by Ronald Malfi
It’s not a person, it can’t be, that is a fucking whitetail deer, a goddamn stray dog, that is not a person, it isn’t, it’s too fucking small to even…
It was small because it was a child. There would be no convincing herself otherwise.
The figure dragged itself across the pavement toward the cusp of the trees, retreating from out of the taillights’ glow. Maggie saw one tiny white foot—five distinct toes splayed—scrabble for purchase on the roadway. The child was injured, probably severely, and she wanted to go to it and attend to it and make sure there wasn’t something she could do to help it, but fear rooted her firmly in place. She was powerless to move.
The bleating of a car horn followed by the blinding dazzle of high beams caused Maggie to scream. She spun around to see a pair of headlights engulfed in a cloud of exhaust barreling toward her. She heard the approaching vehicle’s brakes squeal. The headlights jounced as the vehicle jerked to a sudden stop.
“Help me!” she screamed, frightened by the fear and panic she heard in her voice. She raced toward the driver’s side of the vehicle just as the door popped open. “Please! I need help!”
“Calm down, calm down.” Even in her hysterical state, she could see that the driver was Cal Cordrick. He had a John Deere cap tugged down low on his scalp with a large brass fishhook clipped to the brim and a few days’ growth at his chin. He reached out and placed one hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “That you, Maggie? Maggie Quedentock?”
“Jesus, Cal! Thank God you’re here! I hit—”
“You all right?”
“I hit someone! He’s in the road!”
Cal peered over her shoulder, presumably to examine the queer positioning of the Pontiac in the center of the road. Then he looked back at her, his eyes small and pink and wet, like the leaky yet soulful eyes of hound. Nervously, he rubbed one thumb up and down his prickly chin. “Stay here,” he said, shoving past her.
She turned and watched him walk slowly past the Pontiac. He paused only for a moment to peer into the open door then kept going. To the darkness, Maggie heard him call out, “Is anyone out there? Hello? Anyone need help?” When no answer came, he kicked into a slight jog, his footfalls hollow-sounding on the pavement, until he disappeared into the blackness. Only the sound of his boot heels assured Maggie of his existence.
Cal Cordrick’s footfalls stopped.
Maggie felt something leap in her chest. Silently to herself she counted to ten…or at least planned to; by the time she reached six, she could no longer control her fear. Too easily she could imagine the darkness as an actual living creature, a creature that had just devoured poor Cal Cordrick whole, just as it had seemingly devoured the child she’d hit.
“Cal!” she shrieked, the timbre of her voice shattering the silence. “Cal! Cal Cordrick!”
Nothing…nothing…
“Cal!”
Cal’s shape reemerged from the darkness, though for one horrific second she thought the figure was that of the person she’d struck with her car. Maybe it wasn’t the darkness that was alive after all. Maybe it was the thing she’d hit that had devoured Cal and was now coming back for her.
Thing, she thought.
But it was Cal, only Cal. His John Deere cap was off and he was running one hand through the stubble at his scalp. She didn’t like the look on his face.
“Ain’t no one out there,” he told her evenly.
“Cal, I saw—”
“Ain’t no one out there, Maggie.” He stopped beside the front grille of the Pontiac and looked at it. There was a dent in the hood and the plastic grille was cracked in two places. “You been drinking some, hon?”
“No,” she blurted.
“Maybe a little?”
“Well, I mean, yes. I was. Earlier.” She felt confused and foolish. Was she dreaming all this? “I’m not drunk, Cal.”
“Could be you just imagined you’d hit someone…”
“No.”
“Or maybe it was a deer. Maybe it just kept running off into the woods. They can do that, you know. My brother once hit a twelve-point buck up on 40 with his Durango and the thing hardly batted an eye at—”
“No. It wasn’t a deer, Cal.” She felt a strange relief about having to convince him of what, only moments ago, she hadn’t been so sure of herself. Even more peculiar was the laugh she felt threatening to burst from her throat. Was she out here losing her goddamn mind?
“Well, Maggie, there ain’t nobody out there.”
“Did you look in the woods?”
“I did. It’s dark and I don’t got a flashlight but I didn’t see nothing. Didn’t hear nothing, either.”
“The person…was still alive,” she said. Closing her eyes, she could see the split-second glimpse of the face, white as the moon with small, dark eyes. “He crawled over there into the trees.” She pointed.
With his hands on his hips and the John Deere cap now stuffed in the rear pocket of his dungarees, Cal turned back around and surveyed the dark and vacant roadway. “Out here?”
She clutched at one of his forearms with both hands. “What do you mean?”
“Who’d be walking all the way out here at this hour?”
She didn’t care if it didn’t make sense or if Cal fucking Cordrick thought she was out of her mind. She closed her eyes and could clearly see the accident over and over, vivid as a film projected onto a screen.
In a small voice, she added, “I think it was a child.”
Cal sighed and turned back around. He was maybe just a few years older than Maggie, but in the false light of crisscrossing vehicular headlamps he looked ghastly and no younger than a mummy exhumed from an ancient tomb. Again, he raked one thumb along his bristling chin. Car exhaust veiled him like mist.
“Christ,” Maggie moaned. Her knees gave out and she felt herself go down, the world becoming a pixilated grid of smeary light, like looking at the world below from the window of an airliner. “Jesus Christ, Cal.”
Cal Cordrick grabbed her and held her upright. He smelled of camphor and Old Spice. Faintly of bourbon, too, she thought. That kid in the road…
“Hang on there, Maggie. I’m sure Evan can—”
“He’s on the night shift tonight,” she whimpered into Cal’s flannel shirt. She was gripping him as if letting go would cast her off the face of the planet.
“Okay,” Cal said. There was an exhausted gruffness in his voice. His breath settled sourly against her face but she hardly noticed. “Do you think you can drive? I can follow you back to your—”
Trembling, Maggie Quedentock released her two-handed grip on Cal’s shirt. Her body numb and her bones as reliable and sturdy as rubber bands, she sank slowly to the pavement. A high-pitched whine began trilling from her throat.
“I think maybe we need to call the police,” Cal said.
2
It was midnight. Sergeant Benjamin Journell of the Stillwater Police Department stood in Porter Conroy’s field beneath a moon that looked like a skull cracked in half. What had been mild weather earlier that afternoon had turned frigidly cold in the wake of the day’s thunderstorm, and he wished he’d brought his parka from his cruiser.
Ben was thirty-five, unmarried, and he possessed a smooth, clean face and youthful eyes that made him look more like an Ivy League fraternity boy than a police officer. Ben had joined the department the day after his twenty-third birthday, when it became clear to him that, having spent his entire life living in the rural western Maryland town of Stillwater, his career choices were cripplingly limited: he could either join the police department or toil away at one of the various factories around town. And while he certainly possessed an affinity for the job, it sometimes seemed like he had just opened his eyes one morning and found himself in uniform. The department had been larger back then and he had found the anonymity of the khaki uniform with the numbered badge at the breast comforting and, sometimes, even freeing. He’d grown up in Stillwater, knew pretty much everyone straight out to the Cumberlan
d Gap (which made the job easier), and he had always considered himself to be one of those rare individuals who found contentment in mediocrity.
He’d gone to college just outside of Baltimore, in Towson, where he’d been an average student. Debt piled up, but it had been Ben’s father who had paid the bills, and the old man never said boo about it. Ben had majored in criminal justice and minored in English literature, a combination that granted him a wealth of diverse friends, and he had been groomed for lofty aspirations upon graduation—aspirations he most likely would have followed had his mother not passed away immediately thereafter.
So he had returned home to Stillwater and to the Journell family farm. Ah, Stillwater! The town existed only because a foolish man named Jeremiah Barnsworth had stumbled upon its crooked valley bookended by two grand mountains back in 1829, arriving just in time to witness a vista of black, stagnant water after one of the great floods had drowned the land. Why Barnsworth had thought this land would be the perfect location to establish some semblance of civilization, one can only wonder. Who proudly plants a flag at the center of decimation? Yet, still waters run deep, as they say, and Barnsworth—who had been a drunkard, a gambler, and a career adulterer, according to some of the descendants of families who had actually known the man—had created a town.
Nearly two centuries after Barnsworth’s usurping of the land, twenty-one-year-old Ben Journell had returned from college to bury his dead mother and attend to his heartbroken father. Four years spent at Towson, and returning to Stillwater had been like returning to youthful memories—the type of memories that are so distant that they might have never happened to begin with. Yet he’d returned, and the hot summer dust rolled up off the roads as he drove back into town, the dust settling at the back of his throat and the smells of the land—the farms with their pig shit and chicken coops and tractor fumes, mingled with the brackish stink of the Narrows—practically clawing at his lungs. Remember me, remember me! Stillwater cried, as if to forget where he came from was to lose some important part of himself. Remember me, remember me! Indeed, how could he forget?
Like a good son, he remained until he felt that his father had moved beyond the grief of losing his wife, Ben’s mother. Ben moved beyond that, too, feeling that the grief had been replaced by some unspoken allegiance between the two remaining members of the Journell family, father and son. They had their roots already firmly planted in Stillwater; where else did he need to go? Back then, there were jobs to be had in Stillwater. With a college degree in hand, Ben already had a leg up on ninety percent of the workforce in town. Hell, he could do whatever he wanted. So what did he want to do? As it turned out, what he wanted to do was put his criminal justice degree to work and join the police department.
He had only been on the force for five years when his father, William Journell, a retired sustenance farmer who still lived in Ben’s childhood home off Sideling Road in Stillwater, began seeing and speaking with Ben’s dead mother. Bill would speak of seeing his dead wife out in the field behind the house, which had once been lush with crops but had slowly become overgrown as the soil hardened and the town dried up all around it. It was usually around dusk, just as the sun melted behind the mountains and Bill was out on the back porch smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of tea. Often, he would wander out into the field where they would engage in long conversations. Other times, she would continue walking clear across the property until she vanished into the curtain of trees at the far end of the farm. On these occasions, Bill Journell would call to his dead wife and attempt to follow her, but he moved too slowly and she seemed determined to remain elusive.
That was how the dementia started for Ben’s father—in momentary bursts of unreality that were quickly forgotten the moment they were over. Ben had witnessed his father standing in the middle of the field one afternoon, talking to someone who was not there. When he went over to his father and took him gently by the forearm, Bill Journell smiled wearily at his son and told him to say hello to his mother. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” the old man had asked, simultaneously frightening Ben and breaking his heart. He took the old man to Cumberland to see a cadre of doctors who all diagnosed him with dementia.
That was when Ben moved back into his childhood home to take care of his father. He would remain there for the next year, through the worsening dementia and the onset of Alzheimer’s, until Bill Journell inevitably passed the previous year. Ben had never moved out of his childhood home and, in the days following his father’s funeral, he thought he could still hear the old man treading the tired old floorboards of the farmhouse. Some evenings, he was afraid to look out the windows and into the rear fields for fear that he would see both his parents out there, reunited in death but just as lively as they had been in life. He began to wonder, not without some sense of irony, if the Alzheimer’s had needed someplace to go now that his father was dead, and since Ben was the only creature still living in the farmhouse, it had invaded him. Was that possible? Could the disease be working him over, worming its virulent fingers through the gray knots of his brain while he slept in the night? This notion made him uneasy. Instead of losing his mind, he took a brief vacation. When he returned, he no longer heard his father’s footsteps creaking up and down the halls, and he no longer feared the sight of his dead parents standing out in the rear fields.
After his father died, and for the first time in Ben Journell’s life, he had begun to second-guess his own life choices. The plants and factories had all dried up as work was farmed out more cheaply overseas. Similarly, the mom-and-pop stores along Hamilton were being systematically replaced over in Cumberland by massive department stores, bookstores that doubled as cafés and toy stores, and corporate chain restaurants with gimmicky menus and salvaged bric-a-brac on the walls. Here he was, Benjamin Journell, only son of the great William and Helen Journell, presiding like Charon over a town that, like a shallow swimming hole in the middle of summer, was slowly drying up beneath his feet. He could go out to Baltimore or Washington, D.C.—or any of the myriad metropolises throughout the East Coast—and live among the living. Hell, why did it have to stop there? He could pick up and go anywhere in the whole country…anywhere in the world, if he wanted to. For the first time in his life, he felt truly free…and also guilty that it had taken his father’s death for him to feel this way.
However, the dying town of Stillwater and the Stillwater Police Department had different plans for him. Just when he was about to make the leap, he was promoted to sergeant. The last mortgage payment on the farm was handed over to the bank and now Ben owned his childhood home free and clear. And because complacency is the demise of momentum, he had stayed. Meanwhile, the shallow swimming hole had become nothing but a pit of dust.
Now, standing in Porter Conroy’s east field in the middle of the night, Ben once more questioned the choices that had caused him to remain in Stillwater, presiding over some farmer’s dead livestock. Sighing, he unhooked the flashlight from his Sam Browne belt and clicked it on. A few steps behind him, he could hear the labored respiration of Porter Conroy and Officer Eddie La Pointe. At the crest of the hill, Ben paused and ran the beam of the flashlight along the expansive field. He could see nothing but black piles of cow shit and swampy pools of rainwater, each one reflecting the stars. Against the horizon, brought into stark relief only when lightning struck, Porter Conroy’s barn loomed like Noah’s ark, the white-shingled cupola like the dome of a space shuttle. Ben cursed silently.
Porter sidled up beside him, reeking of booze and days-old sweat. He was an anemic fellow with a nose like the periscope of a submarine and skin as roughly textured as burlap. At least Porter had been forward thinking enough to slip into a fleece-lined dungaree jacket.
“Where?” Ben said.
Porter pointed beyond the crest of the hill. In a voice that sounded very much like a sinner confessing to a priest, Porter said, “Just over the hill. I first came across ’em less than an hour ago. I figure it’s some kind of animal did
it.”
Ben scratched one ear. “Did you hear any noises, any commotion?”
“Not a sound,” Porter told him. “For an animal to do something like that, you’d think you’d hear something, right?”
“You’d think,” Ben agreed.
Eddie La Pointe appeared beside Ben’s other elbow. The officer had the green, sallow skin of someone chronically seasick. He glanced at Ben with large, beseeching eyes. He looked tired and very young. “Do you smell that?”
Ben nodded. “I do.”
“What is that?”
Without responding, Ben Journell walked to the top of the hill then swiped the beam of his flashlight back and forth across Porter’s east field. Whitish lumps appeared in the searchlight’s beam, humping out of the grass like great mounds of sand. Ben counted eight of them before Porter and Eddie joined him at the top of the hill, their combined respiration forming clouds of vapor in the frigid air.
“There they are,” Porter said, disgust evident in his voice.
“How many in all?”
“Christ,” said Porter. “All of ’em.”
“I mean, how many is that?”
“Thirteen.”
Scanning the field again, Ben quickly recounted. “Where are the others?”
“In the barn.”
Ben frowned. “Whatever did this got into the barn, too?”
“Yeah, Ben,” Porter said. “Bold little cuss, whatever it was.”
Ben went over to the first whitish heap rising out of the field, Eddie and Porter following close at his heels. The whitish heap was one of Porter Conroy’s Holsteins, keeled over dead on its side. Its mottled white hide looked incongruous lying in the black, wet grass. Ben’s flashlight illuminated the massive piebald flank first. He was surprised to find no wounds along the cow’s body that would have been common in an animal attack. A muddy, congealed jelly that at first looked like it could be blood coated the Holstein’s rear, but on closer inspection—and getting a whiff of the stuff—Ben realized it was feces. He traced the flashlight’s beam along the flank to the neck and saw that the white hair of its throat was fully exposed. Thin red crescents, like a series of curved puncture wounds, scaled the length of its throat, the depth and severity of which could not have been fatal.
