by Kent Meyers
You cut me?
No, I ain’t caught you either. Point is, though, you got neighbors, and—
Neighbors on Valen land. You catch me, we kin speak again. I’m goin now.
And he did. Put his pickup in gear and left me standing there, the only person ever did that. And I let’m go. I hadn’t cut Shane doing anything. Couldn’t even catch the sonofabitch actually driving at night without headlights. He always saw me first.
Two camels short of a caravan. Crazy as a bag of drywall screws. Thinks just because Old Joe Valen owned a chunk of land back when men were men and sheep were nervous, he’s got a right to go wherever he goddamn pleases. That time Stanley Zimmerman’s buffalo got out on the highway I know damn well he was the sonofabitch cut the fence. Thinks it’s still his land. Shoulda locked him up just for the way he smells and thrown the key in the river.
Everyone figured his father, Rodney, would end the Valen line. How the hell Rodney managed to find a wife’s beyond anyone. He’s forty years old, living with his father, Ralph, and his grandmother, Emma, Old Joe’s wife, in that house out by Mattinglys’. Damn near the same day his old man died, Ralph sold the original land, with that house Old Joe was so damn proud of. Stories are Emma fought that move, but what’s she going to do, sit out there on that place so far from anyone she had to keep her own tomcat, and chew the air? Why she’d want to stay out there is anyone’s guess. She finally gave in and moved to the new place with Ralph and his wife, who stuck it out till Rodney was twenty-five, then decided she’d had enough of the good life and left. So there the three of them are, Emma and Ralph and Rodney, the lot hootier than a trunkful of owls. What kind of woman would marry into a deal like that?
Story is, Rodney traded a couple of horses for a car and started driving and didn’t know how to stop. Ended up in Minnesota, comes back telling of a woman he met in a bar. Dream on, broomstick cowboy. But two weeks later this woman shows up, Sarah Cornwall, asking directions to the Valen ranch. Once people get straight she’s asking for the present Valen ranch and not the old one, they send her out and, no one could believe it, she up and marries Rodney.
Ralph and the old woman moved upstairs, leaving Rodney and his bride all that privacy—but even so. And even when the old woman hit ninety and got forgetful enough she couldn’t remember she was too damn stubborn to die, that house couldn’t’ve been too roomy, especially with Shane now born. Sarah finally wakes up and looks around and realizes what everyone else knew all along and gets in her car and returns to Minnesota, leaving seven-year-old Shane to his father’s and grandfather’s care. In other words, not much care at all, and even less when Ralph died a couple years later.
I was a few years older than Shane, but what I remember most about him is how little there is to remember. Never knew if he was going to be in school or not, it was all haphazard with him, so I remember him more by his absence than his presence. Even then he was out prowling. Spent more time with animals than with people, slept outside more than he slept in. Not too surprising he’d grow up and decide on a career in poaching, even if we can’t prove that’s what he did, since no one ever cut him at it. But his letter writing—no one knew a goddamn thing about that until Sarah returned and the whole business burst out of that ramshackle house into the light of day. Crazy thing. You think you know every weird screw that puts a guy together and what his secrets are, but it turns out he’s got secrets beneath the secrets, and the ones you know are just keeping you from thinking he’s got others. Like a black hole. So goddamn invisible it’s gone right through to being visible again. To where everything is pointing to it, things warping around it, deforming. But unless you got a notion of what a black hole is, a theory of why, you just think, Hell, ain’t that an odd region a space.
Shane always had his pickup lights off and his house lights on. You could see the damn thing, lit up every room, off the Red Medicine Creek Road right before you got to Mattinglys’ and Zimmermans’. Didn’t matter what time a night. Didn’t matter if Shane’s pickup was there or not. Lights were always on. So what the hell was the crazy sonofabitch doing?
She brought the letters back with her. I found them inside her car, seven thick packs of them tied up with satin ribbons. Trying to figure it out, you don’t know how far back to go. Maybe to when Sarah up and left. Or maybe to whatever the hell appealed to her in Rodney that got her out here. Or maybe you got to go clear back down the Valen line, to when Old Joe managed to wrest that land away from the Indians and the government and build that house out there like some prairie palace. There’s a sonofabitch! He’s still being talked about. Story is he once whipped his wife with barbwire for not having a meal ready on time. Bea Conway, of course, who’s the expert, and if you don’t believe that, just ask her, don’t put much stock in stories like that. Where’s the documentation? is her favorite question. But if you look at the records she’s got in her own damn book, it’s goddamn odd how many kids in Old Joe’s family died young: Cause unknown. Unknown by who? Must be kids buried all over that Valen ranch. Little bundles of baby planted. You go out there, you wonder what you’re stepping on.
Then there was Eddie Little Feather’s story, before he got run over, about his great-grandfather being shot by Old Joe when he was trying to get someplace safe after Wounded Knee. Not that Eddie had the kind of authority that made people take his word for things. As Bea would say, there’s no proof—and who the hell’d want to find it if there was? Point is, with Shane, it wasn’t just himself spooked people. Wasn’t just those red eyes behind that windshield. Was his whole family history. It ain’t pretty imagining a woman whipped with wire—and she had the face to prove it, unless the face started the story. People claim sometimes to see her parading by with children following, none a them speaking a word. Course I can’t afford to put no more stock in stories like that than Bea does, or I’d be off on wild goose chases every goddamn night. That’s in the past. Had nothing to do with Shane. Just ghosts. Bleeding mothers and dead children and an old man who finally got his hot meal, and some Indians who disappeared a damn long time ago. Cause unknown. All I’ve really got to make sense of anything are the letters—that is, what I’ve got of them.
Here’s the first one:
july 15 1963
der mom
how are you. i ben fine. dad to. thank you for the birthde card. and the mony. i bout shotgun shels. i got a grows. there harder then fezzant.
shane
A few things could intrigue you about that letter. For instance, the year. Shane was only eight years old when he wrote it—his first birthday after she left. She sends him money. She can’t even imagine something he’d like.
And then the month: grouse season don’t open till October. No sense waiting till you’re grown to get started on your career, I guess.
But what gets me is how, even way back then, he’s got that dad to.
On Shane’s seventh birthday Rodney handed him a loaded twelve-gauge and his mother left. Rodney wasn’t what you’d call eloquent, but he had a couple of guys he used to drink with, so we got these bits of quadruple-drunk story: Rodney drunk when he told it, his friends drunk when they heard, then drunk again when they retold it to a bunch of drunks. So, Rodney gave Shane that twelve-gauge, and you can imagine Sarah watching from the window, though that detail’s not supplied. Been watching for eight years. All that hope she stuffed into her car in Minneapolis when she first came out here is about to crumble into dust. The last straw’s about to get loaded onto that goddamn, overworked camel’s back. She sees her son lift that shotgun, taller than he is, while her husband points to the pump, crooks and uncrooks his elbow, imitating how it works. Points to the bead on the end a the barrel. The trigger. Then stands back, looks around, shrugs his shoulders, opens his hands. I can just see it: Whatever the hell you can find, son.
Shane’s skinny arm bends and straightens, works the pump. She’s watching. Her little boy. Then the gun swings up and the barrel sweeps toward her, there’s that sickening moment when its b
lack dot is winking right at her and she’s not sure what he’s finding to shoot at, doesn’t even know if he knows she’s behind the window, and then it’s gone up and by and then boom! She jumps and crams her fist into her mouth to tamp her scream back down, she’s afraid if she lets it out she’ll never stop, she’ll become the kind of thing they put on display at Wall Drug for tourists to see, the Screaming Woman, right next to the piano-playing gorilla with the grody knuckles, him playing and her screaming, a real duet. The weathervane on top a the barn, one a them old rooster things, half-rusted out and been pointing the same way for as long as she’s been Rodney’s wife, don’t matter how strong a different wind’s blowing, she sees it rise off the roof. For just a moment it looks like that metal rooster’s going to up and fly away. But then it tumbles and falls and clanks down the shingles on the other side, where I found the damn thing in a patch of leafy spurge grown up around it forty-odd years later.
There she is, her fist in her mouth, she sees her little boy knocked back by the kick of the gun. He’s wounded, something’s broken. His shoulder’s twisted, his eyes are astonished he’s hurt so bad, she’s never seen that look on his face before. It unparalyzes her, she pulls her fist from her mouth, he needs her, she cries at the windowpane, Shaney! and starts to go to him.
But before she can turn her head from the window she sees his grin, perverse as a goddamn zipper opening in the middle of his mouth and spreading both ways. And then Rodney’s voice, you can just hear it rumbling through the windowpane: Good shootin, son. Now you know how, you shoot that gun anytime you want. Shells’re in the broom closet.
She leaves that afternoon. What’s the point of being a mother? Just gets in her car and leaves. Shane’s prowling the pastures looking for nonmetal birds to shoot, and Rodney’s she doesn’t know where. She throws a suitcase of clothes in her car. Takes nothing with her that wasn’t hers when she came, including her son.
Here’s the two that got me thinking:
July 15, 1976
Dear Mom,
Thank you for the money. Yeah, I turned 21. It ain’t a big difference to me, though. I been doing pretty much what I want for kind of forever anyway. It ain’t like 21 and there you are like I hear with college kids. Dads doing fine. Cattle prices been OK.
Shane
July 17, 1977
Dear Mom,
Thank you for the money. My birthday was real good this year. Cattle prices was better than maybe ever least what I can remember. Dad said we ought to celebrate so we drove down to Rapid had dinner at the Howard Johnsons. I dont know if you was ever there but its good food let me tell you. Dad makes about the best pies ever but that Howard maybe has him beat. The waitress kept flirting with him and he was joking all night maybe I shouldnt be telling you that kind of stuff. Even people at the next table was laughing at Dads jokes wondering if he was a professional comedian come to do a show at that Civic Center they just built in Rapid. Anyway Dads doing real good and my birthday was real good and the money you sent Ill get something real nice with it dont know what yet but itll be nice. Something youd like and Dad too.
Shane
Look at them letters. I was leafing through them in my patrol car about a week after the whole thing happened, passing time while I kept an eye on the radar, and wondering what I should do with the things, when I come on those two, one after the other like that. I can see how Sarah, getting them a year apart, might not have noticed anything. But me, I’m reading along, and I got thirteen letters where Shane hardly says a damn thing, and then all of a sudden, in 1977, Rodney’s all over the place—taking Shane to Rapid, flirting with the waitress, telling jokes, making pies. Where the hell’d this come from? Wasn’t the Rodney Valen I knew.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been reading them letters at all. There was nothing to investigate and no one to indict if there was. At the time I thought the whole thing was as obvious as when Eddie Little Feather passed out on the highway and that Colorado Springs truck driver hit him. Same sort of thing: hell of a mess but once you get it cleaned up, it’s over and done with. Legally, those letters might’ve been private, not mine to read at all unless I was pursuing a case, which I wasn’t. On the other hand, there was no one to protest or care. So I’m passing time with them and trying to get my head around Rodney Valen making pies when it hits me: he died in 1976. Collapsed on the sawdust of the Ruination Bar. Middle of a sentence. No one ever did find out what he had to say, which was maybe for the best. But he’d just refilled his glass, so it was a waste of beer. And he was running a tab. Miller Freeman says he’s seen all sorts of ways to get out of paying for beer, but Rodney Valen’s method topped them all.
Hadn’t of been she opened her car door we might still not know about it. Richard Mattingly’s out spraying herbicide on that damn salt cedar’s infesting Red Medicine Creek between his ranch and the Valen land. That salt cedar, now’s, a battle, and he’s out there two days in a row and sees that car sitting there outside that molting house. Told me it just didn’t feel right. Not a car he recognized, first of all. And then the door open like some broken wing. And Shane’s pickup there, not moving. It was that last bit that convinced me. The thing about weird sonsabitches is they stick to their weird. You can trust them. Normal people keep their weird hid, so if it ever gets out you have no idea where it’ll go. But Shane Valen—I knew if he wasn’t crawling around the county in his pickup, with his lights off, poaching, something was serious wrong.
I got out there and parked behind her car, which at the time I didn’t know was her car. Wasn’t a sound out there, and that house with the blank windows waiting. I opened my door, called out, Shane! It’s Greggy Longwell!
Wasn’t even an echo. Was like that house was so moldy and soft it absorbed my voice.
I didn’t think Shane’d actually shoot me, but no one I knew’d ever drove up to his house and tested his paranoia. So I got out of the car low, but not so low I’d look like I was sneaking. In other words, I looked damn precisely like I was sneaking and made myself a good target besides, which shows the value of compromise.
Shane, I’m coming up to the house, I called.
Not a sound. But there wasn’t nothing to do now but do it, so I shut my car door and started walking forward real slow, up past her car. And then, Jesus!
I’m standing by that open car door, looking at this old lady, and she’s got a big hole in her chest, and there’s blood spattered all over the far window and a big smear of fingers through that blood like she reached up to grab the window and then gave up and just slid back down to the seat. She’s laying horizontal, her legs in the driver’s seat, her shoulders in the passenger’s. The shotgun blast must have lifted her right up and knocked her over. Her eyes’re staring at the velour of the car roof, blank and blue as marbles. But I can handle that. Even the two-day stink I can handle. What froze me were the goddamn snakes.
I know snakes will crawl into open cars for warmth. Brock Morrison still talks about that time twenty years ago it happened to his wife and she drove fifty miles with the damn thing on her lap, afraid to move. But that was just one of the sonsabitches. I was looking at snakes everywhere, twisted around like some puzzle that wouldn’t never unravel. Snakes on the floorboards, the dash, slung over the backs of the seats. And that wasn’t the worst of it. There were snakes all over her body, twisted in figure eights around her almost-nothing breasts, snakelaces wrapped around her withered, rotting neck and snakelets around her bony ankles and wrists. Snakes in her hair, vined around her feet. Crowned and booted with snakes.
Wasn’t a soul in the county knew Shane well enough to confirm he actually had rattlesnakes living with him, though talk was he let them curl around his feet while he drank his evening coffee before he went out poaching. But who the hell’d believe that kind of shit? Sure as hell not me. I got enough to do sorting out the bizarre from the just plain strange without adding in the implausible. But shit! Now I had to wonder just what was in that house. When I was finally able to mov
e I went toward it real slow, watching every goddamn grass blade and every goddamn shadow under every goddamn grass blade.
I stood on the cinder blocks Shane used for steps, wondering if there were snakes curled up inside them. I moved to the side of the door and turned the knob and pushed. The door swung in, but nothing happened. Now I had me a hell of a fix. If I walked in slow, the crazy bastard might shoot me standing up, and if I barged in rolling on the floor like on some goddamn TV show, I might be rolling into a dozen rattlers. I eased away from the door and ducked under the kitchen window, then peered in sideways through it. It was so grimy and streaked and covered with dirt I couldn’t see a thing, and I didn’t want to get too close, so I’m peering and peeking at an angle trying to see through that dirty glass, when my eyes adjust and instead of seeing past the glass I look right at it, and them smears ain’t dirt blocking my view, they’re blood spatters turned dirt-brown, and specks of dried-out tissue and little slivers of bone.
Shane! I called. You stupid sonofabitch, Shane! You get your ass out here, hear?
Nothing. Just a constant, swishing sound I’d been hearing a while already, which just then I realized what it was. It was snake-skin moving against itself, so goddamn many of them sonsabitches in that house it sounded like wind in a forest in there.
Goddammit, Shane! If you don’t get your ass out here, I’ll—
But I didn’t have no idea what I’d do. I looked at that dried blood on the windowpane and thought: There’s someone dead in there, and there ain’t but two vehicles, and one’s hers and the other’s Shane’s, so it don’t take no Dick Tracy to figure out whose blood’s on the window.
