Robert Coover - John's Wife

Settler’s Woods was burning. The fire, roaring its hollow inanimate roar as it licked at the black sky, seemed to stroke the lightning out of the night as it stormed inward from all sides toward the center, where a deep darkness also reigned. A great conflagration, unlike any this place had known since Barnaby’s lumberyard went up just after the war. The glow of it could be seen all the way across town, as far as the golf club and no doubt beyond. Indeed, on a night so dark and overcast, with the power out, the whole town seemed gilded by it, and many of those not asleep were soon drawn to the source of so eerie a spectacle, some dressed only in raincoats pulled on over pajamas, these gathering sightseers adding to the worries of the beleaguered police chief and mayor and the forces of law and order they’d assembled there, all of whom were now encircling the blazing woods, weapons poised to shoot whatever might come raging out through the billowing smoke and flames. That big thing was in there somewhere, ringed about now by a circle of fire, that was what might come out, that was what people were waiting to see: Big Pauline. The word was, she was wounded and dangerous. People should clear the area. Of course, they pressed closer. How big was she? There were rumbles of thunder in the air, and some of the armed men said that might be her, walking around in there. She could kick a car like a football, they said. There were rumors she had eaten people alive. “She picked her own father up and threw him so far outa here he ain’t been seen since!” She was once a woman, known to many in the crowd, intimately to more than a few, and as a woman, was wed to the town photographer, surely soon to be a widower and so to be pitied, and indeed he was pitiable, standing there at the fire’s edge in a fat gap-mouthed stupor, his bulging lashless eyes blankly reflecting the flames, looking, without his familiar camera and bagful of lenses, as though he’d left his wits somewhere as well. He seemed to be the only person present who did not know why he was here. The police chief wished, frankly, he’d not had the man brought out, dazed and clumsy and unreliable as he was, useless to him and a likely casualty if things got worse, and they showed no signs of getting better. The tossing of his prisoner, for whose well-being he was responsible (how was he going to explain all this to Bert and the boys upstate?), was the act of terror that had convinced him finally that this creature who was once his friend had to be destroyed. Before that, he’d been clinging, while clinging to the soft ridge of flesh just below her navel, to the hope that they might somehow find a peaceful resolution to a public crisis that had, increasingly, become a personal crisis of his own: not just that as a prisoner of sorts, he was in the line of fire and could get killed (he was not afraid, he had been through all that in his days as an expendable grunt in a deeper, darker woods, and what was a football lineman but a body in the line of fire?), but more that he was being forced to choose, loving both, between order and the embodiment, not to put too fine a word on it, of its contrary. Forcibly snuggled up against her warm rumbling belly during her interrogation of her father, he’d gazed up at the tender monument of her overhanging breast, rimmed with a pale radiance whenever lightning rippled, and felt himself at the edge of some fundamental revelation and some fundamental change, as though … as though he might… But then she’d cocked her arm and spread her legs to pitch the old goat, and his brief visionary moment over almost before it had begun, he’d fallen out of her relaxed grip and slithered down through her dense jungly bush, barely escaping being flattened as, hurling herself forward to complete her throw, she’d slapped her thighs together just as he’d dropped between them. The mayor and the deputized posse had opened fire to cover his escape as he scrambled out from beneath the beetling mass of her squatting haunches, limping from his fall, and she’d groaned and lashed out at her tormentors, tearing up the space around her and sending them all scattering in frantic retreat. All but the young golf club manager who, slow to react, had got snatched up by her, whether as hostage or provender, it was hard to tell from down in the trees. His capture had restricted them to shooting at her bottom half only, which only added to her rage without bringing her down, her savage counterblows forcing them into ever deeper withdrawal, dragging their wounded with them. It was the mayor who had finally suggested they burn her out. “No choice,” he’d said, and most had agreed. The police chief had objected, but he’d lost his bullhorn, and could be heard by only a few and those few had little sympathy with his dithering. They were all frightened and exhausted and nothing else had worked. “But what about the guy in the banana pants?” “He’s dead, man. She ate him.” And so they’d spread out and encircled Settler’s Woods with gas cans and torches and, on a signal passed by honking horns, had set the fire that now raged, sending flames soaring into the sky and drawing townsfolk to its edges by the hundreds, more arriving every minute with blankets and coffee thermoses and instant cameras in spite of ominous signs of an approaching thunderstorm and repeated police warnings that everyone should return home immediately or face possible arrest. Some scoffed at the extravagant accounts and said they doubted any such creature was in there, but others said she was in there all right, they’d seen her, plucking trees like Brussels sprouts and eating people whole, chucking them into her jaws like breakfast sausages. There was a sudden clap of thunder, and the skeptics in the crowd wisecracked about that (“I suppose she just let one!”), but an old boy from the Country Tavern, showing them his fresh scratches and bruises and torn shirt, said it was no joke, that was one mean fucking mother in there, and he gave them all a chilling account of what had happened to poor old Shag and Chester earlier in the evening. “Damned right, flat as a doormat, I shit you not!” A woman in a checkered nightshirt and anorak, sipping coffee, wondered aloud where John was, wasn’t this the night of his Pioneers Day barbecue, and someone said hadn’t he been killed in that terrible accident at the humpback bridge they’d passed coming out here, and, no, argued another, that must have been someone else, John had flown upstate to call out the National Guard. Others said they’d heard his daughter had been abducted and possibly his wife as well, and there were reports that the motel at the edge of the Woods was on fire and its owner shot, that babies had been stolen from their cribs to feed the monster lady and that churches had been desecrated, and that the owner of the Ford-Mercury garage and his wife had been brutally murdered in their own home or else in an ambush out at the car lot. “They say the manager of the hardware store might have done it.” “I’d heard it was the simpleton who was helping Big Pauline.” Thus, at the edge of the burning forest, the wild rumors spread like the fire itself, now closing in on the dark center of the woods and setting the air in there madly awhirl. Suddenly, there was a blinding light and a terrific explosion as a thunderbolt came smashing down as though sucked into the woods’ core and people were knocked to the ground or fell over one another and everyone pulled back, even the police and their deputies. They’d all heard it: something like a haunting baleful wail, or maybe it was just the whine of the whirlwind at the center of the great ring of fire, but now the storm began in earnest and the lightning crashed about them and the sudden hurricane-force gales whipped up the forest flames, and sparks flew in all directions. “It’s gonna get outa hand!” someone shouted, and indeed little wildfires were starting up everywhere and people’s clothes and hair were getting singed as they tried to escape the burning shower and there were fears the sudden violent winds might drive the fire into town. “Oh my God! I left my kids home sleeping!” “Damn it, Otis! I told you this was a bad idea!” But then the rain began to fall, great lashing torrents of it, upending people as they ran toward their cars, turning the ground underfoot almost instantly into a river of mud through which they slipped and splashed and crawled on all fours, the incessant flashes of lightning cracking around them like celestial whips, herding them, soaked and terrorized, homeward to their dark empty beds.