Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales

by Norman Partridge

  He watched Cummings stagger away; the big man kicked through tangles of dry, spidery weeds that planted tiny burs in the cuffs of his overalls. When the plumber was gone, he uncoiled the garden hose and sprayed the oleanders until the puke mixed into the dark soil below.

  Six hours later he sat in the backyard, drinking a cold bottle of beer and admiring the wet, gleaming concrete. A stand of tall cosmos bent their flowery heads over the rim of the pond, as if inspecting his new creation. Grinning, he took a swallow of beer and hoped that they approved.

  A wind rose in the west. Purple and white cosmos petals blew into the concrete hole. Swirls of maple leaves and dust followed. He was going to have to cover the damn thing. "Shit," he said, and went to buy a tarp.

  Monday came and she didn't come home. No one at the firm knew where she was. Maybe she stayed over an extra day to relax, they suggested. Maybe he should call the hotel. He checked with the hotel and found that she had never checked in. He called the police and they came and asked him questions. Afterwards, he saw them talking to Joe Davidoff and Cummings. They came back the next day and talked to Cummings some more. Marie phoned and said that the police had talked to everyone at the shop, too.

  He didn't go to work. He didn't finish the pond. He drank beer and threw the empty bottles into the concrete pit. He got tired of looking at the pile of fresh cedar 2 by 2s from the lumber yard and covered it with a tarp. He barbecued steaks and pork chops and salmon. And then, one night, he decided to start running again.

  He found his sweat pants in the clothes hamper, along with a T- shirt he'd bought at a championship fight in Las Vegas. Smiling, he filled a paper bag with Friskies and took off. At first he couldn't get his wind. After the first mile, his lungs were burning. The pastel housewives gaped at him as he raced by, and if he hadn't been busy sucking mad, ragged breaths, he would have laughed.

  He was sure that they were all wondering what he had in the bag, now more than ever.

  The cat was gone. Some nights as he approached the creek he imagined that he could hear his wife calling it —kitty kitty kitty, her voice a hissing whisper — but when he squeezed between the two old oak trees, she was never there, and neither was the cat. Still, he always ripped away the top of the lunch bag and left the cat food. The next night it would be gone. He didn't think the cat was eating it —he was probably feeding a skunk or a raccoon. It didn't really matter.

  After his run, he watched a couple movies before turning in. He'd returned to work, and Marie was supplying him with a steady diet of Cary Grant comedies that he hadn't seen in years. Often they made him laugh, and he covered his mouth in shame.

  He was shaving when the doorbell rang. It was a sunny but cold October morning, and he wiped his face and tied a robe around his waist as he walked down the hall. A detective was at the door with a search warrant. He blinked and stared at the detective. Marie had sent him home with The Awful Truth the night before, and he thought that the man bore a startling resemblance to Ralph Bellamy.

  The detective was accompanied by two men with a jackhammer. They set it up in the backyard and started breaking through the pond's concrete bottom. He finished shaving and came outside with a cup of coffee just as the men started to clear the debris. They heaved jagged pieces of concrete over their shoulders. The gray slabs landed in the garden, crushing several stands of cosmos; the thin yellow stalks broke like strange, diseased arms.

  The men dug deeper and deeper, using shovels now, and then they started widening the hole. The idiots damn near broke the water main. He stayed out of the shade and kept wishing that it would get warmer, but it never did.

  The detective and his men left at 4 o'clock. He put on boots and gloves and found a pair of black-handled clippers. Lovingly, he trimmed the broken cosmos. Then he filled a bag with Friskies and went for a run.

  He came home earlier now, stopping along the way for takeout pizza or Chinese. Even though nights could be incredibly busy at the shop, Marie said she didn't mind the late shift. The whole thing was kind of cute. Each day she would send him home at 4 o'clock like a schoolboy.

  He enjoyed the luxury of running at sunset, when most people were only just getting off work. He sat quietly at the pool until twilight, and then he returned home, where he read or watched television.

  It was sprinkling the first night Marie came by. She said that she'd unpacked a late UPS shipment and found an old Robert Mitchum movie that she knew he wanted to see. He could hardly be inhospitable. Besides, he'd just opened a bottle of wine and didn't feel like drinking it alone.

  They sipped Chenin Blanc and watched the movie. Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer were in Mexico. A government payroll was missing, and William Bendix thought that Mitchum was responsible. Marie inched across the sofa, her knee met his, and he was embarrassed by his quickening pulse.

  Marie smelled nice. Her black hair was damp with rain. She wore a black skirt and a cream-colored silk blouse that spilled loosely over her large breasts and gathered at her waist. "I love movies like this," she said. "Cheap movies where they don't have to play by the rules. Old black-and-white movies where you can't tell what's going to happen."

  He rose and turned off the television. Marie stared at him, afraid that she'd said something wrong. He stared at her breasts. She looked away; she didn't seem to know what to do with her hands. Her wine glass sat empty on the coffee table. She almost reached for it, but changed her mind. It was raining outside.

  He bent behind the couch and pulled a cord. The heavy green drapes whispered closed.

  Quiet in the room, but for the rustle of cream-colored silk as Marie unbuttoned her blouse. She slipped it off her shoulders and closed her eyes. He just looked at her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean—"

  He smiled, brushing her long hair away from her scented breasts. "Don't be," he said. "Sometimes it's easier not to know what happened."

  Two weeks later they started jogging together. He hired a couple college kids to work nights so Marie could go home with him at 4 o'clock. They didn't try to hide anything.

  A cooling breeze rose over the hills in the evening, but it didn't yet smell of fall. Marie wore sweatshirts and nylon running shorts. She carried a paper bag at her side.

  The pastel ladies looked away when Marie smiled at them.

  It wasn't easy to tell Marie about the pool, but he couldn't imagine keeping it from her. She wanted to know everything about him.

  Each time he tried to explain it — the cat, his wife — his words sounded muddled, even to him.

  One night while he was staring at his reflection in the still water, Marie tossed a pebble into the pool. He was surprised to see her — Marie said that the pool made her feel uneasy, and she rarely followed him between the two oak trees for that reason. He tried to embrace her, but Marie scampered away, grinning like a naughty child. Turning sharply, she slipped on the thick mat of oak leaves and fell backwards onto the ground, giggling and smiling up at him. A gusting breeze rippled across the pool and shivered over his back. "Oh, God," he whispered.

  The dirty white horror lay next to Marie's head. There was no way he could hide it from her. She slowly turned to look at the halfburied thing — the matted fur, the crusty blood, the swarm of ants — and screamed.

  His hand caught hers and she pushed him away. Shaking, Marie moved toward the cat, forcing her left hand out in front of her. Suddenly her hand darted forward; she pulled the muddy buck knife out of the cat's body and closed it, hiding it in her ivory-white fist.

  Marie kicked papery brown leaves over the carcass. "No," she said, her eyes brimming with tears. "No!"

  Clutching the knife, she ran, her expensive jogging shoes crunching over dry oak leaves.

  The breeze whispered over the pool, smoothing the rippling water. Soon the pool was glassy and black. Calm. He closed his eyes and wanted to smell barbecue and limey margaritas and wonderfully green grass, but he smelled nothing but old oak trees, dead leaves, and night.

  It took him
a long time to walk home.

  They didn't run anymore after that night, and Marie never mentioned the pool or the cat again. He began working on the pond deck in the evening, and she returned to work at the shop. Some nights she would come over, most nights she wouldn't.

  He had a hangover the morning he found Cummings's dog. He went outside to get the Sunday paper and discovered the animal on his driveway, slit from shoulder to gut, dead. Blood was everywhere. Splattered on his car, his driveway, his Sunday paper. Everywhere.

  He called the police. Cummings wouldn't answer his door, but that was because he was dead in a bathtub full of his own blood. His wrists were slit to the bone. Two of his dogs were dead in his bedroom—Cummings had slit the animals' throats. The third dog, the one that had ruined the Sunday funnies, hadn't been so lucky. It had jumped through the bedroom window, crawled through the oleanders, and died in someone else's driveway with a shard of window glass lodged in its ribs.

  Later, the coroner would announce that Cummings had ingested a great deal of vodka during his last few hours. The coroner never revealed that the plumber had also swallowed a small ball of rusty barbed wire.

  In a drawer in Cummings's bedroom, the police found a woman's spandex swimsuit. Wrapped inside it, in a Ziploc bag, they found a human hand.

  Detective Ralph Bellamy returned to the neighborhood with his jackhammer crew. They found Cummings's wife buried beneath his new cinder-block barbecue pit. The corpse had two hands.

  They kept digging. He was starting down the driveway, a bag of cat food in hand, when someone started crying beside a hole in Cummings's backyard and the detective called him back to the house.

  Marie moved in just before Thanksgiving. She took over the shop. Everyone told her not to work so hard, that she really shouldn't work at all during her first pregnancy, but she wouldn't listen.

  He stayed home, renovating Cummings's house. No one else had wanted the place, so he'd made an offer on it and picked up the property for a song. He had dreams of jacking up the price and making a bundle, but if that didn't work he was just going to sit back and collect rent until the market was better. So far he'd painted the interior and refurbished the bathrooms.

  One afternoon, while he was refinishing Cummings's living room floor and quietly cussing the dead man's dogs, the detective who looked like Ralph Bellamy showed up with a large cardboard box.

  "I believe these belong to you," he said. "We found them in Cummings's junk. Seems your neighbor had a rent-a-space outside of town."

  The box was full of videotapes from his shop.

  The cedar slats creaked as Marie stepped onto the deck. She unfolded the buck knife and sliced through a water-filled plastic bag. A dozen koi spilled into the pond, their bodies all black and gold, white and tarnished silver. Marie closed the knife and tossed it into the murky water.

  Glistening scales ruffled the still surface as the koi explored the pond. He told her about the cop, and about the box of tapes.

  Marie kissed his cheek. "That Cummings," she said. "He thought that he was awfully cute, always coming to the shop at the last minute, thinking he could pick me up because it was closing time. And he thought that I was so interested, just because I let him take home all those tapes for free." She laughed. "He said that I was crazy — good crazy, good-in-bed crazy.

  "You should have heard him laugh when I asked him to plant the cosmos. Now, Marie, he said, why in the world do you want me to plant flowers at a vacant house? Kind of a housewarming gift, I said. A magic good-luck offering. I told him that I had a premonition that my boss was going to be his new neighbor. Of course, it was more than a premonition—just a week before. I'd spent a day clipping real estate listings for you.

  "You should have heard Cummings tease me about it, though. He thought witchcraft was some kind of funny hobby, like collecting postcards or matchbooks. He thought that until I put the knife in his hand for the first time and told him about the spidery weeds in his yard."

  Marie's smooth white hand drifted over his cheek. "He didn't know when it was over, though. Poor Cummings, visiting the shop with his wounded puppy eyes, complaining about how badly my weeds made his tummy hurt, begging me to help him. He was so happy the night I told him that I wanted to see him again—at his place for a change. I said that I'd bring along a movie that didn't have an end. I promised that I'd make everything better. Of course, by that time, there was no way I could."

  They watched the koi for awhile, and then Marie went inside to open the champagne. He thought about his wife feeling guilty, leaving for yet another business trip. He saw her slipping into her spandex swimsuit and nylon shorts, closed his eyes and dreamed of her squeezing between the old oak trees with a great big bag of Friskies in hand.

  Marie had been at the pool with Cummings. Marie wore cosmos in her hair; Cummings had the knife. Maybe Marie pulled out the Ziploc bag first and told her what it was for. After awhile they did it. And then Marie killed the cat because the little bitch wasn't going to take care of it anymore. Or maybe Marie was afraid of the animal. He didn't know. Didn't want to know.

  He sat and waited for Marie to bring the champagne. He didn't really want any — lately he'd had trouble with strange stomach pains.

  A smile played at the corners of his mouth as he remembered all the weeds he'd pulled in Cummings's yard during the last few weeks. How many trash bags had he filled? Ten? Twenty? He wondered what Marie would say if he told her how hard he'd been working.

  A fish jumped in the pond and disappeared in the dark, swirling water. The cosmos stood dying, stiff and brown; the broken stalks rattled in the cold evening breeze.

  An Oxblood Stetson Hat

  I'd always wanted to write a story involving Stackalee, the legendary African-American badman. Most of us who came along during the baby boom first heard of Stack in Lloyd Price's '60s hit, "Stagger Lee,"[34] which was a reworking of the folk song that I used as a basis for this piece. Growing up, I loved Price's song. And as I grew older—and began to study American folklore—I knew that Stackalee was a character I wanted to work into a story if I ever got the chance.

  I sold "Stackalee" to Cemetery Dance in March 1990. The story was a good fit for Rich Chizmar's magazine—it raced along, hit a couple of good bumps, and tied up in 3,000 words—but I kind of wish Rich had taken a pass on it. If I would have had "Stackalee" sitting around a few months later, I would have pitched it to the first volume of Jeff Gelb's Shock Rock instead. But that's the way it goes sometimes—by the time Shock Rock rolled around, I didn't feel like writing another rock 'n' roll horror story, so I didn't take a shot at cracking that anthology (which featured good stories by Stephen King, David Schow, and Brian Hodge, among others).

  "Stackalee" was published in CD #5. I got busy with other projects, but somehow the story kept nagging at me. It wasn't that I was dissatisfied with it. I'd set out to write a quick little shocker, and the story did the job fine. But somehow I felt like I'd missed an opportunity with the character of Stack himself, for in truth he's really a minor figure in "Stackalee."

  The focus of that tale is really Billy Lyons, a singer who shares the same name as the man gunned down by Stack in the classic song.

  And when I finally put my finger on it, I realized that that was the real problem. What bothered me about "Stackalee" was that I'd written a story about the wrong guy. I was interested in the man who gunned down Billy Lyons, not in Billy himself. Sure, I did what I could with ol’ Billy... but he wasn't the kind of character I'd come to think of as a "Norm Partridge guy."

  And here I'm going to hit the brakes and ask you to trust me on that one without a whole lot of explaining, because I'm not about to describe to you exactly what (or who) a "Norm Partridge guy" is. Let's just say I know him when I see him and leave it at that. To tell the truth, self-analysis of that sort makes me uncomfortable. I'm not the kind of writer who's tempted to unscrew the plate on the back of my creative pocket watch and start fiddling with the gears and wheels to
see exactly how it works. Nope. I've always been afraid that if I did too much of that I'd lose some of the magic... and maybe break the damn watch while I was at it. To put it another way: I've always relied on instinct as much as studied intent. When it comes to my creative pocket watch, I'm more likely just to check the time, wind that sucker up, and let it start ticking.

  And that's what I did a few years later, when I decided to take another shot at working with the character of Stackalee. The second time out I turned Stack into an anti-hero of sorts for a long story called "The Bars on Satan's Jailhouse." That tale proved a more comfortable fit for the character I had in mind.

  In "Bars," I wanted Stack to retain the menace of his folkloric antecedent, but I wanted to 1) take him down the road a piece and 2) figure a way to make him the focus of the story.[35] I didn't want to define Stack as the classic western bad guy in the black hat, and neither did I want him to be the classic good guy in the white one. I wanted him somewhere in between, a one-of-a-kind force of nature—the stranger in the oxblood Stetson hat.

  To do that, I had to change him. I've always loved characters whose heroism was cloaked in the villain's cape. Think of the '60s television version of the Green Hornet or Disney's Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. Both characters went nose-to-nose with evil, using methods their adversaries might employ. Society-at-large often saw them as villains. While I also loved more conventional heroes growing up, these two characters caught my attention early on and have held it to this day.

  Stack, of course, was different from the Green Hornet and the Scarecrow. He wasn't the kind of character who'd have a secret identity, though I did create a past for him that was something less than his larger-than-life present. But it was his present I needed to focus on in "The Bars on Satan's Jailhouse," and that wasn't hard to do when that present fell within the confines of the mythic American west... another favorite vein of folklore and American legend. That was when the idea of Stack as anti-hero came in, and a few other influences came into play as well. Think Leone's Man with No Name from the spaghetti westerns, and you'll have an idea what I'm talking about.