Upright Beasts Read online

  “Isn’t that kind of crazy?” Foster said. “He can’t be happy doing that, can he?”

  11.

  There wasn’t a lot to do in town, and I was glad my flight was in only two days. Most of the shops sold knickknacks of the town’s glory days, although how glorious those days ever were seemed up for debate.

  The main things in town were the old gold mines. They were these huge jagged holes appearing suddenly off the road, like deep wounds in the land. Foster took me to three of his favorites. Each had rickety and abandoned buildings hanging over the edge of the pits. One was red, another sky blue, and the third may have once been white but now was sullied into a dusty brown. I suppose these were the buildings where the pounds of rocks had been crushed to rubble and the shiny bits separated from the dirt.

  “These are really something. Can we go down in them?” We were standing over the pit by the blue building.

  “Probably not a good idea,” my brother said. “But we could sneak up there, maybe.”

  We climbed up the tower attached to the blue building. There were some dust-coated milk crates we used as seats. I couldn’t see any gold glinting in the old rocks below. My brother locked a zoom lens on his camera and starting clicking away at the evergreens that dotted the hill rising beyond the pit. I halfheartedly sketched out a story idea, but mostly I sat there and tried to decide about my relationship with the woman back home or figure out if the decision had already been made for me. Every once in a while, a small bird would fly onto the railing, notice us, and flitter off again.

  “It’s really peaceful up here, right?” Foster said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I see how someone could get used to this.”

  12.

  “How are you doing? In life and stuff?” I was saying. There were only seven other people in the sports bar.

  “Pretty good, I guess.” Foster finished chewing his bite of burger. “You know, I feel like I’ll give myself a few years to see if the photography takes off. If not, maybe I’ll go to law school. I’ve been doing a little LSAT preparation already.”

  We finished up, and I covered the tab. It seemed like the older brother thing to do.

  Walking back to the car, I saw a dark blue Ford pickup with the bright yellow chicken costume leaning against the passenger-side window. It was just the body. There was a deep black hole where the head should have been.

  “Holy shit, Foster,” I said, elbowing him.

  We walked over and looked in through the window. The head was on the floor next to a large water bottle. It was made of bright yellow foam spray-painted with white and black for the eyes. Someone had drawn two phalluses on the dirt of the pickup’s back window.

  “Do you think he was eating at the bar with us?”

  We went back inside and ordered another round of beers. Suddenly there was excitement in the stale bar air. We looked around. Other than the family of four eating in the corner, there were three men at the bar. They were all looking at different sports games on the overhead TVs. There was a skinny guy in a flannel shirt watching baseball, a clean-shaven teenager glued to hockey, and a slightly overweight bearded man following a golf tournament.

  “With how small this town is, everyone must know the guy as the chicken suit guy,” Foster whispered. “Imagine every person you pass knowing this horrible detail about you.”

  “Must be hell to hit on girls,” I said. “Or men,” I added.

  When one of the men looked our way, we quickly shifted our eyes to the TV screens.

  “I bet it’s the beardo,” I said.

  We watched him eat a hot wing with surprising daintiness. Afterwards, he carefully cleaned his fingers on a napkin. He had a small mountain of used napkins and sucked-bare bones in front of him.

  “Let’s go say something.”

  “I don’t know, it could be any of them,” Foster said. “Hard to tell in that suit.”

  We kept watching them for a while, waiting for some sign, I guess. After about forty minutes, we went home.

  13.

  I guess I’ve been thinking about my brother’s trip a lot recently because I’m feeling a little lost myself. My girlfriend and I recently broke up for reasons I can’t really explain. Things just fizzled out without any discernable causes. It was as if we suddenly didn’t know who we were anymore, or maybe that we never realized who the other was until the end, and the realization made us simply tired instead of distraught or full of joy. We continued having sex for a few weeks, but even those close moments were spread further apart, until we went our separate ways.

  Yesterday, a friend of mine—a good friend I have a hard time getting together with these days—sent out a mass e-mail announcing that he had spent the last month training to be a real estate agent. He had just that day passed his certification. Ever since I had known him, which was at least four years, he had been an aspiring actor. Now he was trading in his auditions for a burgundy blazer and not looking back. He must have mentioned this to me at some point or posted about it online, but somehow it hadn’t registered, or I hadn’t believed it until suddenly he was texting me to ask if I knew any couples looking for a large one-bedroom in the neighborhood next to mine.

  I’m spending a lot of time alone these days. I’m trying to put my head down and get some work done. Finish up some projects and see if I can be one of the ones who pops out of the rut. Otherwise, I might have to make a right turn myself.

  I’m not sure what my brother is doing right now. Last time we talked, he was still on the fence about law school. I haven’t talked to him in about two months though. No particular reason. I simply haven’t found the time.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE WEATHERVANE

  So this clown Dave buys the house next door to me, and now he’s my neighbor. Okay.

  It’s one thing that he’s a carpetbagger who thinks he can turn himself into some sort of old-fashioned, down-home country boy by wearing a cowboy hat and boots with plastic spurs. This is Virginia, mind you, not the goddamn Wild West. I don’t mind. I’m a tolerant guy. But what sticks in my craw is the weathervane.

  Lord knows what airplane catalog he found it in. The thing looks like it was designed by someone who was abused by farmers all his life and now gets revenge by making ugly weathervanes. It’s gigantic and has some sort of southwestern theme. The rooster is painted fluorescent green with a pink beak, and it has metal ribbons that twist in the wind.

  “Dave,” I tell him the first day I see it. “That is one ugly son-of-a-bitch rooster.”

  Dave takes this as some sort of Southern joke and pats me on the back. “Looks marvelous, don’t it?” he says.

  Now it gets pretty windy in this part of Virginia, and the first big storm that hits, the weathervane snaps right off his roof and stabs into my front yard. Imagine if I had a daughter and she had been playing out there in a sandbox or something? She might have been decapitated by a giant rooster! How is that supposed to make me feel?

  So I do the only thing I can and go out and pick up the weathervane and toss it through Dave’s living room window.

  Well, this Dave is a stubborn guy. I see him out there the next morning directing some Mexicans up a ladder to fix the weathervane.

  “What the hell, Dave?” I say.

  “Damn thing blew off and into my window in the storm,” he says. “Might have to put some crazy glue on it next time. Ha ha.”

  Well, the next big storm that hits, what do you know? Snap, whoosh, crash. I stumble outside and pick up the rooster off the wet grass. While it technically landed in his yard this time, it’s close enough to mine to make me concerned. So I march over and toss it through the jerk’s dining room window.

  Dave pretty much stops talking to me after that. But the weathervane goes back up, and then a few months later another big storm hits. Dave is out of town this time, and the weathervane doesn’t snap all the way, it’s still half-attached and flying around in the wind like a circus flea tied to a miniature trampoline. How am
I supposed to sleep knowing that any second this giant weathervane could snap off completely, fly through my bedroom window, and murder me in my own bed? I pay my taxes like anyone else. So I grab my ladder, go over to his house, and wrench off the weathervane with my hands. Then, when Dave comes back a few days later, I grab the rooster, head over to his house, ring his doorbell, and when he answers, I try to toss the damn thing through his stupid asshole heart.

  Dave’s a nimble fellow, and he leaps out of the way, and pretty soon I’m sitting in the county jail with a whole host of freaks and perverts. I pay my bail, return home, and what do I see as I pull in the driveway but Dave and the goddamn Mexicans reinstalling the goddamn weathervane!

  I mean, I’m a man. What am I supposed to do? I’ve got a job on a farm outside of town. I work with my hands. These days that means pulling levers and pushing buttons on giant machines, but I try to keep some pride in my life. It’s been hard lately. I’ve been lonely since Molly left. She was the only girl I’ve ever loved. I’d always thought we would be together forever, but I guess she had different plans. Every winter seems colder than the last, and the bills only get longer. And on top of all that, I have to deal with a neighbor who doesn’t have an ounce of respect for me or my property? What am I supposed to do?

  I just want someone to tell me what I’m supposed to goddamn do.

  THINGS LEFT OUTSIDE

  I wish it was me who had found her and not my husband. I kept wondering what she looked like in her natural state, so to speak. What if Gerald had moved her around?

  Gerald didn’t notice me when I got there. He was walking around in a semicircle as if he wanted to get closer, but her body was letting off a magnetic force that kept him away.

  “Who does she belong to?” I said. I was out of breath and leaned against a tree.

  “What?” Gerald said, turning around. There were a few cows nearby. They were looking at the three of us with large eyes.

  “I mean, she’s half on our land and half on the Smiths’ pasture.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I’m not sure it matters.”

  “The head is on our half,” I said. “I think that should count for something.”

  I had been folding laundry when Gerald called. I liked doing it right when it came out, when it was so hot it almost burned my hands. I could feel his excitement through the little speaker beside my ear. Gerald told me he had been walking near the edge of our property and found our cat, Mitzy, chewing on a dead woman’s face.

  We’d lived on this backwoods land for two years, Gerald and I. It was a twenty-minute drive from town. If you walked through the woods, you’d come across a cow pasture cut out from the forest with rusty barbed wire. When we first moved in, we used to drink a bottle of wine and go and stick our hands through the fence so the cows would lick our palms for salt.

  Gerald had already placed his bandanna over the woman’s head. He said it was the Christian thing to do.

  “Oh, Gerald,” I said, and threw my arms around him. “Who would do something like this?”

  “It’s deer season,” Gerald said. “She was probably shot by a hunter who realized his mistake and fled.” He was looking past me. He had a large beard at that time, and his face seemed to be shrinking into it as he talked. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably what happened.”

  The woman was on her belly beneath the barbed wire, legs jutting into the cow pasture. You could tell by the color of the dirt that there had been a lot of blood, yet her jeans and green button-up looked untouched from the back. They could have been pulled fresh out of the dryer.

  “I think I have that exact same shirt,” I said. “I bought it on sale at Gap.”

  I squatted close to the body. I thought she would look peaceful, and that I would feel a spiritual calm spread through my veins, but it didn’t happen. With her head hidden under the bandanna, she looked more like a mannequin. I wanted to reach out and bend her limbs into a livelier pose.

  Gerald squeezed my collarbone with his hands. He bent down and put his dry lips against my cheek. “The cops said they’d be here soon.” He said it so matter-of-factly. She was already passing out of our hands. “We should go back to the house.”

  “No,” I said. “We need to be with her till they come.”

  My husband sighed and sat on a stump with his hands on his knees. I stayed in the damp grass near the body. The woman was laying belly down, with her arms curled in front of her head. I could imagine sleeping like that, with a pillow under my head instead of mud. I kept hoping the wind would blow the bandanna off her head. There were a few bugs crawling over her body. One flew onto my foot, and I flicked it away.

  “I’m getting kind of hungry,” Gerald said after a bit.

  Not much normally interrupted our eating out here. We inherited the house from Gerald’s parents after his father died of a stroke and his mother gave up and moved to Florida. It was a quiet place, but close enough to town that we weren’t hillbilly hermits.

  Gerald and I had met in high school. He had been on the state champion football team, although I always forgot which position. We’d been together for long enough it felt like nothing at all.

  It was already getting dark when the police arrived. They turned the forest upside down with lamps and walkie-talkies. They took Gerald aside, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed to be giving a description of our cat.

  I watched the police dump out the woman’s backpack. There was a bag of trail mix, three tubes of beauty product, a bottle of red wine, and a digital camera. All objects I own and use myself. They put these in plastic bags that they zipped shut. At one point I thought I saw Mitzy, her eyes bouncing beneath a bush like glow-in-the-dark balls.

  The police only asked me if I’d heard any unusual noises. I said no, and they said they might need to talk to me down the road.

  After that we had to leave the area.

  When we got home, I went to the bathroom. I flushed the toilet and then looked in the mirror and tried to cry. I walked around the house, calling for Mitzy. She kept darting under different pieces of furniture.

  Gerald was snacking in front of the TV. I sat down next to him and took a handful of chips.

  “Was she beautiful?” I asked.

  “What? I didn’t know her,” he said quickly.

  “But you saw her face before you covered it up,” I said. “What did she look like?”

  “Christ, Carol. I dunno. Normal?”

  “That’s it?” I said. “You don’t remember her eye color or anything?”

  Gerald stood up and walked over to the trash can and spat out a plum pit, then walked back and sat down.

  “She had brown hair,” he said. “About your length. I dunno if you’d call her pretty. Pretty enough I guess. Her face was wide open and stuck in the mud. I didn’t want to keep looking at her eyes.”

  “For some reason I want her to be beautiful,” I said.

  I could have been doing anything when it happened. Slicing an apple, napping on the porch, wrapping my fingers around Gerald’s privates. And out there, she was breathing her last breaths. The police had taken the body away in a dark bag, but I kept wondering about her. I would try to imagine her face, and it would be the face of a sister of mine. A twin sister I never knew I had, a mirror reflection I had failed to protect.

  I didn’t dream about her, or didn’t remember the dreams, but I also didn’t sleep much. I rolled onto my side and watched a small pool of saliva leak out of Gerald’s red mouth.

  At breakfast, I couldn’t help myself. “Would you say she was older or younger than me?”

  Gerald was dipping pieces of bread into his runny eggs. He took the piece that was halfway in his mouth and placed it down on the rim of the plate.

  “It’s in the past,” he said. “Death is just a part of life. I think we should let it go and move on.” He put the toast back into his mouth. I got up to refill my coffee.

  It was a bright day outside. A ladybug flew into the
window. I thought I heard gunshots in the distance.

  “Hey, maybe we could go in and see a movie later tonight,” Gerald said. He scraped a large chunk of butter across his toast. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Her skin was pale. It seemed like she might have a lot of freckles, like me,” I said. “Do you remember her freckles?”

  “Christ,” Gerald said. “Sometimes I wish we’d never even found that thing.”

  Since the economy had gone sour, Gerald hadn’t had much work. He got a call every now and then to fix up a rotted porch or help build a new staircase, but most days he sat around. That day, he put on his coat and gloves and drove off like it was any other Tuesday. He’d finished up his breakfast while I was in the shower.

  “Gonna go put in some applications,” he said. “You never know when things will pick up.”

  Mitzy came out from behind the stove and jumped on my lap. I ran my fingers over her head a few times. “You weren’t really chewing her face, were you? You were just licking it clean to get a good look.”

  I listened to Gerald’s pickup sputter off, then walked over to my jacket and pulled out the policeman’s card. I told the lady who answered my name and said I wanted to know what they had learned. “Did the autopsy reveal anything? Has anyone identified the body? Do they have to do that before the autopsy?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “That’s privileged information. We can’t give out information on ongoing investigations to anyone who isn’t a relative of the victim.”

  “How do I know if I’m family or not if you can’t tell me her name?”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait for the public announcements same as everyone else.”

  Mitzy yawned and hopped off my lap to find her bowl of water.

  “The secret to a good red sauce is brown sugar,” Margaret said. “You might not think it, but that’s what all the restaurants do. Mix it in until it’s muddy and mix in the noodles.”