PHENOMENOMENON
NARRATOR
“It was one of them unexplainable phenomenomenons,” Gunther said, swaying a little on his customary stool at the Backtrack Bar, while Ace the bartender ignored him. Gunther had forgotten his resolution to keep quiet about what he’d seen in the woods, which didn’t matter much, because no one paid any attention to him anyway, so he embellished. “Red eyes he had, and fangs as long as ice axes, and he tore that deer to pieces. Completely to pieces. Nothing left but red sludge, like cherry pudding.”
“Never heard of cherry pudding,” Ace said, flipping channels on the TV, though one station full of fuzzy snow looked more or less like another to Gunther’s untrained eye.
“It’s pudding,” Gunther told Ace, or maybe his beer, since that’s what he was looking at most intently. “But cherry-flavored. Maybe I should’ve said ‘blood pudding.’ Since there was so much blood?”
“What’s this about blood?” The town’s head (and very nearly only) cop Harry Cusack eased onto the stool next to Gunther, who grunted a greeting. Harry was all right. He’d been known to lock Gunther up for drunk and disorderly, but he always let him go after he’d dried out, and true, he made you clean up your own puke if you let loose in the cell, but he’d give you a cup of coffee afterward to clear out the taste. “Don’t tell me you witnessed a crime, Gunther, because I can’t think of anyone in the world who’d be a worse witness than you, officially speaking.”
“A blind deaf-mute, maybe,” Ace said. “With a felony conviction and a history of mental illness.” He paused. “Or that boy Clem who works over at the Half Good Grocery for Dolph, he’s dumber than a bag of hog snouts.”
“But if you did see something,” Harry said, putting a companionable arm around Gunther’s shoulders, “I’d be pleased to hear about it. My daughter’s coming into town tonight to stay with me for a while, and if there’s a criminal element hanging around, I may as well clean it up before she gets here.”
“No crime,” Gunther muttered. “Unless killing a deer with your bare hands is a crime.”
“Maybe animal cruelty, depending. And killing animals is part of the homicidal triad, you know, indicative of a budding serial killer, right along with bedwetting and setting fires.”
“You’d think with a name like ‘homicidal triad’ that actually committing homicide should be one of the three,” Ace said, to general lack of response. Some bartenders stood there, not paying any attention, as their regulars babbled on about this and that. Ace was pretty much the opposite.
“So when and where and who was this?” Harry said, peeling the label off his bottle of Krepusky’s Red Ribbon Beer.
Gunther marshaled all his mental powers and attempted recollection. He wasn’t a stupid man, not at all; he was just an extremely drunk man, and it was his grave misfortune that stupid and drunk were often indistinguishable even from a very slight distance. “Yesterday, ’round about twilight, out near my place. Don’t know who. Some fella, maybe seventeen, eighteen. He didn’t look like anything special, but he moved fast as a greased pig with a lightning bolt up his ass.”
“That’s pretty fast,” Harry allowed.
“He jumped on the deer, and it was like a bird of prey falling out of the sky and landing on a little bunny rabbit or something. Just bite, tear, rip. When the fella saw me looking, he ran away.”
“Hmm,” Harry said. “I reckon you ate the deer? Turned my evidence into steaks and jerky?”
“Uh,” Gunther said, and Harry sighed.
“That’s all right. Keep your eyes open, though, and if you see that fella around, let me know? Somebody who’d run down and kill a deer bare-handed… I’d say that at least warrants a friendly conversation.”
“You missed the part where he said the guy was some kind of supernatural wolfman dracula monster,” Ace said. “With red eyes and big teeth and who knows whatall else.”
“Hmm,” Harry said, and drummed his fingers on the bar. “Well, that’s all right. What good’s a story if you don’t gussy it up a little to make it even better?” Harry laid his money on the bar, and Ace pushed it back to him, a little ritual Gunther had witnessed with jealousy a million times—he damn sure paid for his drinks, and sometimes Ace got a wild hair and wouldn’t even sell him any booze, let alone go giving it away—and told Gunther to stay out of trouble.
“Another whiskey,” Gunther said, after ascertaining that enough of his Army pension money remained in his wallet to justify the extravagance of whiskey you drank inside a warm bar instead of a cold fishing shack.
“Only if you promise not to tell any more stories about pudding,” Ace said. “You’re making me hungry.”
“You really want me to go tromping around the woods, what, looking for tracks or something?” Stevie Ray said. He was Harry’s assistant and the only other employee of the Lake Woebegotten Police Department, though he was only a part-timer, and in his other job as back-up bartender and sometime bouncer at the Backtrack Bar, he’d become very well acquainted with Gunther Montcrief. “On the say-so of the most notorious drunk in town?”
“I take your point, but Gunther doesn’t usually tell wild stories.” Harry propped his feet up on the big desk. “He usually tells old stories about the combat he’s seen and the women of negotiable virtue he met during his years stationed in the Pacific, but this? This is new. If there’s a feral fella running around the woods eating deer, don’t you think we should know about it?”
Stevie Ray sighed and pulled on his earflap hat. He went outside and walked around the back of the police station—which was more a general-purpose civic building that happened to have a jail cell in it—and took a moment to breathe the autumn air. Tomorrow was the first day of September, and winter would be along a month or so after that. Stevie Ray tried to live in the moment, but it was hard not to think about what the future might bring.
After making sure he was alone, which wasn’t too difficult in a town as small as Lake Woebegotten, he took out his cell phone and scrolled through the contacts to a name that just read “Dr. S.” He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, doc, Stevie Ray here. I just thought you should know, somebody saw one of your boys running down a deer out by the lake.”
He listened a moment, then sighed. “It matters because it was the part of the lake by the Ojibwe reservation. You don’t want to upset the Woebegotten Band—” Another pause to listen. “Well our witness didn’t say anything about the hunter being hairy, and was pretty specific about it just looking like a normal fella apart from the super-speed and whatnot, so no, I don’t think it was one of the boys from the rez. If it wasn’t one of yours, then who? Don’t tell me there are other—no. Okay. No, I don’t know which one it was, probably Edwin or Garnett, if it’d been Hermet the witness probably would have mentioned the fella was the size of a grain silo. Just have a talk with them, okay, before I hear from Mr. Noir? I don’t know how I got roped into being the go-between and peacemaker between you… Ha. Yes, all right, I’m a peace officer, fair enough. So help me by keeping things peaceful.”
He closed his cell phone and sighed again, this time just for his own benefit, because if you couldn’t feel sorry for yourself once in a while, where was the pleasure in life? He trudged around the building toward where his truck was parked by the curb. He’d have to go wander around in the woods for a while now, just to keep up appearances for Harry.
Ordinary people like me shouldn’t have to mess around with folks like the Scullens, he thought. The ones on the other side—the few elders on the reservation who knew the secret of the Scullens, and had secrets of their own—were bad enough, but at least they were human most of the time. The Scullens were never human at all anymore. Really made a guy want to pause and reflect on how his life had gotten to this point, maybe wish things had gone a different way, but oh well. If wishes were horses, beggars would eat.