The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories (4 page)

The radio announcer reads the police
reports, and sometimes their father mutters, “Dios mio.” His head
hangs as he listens to the report of another body, a dead Latino
teen found in a ditch outside of town. The Spanish station alone
reports the missing. The only pattern to the tragedy is that the
victims have been the children of undocumented workers—killed by a
bullet in their brainpans. But the bodies were mauled after death,
mangled and partially eaten. He listens and tries not to think of
the layer of dust on Tesoro’s truck. He tries not to think of his
son’s late nights. He fights against the horrible visions of those
victims—bodies that must share a raw, red color with the beef
carcasses hanging in the plant cooler.

In the kitchen, their mother scrubs the
sink, pushing hard with the wire brush to blot the sound of the
announcer’s voice while Saul sits at the little table and ignores
his homework. The kitchen stings of bleach before she is through.
Tesoro’s truck rumbles in the yard—the ’62 Ford that he promises to
paint one day and their father once joked was dead and resurrected.
The joke died when Tesoro came back with the bullet around his
neck. The truck still wears patches of rust like bullet wounds.

Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl
fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early
morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in
the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In
his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.

When his mother cries, Saul says, “It’s
alright, Mama. He’s still our Tesoro.”

On some evenings, rare evenings, Tesoro
joins the family and tells stories while his father drinks cold
cerveza. He tells the story of the old woman in a black berka, the
woman whose wrinkled fingers looked like wet tissue paper on a
piñata. Unreal fingers. Fake fingers. Tesoro talks about the
talisman, the blessed scroll of paper he bought and carried in his
shirt pocket, a superstitious custom to bring him home alive.

Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark
magic.

The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and
laughed, too.

That afternoon, a car exploded in a small,
Baghdad market.

That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.

Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s
eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his
shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet
broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like
oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”

Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of
sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on
the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but
it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in
ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him.
He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with
gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old
handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul
keeps it close.

But Tesoro is his brother. The dead are
strangers.

A night comes when the rumble of Tesoro’s
truck takes away the dream. Saul wakes, creeps down the hallway,
and listens at his parents’ door. Nothing. Another sound, a door
clicking shut in the unfinished basement. Tesoro’s room is down
there. Saul checks the locks on the door and glances out the
window. The rusty Ford is in the lawn next to the drive.

His mouth goes dry. Tesoro is his brother.
His flesh and blood. When he pulls the gun from under his pillow it
is heavy and cold. A shudder crosses his body.

Saul starts on the steps, and a little
creaking noise calls out with each. Halfway down, he stops
breathing and waits for a moment. A light glows from under Tesoro’s
door. Like a moth, Saul is drawn to it, likely to burn up in the
flame. His hand rests on the knob, the other clutches the pistol
grip. The smell of stale blood is back, worse now. Amplified.

“
Saul?” Tesoro asks through
the door, his voice cold like a block of granite.

Inside, Saul finds what is left of Tesoro on
his bed. His shirt is off, bunched in a pile on the floor. Both
hands rest on his knees. When Tesoro looks up, his face is streaked
with blood. His teeth are dark and discolored, his mouth blotted.
Tesoro’s face wears neither a smile nor frown—a blank expression
with black eyes.

“
You brought a
gun?”

Saul looks at the pistol, his hand shaking.
“Papa’s.”

Tesoro’s lips curl slightly at the corners
and one hand stretches toward his brother, palm open. “They will
come for me, sooner or later. They will need more than guns.” The
other hand touches the lump of lead dangling from his neck.

For a moment, neither speaks.

In that moment, Saul understands; in that
moment, he kneels to the old magic in his brother’s eyes. What
crawls Saul’s spine is damp and black and dead. His eyes close and
fingers uncurl. The gun drops into Tesoro’s open hand.

He smiles, showing the full horror of his
tainted mouth.

“
I’m leaving.”

Saul steps forward and touches his brother’s
shoulder. The flesh ticks like a horse’s flank chasing a fly. The
skin is cold and almost grey. “We can take your truck.”

“
Si,” Tesoro replies. “Mi
hermano.”

Saul hesitates, breathing through his mouth
to avoid the smell. He looks at his fingers, imagines the skin
peeling away from scrubbing. Blood makes a stubborn stain. “First
the bleach. I will clean your clothes… the truck, and then we go.”
He stoops, gathers Tesoro’s shirt, and leaves the room without
another glance at his brother.

4: A Plague from the Mud

Oregon has always known plenty of rain, but
that particular summer was unusually wet. Those relentless rains
drenched Monument—a small scattering of houses swallowed by pine
trees in the John Day River Valley. It was a tiny town with a
population hovering around 150. They were loggers, mostly, or other
folks that enjoyed the solitude and security supplied by miles of
quiet evergreens. So small and nestled neatly into the valley,
Monument could just vanish, and most folks wouldn’t notice.

One damp morning I sat in a small booth at
Pine Peaks Café, reading my newspaper, poking at the soggy remnants
of a short stack of pancakes, and trying to ignore a black beetle
scurrying across the restaurant’s “sparkling” floors. Over at the
counter, Randy Crouse, a bearded bear of a man who ran a small
logging outfit that usually did piecemeal work on contract, sat
sipping a cup of coffee. He perched on his stool with slumped
shoulders, wearing the look of a man who witnessed too many wet
days.

“
Aw hell, Darla. You might
as well fill ‘er up again.” Randy pushed his cup and saucer across
the counter. “I don’t see as we’ll be cutting again today. Too,
wet, even for Oregon.”

Darla Smith, a dark haired wisp of a
middle-aged waitress, poured him another cup of black swill. “Yeah.
This is a bit much.” She aimed her voice at my booth. “What d’ya
think Professor, we going to drown out here, wash away with all
this rain? Some kind of biblical flood?”

I hated the nickname. Most everyone in town
over the age of twenty-five called me Professor because I taught
English at Grant County Consolidated High School. I was the only
teacher on the payroll who lived in Monument. “I wouldn’t know
really, but I figure these things go in cycles.” I straightened my
glasses and turned back to the newspaper.

“
What do you mean,
‘cycles’?” Randy asked through his beard, sitting up on his stool
to show his barrel chest.

“
The rain. Some years it’s
more; some years less.”

“
Damn genius,” Randy
muttered. He looked down just then, spotted that little black
beetle, and crushed it with his size thirteen boot. “Hey, Darla.
Don’t call the health department just yet, but it looks like the
rain is driving ‘em inside,” he said, holding up the soiled sole of
his boot.

“
Shut up, Randy,” Darla
said.

“
Speaking of health codes,
why don’t you sell that bread anymore, the stuff you used to bake
right here in that big old oven out back? Somebody find a bug in a
loaf?” Randy asked with a wide grin.

I saw Randy again about a week later. He
stood at the back of his of his dented Chevy, leaning over the
tailgate and talking to a couple of his workers: Pete Archer and
Manny Swick. Pete and Manny were Monument’s Laurel and Hardy. Manny
was the plump one with a constant smile lurking under his thick
mustache, and Pete had a pale face—long like it had been stretched
in a taffy machine.

“
Hey Professor, get a load
of this.” Randy waved one big paw in my direction as I crossed Main
Street in front of Peterson’s Drug.

The sky still hung in a damp gray shroud
around the trees, but Monument was as dry as it had been in weeks.
A quick thought shot through my head: Randy, Pete, and Manny should
probably be out in the forest cutting on a day like that,
especially during such a wet year.

“
What is it?” I stepped
closer to the men huddled around the bed of Randy’s truck. Lumpy,
Randy’s old, nappy hound, sat panting near the cab. There was
something else, too—shiny and black like a dress shoe. Little legs
like bits of broken black bamboo jutted out at odd angles. At the
front was a smallish head with a set of nasty pincer jaws—not huge
like a Hercules Beetle, but wicked enough. Its body was about the
size of a large rat.

“
This some kind of gag?” I
asked.

“
Like hell. We found a few
of them out at the cutting site. All dead like this one.” Randy
leaned in and I could smell a hint of whiskey just under the coffee
stench. “A couple of them looked like they were stuck in the
mud—like they were climbin’ out.”

“
What do you suppose it
is?” Manny asked, a hint of fear floating just under his words. His
usual ruddy face looked whitewashed and pale.

I bent over the tailgate, a little shocked
by the possibility. “A beetle, I guess.”

“
Damn big beetle.” Randy
stroked his beard.

“
You should really show
this to Lane, you know Nancy Albricht’s kid. He’s back for the
summer, and he’s studying entomology at Oregon State.” I looked at
Randy. “This would be like winning the lotto for him.”

“
Anto-mol-ogy,” Randy spoke
slowly. “What’s that, beetle breeding?”

“
Entomology. The study of
insects. Bugs. Let’s give him a call.”

“
It kind of looks like a
common black beetle—family
Carabidae
. They’re an
import from Europe. Not native to the Pacific Northwest, that is.”
Lane Albricht, blonde and broad, stood in the center of the small
group of men gathered around his father’s workbench, poking and
prodding the specimen Randy brought from the forest. “Damn it’s
big. Where’d you find this?”

“
There were a
few out near our site. Maybe a half dozen. A couple of them looked
like they were crawling up out of the ground.” Randy made a face
and pantomimed a large beetle exiting a pile of mud. I figured the
beetle in the woods didn’t have a beard.

Lane tilted his
head and studied Randy’s acting. “Interesting. Most
Carabidae
species usually live under old trees, bark, or stones
near water. Were the others the same size?”

“
Yep, close
anyway.” Randy ceased his beetle impression. “Look, these things
are a little spooky, and we haven’t even seen a live
one.”

“
Yeah man. I
don’t wanna be out there with these things crawling all over me.”
Manny shivered, jiggling his protruding belly. Pete
nodded.

Lane carefully
looked at each man in turn, “Large insects aren’t unheard of. They
found this other beetle,
Titanus
giganteus
,
in
Brazil that was about seventeen centimeters long
. This guy is easily bigger. I’d like to know if
you find anything else. Especially a live one.”

“
Whatever kid.
If we do, it sure as hell won’t be alive for long.” Randy thumped
Manny and Pete in turn. “I guess we better get to work fellas.
We’re wasting daylight.”

Peter and Manny
exchanged a look. “Look, Randy, I can’t speak for Manny, but I’m
not really sure I want to go back out today,” Pete said, glancing
back at the black critter on the bench.

“
Yeah Randy,
maybe we should…” Manny began.

“
You’re both a
couple of pansies. Ain’t nothing out there I can’t squash with my
boot.” He started across the street toward his truck and climbed
into the cab. “You sissies can walk home. And kid, you can keep
that one. Call it a souvenir.” With a slight chuckle, Randy started
the truck and rolled down the street.

The four of us
stood in silence for a moment.

I turned to
Lane, glancing first at the black specimen on the table. “Are these
things going to be a problem?”

“
Naw. Probably just some freaks, aberrations. I
mean
Carabidae
is a carnivorous species,
but…”

“
Carnivorous
beetles?” Pete’s taffy face stretched with surprise.

“
Sure—they eat
other insects and can run really fast to catch their prey. But they
wouldn’t harm animals.” Lane ran his hand through his wavy blonde
hair. “I’m gonna call my advisor. I know he’ll want to see
this.”