by Aaron Polson
3: Tesoro’s Magic Bullet
Tesoro comes home with a bullet on a chain around his neck. Not just any bullet, but the bullet, the one that the doctors pried from his ribcage, the one that should have killed him, only it didn’t. It didn’t even look like a bullet anymore. Now, it is a lump of lead, a misshapen mass of grey metal in a small bag dangling above the Marine Corps tattoo on his chest.
“It’s a magic bullet,” he tells his little brother the first night. As he does, his breath reeks of stale blood like the stains on their father’s work clothes after a shift at the meatpacking plant. Saul turns away.
Despite the smell, the ashen hue in Tesoro’s cheek, they are brothers. Saul basks in Tesoro’s machismo and wants to be a Marine one day.
On the mornings after Tesoro’s late nights, Saul sleeps late and skips school. In Garden City, a place of pork and beef processors surrounded by Kansas plains, no one notices, no one wonders about another Latino kid missing school. The teachers lose count of their shifting student body, and Saul becomes less than a number. He sleeps late those mornings. He sleeps easier because the sun is up, warming his bed through the open window. Bad dreams hide during the daylight, so Saul sleeps a black sleep with no dreams.
It happened like this:
Tesoro was on foot patrol in Baghdad. A car exploded, bright flames pushing the sky. The other Marines tensed, took cover. Tesoro didn’t move, watching a woman stream from the flames with a tail of smoke. She screamed louder than the bellow of the burning wreck, and the sound solidified his flesh just long enough. Too long. When the bullet broke through his chest, tearing cloth and skin and bone, his ears lost everything: the screaming woman, his sergeant’s barking voice, the fire, and the crunch of his body on the rocky dust. His ears lost everything except the snap of that bullet, the sound coming after it cut into his body.
A moment later, return fire from the Marines sounded distant, like firecrackers under metal cans. The blue sky lay across his dying eyes like a shroud.
In the evenings, after all but Tesoro dine together at the table, their father listens to an AM radio station that broadcasts the news in Spanish. He sits in his chair, worn and tired; lines like wrinkled leather punctuate his face. His finger taps against his lips as he listens.
The radio announcer reads the police reports, and sometimes their father mutters, “Dios mio.” His head hangs as he listens to the report of another body, a dead Latino teen found in a ditch outside of town. The Spanish station alone reports the missing. The only pattern to the tragedy is that the victims have been the children of undocumented workers—killed by a bullet in their brainpans. But the bodies were mauled after death, mangled and partially eaten. He listens and tries not to think of the layer of dust on Tesoro’s truck. He tries not to think of his son’s late nights. He fights against the horrible visions of those victims—bodies that must share a raw, red color with the beef carcasses hanging in the plant cooler.
In the kitchen, their mother scrubs the sink, pushing hard with the wire brush to blot the sound of the announcer’s voice while Saul sits at the little table and ignores his homework. The kitchen stings of bleach before she is through. Tesoro’s truck rumbles in the yard—the ’62 Ford that he promises to paint one day and their father once joked was dead and resurrected. The joke died when Tesoro came back with the bullet around his neck. The truck still wears patches of rust like bullet wounds.
Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.
When his mother cries, Saul says, “It’s alright, Mama. He’s still our Tesoro.”
On some evenings, rare evenings, Tesoro joins the family and tells stories while his father drinks cold cerveza. He tells the story of the old woman in a black berka, the woman whose wrinkled fingers looked like wet tissue paper on a piñata. Unreal fingers. Fake fingers. Tesoro talks about the talisman, the blessed scroll of paper he bought and carried in his shirt pocket, a superstitious custom to bring him home alive.
Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark magic.
The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and laughed, too.
That afternoon, a car exploded in a small, Baghdad market.
That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.
Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”
Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him. He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul keeps it close.
But Tesoro is his brother. The dead are strangers.
A night comes when the rumble of Tesoro’s truck takes away the dream. Saul wakes, creeps down the hallway, and listens at his parents’ door. Nothing. Another sound, a door clicking shut in the unfinished basement. Tesoro’s room is down there. Saul checks the locks on the door and glances out the window. The rusty Ford is in the lawn next to the drive.
His mouth goes dry. Tesoro is his brother. His flesh and blood. When he pulls the gun from under his pillow it is heavy and cold. A shudder crosses his body.
Saul starts on the steps, and a little creaking noise calls out with each. Halfway down, he stops breathing and waits for a moment. A light glows from under Tesoro’s door. Like a moth, Saul is drawn to it, likely to burn up in the flame. His hand rests on the knob, the other clutches the pistol grip. The smell of stale blood is back, worse now. Amplified.
“Saul?” Tesoro asks through the door, his voice cold like a block of granite.
Inside, Saul finds what is left of Tesoro on his bed. His shirt is off, bunched in a pile on the floor. Both hands rest on his knees. When Tesoro looks up, his face is streaked with blood. His teeth are dark and discolored, his mouth blotted. Tesoro’s face wears neither a smile nor frown—a blank expression with black eyes.
“You brought a gun?”
Saul looks at the pistol, his hand shaking. “Papa’s.”
Tesoro’s lips curl slightly at the corners and one hand stretches toward his brother, palm open. “They will come for me, sooner or later. They will need more than guns.” The other hand touches the lump of lead dangling from his neck.
For a moment, neither speaks.
In that moment, Saul understands; in that moment, he kneels to the old magic in his brother’s eyes. What crawls Saul’s spine is damp and black and dead. His eyes close and fingers uncurl. The gun drops into Tesoro’s open hand.
He smiles, showing the full horror of his tainted mouth.
“I’m leaving.”
Saul steps forward and touches his brother’s shoulder. The flesh ticks like a horse’s flank chasing a fly. The skin is cold and almost grey. “We can take your truck.”
“Si,” Tesoro replies. “Mi hermano.”
Saul hesitates, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell. He looks at his fingers, imagines the skin peeling away from scrubbing. Blood makes a stubborn stain. “First the bleach. I will clean your clothes… the truck, and then we go.” He stoops, gathers Tesoro’s shirt, and leaves the room without another glance at his brother.
4: A Plague from the Mud
Oregon has always known plenty of rain, but that particular summer was unusually wet. Those relentless rains drenched Monument—a small scattering of houses swallowed by pine trees in the John Day River
Valley. It was a tiny town with a population hovering around 150. They were loggers, mostly, or other folks that enjoyed the solitude and security supplied by miles of quiet evergreens. So small and nestled neatly into the valley, Monument could just vanish, and most folks wouldn’t notice.
One damp morning I sat in a small booth at Pine Peaks Café, reading my newspaper, poking at the soggy remnants of a short stack of pancakes, and trying to ignore a black beetle scurrying across the restaurant’s “sparkling” floors. Over at the counter, Randy Crouse, a bearded bear of a man who ran a small logging outfit that usually did piecemeal work on contract, sat sipping a cup of coffee. He perched on his stool with slumped shoulders, wearing the look of a man who witnessed too many wet days.
“Aw hell, Darla. You might as well fill ‘er up again.” Randy pushed his cup and saucer across the counter. “I don’t see as we’ll be cutting again today. Too, wet, even for Oregon.”
Darla Smith, a dark haired wisp of a middle-aged waitress, poured him another cup of black swill. “Yeah. This is a bit much.” She aimed her voice at my booth. “What d’ya think Professor, we going to drown out here, wash away with all this rain? Some kind of biblical flood?”
I hated the nickname. Most everyone in town over the age of twenty-five called me Professor because I taught English at Grant County Consolidated High School. I was the only teacher on the payroll who lived in Monument. “I wouldn’t know really, but I figure these things go in cycles.” I straightened my glasses and turned back to the newspaper.
“What do you mean, ‘cycles’?” Randy asked through his beard, sitting up on his stool to show his barrel chest.
“The rain. Some years it’s more; some years less.”
“Damn genius,” Randy muttered. He looked down just then, spotted that little black beetle, and crushed it with his size thirteen boot. “Hey, Darla. Don’t call the health department just yet, but it looks like the rain is driving ‘em inside,” he said, holding up the soiled sole of his boot.
“Shut up, Randy,” Darla said.
“Speaking of health codes, why don’t you sell that bread anymore, the stuff you used to bake right here in that big old oven out back? Somebody find a bug in a loaf?” Randy asked with a wide grin.
I saw Randy again about a week later. He stood at the back of his of his dented Chevy, leaning over the tailgate and talking to a couple of his workers: Pete Archer and Manny Swick. Pete and Manny were Monument’s Laurel and Hardy. Manny was the plump one with a constant smile lurking under his thick mustache, and Pete had a pale face—long like it had been stretched in a taffy machine.
“Hey Professor, get a load of this.” Randy waved one big paw in my direction as I crossed Main Street in front of Peterson’s Drug.
The sky still hung in a damp gray shroud around the trees, but Monument was as dry as it had been in weeks. A quick thought shot through my head: Randy, Pete, and Manny should probably be out in the forest cutting on a day like that, especially during such a wet year.
“What is it?” I stepped closer to the men huddled around the bed of Randy’s truck. Lumpy, Randy’s old, nappy hound, sat panting near the cab. There was something else, too—shiny and black like a dress shoe. Little legs like bits of broken black bamboo jutted out at odd angles. At the front was a smallish head with a set of nasty pincer jaws—not huge like a Hercules Beetle, but wicked enough. Its body was about the size of a large rat.
“This some kind of gag?” I asked.
“Like hell. We found a few of them out at the cutting site. All dead like this one.” Randy leaned in and I could smell a hint of whiskey just under the coffee stench. “A couple of them looked like they were stuck in the mud—like they were climbin’ out.”
“What do you suppose it is?” Manny asked, a hint of fear floating just under his words. His usual ruddy face looked whitewashed and pale.
I bent over the tailgate, a little shocked by the possibility. “A beetle, I guess.”
“Damn big beetle.” Randy stroked his beard.
“You should really show this to Lane, you know Nancy Albricht’s kid. He’s back for the summer, and he’s studying entomology at Oregon State.” I looked at Randy. “This would be like winning the lotto for him.”
“Anto-mol-ogy,” Randy spoke slowly. “What’s that, beetle breeding?”
“Entomology. The study of insects. Bugs. Let’s give him a call.”
“It kind of looks like a common black beetle—family Carabidae. They’re an import from Europe. Not native to the Pacific Northwest, that is.” Lane Albricht, blonde and broad, stood in the center of the small group of men gathered around his father’s workbench, poking and prodding the specimen Randy brought from the forest. “Damn it’s big. Where’d you find this?”
“There were a few out near our site. Maybe a half dozen. A couple of them looked like they were crawling up out of the ground.” Randy made a face and pantomimed a large beetle exiting a pile of mud. I figured the beetle in the woods didn’t have a beard.
Lane tilted his head and studied Randy’s acting. “Interesting. Most Carabidae species usually live under old trees, bark, or stones near water. Were the others the same size?”
“Yep, close anyway.” Randy ceased his beetle impression. “Look, these things are a little spooky, and we haven’t even seen a live one.”
“Yeah man. I don’t wanna be out there with these things crawling all over me.” Manny shivered, jiggling his protruding belly. Pete nodded.
Lane carefully looked at each man in turn, “Large insects aren’t unheard of. They found this other beetle, Titanus giganteus, in Brazil that was about seventeen centimeters long. This guy is easily bigger. I’d like to know if you find anything else. Especially a live one.”
“Whatever kid. If we do, it sure as hell won’t be alive for long.” Randy thumped Manny and Pete in turn. “I guess we better get to work fellas. We’re wasting daylight.”
Peter and Manny exchanged a look. “Look, Randy, I can’t speak for Manny, but I’m not really sure I want to go back out today,” Pete said, glancing back at the black critter on the bench.
“Yeah Randy, maybe we should…” Manny began.
“You’re both a couple of pansies. Ain’t nothing out there I can’t squash with my boot.” He started across the street toward his truck and climbed into the cab. “You sissies can walk home. And kid, you can keep that one. Call it a souvenir.” With a slight chuckle, Randy started the truck and rolled down the street.
The four of us stood in silence for a moment.
I turned to Lane, glancing first at the black specimen on the table. “Are these things going to be a problem?”
“Naw. Probably just some freaks, aberrations. I mean Carabidae is a carnivorous species, but…”
“Carnivorous beetles?” Pete’s taffy face stretched with surprise.
“Sure—they eat other insects and can run really fast to catch their prey. But they wouldn’t harm animals.” Lane ran his hand through his wavy blonde hair. “I’m gonna call my advisor. I know he’ll want to see this.”
Manny smoothed his mustache with one finger. “Look guys, I think we’re going to hoof it back downtown.” He turned and started walking with Pete.
“Take it easy,” I called after them and turned to Lane. “They seemed a little spooked. Do you think we should try to get in touch with the park service or something?”
“No. Not yet. This could be an important find. We don’t want the state coming in and mucking things up with paperwork. If these beetles really were crawling from the ground…I dunno, they could be a new species, something not studied.” He must have seen the confusion on my face. “You know about cicadas right?”
“Cicadas. Yeah, they make that buzzing sound. Only around during certain years.”
“Right. They spend most of their lives underground, only coming out to mate and die. A lot of insects go through early stages in the life cycle underground—natural protection from predators.” Lane looked at the
beetle carcass, touching the tip of one foreleg. “I think this guy ‘grew up’ underground. Look at the forelegs.”
I examined the two segmented limbs closely, noting they were somewhat thicker, maybe sturdier, than the other legs. “How do they know when to climb out of the ground?”
Lane bent down and really scrutinized the beetle’s abdomen. “Probably just a chemical trigger…something inside that says ‘it’s time’.”
“Probably?”
“Yeah. Sometimes these things happen because of environmental factors.”
“The rain?”
“Not exactly. More like ground temperature reaching a certain point—raising a degree or two. Something like that. Something that would signal ‘everything’s ok, come on out’ to the little bundle of nerves in his ganglion—his insect brain.” Lane thrust a thumb toward the beetle’s head. “I guess enough rain, if it’s warm enough—could help boost the ground temperature. I don’t really know.”
We always had our fair share of community wildlife in Monument. Deer or elk would wander through town, especially in fall—during mating season, the “rut” as we called it. That summer, more large mammals wandered out of the surrounding woods, many more than I had experienced since living there.
The sheriff, a thick, balding fellow named Mort Kress, and one of his deputies, Benny Wilson, brought this large buck into town one day. It was dead—mauled. Something had torn the poor thing open, gutted it. I was sitting outside the café when they pulled up in the sheriff’s truck, and I could see the antlers sticking out of the bed. Curiosity drew me across the street. “What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing but road-kill, I guess. Benny and me figured we better load it up, get it out of there. Found it out on Deer Creek Road. Surprised nobody reported this one.” He slammed the door of his truck shut.
“What do you mean?” I glanced into the bed, saw the horrible strips where flesh was torn from the sides of the deer.