The Day Baron von Sickle Disappeared
by Craig Donegan
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Next morning, Bruce awoke before sunrise. Too early, he thought, to call Mrs. M., so he walked to the pond and climbed into the branches of a dead post-oak tree where he watched and waited. Ten minutes in, a raccoon arrived to wash and eat at its leisure until a coyote with three pups came along. When the coyotes moved on, a frail doe approached in fits and starts. She stomped her hooves, sniffed the air, snorted, flicked her tail and lowered her head until her nose whiskers touched the water and she began to drink.
With incredible speed, and no warning, the water exploded from below. Before he could blink, Bruce saw the gator’s jaws snap and the deer’s head jerk and twist as both animals slid under the water. Bruce froze in place and watched until the water calmed. Not even fish disturbed the surface, despite several mayflies that flopped on the glassy face of the pond.
His legs had gone numb, which made him clumsy as he climbed from the tree and lumbered toward the office. There, he dialed Mrs. Moczygemba. On the third ring, she answered in a sleepy voice, tinged with dread. “Yes, who’s this calling?” she asked.
“It’s me. Bruce. Down at the Ranger Station.”
“Oh.” And after a pause, “I prayed all night. But the news is bad. Isn’t it?”
“Well, ma’am, just remember, miracles happen. I mean who’d ever thought we’d have gators in Baron von Sickle?”
“I’d hardly call having gators a miracle,” she said.
“Well, it’s at least a sign, just like all the people leaving town. We could make that stop, you know.”
“What’s that got to do with Randy?”
“Nothing right off, but I will say this. You know Schubert’s Pond.”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, the walls of the pond all the way down are pure limestone. I’ve read reports that there are spots in them where divers in recent years have found air pockets. And it must be true, because that alligator, which I saw again this morning, was under water for too long not to drown for lack of air.”
“False hope’s for fools. And you failed me and Randy, so I’m calling out the vigilantes. We’re gonna kill every gator, coyote, and rattlesnake in this decrepit little town. Rid this place of the varmints that’re killing our pets and dividing, running off our people. I hardly have a neighbor left, and pretty soon I’ll be gone, too, one way or the other.”
“I understand, Mrs. Moczygemba, but I’m afraid you’ve gotten it backwards. The varmints are the symptom, not the problem.”
“You sound like my doctor. ‘Quit smoking and chewing. Stop drinking whiskey. Don’t eat all them eggs.’ Well, who can eat eggs these days? All the chickens are dead. And who’s fault is that? Coyotes. Chicken snakes. That’s who.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not,” said Bruce.
“Then who is the problem, Mr. Honeycutt? You couldn’t stop that gator from killing my Randy. Who’s responsible for my dog being dead? Now that’s a problem, don’t you think?”
“But it’s not the problem, Mrs. Moczygemba. The problem is us.”
* * *
Early Sunday morning, three days after Randy the poodle had disappeared, several members of the Baron von Sickle Taxpayers Association, with its newest member, Mrs. Moczygemba, arrived on Bruce’s front porch. One of the men, in flannel footie pajamas and a red hunting cap with ear flaps, carried a ball-peen hammer. With no warning, he stepped to the doormat like a baseball player entering the batter’s box and swung the face of the hammer against the front-door handle, which tore loose and flew off the far end of the porch. With a flick of his wrist, he then slammed the peen into the doorbell button, which left a hole the size of a 10-guage shotgun slug.
“What in the hell have you done?” asked the Association President as he slapped his right palm against his own forehead.
“I’m getting his attention, that’s what I’m doing,” said the man with the hammer. “He’s a public servant. We pay his salary. He ought a be out hunting that gator or them coyotes that killed my wife’s cat last night. But all he wants to do is to blabber nonsense about why the varmints are here when he ought to be out there making them gone.”
“Well, you just smashed taxpayer property, you idiot,” said the president.
“What the hell?” said the man, lifting an ear flap as if he’d misheard.
“This ranger’s house, you fool. Who do you think paid for it? Who do you think pays for its upkeep? We, the taxpayers, that’s who.”
“Communists!” shouted the man in the red pajamas. “It’s them that’s behind all this, anyway. It’s their doing. This alligator and the drought and the heat and all.”
“Screw the communists,” said the president. “You’re the culprit here, and I’ll see to it that you personally pay to fix all this damage you’ve done. ’Cause it’s damn well sure not coming out of our pockets,” he added with a sweep of his arm as the other Association members, including Mrs. M., nodded their agreement.
Just then, Bruce appeared at the front door, which he pushed open with his fingertips and then stepped outside in his plain white tee shirt and Army-green ranger pants. He paid little attention to the small vigilante mob standing on his porch. Instead, he examined the torn wood where his door handle used to be. Then he ran his hand over the hole in the frame but jerked it away when he picked up a splinter. He turned up his palm, plucked out a fine sliver of wood and then watched a small drop of blood rise and darken in the early morning light. He glanced up at the familiar group of people who stood on his porch looking angry and noticed that Mrs. M. had a ten-inch Swiss Army butcher knife clutched in her right hand.
“I gather you think I can help you with something,” he said.
“That’s one way of putting it,” said the president. “You follow us. We’re going to the pond. But you’re the one’s gonna kill that gator.”
“Really? You want to kill the alligator?”
“I’d do it myself, but all I got is this thing here,” said the man with the hammer. “Anyway, it’s your job.”
At the pond, some were shocked to see the water level so low.
“You’re surprised?” Bruce asked. “You’ve known for years we’ve been losing water to drought and to towns all around us that pump and sell aquifer water to the highest bidder. You’ve seen the pipelines go in. At some point they’ll suck us dry. Am I really telling you something you don’t already know?”
No one replied, but after a moment of silence someone shouted “Gator!” and, sure enough, up through the water came the head and half the torso of the scaly beast.
“Get me a rope,” Bruce ordered the president and, within seconds, someone produced a lassoing rope, left over from a time when the town still had horses and calves for rodeo roping.
Bruce put a lasso in the rope and lowered it into the water. There, he wheedled it down to the gator’s nose until the creature’s head passed through. With a jerk, the gator started to dive, and Bruce dug in his heels. He gave an enormous tug and cried out for help, which caused Mrs. M. to grab the rope while some others pitched in, but some of the more boisterous men ran home to protect their wives and children from danger, as they later explained it.
Once the gator tired, the men who remained helped Bruce haul the reptile over the pond’s rim. This time Bruce was fast with his pistol. Two blinks of the eye and the creature was dead.
He then slid the Swiss Army knife from Mrs. M’s limp hand, sliced open the gator from stern to stem. Next, he slit the stomach, reached inside, and withdrew the remainders of Randy’s rhinestone-and-sequin collar, still entangled with clumps of white poodle hair. At the grisly sight of her canine Jonah, Mrs. M’s knees gave out, and she fainted as the president of the taxpayers’ association jumped back, giving the old lady’s head a clean shot at the ground.
Afterward, a trickle of von Sickleans returned to the pond. There they pitched tents and held revival meetings, some beseeching hitherto unknown gods. They paid homage, sacrificed bits of charred opossum and snake, and asked for mercy from mysterious forces beyond their ken. Others simply wandered off, while some went home and declared war against all varmints and predators, foreign and domestic.
But over the ensuing months, many of the remaining families packed their belongings and drifted away, never to return. Most went north, but some lit out for Antarctica. And there, according to rumor, several arms and munitions manufacturers set up shop to recruit vigilantes from among the frenzied settlers who sought shelter in the melting ice of their madness.
As for Bruce, on the evening of the day that he butchered the gator, he went to the pond to bury the creature and to watch the sunset. But this time, when the great burning ball dipped below the horizon, blood-orange was not the color that drenched the sky. Instead, the dome above him glowed a lustrous red, except for the pearly white evening star, which he imagined was a tiny portal to heaven.
* * *
In the wake of what became known as The Battle at Blue Hole, caretakers, as they called themselves, began to roam the streets at night. Armed with rifles and shotguns, they hunted pumas from the nearby foothills, bears from who knows where, and even an ocelot that Mrs. M. swore she saw eat Alfie Johnson’s ferret alive. Meanwhile, three young gators slipped into town and set down stakes at the Blue Hole.
The Church of the Hoot Owl in the Darkness began to offer evening prayer, but attendance was poor and eventually dropped to nothing. Most von Sickleans had kept faith that God would save them for being such hard workers who provided well for themselves and their families. But now they’d learned the hard way that God doesn’t “Help those who help themselves” as much as “Help those who help each other.”
Bruce, in his self-appointed role as witness, recorded clips that captured non-native creatures as they drifted through town. The more he buried himself in the project, and the more publicly he proclaimed that science trumped faith in the matter of physical survival, the more alienated he became from his fellow von Sickleans. Many of those declared themselves survivalists who pledged to kill every living creature in town before leaving for Antarctica.
Together, Silverback and Mrs. M. eventually condemned Bruce’s efforts in a column they published in The Monthly von Sicklean, a one-page mimeographed news summary of comings and goings in town. They accused him of photoshopping pictures. and of splicing video clips from far-flung parts of the Americas, to create the illusion that the onslaught of predators and scavengers was the natural outcome of conditions worsening throughout the hemisphere. On the contrary, they insisted the migrating creatures were most likely omens, supernatural portents from God — or the Devil, who knew? — that carried within them the town’s seeds of destruction.
Two years later, during a prolonged manic phase, Silverback proposed to Mrs. M. and they married. Yet within the year, their dreams went to dust when an unknown species of virus or bacteria, decomposed them head to toe in their bed one night, leaving behind two cadaver-sized piles of dirt.
Despite great danger to himself, Bruce put their remains in a wheelbarrow and toted them to the edge of town for the burial while fighting off three hungry buzzards along the way, each of which managed to down its share of the Silverbacks before the deceased were properly placed in the ground.
Then Bruce returned to his office to complete the paperwork that documented the deaths and burials. Three hours later, when he returned to the gravesites with two wooden crosses, he found three clumps of soil nearby, each about the size of a buzzard.
* * *
Before long, Bruce was left alone, the last living human in Baron von Sickle. And the thought came to him that when he was gone, the town, too, would disappear. This was not because he believed it would literally vanish or was somehow contingent upon him as the last man. But it was, he thought, contingent upon something, a type of witness, an articulate consciousness, that could testify to the place’s existence.
Moments later, as the sun set behind an especially sanguine horizon, Bruce breathed in the smell of the heat and dry dust. He went to the pond for his regular evening vigil, but this time he sat close, almost snug, to the water’s edge. He found a strange comfort there, which he’d only felt before on the rim of the earthen dam. And as he sat, the world around him grew darker, though nightfall had yet to come.
Then he looked down beyond the rim of the pond and watched, mesmerized, as one of the gators rose slowly, clinched him almost gently by the feet, and pulled him under. The surface shimmered above, and, while his lungs filled with water, he felt something inside himself peel away and begin to rise, lifting him out of his body.
As this occurred, he rotated gently and looked down upon the pond and the town of Baron von Sickle. Slowly, as the world faded before him, he clearly saw the gators’ glistening eyes and pulsing nostrils, which pierced and pushed him upward, away from the waterline. The creatures, witnesses all, watched and breathed in rhythm with what seemed to him infinite patience, a sense of good riddance, fond feelings of farewell.
Copyright © 2023 by Craig Donegan
