The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (2 page)

“For one thing, they kept records on clay tablets.”

“Cuneiform,” I remembered.  “The first newspapers, kind of.”

“Yes.  And many of them, thousands of them, survived the centuries.  Some of the records were about breeding and domesticating horses.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.  “God, my mother would give anything to see those.”

“Me, too,” he said.  “But the information in those tablets was passed down through generations, and when the descendents of the Sumerians and the Babylonians became wanderers of the desert, they took their horses with them.”

“Do you find a lot of similarity between Middle Eastern Bedouin tribes and American Indian tribes.”

“A little.  The tribal systems still exist in both cultures.”

“Both have respect for the horse,” I added.

“Yes.  I mean, we don’t use the horse to get around any more, or to carry our homes from place to place, but the idea of the horse is still ingrained in us.  The Iraqis kept and nurtured a special herd of over a hundred purebred Arabians.”

“My mother told me once that the Dutch government owns some of their country’s best warmbloods.  It might be the same in Germany, too.  They have hundreds of years of selective breeding.”

“The Iraqi National Herd has five
thousand
years of selective breeding.  And like you say of the Dutch, they didn’t belong to Saddam or his sons, they’re not Sunni or Shiite, and they don’t belong to one city rather than another.  They belong to the Iraqi people as a whole.  In a way, if you help the horses, you help the people.”

I closed my eyes and
visualized a herd of magnificent Arabian horses running free over miles of pasture land, free to fight and race and breed.  Then I opened them and looked toward the dozen and a half stalls.

“Where are the rest?” I asked.

“The rest?”

“You told me that there are over a hundred horses in the herd but there are only, what, twenty stalls.”

The Enemy Hunter looked toward the stalls and a sadness came into his eyes.  “When the first Army units deployed into the city,” he began, “there was a firefight.  A cruise missile destroyed their old barn.  Only nineteen horses survived.”

“They were killed?” I asked stupidly.

Ossie nodded.

And there, then, the barrier I had been building up inside myself to keep from feeling any real anger or sadness or futility started giving way, not with a mortar shell or a bomb, but more like its atoms just fell apart and crumbled to dust, and I was suddenly engulfed in grief.

“Wait.  Let me get this straight,” I began, tears starting to come.  “To protect the oil flow to American gas guzzlers, the military slaughtered more than eighty 5000-year-old pureblood Arabian horses?”  The tears were streaming down my face.  It was the first time I had cried since I arrived in Iraq, and I have cried many times since.

“Collateral damage,” he said. He paused, looking away, then added an afterthought. “It was a Tomahawk”.

“What?”  I felt dumb in so many ways and had no idea what he was talking about.

“The cruise missile that took out the horses.  It’s called a Tomahawk.”

When I couldn’t find anything to reply, he said simply, “I want to go back home.”

“Me too.”

As we walked back to the hotel, the life seemed to go out of both of us.  I suppose we talked about our future plans, what we would do when we got back home, although I’m sure I didn’t have a clue.  I do remember one thing more before we parted in the lobby.  I asked him if were possible for me to see the old cuneiform tablets with the inscribed breeding information that had been preserved so carefully for millennia.

“Gone,” he said simply.

“Gone?  What do you mean gone?”

“The museum was hit by another missile. Whatever wasn’t pulverized into dust was stolen by looters.”

The next day I got my wish to go home.  My mother had been bucked off her three-year-old filly and killed.

Chapter 1

By the looks of my bedroom, the last few weeks had been bad ones.  Dirty sheets lay heaped up in a corner surrounded by almost a month’s worth of clothes.  Against the wall, my blue iMac computer splattered with yellow stick-it notes sat on a small desk littered with flint arrowheads.  A dozen tightly crumpled sheets of paper lay on the floor by the printer where I had dropped them in disgust.  On a nightstand, an unopened bottle of tequila kept company with a digital alarm clock and a conch shell ashtray.  An overhead fan created a slight draft that wafted marijuana smoke toward an open-curtained window.  And below the fan blades, I was lying naked and damp on a rumpled queen-size bed.

Almost eleven months had passed since my mother’s funeral, which I missed when the transport plane I was supposed to catch out of Amman had been grounded for two days because of a bomb scare.  I still loved journalism, but was sick of reporting on war and death.  After leaving Baghdad I quit my high-profile job with
The Richmond Times-Dispatch
, staged a fight with my boyfriend, and moved back to my home town of Pine Oak, a small city in the Florida panhandle, where there was not much else but forest, breeze, and a twice-weekly gossip sheet called
The Pine Oak Courier
.  I got a job with
The Courier
, which paid almost nothing, and moved to my parents’ farm, empty now except for me.  I had a boyfriend for a while but being with him had been too much like war.

I reached out and placed my roach clip carefully in the conch shell.  Marijuana is generally not my thing, but a supply of the stuff had recently dropped into my lap and I was languidly high.  Not high enough to forget that I would be spending Friday night at home again, but high enough, if I concentrated, to slow down the fan blades to the point where I could read the letters that were scrawled in lipstick on each one:  D-O-N-N-Y. 

Never trust guys with 5-letter names.  They’ll write their names on your fan blades.  Later, they’ll begin on your shoulder blades and work their way down and around until their names are inscribed throughout your whole body.

But Donny was gone now.  Was with Linda C now.  Looking back on it, I realized that it was partly my illness that had driven him away.  Breathlessness, fatigue, and general depression had crept over me so slowly that I at first assumed they were the effects of my mother’s death combined with the hopeless knowledge that I had uprooted myself from a situation I had worked all my life to attain, only to return to a place I had once vowed to escape from.  But it had gone beyond that now and I often found myself staring at those dark fan blades, my heart drumming like galloping hooves.  I was starting to think I had some kind of combat fatigue that was lingering far longer than it should.  It was getting worse as the months went by.

Getting high is for shit.  I was reaching toward the whirring fan to smear out the letters when the harsh notes of a jangling phone cut through me like shards of glass.  I grabbed blindly for the receiver, knocking the conch shell onto the bare wooden floor with a clunk, spewing ashes everywhere.  The hooves were trying to kick through my chest.  I let the phone ring once, twice, until I was calm enough to answer.

“’Lo?”

“Sue-Ann?  Hey, it’s me, Mark.”

“Hey, Memark,” I answered.

“Listen, Sue-Ann.  Are you busy right now?”

“Busy?” I asked.

“Mr. Dent just called me on my cell.  There’s something going on down at Meekins’ Market.  Can you get down there?”

The shock of the ringing phone was wearing off and I tried to will myself alert.  I failed.  I was stoned and tired deep through to my bones.  I looked at the digital clock.  Nine twenty-five p.m.  I stalled. “What is it?”

“Not sure; something about a dead goat.  But there are supposed to be cars from at least three law enforcement agencies.”

“Cal Dent called to tell you about a dead goat?”

“He heard it from Billy Dollar.”

“Dilly called in another story?”

“I guess.”

“Why tell me, then?  You’re the fair-haired boy.”

“Come on, Sue-Ann,” he wheedled.  “I can’t help it if the boss has been using a lot of my stuff lately.  But I can’t do this one.  I’m drunk.”

“You don’t sound drunk to me.  Besides, who isn’t?”  In the silence that ensued, I heard voices in the background, the sound of cars on a highway.  “Where are you?” I asked.

“Some little speakeasy in Forester.  And listen, Sue-Ann, I’m not alone, do you know what I mean?”

I propped my back against the cool headboard and tried to think it over.  Billy Dollar—who drove the only night patrol car in Pine Oak—got ten bucks every time he tipped off Cal Dent that there was a story to be had.  It was supposed to be a secret from the other officers but even the sheriff up in the county seat knew about it and used it as an unspoken excuse not to give Billy a raise.  A few of his tips had been good ones, though, like the time an eighteen wheeler had jackknifed and scattered bricks of high-grade marijuana along both shoulders of the interstate.  I was currently reaping the benefits of that story.

“Okay, Mr. Hormone.  Tell me about the goat.”

“Thanks, Sue-Ann. Only thing I know is that the guy down at Meekins’ found a dead goat in his dumpster.”

“Somebody murdered a goat?”

“Right, that’s what I heard.”

“And Cal wants you to go down there and find out why?”

“Maybe there’s something to it.”  His voice told me that he thought nothing of the kind.

“Yeah,” I told him.  “Sure.  I’ll get over there as soon as I can.”

“I owe you.”

I hung up.

Right.  I was going to rush out into the night and try to get an interview with the last person to see the goat alive.  I thought about rolling another jay, but fell asleep instead. 

It was a fitful sleep, a few hours of unconsciousness followed by an hour of drowsy discomfort, trying to shape my pillow into a mass that fit my head, searching for a cool spot on the bed or a comfortable position.  When the fluorescent numbers on the clock read 5 a.m, I gave it up for the night.  The air was cool, made more so by the slowly spinning fan, but I was covered with sweat.  Still, I felt surprisingly rested and alert.  The marijuana seemed to have done some good after all.  I flung on a terry-cloth robe and padded into the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker.  Kitty Amin, my black shorthair, was asleep on a blanket on one edge of the sofa.  The cat half raised his head as I passed, then settled back down into his nap.

Waiting for coffee to brew is worse for me than waiting in line at a party for a bathroom to be free, but five interminable minutes later, I returned to the living room, coffee cup in hand.  I switched on the radio, dial set all the way to the left, then sat down on the sofa next to Amin with the intention of going through a pile of mail that had been collecting for a few days.  The voice on the radio was that of a young woman, giggly, maybe a little drunk or high.  Probably the deejay who called herself Gamma.  She was giving a recipe for okra stew but her voice kept fading out, as if she were moving around in the booth and only occasionally talking directly into the microphone.  I had discovered the pirate station while channel surfing a couple of months before and was fascinated.  It had no set call letters, sometimes claiming to be W-O-R-M or W-F-U-K.  Sometimes the number of letters didn’t seem to be important and I had heard W-E-I-R-D and W-I-C-K-E-D.  

Gamma was on the air again.  “And if you don’t like it, you can always toss it in your mulch pile.  Hey, I found an old Yma Sumac record in the Goodwill store yesterday for a dime.  I mean, it was marked a dime, but I ripped it off.”  She giggled again.  “I’ll play a few cuts from it, then read you a poem I just wrote.”

Abruptly, a series of needle pops came over the air followed by the highest pitched voice I have ever heard, scatting to a kind of Brazilian big-band beat.  It was the kind of thing I had come to expect from the station—something totally unusual or outrageous.  I was glad someone was on tonight—sometimes days went by without a peep and I worried that the FCC had closed in on the mysterious station.  I listened with a kind of sensual tranquility as I leafed through a Dover Saddlery catalog, through junk circulars and credit card offers.  My sweats had stopped and the coffee was working its spirited magic.

I took up a letter from my insurance company and ripped open the side as the high voice in the song descended several octaves into a kind of bear growl.  My rates were going up.  I remembered the TV advertisement the company had used to entice me into buying it:  “And if you buy your policy now, your rates will
never
go up.”  Maybe it depended on your definition of “up” or maybe “never.”  Either way, I was screwed.  My savings were next to nothing and it was obvious that Cal Dent was easing me out of my job.  Telling me to rest, take it easy, giving all my stories to Mark.

Oho, a letter from my father, postmarked where?  Italia.  Me o my o.  I slid it onto the coffee table to read later and trudged back into the kitchen for another cup of coffee.  I glanced through the window; the full moon was just visible through the ridge of pines beyond the pasture.  The faint popping of rifles passed through the window from hunters far out in the forest.  It was a sound that always gave me a jolt, a phantom bullet passing through my heart.

On the radio Gamma was reading her poem.  It was way out there, as her stuff usually was; a flurry of adjectives descending on an idea that I couldn’t latch onto, although I had a vague suspicion that one existed.

“It was whistly, grisly, blood on the moon

a ripening tripening, diapered cartoon.”

Gamma went on for a few more lines in that same vein, then, without stopping for effect, said, “And now, apropos of absolutely nothing here on eighty point oh the recipe station, is a whole side of Mick, Keith, and the boys doing their version of the album they call
Goat’s Head Soup.
  Get your five-thirty a.m. asses out of bed and dig it.”

I jerked my head up involuntarily.  Goat?

There was a dead goat at Meekins’ market.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  Probably.  Certainly.  But Gamma—and most of the other nattering deejays at the pirate station—sometimes gave me the heebie jeebies.  Maybe that’s why I tuned in.  Five-thirty?  Check out a goat in a dumpster at the edge of town? 

I didn’t have anything better to do.

~  ~  ~

A dozen Styrofoam coffee containers were hip-hopping along my floorboards as I sped along the rutted dirt road.  A dry few weeks had turned the road into a long washboard.  When I first moved back to Pine Oak I had gotten mad at the young bucks for speeding down the rough road at double the posted limit; later I learned that the faster you went, the less you bounced.  Tonight, my old Toyota pickup sailed over the ruts with just a little shimmy.  The few houses out this way were still dark and my headlights showed the way clearly.  No dust meant that no one was up and about yet.  When I turned onto the highway I switched on the radio.  The Stones were still playing.  I like them okay, but I’d never heard of
Goat’s Head Soup.
 It was all right, I guess, something to get through the couple of miles I had to drive.  But I made a mental note to check on whether the Stones had ever actually made a record with that name.

I had been shopping at Meekins’ Market pretty much all my life.  Situated on the very edge of town, it was the last place to get groceries for most of the folks living in the rural areas—like me—and the first for people driving in from Forester.  And its unusual two-part structure made it one of the strangest places in this part of the country.  The front building was just a rectangular stall paralleling the highway, thrown together with two-by-fours and chicken wire.  But as you entered, the walls gradually conformed themselves to fit into a Quonset hut that old man Meekins had bought off the Army for twenty-three cans of shoe polish right after World War II.  I had gone to high school with the current Meekins—Clarence—who had been a talented athlete but turned down a football scholarship at Wabash College to run the family business.  Hadn’t made many improvements in those sixteen years—the chicken wire was probably from the same roll that his granddad fished out of  an abandoned construction site back in the forties; nevertheless, it had become the best place in Jasper County for pretty much whatever it carried on a given day.  No one knew how Clarence was able to get the jump on the Piggly Wiggly, but the produce boxes crammed onto the old wooden shelves held the freshest fruit and vegetables in the area.  Customers could also find various kinds of nuts, herbs, seeds, locally produced honey, even sugar cane in season.  You could also buy azalea and boxwood plants for your front yard and a straw hat with a green sun visor to wear while you tucked them into the soil.  Then there were the more unusual items: boxes of used harmonicas, containers of glass spools that formerly sat atop telephone poles, rows of vintage postcards, and issues of
Look Magazine
and
TV Guide
from the 1950s.  People liked to browse the crowded aisles back in the darkened Quonset hut—it would be rare to find something you were actually looking for, but almost impossible to come out empty-handed.

But if Clarence’s purchasing wizardry was a mystery, so was his strange habit of closing up shop for weeks at a time without a word.  Anyone looking through the chicken wire would see every shelf completely empty.  Yet when he opened back up—a week or a month later—everything would be as fresh and exotic as before, although maybe switched around some location wise.  And somewhere in the burgeoning aisles would be a box or rack of items that was not there before.