HOWLERS (3 page)

“Willis, they say you killed Ann and the kids. Quentin, everyone, says you’re crazy,” the deputy said.

Willis walked to the cell door. He put his hands on the bars. He reached out to his friend. He tried to grab Eric’s arm to convince him that it was dangerous—and that what had happened to his family could happen to anyone in town.

“I’m not an animal, Eric, for Christ’s sake. I’m not crazy. Please, listen to me. You have to go home, get Gina and the kids, and get out of town before it’s too late!”

“Willis, I can’t do that.” The deputy picked up a bag of clothes he’d set on the floor. “Your mom brought you some things from your place. Why don’t you change, and then I’ll take you downstairs.” The deputy unlocked the cell door.

The clothes Willis wore were the ones he’d worn the day before, and were bloodstained. His wife’s blood had soaked his shirt and t-shirt. It had dried, and the shirts were stiff and smelly. He’d appeared in court covered in Anne’s blood, refusing to wear the orange overalls the sheriff had offered.

“Willis, I’m sorry. I really am,” the deputy said. “Whatever happened up there, at your place, I’m sorry.” He swung open the cell door and handed Willis the bag of fresh clothes.

At 9:00 a.m., T.C. McCauley walked his prisoner out of Timberline’s granite-block sheriff’s station and put him in the back of his patrol car for the trip down the mountain to the state’s facility for the mentally ill in Sacramento. The judge in town had gotten the county prosecutor’s office to agree to a psychological examination before multiple charges of homicide were filed. The old judge, like so many of the town’s people, had known Willis Good his whole life, and felt sorry for him.

The wind started up as they pulled onto Main Street. A few people were making for work, bundled in snowsuits. Shop windows gave off a soft, yellowish glow. As the patrol car passed the front of the town’s brick library, snow began falling lightly again.

From the back of the sheriff’s car, Willis remembered all the winter days just like this one, spent in the town’s library studying. He pictured the small reading room and its green well-waxed linoleum floor, with its ceiling-to-floor shelves of books. He recalled the library’s smells that he loved: books, women’s sweaters, coffee that the librarians kept on a hot plate in the back office. He remembered the old librarian who’d befriended him when his mother, a drunk, first came to town. The ancient-seeming woman had given him a stack of children’s books and let him stay all day. When the other kids were sent home at dinnertime, he’d been allowed to stay. The librarians, having informally adopted him, would all chip in and buy him dinner from the Copper Penny, making sure he ate before they finally sent him home to his mother, who they suspected wasn’t feeding the boy enough. In many ways, the town had raised him.

“T.C., something is really wrong here,” Willis said from the back of the car. He said it almost offhandedly. “You’ll see. I told them back there, Quentin and anyone who would listen, but they don’t want to believe me. I figured part of it out this morning while I was with my mom. I’m sure it’s something at Genesoft. You know Ann worked at Genesoft. You know that, right? That she worked there?”

McCauley shot a glance into the rear-view mirror. They pulled out of Timberline and onto one of the loneliest country roads in the Sierra Nevada. The narrow county road connected Timberline with the rest of Southern Placer County. The early-morning shadows cast by pine trees were dark and cold-looking. Willis’s young face came out of one shadow and passed into another, then did it again, as he waited for the sergeant to answer him.

“Willis, this is the hardest damn thing I’ve ever done,” T.C. said. He hadn’t spoken since he put Willis into the car. Willis looked out the window. T.C. McCauley had known him since they were boys.   Even as a child, T.C. had known about the conspiracy of kindness to keep Willis clothed, feed and nurtured.

“Why’d you do it, Willis? You went away to college back East—what was it, Harvard?”

“Yale,” Willis said.

“Your mom is doing so much better now, Willis.”

   “Look, T.C. , we do not have time to talk about my mother,” Willis said, getting angry. “Now I’m going to tell you a story. I want you to listen to it. I want you to listen very carefully. Down there in Sacramento, you know I’ll just be another guy in a police car. You’re my last chance. You’re everybody’s last chance. “I think I know what happened,” Willis said. “Ann got a job down at Genesoft. She was there all week, no break. They had some new products to launch. She came home yesterday at mid-morning. She said she was feeling funny. That’s when it happened. She changed. She became something—something monstrous.” He tried to say the word “monstrous” in a way that would sound sane.

“Willis, you killed Ann and the kids,” T.C. said.

Willis stopped speaking. The pain of the accusation shot through him. He tried to control his anger when people said that, but it was becoming more and more difficult. He wanted to scream into the nightmare, but didn’t let himself. Instead of yelling, he made himself speak very quietly, and very carefully.

“No. No, you see, that’s not what happened at all. I tried to save the children, but Ann was too strong for me. I couldn’t manage it. We fought out there on the driveway. I tried to stop her . . .  she killed the children.”

The deputy drove on, not answering.

T.C. lit a cigarette and inhaled, carrying the smoke deep into his lungs, savoring it. It was against the law to smoke in the patrol car but he couldn’t help himself. The storm raged around them, but neither of them mentioned it. The blinding glare of the patrol car’s headlights reflected back at him from the ugly white face of what was becoming a major blizzard. He leaned forward, reinserting the car’s cigarette lighter into the dash, the deputy’s big shoulders rolling forward. It was almost completely white outside. Inside the patrol car, the lights of the console gave a greenish tint to T.C.’s face. It would take another hour to get to the freeway at Emigrant Gap, another good hour from there to drive to the State’s facility for the criminally insane in Sacramento. He had listened to Willis’ story for the last half hour without saying a word.

“Do you believe me?” Willis asked, his voice slightly muffled by the plastic shield that separated the patrol car’s backseat from the driver. The snowstorm outside, the handcuffs, the dirty worn interior of the sheriff’s car, the ugly plastic divider between him and the deputy, were all making it seem hopeless. The Valium Dr. Poole had given Willis back in Timberline had sucked the life out of him. His throat was dry, his voice weak because he’d talked so much since he’d gotten in the car, almost nonstop. 

“Can’t say that I do, Willis,” T.C. said.
Crazy fucker
.  McCauley’s eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. The deputy had carried a lot of men to the county jail. He’d heard a lot of stories. And he’d heard a lot of weird things from the back of the patrol car. He was used to it. But Willis’ story was the craziest he’d ever heard.

It’s the ones who look like choirboys that are the worst, the ones that look normal
, T.C.  thought. And then he was sorry he’d thought it. He still liked Willis; he couldn’t help it. When you’ve known someone since you were kids, it’s impossible not to think you really know them.
Knowing someone always makes for empathy
, the deputy thought.

“You have to believe me. Don’t you understand? I’m just like you. You would have done the same thing, T.C. I’m not crazy! You have to believe me. For God’s sake!” Willis realized he was yelling, and stopped himself.

“Willis, look. There isn’t a lot I can do. You understand. I would save it for the doctors. Try to convince them—right?”

“There isn’t time for all that. It’s happening too fast,” Willis said. “I didn’t have any choice.” Willis looked through the milky-looking plastic divider at his last hope. “Ann was going to hurt us. They get very strong, you see. I don’t pretend to understand exactly what happened to her.” Willis’ voice trailed off. He understood suddenly that it was hopeless. No one was going to believe him. He looked at the T.C.’s eyes peering back at him in the mirror, unconvinced; they moved away.

The patrol car, its top carpeted with inches of hardened snow, its sides mud-spattered from the back country, turned off the busy frontage road into a halogen-lit gas station at Emigrant Gap. The gas station was crowded and oddly surreal-looking, the pump area brightly lit and busy.

McCauley turned off the engine. The car’s radio, playing a country-western station stayed on, the music playing over the sound of the moving windshield wipers. “Jesus, kick me through the goal posts of life!” The song’s lyrics seemed oddly humorless in the early morning.

All the deputy’s twenty-seven years—three, very hard ones, spent in Iraq—showed as he glanced into the rearview mirror. He pulled on his cheap Sears winter gloves, then opened his car door. A cold wind was blowing straight off the Sierra. As T.C. walked, he pulled out his cell phone. He could make out traffic below on Highway 50 as he lifted the cell phone to his face. He’d dialed his home number in Timberline.

“Are you okay?” T.C. said. All the talk of dead wives had scared him. The deputy heard his wife’s sleepy voice come on the line. “I just felt like talking to someone,” he said. “I’m at the Denny’s at Emigrant Gap. I’m taking Willis to Sacramento.”  He could barely hear his wife’s voice over the wind. “Just wanted to say hi. I’ll call again when I get to the facility. I should be home around four, if the roads stay plowed.”

“There’s been a lot of strange news,” his wife said. “T.C., a lot of people are going missing here in town.”

The deputy held the phone and looked out at his patrol car. “That’s what Willis said would happen.”

“What?” his wife said. She worked as a fourth-grade teacher at the elementary school.

“Willis said that was going to start happening,” T.C. said into the phone. He had to speak up because the wind was gusting so hard.

“What?” his wife said again.

“The one who killed his wife and children. Willis Good. You know,” T.C. said. “He said his wife turned into some kind of monster.”

“What’s Willis got to do with this? Poor man,” his wife said.

“I don’t know.”

“T.C., I’m scared. I called my brother’s house in Reno this morning, and no one answered.”

“Well, the phone lines are probably down because of the storm last night,” T.C. said.

“No . . .  the lines are okay. I checked,” his wife said. T.C. didn’t hear the last part because of the wind, and the blaring of a big semi-truck’s horn, passing below on the freeway.

“I love you, baby,” she said. “Did Willis do it?”

“Yeah, he did it. I love you, too,” T.C. said. “I’ll see you for dinner.” He lowered his phone. He turned and looked at the sheriff’s car.
If I start believing Willis’ story, I might as well follow him into the nut house myself.

T.C. got back in the patrol car. He looked in the mirror. Willis looked at him.

“You heard something, didn’t you?” Willis said. “I can see it in your face.”

“My wife’s people have gone missing in Reno,” T.C. said.

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you told me. I think it’s the phones. The lines are probably down,” T.C. said. “You know, because of the storm, so they don’t answer. Cell towers aren’t working, I mean.”

“It’s not the phones, God damn it!” Willis said. “It’s them. They’re turning into them!”

“Monsters, right?” T.C. said.

“I didn’t say that exactly. But yes, if you want to call them that: monsters. All right. Call them anything you want. What difference does it make what you call them?”

“You expect me to believe that bullshit, Willis?”

“All right. Wait until your wife disappears, then,” Willis said.

T.C. turned around. He looked at the prisoner through the dirty plastic divider.
Anyone would look like a criminal through that plastic
, he thought.

“I tell you what. If she disappears, I let you go,” T.C. said. “How’s that?”

“If she disappears, you won’t want to let me go,” Willis said.

The deputy pulled out of the gas station and crossed the frontage road, into the almost-f Denny’s parking lot. “You hungry?”

Willis looked at him.

“I guarantee this will be your last good meal for a while. I’d come in if I were you. I promised your mom I would make sure you had a square meal. If you try to escape, I’ll shoot you. I swear to God, Willis. Do you understand that? I’m not supposed to let you out of the goddamn car, much less take you into Denny’s for a meal.”

Willis nodded. He felt himself being picked up out of the back in the wind and cold. He felt the handcuffs come off his wrists.

“Thank you, T.C.,” Willis said.

“You’re welcome, Willis.” The deputy, much bigger than him, turned him around and they walked toward the restaurant together.

“Would you really shoot me?” Willis asked. He looked over his shoulder at T.C.. Willis was wearing the clothes his mother had brought him: a clean t-shirt, blue jeans and a heavy Sheriff’s Dept. green nylon coat that Quentin had lent him so he wouldn’t catch cold on the ride.

“Why, you feeling lucky?” T.C. asked.