Last Summer at Mars Hill (18 page)

The dogs did, though. At the sound of her voice they stopped. When she repeated the command they turned and leaped from the cab, their great forms flowing to the ground like black syrup poured from a jug. Big as they were they looked scared. Even from where I crouched I could see their ribs, the swollen joints of their legs, and the silvery glint where one still wore a cruel collar around his neck. Sudden panic overcame me: what if they scented me and attacked? But running would only make it worse, so I bellied down against the coarse ground, praying the wind wouldn’t turn and bring my scent to them.

And the dogs seemed to want to run. They started to race across the narrow ridge, but once again Irene shouted a command, her switch slashing through the air. As though they’d been shot the dogs dropped, burying their muzzles between their front paws like puppies. Irene turned her back to them and walked toward Brownen.

She walked right up to him, until her hands touched his sides. He drew his arms up to hold her, but I saw how his eyes were on the dogs. Then she thrust her pelvis against his, ran her hands along his thighs and up his arms, until he looked down at her. His head dipped; moonlight sliced a gray furrow across his scalp. I could no longer make out Irene’s face beneath his; and that was when she raised her hand.

The slender switch she held hung in the air for a moment. When it dropped I could hear its whistling, so that I thought he’d cry out as it struck his shoulder. But he didn’t; he only looked up in surprise. He started to draw away from her, puzzled, his mouth opening to say something. He never did.

As smoothly as the dogs had poured from the back of the van, Brownen fell to his knees. For an instant I lost sight of him, thought I was looking at another of the stony cusps stretching across the hills. Then I saw him; saw what he was becoming.

A wail cut across the hillside. I thought it was Brownen at first, but it was one of the dogs. At Irene’s feet a dark form writhed, man-size but the wrong shape. In her hand the switch remained, half-raised as though she might strike him again. The shape twisted, as though struggling to get up. I heard a guttural sound, a sort of grunting. My stomach contracted; I thought of running back to my car but that would mean standing, and if I stood there would be no way of pretending that I hadn’t seen what had become of Brownen. In another moment it was too late, anyway.

Irene Kirk stepped back. As her shadow fell away the figure at her feet squirmed one last time, tried to rear onto his hind legs and finally rolled onto all fours. It was an animal. A pig: a boar, one of the things I’d seen that afternoon, slaughtered on the Lauren ranch. In the moonlight it looked immense and black, its grizzled collar of fur seeming to cast a sheen upon the ground beneath it. It had tusks, not large but still vicious-looking, and surprisingly dainty feet ending in small pointed hooves. There was no man where Brownen had stood a moment before; nothing but the javelina and Irene Kirk, and crouched a few yards away her two dogs.

My eyes burned. I covered my mouth with one hand, retching, somehow kept from getting sick. I heard a high-pitched sound, something screeching; when I looked up the javelina had darted across the ridge, heading toward the car.

“Jimmie Mac! Buddy!” Irene’s voice was clear and loud, almost laughing. She raised her wand, pointed at the boar scrabbling through the brush and yelled something I couldn’t make out. I raised myself another inch, in time to see the two dogs burst from their crouch and take off after the javelina.

Within seconds they had it down, within the shadow of the RV. Their snarls and the peccary’s screams ripped the still air. I could hear its hooves raining against the metal side of the van, the dogs’ snarling giving way to frightened squeals. The sharp odor of shit came to me suddenly, and a musky smell. Then it was quiet, except for low whimpering.

I let my breath out, so loudly I was sure they’d hear me. But the dogs didn’t move. They wriggled belly-down against the ground, as though trying to back away from the carcass in front of them. A few feet away Irene watched, her arms lowered now, her stick twitching against her thigh. Then she walked slowly to the animals.

The dogs groaned and whined at her approach, writhing as though chained to the wheels of the van. When she reached them her arm shot up. I thought she would strike them, but instead she brought the switch down upon the javelina’s corpse. The moon glinted off the slender wand as though it were a knife; and then it seemed it
was
a knife. Because where she struck the carcass slivers of flesh spun into the air, like a full-blown rose slashed by a child’s hand. Ears, lips, nose; gleaming ribbons falling around her feet like leaves. She was laughing, a sweet pure sound, while at her feet the dogs moaned and clawed their muzzles with bloody paws.

I couldn’t bear any more. Before I could stop myself I was on my feet and bolting, my feet sliding through the loose scree and dust swirling up all around me. Only a few yards away was my car. I jumped over a pointed tooth of stone, thought almost that I had made it; but then I was screaming, falling beneath some great weight onto the rocky ground.

“Janet.”

The weight was gone. Above me something blotted out the sky, and there was warmth and wet all around me. Then I heard kicking, and the dark shape whimpered and fell away. I threw my arm protectively across my face, groaning as I tried to sit up.

“Janet,” the voice repeated. I could see her now, arms crossed, a line creasing her forehead where a scratch was drawn as though with red ink. “What are you doing here?” Her tone was disbelieving, but also a little amused, as though I were a disappointing student who had suddenly proved to have some faint spark of intelligence.

I said nothing, tried to back away from her. A dog lay at either side of her legs; in between I saw her boots, the worn creased leather now bloodstained and covered with a scruff of dirt. Blinking I looked up again. Her eyes were cold, but she smiled very slightly.

“I have to go now,” she said. I flinched as she raised her arms, but she only yawned.

Behind her the sky had faded to the color of an oyster shell. The moon was gone and now only the stars remained, pale flecks, like bits of stone chipped from the ground beneath me. In the ashen light Irene suddenly looked very old: not like an old woman but truly ancient, like a carven image, some cycladic figure risen from among the stones. I thought of Lyman talking about dragon’s teeth; of an ancient Greek hero sowing an army from broken stones.

And suddenly I remembered something. An absurd image, thrown back from some movie I’d seen as a child decades before. One of those grim bright Technicolor epics where toga-clad heros fought hydras and one-eyed giants, and sweating men groaned and yelled as they strove against the oars of a trireme. A woman on a white beach, a sea like blue ink spilling behind where she stood smiling at an assembly of shipwrecked men. Then her hands swept up, one of them holding an elaborately carved wand. In front of her the sand whipped up in a shimmering wall. When it subsided the men were gone, and she was surrounded by pink grunting pigs and snarling German shepherds that were stand-ins for wolves. She raised her arms and the wolves turned upon the swine, howling. I could almost remember her name, it was almost familiar…

“Goodbye, Janet.”

Irene Kirk knelt, bending over one of the dogs; and it came back to me.

Not Kirk.
Circe.

I struggled to pronounce it, then saw how she held her switch, so tightly her fingers were white.

“Time’s up, Buddy,” she said softly. Her other hand grasped the dog by its collar, and I saw where something pale fluttered, a piece of tattered cloth wrapped around the leather. There was something printed on it; but before I could focus her hand moved, so swiftly the switch became a shining blur. The dog made a gasping sound, gave a single convulsive shake. When her hands drew back I saw where its throat had been cut, a deep black line across the folds of loose skin where blood quickly pooled over the paler knobs of trachea and bone. Frantically I pushed myself away from it, heedless of the other dog whining beside its mistress.

As quickly as she’d slashed its throat the woman stood. She took a step toward her van, then stopped. She glanced down at me, her eyes black as though hollowed in stone.

“Don’t think about it too much,” she said, her mouth curving slightly. Then she stooped and with one swift motion flicked the collar from the dead animal’s neck. “Or—”

Her smile widened as she finished ironically, “Think of it as
justice
.”

She tossed the collar and I shrank back as it landed almost in my lap. There was enough dawn light now that I could see that the scrap of cloth wrapped around the leather had been torn from some kind of uniform. I could make out the faint letters beneath the crust of dirt and blood.

D.L. GROGAN
, it read,
US PENITENTIARY
54779909.

I watched her walk away. When she called “Jimmie Mac!” the remaining dog stumbled to its feet and followed her, its shadow humping between the lines of stone brightening in the sunrise. Then they stood at the rear of the van, the woman holding the door while the dog whined and groveled at her feet. I stood and staggered to my car, glancing over my shoulder to see if they were watching, but neither one looked back at me.

Like “The Bacchae,” this was another story that annoyed readers, this time in
Fantasy & Science Fiction.
I wrote “Justice” in a blind red rage, after reading an article about a support group called Parents of Murdered Children. A man of my acquaintance read it in manuscript and was so enraged by it that he didn’t talk to me for two days. The Oklahoma setting of “Justice” is real; so were the murders committed by the men who merit Circe’s justice.

I
SEE HIM ONLY
in bright dreams:

white face laughing, crouching in the crook

of an oak with thrashing leaves. It seems

he waits patiently, the years to him a blink, a look

(glancing; no haste for those hands that reach

for mine) to see if I have wakened since last we met.

Breathlessly I beg him, “Speak to me, teach

me the words that act as passkeys, the quiet

song that soothes the Dog; name the place where I

can cross the narrow river, enter the forest, climb

that tree to join you.”

He laughs at the lie they taught me:

Of course I will cross that black water, in time.

And then I wake.

The leaves fade. The vivid eyes grow dim.

I pull the curtains fast against the dawn,

and turn to wait for him

This is about the Boy in the Tree, the demonic figure I’ve been dreaming about since I was seventeen. In Boetia, in ancient Greece, Dionysus was called Dendrites, “the one in the tree.”

N
OW YOU KNOW EDDIE
Rule came and took that baby girl three days after she was born.

Actually, his mother took her, Nora Margaret. That was his mother’s name, not the girl’s. Marched right into that hospital room, Loretta said the nurse was checking her stitches Down There and Nora Margaret marched right in anyway, didn’t give a tinker’s damn.

I’m taking that baby, she said.

Pardon me? said the nurse. She didn’t know Nora Margaret Rule from a hole in the ground.

Excuse
us
, she told the nurse, I think you better go now.

The hell you will, said Loretta; at least now that’s what she says she said, but I knew Loretta since fourth grade and she never said a swear in her life ’til she met Eddie Rule, and let me tell you, he was such a goddamn son of a bitch, pardon my French, I would of swore, too.

Now, Alice Jean honey, let me explain something. That shade is just all wrong for you. You’re a Summer Rose, remember, you got that blonde hair and blue eyes, you just
have
to go with the Love That Pink. That’s the wonder of Mary Rose Cosmetics, everyone gets their own special coordinated color. I think the Salmon Joy is for Erika here, now see the difference?

I thought you would.

Now I’m sorry, I got distracted. But Loretta says now she should of told Nora Margaret off like that, anyhow, swears or not, and I wish she had.

We’re married, Loretta said. Ask that nurse, she saw it, Mr. Proctor came down and did it before the baby came. The nurse was gone by then but Loretta showed me the license, it was real all right, she’s still got it at home. They wanted to see it for the movie.

Well, you ain’t married no more, says Nora Margaret. Loretta told me later, she was surprised a rich lady’d talk like that, but I told her Nora Margaret Rule had no more schooling than my dog King, she just married a rich man is all. Anyway she flaps some thing in front of Loretta’s face, Loretta practically went into hysterics then and they called the doctor in. She got them to annex the marriage—

Pardon?

Oh. Well, whatever. Annul it, then, she went to court and had them fix it somehow, said ’cause her son is a Catholic and there was no priest it wasn’t a real marriage. Loretta said if you’re a Christian how come you’re taking my baby and I’m gonna call the police.

Catholic, not Christian, Nora Margaret says, and don’t waste your breath, Miss Missy.

Loretta says, It’s
Missus,
and Nora Margaret says, Not anymore it ain’t. And you know she really did, she took that little baby practically out of her mama’s arms and took it away. Paid somebody to adopt it in Richmond and that was the last Loretta saw of it.

Erika, honey, I swear that color takes ten years off your life. Not that you need it. I swear. Alice Jean, don’t you think so? I love it that we can compare like this, friends at home. That’s why I love Mary Rose Cosmetics, I can come right here to your house with everything and then later, in the middle of the night, you change your mind, why next day I can come right back and you can exchange that Salmon Joy for anything you like.

That Touch of Teal is
very
popular this year, Erika, you just go right ahead and try it. Kind of smudge it around your eyelid like that. There. I sold one to Suzanne Masters last week, she had that Dinner Dance at the Club to go to and it just matched her dress. I told her if I keep going like this, I’m gonna have that Mary Rose Cadillac by the end of summer and drive my kids to school in it.