The Narrows(21)

“London broil. The hell you think I’m feeding them?”

Shaking his head, Eddie said, “What kind of animal does something like that?”

“I have no idea,” Ben said.

“I know what it is,” Porter barked, shattering the quiet. Apparently something had just dawned on him.

Both Ben and Eddie turned their heads toward the older man.

“Ted Minsky,” said Porter.

“Ted Minsky did this,” Ben said. He jerked his chin due north, in the direction of the Minsky farm. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“The son of a bitch has been skinning deer and leaving them dangling from his porch. Damn things attract buzzards and then the buzzards shit all over the place and tear the hell out of the bedding in my barn.” He jabbed a knotted finger at the dead milk cow. “Buzzards did this.”

“Buzzards don’t go after living animals,” Ben told him.

“Don’t tell me.” Porter was obstinate. “I’ve seen those filthy birds all over the goddamn property. They got claws like industrial machinery.”

Ignoring Porter, Eddie looked back at Ben and shrugged his shoulders. “What about a bear?”

Deep in thought, Ben didn’t answer. It wasn’t unusual for black bears to come down from the mountains and make their way into the surrounding towns. He had seen them loitering around trash cans and at the cusp of Wills Creek on more than just a few occasions. When he was a boy, he’d had friends who’d crossed their paths—unharmed, thankfully—while hiking through the woods no more than a mile or so away from civilization. However, he had never heard of a bear attacking a field of livestock before. And such a precise wound as this? To crack open the back of the skull and presumably eat the contents? Ben couldn’t think of any indigenous animal capable of doing such a thing.

Ben stood up. In the beam of his flashlight he could make out all the other slumped forms dead in the field. They appeared to glow beneath the light of the moon. “They all look the same?” he asked Porter.

“What do you mean?”

“The other cows. Their bodies all look like this one?”

“More or less,” said Porter. “Except maybe for the ones in the barn.”

Ben asked about the ones in the barn.

“Their heads,” said Porter. “Goddamn buzzards tore their heads clean off.”



3



With Ben’s assistance, Porter pulled open the large double doors of the barn, the squealing hinges like the shrieks of pterodactyls. From within—and almost instantaneously—a pungent, almost medicinal odor accosted them. Eddie said, “Ah, phew,” then pulled a face and waved his hand back and forth in front of his nose.

That’s not the smell of cow shit, Ben thought, following his flashlight’s beam into the barn.

The barn was spacious and wide, with a ceiling that yawned to nearly three stories. The floor was scattered with hay and there were great bales of the stuff stacked like oversized building blocks beneath a roost. In the beam of his flashlight, Ben made out farming tools hanging from pegs driven into support beams and tools hanging from a pegboard against one wall. The smell of the place caused his eyes to water.

Porter took down a kerosene lamp from a nail that protruded from the doorframe and lit it. Soft, orange light pulsed ahead of them, making the shadows dance. “Storm knocked out the power to the barn,” Porter said, addressing the electrical outlets gridded about the high beams in the ceiling with a crooked, arthritic finger.

“Where are the cows?” Ben asked.

“I’ll show you.” Porter cut around Ben and headed for the shadows deep in the belly of the barn. The lantern’s light cast a halo around his stooped old frame. Ben and Eddie followed, stopping only when they arrived at a wall of three segregated stalls. Each Dutch door stood ajar. There was more straw here as well, heaped in mounds and scattered with what Ben assessed to be oats and grain. And something else, too. Spotlighting a specific mound of hay, he bent down and immediately recognized the third substance as blood.

Ben looked up and peered into the first stall. Inside lay the patchwork hull of another large cow. It was on its side, hooves out toward the open Dutch door, exposing a quill of tender-looking white udders for Ben’s scrutiny.

“There’s two more just like that one,” Porter said, jabbing his gnarled finger at the other two stalls where similar humped shapes rose up out of the darkness.

Just as Porter Conroy had promised, the cows’ heads looked to have been practically sheared off their bodies, leaving nothing behind, save for a pulpy tangle of tendons surrounding the jagged protrusion of a backbone jutting up through the mess like the tapered and pointy head of a spear. There were slashes of bright red blood on the wooden walls of each stall and in the hay surrounding the stalls.

“Where are the heads?” Ben asked after he’d examined each carcass.

“Beats me,” Porter said.

Ben rubbed his upper lip while Eddie, still peering down at the massacre in one of the stalls, kept muttering over and over to himself, “Sweet Mary.”

Ben jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the barn’s double doors. “You typically keep those locked?”

“No, sir. I don’t.” There was an undeniable pride in the old man’s voice. Like many of the old farmers out in this part of the country, Porter Conroy was adamant about not changing his ways. The only way someone like Porter would put a lock on his barn doors was when cows figured out how to work doorhandles.