“Kid. You shot me like my brother.”
“I’m sorry, Manolo, but why’d you run away?”
“Chance to go to the Albikerk, get tortillas.”
“So it was just a story?”
“Had to do it, kid, get away from them beatings.”
“You’ll go to the spirit prison, Manolo.”
Splitface laughed again. “Sure, kid, su—”
He lay dead, blood spilt on the barren red earth. Rulon fetched a pick and shovel to bury him. He’d just started to dig a hole in the hard earth when the others returned. Two women were with them, one older, the other not much more than a child. They walked on either side of Nephi’s horse, hands tied to the saddle horn. Both wept continuously.
“Did Splitface run?”
“Yes. He gave me no choice.”
“You did right. Good burying him too. We’ll camp here a few days, water and graze the stock, rest up. Obadiah, help your brother.”
Obadiah grabbed the pick and went to work. He took a breather while Rulon shoveled out the dirt.
“What happened?”
Obadiah was unusually quiet and subdued. He looked around to see if anyone else was listening.
“We rode down. Pa tried talking, but they just jabbered foreign, like Splitface did. Then they got real mad because Nephi was looking at the women.”
“Is that when you shot them?”
“Pretty much. I don’t know just what happened. Maybe one raised his hoe first. I know Nephi fired straight into one from the hip and Pa finished the other.”
“And now they’re just out there?”
“Pa said bury them later. He said get the women out first.”
When the hole was several feet deep, they grabbed Splitface’s body, dragged him over, and lowered him into it. After the earth was tamped, Rulon prayed for him. The rest of the day passed quickly. The men ate a pot of cooked beans with chunks of rabbit meat from one of the shacks. Hyrum fed the women too. He made Parley and Nephi bury the dead men. Rulon was set to hunting game.
Grateful to get away, Rulon wandered for several hours, as far from the shacks as he could. The water drew what little life remained, small game like quail and rabbit. Unaccustomed to humans, they were pitifully easy to shoot. Bag full, Rulon lingered and didn’t return to the campsite until after dark.
“Where were you? Never mind, least you got a lot. You want supper?”
“No thanks, Pa. I’m not hungry.”
“Please yourself. Go to bed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Parley, take the first watch. Keep a sharp lookout by the gully. Someone might be out there. Take a three-hour stretch. Take my watch to keep time.”
He handed Parley a digital wristwatch with a luminous dial, one of his most treasured possessions. Parley left for his post, studying the shining gadget as he went.
“Everyone else sleep. Got another long day.”
Rulon laid out his bedroll next to Obadiah’s and crawled into it.
“Why’d Pa give Parley his watch? He never lets anyone touch it.”
“I don’t know. Go to sleep.”
Rulon rolled over onto his side and closed his eyes. He eventually lapsed into an unhappy, uncertain slumber, haunted by gray shadows and without real rest.
“AAAAAAUUUUGGGHHH.”
An awful scream tore through the night, the roar of a wounded bull in mortal pain. Rulon and Obadiah both leaped up, bolt awake.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. Get your rifle and I’ll get a light.”
Obadiah pulled a flashlight from a pack.
“It came from the corral.”
They found Hyrum just outside the corral, naked and covered from throat to chest with deep stab wounds, his clothes in a heap nearby. Ashamed and aghast, his sons stared at his blood-smeared corpse.
“What happened?” Obadiah finally choked out.
“I’ll tell you,” Nephi said.
He strode into the light, rifle slung over his shoulder, flashlight in one hand. With his other hand he dragged the young woman along, pinned by the wrist.
“Your father was a fornicator, ready to lie with a harlot in the dirt.”
“You be quiet, Nephi,” Obadiah said.
“How do you think he died?” Nephi said. “The whore took his knife when he wasn’t looking. See her around, boy? No, you don’t. She ran away. Well, I made sure this one didn’t get away. She’s mine now.”
He yanked her close and shoved his grizzled face next to hers. She shrieked and tried to push him away. Rulon strode over and shoved Nephi full in the chest. Nephi reeled away. The girl broke free and ran behind Rulon.
Nephi bared brown teeth in a snarl. “What do you think you’re doing, boy? Offering violence to your own elder kin? What kind of Allred are you?”
“One that’s had enough. I knew this was wrong from the start, but I couldn’t tell Pa. Now he’s dead. This has gone far enough.”
“Give me back my woman, boy.”
Rulon pointed his rifle at Nephi.
“No.”
“Pull on your own kin, will you? I’ll kill you first.”
He snatched for his rifle,
“Stop that, Cousin Nephi.”
Parley walked up, shotgun leveled at Nephi.
“Rulon’s right. We’ve done enough. We’ll bury Hyrum and leave tomorrow. Nephi, sit by the fire with me until you’ve calmed down.”
“She’s mine, Parley.”
“No, she’s not and that’s the end of it. Now get to the fire.”
They left.
Obadiah said, “Let’s get something to cover Pa.”
“Yes.”
Rulon faced the young girl. Even by torchlight, he could see her large, luminous pupils were black, totally unlike an Allred. He held his hand out.
“Come on, I’ll take care of you now.”
Mark Mellon is a novelist who supports his family by working as an attorney. Short fiction by Mark has recently appeared in Deadman’s Tome, Yellow Mama, and Thuglit. Four novels and over fifty short stories have been published in the USA, U.K., and Ireland. A novella, Escape from Byzantium, won the 2010 Independent Publisher silver medal for fantasy/science fiction. A website featuring his writing is at mellonwritesagain.com.
Ursus Horribilis
by
Nick Manzolillo
It used to be a special occasion when I would stay up to hear the echo of coyotes howling throughout the forest, as if they were declaring over and over that man can’t own everything. Now that I am alone, I hear them nightly. Sometimes, barefoot, holding a can full of backwashed beer, I meet them at the edge of the woods. I howl back but receive only silence.
My dad told me how to hunt, but he didn’t teach me. On the rarest of occasions, he would disappear in the woods with his friends for one or two nights and then he’d come back with stories of polishing off thirty racks of beer and shenanigans that ended with the drunkest fellow being dunked into a lake. He took me shooting at targets out in the woods, sometimes but not often. He’s long dead, and now that I am alone in a house meant for four, I’ve been in need of a hobby. I’ve been teaching myself how to hunt, although I don’t want to kill anything.
I want to aim down the iron sights, take a deep breath, lower the rifle and watch something roam free. I still have Dad’s gun from when I ransacked his garage after the funeral, before my sister sold everything. It’s got all sorts of gizmos and attachments I never played with and in the outside compartment of the gun’s case I found a “Fisherman’s Guidebook,” although the times Dad went fishing were even fewer than the times he went hunting.
Still, all the people I’ve ever met who take their guns or bows out into the woods to kill things and maybe eat them or wear them do it because their fathers taught them, because their family’s been doing it for generations. It’s a strange sensation, picking up a loose thread and trying to spin it into something real. I don’t have any traditions I follow, not
anymore. Just meaningless habits, motions you can go through without thinking, like the morning piss. That’s what I’ve been; one long morning piss, even as the stars poke through the sky.
The woods here are older than most, with sturdy-as-rock oak trees silently screaming their century-long domination. The animals come from generations of their kind—the land has always been their home. Summer and then winter, which runs longer here below the mountains than it does in other places, they have witnessed the extinction of the vast majority of this country’s native inhabitants. Their children survive an endless wave of hunters with guns that evolve faster than they can.
It’s a walk through the woods with a metal stick that can make a loud noise and a stink that burns your nose. I’ve got my wallet in the pockets of my sweats and I almost didn’t bring the gleaming little knife I bought at Walmart until I realized the shirt I had slept in had a front pocket. There’s something about hunters waking up at four-thirty or something. It’s eleven a.m. when my running shoes crunch across a toppled pinecone. I didn’t bring a beer. There is no beer in my hand, so fuck it. I have the same intentions as any professional stalker of the forest. I am okay.
Sober or not, I slip into a ditch about ten minutes into my walk and my ass gets soaked from damp mud. A cluster of thorns snares my wrist and I lie there in that sudden trench on the forest floor I thought was so clear. Tears run down my cheeks. I tell myself they’re only from the sudden pain. I’ve lived in the woods my whole life, but when was the last time I went for a walk in them? She was with me then, that last time, I’m sure of it, although I can’t remember it.
You hear about people from the city who venture out here below the mountain’s shadow. To them, they may as well be in Puerto Rico or something, for how different, for how special, this all seems to them. It just goes to show that when I thought I was leaving, for that same city in the valley, when Jill had that job offer she worked so hard for, balancing an internship on top of her career for the magazine, I thought I was really going to miss this place. I thought I needed the forest around me, blanket that it is. I thought I needed to know that the animals were close. I was afraid of breathing toxic air. Then we never left. Then she got pregnant.
I have nothing to teach anybody. I have nothing to pass on, besides a few acres of land and a house in need of renovations from fixing the plumbing to clearing out the termites chewing through the floors that hold my bed up. I shouldn’t have to worry about any of this anymore. I live alone now. Jill is in the city. The baby never arrived.
I am a hunter. I pull myself up from the random ditch, like the half-dug grave that it is, and I swing up my rifle. I am also the hunted. There are enemies in the forest. They have hidden something from me. I get down and crawl, gently parting the twig fingers and bush-top canopies around me as I creep forward, imagining strangers up ahead surveying my approach. I am a hunter, and this is my forest.
At one point, in the distance, I see a family of turkeys running two by two behind a large mound of glacier-dumped rocks. I run after them, swinging the rifle in my arms, feeling like a soldier. Roots grab my foot but I pull it free. By the time my untested lungs are running hoarse in their attempt to feed me air, I’ve scaled the top of the mound of rocks. Crouching on one knee like a wild hunter from the eighteen hundreds, I peer through the scope for a sign of the walking thanksgiving dinners. Nothing. I wonder what’s harder to chase, a turkey or a chicken. I’m delivered a sudden flash of a small boy or girl, running around a screaming chick in a backyard that is now strewn with weeds and the old rusted door of a pickup truck. I’m playing Rambo instead of learning how to garden, to farm … hah. I’m still taking the easy route.
If I did cap a deer, that’d mean something, I bet. Somewhere, in a place where dreams exist, there would be a complete circle and my father would nod down from whatever eternal blackness he now resides in. I remain perched on the rock with a scope for eyes. I can’t go blasting at tree trunks or snipe off pinecones; that’s the difference between this and playing in the woods like a kid. I have to stalk the inhabitants of this forest. I need to have one of them in my sights and then, like a six-year-old with a light-up gun, I’ll say “pow” and lower the rifle. As if I’ve already fired, a scattering of palm-sized birds rises in the distance. I don’t know their names. If it’s not a thing of prey or a blue jay or a crimson cardinal or a hummingbird then it’s a nameless thing with wings. Glancing across the tallest branches of the treetops, I wonder whether there are bats hiding somewhere in plain sight. They’ve got to go somewhere. I feel like I know them better than the birds, when I’m sitting on the porch at night. They come right close, chasing insects that in turn chase the beams of light from just above my plastic chair. The only caves around here are no more than burrow holes, unless those leathery little things fly all the way to the mountains to rest.
In the distance, what I’ve mistaken for the crumpled remains of a bark stripped tree with branches rising up from the ground like the arms of the living dead becomes something else, as I inspect it with my scope a second time. Bones. A collection of them, forming the physical memory of something, likely a moose. I haven’t seen a live moose since I was a kid, from the back of my father’s pickup as my mom cried out and he hit the brakes. That massive, horned thing stood there, unimpressed by the greasy roar of the pickup. My father switched the engine off and we sat in a silence so alive with the creature before us that my ears hurt from the strange beauty of it all.
I slide down the boulder. My stubborn brain’s reminded I’m not in my twenties anymore when I try to spring to my feet and end up rolling through the underbrush. My rifle bellows out a great, fiery yell and as the tumble ceases I’m lying on my back, staring at the black mouth of my rifle. The pain fades and I’m left thinking, staring down that little precisely round abyss. From the ringing in my ears, the round had been close.
I’ve looked down the barrel before. Half serious, I’ve pressed it against my forehead. Click, click, click. More serious, I’ve even loaded it before turning that little mouth to myself, to give me a kiss. From the porch I’ve enjoyed pulling the gun away, firing it single-handed into the forest. I’ve slept with it, pressed skinny and cold against me in my bed, the scent of its barrel beneath my nose like freshly roasted cigarette fog in Jill’s hair, back when she used to come home, to our home, and smoke her Virginia Slims after every shift.
Any living beast around me for a mile or so is running, hauling ass, hiding. I can’t even pretend to hunt. Most I can do is pick through the bones of something great, and dead.
The pebbles of deer shit I find on my way to the bones nearly revives the hunting fantasy, but I have no way of telling how fresh the poop pellets are as I prod them with my shoe, other than that they squish instead of crack. Some ancient Sioux tracker from a dead age could follow dozens of animals through this forest based off broken bits of foliage, and I can’t read a pile of a shit. Game over.
I have some vague idea about collecting the moose’s antlers and I wonder just how old the bones are. There’s a junk pile accumulating on my kitchen table; a pair of horns would make a nice bowtie for it, until they too become buried. Maybe I could collect the whole skeleton, put it back together with wire. Maybe being an artist is a cure. I’ve driven by isolated lunatics with strange displays in their front yards. Collections of strange, welded things or woodcarvings of animals similar to totem poles. I need to do something. I need what I don’t have. I need what I had.
I’m carrying the rifle backwards, so that its mouth points off behind me. It’s no more than a sentimental toy I can’t leave out here. I’m at least an hour past my property lines, wherever they’re officially drawn. The adrenaline went, scattering with the rifle shot, which I never should have loaded until I got back to the house and set up beer cans as targets. It’s going to be a long, boring walk home, where I will find the restlessness tenfold until I do something about it. Until I drink.
The bones seemed whiter through the sc
ope and in my head. Up close they are as yellow as my teeth. Faded clumps of skin still cling to them. There’s no smell as I peer over the thing. I’ve gotten used to the dampness of the woods. Once you start thinking something a certain way, it’s hard to change that train of thought. I’m standing over these massive bones in the middle of the woods, looking for the antlers I plan on taking for a prize, when I realize I’m not looking at the remains of a moose. Another moment of applying imaginary skin, claws, and a black-lipped snarl to the thing, and then I realize it’s a bear, its jaw lined with thick pointed teeth as if the thing died screaming.
You hear stories of bears venturing in these parts, a stray that’s gone for a stroll. This is a big one. Bigger than any oversized raccoon of a black bear I’ve ever seen a picture of that was trespassing through a backyard in some nearby town. What do bears die of? Old age? Indigestion? Tumors, probably, like everything else. Old men, young women with life in their womb.
I prod the skeletal face with the end of my rifle. The desire to take something is stronger than the urge to knock a shot glass into my sweatshirt pocket the only time I ever shoplifted. Like some voodoo priest, I’m plotting over what to take back to the house with me. The skull? How long before bones rot, disintegrate, whatever they do … Do they stink? As soon as I move the skull from where it’s partially sunken into the wet earth there’s a flash of yellow larvae, maggots squirming through the mud around it. Maybe they live in the bones, as if the thing’s foundation is corrupt. Even in death, the memories of life are feasted upon.
My attention is drawn to a sprawled arm or leg, whatever it could be called, and with a poke of my rifle I unfurl a clenched paw, revealing a collection of black, crescent moons. An image of fabled natives and gritty hunters wearing bear claws along their body, their costume, comes to mind. As I scoop the claws up, mindful of grabbing a fistful of maggots that may be hiding beneath them, I’m suddenly wary of the great skeleton springing up and over me like a fabled bear trap. Bones, if properly assembled, could be a cage more than anything else. A box that death built.
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