For his part, Bayard too found the new pets compelling. They thumped their feet joyously when he approached their cages with lettuce or parsley, and as they nuzzled his fingers he gazed out over his cleared acre to the trees beyond and thought how this was only the beginning. He would have goats, chickens, pigs, maybe even a cow or a horse. The way he saw it, a pet today was meat on the hoof tomorrow. Hadn’t they eaten horses during the First World War? Mules, oxen, dogs? Not to mention rabbits. Of course, these particular rabbits were an exception. Though in theory they were to be skinned, stewed, and eaten in time of distress, though they represented a hedge against hard times and a life-sustaining stock of protein, Bayard looked into their quiet, moist eyes and knew he would eat lentils first.
The following week Bayard took the family into Missoula for a double sci-fi/horror feature (which only helped confirm him in his conviction that the world was disintegrating) and dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. It was after dark when they got home and the Olfputt’s headlights swung into the yard to illuminate two tiny figures hanging like wash from the simulated beam that ran the length of the front porch. Melissa spotted them first. “What’s that?” she said.
“Where?”
“There, up on the porch.”
By the time Bayard saw them it was too late. Fran had seen them too — disheveled ears and limp paws, the puny little carcasses twisting slowly round their monofilament nooses — and worse, the seven-year-old, rousing herself from sleep, had caught a nightmarish glimpse of them before he could flick off the lights. “My God,” Fran whispered. They sat there a moment, the dark suffocating, no gleam of light for miles. Then Marcia began to whimper and Melissa called out his name sharply, as if in accusation, as if he alone were responsible for all the hurts and pertersions of the world.
Bayard felt he was sinking. Pork fried rice and duck sauce tore at the pit of his stomach with a hellish insistence, Fran was hyper-ventilating, and the girls’ lamentations rose in intensity from piteous bewildered bleats to the caterwauling of demons. Frightened, angry, uncomprehending, he sat there in utter blackness, his hands trembling on the wheel. When finally he turned on the parking lights and pushed open the door, Fran clutched his arm with the grip of a madwoman. “Don’t go out there,” she hissed.
“Don’t be silly,” Bayard said.
“No,” she sobbed, clawing at him as if she were drowning. Her eyes raged at him in the dim light, the girls were weeping and moaning, and then she was pressing something into his hand, heavy, cold, instrument of death. “Take this.”
Six or seven pickups were parked outside the T&T Cocktail Bar when Bayard rolled into downtown Bounceback. It was half past eleven, still hot, the town’s solitary street light glowing like a myopic eye. As he crossed the street to the telephone outside Chuck’s Wagon, Bayard could make out a number of shadowy figures in broad-brimmed hats milling around in front of the bar. There was a murmur of disembodied voices, the nagging whine of a country fiddle, stars overhead, the glow of cigarettes below. Drunks, he thought, hurrying past them. Their lives wouldn’t be worth a carton of crushed eggs when the ax fell.
Bayard stalked up to the phone, tore the receiver from its cradle, and savagely dialed the number he’d scribbled across a paper napkin. He was angry, keyed up, hot with outrage. He glistened to the phone ring once, twice, three times, as he cursed under his breath. This was too much. His wife was sick with fear, his children were traumatized, and all he’d worked for — security, self-sufficiency, peace of mind — was threatened. He’d had to prowl round his own home like a criminal, clutching a gun he didn’t know how to use, jumping at his own shadow. Each bush was an assassin, each pocket of shadow a crouching adversary, the very trees turned against him. Finally, while Fran and the girls huddled in the locked car, he’d cut down Lennie and Duke, bundled the lifeless bodies in a towel, and hid them out back. Then Fran, her face like a sack of flour, had made him turn on all the lights till the house blazed like a stage set, insisting that he search the closets, poke the muzzle of the gun under the beds, and throw back the doors of the kitchen cabinets like an undercover cop busting drug peddlers. When he’d balked at this last precaution — the cabinets couldn’t have concealed anything bigger than a basset hound — she’d reminded him of how they’d found Charlie Manson under the kitchen sink. “All right,” he’d said after searching the basement, “there’s nobody here. It’s okay.”
“It was that maniac, wasn’t it?” Fran whispered, as if afraid she’d be overheard.
“Daddy,” Melissa cried, “where’s Lennie, and. . and Duke?” The last word trailed off in a broken lamentation for the dead, and Bayard felt the anger like a hot nugget inside him.
“I don’t know,” he said, pressing Melissa to him and massaging her thin, quaking little shoulders. “I don’t know.” Through the doorway he could see Marcia sitting in the big armchair, sucking her thumb. Suddenly he became aware of the gun in his hand. He stared down at it for a long moment, and then, almost unconsciously, as if it were a cigarette lighter or a nail clipper, he slipped it into his pocket.
Now he stood outside Chuck’s Wagon, the night breathing down his neck, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Four rings, five, six. Suddenly the line engaged and Arkson, his voice shrunk round a kernel of suspicion, answered with a quick tentative “Yeah?”
“Sam? It’s me, Bayard.”
“Who?”
“Bayard Wemp.”
There was a pause. “Oh yeah,” Arkson said finally, “Bayard. What can I do for you? You need anything?”
“No, I just wanted to ask you—”
“Because I know you’re going to be short on hardware for harvesting, canning, and all that, and I’ve got a new line of meat smokers you might want to take a look at—”
“Sam!” Bayard’s voice had gone shrill, and he fought to control it. “I just wanted to ask you about that guy in the beret, you know, the one you had with you up here last month — Cullum?”
There was another pause. Bayard could picture his mentor in a flame-retardant bathrobe, getting ready to turn in on a bed that converted to a life raft in the event that a second flood came over the earth while he lay sleeping. “Uh-huh. Yeah. What about him?”
“Well, did he ever buy the place? I mean, is he up here now?”
“Listen, Bayard, why not let bygones be bygones, huh? Rayfield is no different than you are — except maybe he doesn’t like children, is all. He’s a one-hundred-percenter, Bayard, on for the long haul like you. I’m sure he’s forgot all about that little incident — and so should you.”
Bayard drew a long breath. “I’ve got to know, Sam.”
“It takes all kinds, Bayard.”
“I don’t need advice, Sam. Just information. Look, I can go down to the county assessor’s office in the morning and get what I want. ”
Arkson sighed. “All right,” he said finally. “Yes. He moved in yesterday. ”
When he turned away from the phone, Bayard felt his face go hot. Survival. It was a joke. He owned thirty-five acres of untrammeled Wild West backwoods wilderness land and his only neighbor was a psychopath who kicked children in the stomach and mutilated helpless animals. Well, he wasn’t going to allow it. Society might be heading for collapse, but there were still laws on the books. He’d call the sheriff, take him to court, have him locked up.