That night on my porch was the first time he'd seen them, really seen them for what they were. It was a Sunday, and as was typical for a Sunday, they'd closed up shop early. It was Leanne's night off. Only Jim was there, along with a few of the young wait-staff, Arnie Jacobs the sous-chef, and the Latino fella who ran the big ugly Hobart dishwasher. I don't remember his name, having only spoken to him a couple of times in his broken English—it might be Javier. Something with a J that's pronounced like a Y; I suppose with only that to go by it could be anything, really. Anyway, Javier or whatever his name was had to leave early—wife had had an accident at the leather mill, so the story went, cutting up her hand pretty badly in one of those deadly machines—and so Jim was left with the last of the dishes and cleanup duty.
He didn't mind the job, said it was where he'd started in the food industry a long way back: bussing tables and running the dishwasher to pay his way through school. It was a Zen thing, he said, something he could do on autopilot, switching off his thoughts for a time. I guess I knew what he meant. In those days before the troubles had come, peace and tranquility hadn't been strangers to me, having been retired a handful of years already. I did a fair bit of work during tax season, to pay for the things Gin and I hadn't saved for, the trips out to see the kids, hospital bills, repairs on the house, etc. But mostly I just puttered about, not doing or thinking much of anything. Peace of mind is something you don't often notice until you've lost it, and it's a luxury no amount of spring tax work has afforded me since our little town of Knee High became a household name.
Jim stepped out into the darkened alley, lugging a stuffed garbage bag in each hand. The mouth of that alley was just wide enough for the garbage truck to pass through with a man hanging off the side, but it opened wider from there, allowing room for two, maybe three cars, two large trash bins and one for recycling. There were three doors. One led to La Costina; the other two were for the army-navy store (in the middle) and a video store. This last was empty (and still is), its windows barred and its doors chained—much like La Costina's and the army-navy's are today.
The single yellow light above the surplus store provided meager illumination for the entire lot. It was triggered by motion, and didn't work the way it was meant: it'd go off with a sudden gust of wind, yet wouldn't when you were standing right below it, waving your hands like a spastic air-traffic controller. This layout is fresh in my mind because I've been there recently, after the police no longer considered it a crime scene and the tape had been cleared away.
Call it morbid curiosity. I needed to see for myself where my friends had lost their innocence. That may sound foolish to you—the mawkish behavior of a washed-up old fart, perhaps. I wanted to see if it held the same dark power over me as they had seemed to hold over the psyche of my fellow Kneeites (a peculiar, vaguely Biblical demonym voted into being some ten years back, which few self-respecting Knee High residents, outside of town council, ever use when referring to themselves). After La Costina's back lot, I hobbled out to the place where the Schultz house once stood, leaning heavily on the brass-tipped cane Gin had bought for me when my knee (of all things) had gone bad a while back.
The oddest thing about these spots was how normal they felt. Nothing at all appeared to be sinister about them. Seven people had been murdered, and the earth itself seemed to know no difference. The ground was dry in places, wet in others; spongy with rotting leaves, hard with packed dirt and stones. In the parking lot, a patch of dandelions now grew where the pavement had cracked, the green paint had flaked from metal doors, the mortar between bricks crumbled here and there. The garbage bins were a little rusted but otherwise serviceable. These were typical post-recession American settings—something you'd see in just about any town from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
I'm not sure what I had expected to find, precisely. I suppose I thought I might feel an imprint of those murders—the aftershock, so to speak. Like those women on the boob tube who, upon entering even the most cookie-cutter of suburban homes, become tearful, grasping whatever medallion worn around her neck and declaring, "I sense a tremendous amount of suffering here." I felt none of this. Horrific things had happened; the world went on, despite them.
What I did feel was an end to that profound sense of loss with which I'd been burdened since the night of their confession. Leanne had picked up the telephone in the kitchen and dialed 911, and Jim had watched her with a strange hybrid of resignation and regret on his face, as she asked the police to come and arrest them. Sitting there, I felt as though the neighbors I knew and, yes, had grown to love, had been murdered before my very eyes. Trudging over the Schultz property, running my fingers over nearly every square inch of the alley behind La Costina, it felt as if I were standing at the graveside of Jim and Leanne Taymor.
I felt—for the moment—at peace.
Nearly a year before, I had stood in the alley, touching things indiscriminately, as if to be certain of their corporeality, and Jim had stepped through the back door with trash in hand, his shadow drawn long over the scale of dried slime on the concrete you often saw out the back of a busy restaurant: the shriveled bits of lettuce and potato shavings, the fish scales and egg shells, the soap suds. The first bag had landed true; the second one had thudded off the edge of the bin. The sound which accompanied it—a "low sort of mewling growl," was the way he described it—had arisen from somewhere in the darkness of the back lot. It was, he said, the sound of an animal either in pain or in heat, and made the hackles on his neck stand at attention for "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The garbage bag had split open, oozing filth onto the pavement. If he left it overnight, raccoons would get to it, or skunks, and spread it all over the damn place. They'd have an even bigger problem to deal with when the maggots and flies set in. Leanne was a fine woman, but she didn't tolerate half-assedness; the spic-and-span, "a place for everything and everything in its place" condition of their home was a testament to that. The animal—whatever it was—suddenly the furthest thing from his mind, Jim approached the shredded bag, preparing to scoop the raw food up with his hands, since there was no shovel handy, and slop it into the bin. Leave it for the guy with the truck to deal with; Lord knows they paid him enough.
As he got down on his haunches and scooped up a handful of filth, there came a scratching behind the bin. Startled, Jim peered around it.
There, clawing at the rusted corner of the bin, was a fat orange tabby. It yowled at him, its eyes shining in the half-light from the kitchen.
"Here, puss puss puss," Jim cooed, and made kissing sounds he would have been embarrassed about in public. He was certain this was the lost cat from the posters. It did not scurry away, merely yowled again, a plaintive sound, nothing at all pleasant about it. It reminded Jim of the time he'd accidentally closed the sliding door at his grandmother's house on the tail of her vicious Siamese. Not the sound it had made immediately, that had been a cry much like a wailing baby, but after the initial pain had subsided. It had lain beside Grandma, glaring resentfully at eight-year-old Jim, yowling every so often, just like the cat behind the bin did now.
Jim waddled toward her on his haunches, making his kissy sounds.
The tabby shied away, the little blue bell on its collar jingling against the tag, and suddenly he saw the reason for its wails. Someone had left the cat tethered to the bike rack on the far wall by a length of chain. They'd been feeding it by the look of her, but a few dishes of 9 Lives didn't excuse the mistreatment.
The cat squalled again. Jim looked at his watch face, slimed with the juicy innards of some vegetable. The minute hand was closing on midnight. His eyes scoured the lot, gazing into every dark nook and cranny, waiting for a shape to present itself, for someone to emerge from the shadows. He'd only seen the man who ran Knee High Surplus once or twice: a pleasant enough older fella, military haircut, dressed not in the camo he would have expected, but in a shiny red tracksuit with an emblem on the left breast.
He didn't look the
type to chain household pets to walls as a form of torture, but Jim knew the old notion that No man is an island was pure claptrap. Every man, woman and child on God's green earth is an island unto him or herself, with oceans of inscrutability between them. We tell ourselves we know someone, even those who are closest to us: our neighbors, or those who share our beds. But how much do we really know? I ask you that in all sincerity. How much do we know? In truth, Jim Taymor knew his neighbor at La Costina's no more than I, apparently, knew my own. He could have been a ritual animal abuser just as easily as a saint.
Fear clutched suddenly and coldly at Jim's midsection. He was thinking of Rosco P. Coltrane. The poor little mutt was on his own out there, defenseless against the animal savagery of the world outside his backyard. Had Rosco spent a night at the end of this same chain?
A sucking, clucking sort of sound startled him. He recognized it as human, even before he turned to see its maker—and what he did see made him reconsider.
The woman, naked as Eve before the serpent, was climbing down the brick side of the building. This in itself did not make his heart perform an awkward triple-somersault beneath his scuzzy apron. What troubled him was that she was climbing down face-first, hand over hand, foot over foot. Her flesh, under the motion-sensing light, was gray-black and cracked like the basin of a dried lakebed.
There was a wet double-slap of bare feet as the woman landed, just outside the slanted rectangle of fluorescent light from La Costina's kitchen. She perched there like a toad, knees perpendicular with her shoulders, hands planted on the ground before her, and in the vague light it seemed as if her eyes were glowing like those of an animal. But her shape was distinctly human. Of that, Jim was dead certain.
He was certain of another thing, too: he knew this person. He'd seen her jogging by the house just about every morning. She lived in our neighborhood. It was Cordelia Moone, who made a living wage fashioning clay pots and trinkets out of her home. He recognized her, even with her graying blonde hair hanging in dirty strands in her face, instead of tied up in its usual neat little ponytail. I'm not inclined to doubt him; Jim has always had a preternatural recognition of faces, which is perhaps one of the reasons La Costina had fared so well. Even out-of-towners he'd remember by name, if he saw them more than once. If he says it was Cordelia Moone he saw under all that muck, as opposed to some wild-eyed transient merely passing through town, I would be apt to take him at his word.
It made the mystery of what happened the following week a fair bit less mysterious, in retrospect.
Jim said he heard Cordelia Moone make a low mewling growl, a sound he'd never heard uttered so authentically from a human mouth. It sounded, in truth, like the cat chained to the bike rack. While Jim scuttled out of sight behind the Dumpster, Cordelia Moone stood on her haunches and yowled. The cat repeated the sound, and it turned in a tight circle toward her, its little blue bell jingling. And as the Moone woman crept into the kitchen's light, her eyes began to glow like a wolf's in a pair of headlamps.
Eyeshine in animals is caused by what they call the "bright tapestry," a layer of tissue directly behind the retina. (The red-eye effect you see in photos is blood illuminated by the flash, an entirely different phenomenon.) The closest a human eye can approximate that animal shine is something called "white shine," caused by cataracts or cataract surgery, cancer, etc.
I looked this up the morning Jim told me everything, while he and Leanne were getting processed at Knee High's Sheriff's station—trying to convince myself, I suppose, that there didn't have to be a supernatural explanation for the glow in the Moone woman's eyes. That the story they told Gin and me wasn't quite as batshit-crazy as it sounded. That they weren't as crazy as I believed them to be. But it was also to re-inter the corpse of childhood superstition their tale had dug up in me, whose shadow had crept up on me during their confession, drawing its claws around my throat. If what they'd said was even half true, my little bubble of a worldview was set to burst.
Only Cordelia's doctor would know for sure, I thought.
And the coroner. He would know too.
Jim told us Cordelia Moone had approached the tabby cautiously, crawling on all fours with her mud-caked tits swaying beneath her, flecks of earth shedding off her like dried skin or insects from a neglected animal. Even from where he was, crouched behind the Dumpster ten feet away, he could smell her: a rancid, musky sort of odor that seemed to radiate from her in hot, fetid waves. He had pinched his nose shut, feeling the prickle in his nostrils that signaled an oncoming sneeze, and watched.
The cat had mewled, like a kitten calling to its mother.
The woman had stroked its fur. Her lips peeled back in a gentle smile, dirt crackling in the wrinkles on her face.
Then she had gripped the cat by all four legs, and while it yelped and jerked in her hands, plunged her face into its soft, furry belly.
There was a crunchy squelch, Jim said, as her teeth tore into its flesh. Jim felt revulsion curdle the contents of his stomach. Her face came up with a Velcro rip, glistening innards and orange fur hanging from her lips, dripping fluids. The cat hung loose in her hands, its glassy marble eyes seeming to stare at Jim with the same accusing look Grandma Taymor's Siamese had given him.
Cordelia swallowed, wiped her mouth in the dirty crook of her elbow, and bowed her head for another bite.
I don't believe Jim would have lied about that, particularly after having admitted to seven murders—eight, if you included the accidental death of the dog. Cordelia Moone was the first, but not that night. Jim stood up slowly, letting the egg yolk and peeled carrot drip through his fingers onto the cement at his feet. I imagine the cold, chunky egg must have felt sickening in his hands right then, like vomit or innards.
Cordelia's nostrils flared suddenly. She lowered her meal, seemed to sniff the air for a moment, and then her shining eyes fell upon her observer. She mirrored his action, rising up on her—I almost wrote "hind legs" there, as if she weren't a woman at all. But of course she was a woman, or at least had been. If she wasn't, the actions Jim and Leanne took from that point on would have been justified. Maybe even lauded.
Her dinner discarded, the Moone woman's blood-streaked arms hung loose at her sides, her shoulders hunched "like an ape," as Jim described her posture to us at our kitchen table. She was swaying back and forth, into the light and out of it, and as she did the flicker in her eyes waxed and waned like... well, like the moon. And when she made that low growl again, he saw her blood-pinked teeth had been whetted down to fangs.
It seemed to Jim she was sizing him up, measuring whether the tasty treat she'd found was worth snapping his neck, or if the risk of killing him was worth the meal Jim himself would make. And while she mulled this over, Jim stood immobile, so terrified by this woman he'd seen puttering in the vegetable garden out front of her bungalow, where most folks had a lawn (or rusted car parts and the like), or sweeping her walkway, or up on a ladder cleaning out her gutters, her face now virtually unrecognizable beneath its coat of grime and her filthy hair. So terrified was he, he admitted freely enough, for a moment he was certain he had wet himself. But it was only the slop from the trash bag, oozing a cold wet trail down his leg.
His attention momentarily diverted by the stain on his pants, Cordelia Moone vaulted over the fence, disappearing into the night.
Why she returned the following night, I couldn't say. Perhaps it's like that song about the cat said, and she just couldn't stay away. All I know for certain is the next night, which was a Monday, Jim came prepared.
Cordelia Moone's sister, who lived in a neighboring town, reported her missing two days later. The hunt was on. MISSING posters were tacked up all over town (by whom I do not know; I never saw anyone putting them up, they had simply appeared one morning, as if the job had been done in the skulk of night) alongside those for Rosco, the Taymors's dog, the orange tabby (that Cordelia had half devoured), and the dozens of other pets who'd vanished from backyards that year. Rumors spread, as they
tend to in small towns, like a California wildfire.
And though her body had not been found, the local rag suggested that perhaps our resident cougar had acquired a taste for human meat.
I thought nothing much of the disappearance, aside from your typical neighborly concern. Well, not entirely. Because I knew Cordelia Moone was a Frugaltarian. Or at least, suspected I knew. Jim's words that night on my porch, while I choked down my bitter brew—They're not what they seem—had been planted in my brain, and they grew a poison plant in my heart like the rhubarb Jim had killed her with. And what could I do, even if I had been certain? Go to the police with a hunch? With Jim's reputation around town, they would have laughed me out of the station.
Of course, by then she was only "missing." When Cordelia failed to surface after several months, the case, like her corpse, grew cold.
4
JIM LAY AWAKE in bed that night he'd come to my porch smelling of trash, while Leanne's breath came slow and steady beside him, much as I would lay awake beside my Virginia when the absurd idea occurred that Jim Taymor might have had something to do with the Moone woman's disappearance. And it was a silly notion. If you had known Jim Taymor—the old Jim Taymor, not the shell of a man I'd since gone to visit each Friday at the State Penitentiary—if you knew him like I did, you would have laughed the thought away without a moment's hesitation. But it was because I knew him so well that the thought wouldn't shake so easily. Because that night on my porch, I had seen a different man—or rather, a glimpse of the man he had only just started to become. A man who'd been lurking under the surface, waiting to come out from hiding.
Gristle & Bone Page 23