Aaron Polson - The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories

Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark magic.

The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and laughed, too.

That afternoon, a car exploded in a small, Baghdad market.

That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.

Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”

Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him. He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul keeps it close.

But Tesoro is his brother. The dead are strangers.

A night comes when the rumble of Tesoro’s truck takes away the dream. Saul wakes, creeps down the hallway, and listens at his parents’ door. Nothing. Another sound, a door clicking shut in the unfinished basement. Tesoro’s room is down there. Saul checks the locks on the door and glances out the window. The rusty Ford is in the lawn next to the drive.

His mouth goes dry. Tesoro is his brother. His flesh and blood. When he pulls the gun from under his pillow it is heavy and cold. A shudder crosses his body.

Saul starts on the steps, and a little creaking noise calls out with each. Halfway down, he stops breathing and waits for a moment. A light glows from under Tesoro’s door. Like a moth, Saul is drawn to it, likely to burn up in the flame. His hand rests on the knob, the other clutches the pistol grip. The smell of stale blood is back, worse now. Amplified.

“Saul?” Tesoro asks through the door, his voice cold like a block of granite.

Inside, Saul finds what is left of Tesoro on his bed. His shirt is off, bunched in a pile on the floor. Both hands rest on his knees. When Tesoro looks up, his face is streaked with blood. His teeth are dark and discolored, his mouth blotted. Tesoro’s face wears neither a smile nor frown — a blank expression with black eyes.

“You brought a gun?”

Saul looks at the pistol, his hand shaking. “Papa’s.”

Tesoro’s lips curl slightly at the corners and one hand stretches toward his brother, palm open. “They will come for me, sooner or later. They will need more than guns.” The other hand touches the lump of lead dangling from his neck.

For a moment, neither speaks.

In that moment, Saul understands; in that moment, he kneels to the old magic in his brother’s eyes. What crawls Saul’s spine is damp and black and dead. His eyes close and fingers uncurl. The gun drops into Tesoro’s open hand.

He smiles, showing the full horror of his tainted mouth.

“I’m leaving.”

Saul steps forward and touches his brother’s shoulder. The flesh ticks like a horse’s flank chasing a fly. The skin is cold and almost grey. “We can take your truck.”

“Si,” Tesoro replies. “Mi hermano.”

Saul hesitates, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell. He looks at his fingers, imagines the skin peeling away from scrubbing. Blood makes a stubborn stain. “First the bleach. I will clean your clothes… the truck, and then we go.” He stoops, gathers Tesoro’s shirt, and leaves the room without another glance at his brother.

Oregon has always known plenty of rain, but that particular summer was unusually wet. Those relentless rains drenched Monument — a small scattering of houses swallowed by pine trees in the John Day River Valley. It was a tiny town with a population hovering around 150. They were loggers, mostly, or other folks that enjoyed the solitude and security supplied by miles of quiet evergreens. So small and nestled neatly into the valley, Monument could just vanish, and most folks wouldn’t notice.

One damp morning I sat in a small booth at Pine Peaks Café, reading my newspaper, poking at the soggy remnants of a short stack of pancakes, and trying to ignore a black beetle scurrying across the restaurant’s “sparkling” floors. Over at the counter, Randy Crouse, a bearded bear of a man who ran a small logging outfit that usually did piecemeal work on contract, sat sipping a cup of coffee. He perched on his stool with slumped shoulders, wearing the look of a man who witnessed too many wet days.

“Aw hell, Darla. You might as well fill ‘er up again.” Randy pushed his cup and saucer across the counter. “I don’t see as we’ll be cutting again today. Too, wet, even for Oregon.”

Darla Smith, a dark haired wisp of a middle-aged waitress, poured him another cup of black swill. “Yeah. This is a bit much.” She aimed her voice at my booth. “What d’ya think Professor, we going to drown out here, wash away with all this rain? Some kind of biblical flood?”

I hated the nickname. Most everyone in town over the age of twenty-five called me Professor because I taught English at Grant County Consolidated High School. I was the only teacher on the payroll who lived in Monument. “I wouldn’t know really, but I figure these things go in cycles.” I straightened my glasses and turned back to the newspaper.

“What do you mean, ‘cycles’?” Randy asked through his beard, sitting up on his stool to show his barrel chest.

“The rain. Some years it’s more; some years less.”

“Damn genius,” Randy muttered. He looked down just then, spotted that little black beetle, and crushed it with his size thirteen boot. “Hey, Darla. Don’t call the health department just yet, but it looks like the rain is driving ‘em inside,” he said, holding up the soiled sole of his boot.

“Shut up, Randy,” Darla said.

“Speaking of health codes, why don’t you sell that bread anymore, the stuff you used to bake right here in that big old oven out back? Somebody find a bug in a loaf?” Randy asked with a wide grin.

I saw Randy again about a week later. He stood at the back of his of his dented Chevy, leaning over the tailgate and talking to a couple of his workers: Pete Archer and Manny Swick. Pete and Manny were Monument’s Laurel and Hardy. Manny was the plump one with a constant smile lurking under his thick mustache, and Pete had a pale face — long like it had been stretched in a taffy machine.

“Hey Professor, get a load of this.” Randy waved one big paw in my direction as I crossed Main Street in front of Peterson’s Drug.

The sky still hung in a damp gray shroud around the trees, but Monument was as dry as it had been in weeks. A quick thought shot through my head: Randy, Pete, and Manny should probably be out in the forest cutting on a day like that, especially during such a wet year.

“What is it?” I stepped closer to the men huddled around the bed of Randy’s truck. Lumpy, Randy’s old, nappy hound, sat panting near the cab. There was something else, too — shiny and black like a dress shoe. Little legs like bits of broken black bamboo jutted out at odd angles. At the front was a smallish head with a set of nasty pincer jaws — not huge like a Hercules Beetle, but wicked enough. Its body was about the size of a large rat.

“This some kind of gag?” I asked.

“Like hell. We found a few of them out at the cutting site. All dead like this one.” Randy leaned in and I could smell a hint of whiskey just under the coffee stench. “A couple of them looked like they were stuck in the mud — like they were climbin’ out.”