Doug Goodman

Every month or so, I'll post a re-print of a story that has already been published.  Thanks to the publishers for allowing me to post these stories.

Haruspex

Originally published in Murky Depths 

The Retriever pawed at the screen door, but no one answered.  There was simply too much noise once the deacon began the rosary.  The dog gave a single low-pitched howl, then laid down next to the empty food bowl.  Whined softly.

Inside the living room, Daniel, too, waited for it all to end.  The new suit itched, and his legs dangled off the folding chair while he tried to remember which bead of the rosary everybody was on.  The hands of his brother and his parents offered little more help than “somewhere in the middle.”  Daniel knew they were on a Hail Mary only because the prayers each contained the line “Santa María, Madre de Dios,” which was easy for him to translate into Holy Mary, Mother of God, but after that line, he always got lost.  He looked forward to the deacon finishing this section of the rosary and repeating everything in English for his dad’s side; then Daniel would know for certain what prayer they were on. 

Fidgeting, Daniel looked around.  All the furniture had been moved out of the living room and replaced with folding chairs.  Every hanging picture with Gregor in it was covered in black.  The redolence of country cooking mixed with the aroma of Tex-Mex dishes seeped in from the side kitchen.  His cousins, who had come all the way from Abilene, looked like they didn’t want to be there.  He looked at some of the farmer families – families of Gregor’s friends.  Those children sat in the back and refused to meet Daniel’s probing eyes, which pleaded for an end to the boredom.  Rosaries were long enough in one language.

Daniel examined the white, ashen face of his brother, who sat trembling in his seat and staring at the coffin.  He watched the deacon in his old and yellowed robes, standing up front with reticence ossified to his face as he led everyone into another Hail Mary.  But Daniel ignored Gregor’s closed casket.  Refused to pay attention to an enlarged picture of Gregor standing on top of the casket. 

Outside, the Retriever gave up on the empty bowl and the enticing smells wafting from the kitchen.  She sniffed around the various cars and trucks, then weaved her way across the yard to the barn.  By the time the deacon began the third repetition of the Hail Mary, the Retriever was needling her nose in a burlap bag of insecticide.  Nobody heard her then, and nobody went looking for her the next morning when she found a stall in the back of the barn, rolled onto her side in the warm hay and, after a last whine, stopped breathing. 

At the same time that the family dog died, Gregor’s coffin was lowered into the cold gray earth, and the deacon threw baptismal water over the grave.  Said, “Just as Gregor’s life began with his baptism into God’s world, so it ends with his return to the baptismal water.”

After another day passed, Daniel started to worry.  Pooka had not come when called for dinner.

“No te precupas, mijo,” Mom said.  “She’s probably running around the woods, eating berries, leaves, y lo que se encuentra su boca.  She’ll be back soon.  No te precupas.”

The words shifted in his mind.  Precuparse.  Meaning worried, not preoccupied. 

The next evening, preoccupied and worried, Daniel went looking for Pooka, ball in hand.  He called her name and searched under the house, in the gully, and behind the old well.  He found her in the barn sunken in the ground, as if the Earth was pulling her under.  At first Daniel did not understand.  He thought his dog was asleep.  He called to the Retriever twice and clapped his hands.  Pooka stayed still.  He threw the old chewed-up tennis ball that she had fetched a thousand times, but Pooka lay there, frozen.

Daniel approached Pooka, realization creeping at the back of his seven-year-old mind, and tears blistering his eyes.  “Pooka?” he called out.  For his small body, he had an even smaller voice.

Daniel sat down next to the Retriever to pet her.  His hand recoiled.  Part of her belly was chewed up.  Blood stained the hay around her.  Her intestines lay in a cold stew to the side.  Rats had gotten to her. 

Daniel started to cry.  Pooka was his birthday present and a friend in a house of older brothers.  She was the only one who never cared what Daniel did with his time so long as he was playing with her.

Suddenly, the dead dog’s belly convulsed.  Horrible things crawled in and out of the entrails.  Creepy-crawlies.  Slithering vermiculate creatures.  Rolling eyes.  A gloved hand shot out of the soup and clamped on Daniel’s throat.  The boy screamed and jumped away.  As soon as he backed off, the hand vanished into thin air.  The dead body lay there alone in the barn with the scared boy.

His dad stood to one side of the workroom, his back to the boy.  Sawdust covered the floor.  Daniel, tears spreading down his face like lava, waited for a response.

His father sighed heavily, and his entire body sighed with him.  “Well, things die.  You just have to deal with it.”

“But she was my dog,” he whined.

“Do I cry when I shoot a deer to put venison on the table?”

“But dad…” the little boy’s voice cracked.

“What about when we butcher the pig or when your mom wrings a chicken’s neck?  Do we cry then?”

“But…”

“Do I cry when…” and he stopped, choked up.  Tears puddled under his eyes.  Said, “Do I cry when I harvest the crops?”

“No.  But dad…”

“But nothing!  This is a farm and things die on it.  As long as it ain’t human, you don’t need to put up a fuss.  Get over it.  She was a stupid dog with a stupid name.”

The boy ran out of the barn.  His father went back to what he was doing with the hacksaw.

Daniel ran to the house.  By now his tear-stained cheeks were flushed, his eyes red.  Breath came to him in gasps.  Inside, he searched for his mom in the kitchen.  The faintest outline from when they brought Gregor in after the accident still lay on the linoleum by the table.  He checked the living room next.  She wasn’t there, either, but his dad’s large deer trophy stretched out from above the mantle.  Daniel never liked the mule deer’s head.  It scared him.  At night, on his way to his parents’ room, he ran past it.  But on this cold day, something seemed odd about it.  Not just scary, but off-putting, like a coat lying on the floor when you know that you just placed it on the hanger, or crops left to die instead of being harvested.

The deer turned to look at him, and Daniel froze.  Then the deer grimaced painfully, menacingly.  Its mouth peeled back with anger.  Part of the head exploded like a smashed gourd, soaking the room in brain-pulp, blood, and horn.  The remaining head and neck writhed on the wall.  Daniel screamed.

His mom ran into the room.  “Ai, mijo!  Que pasa, Daniel?”

“Pooka died, and the deer head looked at me!”  His mother looked up at the ugly head.  Too white-trash for her.  She wished her husband would throw it out, but it was his trophy from one of his hunting trips.  She despised it.

She held her little man and hugged him.  He started breathing easier, his gasps turning to whimpers and whines. 

“Que pasó con Pooka?”  Her voice was warm and soothing.

“She was just lying there.  In the barn.”

“Okay, okay.”

“I loved Pooka,” Daniel said, tears again sluicing down his cheeks.

“We all did.  Shhh.”

When he finally calmed down, she poured him a glass of milk and told him to go see his brother.  “Sepo que no es facile,” she said, then made a motion to hug herself as she said, “Necessitan sus hermanoes en estes tiempos malos.” 

Daniel stared at her blankly.  “You know I don’t understand you when you speak Spanish.”

She kneeled down to him.  “Language is life, Daniel,” she said.  “It goes beyond simply understanding the meanings of words.  You have to learn how everything fits together.”

Daniel still was not sure what his mother was talking about, but he was glad she had said it, so in his abbreviated diction he said, “Gracias por el leche,” and then he ran upstairs.

“Por la leche, la!” she shouted up after him.

Daniel spilled a little of the milk on the old gray stairway, ran past the empty bedroom, and found Tomas staring out his bedroom window at a charnel, brown landscape. 

Daniel looked out the window, too.  Naked branches jutted out of the ground like bones. 

Huesos. 

The last few rows of the field remained unharvested, the picker still in the same spot.  The sun was setting.  Its long rays scintillated off the cold metal and seemed to set the picker on fire.  One day, somebody would have to go out to the tiller and clean up the mess.  If they were lucky, an early snowfall would come through and cover their shame.

His brother rubbed his nose, then turned as if seeing him for the first time.  He had a thousand-yards look in his face.  “What’re you doin here?”

“Pooka died.”

“Pooka is puke-ah,” Tomas said matter-of-factly.

“No she’s not!” Daniel yelled back, his voice tiny and shrill.

“Yes she is,” Tomas grumbled.

“No she’s not!” Daniel begged.

His brother turned back to the window and quietly disregarded Daniel.  Daniel did not know Tomas’ dismissive attitude had more to do with the empty bedroom than needing to deride the dead pet.

“No she’s not,” Daniel protested quietly to himself.

If he felt alienated at home, school was like quarantine.  The kids at the county school avoided Daniel like he had a disease that, if contracted, would kill their brothers and sisters, too.  So instead of sitting outside watching everybody else play during recess, Daniel went to the library. 

Between a book about Egyptian pharaohs and one about Greek heroes and monsters, Daniel found a thick book almost half his size, titled Ancient Religions.  He sat in a plastic blue chair and flipped through its weathered pages, becoming engrossed in the Greek/Roman Gods, Goddesses, and Religious Practices chapter. 

The pictures amazed him, (boca abierta, his mom would say) as well as the stories of the gods.  His little fingers traced the outlines of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, and Saturn, God of the Harvest, their hands clasped together.  They were brother and sister.  Hermanoes.  He snuck the book out with him during second-grade recess so that he could show his brother, whose class had recess at the same time.

Milky layers of dense, turbid clouds rolled across the sky.  Light-impenetrable.  The bitter October wind burned his cheeks as he ran outside.  Tomas was nowhere to be found, so Daniel crawled up on a concrete rail and read about augurs, who could see things others could not.  There were many types.  Augurs who divined from a flock of birds used avispicy; from weather, aerispicy; or from the stars, astrospicy.  Then Daniel read about haruspicy.  The definition mesmerized him.  Outloud he read, “Haruspexes were Roman priests who could divine the future through the study of a dead animal’s organs.  Woah.” 

He had to show Tomas his new book, his Rosetta Stone.  Daniel ran with the book in his arms throughout the playground.  He finally found Tomas next to the old rusted swing set.  Daniel ran to him, but tripped and fell on his hands and knees.  The book flew, sprawling into the wet mulch.  Daniel got up, then lifted the sullied book. 

Underneath the book, a black crow, its wings contorted into morbid positions, stared back at him from eyeless sockets.  Waves of bugs and leaves and worms swelled out of the dead bird.  Once again, a giant gloved hand grabbed him by the throat.  The air thickened with a redolence of leather and sweat and fear.  The hand squeezed.  Daniel couldn’t breathe.  He threw up.

Daniel sat in the nurse’s office with a thermometer in his mouth.  On the phone, the nurse leaned in her chair and nodded.  With mom, Daniel thought.  He no longer understood adults any more.  Their tones changed, like the way the nurse talked to his mom as though she was a child.  Everything she said sounded apologetic.  The way she described what Daniel had told her.  The way she asked about the family.  Questions with implied frailties.  This was his mom, the strong and steadfast woman who had an answer for every question, came from a migrant worker upraising, pushed her children to learn her language, and did not take anything from anyone.  She should be treated like a warrior queen, not a sick baby.  Daniel sighed.  Adults were like a language Daniel could not understand.  He knew they made sense, but he could not interpret the words.

The nurse hung up with his mom and walked over to him, her flats slapping on the tile.

“You’re trying too hard to deal,” she said in her sweet Southernese, “You know that?”  She smiled.  She was young and smooth-skinned and she had a pretty curl at the sides of her lips.  “Your brain is trying to wrap itself around everything that’s happened to you.  That’s why you’re seeing these things.  It happens to lots of kids who go through this kind of trauma.  They see things.  Sometimes ghosts, sometimes boogeymen, and sometimes…sometimes what you see.  I’m sending you home for the rest of the week, but I’ve told your parents to distract you.  Take you to a movie.  I’ll bet you’d like that.”

But there are no theaters in the boonies, so instead his mom gave Daniel old comic books to read while she prepared dinner.  Tripas and tortillas.  After serving dinner to the children, she allowed them to watch an extra hour of television before going to bed.

Laying in his bunk, Daniel listened through the floor to his parents talking about him.  His father had come in late, and his mother told him everything that had happened.  She even told her husband that Daniel was seeing things. 

Daniel could not hear the exact words, which came up through the floorboards like fire embers – clear from a distance, but burning up into nothing just as they got close enough to catch.  He did hear his father yell “Children are friggin useless, Mar.  Friggin worthless.”  Daniel heard a slap, and then the front door slammed shut.

When Daniel woke on Saturday, his father was sitting across from him at Daniel’s desk.  Dark splotches, like the arms of a galaxy, circled his father’s eyes.  His wrist was almost healed.  In his lap lay a rifle.  The outline of a deer was carved into the wood grain finish.

“C’mon.  We’re going huntin’ and not for snipes.”

Daniel jumped out of bed and dressed in seconds, then scrambled after his dad.  Didn’t brush his hair or teeth.  His mother protested.  She said Daniel was too young to go hunting.  How was he going to hold the rifle in his little hands?  But his father believed in him.  “Besides,” as his father pointed out, “The boy needs to learn about death.”

“But it’s not hunting season yet.”

“Don’t worry.  We won’t go far.  Daniel has to learn, or he’ll never grow up.”

Daniel followed in his hand-me-down clothes and boots too big for his feet.  A giant jack-o-lantern smile crossed his happy brown face.  The ghost of a hunter’s moon floated in the western sky.  Out in the distance, the picker stood sentinel over the unclaimed harvest.  They passed Pooka’s grave on the way out to the fields.  A pile of rocks memorialized his childhood friend, but Daniel did not notice.  He got to hold the bullets.

In the morning light, they crept through the bushes and looked down on the gully.  His dad handed him the .22.  Daniel held it like Communion bread.

“Now remember.  Take it easy.  Wait for the shot.  I am gonna chase out a deer.  Once you see it, take the shot.  But remember NOT to shoot it in the head, or you’ll ruin the trophy, okay?”

Daniel smiled.  The trophy.  “Okay.”

“Behind the shoulders.”

“Shoulders.”  Daniel’s eyes twinkled.  This was better than seeing any movie.  Black-and-white images of kids he knew holding up a buck’s head in the paper swamped his mind.  Maybe he would get his picture in the paper, too.  “Daniel Pitchett’s First Buck,” the caption would read. 

His father slid back out and walked off into the brush.  Daniel waited.  Crisp autumn under gray clouds.  Cool breeze, but not cold enough for mouth farts.  Red and gold leaves.

The buck peeked from between the trees.  He had long, tall antlers and a majestic, stoic face.  Daniel saw himself displaying this buck in the picture.  The kids at school would be so jealous.  

Daniel aimed at the body.  He didn’t have a clear shot.  Too many bushes.  He could only pray he hit the deer in the shoulders.  He smelled death, heard bugs and worms crawling along his boots.  He fired his gun.

The rifle kicked, knocking him on his ass.  Someone screamed.  The deer collapsed.  Daniel ran into the gully.  He hoped that by killing while having a vision, he had quelched them.  But when he arrived at the kill site, all he found was the deer head from the mantle laying on the ground, a bullet hole in its head.

His father sat in the mud, crying.

“Why couldn’t you shoot right?  Didn’t I teach you to aim?”

Daniel shirked away.  “Daddy?”

“What good are you, if you can’t even shoot a damned deer?  Dammit!” 

His father reached for him, grabbed him, hugged him.  Cathartic tears ran over Daniel’s face.  He liked being hugged by his father.  It felt like home.  But before he realized what was happening, his father forced him down on his back.  Held him down in the gully.  In the brack.  In this festering hole in the Earth where the bugs and leaves and worms squirmed around him and he couldn’t breathe and the gloves were so black and so powerful and stunk of leather and his father’s face was bright red and blurry and Daniel’s eyes rolled back and lightning bugs scurried at the edge of his vision and then…

And then another shot cracked through the forest.  And his father slumped over, a smoking hole in his chest.

Daniel inhaled, but the air wouldn’t go in, so he sucked harder and tried to stand.

Tomas walked out of the bushes, rifle in hand.  “I had a vision,” Tomas said.

When he could speak, Daniel croaked, “Dead animals give you visions, too?”

“No.  I had mine at Gregor’s viewing.  Nobody saw him open the casket.  His face was really screwed up.  He told me you were in trouble.  That dad was going to do something horrible if I didn’t stop him.  I thought I was crazy till last night when I overheard mom telling dad that you were seeing things.”

“Necrospicy,” Daniel said.  “Divining from dead people.”

Daniel looked at his dead father.  Pooka came to his mind, first the dog and then the word.  It meant a guardian spirit, a totem, an animal friend.  It was a Gaelic word, a book had told him.  His mind drifted to other words.  Preocupado.  Huesos.  Hermanoes, his mother had taught him.  The words lost their English meanings.  They took on a life bestowed on them by his story. 

“Daniel?”

“Yes?”

“In your visions.  When you saw things in dead animals.  Did they tell you anything about mom?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Tomas walked away, the rifle still in his hands.