Moonbane

by Al Sarrantonio

  But I thought of Richie out there somewhere, and the chance I had of saving not only myself but him as well (couldn’t they be working on something at Kramer—something listed under national security—that would turn my son back from beast to man?).

  My foot moved; I stepped outside.

  Daylight blinded me; I felt like Mole in the Wind in the Willows, meeting sunlight for the first time in spring. It was a beautiful day. It was for days like this that Emily and I had moved here. There was no humidity; the sun would prove hot later, but a step into the shade would banish the heat. The sky was blue, with a depth no city in the United States knows any longer. I had written a poem called “High Blue” that described it like this: Deep pail of sky, the blue bottom of atmosphere.

  That was the way that sky looked. This was the kind of day that I always worked well on. I used to plant myself in a chair in the orchard on the other side of the house, and smell the flowers that would soon burst sweet fruit from their middles, and in the ripeness of that atmosphere I would bear poems. I had written all of my book Lone Beginnings there; that had been my first book of poems in my Southwest series, which had been well received and which I loved more than any of my other work.

  I had done well here; I thought of why we had moved from the East—the oppression of the cities, the wants and needs and the sheer weight of all those people on the sensibilities were overloading me. I felt that if I did not get away from them they would smother me and, finally, snuff out my will to work. I had colleagues who thrived on the dynamism of New York and Boston; the art and culture did not overwhelm but rather stimulated them to a passion I could not feel. I felt suffocated, and my poems were cramped, stifled things.

  But here I had learned to breathe, and as I had breathed so had my work. As the horizon had widened here, so had my own horizon.

  But that had been before. I thought of the poem I left on my desk upstairs, which meant so little to me now, and, as numbed and grieved as I felt, I wondered if I would ever write again.

  Hiking up my pack, I stepped off the porch.

  I checked the car first, knowing what I would find. The distributor cap had been yanked off; it lay in the driveway crushed. For good measure they had ripped the spark plug wires out, along with the battery cables and radiator hoses. All of the windows had been smashed.

  Still, fool and romantic that I am, I thought I would try the key in the ignition.

  As I reached to open the door on the passenger side I noticed a strange object in the driveway. It was a pile of bones, stark white, which had been shaped into a rough pyramid.

  A shiver bolted through me, and I drew back, retrieving my pack, not wanting to think about the pile of bones, giving up my idiotic notion about magically starting the wrecked car.

  Now that I knew I would have to walk, I wondered how active the wolves were during the day.

  There was a stand of cottonwood trees at the bottom of the driveway. I stayed close to it until I reached the road. An eerie sight met me. There was nothing but dusty emptiness and silence. My mailbox stood knocked at an angle, stuffed with the mail of its final delivery. Some of the contents had spilled to the ground. I stood over them, seeing a familiar creamy envelope. I picked it up and slit it open—and there was an acceptance letter from one of the better poetry journals.

  “Thanks, Bill,” I said quietly, looking at the editor’s familiar signature, dropping the letter to the road.

  I looked up.

  Dust and silence. Our road was the kind you saw in movies where the bus stops in the middle of nowhere to let a single passenger off. The nearest house was nearly a mile away; beyond, there were more houses, and fewer stands of Cottonwood. We lived on the cusp of a changing environment. When I was stationed in Texas in the army I saw the same thing. In Arlington, the trees are plentiful and healthy; by the time you pass Fort Worth the desert is already claiming the foliage. Free of Fort Worth, the desert takes over.

  I hitched my pack and headed into the desert.

  CHAPTER 10

  Death Piece

  A quarter mile along Route 20 I saw the first signs of desolation. A tractor-trailer had slammed a brown station wagon from the rear. The semi had tilted and lay like a felled dinosaur, its trailer groaning toward the road but the huge wheels not quite making it.

  The station wagon was empty; so was the trailer cab, but the back doors of the trailer were open wide to the sky.

  I hoisted myself up onto the bumper and looked down into the gray cavern of the trailer. The most powerful feeling I had ever had in my life washed over me.

  I smelled death.

  Nausea filled me; I closed my eyes and nearly fell from the bumper, gagging. But I held on, steadied myself and looked into the trailer again. It was empty. There was nothing in there, no puddles of blood, no bodies, to indicate the feeling of carnage I felt.

  But, now that I examined the interior more closely, I saw clues that told me that I was right in my feelings.

  There were spots around the plywood-lined perimeter of the cabin that had been clawed through. Distinct scratch marks were noticeable; at one point, the metal exterior of the trailer had been reached. And the faint odor of blood was persistent. On closer examination I saw the same sort of pale, dry bloodstains I had seen in my living room.

  It was as if an immense slaughter had been undertaken, and then someone had cleaned up antiseptically afterward.

  As I jumped down to the tarmac again, filling my lungs with fresh air to wash out the sour dried stench that had filled them, I spotted the remnants of a denim shirt behind the truck. I picked it up and smelled it. Again that faint but unmistakable odor. But no bloodstains. The shirt had been shredded, and as I arranged it on the ground I discovered that whole sections of it were gone.

  Something caught my eye from the shallow ditch that bordered the road.

  In the ditch was a pile of clothes similar to the shirt. They were worker’s garments, mostly, though there was a young woman’s pair of jeans and a tank top, along with a little girl’s pink dress. All shredded, with pieces missing.

  Ten yards up the shallow ditch, the sun glared whitely, and when I reached the source of the glare, my mystery was solved.

  I have already described the roughly conical pile of bones I found in my driveway. Here was a miniature pharaoh’s graveyard of them. I counted thirty, and a coldness went through me because I could no longer deny what they were. I found a stick and pushed at the nearest pyramid. It collapsed, bones falling aside to reveal a gleaming human skull beneath, mouth locked open in the final screaming grin we all wear beneath the flesh. There were enough bones, cleaned spotless of meat, to assemble an entire human skeleton.

  I could imagine what happened. The truck must have been filled with migrant workers, illegal aliens, possibly, and perhaps it had sideswiped the station wagon the night of the meteor shower. A young mother and her daughter in the station wagon; they get out, the driver gets out, maybe the workers are still in the trailer because they were told to stay in there no matter what. They know what will happen if they are caught.

  The meteors fall. The truck driver, probably, investigates, and one of the wolves comes at him. The woman and daughter begin to scream; by now, one of the illegals says the hell with this and opens the back of the truck. The woman and girl get in; maybe they get the door closed but it doesn’t make any difference because one way or another the wolves get in. Maybe it took hours.

  Then…

  I retched into the sand, dropping my stick into the ditch beside me. I had known all along what the heap of bones in my driveway had been—who they had been—but now, in this killing field, I was faced with it squarely.

  I knew now what had happened to my dear Emily; if I had tumbled the pile of bones in our driveway I would no doubt have found her skull. And I had seen the ferocity of my transformed son when blood scented his nostrils.

  I vomited the untasted remains of my breakfast, and, long after, I continued to vomit when th
ere was nothing left in my stomach.

  I moved away from that place. I covered a half-mile, and when I looked back, the truck, still a fallen dinosaur, was curling down the line of the curving road. I cursed its existence.

  I walked on, the sun at mid-morning height now.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Dying Man

  The first house I reached belonged to a man named Briggs. He was my closest neighbor, and though we were not friends he had never refused my company, nor I his, when we had met. His wife had died twenty years ago; he was a retired schoolteacher and he helped orient me when we had first moved in. It was he who had steered me to the right stores, told me who the “crooks” were (I remember he included my landlord in their number after he had wheedled the amount of rent I was paying out of me) and told me where the roads would wash out in spring when the rains came. Though he was a teacher he was not a bookish man, and our interests were incompatible enough that our acquaintance had never blossomed into friendship.

  I wondered what had become of him.

  I soon found out. His bones were near the porch, piled neatly in a front vegetable garden where he had grown radishes and cucumbers (this was one of the reasons I knew we could never be close: a man who plants radishes in the front of his house just doesn’t care much for the beauty in life). A brown felt hat he had nearly always worn was torn to bits nearby.

  A mere thirty yards from Briggs’s home—an oddity in this part of the country since dwellings tended to value their spread—was a house belonging to one of the most interesting, and strangest, men I had ever met.

  He was a hermit named Cave. That alone had intrigued me enough about him to want to know more.

  The story was that Cave had been a painter of some merit in the 1930s, and that something had happened to him involving a woman, and that he had shut himself up in 1938, vowing to have nothing to do with humanity again. He never left his home; he brandished a weapon at anyone (including myself, the one time I had tried) who came nearer than the front gate. It was said he painted incessantly, screamed in the night, and that most of his paintings were the same portrait of his lost love, done again and again. His food and supplies were delivered once a week by the same clerk from the same grocery store; the bags were left on the porch, the bill always paid by check, left on the porch under a rock.

  Briggs, in his gruff way, had been only too happy to clear up some of the romance for me. “It was just before I moved here, 1938,” he told me. “Cave was shacked up with some little piece, and his brother came to visit. The girl left with the brother. Period.”

  But for me, Cave was still a romantic figure, a man who had been spurned by the world and so spurned it back. I began to imagine him in there with his paints and his canvases, composing the same portrait of his “little piece” over and over, as madness claimed his mind.

  He was the perfect subject for poetry, of course. I had written about him, or rather my idealization of him, in a number of poems:

  ~ * ~

  Man an island,

  Soul lost in storm

  Surrounded by great weight of land.

  ~ * ~

  I had wanted badly to know Cave, to see his paintings, and here was his house, the gate unlatched, front door open.

  I went in.

  It was a house similar to Briggs’s, a farmhouse, with just enough room for everything essential and little room for more. I did not see Cave’s remains near the peeling porch of the house; I admit that I did not look very hard.

  But I did find Cave’s trespasser-chasing shotgun, leaning just inside the door with an open box of shells next to it, and, as I looked through the house, I found what I fully expected to find, but not what I had wished. Cave was a filthy old recluse; the house was not the self-centered castle of a rejected artist, but the home of a man who had lost touch with civilization. In the kitchen, the sink was brown with stains. Roaches retreated from my steps, and the entire house exuded the odor of garbage and uncleaned toilet. One room was filled with empty cereal boxes stacked in tall, rickety piles. There was barely space to enter. I found no paintings anywhere; no hints in books, or dust-covered supplies, that he had ever been an artist.

  There was no attic, but there was a storm cellar. Most of the houses in this area had well-built basements in deference to tornados. Take the toughest, strongest man in this part of the United States and mention the word tornado: fear will rise into his eyes. I once saw a town not twelve miles from my house taken off the map; two twisters, one of them by accounts a white tornado (this is no joke; a white tornado obtains its color from white dust) touched down a quarter mile from the outskirts, did their business, then lifted up a quarter mile outside what had been the town of Parker. Nothing was left standing but a single stone arch from the front entrance of what had been the elementary school. Automobiles had been wrapped like letter C’s around trees. One looked as though it had been put through a car compacter. Tin roofs had been peeled from housetops like banana skins and left in treetops. Telephone poles along the line of the town were bent at the same forty-five-degree angle to the ground. Tractors had been angrily bent and crushed; barns torn to shreds the way a child petulantly treats a paper toy that won’t do as it should. Parker had been dusted from the face of Earth.

  It was from the cellar in Cave’s house that I heard him speak.

  “Come down,” he growled as I stood in the dark doorway. I knew it was he; it was the same voice that had encouraged me, with more strength, and with the help of his shotgun, to “Get off my property.”

  The cellar door was loose on its hinges; a damp moldy smell pushed up from below.

  “Are you hurt?” I called.

  I was answered by a grating laugh. “You could say that,” he said.

  I took my flashlight from my backpack, snapped it on, and aimed it into the cellar.

  At the bottom of the stairs was one of his paintings.

  So at least some of the stories were true. My romantic images flared up again. I imagined him barricaded in his basement after the wolves came, producing what might be his last testament to the world. There would be a canvas down there, a Guernica filled with werewolves and the scuttling things from the dark corners of his own tortured life.

  “I’m coming down,” I said.

  I was greeted by damp silence.

  I advanced, drawing out my ax. My foot tested each rotting step for strength.

  There was a damp, close wall at the bottom of the steps. Against this the painting I had seen rested. The canvas looked old, a study of fruit on a table surrounding a green vase filled with tired daisies. It was not particularly distinguished. It looked like the kind of thing any art student might turn out.

  Dusty light filtered in from the cellar windows. At the back of the basement I heard a rattling cough. I advanced deliberately to see a separate room back there, something like my own cellar workshop.

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “Here,” he answered from the small room. He laughed weakly, breaking into a cough.

  I made my way to the doorway.

  Another painting rested against a stack of cardboard boxes. It, too, was a still life: apples and a torn loaf of bread arranged on a checkered tablecloth. Completely undistinguished. I began to despair of his talent.

  “Coming?” he called.

  “Yes,” I said, tentatively.

  And then I saw the painting.

  It was The Woman. It had to be. A thin, longish face. Serious mouth. The hair, cut in a pageboy style popular in the thirties, emphasized the long, coltish look of the face. The eyes, dark, deep, were knowing, smiling, if wryly, where the mouth was not.

  This portrait was just inside the room, propped slightly askew on an easel that had been broken and mended.

  The room was crammed with paintings. Another, more surreal version of the woman’s portrait hung on the back wall of the studio, illuminated by a wash of sour yellow sunlight from a dirty basement window. Other frames cut off its low
er portion, and canvases nearly blocked the doorway, but the eyes had been enlarged unnaturally and had lost their amusement.

  “Come in,” he said.

  I stepped through the doorway.

  My foot hit something. There on the floor was the body of the wolf he had fought. It was chewed half away. The lower torso was cleaned white bone, the upper fairly intact except for dry gouge marks around the face, and a curiously empty and large wound on the left temple.

  “Where are you, Cave?”

  “Here.”

  He sounded very close. I didn’t see him, but then a hand-like object moved near the back of the room. It looked as though it was covered with a thick black strip of blanket. It was not. What Cave motioned toward me with was his fur-covered front paw.

  Brandishing my ax, I moved warily around a stand of blank canvases.

  The rest of Cave edged into view.

  He was a wolf.

  He smiled. It was the smile of a demon held painfully at bay. At any moment, the bright yellow at the edges of his eyes might fill in, sending him from man to animal.

  “You’ve fought it,” I said with wonder.

  He laughed hollowly. “For a little while.” Each word sounded as though it was battled for. “Don’t worry,” he continued, “I can’t get at you.”

  I saw what he meant. He was bound tightly, expertly around the middle and around three of four limbs with wire cable. Only his head and right arm could move. All the roping led back to a thick water pipe behind him.

  “It took me the better part of a day to do this,” he said. His slow, bitter laughter came. “I had much encouragement”—he made a movement with his hand, indicating his head—“not to complete the job.”

  “It must be horrible,” I said.

  “It’s easy,” he said quickly. But I saw the lie in this as his eyes brightened and his breathing quickened; a low guttural sound began in his throat, which he slowly brought under control. After a time his eyes cleared and he regarded me again. “Staying alive is the hard part. Every moment I live I’m afraid of slipping and becoming that thing”—he indicated the dead wolf in the doorway—“again. For even a moment, that would be unbearable.”