The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories (13 page)

Some of these shadow soldiers approached me
and reached out with black fingers. The jar vibrated in my hands,
almost dancing as the figures approached. Each had one eye, the
other just a space, and empty circle of white. I didn’t really feel
anything—no fear, no repulsion.

One of the shadows stepped in front of the
others. He touched the side of his face, the space next to his
intact eye, and I suddenly stretched like a thin filament through
space, drawing into his vision. Daylight burst in normal colors.
Our company lined up outside the bunk houses, and an unfamiliar
officer paced in front of the line of ragged grunts. I saw faces I
knew, but no Gerard Karnowski or Lt. Terry Wucker.

Suddenly, blackness and stars leapt at me
while The Surgeon chuckled at my side. “You’ll learn.” Then a pop,
a nearby but muffled sound. I hugged the earth, fearing sappers—a
surprise attack. As I hunched to the ground, my eyes were parallel
to his boots, black but caked with too much of the red-orange dirt.
The Surgeon hadn’t even flinched.

“
That’ll be the
Lieutenant.” He knelt down next to me as I pushed myself into a
sitting position. His eyes flashed for a moment, almost fading to
bright red before dissolving into his usual brown. “I tried to warn
him.” I looked into camp and saw dark forms rushing about in the
night as the raid sirens began to crank.

“
What?”

“
Look. You keep this.” He
set the jar on the ground next to me. “I’m tired. It’s gotten too
heavy.” He strolled back toward the hootches, tumult, and
commotion, vanishing in shadow and movement. I sat on the ground
next to the jar, just studying the eyes for a short while before
scooping it up and heading for shelter.

Gerard Kowalski was gone the next morning.
In his bunk lay his clothes and bowie knife, but nothing else, no
letter, no clues to his disappearance. Lt. Wucker died, officially,
at the hands of a VC sapper. Most of the members of D Company knew
the truth. One of us—hell, all of us—fragged him for not following
The Surgeon’s advice.

In time, I learned to rely
on those shadow-soldiers. I learned to “see” like The Surgeon:
avoiding mines, snipers, and helping to make the platoon one of the
most efficient in the 1
^st
Infantry. Our new
Lieutenant learned to value the gift The Surgeon left behind. At
the end of June, 1970, I boarded a Freedom Bird and came back to
The World. The jar, wrapped in brown paper, rested in my lap on the
plane. Disconnected from war, its power faded, but it sits, my one
souvenir, on a shelf in my basement, next to old Christmas
ornaments and board games—still wrapped in plain brown
paper.

10: Bottom Feeders

We rode our bikes to
Potter’s Pond on lazy Saturday afternoons in the spring, before
school let out for the summer and the heat grew too oppressive. I
struggled on my brother’s ten-speed while Joel raced his red Huffy.
We traveled with our fishing poles balanced on handlebars, jutting
out in front of us like antenna. Potter’s Pond was a forbidden
place
tucked behind Greenwillow Cemetery,
a secluded spot to fill Saturday afternoons.
Joel’s dad had lectured him about trespassing and how much
trouble we could find—but we laughed at his warnings, and Elroy
Jantz, the old owner of the bait shop, told stories that drew us
like moths.

“
Hope you’re not planning
on heading up to Potter’s Pond,” he told us as he scooped baitworms
into a brown paper sack. “It’s a pauper’s grave, full of folks who
couldn’t feed their families or buy a small hunk of land of their
own.”

We snickered at first.

“
Dressed ‘em in old
throwaway suits and dresses from the DAV for a quick service, then
tossed the bodies straightway in the water, just as soon as the
dead man’s folks left.” The old man leaned forward, examining us
with his black gaze, and then laughed in a thick tone that killed
our smiles but roused curiosity. “They died hungry, and they’re
still hungry.”

The sky was clear, and the bright sunshine
chased away any shivers spawned by Elroy’s story as we wound
through the gravel paths of that immense cemetery. Generations of
Spring County residents lay under the rolling grass with plenty of
hills and trees blocking the view, so we couldn’t take in the whole
place from any one vantage point. I struggled on the gravel roads
because of the narrow ten-speed tires; Joel rode ahead and would
mock me over his shoulder with lines from B-movies we watched on
late night TV.

“
They’re coming to get you,
Denny,” he said that day.

We left our bikes at the back of the
cemetery as usual, laying them down just outside a barbed-wire
fence hiding in the tree line. That fence marked the border between
Potter’s Pond and Greenwillow. Erected years ago out of crooked
tree limbs and poorly strung, the fence wouldn’t hold our weight,
so we took turns squeezing between the sharp wires while the other
pried them open, crossing the threshold one at a time.

Through a path between trees—tall oaks
perfect for climbing with low, untrimmed branches, dying brown
pines, and knobby arthritic redbuds—we saw the green of the pond.
The odors of dirt, moss, and decay floated in the air. Stout Kansas
wind rarely broke the water’s surface because of the trees that
encroached on its lip; only two small bare patches of packed dirt
remained open for fishing. The pond wrapped around at the eastern
end, bending out of sight. I’m sure it would be a sort of gourd
shape if seen from above, with curved stem hidden from view by
branches and aggressive undergrowth. The land around the pond was
so green and alive, yet somehow twisted, crooked, and diseased.
Sometimes old man Jantz’s stories were easy to believe.

Joel sat and busied himself with knots and
fishing line. I worked a writhing earthworm onto a single barbed
hook. We never used treble hooks in that pond anymore; the
bullhead, these runty catfish, had small mouths, and we lost many
hooks before learning our lesson. A worm threaded on a thin hook
worked well enough on those eager bottom feeders.

“
How many you shooting for
today?” Joel asked as he tied the nearly invisible knot with his
adept hands.

“
At least a dozen.” I
chuckled, casting my line into the slime, studying my orange cork
bobber, waiting for the inevitable action.

After a few moments of silence, Joel stood
and tossed his line in, angling away from mine. “I’m going for
something big today.” He sat on the packed earth, staring into the
water. “Something big has to live in there.”

We waited. Joel’s bobber was the first to
dip below the still surface. “First blood,” he said. As he yanked
the pole to set his hook, the line held.

“
First snag,” I replied.
Potter’s Pond may have been full of hungry bullhead, but it also
contained more than its share of snags—bits of log, vines, and
roots of trees that undoubtedly created a thick underwater
labyrinth. This made a perfect home for bottom feeders, scavengers
lying in wait, and a perfect spot for snags.

Joel tugged hard, walking his pole up the
bank. “Whatever it is, I’m pulling it out.”

I glanced into the stinking water. “Are you
sure you want to?”

“
I don’t want to tie
another damn knot and lose a hook if I can yank this
out.”

I watched the spot where his line broke the
surface. Slowly, steadily, the water split open and something
green-black under the afternoon sun grew out of the pond. At first
I thought it was a log, a mossy bit of fallen tree until the heavy
vulture’s head of a massive snapping turtle rose from the
surface.

“
Cut the line.” I scrambled
up the bank toward Joel.

“
What?”

“
Cut the line!” When I felt
a safe distance from the water, I turned and watched the monster
sink below the surface. Joel sat behind me with his pocket knife
still clutched in his hand, and I joined him on the
ground.

“
Damn.”

“
Yeah,” I said.

“
I wonder what else is in
there.”

I turned to look at Joel, his eyes wide and
curious.

If he hadn’t pulled out that behemoth
snapper, we would have never searched the uncharted end of Potter’s
Pond for a new spot to cast our lines. As we walked through the
underbrush, any lingering sign of a path disappeared. Our pant legs
caught on thistles and sandburs, swishing and snagging through the
calf-high grass. The high branches began to hoard sunlight, and
despite the clear sky beyond, swollen shadows darkened around us.
The far end of the pond always rested in the shadows.

Below the sound of our tramping feet and
whisper of the grass, another sound grew and spread. This sound
reminded me of camping trips: the buzzing of a thousand flies
around a trash bin after Dad cleaned the day’s catch.

“
Do you hear that?” I asked
Joel.

“
What?”

“
The buzz,” I whispered to
him. I don’t know why I whispered, other than the feeling of being
swallowed by the shadows and trees. He stopped ahead of me and
balanced his pole on the ground.

“
Denny.” He slowly turned
his head to look over his left shoulder all goggle-eyed. “Come
here.” Maybe his quavering voice, seeing too much white around his
eyes, or the claustrophobic trees spurred my fear because I wanted
to leave, climb on the bike and go. But I obeyed him against the
growing storm in my stomach.

He said nothing more; he didn’t need to say
anything else. Lying on the ground, jutting out from behind a low,
scratchy bush, I saw two legs. Pants really, and shoes, but they
had form and shape unlike they would if they were empty. The pants
were black, dirty with mud, and torn in places. I thought of
Grandpa’s funeral, the black suit in which we buried him, and
suddenly remembered the legions of dead on the other side of the
short barbed wire fence behind us. Old man Jantz’s stories of the
poor, unhappy dead swirled in my head.

I can’t exactly explain the feeling, but the
body drew me to it like some sort of obscene gravity—like a lure, a
worm on a hook for a curious twelve-year-old boy. Joel stayed
behind, but I rounded the bush and looked on the rest of this
grotesque thing. The torso was still covered by a filthy suit coat
that had once been black like the pants. My eyes traced the left
arm to a white bloated hand covered thickly by black flies, the
source of the buzzing sound. Corrupted by insects, water, and
occasional shafts of warm sunlight, what flesh remained seemed
shiny and waxen, like melted fat. I stood for a moment and stared.
Maybe the motion of the files fooled me, but the hand seemed to
twitch and move, curling those awful dead fingers.

Joel poked me in the ribs and shouted,
“Gotcha!”

My body burst with terrible fire, all my
nerves lit with fright. I screamed, dropped my fishing pole,
wheeled, pushed the laughing Joel out of my path, and ran without
thinking. It was pure fight or flight. No thought impulses broke
through to my higher brain until I had scrambled over the barbed
wire fence, tearing my pants and carving a long red scratch on my
right leg. Behind me, someone—surely Joel—crashed through the
brush. I thought I heard his voice, but I already pushed furiously
against my bike pedals, racing for the stone pillars at the exit of
Greenwillow.

By the time I rode the five blocks home, my
terror had cooled to the point that I even questioned whether I saw
a body at all, almost laughing at myself for fleeing. The pond,
those trees, and the midday darkness became so surreal, so far
away. Mom knelt in her flower garden, and she watched as I coasted
down our hill and into the driveway.

“
You and Joel have fun
dear?”

“
Yeah,” I answered. In the
post flight hangover, I didn’t feel like talking, and I certainly
didn’t want to try and explain anything about the forbidden pond.
When I stretched out in bed that night, trying to sleep, I kept
seeing that white flesh and the buzzing flies floating in the
shadows of my room. Once sleep came, I dreamed of that snapping
turtle and the hideous white hand. I woke in the morning like I had
swallowed a heavy stone; I’d left my fishing pole at the
pond.

Blaming Joel for the lost pole, I ignored
him at school on Monday. He had a different home room teacher, and
I took band, so our class schedules were thankfully unaligned. He
approached me in the hallway twice, maybe with a well-planned
apology, but I turned the other way each time I spotted him. That
night he called the house. Mom answered I had her lie and say I was
out. She should have suspected a falling out between Joel and me,
but she played ignorant well.

But Joel cornered me after school on
Tuesday. “Look Denny, let’s talk,” he said.

“
I’ve got nothing to
say.”

“
Look, I’m
sorry.”

“
Great.” I looked at him,
anger boiling behind my blue eyes.

“
Okay.” His voice sounded
unconvinced, skeptical, but he continued. “I think we should go to
the police.”

“
Police?”

“
The body,
remember.”

“
I remember you scaring the
shit out of me.” I really wasn’t ready to play nice, and I’d spent
the last two days trying to convince myself that I didn’t see a
rotting corpse—just some old, discarded clothing. His witness to
the thing brought it to life again, the white hand moving,
twitching.

“
Look.” He shifted his
weight between legs. “I said I’m sorry.”