Swift to Chase

by Laird Barron

  I shot two males, but made him do the skinning.

  * * *

  It got dark and we knocked off for dinner at that seedy tavern of our initial fateful rendezvous. I compounded my daily quota of moral transgressions by chomping a steak and powering a couple of beers on his tab. Although, much as it pained me to acknowledge, blasting coyotes hadn’t been bad.

  In fact, I’d rather enjoyed it, tried to convince myself coyote murder was therapy, if not law of the jungle justice. Doing unto predators who surely did unto the weak and the wounded, and kittens. I am human, thus a justifier of irreconcilable behavior. Therapy, right.

  Therapy shouldn’t get the pulse pumping, no. Lining up the trotting coyote in the scope, waiting for the precise instant, then half an exhale, squeezing the trigger, and watching the animal kick over, its slyness no bulletproof shield. Goddess of death, that’s me. We aren’t so far removed from the primitive iterations of our species that slurped blood from the jugular. Like dirty, sleazy sex with a complete stranger, I’d probably hate myself later. As long as my pet cowboy plied me with drinks and physical comfort, that eventuality could be held at bay. I could drown myself in his bad influence and not worry about the bill that was surely coming due.

  The waitress, a double dee bimbo, hung on him as floozies will do, called him Steffy and batted her fake lashes to put out a fire. I wondered if he’d fucked her, thought probably, definitely. He went to the men’s room and I caught her in passing, asked how they knew each other, sizing up the competition, I told myself. Flexing the claws, that was it. She gave me a dead cow stare and said she didn’t know my boyfriend, slung him drinks and that didn’t mean shit from Shinola, and kept trucking. Busy woman. Bumpkins at every table and bellied to the bar, even on a Sunday night. Her whore purse would be stuffed with folding green by last call and the long walk in the dark to her Pinto at the employee end of the lot.

  Hoyle returned with more beer. Sauntered back to the table with more beer, to be accurate. Bar lights backlighted him Travolta style. Best looking dude in the joint that night, maybe every night. His totem animal was something savage and furtive, it watched me from beneath heavy lids.

  Expansive with alcohol, I said, “It occurs to me that this dog mutilation spree could be the work of a coyote hunter. Or any kind of hunter.”

  “What spree?” Hoyle sipped Pabst. His lips were thin and secretive. His lips and his teeth also belonged to the animal.

  “The thing. The thing. Ninety dogs, minus heads and paws. A satanic cult or a thrill kill club, according to the yokels. The sensation sweeping the nation.”

  “Yeah, that. I don’t really like dogs very much. Haven’t paid attention to the gossip. On your mind, huh?”

  “I like dogs. A lot.”

  “Coyotes get no love?”

  “Humans have a pact with dogs. You don’t break a pact.”

  “Not particular to them. Not really.”

  “Humans or dogs?”

  “Dogs. Animals. They’re filthy.”

  “It’s an unattractive quality in a man.”

  He smiled, slow and easy. Occurred to me that I wasn’t expansive, I was drunk.

  “You think I’m stupid. The way you speak to me.” He didn’t sound mad.

  “Shallow. I think you’re shallow.” The double dee bimbo with her Daisy Dukes and red pumps, the fact he’d had her every which way, provoked my mean streak.

  He studied his fingernails. Took a long pull on his brew, wiped his mouth. When he looked at me I saw myself, a pale blur, Casper the Friendly Ghost’s sarcastic little sister. “Did you hear they’re building a telescope in Hawaii that’s more powerful than anything ever invented?”

  “Why, no, Steff. I did not.” Steffy is what nearly escaped.

  “Know what they’re going to look at with that super-duper telescope?”

  “The mother of all telescopes? Let me guess…The stars?”

  “The beginning.”

  “The beginning of what?”

  “Of everything.”

  * * *

  He poured cheaper than Cuervo tequila all over my skin and lapped it up. No lights, no radio serenade, his breath hot in the hollow of my throat, kissed bruises on my arms, my inner thighs. After, the trailer became cold as a grave and an inkling of the consequences began to sink into my thick skull. Stars blinked through the window slot. Coyotes sang of death and vengeance on the prairie.

  Hoyle rolled onto his side. His breathing steadied. I thought he’d fallen asleep when he said in a slurred voice, “It doesn’t follow that a coyote hunter is going after dogs. Not a real coyote hunter, I mean.” His lighter snicked and soon came a slow roll of smoke. That cigarette was almost gone before he finished his thought. “The coyotes are business. This other thing. It’s pleasure.”

  My nakedness became quite acute.

  He laid his rough hand on my belly and said, “Considering what you’ve seen, what you’ve been through. Maybe you should leave this alone.”

  The trailer settled. Out there, a breeze moaned and wind chimes clinked to accompany the coyote chorus. All those dead stars shone on.

  “This has been waiting for me,” I said to him while he snored.

  * * *

  Monday was riding-a-tractor-in-the-back-forty-of-some-hayseed’s-ranch-day and Hoyle departed before sunrise. I slept in until the heat made an oven of the Airstream. Glass of warm water from the tap in hand, I explored the property, ducking under withered gray clotheslines, and forging through stunted shrubs, stumps, and earth mounds that disgorged ant convoys that streamed black in the sand. Little biting fuckers were everywhere underfoot. Tried to avoid crushing too many, but you know. That ubiquitous breeze whispered in the grass, fluted through soda bottles arranged as dingy candelabrums made of sticks, rattled the chimes and mussed my hair. The wind chimes were clumped in the petrified grasp of bushes and scrub trees, dozens of them. Metal tinged and pinged and it was almost there for me. Almost. The puzzle squirmed and refused to crystallize.

  I got that sense of unfriendly scrutiny, of being the object of a malevolent desire, how the coyote must feel as crosshairs zero in right before its brains are blasted out the other side, yet different, this was all around me, and I ditched the glass and beat it for the trailer, ran no different than the panicked heroine in a horror flick with a chainsaw gunning maniac on her heels. Locked the door and had a breather, fists clenched, heart in spasms, gulping for air. No safer inside, though, I knew that.

  Nothing happened and I calmed down, tried the television, got no picture, tried the radio, a scratchy gospel station only, and for a long stretch I sat in a lawn chair, knife balanced on my knee, while dust motes swirled and sweat poured into my socks. I put the knife away and eyed the clutter. Laundry, boxes upon boxes of magazines and Christmas lights and photograph albums, yellow receipts, camping gear, miscellanea.

  Better believe I took the opportunity to ransack the place. It didn’t amount to anything.

  * * *

  There wasn’t a discussion regarding how long I’d stay or what it meant. Hoyle drove into the dark heart of each dawn. I’d smoke my first cigarette while his taillights dwindled. Evenings he’d straggle in from the red haze, caked in range dirt, pockets full of hay and gravel, shower and wolf his supper, down a six pack, collapse, roll onto me to fuck me somewhere along the line. My contribution was to shovel the long neglected barbeque pit and throw on hamburgers to chase all that beer, and to get fucked. Could have been worse duty and it got me where I wanted to go, or at least it got me closer and closer.

  Other nights we hit the tavern.

  Weeknights it was just us chickens in a suddenly cavernous hall. Everybody off hunting Grendel, I said, curious if he’d get it. With him it was impossible to tell. He was a cold one, my Steffy Hoyle, sharper than he appeared, possibly. No stray emotions. He didn’t raise his voice or get overly excited, not even during sex, except I woke from a nightmare of strangulation to hollering and war whooping, the strident wh
ine of an engine, stared out the window and he had that Kawasaki hell bent for leather, headlight drilling a hole into the perfect darkness. Dead drunk, naked but for hat and boots, he shrieked in atavistic joy as he slalomed through the minefield of stumps and gopher holes in the field, revving that bike for crazy as a motherfucker jumps over fallen logs and grassy berms. Crashed it in the yard while cutting donuts. Laid the machine over and it flew fifty or sixty feet, smoked and died. Took some skin off his shins and palms, the bloody mess not quite as bad as it looked. I cleaned him up, picked gravel and bits of grass from the wounds. He didn’t flinch, sat stinking of alcohol, legs akimbo, eyes wild, then dull and duller, sank into a stupor, then fell asleep and in the morning it hadn’t happened. But it did happen, and several other times, although he managed not to wreck the bike so badly that he needed medical attention. Matter of time. Man with a death wish usually gets what he wants.

  Once, we cruised over to his friend Lonnie’s house, a shotgun shack not far from the county landfill. Lonnie was a biker, or a biker wannabe, kept a massive Harley in a makeshift carport under a canvas tarp because he didn’t have a garage. Guy was brawny and hairy, wore tinted aviator glasses indoors and out. Smelled of hair gel and musk. His fingernails were blacked from getting mashed. Tats and a death metal T shirt. Death to Tyrants, Death to Infidels, Death to Everybody. Chained a pair of scarred and muscular pit bulls to the bumper of a truck on blocks. Grizzled brutes with jaws wide enough to crush my head. Sweet as puppies, not a mean bone in them. He didn’t appear overly fond of the dogs and they were indifferent to him. Dogs were real friendly toward me, though. Slobbery kisses and paws to the jaw rough housing and such. I played with them while the boys chatted about riding choppers and hunting and guns. Lonnie also moonlighted as a coyote culler. Birds of a feather, right?

  On the ride home I asked if Lonnie fought the dogs, tried to make it sound casual. Hoyle didn’t answer. He pressed on the accelerator and drifted into the oncoming lane as we rounded a bend. Needle pegged at eighty. Almost went head to head with a good old boy on a road grader with the blade up. Got to give it to Hoyle — he tapped the brakes and swung us past with inches to spare and his free hand never stopped stroking my leg.

  During the second week I dragged a ten-speed from under the trailer where it rusted among abandoned tire rims and sheets of tin siding. A bit of chain oil and wrench work, I got the bicycle fixed right up and I pedaled my ass into town. Hadn’t ridden a bike since high school and the six-mile slog nearly precipitated a coronary conclusion. Instant blisters, instant sunburn, steam rose from me in a trailing shadow. I staggered inside the mom and pop on Main Street and drank two quarts of lime Gatorade while Methuselah the Clerk observed my antics with gap-toothed bemusement. Goddamned Gatorade made a snowball in my gut that wanted to ricochet right back out, but I held on, held it down. I hung tough and paid the clerk, smiled sweetly as if my lobster sunburn and chattering teeth weren’t nothing but a thing.

  I composed myself and moseyed around town for the rest of the afternoon. Youngish female and not terribly unattractive, nobody mistook me for a pervert or a weirdo as they would’ve if I’d been some bearded, sunbaked dude lurching in off the prairie. People skills, I had them, and most folks were willing to shoot the shit with me as they watered lawns, or washed cars, or slumped in the shade of their porches. I wore my shades and gave everybody a different story, all of them pure baloney. Nobody knew Hoyle, although stoner skateboard kids loitering in the mom and pop parking lot had seen him around, and I’m confident the pancake makeup tarts at the realtor and plumbing supply offices would’ve gotten misty-eyed at his mention.

  A wasted Vietnam vet parked in a wheelchair at the entrance to the Diamond Dee Gentleman’s Club panhandling for change knew Lonnie; of course he fought his dogs, Leroy and Gunther, tons of locals did. Pit fighting was real popular. The veteran owned a collie mix with the softest, saddest brown eyes I ever did see and he covered the dog’s ears when he leaned close to confide that the hardcore crowd used house pets and strays as bait for the killer breeds. The bait thing notwithstanding, fighting dogs in gladiatorial exhibitions was innocent, really! Death was rare, usually an ear or an eye got removed at the worst, a lot of yip and yelp signifying nothing, so to speak. The other stuff going down? The dogs piled into sacrificial mounds off route 80, or buried alive in burlap bags down to Stabinham Creek? Now, that was insane. Whoever was scragging dogs wholesale was a psycho sonofabitch from the darkest pit of hell and woe unto the sap he eventually turned his knife and arrows against, because sure as horses made little green apples it would come to human butchery. See if it didn’t. That assessment seemed to be the consensus and a page three story in the paper confirmed law enforcement, including the FBI, agreed. Whether the feds planned to make it a priority was another matter.

  Damned if I knew what I hoped to learn from this shotgun approach to detective work. Definitely I was bored out of my skull, lurking at Hoyle’s trailer. Definitely recent life events had activated a recessive sleuthing gene.

  I pedaled home. Redness pooled on the horizon.

  * * *

  In a disappointing development, Hoyle and I didn’t screw for four nights running. He poured liquor down his throat and fell into a slumber that was as unto death itself. Did not even snore, did not so much as twitch. I began to wonder what was in it for me because my days in that backwater town weren’t proving out in any way, shape, or form. I dreamed of old loves lost to shipwreck and mayhem, and I dreamed of dogs I’d known, all of them gone back into the dirt. Dad waved to me from a distance where he stood amid knee-high grass, a warning in his grim smile, the white skull of a cow he raised in his left hand. He’d seldom tried to tell me anything requiring words when I was a hellion child and he didn’t now. A golden darkness radiated from him and pushed me into the territory that lies a breath or two on the other side of waking. Erotic nightmares followed. These involved Hoyle, although his face was obscured by the shadow of his hat. After he’d gotten his rocks off he’d shove me from the moving truck, or leap from it himself, leave me to tumble down a cliff, be consumed in fire. Or I’d emerge unscathed and a piece of the underbrush would detach and come after me, a bear covered in leaves, bits of a shredded net, reared on its hind legs and full of Satan’s own desire to fuck me or devour me, one then the other.

  I’d emerge into consciousness, aroused and afraid.

  With the frustration of one type of lust, the wandering kind crept into my thoughts, had me eyeing the straight shot to the distant highway, phantom engines rumbling, phantom exhaust on my lips, headlights branding an SOS into my frontal lobes. Except, Sunday came around before I got resolved and it was coyote sniping time again.

  Hoyle pushed coffee at me, said he hadn’t toured this particular zone in several months, then we were in the rig and moving toward a seam of light above the mountains. We didn’t talk, not that there was ever much chatter, but this was two-cactuses-on-a-date quiet. The drive was longer than I expected. The road went on and on, degraded from blacktop to gravel, to dirt, to scabbed tracts of bare earth in a sea of bleached grass. Plains spread around us, larger and deeper than the sky. Spectral and wan, gradually acquiring substance like film in an acid bath. Landmarks I’d learned recently were absent or in the wrong direction.

  He stopped the truck and shut it off. Reached into a duffel bag and presented me with a rabbit facsimile. Plush and brown, wired to emote vulnerability at various decibels. My task was to pace one hundred steps upwind and set the decoy in play. Once I trotted back we’d find a likely spot with a clear line of fire and settle ourselves to wait. He pecked my forehead by way of dismissal and began to scribble in his culling book. I was tempted to argue, to sneer and inform him he wasn’t the bwana of me. Wasn’t worth the hassle. I had a hunch I’d get on the highway east any day now, leave this shit-kicker paradise in the rearview. Thus and so.

  I trudged into the prairie, sullenly counting paces, each step precisely, more or less, one yard as my D
ad the Marine had taught his kiddies. Made the football field-long hike and set the robot rabbit on a log in a patch of sand and weeds. I turned and saw the truck, grill blazing with reflected sunlight, and no sign of Hoyle.

  As I approached, I fully expected him to step from behind the opposite side of the cab, shaking the morning dew off his pecker, but he didn’t. It became apparent he wasn’t crouched in hiding and I came over and tried the doors. Locked tight, no keys in the ignition, no duffle bag with food and water. His rifle was missing from the rack. I shaded my eyes and turned a full circle, scanning for his outline against the blankness. I shouted his name, and in the middle of all this I glanced at the bed of the truck and realized the Varmint Suit wasn’t there either. The spit in my mouth dried.

  Oh, what goes through a woman’s mind at a moment like that.

  Instinct kicked in and I went from a standstill to a sprint, six maybe seven strides in a random direction, and did a Supergirl dive. Scratched, bruised, winded, I didn’t feel a thing except my heart trying to climb out of my mouth. Those newsreels about trench fighting in World War I, G.I.’s belly-down kissing the dirt as they wriggled under barbed wire? That was me navigating a shallow depression away from the track.

  I wormed along until my arms failed. I rolled over and lay still, half covered in swaying grass. Clouds inched past my face. Horses, a hound, Dumbo’s lopsided head. A pair of hawks drifted along crosscurrents, wheeling and wheeling. Gnats bit me and I didn’t care, my being was consumed with listening for the crunch of footsteps, although I imagined if he spotted me I would hear exactly what the doomed coyote did in its last split second on earth.