Last Summer at Mars Hill (15 page)

Suddenly, without warning the road ahead of me twisted, one hairpin turn after another. The map fell to the floor while I cursed and slowed to a crawl. To either side sheer walls of stone rose, only six or seven feet high but enough to block out any view and much of the yellowish light. Then the last turn ended, seeming to leave me hanging in the air. The radio reception crackled and inexplicably died. I glanced in the rearview mirror to make sure there was no one behind me and eased the car to the side of the road.

I was atop a jagged hill overlooking a vista out of ancient Britain. An expanse of hills that looked as though they had been formed by huge hands crumpling the land together and then gently pulling it apart again. Some of the valleys between these hills formed nearly perfect Vs, their clefts so sharp and steep that no sun seemed to penetrate them. It was like a child’s drawing of mountains, although compared to real mountains back east, these were barely tall enough to pass for hills. What made it so creepy were the stones.

There were thousands of them; thousands upon thousands. Pale gray and bleached white, like the tips of shark’s teeth protruding from the earth, and arranged in perfect lines, row after row, that dipped and rose as the hills did, until they disappeared upon the horizon. Between them the long prairie grasses grew sparsely, as though sown upon grave mounds. There were no trees, no shrubs, nothing except for the grass and stones. It was impossible to imagine who could have put them there—a task so immense and mindless it seemed beyond human comprehension—but so orderly was the progression it seemed unimaginable that it could be some natural formation.

I pulled my hair back with my bandanna and got out. The wind beat against me, hot and damp, and I could hear the grasses whispering as they bent across the rocks. On another morning, with clear sky overhead and wildflowers nodding between the rows of limestone, it might have been an exhilarating sight. That day I found it nearly unbearable. I hurried back into the car and cranked up the a/c. Ten minutes later I was on the Interstate.

Having circumvented Lyman’s directions, it took me a little longer to find the Lauren ranch. The Arbuckle Mountains disappeared as quickly as they had appeared, and soon I was back on the unbroken flatlands, with cottonwood and mesquite along the roadside beneath signs for Stuckey’s and Burger King. Finally I saw signs for Gene Autry, and a few miles later turned down a rutted gravel fire road that ran past tumbledown barns and a single rusting oil well. I was relieved when I saw three pickups pulled over to the side of the road. I checked my face in the mirror, rubbing my damp palms on my jeans and combing my hair back neatly. Too late I wondered if I should have worn a skirt—out here women still dressed like
women.
Not like they did in Texas, where housewives shopping at the H.E.B. all looked like
Dallas
extras; but I’d learned to be careful about how I looked, even for a cattle mutilation.

A hundred yards from the road four men were standing around a dark form sprawled on the ground. I crawled over the barbed wire fence, glad I’d worn my own (new) cowboy boots. Overhead buzzards circled. The heavy wind carried an oppressively sweet smell. The men knotted together, talking with heads downturned beneath their Stetsons and glancing at me sideways. The fourth walked toward me.

“I’m Janet Margolis from
OUR
magazine,” I said, holding out my hand. He took it gingerly, nodding. “Thank you for seeing us. My photographer should be here soon.”

“Well. I’m Hank Lauren.” He cleared his throat uneasily. “This’s my land here, some of my men.”

I followed him to where the others stood upwind of the first carcass. A few feet behind it was another, and next to that a third. As I approached the men grew silent. One lit a cigarette and tossed the match so that it dropped onto one of the dead animals. Beside me Hank Lauren’s feet fell heavily on the stony ground.

I stopped to gaze at the first body, then looked up at him in surprise.

“They’re not cows.”

He shook his head. “No ma’am. They’re wild boars. Least I think they are. Agricultural Extension Office is checking, make sure nobody had some hogs escape the last few days.”

“Javelinas,” one of the other men explained. When I looked up at him he glanced away, but went on as though talking to the air. “That’s a sort of wild pig we got around here. Sometimes they breed with the other kind. These’re the biggest ones I ever seen.” A shuffle and a murmur of agreement from the others. Hank coughed and waited while I stooped to look more closely.

It was a horrible sight, whatever it had been. An ugly thing to begin with, larger than any pig I’d ever seen, not that I’d seen many. Big enough for a man to ride on, if he could straddle its wide back. It was covered with coarse black hair, rising in a high bristly peak up its spine. Around its neck paler fur, nearly white, formed a collar. I took out my tape recorder and clicked it on.

“What’d you say this animal was called?”

“Javelina,” the man answered loudly.

“Peccary,” another said, stepping forward to nudge one of its stiff forelegs with his boot. “Collared peccary, that’s what the Extension Office calls ’em. Down along the Mexican border they call ’em javelinas.”

“Peccary,” I repeated into the recorder, adding, “This is one big pig.”

From the road echoed the sound of a car rattling along, and I looked back to see a big white Cadillac pull over. After a minute Lyman stumbled out, freighted with gear. He turned to shout thanks as the Cadillac roared away, then picked his way over the fence.

“Take a look at this, Lyman.” I waved him over, trying not to grimace as a hot rank wave rose from the carcass at my feet. The men started talking among themselves again as Hank Lauren and Lyman shook hands. “I’ve never seen an animal this ugly in my life.”

“Looks like someone didn’t think it was ugly enough.” Lyman swung out one of his cameras and started shooting. He squinted up at the sun, pewter-colored through the clouds, then back at the animal’s face. “Damn, you all had one sick puppy out here, do that to a damn pig. I’m sorry, Janet,” he added in a lower voice. “I shouldn’t have made you come out here by yourself.”

I frowned, but Lyman only turned back to his shoot. It wasn’t until I crouched beside him to examine the thing’s head that I saw what he meant. What I had thought to be the peccary’s natural, if ugly, visage, was actually the result of some ghoulishly skillful work. The skin had been sliced into roseate petals around the eyes and folded back. Its ears were gone, and flies and gnats crawled in and out of the exposed white tubes that fed into its skull. Its lips were gone, too, so that the tusks and worn yellowed teeth looked enormous and raw, stained with blood and dirt-pocked.

“Jesus,” I muttered. I stood, wiping the sweat from my palms, and glanced over at Lauren and his men. They said nothing, fastidiously ignoring me. I walked to the next carcass.

The other bodies were the same. “Mutilation of a ritual, probably sexual nature,” I spoke into the recorder. “Damn, this is really sick—” I coughed and detailed some of the more obvious atrocities.

Hank Lauren was near enough to hear what I was saying: out of the corner of my eye I could see him nodding. I looked away, unaccustomedly embarrassed. How often did one use words like
castration, sodomy, coprophagy
when referring to a pig? Over the last few years I’d learned how to deal with such horrors when associated with women or children—you turned it into righteous outrage, and that turned into money in the pages of
OUR
magazine—but still, I’d never been there to see the bodies uncovered. The sight of those grotesque, pathetic corpses, coupled with the stench of excrement and putrefaction made me feel faint. I switched off my recorder, surreptitiously covered my mouth and took a few deep breaths. I didn’t want Lyman to see how this was affecting me. Then I stepped away to join Hank Lauren.

“So this happened last night?”

He shook his head. “Night before. Found them yesterday morning. Vet came out to do an autopsy said it happened that night.”

“What do they think it was? Dogs?”

He snorted. “No
dog
could do that. No coyote either. Somebody with a razor—you ever see a dog do
that
?” He pointed at one of the carcasses, its violation grotesquely evident from where we stood.

“So what do they suspect?”

He shrugged but said nothing. One of the other men, the one who’d been smoking, coughed and said, “Something like this happened few weeks ago down in Ladonia. That’s Texas, though.”

Murmurs. “Last year there was something about it, some place in Colorado,” another man put in. “These mutilations. Saw it on
Current Affair
,” he added, turning to his boss. “You remember I told you ’bout that?”

I nodded and looked at Hank expectantly, my thumb on the recorder button. He was staring at the buzzards wheeling patiently in the sky. “What do you think, Hank? I mean, anything strange going on around here—cults, stuff like that? Kids listening to weird music?” I didn’t usually ask leading questions, but sometimes—with men especially—you had to keep probing before you finally hit a vein.

“Around here we don’t go in for that kinder thing.” It was one of the other men who answered. He’d been frowning, watching Lyman race through two rolls of film. Now the ground crackled beneath his heavy boots as he walked to join Hank and me with that slightly bowlegged gait. “Church is a big deal out here. Kids don’t go in for that satanic music. Ones who do move on out.”

The other men nodded. Lyman glanced over at me and winked.

“So nothing that might explain this?” My voice sounded a little desperate. I had visions of the rest of the day blown at the Agricultural Extension Office, trying vainly to come up with some kind of hook for this damn story. “No kind of revenge angle, cattle rustling, anything like that?”

“Don’t nobody rustle wild hogs,” Hank remarked. The others laughed.

“Well, shit,” I muttered, switching off the recorder. The stench from the corpses was starting to overwhelm me. The afternoon air was warm and humid, and clouds of blowflies were erupting from swellings in the pigs’ bellies and their raw faces. “Lyman—?”

Lyman had moved out to focus on the four cattlemen, the bloated carcasses in the foreground. The smoker lit another cigarette, cupping cracked hands around a match. He looked up and said, “Hank, what about that business with your sister and Brownen?”

Hank Lauren didn’t say anything, but after a moment he nodded. I tried not to look too eager, but fixed him with a quizzical look.

“Your sister?”

Hank Lauren breathed in noisily, raising his head to stare up at the sun raising a gray blister in the clouds. “Don’t have a damn thing to do with this,” he said.

“I just meant it’s been in all the papers, Hank,” the first man countered, and Hank sighed. I armed myself with the recorder again.

“Just some problems with her and her ex,” he said wearily. “Locked him up on account he beat up on her and my nephew. But they let him out, some kind of restraining order. I testified, I heard that s.o.b. threaten t’kill her and the boy. He’s a sorry bastard. Got arrested for dealing drugs, too. Well, they let him out anyway. He started calling her and now he’s disappeared. Sue’s about ready to leave town, she’s so scared he’ll come some night’n cut her throat.”

“So you think this might be some kind of sick vengeance he’s taking on your sister?”

He shrugged, glanced at his watch. His eyes when he raised them again were dull. “Well, I sure hope not.” He dug his heel into the dirt and tilted his chin toward the pickups leaning at the roadside. “You got to excuse us, but we’ve got a few things to take care of this afternoon.”

We shook hands and Lyman took some more pictures of Lauren and his crew. I got addresses and a few telephone numbers, and promised them the article would be out within the next week or two. Lyman and I watched the trucks leave, firing one after another and spurting off in a haze of dust and gravel.

“Well,” I said as we headed to the car. “That was certainly a disgusting waste of time.”

Lyman shrugged his equipment from one shoulder to the other. “What was that about his brother-in-law? Sounds like your kind of thing.”

I kicked up a cloud of gritty dust, grimacing as we met the barbed-wire fence again. “It’s only my kind of thing if he kills his ex-wife and shows up on national news. God, this is a depressing place.”

“Well, we’re done now. I booked us out tomorrow at eleven. So we can head to Oklahoma City tonight and get a hotel, or wait till morning.”

He threw his stuff into the car and leaned against the trunk.

“For god’s sake, let’s get out of here.” I glanced back at the carcasses. A buzzard had landed beside one, hopping about it like an excited kid, finally pouncing on a long ribbon of flesh and tugging at it. “Ugh.”

“We-ell—” Lyman eased around to the driver’s seat, shading his eyes and looking wistfully into the distance.

“Oh, come on, Lyman!” I yanked my door open, exasperated. “What in it? See Rock City? Best Little Whorehouse in Gene Autry?”

“Nooo…” He started the car and we jounced down the road. “Just there’s this great place for barbecue up by the Arbuckle Reservoir. Indian territory but not too far from here. Only thing is, it’s only open for dinner. But there used to be a pretty good motel—”

I was too dispirited to argue. “Sure, sure. Whatever. You drive, you feed me, whatever you want. Just make sure this time tomorrow I’m home. Okay?”

We found a dusty little motel and checked in. I made a few phone calls about Lauren’s brother-in-law. I found his ex in the phone book. She hadn’t bothered to change the number, but I’d long since ceased to be surprised by what women wouldn’t do to avoid an abusive s.o.b. She was polite enough but didn’t want to talk to me; I left the number of the motel in case she changed her mind. Then I called the local constable. According to him, yes, George Brownen had been released; no, there wasn’t anything special they could do to protect his ex-wife, and the whole thing was probably being blown way out of proportion.