The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories (9 page)

“
Gina …”

Her fingers brushed across
his cropped hair. “When I found the jar…it was like they were
talking to
me
,
Calvin. Whispering, telling me what to do.”

Calvin’s car was gone when the police
arrived. They entered through the open door and found his body
slumped against a wall in the kitchen. A dark stain swallowed the
front of his shirt, a thick run of blood from his throat. Both eyes
were gone, gouged out, leaving two rough wounds in his face. His
old pocketknife sat on the table, alone, smeared and sticky with
blood. The jar, the eyes, and Gina were nowhere to be found.

7: Grim Adaptations

On a late Sunday afternoon, Scab Hullinger
caught an abomination in the Republican River about forty yards
downstream from the old wrought-iron bridge south of Springdale.
Glistening wet, heaving, and gray as a dislodged lung, the thing
flopped and writhed in a cooler filled with murky river water.
Three boys on the fringe of manhood, one thin like a twist of wire,
one wide and solid like a bulldog, and Scab somewhere
between—slender but athletic—stood on the muddy bank, staring at
the thing.

“
Damn Scab, that’s big.
Nibbled like crazy on my fingers.”

“
Did it get any of them?”
Joel asked with a chuckle while rubbing his grubby hands across the
front of his jeans.

“
Naw. Just sandpaper gums
like most bottom feeders.” Allen, a skittish rail of a boy with
brown-black eyes bulging from his thin face, squatted next to the
cooler. “I’ve never seen a channel cat that color.”

“
Can’t be a channel cat,”
Joel said.

“
Like hell.” Allen spat in
the mud. “Has to be. It’s got the flat head, whiskers and pretty
grim looking spines on the sides.”

“
Sure does. Cut myself on
one of them.” Scab held the meaty part of his left palm, squeezing
just hard enough to produce a thin stream of blood from a jagged
gash.

Joel kicked the cooler with one muddy boot.
The fish flopped slightly in the cramped enclosure, showing a wide,
flat eye of green-gray. “You ever seen a channel with eyes like
that?”

The three were silent for a moment.

“
I’m gonna call Barry. He’s
home this weekend.” Scab said, fumbling in his jeans for a cell
phone.

Joel scratched his black hair. “Your
brother?”

“
Yeah, he’s studying fish
and wildlife at college, right?”

Allen paced behind his garage while Joel
cleaned the rest of the afternoon’s catch.

“
You could help out, you
pansy.” Joel wiped the filet knife on a rag. “It’s your house, your
freezer, your fish.”

“
You’re doing fine all by
yourself.” Allen flipped open his cell phone. “Where the hell are
they, anyway?”

“
Hell if I know.” Joel
rubbed his hands under the backyard spigot. He was shaking them off
when Scab’s car pulled into the alley.

“
Hey Scab,” Joel called.
“Hey Barry.”

Barry Hullinger smiled as they climbed out
of Scab’s Honda. Scab managed a cursory grin while cradling his
wounded hand.

Gavin Hullinger earned the unfortunate
nickname “Scab” in middle school when Cori Hamilton, still the
prettiest girl in Springdale, caught him chewing on a bit of loose
skin from his elbow in seventh grade PE. He grew out of his
awkward, boney frame in the five years since and became starting
linebacker for the Springdale Saints’ district championship squad.
He was even the frontrunner for class valedictorian, but the name
held on, as stubborn things will in small towns. His brother,
Barry, had been one of the finest scholar-athletes to graduate from
Springdale High School.

“
Where’s the fish?” Barry
asked.

The four young men stood around the stained
cooler in Allen’s garage. The grayish fish-thing thrashed about,
splashing a little water over the edge each time someone disturbed
its temporary home, but otherwise floated motionless in the
muck.

Joel picked mud from under his fingernails
with a pocketknife. “So, channel cat or not.”

“
If it is, it sure isn’t
healthy,” Barry said, squatting next to the cooler. “This
color…isn’t right. Those eyes…I think it might be dead.”

“
Dead?” Allen asked. His
voice shot up an extra octave.

“
Well, it looks dead.
Smell’s dead, too. I don’t know what’s keeping it
going.”

“
So what do we do? Filet
the thing, have a fry up with some beers?” Joel chuckled and then
shook his head.

“
I’m not eating that shit,”
Allen squeaked.

“
No,” Barry said as he
stood. “We aren’t going to fucking eat it. Are you really as dumb
as Gavin says?”

Allen frowned.

“
I’m going to call one of
my professors.”

“
Your professor?” Joel
flicked the knife shut on his pant leg. “What the hell
for?”

Barry shook his head slowly and scratched
his chin. “I don’t know. But something’s not right.” He glanced at
his brother who was leaning against the side of the garage. “Look,
I better get Gavin home”

“
You sure we should be
doing this?” Allen asked as Joel steered his truck over the rough
gravel roads in Greenwillow Cemetery.

Joel shrugged. “Look, do you want to keep
that freak-o-fish at your place this weekend?”

Allen squirmed in his seat. “Hell no. But
what if Barry wants to see it again—”

“
I don’t give a shit. The
college-boy can fish it out of the pond.” Joel squinted into the
gathering twilight ahead of the truck. “’sides, if it is a good
sized channel—even a mutant one, it can take out some of the nasty
little bullhead up there in Potter’s Pond. Maybe make the fishing
worthwhile.”

“
Yeah, I ‘spose so. But
what if it is sick. Diseased or whatever Barry said?”

Joel smiled. “Well, it’ll clear up Potter’s
Pond either way.”

Just beyond the city limit of Springdale,
Kansas, in the woods beyond the boundary fence of Greenwillow
Cemetery rested an abandoned farm pond. Years of disuse allowed the
trees and brush—mostly crooked spruce trees, sickly cottonwoods,
and gnarled redbuds—to encroach on the shores of Potter’s Pond. The
name spun from the pauper’s graves, Potter’s Fields, of old. The
boys understood little of the Potter’s Pond legend, only vague
myths about the poor of Springdale being tossed to its green depths
when they couldn’t pay for a decent funeral. That’s what the old
men at Jenson’s Hardware joked about every time the boys bought a
few dozen worms for bait so they could spend a Sunday afternoon
catching tiny bullhead when they were younger. The pond teemed with
those small members of the catfish family.

Joel brought the truck to a rough stop on
the road nearest the barbed-wire fence marking the edge of the
cemetery. “Look, you coming? Or do I have to lug that damn cooler
all by myself?”

Allen glanced out the window, noting the
heavy outline of trees like black fingers lunging toward the
darkening sky. The trees around Potter’s Pond always lost their
leaves earlier than the rest of town. He closed his eyes for a
moment and tried to swallow the deafening thud of his heart. “I’m
coming. But let’s hurry up, all right?”

Scab missed school on Monday, and both Allen
and Joel were a little concerned.

When he was gone Tuesday, Allen was
worried.

“
Do you think we should
call him?” He asked Joel after PE.

Joel shook extra water from his hair and
rubbed his head with a towel. “I did last night.”

“
Yeah?”

“
His mom said he was pretty
bad. Stomach flu, or something like it.”

When Scab missed school on Wednesday, Barry
met Allen and Joel in the high school parking lot.

“
What the hell are you
doing here?” Joel asked.

Barry, his eyes rimmed with dark circles as
if he hadn’t had much sleep, cleared his throat. “Gavin’s not
well.”

“
Yeah, your
mom—”

“
It’s worse than that. I
drove in yesterday after class. I’ve been up with him all night.
He’s been vomiting. Sometimes blood.” Barry slumped against his
steering wheel and looked past the others at the school building.
“She’s got to work nights at the new job, and didn’t want to leave
him alone. I told her he needs the hospital, but she’s afraid
they’d take him to Kansas City.”

Allen and Joel exchanged a look. Allen
shifted his weight nervously.

“
Hospital?” Allen asked.
“Why not just go to Doc Carlton’s?”

“
Mom lost her insurance
when she was laid off at the plant.” Barry rubbed his eyes. “You
guys need to see something.”

They followed Barry to the Hullingers’
house. The place was quiet, Scab’s mom gone for work, having left a
note for Barry on the counter. Upstairs, the odor started, hanging
in the air like a blanket of rot.

“
What’s that smell,” Allen
said, his voice pinched as he held his nose.

Joel punched him in the arm.

Scab lay in bed—Springdale’s all-league
middle linebacker reduced to a pallid smudge under his sheets. The
putrid smell radiated from his room. Joel and Allen both tugged
their jackets off in the stifling humidity. Barry pulled the
comforter down to show Scab’s left hand, and his brother’s eyes
fluttered open.

“
Hey…guys,” he managed to
say.

“
Look.” Barry held up
Scab’s left hand, peeled back the gauze, and titled the wound into
the light so the others could see. The area around the small cut in
Scab’s hand had blackened, and little dark fingers stretched out
from the wound. His face was pale, but his hand, other than the
black gash, was utterly gray.

“
God…” Allen backed toward
the door.

“
God doesn’t have anything
to do with this.” Barry gently laid his brother’s hand back on the
mattress. Scab’s eyes blinked open and shut a few more times. “Do
you still have the fish?”

Allen flashed a nervous glance at Joel. Joel
set his jaw and shook his head.

“
What? Why would we need
the fish?” Allen took a step away from the bed.

“
We dumped it,” Joel said,
his voice flat and serious. “We dumped it in Potter’s
Pond.”

Barry nodded his head slightly. “Potter’s
Pond?”

“
It’s what the old guys in
town call that pond out behind Greenwillow.”

Barry stood and moved toward the door. “I
want to find that fish.”

Joel, noting the stoic determination on
Barry’s face, nodded and followed him down the stairs. “I’ll
drive,” he called.

For a moment, Allen hesitated. He glanced
back at Scab, and then scurried after them.

Barry grabbed a fish net and a couple of
rods from the garage and tossed them in the back of Joel’s truck.
It was an extended cab, but Barry jumped in the front seat, leaving
the back for Allen.

“
What’d you catch that
thing with?”
“Just worms,” Joel said. He turned the key and fired up the truck.
“We tried blood,

liver, all kinds of stink bait, frozen
shrimp…nothing else worked.”

“
Figures…”

“
What figures?”

Barry shook his head. “Just a theory I have.
Let’s go—this could take a while. Can we stop by Jenson’s and pick
up some more worms.”

“
We have some over at
Allen’s place.”

As Allen slammed his door, Scab came
shambling out of the house wearing a heavy coat and unlaced boots.
He waved for them to stop.

“
I’m…going…too. I
don’t…want to be left…alone.”

Three of them spilled out of the cab while
the fourth leaned against the small, rear window of Joel’s truck.
Scab’s eyes were open, staring out at the field of granite grave
markers. “I’m going…to die,” he muttered.

“
Stop saying that negative
bullshit,” Barry said. “Look. You stay here. Stay warm. We’re going
to catch that god-forsaken fish and figure out how to help
you.”

The three healthy men started toward the
fence. Joel and Barry were laden with fishing poles, a net, and
various tackle; Allen carried his shotgun, his hands squeezing the
stock and barrel until the knuckles went white.

Joel set his rod on the other side of the
fence and pushed a heavy boot against the loose barbed wire,
pushing it down so the other two could climb over. “I don’t know
why you brought that thing. Not like you’re going to shoot the fish
out of the water.”

“
I just feel
safer.”

“
You’ll probably just shoot
yourself in the foot.”

Joel and Barry led through the winding path
to the pond, their feet cracking fallen twigs and sucking against
soft patches of mud. Allen trailed behind.

“
Why do you need the fish?”
Joel asked.

“
Well…the doctor might need
to see it, to help figure out what the hell is wrong with my
brother’s hand. I’m taking Gavin in either way—with or without
Mom’s permission.” Barry looked at the sky. “We don’t have long.”
Sunset was still two hours away, but the maze of dark branches
overhead blotted out much of the light.

“
You said you had a
theory—about the live worms.” Joel pulled back a limb so Barry
could climb underneath.

“
Yeah. It’s a little crazy
maybe, but I figure all that run off near the Republican must have
something to do with that weird fish. None of my professors had
heard of anything like it, but all of the chemicals the farmers
dump on their fields, all the crap folks in town dump in the
sewers…add up to a pretty nasty cocktail.”