The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (26 page)

There was little rebuff or criticism from the rest of the ranch hands on the station as Rawlie and Mysel sat around one of the few the campfires at night—he with his head in her lap when she read to him. The others didn’t really bother at all and her father was never out at night but stayed in his bedroom looking through her mother’s things perhaps. He sometimes did that.

The others thought them up to something else, too—but no. She stroked Mysel’s dark hair and stared at any who came near to say anything. They soon turned away with a gentle gesture of contrition.

Rawlie read to him from Ovid of a girl who turned into a tree. And now and then Mysel would catch her arm and ask had she changed yet? Laughter from him. Rawlie smiled at that. The change—that was what it was all about wasn’t it? The change from one time to another—from one being to another—one universe to another without losing anyone along the way—to anything. To madness. To isolation. To oblivion.

Rawlie thought about how the other someone she once knew who had given everything of himself to make things better for others—his hand always catching hold as they fell. He cared and it cost him. She wished they could bring him back. Or at least bring back what he stood for. Equality. Fairness for all.

She asked her father for the compound bow and quiver of arrows he had promised her a bit back. He nodded quietly and got on with getting them. They arrived within a few days and he patiently set up a training area not far from the manuka trees. He got some ranch hands to set up six large straw bales. He thought about a target. So did Rawlie. In the end she sewed a blue jumper to some old dark trousers and secured the ends of trouser legs and sleeves. Then filled the whole thing with straw and attached it to the bales. She placed a pumpkin which would suffice as a head on the level top and even carved a face upon it.

At first she missed of course and hit a manuka with the first shot, which caused her father to frown. But, from then on in she reached her target time after time. Then she aimed for the heart of the guy. She missed and hit the pumpkin head. Her father laughed. The head or the heart. The heart or the head. What to do? she wondered. The quiver of arrows was fixed firmly on her back and as she practised day after day the speed with which she could fire the arrows increased and the guy was left in tatters. Different targets were attached to the bales. The ranch hands came up with ever more weird things to hang there. Some belonged to the insides of animals. Once there was a sheep’s head. It all became a running joke. There was a possum one day. The targets became smaller. One morning there was a heart of some animal or other. That was soon reduced to almost nothing.

One night Rawlie sat on the floor and pulled out the wooden chest from under the bed. There was a little silver plaque fixed to the lid. The box had been put away since her mother’s death a few years ago with a note which said: “For Rawlie. A memory. Pandora’s box—to be opened only if and when.” THAT had always puzzled Rawlie. She hadn’t wanted to open it until now. Her mother called her Pandora now and again. Rawlie had joked that Hope could stay out of the box forever. Her mother smiled but there was sadness in her eyes.

Now was the time, thought Rawlie. She opened the lid. It was empty except for one thing—a doll. A rag doll with scraggy blonde hair, wearing a faded short blue dress trimmed with lace. The hem was way above the knee. A goth lolly doll in fact but with cross-stitches for a mouth. Rawlie got up from the floor and sat on her bed with the doll. Rawlie reached across to the small set of drawers by her bed, opened the top drawer, and found a pair of scissors which had been made in the shape of a stork. The cutting edges were the stork’s sharp pointed beak. As a child she had made her hand bleed when she had tried to unpick some sewing with them. She hoped she could avoid doing that now. Rawlie used the stork scissors to take out the stitches that formed the mouth. She then threaded a needle with cotton and carefully made the doll a new mouth with neat backstitch. Once done she tied the doll’s hair up as best she could and placed her upon the cream pillow.

Rawlie then picked up the notebook and ran her fingers across the leather. She opened it and on the first page she wrote the title—“The Keeper of Thoughts and Dreams.” She wondered if that should be “The Keeper of Hopes and Dreams.”

She glanced up at the hill that led to the mountain. There was nobody on the hill. But then she looked again—beyond the hill at the mountain. Almost at the top she thought she saw a tiny speck in the distance, and then saw it fall. It seemed to bounce off the large boulders.

Rawlie put a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. She looked down at the words on the page; violently crossed out the title, and flung the book to one side—she then picked up her bow and went out into the paddock where as dusk fell the grass shimmered in waves towards her. She aimed and waited. Whatever was there could not be killed by a mere arrow but it was all she had now. Rawlie would not see the golden stars that night and she thought perhaps nobody else would again either.

The Last Crossroads on a Calendar of Yesterdays

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

O
lympia was sunstroke hot on its way to inferno, day five. Even with frequent pulls on cans of slightly chilled soda, slow motion was all Chance and Ray could muster while moving Ray’s baby-sister into her new walkup. The 25-each she’d given them was looking like tonight’s
cold
beer money when they stopped at the traffic light and saw Pershing set the bulky crate of books at the curb.

“Might pick up a few more dineros for cerveza if we help him?” Ray said, pointing at the wall of crates and boxes Pershing had stacked at the mouth of the alley on the northside of the Broadsword Hotel.

“All fit in one load.”

Ray lowered the window. “Hey, need help moving your stuff?”

Pershing was too wiped to glower. “They’re junk. I’m just putting them out here for the garbage man.”

“Lot of books by the look of it. One old classic can equal cha-ching,” Chance whispered quickly to Ray. Gazing at fat leather spines, he grinned as a scene from
The Ninth Gate
glittered like cash-in-hand.
Collectors go for them old puppies
.

Ray smiled and nodded his yup. “Mind if we take
’
em?”

“All yours.”

It had taken Pershing three days of back-breaking labor to haul all the boxes down from the 6th floor to the curb. Chance and Ray had them loaded in the van in less than an hour. In the green patch with two wooden benches and a memorial plaque that passed for a park three blocks away they rifled through the boxes. There were skeletal pamphlets like
Magick in Theory
,
Will and the Cosmic Moment
,
Das Erdreich des Rundwurmes
, tucked between hefty volumes on psychic powers and séances, the use of poetics in the occult, arthropods in the supernatural, lycanthropy, demonology and the occult Reich.

“Now all we need is an obsessed follower of the dark side… With plenty cash.”

“Gimme your cell, I have an idea.”

Six hours later, Chance’s old library connection, an ex that wished she hadn’t dumped Chance for the Lying Asshole, had them hooked up and holding 725 dollars cashmoney. Showered and two rounds into killing the day’s thirst, they were blasting rock-n-roll sexmusic from the jukebox in Guerlain’s Boomtown. Ray was a Jack-double and a Lowenbrau (and a conditioned-with-vodka blonde) ahead and about to tell Chance they should have pushed for a few hundred more, when the blonde with the cleavage said, “My bedroom has a brand new A/C unit, but what it doesn’t have, Ray, is a
stud
to regulate the room temperature.” Any regret on parting with the books for less than a grand vaporized.

Ray informed Chance of his destination and was gone like a bullet-train.

Chance was traveling the wings and contours of the phone number his ex had given him…
Could… could. Maybe? Shit
. He took the slip of paper out of his wallet and placed it on the bar. For half a beer he stared at it. The razor chords of The Brandos’ “Gettysburg” napalmed the bar and the pain-lyrics kicked in. Cold white moonlight on graves… mothers. Sons. Died… Her number and words in the song became a cascade of darkness, brought to mind the number tattooed on the old man’s arm.

Ovens
. “Fuck.”

Following directions, they’d driven into the Black Hills and found the old man’s house in a hollow that would have caused a surveyor to erase the word Boondocks from a map and replace it with PRIMAL. Kellerman came out to the van and looked at over two dozen books plucked from various crates; his hands trembled when he held Binsfeld’s
Classification of Demons
. Chance clearly heard him say, “The Disputer.” In a voice untouched by miracles or mercy or Heaven, Kellerman counted out the money and handed it to them. They carried the books inside for the old guy and piled them neatly in the center of a small, overfilled library. Chance read a few spines; they bore titles that alluded to obscene rites and dark subject matter. He also saw the numbers tattooed on the old man’s arm and the traffic of pain and anger that made Kellerman’s eyes and mouth terrible ground.

You survive the camps and when you come out the other side you’re fucking interested in occult-shit
. “Didn’t you see enough monsters?”

Chance saw piles of bodies—shoeless, in rags, naked skeletons, belief and sense (every fact consulted) and miracles sliced away, broken… life sucked right out of them. Shivered. “Fuck.”
Fuck
. He put the number written in blue ink back in his wallet and ordered another beer. “And give me a double-Jack back too, willya.”

***

To and fro. Rocking. Slow.

Slow.

Measured, not sluggish. Predator readying true for ignorant prey.

To…

and back again. His grip not far from the shotgun.

The old man sipped his sweetened coffee from an old porcelain mug. From his hillside porch he stared into the night-darkened forest toward what was no longer the Hambly property. Old discomforts and slowmotion anger was a butchering quicksand that was bringing on tears. Kellerman put the filtered-tip cigarette to his lips and inhaled. Took the smoke deep. Held it. Exhaled. “Ruined, Zina… Bastards have ruined it.”

“—against the horde of insidious parasites
.
”

“You are the
White
…
American
…
Dream
. You are the defenders of White European culture and heritage. Your commitment and actions preserve what
Our
American Fathers—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and John Adams—shed blood to establish and protect… our Great White Nation.
You
are America’s
true
patriots.”

Pride-roasted cheers and a vigorous round of applause billow through the compound carved-out of the darksome forest of rugged pine.

“WAR DAY.” The voice of the Allfather or a blood-and-fire Jehovah at 110 decibels thunders from the loudspeakers and echoes in the hills. “Is a HOLY DAY!”

Another explosive burst of applause followed by a chain reaction of Nazi salutes expressing their pathological eagerness. Amens dash like snarls. Three semiautomatic handguns bark and send their payloads skyward. Two sisters, paleskinned twins married to paleskinned brothers, rise from their seats and begin singing a bastardization of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Their enflamed voices are joined by ten and ten and ten and ten. Fifty-strong becomes nearly one hundred.

Once Metzger disciple, before the riff became a chasm, Walter Warren smiles on the crowd. “In a week this compound, the new home of the White Liberation Alliance, will be completed. God is pleased with
your
work, brothers and sisters. God is pleased.”

Not enough miles away, or countries for that matter, Kellerman caught the amplified words. He’d heard the raised voices sing and the gunfire. Heard them last Saturday night, and too many times in the last months.

“Nazis.”

Zina sat up. Growled.

The old man shivered.

Zina stood, faced the black woods, offered the thunder her teeth and an unsheathed promise steeled with Till-Death-Do-Us-Part loyal.

Twenty years since he’d briefly lived in Olympia, in the distance below. Twenty years since he’d come west to these hills and hollows, hoping to find balm. There were small moments when he could pretend (if the sky was soft summer blue and the sun warm and the blooms gave off sweet scents) the beauty it held helped. Kellerman was an old man now, felt it when the cold ruled muscle and mind mercilessly, saw it sear the tired face the mirror slapped him with. The nightmares and wounds (still a bullet to heart and mind no prayer could moderate) of the small boy he’d been, the boy the Americans liberated from Buchenwald, now fully reawakened by the hate that had invaded his property, were, these last few months, as loud and haunting as the last breath of his cancer-ridden wife.

Kellerman’s right hand stroked Zina between her ears. “Yes, girl, I know.”

He stood and stubbed out his cigarette on the porch boards, picked up his mug, his shotgun, and turned to go inside. “Little good it will do, but we will try the Authorities again tomorrow, girl.”