Mad Cow Nightmare (8 page)

“USDA?”

“Department of Agriculture,” she said, dropping her hand. “They’ve warned us not to play this up—this CJD thing. Not to come here and poke around.”

“Why’s that? The woman’s disappearance is already on the radio. There’s no secret about it.”

“Possibility of BSE—you know, Mad Cow—somewhere. Maybe here,” the reporter whispered. “They don’t want that spread around. There’s never been a case of Mad Cow in the U.S. The government doesn’t want that.”

“And if there should be?” he asked, something sticking in his throat. He swallowed his coffee but it wouldn’t go down.

“Denial,” she said. “It never happened.”

Colm didn’t get it. And he didn’t want to ask. “Doughnut?” he said, swallowing hard. He needed to spread goodwill, wanted good press at least for Ruth. After all, he wanted to move in here with her. He was sick of living in a mortuary—his father would have to cope without him nights. Colm was a domestic animal. He needed a woman to come home to nights, a hot meal, someone to sound off to, a little lovemaking—hell, more than a little. All those years of living alone . . .

Besides, he loved Ruth. Damn it, he just plain loved her. Always had. Always would. Never mind she called it Irish bullshit. Though he knew she didn’t really mean that. Did she?

Uninvited, the cameraman stuck a doughnut in his pocket. The woman was pointing down toward the pasture, where Maggie was singing at the top of her lungs. Jeez, Colm just wanted to get out of here now, let the reporters have the traveller, bend her ear, make her talk if they could. He wanted to get back to the real world: the world of buying and selling houses and land. He was comfortable in that world.

Colm was a rational man. He’d never liked fairy tales when his mother read them to him. As a child he was scared of the supernatural: werewolves, ghouls, witches, vampires. And already this CJD thing bordered on the supernatural. Where had these plagues come from anyway? How could a virus like AIDS or CJD lie dormant inside a person or animal for up to forty years and then decide— whoosh!—to come out and devour the body? It was beyond his ken. He could help his dad fill a body with formaldehyde and cremate or bury it—but what did you do with a live woman who might be harboring a deadly plague inside her body?

It was like those fairy tales where the beautiful woman smiled at you, got you lusting after her, then offered a poison apple.

“Go ahead,” he told the couple. “Down the path to the east pasture. Follow the voice. But there are seedling trees there, don’t step on them.”

The phone rang again, five times until the answering machine kicked in—a man’s excited voice, wanting to speak to Ruth. He was a farmer, too, he had sheep, he said, on Bailey Road. Another kook, Colm assumed, worried about his animals, as if Ruth’s farm could contaminate his, at least a mile away. Colm knew Bailey Road, it was full of large homes, newly built by down-country retirees. This guy must be the Perlman fellow his associate had sold land to, to graze sheep on. Got moved in and bango, the wife took off. Well, Colm had heard every story known to man in his real estate dealings: deaths, divorces, adulteries, even a murder or two. Those fairy tales mirrored reality after all.

He grabbed his briefcase and left the house. “See no evil, hear no evil,” he told himself and hopped into his old blue Horizon. It started up after the second try and Colm was off to the real world.

* * * *

Now Sharon was on her high horse. She filled the doorway of the trailer, holding the door barely open so the reporters couldn’t see in. They stood there like minor deities: the man with the camera like a huge roach around his neck, the woman with clipboard and pen, practically panting with excitement. She was already describing the yellow trailer, Sharon supposed, the laundry spread out on the grass, a horse and pig grazing nearby, munching on her mother’s trees, a small dog of indeterminate breed relieving itself against a half-grown scotch pine.

“Don’t let them in!” Maggie hissed behind Sharon, and “Don’t go out,” to Liz and the grandmother. “It’s none of their damn business. They’re like lice in the hair. They want to burrow in and dirty you.” She shook her own frizzy mane of red hair loose, then wrapped her arms defensively across her chest.

“If you have any questions, I can answer them,” Sharon told the reporters. “I’m the farmer’s daughter.” Sharon liked that title, she had used it before with salesmen, land seekers, charities, religious kooks who came to harass her mother. Sharon liked to be interviewed. She’d been interviewed at length after she’d discovered that woman killed with an icicle up at Molly’s Crotch, and surprised herself at how well she’d handled it. If only she could write or sing or act or become someone famous she would quite enjoy the notoriety.

But Sharon had no particular talent, except for the sheer act of living: she simply poured herself into life, that’s all. She had a gift for people, her husband, Jack, would say.

“We heard the missing woman’s cousin lives in this trailer. We’d like to talk to her—please,” said the female reporter, and Sharon smiled.

“I’m afraid she’s indisposed. Upset about her cousin, you know. There’s nothing she can really tell you.”

“How long has she known the missing woman? Were they really cousins? Where did they grow up?” the reporter asked, her pen poised above her pad. “Was the woman suicidal? Was she trying to drown herself in that bathtub? Where’s the man she came here with? Night before last, was it?”

“Whoa,” said Sharon, “slow down.” There was a flash where the man was taking pictures. Flash, flash, flash, in all directions. Sharon pushed a wisp of honey hair back from her forehead, tilted her face for a better profile. Then laughed. How could she answer all those questions? “I’ve no idea,” she said. “You’ll have to make an appointment with Ms. O’Neill. I told you, she’s unwell. Her cousin is missing, that’s all we know. The man she came with is missing. Maybe they’re together. Maybe they’re not. No one knows. The pair arrived only night before last.”

“How did she look?” the reporter asked in a hushed voice. “What were the symptoms? Jerking walk, poor balance? Dementia?” She was listing the symptoms of that CJD thing.

Now Sharon’s back was really up. “None of those symptoms. Not a single one! She was tired, that’s all. Plain old fatigue. Have
you
ever had surgery?”

When the reporter, taken aback, said, “Well, yes, but—”

“There’s no reason to think she has that disease. None! There were hundreds of patients in that place. The hospital wants those people back as a precaution, that’s all. I mean, you think just because she had surgery there she caught that disease? Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?” She found herself moving down the trailer steps toward the reporters, making them step back.

The woman wouldn’t give up. “I heard the cousin singing. I know she’s in there. She gave a concert last month up in Burlington. The reviews were—well—” She wriggled her fingers up and down. “So-so,” she said.

“What?” the voice screamed behind Sharon. “I got a beautiful one in that
Seven Days
paper. They called me lilting, lyrical, true-pitched, pure!”

“And dissonant,” said the reporter, smiling. “Overly sentimental, too flashy.”

“Nonsense!” Maggie stepped out, shoving Sharon aside. She had a news clipping in her hand. “Read this. Read it! They was talking about my dress when they said flashy, not my singing. You assholes quote everything out of context! Everybody liked my dress. I’m a traveller. Flashy colors is the way we dress. You want us to change just ‘cause dull people like you wear black and gray and look like ghouls? Do you, hey? Hey?”

She began clicking imaginary castanets, doing an intricate dance step around the woman, hands waving in the air. The camera flashed and flashed, luring her on. Maggie snapped her fingers in the cameraman’s face and he grinned ear to ear. The reporter was furious. “Make her stop that,” she told Sharon. But what could Sharon do? The interview was out of control.

“Go home,” Sharon told the woman. “Then she’ll stop. She doesn’t know anything. There’s nothing to know! There’s no contamination here. It’s just fear you’re spreading. You should be ashamed of yourself. Now go home and tell your paper to cool it.”

The grandmother, Boadie, appeared in the doorway in a long purple and orange skirt and the camera flashed again. She glared fiercely at the female reporter, pulled a kitchen knife from her belt, and swung it in a wide arc about the woman’s head. The reporter shrieked and dropped her notebook.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” she told the man. “They’re crazy, these damn gypsies. We’ll come back later, talk to the owner.” Then, “Quit that!” she shouted at the old woman as the knife flashed about her ankles. “You want to kill somebody with that knife? They’ll put you in the funny farm.”

“She’s already in the funny farm,” said the cameraman. “If this isn’t the funny farm I’m a pig.”

“Pig!
You’re
the pig!” cried the grandmother and spit on his turning back.

Sharon picked up the notebook and tore off the page the reporter had been scribbling on; then handed over the notebook. The woman snatched it back angrily and stalked on up the hill.

Sharon’s adrenaline was up; she felt good about the interview. She couldn’t wait to describe it to her mother and Colm, describe how she’d saved the day. She couldn’t wait to read the account in the paper. “Thank you,” she hollered after the reporter. “Thank you for coming.”

Boadie stuck the knife back in her belt and spit again in the wake of the reporters. She grinned when the man wiped the spit off his camera and turned to glare at her. Boadie had a long spit, she could reach up to two yards—she’d had years of practice. It was her grandmother taught her after the cops chased her parents, and horse and caravan ran off the cliff, killing them both. Spit at the fuzz, spit at fate, spit at the world, her granny had taught her. “They’re all out to get you, you can’t trust nobody. So spit, girl, spit.” And Boadie did.

She’d spit at that no-good husband of hers, too; she wasn’t one to let him beat her up the way some men beat their women. She wasn’t named after that warrior female for nothing. Boadicea, the warrior’s name was: belonged to some tribe and led a revolt against the Romans. Her mother said she was descended from that tribe. But then her grandmother’d always made up stuff so you never really knew.

One thing she did know from Granny Ward: They was descended from Irish bards—uh-huh, one of the oldest travelling families in Ireland. The name came from Mac an Bhaird—in Gaelic it meant “son of the bard.” Bards, like travellers, her Irish granny said, travelled the countryside trading stories and poems for food and a bed. When the English tried to stop them, they had to go underground. Boadie’s ancestors turned tinkers but they never stopped telling stories.

Like her granny, Boadie didn’t like reporters coming to peer into her life. They’d only write up bad things, like travellers steal, travellers lie, travellers don’t take baths, travellers cheat. When Boadie never stole anything anyone really needed. What was an ear of corn when the farmer had a whole field full? What was a loaf of bread when end of day it was already going stale on the store shelves? Boadie knew how to dip the bread in warm goat’s milk to give it moisture again. Boadie knew how to make do.

And she did take baths—once a week anyway. A bath a week was enough—saved on soap? Boadie couldn’t fathom why there was all this talk about Nola taking that bath when the poor girl’d been on the road a week or more. It was just her bad luck, that’s all, that Ritchie walked in on her. For Boadie seen him running on up there, oh yeah, it was after he took down that tent, rolling up her things with it, without her say-so, sure. Ritchie wasn’t one to ask permission to do things. And now Nola was running from Ritchie.

“Go girl, go! Run for your life!” Boadie shouted in her head.

Boadie didn’t like Ritchie, though sometimes she was sorry for him the way Uncle picked on him. She seen Ritchie cry once, he was so upset, and she wanted to go back and spit at Uncle. And she did—more than once she got him in the back.

But Uncle seemed to worship Darren. Boadie seen the way Uncle looked at Darren—like he was peppermint candy and Uncle couldn’t wait to hold him and lick him down. But Darren wouldn’t give his uncle the time of day. And Ritchie liked his younger brother, though there was jealousy there, Boadie saw that. Ritchie was head over heels about Maggie, but she’d run when she seen him coming. Still, Ritchie mooned after her.

Men.

Boadie’d had her share of men—some good, some bad—and now she was done with them. They mostly just wanted sex, drink, trucks, meat—in that order, and Boadie was sick of it all. When her husband suffocated after vomiting in his drink, Boadie got her first pig. A pig was pink and cute and smart; it was worth ten husbands. A pig didn’t talk back, it didn’t want sex with her—it just wanted food. It didn’t drive a pickup, it just loved.

A pig was made out of stars just like herself. Somebody’d told her that once, about how we’re all made out of the same stuff as stars. Boadie liked that. To think she’d been a star once! Boadie was Roman Catholic, yeah, but she didn’t believe in all that heaven business. You got burned up when you died and your ashes went back in the earth and into the air and turned into stars. That’s what Boadie believed.

Boadie went outside and picked up her potbellied pig where it was rummaging in the grass. It made a sweet squealing sound, let her cuddle it. When she held it to her chest, heavy though it was, it felt like she could defend herself against anything—reporters, cops, weird uncles—even death. Boadie wasn’t afraid of death, no, not her. Boadie was going to turn into stars.

* * * *

Ruth found Franny and Henrietta outside the horse barn, slumped together in a pile of hay, their arms around one another. The three remaining Lippitt Morgans stood languidly in their stalls, tails flicking, bulging eyes gazing sadly at Ruth as though they knew one of their kind was missing—and one of them might be next.

“We’ve searched and searched,” Franny said: “pasture, woods, trails—we called the neighbors. But really, there’s no way she could of got loose. She’s gone, that’s all, Ophelia’s gone.” She dropped her head on Henrietta’s fleshy shoulder.