These Heroic, Happy Dead

by Luke Mogelson

  One afternoon, while checking on the irrigation, Mayeaux had heard what sounded like a human cry. Back in the trees, he’d found two animals wrangling on the ground. A fisher cat, it appeared, and a doe. Both were bloodied and plastered with wet leaves. Mayeaux grabbed a branch and brandished it. The fisher scurried off. For a long time, the doe wobbled on its stiltlike legs. Then it charged at Tom and jumped into his arms.

  Mayeaux held it. He felt the doe’s thin hide; beneath the hide, the ribs; beneath the ribs, the lungs; beneath the lungs, a warmth; beneath the warmth, a shudder. He recognized that shudder. It was a response to sounds he couldn’t hear, odors he couldn’t smell, and dangers of which he, Mayeaux, would never have to be afraid.

  Later, when he told Nate about it, Nate snorted. “It’s a fisher cat cries like that!” he said, and laughed at Tom for succoring the real killer after chasing off its victim with a stick.

  —

  A week after the storm, Hannah told Mayeaux that she would spend the next few months in Tahoe, with her sister. She didn’t have it in her, she explained: a whole winter out there alone.

  He helped her pack up the Suburban. Before she pulled away, Hannah rolled her window down. “About the pigs,” she said.

  “We can talk when you get back.”

  “I want it done while I’m gone.”

  “I hear you. But why decide right now?”

  “I’m not,” Hannah said.

  He’d known it was coming. Even so, the following week, when he slaughtered and butchered the boar and sows, Mayeaux was unprepared for the loneliness that gripped him. The problem was that Leo had been right: although he did everything that needed to be done, and many things that didn’t—although he mowed the field, painted the roof, stained the deck, cleaned the barn, chopped wood, cleared brush, and brought shit to the dump—without the hogs, there just was not enough to do.

  He spent the next several weeks driving up and down the fire road, looking for trees felled during the storm. By December, he’d stacked enough split logs against the Airstream to keep it heated through half a dozen winters. It was around this time, they later reckoned, that he started visiting the house.

  Hannah had left Mayeaux a key so that he could clear the pipes before they froze, and first he got into the habit of using her kitchen to prepare his lunch and supper. He built fires in the fireplace. He snooped around the rooms. Evenings, he sat at Nate’s desk, in Nate’s study, drinking Nate’s booze. One night he stumbled to the closet where Hannah stored the deer mounts. Seizing a twelve-pointer by the antlers, he lugged it to the living room. The screws on which it once had hung still poked out from the wall. Mayeaux climbed onto a chair to catch them with the brackets. When he crashed, the impact popped his dentures clean out of his mouth.

  Mayeaux scrambled after them. He fit them back onto his gums, went to the bathroom, checked the mirror. It looked like someone had hit him with a bat.

  —

  It was January when they came again. Earlier that afternoon the sun had broken out, melting the topmost layer of the snow and creating a liquidy slush that had since refrozen to form a brittle crust. As Mayeaux trudged toward the aspens, the .30-.30 on his shoulder and his jacket pocket full of ammo, his boots crunched through with every heavy step.

  The hounds were down the ridge and square into the wetlands by the time he reached the creek. He stretched out on the far bank and loaded.

  When the army had finally given him the dentures, Mayeaux had had to make an effort to try to smile more. Not until after he was discharged, went on the road, met the Tuckers, and settled in Plumas—where no one knew the teeth were fake—did he really find a knack for it. The day Nate died, Mayeaux had been practicing his smile while mowing the field. That was why he’d hit the stump.

  Nate was in the hutch. When he heard the loud metallic clank, the blades slamming into wood, he came running out.

  “Don’t tell me,” Nate said.

  Mayeaux had his foot on the clutch. The engine idled; the drive shaft was engaged.

  “Should I shut it down?”

  Nate bent over the gear box, inspecting the bolts. “How many times?” he said. “How many times have you mowed this fuckin’ field?”

  “I’m gonna shut it down.”

  “If we need new blades,” said Nate, “it’s coming from your pay.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Is it? I guess you can afford it, can’t you?” Then, yelling over the engine, Nate told Tom that he knew about the plants. He knew about Dave.

  “What do you think she’ll say when I tell her?” Nate asked. He shook his head. “I suggest you start thinking about where you’re going next.”

  Those words! How those words would come to haunt Mayeaux!

  Before he could think about it he’d done it. All he did was move his boot a smidge; the pedal leapt up on its own. When the shaft spun into action it snared a piece of Nate’s clothing—the cuff of his jacket, maybe, or the tail of his shirt—and whipped him around several dozen times, each revolution pulping his face and legs against the steel blade carriage, the rocky ground. By the time Mayeaux reengaged the clutch, Nate was wrapped on the equipment like he was empty clothes. There were pieces of him everywhere; there was nothing but a gory rag.

  A long time passed before Mayeaux turned around and looked. A long time he sat on that tractor, staring at those mountains in the pretty, pinkish light…

  When the lead dog came thrashing out of the dark it didn’t even slow, just kept flying full-bore into the shallows, straining its neck to breathe above the splash. Mayeaux nearly missed his chance, getting off a hurried round as the bluetick clambered at the bank. By dumb luck it was a head shot. The bluetick somersaulted backward, landing in a mess, oozing from its shattered skull. As the rest of the pack caught up to Gypsum and saw the dead hound with its brain sprayed across the ice, most of them reared back and cowered in the pines, whimpering like pups. Mayeaux picked them off. The last two, in a panic, wound up in a deep part of the creek, scrabbling at boulders too slick to purchase. After Mayeaux killed them, they turned slowly in the current, catching on a log. Back in the trees, one of the bitches was howling from a gut wound; Mayeaux sent a last bullet through her neck and then at last the woods were quiet. All around him, hot brass burrowed narrow tunnels in the snow.

  —

  Henry Parson leaned back in his chair with his boots on the desk, phone in his lap. The receiver had one of those curvaceous shoulder-rest accessories that had always struck the sheriff as somehow sexual or feminine or both, but which he made use of anyway now, seeing as no one was around.

  It was time to call. Almost a week had passed since Dave Campbell and Leo DeMint had shown up at the station. Henry had been tempted to inform Hannah Tucker that same day. If nothing else, it was an excuse to talk to her. The news, though, put him in an awkward spot. No way around it: it was embarrassing. The pig farmer’s widow had been right about Tom Mayeaux all along—while he, Henry Parson, a twenty-year lawman and the elected county sheriff, had dismissed her suspicions out of hand. Henry cringed to recall the numerous occasions on which he had reassured Hannah in the condescending style of someone who’d seen it all before—telling her it was only natural, she was looking for a reason, somebody to blame.

  Even after Dave had told him what he’d witnessed that day from up on the ridge, Henry’d been reluctant to believe it. (Neither Campbell nor DeMint was exactly a model citizen himself, and it was not beyond the possible that they were out to settle some unrelated beef with Tom.) But then, when the sheriff drove out to the Tucker place to have a chat with him, he’d found the Airstream empty, the flatbed missing, Mayeaux long gone.

  That day in the sty, Mayeaux must have lied about where he was from. Henry had failed to locate any relatives. He’d tracked down his old commanding officer, a major now, who only had the vaguest recollection of Mayeaux. The major had given Henry a contact for Mayeaux’s old platoon leader, and that man had gone on and on
about Tom—couldn’t say enough for him, exemplary soldier that he’d been.

  Exemplary.

  Henry dialed the number. How was he going to explain this to her? What manner should he affect—a friend’s? In what tone of voice was Henry going to tell Hannah Tucker that there were indications the boy he was now convinced had killed her husband was also living in her house, sleeping in her bed, using her things? Should he mention the buck head in the fireplace, its hide singed black, the plastic nose and eyeballs melted?

  No. He’d just urge her not to worry and swear that they would find him. No empty promise, that. Where, after all, could Tom Mayeaux go?

  I was staring at a brown sky. Just moments earlier a researcher from the United Nations Ornithological Department had told me that fecal particulate from the city’s open sewage system made up an alarming proportion of the atmosphere in Kabul. The researcher was the sort of person who would say, “If you really want something to write about…” or “You’re looking for a story? What if I were to tell you…” as if, before meeting him, you had lived in darkness, scribbling claptrap of zero consequence to anybody. He’d invited me to lunch because he had some urgent information regarding birds. Something to do with the great migrations above the Hindu Kush, the desertification of Iranian wetlands, mass extinction. “Have you ever seen a Siberian crane?” he asked me. “No, you haven’t. No one in Afghanistan has seen a Siberian crane in the past seventy years.”

  I pretended to take notes. My notepad, back then, was mostly pretend notes. Many of the pages featured detailed sketches of me killing myself by various means. One especially tedious interview—with a mullah, another fucking mullah holding forth behind a vertical index finger—had yielded a kind of comic strip of me leaping from a skyscraper, shooting myself midair, and landing in front of a bus.

  A waiter appeared and asked whether we wanted any coffee. He wore an anachronistic tribal costume and a prayer cap adorned with sequins. The garb complemented the restaurant’s verdant rose garden, the pleasantly burbling fountain, and the private gazebo in which we sat, the researcher and I, surrounded by paisley tapestries.

  “I already told you I don’t drink coffee,” the researcher said. “I wanted pomegranate juice.”

  “One pomegranate juice?” the waiter asked.

  “Not now. Now it’s too late.” The researcher pointed at his plate. “Now I’ve eaten.”

  “No pomegranate juice?” the waiter asked.

  “No pomegranate juice,” the researcher said. “Bring me a green tea. Can you manage a green tea?”

  “One Afghan chai.”

  “I’ll have one as well,” I said.

  “Two Afghan chai.”

  As soon as the waiter turned his back, the researcher rolled his eyes. “Afghan chai. It’s Lipton, for Christ’s sake. I’m sorry, what was I saying? Ah, yes, you’ve never seen a Siberian crane…”

  I returned to my sketch. A few days ago, I’d posted a minor web item about a contractor who’d got himself decapitated while transporting a duffel bag full of cash across the Kandahari Desert. There was a new technique, seemed. Rather than a knife, they used wire. They looped the wire around your neck, stepped on your back, and pulled up with a rapid sawing motion. Picture a bowler polishing a bowling ball. Anyway, I was trying to draw the researcher doing this to me (while, at the same time, I double-fisted a bottle of rat poison and a bottle of arsenic), but I was distracted by the gardener, a bearded man dressed in the same traditional robes as the waiter, roaming the grounds with a pair of clippers. Every couple of steps, the gardener would pause, seat the stem of a rose between the two blades, begin to squeeze, think better, release the stem, and continue on his way. I watched him do this maybe half a dozen times.

  My failure to sympathize with the birds—which, thanks to the drones and the Arabs and the fecal particulate, appeared to be suffering an unprecedented genocide—was no doubt attributable in part to my hangover. The night before, I’d stayed too long at the Norwegian embassy. I’d been trying to get into the pantsuit of a consultant for the World Bank. She was new to Kabul and, I sensed, typically stimulated by the proximity of violence and privation. (Not the reality, never the reality—the proximity.) Hours of careful effort had been undermined by a brief, emasculating incident at the snacks table. We were loading up our paper napkins when a drunk Frenchman stumbled over and began dipping pieces of bruschetta into the bowl of tomato salad. I knew this Frenchman. He was into gemstones or helicopter parts or some such, and he was a dangerous, erratic alcoholic. Therefore, although the Frenchman was polluting the tomato salad with his dirty French fingernails and even his hairy French knuckles, I pretended not to notice. Not so my consultant. The thing to do was use a fork, she communicated to the Frenchman by offering him one. The Frenchman smiled at us both, took the fork, and stabbed it in the wall, where it stuck like a dart. Then he sank his fist into the bowl of tomato salad, all the way to the wrist, and turned it like a pestle before lifting out a dripping handful. This the Frenchman brutally flung on the bruschetta, which, when he offered it to me, I somehow lacked the courage to decline.

  “Coffee?” the waiter said. I looked up to see him placing two steaming mugs on our table. The researcher drew a breath.

  —

  I was staring at a brown sky. I sat up. The first thing I noticed was a leg. It stood a yard from me, still socked and shoed, as if it had come detached midstride. Next I saw the hole in the wall. It looked as if a wrecking ball had been swung through. Cinder blocks and sandbags and concertina wire all lay in a dusty heap. A dog sat on top of the heap. The dog—one of those Kabuli street hounds glistening with bald patches, a tumor the size of a cantaloupe hanging between its haunches, and no doubt an ear infection that caused it to list and wander in psychotic circles—was barking mutely. I realized I was deaf. All I could detect was a high-pitched tone, like a test of the emergency broadcast system. The emergency broadcast system? I thought. Jesus, I was getting old. Then I wondered: Tinnitus—rhymes with “hit us” or “smite us”?

  Maybe this was only a test.

  I was watching a woman pull a long splinter out of her cheek. It kept coming out, like a magic trick.

  “Sue?” I said.

  It was Sue Kwan, from Human Rights Watch. She’d been at the Norwegian embassy. I’d bluntly propositioned her after abasing myself in front of the World Bank consultant. Kwan had rebuffed me so gently, with such pity. I’d responded by calling her latest report biased and confusingly structured.

  Now she looked at me, wide-eyed, unable to answer on account of the splinter.

  “I’m sorry, Sue,” I said.

  I can only imagine how absurd it must have sounded. Sue, though, seemed not to have heard me either. I followed her gaze back to the hole in the wall. Several men with rifles were climbing over the rubble, into the garden.

  —

  Sue Kwan was a good source. She always gave me early drafts of her reports, despite her organization’s rules against doing so. Furthermore, her motives, unlike those of most of us, weren’t really suspect. She was not stimulated by the proximity of violence and privation. A genuine person, Kwan: she was there to help. Of course, I often went around deriding her for being stupid and naïve.

  I remember this one time, we were sharing a taxi, sitting in traffic after a party at the Dutch embassy, when a street urchin carrying a crate of eggs collapsed on the sidewalk and began convulsing and foaming at the mouth. The old fake-a-seizure gimmick—but Sue fell for it. She got out of the taxi and crouched over the boy.

  “Sue, get back in the car!” I shouted.

  “He needs help,” she said.

  “It’s a trick,” I told her. “It’s fake.”

  And here Sue turned on me a look that I recognized immediately. It was the look I’d always imagined God would have were I ever forced to meet Him.

  “So what?” she said.

  So what!

  Maybe she wasn’t so stupid, naïve. But then, why had she ra
ised her hand? Why was she waving at the men with guns climbing through the wall? Did she actually think they were there to help? Or could it be that Sue was offering herself, at last making the sacrifice she’d been put on earth to make?

  “No, Sue,” I said.

  She paid no heed. She kept waving. One of the men lifted his rifle and shot her in the stomach. Sue slumped forward, and the man walked up and shot her in the head. That was the end of Sue Kwan. That was the death of one of the few genuine, unsuspect people I encountered during all my time over there.

  Or one of the stupidest, the most naïve.

  The gunmen were clean-shaven, clad in normal city attire. There were four of them. Each had a Kalashnikov with a banana clip duct-taped upside down to another banana clip. This way, when the first banana clip was empty, he could simply eject and flip it over, rather than having to fumble around in his pocket or what-have-you, wasting precious shooting time.

  One wore an opalescent vest that seemed to shimmer and undulate in the sunlight. What was opalescent and seemed to shimmer and undulate in the sunlight? Pearls, I thought.

  Then I thought: ball bearings.

  They did not dally, these four. They got right down to killing. The gunman who’d shot Kwan appeared to be the leader. He yelled instructions to his comrades, who fanned out and started finishing off the survivors of the blast. I watched them execute a fat American who looked vaguely familiar. Yes, he was DEA, an adviser or analyst working on the poppy problem. He was down among the roses, bloody and weeping. When the gunman loomed over him, pointing the muzzle at his face, this fellow did the most peculiar thing. He grasped the travel wallet that hung around his neck—a transparent window on the front displaying his security-clearance badge—and held it up.