right armpit. Carefully, he tipped the girl over onto her side. Broken bones shifted inside her, and the sound was not unlike the sometimes grinding of his wife’s teeth in the night. Reader saw what Alvarez wanted him to see. The girl’s posterior skin had a slight reddish hue, as if the sun that had warmed the rocks beneath her had somehow blistered the back of her, and there were mottled, tire-tread bruises that crossed her back, purpling out from bands of sheared flesh, but there was no discoloration where the blood should have pooled. “No lividity,” Reader said. He set the corpse gently back upon the table.

  “It never set in,” Alvarez said. “Despite the fact she was on her back in the road for thirty-plus hours before she was found.” He went over to an old Electrolux icebox in the corner of the room and opened it. Inside was a sandwich in Saran Wrap, and next to this was a metal test tube rack. Alvarez removed a single capped tube and closed the fridge. He held the tube out to Reader. “This is a blood sample I took from her yesterday, after they brought her in. I took it from the thigh, just below where the artery was cut.”

  Reader held the tube up to the fluorescent light.

  “Just give it a shake,” Alvarez said.

  The blood swished in the tube. “Thin as grape juice,” Reader said.

  “No coagulation. And that’s strange enough, right?” Alvarez returned the test tube to the icebox. “But here’s something else: the bloodstains on her skirt and the blood smears on her thigh tested as inhuman.”

  “Animal?”

  Alvarez shrugged. “Inhuman.”

  “You type the blood you took from her?” Reader asked.

  “I did not,” the medical examiner said. “I couldn’t.”

  “Beg your pardon, doc. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but that’s not a complicated test as I understand it.”

  Alvarez smiled. “I imagine you’re a little sharper than all that, ranger. But you’re right. It’s not a complicated test. But when the blood I collected from her clothes and skin tested negative as human, I decided to apply the same precipitin test to the blood I drew out of her. After all, visual evidence alone suggested that the blood on her leg and dress should have been hers, or at least, perhaps, an assailant’s. Nothing about the state of her suggested any other blood but human should be present. So when the case proved to be otherwise, I got curious. The antiserum we keep in stock here to conduct the test is generated by injecting a lab animal with human antigens, and then the animal creates antibodies, and those are combined—”

  “With the blood sample,” Reader said. “I know how the test works, doc. And?”

  “Well. The blood I drew out of the corpse also tested negative.”

  Reader stared at the doctor. “The blood in that body,” he said. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “That body right yonder?”

  Alvarez said, “Inhuman.”

  Suddenly the room was no longer cold to Reader. He pulled off his gloves and tossed them in a bin marked Medical Waste. He took off his coat and folded it over his arm.

  Alvarez went on. “These two things, the lack of lividity and the inhuman blood, I don’t know what they mean, exactly, how they relate, but I do know that there are animals whose saliva contains anticoagulants, to facilitate hematophagy—”

  “Whoa, doc, whoa. What makes you think it just wasn’t a faulty test?”

  Alvarez removed the small, wire-framed glasses he wore and set them aside on a nearby table. He leaned back against the table and rubbed his eyes. “I did it three times. Each time it was the same. Of course, it’s possible, yes, that there was some mistake. The antiserums we have here aren’t exactly the freshest. We don’t use them very often. And I haven’t slept all night. I thought of that, too.”

  Suddenly eager to see daylight, Reader picked up his hat from the stool and held it by the brim. “Well. Fascinating as all this is, it doesn’t much fit my case. Save the honky-tonk angle.”

  “You a religious man?” Alvarez asked.

  Reader said, “Not really, no. I believe in the efficacy of science.”

  “There are some who might say, mi abuelita among them, that what we have here is a kind of miracle. Here is this poor dead girl, her body wrecked, her heart and lungs and brain all broken beyond repair, a shell of a creature who once lived and now does not, and yet the blood in her veins still flows, still moves, as if of its own accord. As if it possesses the will to survive. How is this possible? My grandmother would tell me that it is my job, as a man of science, to make this miracle understood, to find God’s purpose in such a thing, perhaps even to the benefit of all mankind.”

  Reader looked at the dead girl and shook his head. “No offense to you or your grandmother, doc, but this don’t look much like any miracle to me.”

  “No,” Alvarez said. “No, it doesn’t. The truth is, sir, I’m no man of any great faith, and I’m sure as hell not a serologist, but I, like you, know enough to know that blood doesn’t behave this way under any natural circumstances.”

  “Or,” Reader said, “it was just a bad test.”

  Alvarez stared down at the drain in the center of the concrete floor. He nodded, after a moment, and wiped his glasses on the hem of his lab coat.

  “What kind of animals they use to make that antiserum?” Reader asked.

  Alvarez put his glasses back on, tucking the wire temples behind his ears. “Rabbits,” he said.

 
Alvarez showed Reader to his office, and from there Reader phoned headquarters and told Mary in dispatch to tell Cecil the trail was looking even colder here, but he’d be out a day or so longer regardless.

  “I’ll talk to the parents,” he said. “Make sure nothing sticks.” He listened a moment, said, “Right,” and hung up.

  Alvarez was behind the desk, boiling water in a Griffin beaker on a hot plate. Reader looked around. It was the office of a man who did not relish his job. A metal desk, a filing cabinet, a typewriter, an out-tray empty, an inbox full. Reader thought about his own office, how little of himself was in it. Bricks and mortar and maps and fluorescent lights. A rack upon which to hang a hat and belt. A calendar on the wall. And files. Stacks and stacks of files.

  “You should go home,” he told the doctor. “Get some rest.”

  “I have a few more tests to do,” Alvarez said. “Before the full autopsy.” He held the beaker with a black silicone glove and poured the boiling water into a ceramic mug. Then he took a bag of Earl Grey tea from a canister on his desk and dropped it into the mug.

  “Where do her folks live?” Reader asked.

  “Little town about ninety minutes west of here. Cielo Rojo.”

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “Day after tomorrow. I’ll do the autopsy tonight, most likely. Less you say different.”

  “No. No, I’m done here. What’d you say the name of that town was?”

  “Cielo Rojo.”

  “Pretty,” Reader said. “Thanks again, doc. Get some sleep.”

  From the office, he walked out into the hall and glanced back in the direction of the examination room. Down the long, dim corridor, the double-doors were open and the stainless steel table where the girl’s corpse had lain was empty. Only the sheet remained, bunched on the floor.

  “Hey, doc,” Reader said over his shoulder. “Somebody move our girl?”

  “Somebody what?” Alvarez said, stepping into the hall.

  “Guess not,” Reader said. He pointed at the opposite end of the corridor, where a pair of doors led out into an alleyway.

  The girl walked in a crooked line, her gait uneven, slow. She wobbled every few steps, had to right herself by reaching a hand out to the wall. Her hips were misshapen, her back a winding road, but her legs seemed to work well enough that she was able to keep her feet beneath her. A flap of flesh hung loose from her back.