Carnivorous Species of the American Southwest

In this small town, there are barns laced like gingerbread houses in snow seasons. The fairy lights that wreathe the porches dance like fireflies in the evenings. Clean, crisp, white picket fences protect cellars filled with bottles of dandelion wine, glowing like summer. There are broken bottles littering the poor parts of town, shards glittering on the overgrown sidewalk. The barbed wire fences are molding with rust. There are people here with skin spun like sugar, a few sooty dark like ash. The first kind blaze down the highway after a full bottle of whiskey. The second get pulled over for going five above on a low-traffic night, far out from anything, where patrolmen are starving from lack of fun and no one needs to know.

Kids here stay in-state, become farm hands, learn the family trade. They grow up and clean their guns ‘til they gleam, sling them over their shoulders while they buy eggs and milk. They drive around with star-spangled flags perched high on their dirt-caked pickup trucks, people here know what pride is, what’s patriotism, what’s loyalty. They chew tobacco on their porches and yell at girls with short hair to act more womanlike, gesture with their rifles to move along at people they can tell are from out of town. They protect the local culture. They keep this neighborhood safe.

You get real classic American dining out here. There’s the Sonic where waitresses roller-skate burgers and malts out to your car and Dairy Queen out on Route 37, the IHOP with nine different flavors of syrup. There’s Cracker Barrel for a nice family dinner, buy some old-fashioned taffy for the kids, bring home a new rocking chair for the house, show your wife you can do nice things now and then. Listen to some real music, Jim Croce, John Denver, they know what to play there, the good stuff. Sometimes you have to drown out the sound of someone getting kicked out for one thing or another, wrong color or some queer or something, don’t know why these kinds of people always have to make a scene. Just stare down at your catfish and collard greens and say nothing, even when it gets violent. They ought to know better than to come here. Make sure to order the hot blackberry cobbler. It is divine.

There’s not much of anything to do out here. There’s a carnival with swings and a merry-go-round comes in the spring, rodeo and gun shows in winter and fall. Some make the long drive to bigger cities on the weekends, most camp out in bars and drink to forget work starts again Monday morning. Some people light fires. There’s a rash of abandoned shacks collapsing along the dirt roads between here and Devil’s Backbone. Old, dry wood, they go up like tinder. You can see the pillars of smoke from town. There’s no one in them when they get lit. Sometimes we wish there was, just so that the paper would have something new to write about.

The corn stretches for miles out here. Golden, plentiful. Shouts are swallowed to the barest whisper in these fields. North becomes South and South becomes fear in these fields. If someone were to wander, they too would be swallowed. They would not be found.

Last August, when the sun was sweltering down like God’s fury, a drought season, crops dropping like the end of days, a corpse was found ditched in the mouth of Sweetwater Creek, down in the valley, in the Sugar Bowl. It was bruised from crown to crotch, wilted poppies blooming red and black over every inch. The paper said it had been lying there three weeks before they found it. In this town we don’t go looking for what we don’t want to know. The body had belonged to a stranger from out of town, wandered in when the dying corn and dogged heat were shaping the tense air here into a powder keg. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, a man in a skirt. Conditions here are dry and unforgiving. Some species cannot survive. Invasives are cut from the root, so they cannot upset the balance of nature. Originally from Vietnam, the stranger was, dangerous place. When we’d first asked he’d said, “I just moved out from Denver,” “I was born and raised in the states,” “I prefer to be called my chosen name, Alice.” We kept asking ‘til he told us what we wanted to hear. His skin used to be just the golden color of wheat, right before harvest. When they dragged him out of the water, it was sallow, prune-shriveled, bloated, sick. Police haven’t found any leads.

In this town, there are dark things out there, lurking in the woods. There’s talk of Sasquatch, Yeti, ten-foot birds, anything to draw tourists to the area, staying in our motels, eating at our diners, buying local. Good industry, supports the community. We make up lies about fake creatures and monsters, creeping around, snatching people up. We were born with no natural predator, so it was make our own or become one. We ignore the real demons, shaving their faces and plucking their eyebrows in our bathroom mirrors.