Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  As George and I drove further north, out of the trees and into the fields of farms just outside the Adirondack Park, I thought a bit about the transformation, or metamorphosis, that I had undergone in the last few days; and tried to feel around inside my head or chest for some degree, or hint, of discomfort or disgust or sadness or glee for all of the valid reasons that I might feel any of those things. A dragonfly larvae lives in water for as long as five years, until a complex set of biological and environmental factors signal that it is ready to change; at this point the larvae climbs out of the water, breaks free of its old habitat and skin, spreads a set of wings heretofore hidden, and flies off to explore the world in an entirely new way, as an entirely new being... essentially unrecognizable as the creature that left the husk behind. I was embarrassed by my own grandiose analogy, but could not dismiss it out of hand; it was too compelling and the fit was too eerily accurate. My environment had changed, and I had altered myself (or been altered by biological programming) to adjust to the demands of my new environment; I was not the Tyler Cunningham that Cynthia had asked to help her a week ago.

  The change that I felt was worrisome on a number of levels, not the least of which was that I had liked the earlier version of Tyler Cunningham (pretty well), and hoped that the new model could interface with the rest of the world without having to relearn everything about humans and human interactions as awkwardly and slowly as before. I had enjoyed my few human contacts and a near-universal love of dogs, and had, like Henry Higgins, grown accustomed to the ins and outs of life with Tyler Cunningham. I was not eager for the new me to prove to be hungry for blood or to see a stolen shotgun as the right tool for every job. Thinking about the shotgun, and who I stole it from, brought me back down to Earth and helped me find my center again.

  I had initially acted in response to the abduction of my... friend... Cynthia; it was odd to use that word, as I had always been comfortable with the idea that friends, like dogs, were something that other people had, while I just pretended. I had done what I always do, scoop big mouthfuls of information, like a whale with krill, feed my analytical brain/gut, and (to messily bring the metaphor full circle) poop out some conclusion. In this case, my conclusion was passable, but my analysis was incompletely digested; I had failed (miserably) to account for the human elements involved. Greedy and immoral criminals do not act, and react, in the same way that regular humans do. This fact should have been glaringly obvious to someone who had read as much crime fiction as I have in my life.

  Stress can temper or crack, strengthen or weaken the substance upon which it acts. I could feel the changes within me, but I didn't understand what they meant (yet), or how they would affect my interactions with the rest of the world at this point. I could not say that I had been changed for the better, or for the worse; all I could say (and I did, although I think it probably just confused George, who was just starting to wake up, based on the thumps and groans coming from the back of the Element) was that I was glad to be alive. He started to move around a bit in a more organized way, and I, needing to pee and preferring to do it and to deal with George while we were still out in the boonies, pulled over.

  “George, I'm sorry that it came to this, but it did.” I had gone into the woods and pee'd, come back and opened up the rear hatch of Element. I was looking down at George, hogtied on the floor, under the wool blanket (I found myself, for a moment, thinking that it must be itchy under there). “We both made some mistakes, and things progressed to the point where we can't both continue to live in the overlapping worlds that we inhabit. I must have gotten lucky, because I certainly can't call the way that I approached all of this even remotely smart.”

  He tossed his head around enough to shrug the blanket off, and made some M-based sounds behind the duct-tape gag; I didn't have to remove the tape to know what he was saying/asking/begging, I had been in his exact position four days ago, and remembered the way it felt and tasted and smelled, to be subject to another man.

  “Nope, I'm not going to take off the gag, there's no point. You'd scream for help or you'd curse me until I blushed or you'd ask for a last coke or meal, and want to get away or kill me or both... I know that I did. I'm not angry with you for acting as you have towards me and my friend Cynthia. It's in your nature, that's all.” He shook all over and arched his back, trying to get closer. He mmm-ed especially emphatically, as if that would change my mind.

  “I'm not mad, anymore, but I am more careful now than I might have been a few days ago. I don't blame you anymore than I would a shark for doing what they do, but I won't pet you, and I can't let you swim where I, or the people that I care about, swim.” I grabbed his hair, pulled his forehead into my chest, as if to hug him, felt on the back of the neck for the highest gap between vertebrae that I could find, slid the thin blade of my fishing knife into the gap, and felt him jerk as I sliced through his spinal cord.

  Everything in him tightened once, and then it all went loose. I had wanted to make it as humane and painless as possible, not needing or wanting to hurt or punish the man. I'm sure that it was essentially painless (certainly better than what I would have gotten from Berry and Justin), but it occurred to me that it might be scary for him while his body died around his brain (assuming that he felt fear); the lights were on, but his body was closing up house for good. He had taken his last functional breath, and his heart would stop within a few minutes; his brain would shut down from oxygen starvation a few minutes after that. I considered talking to him like I do with the injured (sometimes dying) dogs that Dorothy sometimes gets, but it seemed disingenuous to me. It probably wouldn't give George much comfort, to have his killer with him at the end, so I just walked away.

  I electronically locked my car (‘bloop, bloop’) and walked back into the field by the side of the road to sit down and look at the stars; the same stars that George might have been seeing through the rear-seat moon-roof of my Element. I had thought, for no logical reason, that there might be some thrashing and/or noise, but of course there wasn't. I drank a warm coke in the cold night, looking up at the stars, thinking about how many planets were within my field of vision; wondered if there was intelligent life on any of them, and if so, what they would make of life on Earth.

  I crushed the can into a hockey puck and stood up, feeling my ass, and to a lesser degree my back, soaked through with cold dew from the grass. My car was still and quiet, and contrary to a side-bet that I had going with myself, didn't smell as though George had evacuated his bowels as my research indicated he likely would. It was only a bit over four miles to Jacob’s farm, and if Gregory had been able to see him since my call (Jacob didn't have a phone in the house which complicated things a bit), then he'd be waiting up for me. If not, I'd have to do some tap-dancing, but looking down possible timelines, I could see more ways that things would work out than ways that they wouldn't.

  Hostetler Farm, 12:41a.m., 9/10/2012

  As I crested the small hill and coasted down into the sheltering valley where Jacob's house and barns were, I could see a light burning in the kitchen, and caught a brief red glow out on the porch, where Jacob must have been enjoying a late night pipe on his swing. I turned off my headlights and pulled up to the house with just my parking lights on, parked, and then turned those off too. He stood up to wave, but then sat back down on his swing, so I killed the dome light, got out, locked the Element, and walked over to join him. There was a rocker next to the swing, and I lowered myself gingerly into the chair, noting for the first time since morning how tired and sore and old I felt... wrung out.

  “Tyler Cunningham, you're moving like I do on the second morning of haying season. Can I get you a glass of my wife's grape wine?” This gave me pause for a second (but only for a second) as I wondered what other types of wine Jacob's wife made, but I found that, for once, I didn't really care to learn the answer to that question.

  “Thank you Jacob, I think that I could use a glass of wine.”

  “Whatever for?” I was tir
ed, and would have had trouble parsing that out if Jacob hadn't started chuckling at his own joke about my odd word choice (“use a glass of wine”). I joined him in laughing at the funny “English” (part of my research on the Amish had included Netflix-ing the movie “Witness”).

  He gave a low whistle, and fifteen seconds later, Sadie came out carrying a wooden tray with a stopper bottle of wine and two low glasses. She wasn't dressed Amish, plain and austere; she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but it was clean and she was showing lots less skin than the last time I had seen her. She handed me a glass after pouring one for her father, and favored me with a shy and happy smile that seemed a thousand miles away from the room/scene that I had taken her from in Lake Placid.

  “Hi Sadie, how are things?” I asked, hoping that was bland enough to allow me to avoid much conversation with her.

  “I'm well, staying here to help through this week, and then catching a ride to visit some family in Pennsylvania for a while. Before you go, remind Father to give you the bread and preserves I've set aside for you. I've nothing but my voice and our kitchen to thank you for my life, so I hope you like fresh bread; the preserves my Ma and I made this weekend with fruits from the farm.”

  “I'll be sure to remind him before I go, I live on carbs!” Sadie looked to her dad while I said this, and tittered when he raised his eyebrows at the term ‘carbs’. “I was glad to help, and it was the most productive use of my time in months, so thank you.”

  She topped off our glasses, set the bottle down on the tray, which was resting on a table between the swing and my rocker, and wished us a good night. Jacob looked as though he might hurt himself smiling so hard, and it occurred to me to feel guilty, this was going to be like shooting plain-dressed fish in a barrel completely lacking buttons.

  “Jacob, I hope that you'll forgive me, both for the late hour, and for the favor that I must ask of you. My father taught me that to take advantage of a friend's offer of help, especially so soon after it was offered, was a rudeness, but the trouble I am in leaves me no choice.”

  “Tyler Cunningham, your father's advice was good, but only when the offer is a gesture. I owe you my daughter, so unless you aim to take her back and away from me, anything I can do for you will be done.”

  “Well... you know, or can imagine, the sort of men that Sadie was mixed up with in Lake Placid?”

  Jacob nodded and looked at the bottom of his wine glass, I could feel his blush and anger from my seat, and went on quickly before he worked himself around to speaking.

  “A man like that killed a woman who may be as close as I will ever come to marrying.” The emphasis on family and duty and doing the right thing among the Amish would be hard to overstate, based on my research findings.

  “He was a man involved in the commerce of drugs and sex, and he took her from me. When I went to speak to the man about what I thought he had done, he shot me.” (more or less). “That is why I'm moving like you'll move in twenty years, Jacob; this man put a bullet in me only days after killing my Cynthia.” I'd debated about how much to share with Jacob, but felt that his being able to put a name to my loss might help tip the balance in my favor.

  Jacob was by now leaning forward and both following my story and trying to anticipate where it was going; I could feel his empathy and sympathy, even though it was too dark to see his face since Sadie had dimmed the kerosene lanterns in the kitchen. He leaned in to top up his glass and fill mine too, using a time-honored camping trick of holding an index finger a half-inch down the inside of my glass, so it wouldn't slop over; I saw him lick his finger when he leaned back to keep listening to my story... I was desperate to end it with truth, but also with the right spin to allow him to rationalize helping me.

  “After he shot me, I lost my calm, my feeling of place in the world, and my desire to work through things peaceably; in the end our conflict could only end in one of two ways: either he or I would be dead.” I paused to take a drink, and look to see the roads my next words would travel.

  “I'm here because I've done a great wrong in putting my world to right, and I mean to commit a further sin, with your help. I have this man's body in my car, and I need your help getting rid of it.”

  Jacob sat back and dug in his jacket pocket for a tobacco pouch. He made, or took advantage of, a lengthy process of inspecting, and loading, and then lighting the pipe he kept in the pouch. The smell took me briefly back a thousand years to morning fishing trips with my father, talking and sitting in the stink of pre-mix boat fuel and fish scales and wood smoke and pipe tobacco; I felt, for a moment, as though my dad was sitting on Jacob's shoulder, urging him to help me (maybe it was Jacob's grape wine). I once caught myself with a treble-hook, and Dad's calm manner and strong hands on mine were the only things that saved me from screaming and crying like a little baby; he talked to me using the same voice I had used the other day with Hope (the scared beagle mix). He pushed the barbs through the webbing between my left index finger and thumb, and cut them out with the pliers he kept in his tackle box... I miss him.

  Finally done diddling around with his pipe, Jacob turned to me and said, “There's nothing for it, but that he'll have to go to the pigs... pen four would be best… 24 fine boars, more than 150 pounds each, and eating near 200 pounds of grain each day, not to mention what slop they get from the women and children.”

  My mouth dropped open in surprise. I had been expecting to have to finesse him into the solution that popped into my head as soon as Gregory mentioned the bacon, but he had obviously gotten there before me. I started to answer him, but he cut me off.

  “What you're asking is little enough for the life of my girl, Tyler Cunningham. What soul this man had is gone, and what's in your car is nothing, but meat or feed now, good for either compost or the hog trough. When I was a boy, my cousin Zeke broke the neck of a calf by mistake, and to hide what he'd done, we hauled the carcass to the big boar pen, and let them at it... 20 hungry boars stripped the meat and ate the offal and cracked the bones for marrow, even the thigh bones and skull.”

  “You can't tell Sadie, or your wife, or anyone.” I cautioned, unsure of myself in this portion of the discussion.

  “You don't know our ways, being an English, but we confess all our sins. In this case however, I'll not confess at our Sunday meeting, but in a private confession, with my brother William, an elder of the community, and Sadie's Uncle. He'll understand what must be done to men such as those who would harm our Sadie, and then I'll take his confession for hiding the crime himself. As long as it gets spoken aloud, we can be forgiven all our sins. I worry about your soul, but can do naught for it in any case.”

  “It may be beyond saving.” I offered lamely, just to fill the momentary quiet.

  “No such thing, you'll come up sometime, and see our church, when Sadie comes back from Jed's farm in Pennsylvania; see her cleansed of a year or two of Rumspringa in a morning.”

  “Now, to your bad man in the car... back up to the big barn yonder, and we'll cut him out of his clothes... it would do no good to choke my boars on zippers and fancy belt buckles.” He surprised me by chuckling at his own (slightly morbid) joke.

  I pulled the Element around to the barn that Jacob had pointed to, and he was already there waiting. We cut the clothes off of George, dropped the shreds on the blue tarp, along with the blanket and gloves and strips of tape and broom and bags and receipts and backpack and everything left over from my stop at Knapp's; then we wrapped it tightly in the tarp and threw it back of the Element. We wrestled George, who hadn't had time to stiffen yet, into an odd hybrid between cart and wheelbarrow, to trundle him over to the fourth pen, which was filled with snuffling pigs happy to see Jacob (and likely also happy to see George). The two of us lifted him up and over the fence, and into the main trough a few feet inside the pen.

  “I'm guessing that I don't want to slip and bump my head and fall in here, Jacob?”

  “Too right, Tyler Cunningham, the pigs would be full for days aft
er eating the two of you... Ha!” his laugh rang out strangely like George's, which gave me a momentary chill.

  We went back out of the covered pen and he pointed out another building, this one low and long, and met me (and the Element) over there. It was his sugaring house, where they boiled maple sap down into syrup. He got the huge wood-fired furnace going, and we lofted the blue tarp, including all of its contents, into the flames. He had a long stick to stir the flames and evidence around, and within thirty minutes (and another glass of wine from a bottle and tin cups he pulled out of his coat), nothing was left except for a few hunks of melted and unidentifiable metal which he swore would fall out and into the ash-trench when he cleaned it next.

  We went back over to the barn, me driving and Jacob walking (he refused my offer of a lift, and I didn't press the issue), to check in on the pigs. I could see a few bone fragments and some nasty stuff that might have been intestines still in the trough, but couldn't swear that they hadn't been there when we dropped George in. Jacob scattered a five-gallon bucket of grain all over the area where the boars had eaten most of George, waited and talked about the winter up here as opposed to down in the Tri-Lakes, blowing cold versus more snow; the boars attacked the area until it looked entirely picked over and clean (except for the pig shit and hay and mud… so not really clean). The whole process had taken less than an hour.

  “Some of his teeth might make it through them boars, but they'll most likely dissolve in the manure lagoon before they end up on our fields a year or two from now.”