Beasts of the Earth (eBook)

2

assumption parish, louisiana – 1965

Munday Fischer walked along the highway ditch, with hunched shoulders and a look of distrust. His steps were soft and measured, as if he expected at any moment to find something delicate resting beneath him. He was a short man with a broad chest and leathered skin, his arms and forearms adorned with series of tattooed symbols, crude lettering, and shaded boxes. He wore prison-issued attire: a light-blue short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into dark-blue trousers with a black belt and black shoes. His thinning hair was slicked back, and his brown eyes were so dark they appeared almost coal-like, darting from one side of the road to the other.

The highway was freshly paved, and he could smell the bitumen and tar. The ditch had been dug two years and two months prior. He’d been on the line of men digging it—striped and chained and sweating. He’d cursed the heat and humidity, the gnats and the hornets, and the endless parade of assholes hurling insults and trash as they drove by. But now there were no chains. He was a free man. He’d always seen himself as such. Freer than other men. Limitless in his cravings and undeniable in his pursuits to satisfy them. For Munday, prison had merely been a change of scenery.

He unshouldered his knapsack and laid it down in the tall Bahia grass that flanked the roadway. He untucked his shirt and loosened his belt, and at the approach of the first car, he dropped his pants and shook his pecker at the driver and passengers alike until the car had passed and was out of sight.

He repeated this presentation several times as he made his way slowly south. One truck stopped and Munday readied for the coming fight, but the driver thought better and continued on his way. Munday left the highway at the Blevins Parish sign and entered into the swamp. He nooned under a bald cypress, laying out his possessions one by one atop the thick tree roots and taking inventory.

He’d been released with three dollars for bus fare and provisions, a pack of cigarettes, a box of matches, and the paperwork that proved his standing within the great state of Louisiana. He’d skipped the bus station and stopped a few miles from the prison at a mercantile where he spent the money on lunch meat wrapped in wax paper, a half block of cheese, a short-blade pocketknife, and a quart bottle of Old Grand-Dad.

He leaned back against the tree and used the small knife to cut chunks from the cheese. He opened the wax paper and took out two slices of ham and doubled them around the cut cheese and ate. He wiped his hands on his clothes and drank from the whiskey bottle and sat smoking a cigarette, listening to the sounds of the wetland wherein he’d spent all but the last seven years of his life.

A red-shouldered hawk circled and screeched, and a wary musk turtle pulled its head inside its arched conquistador shell. Insects twittered and buzzed, and Munday closed his eyes and counted the occasional plinking of water frogs. The rush of feeling seemed to vibrate, to move through him like a thousand memories at once. And what memories they were, more violent and disturbed than the most horrific imaginings of other men. Lesser men, he thought.

There was a triumph in his endurance, his continued existence. He could himself no longer see the tragedy of his life, but rather a twisted divinity. He had, through the years, begun to enjoy the delusion of significance—the idea that his heart beat on some greater plane. Some imperatorial outworld governed by forces powerful and dark. To deny his lurid leanings was to risk losing the very thing to which he attributed his survival.

He could taste the thickness of the air. He stuck out his tongue, darting it in every direction, opening his mouth wide. He was a scourge of evolution, a wayward biproduct blending reptile and man. This was his swamp, he decided. He would be the king, and this his kingdom.

His bottle was half-empty by the day’s gloaming, and through such dusk came the distant purr of a boat motor. The Swamp King clambered out on a bowed log as the small johnboat came into view, weaving slowly between the trees.

“Halt,” Munday cried in a poor British accent. “Who goes there?”

The motor sputtered off and the boat glided toward Munday, and he watched from its port side as it cut through the water’s algae coating.

“What say, fella?” the driver offered. “You need some help?”

The boat’s captain was a teenager at best. He wore denim shorts, a tattered ball cap, and a life jacket over his bare chest.

“Why are you in my swamp?” the King asked.

“What’s that, now?” the boy asked, looking over his shoulder as if there might be someone else to better interpret such a question.

“My swamp,” Munday motioned with both arms to the world around them. “Who gave you leave to be here?”

“Your swamp?” The boy was beyond confused, but he had not yet sensed the danger he was in. “Mister, I don’t understand the first word of what you’re talking about. This water ain’t owned by nobody that I’m aware of. The parish maybe. It goes all the way down to the coast.”

“Are you a spy, boatman?”

“A what?”

“A spy, goddamnit. Don’t play dumb with me, boy.”

“I’m just gonna go on down the river,” the boy said. “I don’t mean no offense.”

“Well, then,” Munday called, walking out to the end of the log. He could see the boy’s haul of catfish in the bottom of the boat. “Be gone with you.”

“Hold on a minute,” the boy said. “I know you. You’re Munday Fischer. You’re the one who did all them things to that little Reeves girl. Spit sandwich, they let you out already?”

Munday leapt from the log and landed in the boat. The boy was too startled to move, and the older man wasted no time in striking the boy’s head with a heavy fist. His knees buckled and Munday was on him and with both hands bashed the boy’s head against the gunwale in a violent fury. He continued this savagery in eerily removed repetition.

The Swamp King made a fire at night and ate the fish in front of his vanquished foe. The boy’s staved head appeared in the firelight as some oblong grotesquery—an unfinished form, wet and half-molded atop the potter’s wheel.

The King ate and drank and threw fish bones at the lifeless body. He laughed and danced around the fire. When he needed to relieve himself, he did so over the corpse and laughed harder still.

The following morning the Swamp King took the boat and maneuvered it several miles upriver and left it overturned in a dark cove. Wearing the boy’s life jacket, the King floated back down to his camp and emerged from the water in a great suit of algae and plankton. He rebuilt the fire and took off his wet clothes and stood naked in his drying. He could feel the boy’s dead eyes staring.

“Don’t you even goddamn think about it,” he told the corpse. “Unless you want it done to you first.”

Half a week in the swamp and Munday had grown tired of being king. His royal subject had a foul smell about him and was attracting buzzards and other scavengers, and all the warmth had left the body. There was no whiskey and the unkept meat had given him bouts of diarrhea. In the dawn of the fourth day, he trudged back out to the road and followed it toward the coast.

He crossed bridges and bayous and was urged on by the land itself as it slightly sloped toward the gulf, returning to the sea from which it had first emerged. The bloodred sun stained the clouds and the clouds stretched and bowed before it, and the whole of the earth bowed before it, and all but for Munday, whose heart had long beat in defiance of the light.

A tow truck without a load came to a trundling stop just ahead of him, and Munday met the driver’s face in the open window. He was an old man with deep pockets around his eyes and a drunk’s bulbous nose.

“Where you headed?” Munday asked.

“Hell, I thought that was my line,” the old man said. “I’m headed all the way down.”

“Drop me at Shelly’s Oxbow?”

“I can sure do it.”

The driver offered a stale doughnut and leftover coffee, both of which Munday consumed in a ravenous, animallike manner.

“Ain’t nobody gonna take it from you, you know,” the old man commented as Munday vigorously dispatched the last of the doughnut.

“That’s all folks do is take things,” he replied.

The old man gave him a concerned glance. Munday was wearing the swamp-stained prison blues, and nearly all of his exposed skin had traces of dirt or mud or blood. His breath and body smelled like swamp water and whiskey.

“You live on the oxbow?” the old man asked.

“I live,” Munday said, and said nothing else.

The truck driver frowned.

“You’ve a dark spirit about you, son,” he said.

Munday looked over at him and smiled.

“You are gonna die today, friend,” he told the man.

“What?”

“I said, ‘How far until the highway ends?’”

The old man swallowed hard.

“About twenty miles or so,” he said.

“Used to not come down this far south.”

“Nossir, they put it in new a few years back.”

“All folks do is take things,” Munday said again.

He opened the glove box and...