Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales

by Norman Partridge

  Reno shook his head. If the guys could hear him thinking like this, all poetic and soft. Hector would crack wise and Coley would start up with that doggy laughter of his. Like this morning, when they'd played the last hand.

  Hector had spread his blackjack on the table and Coley had set his sixteen next to it, Reno all the while staring down at the four he was showing as dealer and wishing that the face-down king of hearts would transform itself into a seven of any suit before he took a hit.

  "C'mon," Coley said. "You know the rules...you got to hit it."

  Reno told him to shut up. His fingers found the first card. His brain told him that he still had a chance of beating Coley out for the shotgun seat in the Jeep. He flipped the card onto the table and his gaze froze upon the Jack of clubs.

  That's when Coley's doggy laughter started up. "You're the farmer! You get to tend the vegetable!"

  Reno slapped the table. "If I've told you once. I've told you a million times: he's not a vegetable, you idiot. Vegetables don't think. They don't walk around, and they don't read goddamn Louis L'Amour books."

  Hector grabbed Reno's arm. "Yeah, but they listen pretty good, don't they?"

  Their eyes met. Reno backed down, embarrassed by his outburst. He hated to make mistakes — and mouthing off with the freak in the next room was certainly a mistake — but most of all he hated to make mistakes in front of Hector.

  After a long moment. Hector let go of Reno's arm and grinned at fat Coley. "Looks like we two boys mosey into Vegas, don't it?"

  "Sure does." Coley laughed. "And Reno stays put, 'cause Reno is the farmer."

  Reno shook with rage, and Hector gave him a concerned glance. "God, the boy's gone all peaked," Hector said. "I do believe he's a tad jumpy about tending the veg all by his lonesome."

  "Yeah, he's a-scared! Just like when he took his army physical and his heart went all wild." Coley drummed his fists on his big chest. “Pitty-pat! Pitty-pat!"

  Reno tossed the cards at Coley's laughing face. "I'll talk to my father about you, you big ape. The old man will bury you when he hears about the things you just said."

  "Now, now." Hector's voice was smooth, conciliatory. "Coley was just joking. Don't get yourself all worked up, Reno. You know what the docs said about getting yourself all worked up."

  There it was, and that was it. They'd left him sitting there, alone. By that time, Reno was just as happy to see them go.

  Reno wasn't happy about it now, though. To tell the truth, he didn't much like being alone with the freak. It wasn't that he was a coward, but he had to admit that his uneasiness did have something to do with fear, though not the kind of fear that Hector talked about. And now, with the dead spider scrambling around again, it was ten times worse than usual, because it made Reno remember all those crazy things his father said about the freak, and Cash, and that other guy who had been with them in Korea.

  When Coley and Hector were in the adobe, the freak blended into the woodwork. But it was different when Reno was alone with the scarred-up bastard. On those occasions the freak had a way of filling up a room, and Reno couldn't help noticing how screwed up the guy was. He couldn't help but remember the stories that Hector and Coley told about him, either. They said that the freak had been just another regular guy —even though he was an Injun —before he got his ass blown up in Korea.

  Reno stared at the armless thing. He couldn't think of "it" as a man because he knew that the freak didn't have any balls.

  The freak didn't notice Reno, just stared at the spider, tapping the bottle every now and then with the big toe of its right foot. The freak's left foot was plastic, as was its left leg from the knee down. Reno made himself look at the freak's lone eye, the one "normal" thing in its hideous face. Gold as the eye of a cat or a lizard, the eye nestled in a patch of dark tissue below the peculiar fishhook-shaped scar that rimmed the freak's caved-in brow.

  Reno felt his breath coming faster. He stared at the empty eye socket jammed with cotton on the other side of the prim little mound of flesh that passed for the freak's nose; the wisps of jet-black hair on a scalp once tanned but now scarred and pasty, as ugly and unnatural as hair growing on an eggshell.

  Finally, Reno looked away, but looking away didn't help much. Reno couldn't escape the sound of the freak's toe-tapping, or the empty whisper of sucking inhalations and exhalations passing through the freak's sagging mouth.

  Reno stood up too quickly, nearly tripping over his chair. He dropped the Life Magazine on the floor. He needed something. A beer. Some noise. In the kitchen, he helped himself to a cold brew and downed half of it while he fiddled with Hector's radio. It was one of those transistorized portable jobs that the Japs were making. He gave up soon enough — nigger jump music that hissed from the tiny speaker made him long for the music of the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman.

  Reno sipped his beer. He listened to it fizz.

  He listened to the freak breathing, the spider scrabbling.

  He wondered if the spider was thirsty. Christ, he didn't want to think about that.

  He didn't want to think.

  There was always the television. His old man had bought it after Reno complained of boredom. It was only a crummy RCA knockoff, but if you got the rabbit ears just right it worked pretty well.

  It was Friday night. That meant Life of Riley and Our Miss Brooks.

  Reno figured he could use a good laugh.

  But the television was in the living room, along with the freak.

  Reno grinned. Living room, that was a laugh, with that half-dead thing in there. God, he was sick of this. The freak. The desert. Coley and Hector. It was just like his father to saddle him with all this, and just like Cash to go along with the old man even though he knew that Reno hated the idea of being so far from home.

  Reno downed his beer, tossed the tin can in the sink, and got another. He thought about the TV, sitting right across from the table where the freak sat. There were leaves for that table, and they could provide some distance from the freak. But those leaves were buried under Hector's guns and helmet and other army junk in a closet down the hall, and the table was so short now that a big slob like Coley could barely fit his fat bulk between its legs.

  Reno downed the second beer. Silly, that's how he felt, like he used to feel when he was a kid and went to those pictures with Boris Karloff doing Frankenstein. He didn't like those pictures much, because they made him squirm so that he couldn't even eat his popcorn. The Mexican kids — the ones who could actually afford to go to the movies, anyway —had always teased him about that. He'd called them the usual names, but he'd known all along that they were right, because usually he ended up carrying the bucket home with him and eating the popcorn cold, soggy with butter.

  The second beer can rang hollowly against the bottom of the sink. It rolled back and forth and then settled. Reno listened to the toe tapping, the labored breathing.

  A chill capered over his spine.

  Oh, brother. If Hector and Coley could see me now.

  Reno sucked down the beginnings of another beer and almost tasted cold popcorn soggy with butter. Jesus. He wasn't a kid. Sure, he hadn't been to Korea, but that didn't mean he was scared. He was as much of a man as Cash or Coley or Hector. Just because some weird gimp was making him remember that he used to be a little punk who had nightmares about Boris Karloff stomping around in elevator boots, that didn't mean he was scared.

  Reno checked out the fridge. There was salami and cheese and mustard and a loaf of rye. He fixed himself a big Dagwood sandwich. It wasn't what he wanted, wasn't really what he needed to prove to himself that he wasn't a kid anymore, but there wasn't any popcorn in the adobe.

  He walked into the living room and stopped short of the table.

  The freak looked up at him. Its head lolled to the side.

  Reno shivered. The bastard’s inviting me to sit down!

  Jesus! Reno was sweating now. Slowly, he walked down the hall, back to Hector's room, as if that's where
he had intended to go all along. He sat down on Hector's bed and gulped beer.

  His heart was pounding.

  He heard Coley's voice: “Pitty-pat! Pitty-pat!"

  "Calm down," he whispered to himself. "You're not scared of any damned freak Injun, and you don't have a bad heart." He closed his eyes. That was the way things were. They had to be that way. Because if he was truly scared, and if he did have a bad heart, maybe being scared could kill him. And if he died here and now, alone with the freak, then his fate would be sealed. He'd be just another —

  Reno sprang from the bed and opened Hector's closet. He pawed beneath a stack of army manuals on demolition work, snatched up a .45 and headed back to the living room. He set the .45 and the beer and the sandwich on the table, but the freak didn't look up. Reno clicked on the TV and turned the sound way up. He heard the tubes fizz warm and watched the black screen brighten. By the time he pulled a chair up to the table, the screen was bright and the little speaker was vibrating with some raspy pitch for safety-razor blades.

  Reno took a big bite of sandwich and chased it with beer. The commercial was set to some silly jingle designed to stay in people's heads, but it wasn't quite loud enough to eclipse the sound of the freak's breathing. Reno almost complained, but the freak didn't seem aware of his presence.

  Reno decided that, on the whole, that was a good thing.

  A bell sounded. Reno turned to the TV. A big white guy came out of a corner, dodged, double-hooked, and drove an equally big black guy against the ropes.

  "All right!" Reno said around a mouthful of salami and cheese and rye. "Get him! Get him!"

  The white guy was doing just that. It was a fierce fight, but it struck Reno as funny, because the announcers kept talking about the guy in the black trunks, and that was the white guy, and the guy in the white trunks, and that was the black guy. Reno thought that was so damn funny that he could hardly contain himself. He'd been watching the news and reading the papers lately — mostly out of boredom—and all this stuff about civil rights was strictly for the birds as far as he was concerned. In fact, he thought that it would be a pretty good idea to fill a boat with every mouthy nigger —

  The punch came out of nowhere. The white guy went down, and a sharp little gasp sounded from the other side of the table.

  Reno turned. The freak's golden eye was glued to the tube like there was nothing else in the world, glued to the white guy on the canvas with a look of pure excitement.

  And then the freak did something very strange. His twisted facial muscles and managed to pull back his slack lips, and he grinned.

  Reno shivered. Then, just as suddenly, he was filled with rage, because this was as twisted as it got as far as Reno was concerned. This freak Injun was so screwed in the head that he could smile at a white guy lying on the canvas with blood leaking out of his mouth and a big nigger standing over him.

  It was pure stone-cold sick, was what it was.

  The freak looked away from the TV and stared at the Coke bottle, but it wasn't like he saw anything. Not the dead spider or anything else. In fact, he looked like he was far away, somewhere else.

  The spider dashed an inch or two, as far away from the freak as it could get.

  Reno slammed his fist down on the table. The bottle fell over. Playing cards jumped, and so did the plate and the sandwich and the beer and Hector's pistol.

  The freak's foot jumped, too.

  The golden eye stared up at Reno, blinking, cringing.

  Reno grabbed the Coke bottle, ready to break it open, ready to gut the freak with the jagged neck. But the TV announcers were barking the winner's name, and the freak was breathing faster now, and the spider was scuttling over the glass, just above his fingers.

  Reno glanced at the screen and saw that the white guy was still lying on the canvas. It didn't matter to him anymore —what mattered now was the freak.

  Behind him, the freak had fallen silent.

  Reno turned off the television and set the bottle on top of it.

  He watched as the spider curled up and died.

  Again.

  Then and there, Reno decided to kill the freak.

  That had been the answer all along. Reno smiled for the first time in months. Once the freak was dead, he could go back home. He wouldn't have to live with Hector and Coley anymore. He could move back into the big house at Citrus Cove and live with his father and Cash and he wouldn't have to put up with Hector's shit ever again.

  Reno snatched up the bottle. This was going to be fun.

  He heard a sharp click behind him. The sound of a pistol being cocked.

  Reno whirled and saw the pistol. The freak had it propped against his plastic foot, and he had the middle toe of his right foot curled around the trigger.

  "Surprise," said the freak.

  Reno's heart pounded. He looked from the gun to the freak's golden eye, and a sharp pain ran up his arm and exploded in his chest.

  "Damn doctors," he gasped, really hurting, grabbing for his heart.

  And then the first bullet took him hard in the chest, and the pain went away.

  But not forever.

  Chapter Two

  Joe Ryan smashed an elbow against the Cadillac's passenger-door window. The glass shattered and collapsed in one big hunk onto the driver's seat, the shards held together with strips of the same gummy tape that Joe's trainer used to wrap his hands.

  Joe stared down at the glass. Just like me, he thought. Busted up good but still in one piece.

  Joe brushed a few stray slivers of glass away from the sill of the door. After the beating he'd taken tonight in the ring, he was through with boxing. He felt good about his decision. No more left hooks hitting his jaw. Not ever. No more five-mile runs before the sun came up, and no more evenings spent sweating off extra weight in a sauna and no more missing an offered beer. And definitely no more getting busted up for short money.

  There were easier ways to make a living, even thought they might involve a certain element of risk different than the risks associated with stepping into a boxing ring. Those kinds of risks went hand in hand with shattered glass. Joe knew that, but he also knew that there was no future in lying flat on his back in a boxing ring, knocked out as cold as cold could be.

  The weird part of it was that he couldn't even remember the fight at all. The reporters had said that he'd been winning until the other guy caught him with a lucky left hook. Joe had stood up to that; he didn't have the chin of a Marciano, but his chin was pretty good. The problem was that the hook had been followed by a stream of combinations that Joe's trainer had described in a voice that was both awed and reverential. "Jesus, the kid was faster than Robinson. It was like you wasn't quite human, taking a beating like you took in there tonight. You got hit with everything. The kid was even throwing right leads. And then he trapped you on the ropes and started throwing double-right leads, every punch hittin' the mark...."

  Joe felt his jaw and tried to think of it as the portion of his anatomy that allowed him to masticate a good steak and not as "the mark." It was good to think that way, because it proved that he still had his head screwed on straight, even though he couldn't remember the fight or where his head had been while his body had been taking a hellacious beating. But he wasn't too brave for his own good, that was for sure. He wasn't like those guys who didn't know when it was time to hang up the gloves. He wasn't going to take any unnecessary chances.

  Joe Ryan had already taken enough chances for one lifetime. Maybe two. Unlocking the Caddy, he hoped that the man upstairs wouldn't mind him taking one more.

  A glance over his shoulder told him that none of the casino patrons were paying him the slightest bit of attention, and there wasn't a parking attendant or security man in sight. Joe scooped the broken glass off the seat and slipped behind the wheel.

  His head throbbed. His teeth felt like little rocks that had been hammered into his jaw. He wrapped his fingers around the wheel, barely able to feel the cool, smooth surface. His f
ingers were swollen and purple, like raw sausages. Christ, he must have hit the kid plenty to end up with hands that looked like that. But he couldn't remember any of it, and that scared him.

  But what scared him even more was the one thing that he did remember.

  He remembered the Darkroom.

  Joe's first trainer, the old pug who launched him as a pro before Joe marched off to Korea, had told him about the Darkroom. "You take a good wallop someday, and it's like that punch didn't hit you at all. It's like your opponent reached out and opened a door and then shoved you inside a room that's all full up with shadows. And you stagger around in there, still throwin' punches even though you're in the black, black dark, because you know that there's stuff in that room that's tryin' to get you. And you don't really want to see that stuff. Take my word on that, because what's in that Darkroom is just about everything that you've ever been scared of in your whole life. So you just keep punching, but you can't keep all those things off a you forever, and it's almost a relief when you start to wake up. That's when those things climb all over you, puttin' you out of your misery, and roll you out of that room and back into the ring."

  Joe shivered at the memory, knowing that he didn't have time for it now. His aching fingers groped beneath the dashboard and found the ignition wires. He tried to keep his mind on the task at hand, but he was still woozy, and his thoughts kept drifting.

  It was nice lying on the seat of the car. Comfy, even. Maybe he could just put his head down, rest for a minute....

  Joe closed his eyes. He hadn't thought about the Darkroom since Korea, since the hell he'd faced on Hill 29. He remembered the explosive concussion of Chinese mortars and the feel of frozen Korean earth blasting up in his face.

  The shell had opened a hole between Bearchild and Cash that swallowed the two soldiers. The force of the blast had sent Joe flying straight up into the air, where he tumbled for too many seconds, flopping and flailing like a wounded bird. Then he descended through the smoke and dropped into the hole, landing between his buddies. Joe had looked at those guys and then he'd wished that he hadn't, because they looked like bloody lumps. Cash's nose had been blown clean off and he was grinning like a drunk. Bearchild was much worse, and Joe had reached out to take his friend's hand, only to find that neither the hand nor the arm was attached to Bearchild anymore. Bearchild's mouth was open in a scream that Joe couldn't hear because his ears were full of empty sounds, like big, angry combers hitting a beach. He'd looked away then, up at the sky, and watched a cloud of iron-gray smoke descend over the hole.