Blanco County 03 - Flat Crazy

by Rehder, Ben

  “That’s what chupacabra means in Spanish,” Trey said. “Goatsucker.”

  Gus Waldrip had his good days and his bad days. Today, so far, was a good day. He hadn’t had a single episode yet. Not that the episodes were scary or dangerous or even particularly upsetting. They were just weird. Of course, that didn’t concern Gus too much, either. True, when you were weird, sometimes people would stare or point. Other times, they’d whisper behind your back. Gus would just smile and go on. He smiled a lot. Most of those people were strangers anyway. So why should he care? But Gus’s brother, Duke, on the other hand—he was the person who had the biggest problem with Gus’s condition. He was always teasing Gus about it. So was Kyle, Duke’s snotty friend. They’d laugh at him. Or sometimes Duke would get pissed off about something and yell at Gus, telling him to straighten up and get control of himself. Like Gus had any say in the matter. And despite his deep, burning anger, Gus would grin. Sometimes, he’d even giggle, right when Duke was hollering at him. That really made Duke mad. But Gus could never understand why. What was the big deal? So he was a little different than he used to be. Life was good. Why get all upset about it?

  Gus enjoyed getting away from Duke on occasion—not just because of the way Duke treated him, but because Duke was so damn high-strung. It was nice to get a break from that every now and then. Like today. While Duke was back at the office, Gus was driving the caliche roads of the Macho Bueno Ranch, Kyle Dawson’s place. Snotty Kyle. Riding beside Gus in his Ford Expedition was Norman Raines. The old man had hair as white as snow. At first, Gus assumed he was about 160 years old. Raines had a Winchester .270 cradled between his knobby legs, the barrel pointing down at the vehicle’s floorboard.

  “How’s your eyesight today, Mr. Raines?” Gus asked, grinning. He popped an Altoid into his mouth.

  “How’s that?” Raines replied, shifting his body in Gus’s direction. Gus noticed that Mr. Raines always moved his entire torso, rather than just his head, as if he had a permanently stiff neck.

  “Your eyesight,” Gus said more loudly. “Think you’ll be able to shoot okay today?”

  “Hot damn, we’ll shoot the shit out of ’em!” Raines replied, cackling; then he snapped the laugh off short as his dentures began to pop out of his mouth.

  In reality, Norman Raines was eighty-three years old, a World War II veteran, and former president of the Texas Board of Independent Insurance Agents. He’d retired ten years ago, at the age of seventy-three, just weeks after his wife had died. Gus knew all this because Mr. Raines had told him, several times, in detail. Gus didn’t mind listening, although it made him feel kind of sorry for the old man.

  On the day they had first met, Mr. Raines had given Gus a brief history of his adult life.

  “The first time I went to Africa,” Raines had told Gus, “I was twenty-two years old. Shot a goddamn charging rhino—can you believe that? Nothing between me and him but a four-twenty-five Westley Richards Magnum. I’d never experienced anything like it, even in the war. So I went back every chance I could. Hunted lions, tigers, you name it. I wanted to bag every wild beast those negras had down there.”

  But, according to Mr. Raines, real life got in the way. He got married, had three children, and was always busy building his insurance agency. His dreams of African predators got sidetracked. Decades zipped by. And then his wife died.

  “When Ginny passed over, I kinda moped around for a year or two, thinking my time would come soon, too. I sat around and waited for it, son—can you believe that? Is that gruesome or what? Well, as you can probably gather, I didn’t die. Wasn’t my time, I guess. My kids kept nagging me to get out more, so I did. Twice a week, I’d go down to the rec center—this crummy old place for geezers like me—and play a little shuffleboard or dominoes. Just marking time, really. I finally thought, What the hell am I doing wasting my time like this? I still got my health. Why not do some of the things I always wanted to do? That’s what Ginny would have wanted.”

  So Norman Raines had made a choice. He decided to live out his final years “in a blaze of glory,” chasing African predators and all the other crazy dreams of his youth. Nine years ago, when his health was still strong, he traveled to Maine and hiked the Appalachian Trail from Monson to Mount Katahdin. After that, Raines learned to fly a plane, caught a five-hundred-pound blue marlin, wrote a novel, crossed the country in an RV, surfed the Gold Coast in Australia, attended the Republican National Convention in New York City, and took up pottery.

  Now he was slowly completing the last item on his list. Three things really. The three animals Raines needed to complete his menagerie of dead African animals.

  But the old man was facing a new hurdle. “Got me some health problems now,” he’d told Gus. “Time’s limited. I gotta hunt while I still can.”

  Gus didn’t really understand hunting anymore, not like he used to. Now he didn’t know why a man would pay thousands of dollars to shoot some beautiful, elegant creature and watch it drop to the ground. On the other hand, Gus really didn’t have anything against it. Especially since Duke always came up with such clever ways for them to make money off hunters like Mr. Raines. Gus sometimes wondered about some of Duke’s methods. But Duke always said, “Hunters like to outsmart their prey, bro. We’re just doing the same thing.”

  Gus rolled the truck slowly along the caliche road, approaching a pasture he had visited a few hours ago, when he was preparing for the hunt.

  “I saw the cheetah right around here yesterday,” Gus said, pointing toward a grove of oak trees. “Duke figures it won’t jump the fence as long as there’s plenty of food for it to eat. So he shot a big hog yesterday and left it laying.”

  Mr. Raines slid the bolt on his rifle and chambered a round, which made Gus nervous. He liked the old man, but Mr. Raines had a palsy and there was no telling where that bullet might go if he got excited. “Well, let’s get after it,” Raines said.

  “I figured we’d just drive around and see if we can spot—”

  “A real man doesn’t hunt from a truck,” Raines declared.

  That’s what Mr. Raines had said last weekend, when he shot the jackal. Mr. Raines insisted on “stalking” it, though the old man could barely open his own truck door. Also, what Mr. Raines didn’t know was that Duke had given the jackal some kind of drug, and it was snoozing quietly beneath some oak trees. Gus had had to throw some rocks at it when Raines wasn’t looking to get it up and moving.

  “That’s fine with me,” Gus said.

  And then he felt it—the first twinge of the day. There was always a warning sign, an electric tickle down the back of his neck. He applied the brakes and brought the truck to a stop.

  “Young fella, you okay?” Raines asked.

  “Rutabagas,” Gus said flatly. “Persimmons.”

  And then, just like that, the episode was over. It was even shorter than most.

  Gus turned to Mr. Raines, who was eyeing him, puzzled. The old man said, “Rutabagas?”

  “Uh, just thinking about lunch,” Gus said. “You ready to go?”

  “Let’s do it!” Raines said enthusiastically, as if he were about to bound from the Expedition and begin a cross-country trek.

  Gus stepped from the truck, opened the rear hatch, and removed Raines’s walker from the storage compartment in the back.

  4

  DUKE WRAPPED THE body in a plastic drop cloth and dumped it in the back of Searcy’s truck. Now the trick was getting rid of it. In the old days, Duke would have asked Gus to help, but not nowadays. He was just too damn strange—ever since the accident. Duke didn’t even like to think about the accident.

  Before, Gus used to be just another good old boy like Duke. He’d hunt and fish and drink beer and chase women, just like a man ought to. He’d poach deer without a qualm in the world.

  But now he was a different man. Kind of goofy, like he’d been sniffing glue. He did all kinds of weird stuff, like laughing hysterically for no reason at all, or watching the History Chann
el. Plus, there was that bizarre thing with the words.

  It happened two years ago, when Gus was still an electrician. Gus had been rewiring a dryer, and a customer, trying to be helpful, flipped a breaker too early. Gus got lit up with 220 volts of juice, and it was his brain that got the rewiring job.

  In the few weeks that followed, Duke blamed Gus’s mental haze on the fact that his brother had been damn near electrocuted. Surely the fog would lift and Gus would return to normal. But the days ticked by and the old Gus didn’t show. He started popping mints all the time, complaining that the electricity had left a coppery taste in his mouth. But that wasn’t the strange part.

  A few days after the accident, Duke and Gus were sitting in a deer blind when Gus said, “Amebic dysentery.”

  At that point, neither of them had spoken for an hour.

  Duke turned to his brother. “What?”

  “Amebic dysentery,” Gus said again. He was staring straight ahead, eyes focused on some faraway horizon.

  “What about it?”

  Gus turned to Duke then, blinking rapidly. “What about what?”

  “Amebic dysentery.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You just said it. You were just sitting there, and then you said, ‘Amebic dysentery.’”

  Gus smiled, but he looked embarrassed. “Did not.”

  “You sure as hell did. Just out of the blue. ‘Amebic dysentery.’”

  “Funny.”

  It didn’t take Duke long to discover, in the days ahead, that Gus was prone to interject all sorts of random words and phrases into a conversation.

  “Marsupial,” Gus would say when they were watching motocross.

  “Esophagus,” he’d blurt out over dinner.

  “Tort reform,” he’d state on the telephone.

  Over time, Duke more or less got used to it. In fact, it would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so damn creepy. Kind of an Exorcist thing. And the thing that worried him: What if they got pulled over by the game warden someday and Gus said, “Poached a deer.” Or “Spotlighting tonight.” That could really screw things up.

  Now Duke had a whole new reason to worry about Gus. His brother was the only one who knew Duke and Oliver Searcy had hunted together—and he wanted to keep it that way. Eventually, the cops would find records of the calls from Searcy to Duke, but that wasn’t much for them to go on. Searcy himself had said he was calling several guides in the area. So Duke knew that in order to keep the cops from focusing on him, he’d have to say they never hunted together. The bitch of it was, he’d need Gus to play along.

  As Marlin maneuvered the curves of Flat Creek Road, heading back toward Johnson City, he tried to remember everything he could about the mythical chupacabra. Sightings had been reported everywhere from Puerto Rico and Nicaragua to Chile and Mexico. A few years ago, there had even been a sighting reported just five hours south, in the border town of Brownsville.

  The chupacabra was known as a stalker of livestock, leaving scores of dead goats, sheep, and calves in its wake. Allegedly, the animals’ throats were punctured, the chupacabra feasting on every last drop of blood.

  Descriptions of the beast varied, anywhere from a large scaly reptile with bulbous red eyes and fangs to a flying monkeylike creature with razor-sharp claws.

  Despite hundreds of alleged sightings, the chupacabra had never been captured. In fact, it had never even been photographed or filmed. Not once.

  In other words, it was total bullshit.

  Marlin was surprised that Trey Sweeney appeared to believe it might actually exist. But then, the biologist, while brilliant, tended to exhibit a complete lack of good sense on occasion.

  Why else would he hole up with a hibernating black bear?

  Why else would he dress up in a deer costume and approach a massive lovesick buck?

  Why else would he attempt to hand-feed a Komodo dragon?

  Trey had done all these things and more, reminding Marlin that while he could trust Trey’s scientific expertise implicitly, the biologist’s judgment was another story.

  Back at the scene, Sweeney had made a cast of one of the animal tracks, and he’d insisted on taking the goat carcass with him. Marlin smiled as he envisioned Sweeney asking Lem Tucker, the medical examiner, to conduct an autopsy. Subject is an adult, uh, goat with multiple visible puncture wounds to the carotid artery.

  Marlin was inclined to forget the whole thing, but he decided he’d better have a talk with Bobby Garza. After all, Marlin still hadn’t heard the facts directly from the sheriff. Maybe there was more to the witness’s account than Marlin knew so far. There had to be some reason why Garza would ask Marlin and Trey to check out a dead goat, which was an everyday occurrence in Blanco County. But then, of course, there was Garza’s Hispanic heritage to take into account—and Marlin felt a twinge of that damned political incorrectness even considering it. The truth was, the chupacabra was a bit of folklore that thrived almost exclusively among Hispanic populations. Yeah, Bobby Garza was a first-generation central Texan. But his parents were natives of Mexico, and they might have regaled Bobby with tales of the chupacabra as he was growing up. Something like that could be hard to shake. Much like the otherwise-sane people who believed in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.

  Marlin turned east on Highway 290, drove into Johnson City, and pulled into the parking lot at the Blanco County Sheriff’s Department. Marlin had a small office there, though he didn’t spend much time at it. It was more or less a place to grab coffee, store some equipment, and return calls (since he still hadn’t given in and bought a cell phone).

  Marlin walked into the building, said hello to a few of the deputies, and made his way to Garza’s office in the back. He stuck his head through the doorway and saw Garza concentrating on some paperwork. “What’s this wild goose chase you sent me on?” Marlin said.

  Garza glanced up, saw who it was, and smiled. “So did you catch it? The notorious chupacabra?” Garza motioned at a chair and Marlin took a seat.

  “Yeah, I got him in a cage in the back of my truck. I’m charging a nickel for people to see it.”

  Garza laughed. “Don’t you wish. You’d be a rich man if you did. You know how many people believe in that thing?”

  “Just please tell me you don’t.” He and Bobby Garza were old friends, and Marlin knew he didn’t need to mince words with the sheriff. “I had enough trouble keeping Trey’s imagination from running wild on this one.”

  Garza rolled his eyes. “Give me a little credit, will you? No, I just wanted to get it checked out because, in case you haven’t noticed”—the sheriff lowered his voice and glanced furtively out his office door—“we got a lotta Meskins around this county.”

  Marlin smiled, though he felt a twinge of guilt for thinking as he had earlier. “You don’t say.”

  “No joke, though,” Garza said. “All kinds of people, not just Hispanics, believe in this stuff. We’ve gotten about two dozen calls already, mostly from people who know Jorge.”

  “The guy who got hit?”

  “Right. Word’s spreading fast. I was thinking at first they were concerned about him—and they are. But that isn’t why they’re all calling. It’s this chupacabra business. I was talking to one of his cousins, down in Nuevo Laredo, and when he told his grandmother what happened, she crossed herself and then fainted on the spot.”

  Marlin couldn’t completely smother a smile.

  “Yeah,” Garza said, “I know it sounds kinda silly, but not if you were brought up to believe in it. Anyway, I just wanted to get the jump on this thing before it got out of hand. That way, we can say no, it was just a dog or coyote, or rogue elephant, or whatever you wise old woodsmen determined that it was. So what’s the story?”

  Marlin shrugged. “Looked like just another dead goat to me, probably killed by dogs or coyotes. None of the meat was eaten, and that usually means dogs got it. But this guy Jorge might have spooked a coyote just as it was sitting down to breakfast. We found some tracks tha
t looked like a dog to me, but Trey wasn’t so sure.”

  “What’d he think it was?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. All he’d say is that he thought it was”—Marlin made quotation marks with his hands—“‘something different.’”

  “How so? Based on what?”

  “Just on the tracks. And I guess on the eyewitness. I think Trey figured any idiot would recognize a dog or a coyote right off the bat. Speaking of which, what exactly did Jorge say?”

  Garza took a breath and leaned back in his chair. “Man, I don’t know. He was pretty rattled. Said he saw a creature with big fangs and a real long neck. And a huge head, too, like a lion. Oh, I almost forgot: It had the face of the devil. That’s what he said. That should narrow it down some.”

  Marlin was glad Garza was showing a sense of humor about this thing. “So any animal wandering around looking like Satan, we can be pretty sure that’s him?”

  Garza winked. “Do me a favor. Let me handle the press, okay?”

  “You really think there’ll be any interest?”

  Garza gave a slight nod toward his office door. Out in the main room, Susannah Branson, a reporter with the Blanco County Record, was making her way toward Garza’s office.

  When Red and Billy Don got back to Red’s trailer that evening, all four of their traps had squirrels in them. That was the only good news of the day. The rest of the day had been a total loss. Red was still plenty pissed at the wetback—and at Billy Don, for that matter, for choosing that crazy Meskin.

  Mr. Pierce, the barbecue king, had canceled the job after he found out what had happened. Said his wife was just too distraught by the whole thing to worry about the rock work right now. He gave Red two hundred bucks in cash and thanked him for his time.

  Red’s first inclination was to take the money and head straight to the electric cooperative and pay off his growing bill. But he and Billy Don kind of got sidetracked and ended up at the Friendly Bar, playing dominoes and consuming large quantities of beer and pork rinds.

  Red grabbed a water hose and began to fill the kiddie pool he’d stolen from the Save Mart that summer. (He couldn’t believe they’d just leave the pools out on the sidewalk like that. It was almost like they were daring him to throw one in the bed of his truck and drive off.) As soon as the water was high enough, he’d submerge the traps, drown the squirrels, and clean them for dinner. Red felt like a humanitarian for drowning the squirrels rather than shooting them, since it was painless. Plus, it saved ammo.