Moonchasers and Other Stories

The Beast in the Woods

By the time I get to the barn tonight, there’s already a quarter moon in the September sky, and the barn owl who always sits in the old elm along the creek, he’s already hooting into the Iowa darkness.

For the first twenty minutes, I rake out the stalls and scatter hay around the floor. Dairy cows take a lot of work. After that I spread sawdust to eat up some of the dampness and the odors.

Not that I’m paying a whole hell of a lot of attention. All I can think of really is his old army .45. Ordinarily it hangs from a dusty holster on a peg in the spare room upstairs where he moved after Mom died two years ago of the heart disease that’s run in her family for years. Dad says he moved in there because whenever he was in their room, lying in their bed, he’d start to cry, and he’s a proud man and doesn’t think tears are proper. Also, when he was drunk one night, he told me that a few times when he was in her room, he talked to her ghost and that scared him. So now he keeps their bedroom door shut and sleeps in the room down the hall.

I wonder where he is now. I wonder what he’s doing.

Three hours ago, he left, saying he’d be back for dinner but he wasn’t.

And then when I went in to wash up and heat up some spaghetti, I passed by the spare room and noticed that his .45 was gone from its holster.

When I’m finished with the sawdust, I go outside and stand in the Indian summer dusk, all rolling Iowa hills and bright early stars and the clean fast smell of the nearby creek, and the distant smoky smells of autumn in the piney hills to the east.

All the outbuildings stand in silhouette now against the dusk, the corn wagon parked by the silo reminding me of tomorrow’s chores.

There’s only one reason he’d take that goddamned gun of his to town. I’m sure glad Mom isn’t here. She tended to get real emotional about things. She would’ve had a real hard time with the past year, Dad’s loan going bad at the bank when the flood wiped us out, and the bank being forced to give Dad until three weeks ago to settle up his account or lose the farm. They gave him a little extra time but this morning he got a phone call telling him that the bank’d have to file papers to get the farm back and auction it off. (“It isn’t the same anymore, Verne,” I heard the banker Ken Ohlers tell him on the porch one afternoon, “we don’t own the friggin’ bank now — the boys in Minneapolis do, big goddamned banking conglomerate, and frankly they could give a shit about a bunch of Iowa farmers, you know, whether the farmers go out of business or not. They just don’t make enough on this kind of farm loan to hassle with it.”)

Then he went into town with his gun.

To the north now I see plumes of road dust, inside of which is a gray car that I recognize immediately.

As I expect, he turns right into our long gravel drive and shoots right up to the edge of the outbuildings. He has one of those long whip antennas on the back of his car, Sheriff Mike Rhodes does, giving his car a very official and menacing look.

He jumps out of the car almost before the motor stops running. In his left hand is a shotgun. He’s a beefy man of Dad’s age, fifty or so. In fact, they served in Nam together, and were the first two Nam vets to be allowed in the local VFW, some of the other vets from WWII and Korea feeling that Vietnam wasn’t an actual war. Fifty-nine thousand fucking Americans die there and it isn’t actually a war, as my dad used to say all the time.

One more thing about Sheriff Mike. He’s my godfather.

“Bobby, is your dad around here?” he says, coming at me like he’s going to hit me or something.

“He went into town. How come you got the shotgun, Mike?”

But he doesn’t answer my question. He just gets closer. He smells of sweat and aftershave. And he scares me. The same way my dad scares me sometimes when I sense how mad he is and how terrible it’s going to be when he lets go of it.

“Bobby, I need to know where your dad is.”

“He ain’t here. Honest, Mike.”

He takes my arm. His fingers hurt me. “Bobby, you listen to me.” He is still catching his breath, big man in khaki uniform, wide sweat rings under his arms. “Bobby, you got to think. Think like a normal person. You understand me?”

Sometimes people talk to me like that. They remember when I fell off the tractor when I was seven and how I was never the same. That’s what my mom always said. That poor Bobby, he was never the same. In school I didn’t read so good and sometimes people would tell me stuff but I couldn’t understand them no matter how hard I tried. And that’s when I’d always start crying. I guess I must have cried a lot before I quit school in the tenth grade because the kids, they called me “Buckets” and they always made fun of the way I cried.

“I’ll listen good, Mike. I promise.”

“You know Ken Ohlers down to the bank?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Your dad killed him about an hour ago. Shot him with that forty-five of his he used in Song Be that time.”

“Oh shit, Mike, I wish you wouldn’t’ve said that.”

“I’m sorry, Bobby, I had to tell you.”

“It makes me scared. You’re gonna hurt my dad now, aren’t you?”

“I don’t want to, Bobby. That’s why I need your help. You see him, you got to convince him to give himself up. There’s just you now, Bobby, your ma bein’ dead and all. You’re the only one he’ll listen to.”

“I’m scared, Mike. I’m real scared.”

And I start crying. Don’t want to. But can’t stop.

And Mike, he just looks kind of embarrassed for me, the way folks do when I start crying like this.

And then he comes up and slides his arm around me and gives me a little hug. Dad, he’ll never do that, not even when I cry. Says it doesn’t look right, two grown men hugging each other that way.

He digs in his pocket and takes out his handkerchief. Smells of mint. Mike always carries mints in his right khaki pocket.

“I have a mint, Mike?”

“You bet.”

I blow my nose in his handkerchief and try to hand it back to him but he nods for me to keep it and then he digs a mint out and drops it into the palm of my hand.

“You remember what I told you, Bobby?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You tell your dad to give himself up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“ ’Cause the mayor, he won’t mess around. He never liked your dad, anyway.”

“They gonna get the dogs out after him the way they did that time with that black guy?”

“Dogs’re already out.”

“And the helicopter?”

“Already out, too.”

“Scares me, that helicopter.”

“Don’t like it much myself. Hate ridin’ in the friggin’ thing.” He wipes sweat from his face. “He shows up around here, you give him that message, all right?”

“I will, Mike. I promise.”

I’m scared I’m going to start crying again.

He looks at me a long time and then gives me another quick hug. “I’m sorry this happened, Bobby.”

“I’ll bet he’s scared, too. I’m gonna say a prayer for him. Hail Mary. Just like Mom taught me.”

“I’ll check back later, Bobby.”

Then he’s trotting back to the big gray car that smells of road dust and oil and gasoline and heat. Inside, he kind of gives me a little wave and then he whips the car around so he can go back out headfirst, and then he’s lost again inside heavy rolling dust that’s silver now in the moonlight.

I go in the house. Upstairs, I go into their bedroom. Mom always kept a framed picture of Blessed Mother on her nightstand. She always said that Blessed Mother listens to boys like me, you know, boys that don’t seem just like other boys. I try not to cry as I pray. Hail Mary full of. Sometimes I get confused. Mom wrote it down for me a lot of times but I have a habit of losing things. Hail Mary full of grace. This time it goes all right. Or mostly all right. And when I’m done praying I light this little votive candle the priest gave her one time he came out here. The match smells of sulphur. The candle smells of wax. Red glow plays across the picture of the Blessed Mother. Hail Mary full of grace. I say a whole nother one. In case she didn’t hear it or something.

Then I’m outside, pretty sure where I’ll find Dad. There’s a line shack up in the hills. Dad and his brother used to play up there. His brother died in Nam. Poor goddamned bastard Dad always says whenever he gets drunk. Poor goddamned bastard. Uncle Win and Mom are buried up to Harrison Cemetery and a couple times a month in the warm season, Dad goes up there and puts flowers on their graves. In the winter months he just stands graveside and stares down at their grave markers, leaning over and brushing away the snow so that their names can be read real clear. He even went up there one night when it was ten below and nobody found him till dawn and Doc Hardy said it was a miracle him being exposed like that — should’ve died for Christ’s sake (how old Doc Hardy always talks) — and probably would have if he hadn’t been so drunk.

And now I’m running through the long prairie grasses and it feels good. The grasses are up to my waist and it’s like running through water, the way the grasses slap at you and tickle you. My mom always read me books about the Iowa Indians and about nature stuff. I liked the names of the flowers especially and always made her read them to me over and over again sort of like singing a song. Rattlesnake master and goldenrod and gay-feather and black-eyed Susans and silverleaf scurf pea and ragwort and shooting star. Some nights I lie in my bed when I can’t sleep and just say those names over and over and over again and imagine Mom reading them to me the way she used to, and making me learn new words, too, three “five-dollar words” (as she always called them) each and every week.

A couple times I fall down. I try not to cry. But the second time I fall down I cut my knee on the edge of a rock and I can’t help but cry. But then I’m running along the moonsilver creek, ducking below the weeping willows and jumping over a lost little mud frog, and then I’m starting up into the red cedar glade where the cabin lies.

Halfway there I have to stop and pee. Dad always says be proud I don’t pee my pants no more. And I am proud. But sometimes I can barely hold it. Like now. And I have to go. The pee is hot and rattles the fallen red leaves. I should wash my hands the way Mom always said but I can’t so I run on.

Behind me once, I think I hear something and I stop. I’m scared now, the way I am when monster movies come on TV. You shouldn’t watch that crap, Dad always says, snapping off the set when he sees that I’m getting scared. The forest is vast. Dark. Slither and crawl and creep, the things in the forest, possum and snake and wolf. And maybe monsters, the way there are in forests on TV. The Indians always believed there were beasts in the woods.

I start running again. Need to find Dad. Warn him.

Now I think of the things Mom read me about the Indians who used to live here. I like to pretend I’m an Indian. I wish I could wear buffalo masks the way they did when they danced around their campfires. Or the claws of a grizzly bear as a necklace signifying that I am the bravest brave of all. Or paint stripes of blood on my arm, each stripe meaning a different battle. They had to come get me sometimes, Mom and Dad, at suppertime, scared I’d wandered off, but I was always up at the old line shack playing Indian, talking to the prairie sky the way the Indians always had; and watching for the silver wolves to stand in the long grasses and sing and cry and nuzzle their young as the silver moon rose in the pure Iowa night.

I see the shape of the little cabin through the cedars now. It sits all falling down in the middle of a small clearing. No lights; no sound but an owl and the soft soughing of the long grasses; and the smell of rotted wood still wet from the rain last week.

I know he’s in there. I sense it.

I crouch down, the way an Indian would, and reach the clearing. And then I start running fast for the cabin.

I am halfway across the clearing when I hear a voice say, “You go back home, Bobby. Right now.”

Dad. Inside the cabin.

I am chill with sweat. And shaking. “Mike, he came out to the house, Dad and said—”

“I know what he said.”

“He says you killed Mr. Ohler.”

“I had to, son. He didn’t have no right to take our farm back. He said he was our friend but he wasn’t no friend at all.”

I don’t say anything just then; just the soft soft soughing of the wind, like the breathing of some invisible giant, sleeping.

“Mike, he says he’s afraid you’ll get killed.”

“I don’t want to go to prison, Bobby.”

“I wish I could see you.”

He’s in the window, in darkness. He’s like Mom now. I can talk to him but I can’t see him. It’s like death.

“I want to see you, Dad.”

“You just go on back, Bobby. You understand me? You just go on back to the farm and wait there.”

And then I hear something again, and when I turn I see Mike coming out into the clearing.

He looks all sloppy, his shirt untucked and his graying hair all mussed. He carries his shotgun, cocked in his arm now.

“I figured you’d lead me to him, Bobby.”

“He won’t let me see him, Mike.”

He nods and then says to the cabin. “I want to come in and talk to you.”

“Just stay out there, Mike.”

“You don’t need to make this any worse than it already is. I’m supposed to be your friend.”

“Yeah, just the way Ohler was my friend.”

“He didn’t have nothing to do with taking your farm back. It was those bastards in Minneapolis.”

“That’s what he liked to say, anyway.”

“I’m coming in.”

“I’ll shoot you if you try.”

“Then you’ll just have to shoot me, you sonofabitch.”

One thing about Mike, he makes up his mind, there’s no stopping him. No sir.

I say, “Can I go with you?”

He shakes his head. “You just stay here.”

“He’s my dad.”

“Bobby, goddammit, I got enough on my mind right now, all right? You just stay right here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry I swore at you like that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I won’t be long.”

From the cabin, my dad shouts, “You just stay out there, Mike. You hear me?”

But Mike walks toward the cabin.

My dad fires.

The shot is loud and flat in the soughing prairie silence.

“Next time I’ll hit you.”

“You’ll just have to hit me, then.”

This time, the bullet comes a lot closer. This time it echoes off the hills.

But Mike doesn’t slow down.

He walks right up to the one-room cabin and kicks in the front door and then goes inside.

I walk back to the edge of the clearing and look at trees. Mom always used to read me the names of trees, too, white oak and shag-bark hickory and basswood and pin oak and green ash and silver maple and honey locusts and big-tooth aspens. Say them over and over and they’re like a song, too.

I need to pee again.

I go into the woods.

I wish I could wash my hands. It always makes me feel bad not to do what Mom says, even when she’s gone.

In the clearing again, I hear them yelling at each other inside the cabin and I get scared. And they’re starting to fight. They slam up against the walls and the whole cabin shakes. I want to run down there but I’m too scared. I don’t want to see Dad hurt Mike or Mike hurt Dad. This shouldn’t ought to be like this.

And then the shot.

Just one.

And it’s louder and the echo is longer and then there is this terrible silence and you can’t even hear the wind now.

And then the cabin door opens up and Dad comes out.

He walks to the center of the clearing, his .45 dangling from his right hand. “You get back to the farm, you hear me, Bobby?”

But I can’t help myself. I go up to him. And I put my arms around him. And the funny thing is, this time he doesn’t push me away or tell me grown men shouldn’t hug each other. He holds me real tight and I can feel how raw-boned he is, all sharp shoulders and bony elbows and gaunted ribs.

He holds me tight, too, just as tight as I hold him, and says, “I messed it all up, Bobby. I messed it all up.”

And then he starts choking and crying the way he did at Mom’s funeral and I hold him and let him cry the way Mom used to hold me and let me cry.

And then he’s done.

And standing in the clearing. And staring up at the moon the way Mom told me Indians used to. She said they believed they could read things in the moon, portents for what would happen to them in the future.

Then he looks at me, and he speaks very very softly, and he says, “You get on back now, Bobby. And you call Mr. Sayre, the lawyer, he’ll know what to do.”

“Is Uncle Mike dead?”

“Yes, he is, Bobby.”

“How come you shot him, Dad?”

“I’m not sure why, Bobby. I’m not sure why at all. I just wish I hadn’t.”

I wanted to say something but I was afraid I would start crying again.

And Dad was already looking back toward the cabin.

“You go on back to the farm now, Bobby, and you call Mr. Sayre.”

I reach out gently for his .45 but he pulls it back. “Maybe I should take that from you, Dad.”

“You just go on, Bobby.”

“I’m scared, Dad, you havin’ that forty-five and all.”

“You just go on. You just hurry and call Mr. Sayre.”

“I’m scared, Dad.”

“I know you are, Bobby. And I’m scared, too.” He nods to the woods and says, very final now, “Git, boy. Git and git fast. You understand?”

“Yessir.”

“You run till you get to the farm and then you call Mr. Sayre. You understand?”

“Yessir.”

And that is all.

He turns away from me, his face lost in moonshadow, and he goes on back to the cabin.

I know better than to argue or disobey.

I start walking slowly toward the woods again and by the time I reach the front stand of trees, the shot rings out just as I thought it would, and I try to imagine what it must look like, their two bodies there inside the cabin, blood and flies and stink the way it is when any kind of animal is dead like that, and then I get scared, real scared, and I start crying.

I want my dad to hold me again the way he did just a few minutes ago, the way my mom used to hold me anytime I asked her. I want somebody to hold me, and hold me tight, and hold me for a long long time because the night is coming full now, and there is a beast in these woods, just the way the Indians always said, a beast in the dark dark woods.