Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (39 page)

I drew a manila envelope from the valise, spread sloppy typed police reports and disjointed photographs beside me. The breeze stirred and I used a rock for a paper weight.

A whole slew of the pictures featured Russell Piers in various poses, mostly mug shots, although a few had been snapped during more pleasant times. There was even one of him and a younger brother standing in front of the Space Needle. The remaining photos were of Piers’ latest girlfriend—Penny Aldon, the girl from Allen Town. Skinny, pimply, mouthful of braces. A flower child with a suitably vacuous smirk.

Something cold and nasty turned over in me as I studied the haphazard data, the disheveled photo collection. I felt the pattern, unwholesome as damp cobwebs against my skin. Felt it, yet couldn’t put a name to it, couldn’t put my finger on it and my heart began pumping dangerously and I looked away, thought of Carly instead, and how I’d forgotten to call her on her seventh birthday because I was in Spain with some friends at a Lipizzaner exhibition. Except, I hadn’t forgotten, I was wired for sound from a snort of primo Colombian blow and the thought of dialing that long string of international numbers was too much for my circuits.

Ancient history, as they say. Those days of fast-living and superstar dreams belonged to another man, and he was welcome to them.

Waiting for cars to drive past so I could count them, I had an epiphany. I realized the shabby buildings were cardboard and the people milling here and there at opportune junctures were macaroni and glue. Dull blue construction paper sky and cotton ball clouds. And I wasn’t really who I thought of myself as—I was an ant left over from a picnic raid, awaiting some petulant child god to put his boot down on my pathetic diorama existence.

My cell rang and an iceberg calved in my chest.

“Hey, Ray, you got any Indian in ya?” Rob asked.

I mulled that as a brand new Cadillac convertible paused at the light. A pair of yuppie tourists mildly argued about directions—a man behind the wheel in stylish wraparound shades and a polo shirt, and a woman wearing a floppy, wide-brimmed hat like the Queen Mum favored. They pretended not to notice me. The woman pointed right and they went right, leisurely, up the hill and beyond. “Comanche,” I said. Next was a shiny green van loaded with Asian kids. Sign on the door said THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE. It turned right and so did the one that came after. “About one thirty-second. Am I eligible for some reparation money? Did I inherit a casino?”

“Where the hell did the Comanche sneak in?”

“Great grandma. Tough old bird. Didn’t like me much. Sent me a straight razor for Christmas. I was nine.”

Rob laughed. “Cra-zee. I did a search and came up with a bunch of listings for genetic research. Lemme check this . . . ” he shuffled paper close to the receiver, cleared his throat. “Turns out this X haplogroup has to do with mitochondrial DNA, genes passed down on the maternal side—and an X-haplogroup is a specific subdivision or cluster. The university wags are tryin’ to use female lineage to trace tribal migrations and so forth. Something like three percent of Native Americans, Europeans and Basque belong to the X-group. Least, according to the stuff I thought looked reputable. Says here there’s lots of controversy about its significance. Usual academic crap. Whatch you were after?”

“I don’t know. Thanks, though.”

“You okay, bud? You sound kinda odd.”

“Shucks, Rob, I’ve been trapped in a car with two redneck psychos for weeks. Might be getting to me, I’ll admit.”

“Whoa, sorry. Sylvia called and started going on—”

“Everything’s hunky-dory, All right?”

“Cool, bro.” Rob’s tone said nothing was truly cool, but he wasn’t in any position to press the issue. There’d be a serious Q&A when I returned, no doubt about it.

Cruz’s dad was Basque, wasn’t he? Hart was definitely of good, solid German stock only a couple generations removed from the motherland.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one—a Spaniard, a German and a Comanche walk into a bar—

After we said goodbye, I dialed my ex and got her machine, caught myself and hung up as it was purring. It occurred to me then, what the pattern was, and I stared dumbly down at the fractured portraits of Penny and Piers as their faces were dappled by sunlight falling through a maze of leaves.

I laughed, bitter.

How in God’s name had they ever fooled us into thinking they were people at all? The only things missing from this farce were strings and zippers, a boom mike.

I stuffed the photos and the reports into the valise, stood in the weeds at the edge of the asphalt. My blood still pulsed erratically. Shadows began to crawl deep and blue between the buildings and the trees and in the wake of low-gliding cumulus clouds. Moony’s Tavern waited, back there in the golden dust, and Cruz’s Chevy before it, stolid as a coffin on the altar.

Something was happening, wasn’t it? This thing that was happening, had been happening, could it follow me home if I cut and ran? Would it follow me to Sylvia and Carly?

No way to be certain, no way to tell if I had simply fallen off my rocker—maybe the heat had cooked my brain, maybe I was having a long-overdue nervous breakdown. Maybe, shit. The sinister shape of the world contracted around me, gleamed like the curves of a great killing jar. I heard the lid screwing tight in the endless ultraviolet collisions, the white drone of insects.

I turned right and walked up the hill.

5.

About two hours later, a guy in a vintage farm truck stopped. The truck had cruised by me twice, once going toward town, then on the way back. And here it was again. I hesitated; nobody braked for hitchhikers unless the hitcher was a babe in tight jeans.

I thought of Piers and Penny, their expressions in the video, drinking us with their smiling mouths, marking us. And if that was true, we’d been weighed, measured and marked, what was the implication? Piers and Penny were two from among a swarm. Was it open season?

The driver studied me with unsettling intensity, his beady eyes obscured by thick, black-rimmed glasses. He beckoned.

My legs were tired already and the back of my neck itched with sunburn. Also, what did it matter anyway? If I were doing anything besides playing out the hand, I would’ve gone into Olympia and caught a southbound Greyhound. I climbed aboard.

George was a retired civil engineer. Looked the part—crewcut, angular face like a piece of rock, wore a dress shirt with a row of clipped pens and a tie flung over his shoulder, and polyester slacks. He kept NPR on the radio at a mumble. Gripped the wheel with both gnarled hands.

He seemed familiar—a figure dredged from memories of scientists and engineers of my grandfather’s generation. He could’ve
been
my grandfather.

George asked me where I was headed. I said Los Angeles and he gave me a glance that said LA was in the opposite direction. I told him I wanted to visit the Mima Mounds—since I was in the neighborhood.

There was a heavy silence. A vast and unfathomable pressure built in the cab. At last George said, “Why, they’re only a couple miles farther on. Do you know anything about them?”

I admitted that I didn’t and he said he figured as much. He told me the Mounds were declared a national monument back in the ‘60s; the subject of scholarly debate and wildly inaccurate hypotheses. He hoped I wouldn’t be disappointed—they weren’t glamorous compared to real natural wonders such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon or the California Redwoods. The preserve was on the order of five hundred acres, but that was nothing. The Mounds had stretched for miles and miles in the old days. The land grabs of the 1890s reduced the phenomenon to a pocket, surrounded it with rundown farms, pastures and cows. The ruins of America’s agrarian era.

I said that it would be impossible to disappoint me.

George turned at a wooden marker with a faded white arrow. A nicely paved single lane wound through temperate rain forest for a mile and looped into a parking lot occupied by the Evergreen vans and a few other vehicles. There was a fence with a gate and beyond that, the vague border of a clearing. Official bulletins were posted every six feet, prohibiting dogs, alcohol and firearms.

“Sure you want me to leave you here?”

“I’ll be fine.”

George rustled, his clothes chitin sloughing. “X marks the spot.”

I didn’t regard him, my hand frozen on the door handle, more than slightly afraid the door wouldn’t open. Time slowed, got stuck in molasses. “I know a secret, George.”

“What kind of secret?” George said, too close, as if he’d leaned in tight.

The hairs stiffened on the nape of my neck. I swallowed and closed my eyes. “I saw a picture in a biology textbook. There was this bug, looked exactly like a piece of bark, and it was barely touching a beetle with its nose. The one that resembled bark was what entomologists call an assassin bug and it was draining the beetle dry. Know how? It poked the beetle with a razor sharp beak thingy—”

“A rostrum, you mean.”

“Exactly. A rostrum, or a proboscis, depending on the species. Then the assassin bug injected digestive fluids, think hydrochloric acid, and sucked the beetle’s insides out.”

“How lovely,” George said.

“No struggle, no fuss, just a couple bugs sitting on a branch. So I’m staring at this book and thinking the only reason the beetle got caught was because it fell for the old piece of bark trick, and then I realized that’s how lots of predatory bugs operate. They camouflage themselves and sneak up on hapless critters to do their thing.”

“Isn’t that the way of the universe?”

“And I wondered if that theory only applied to insects.”

“What do you suppose?”

“I suspect that theory applies to everything.”

Zilch from George. Not even the rasp of his breath.

“Bye, George. Thanks for the ride.” I pushed hard to open the door and jumped down; moved away without risking a backward glance. My knees were unsteady. After I passed through the gate and approached a bend in the path, I finally had the nerve to check the parking lot. George’s truck was gone.

I kept going, almost falling forward.

The trees thinned to reveal the humpbacked plain from the TV picture. Nearby was a concrete bunker shaped like a squat mushroom—a park information kiosk and observation post. It was papered with articles and diagrams under Plexiglas. Throngs of brightly-clad Asian kids buzzed around the kiosk, laughing over the wrinkled flyers, pointing cameras and chattering enthusiastically. A shaggy guy in a hemp sweater, presumably the professor, lectured a couple of wind-burned ladies who obviously ran marathons in their spare time. The ladies were enthralled.

I mounted the stairs to the observation platform and scanned the environs. As George predicted, the view wasn’t inspiring. The mounds spread beneath my vantage, none greater than five or six feet in height and largely engulfed in blackberry brambles. Collectively, the hillocks formed a dewdrop hemmed by mixed forest, and toward the narrowing end, a dilapidated trailer court, its structures rendered toys by perspective. The paved footpath coiled unto obscurity.

A radio-controlled airplane whirred in the trailer court airspace. The plane’s engine throbbed, a shrill metronome. I squinted against the glare, couldn’t discern the operator. My skull ached. I slumped, hugged the valise to my chest, pressed my cheek against damp concrete, and drowsed. Shoes scraped along the platform. Voices occasionally floated by. Nobody challenged me, my derelict posture. I hadn’t thought they would. Who’d dare disturb the wildlife in this remote enclave?

My sluggish daydreams were phantoms of the field, negatives of its buckled hide and stealthy plants, and the whispered words
Eastern Washington
,
South America
,
Norway
. Scientists might speculate about the geological method of the mounds’ creation until doomsday. I knew this place and its sisters were unnatural as monoliths hacked from rude stone by primitive hands and stacked like so many dominos in the uninhabited spaces of the globe. What were they? Breeding grounds, feeding grounds, shrines? Or something utterly alien, something utterly incomprehensible to match the blighted fascination that dragged me ever closer and consumed my will to flee.

Hart’s call yanked me from the doldrums. He was drunk. “You shoulda stuck around, Ray-bo. We been huntin’ everywhere for you. Cruz ain’t in a nice mood.” The connection was weak, a transmission from the dark side of Pluto. Batteries were dying.

“Where are you?” I rubbed my gummy eyes and stood.

“We’re at the goddamned Mounds. Where are
you
?”

I spied a tiny glint of moving metal. The Chevy rolled across the way where the road and the mobile homes intersected. I smiled—Cruz hadn’t been looking for me; he’d been trolling around on the wrong side of the park, frustrated because he’d missed the entrance. As I watched, the car slowed and idled in the middle of the road. “I’m here.”

The cell phone began to click like a Geiger counter that’d hit the mother lode. Bits of fiddle music pierced the garble.

The car jolted from a savage tromp on the gas and listed ditchward. It accelerated, jounced and bounded into the field, described a haphazard arc in my direction. I had a momentary terror that they’d seen me atop the tower, were coming for me, were planning some unhinged brand of retribution. But no, the distance was too great. I was no more than a speck, if I was anything. Soon, the car lurched behind the slope of intervening hillocks and didn’t emerge.

“Hart, are you there?”

The clicking intensified and abruptly chopped off, replaced by smooth, bottomless static. Deep sea squeals and warbles began to filter through. Bees humming. A castrati choir on a gramophone. Giggling. Someone, perhaps Cruz, whispering a Latin prayer. I was grateful when the phone made an electronic protest and expired. I hurled it over the side.

The college crowd had disappeared. Gone too, the professor and his admirers. I might’ve joined the migration if I hadn’t spotted the cab of George’s truck mostly hidden by a tree. It was the only rig in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell if anyone was behind the wheel.