Who’s to say why a man does what he does? Hunter Wilson was seven when his parents emigrated from New Zealand to the U.S., but he still remembered with nostalgia the wooly clouds of sheep that drifted across the emerald hillsides, hard work to care for, but what life doesn’t involve hard work? Hard work or not, their farm failed, and Hunter’s father convinced his mother they should seek the glittering haven of New York City. A world away, a new world, a new life.
Hunter’s parents had all the enthusiasm of young love even after a decade of marriage, but failure embraced them more tightly than love. Hunter was eleven when his parents traversed North America in a lumbering Buick Roadmaster, a hacking dinosaur ticketed twice by police for not maintaining minimum speed on the interstate. Once in Los Angeles, even failure took a back seat. His parents opened a copy shop, expanded the business to several more shops, and banked enough funds to entertain a college education for Hunter at UC Davis.
Which is where Hunter met and fell in love with Sharon Milne, her eyes so pale and blue she wept at the dawn. She dipped her head when she said hello, and her emotions sometimes so overwhelmed her that she shivered as a substitute for language. But she could also balance a spreadsheet, make it roll over like a puppy ecstatic to have its belly scratched, and that was a skill beyond Hunter’s mastery. Sharon studied agriculture but had never farmed or raised livestock. Hunter had. And so, after graduation, marriage and migration to the foothills of the San Juan Mountains in Colorado.
What goes round comes round.
A sheep ranch, although barely a ranch by local standards, more like a toy if you credited diner gossip. “We’ll aim for the high-end organic market,” Sharon assured Hunter. Their parcel was small but abutted Bureau of Land Management acreage, the grazing permits a handful of pennies per month. During the daylight hours of their first summer, Hunter and Sharon constructed fences and sheds, interrupted only by Hunter chasing Sharon around their homestead with carpentry nails protruding as fangs from his mouth. Wolf and sheep was the name of that game, and you can guess how it ended. Come evening, Sharon crafted stained-glass suncatchers to decorate their mobile home, and Hunter tried to interest their dogs in leftovers from black-bean burgers and tofu omelets. That September, they purchased Corriedale sheep at cost from a Kiwi transplant who Hunter’s dad knew through the friend of a friend.
The birth of their first lamb the following April should have been a cause for celebration, a generational signpost driven into the land as a claim. Not so. The mother ewe, blood dribbling from her rear, nuzzled the stillborn lamb. She licked bloody goo from the lamb’s nose and forehead, seemed to entreat it to breathe, to stumble to its tiny hooves, to suckle at her painfully engorged udder. Sharon shivered then screamed, screamed almost too late because she had never witnessed a birth and didn’t know what to expect, “Its head, the lamb, in the middle of its head, it only has one eye!”
Who’s to say why a man does what he does? Hunter, at age nine, on a rare weekend excursion with his parents to Coney Island. Late August, the weather unseasonably cold, Hunter’s windbreaker a joke even though zipped to his chin. The billowy lines of the Cyclone roller coaster rose tsunami high over the other rides but were empty of cars, the entry gate locked. “You promised,” Hunter said. Dad scanned the vicinity for lights and swirling, rattling motion. “What about the Wild Tea Party?”
Hunter glowered. Sailing around in oversized teacups? That was for babies. “I’m cold,” Hunter said.
One of those looks parents love to exchange, each blaming the other for their current predicament.
“What about . . . ?” Hunter pointed to a long, low building decorated with canvas banners that flapped like leaden wings in the wind. Strange men, weird women. Lightning bolts, mermaids, and swords. Red lettering bright as the ketchup on the lukewarm hot-dog he had tossed half-eaten into the trash.
“That’s a sideshow.” Mom’s lip curled.
“So?” Dad said.
“A freakshow.
“At least it’s indoors,” Dad said. Cold fingers of rain explored their collars and cuffs.
Indoors and warm. That should have been sufficient, but Hunter’s wooden seat was hard against his bony butt. Worse yet, a hefty man in a sodden winter coat settled directly in front of Hunter and so, although the emcee’s patter revealed the premise for each performance, Hunter enjoyed few of the visual details. A woman supposedly coiled like a snake inside a box to avoid sword thrusts. Another allowed herself to be strapped to a chair and her hair stood on end when an electrical switch was thrown. The emcee, not to be outdone, swallowed fire, nails, and items proffered by the audience. Hunter cringed when his dad laughed too loudly at the complaint, “How in the holy Hell am I supposed to get my watch back?”
The uncomfortable dream of the live show was allayed in part by the displays on the way out, these available at the minimal cost of one dollar per adult, children at half-price. “We’ll only be a minute,” Hunter’s dad said to his mom in response to Hunter’s insistent tug. The taxidermied mermaid and gryphon, their chimeric stitches still showing, were so obviously fake as to be laughable.
The thing in the jar was something else.
The wide-mouth jar was much like one that had held pickles at Hunter’s neighborhood deli. The thing submerged in the yellow liquid was deformed but clearly once alive, its skin hairless, rubbery, and loose around its bones, if it had once had bones. Four doughy clots formed its legs, ending in soft, translucent hooves. Its head was too large for its body, too large really for the jar, and was smushed against the glass, its ears folded and crumpled like water-logged cardboard. A bulbous white tongue protruded from the lipless mouth. Most horrible of all, the thing had only one eye, a single immense eye of a glazed blue that stared back at Hunter and invited him to blink. Each time Hunter blinked and returned the stare, that thing still stared out at him.
Hunter read the fly-specked label on the jar. “What’s a cyclops?” he asked.
The chest freezer was large enough to accommodate a horse. The veterinarian, ten years Hunter’s senior and with the tiresomely long name of Constantine Hurley, filled in a tag and tied it to the bag containing Hunter’s dead lamb. There were two other packages in the freezer, a cat and a small dog Hunter guessed based on the shape and size of the bundles. The vet slammed the freezer lid closed on what was mostly cold air.
“Let’s take a look where you’ve been grazing your sheep.” Constantine’s lip was creased by a scar, a white line that extended into his dented cheek and which distorted his every proclamation into a lisp. Stigmata, Hunter wondered, perhaps due to a mishap with an unruly charge.
“You want to drive up there? Now?”
“If that’s where you grazed your sheep.”
“I have a permit.”
“That’s not my point.”
It was a good half-hour drive in the vet’s Ford pickup, one that still smelled of the showroom, and then, after the gravel road ended in scrub, another twenty-minute hike through brush. The peaks of the San Juan’s were crowned in blinding white, the ground they hiked frozen in the shadows, and trickling runoff and boot-sucking muck where warmed by the sun.
“I like it up here,” Hunter said. An understatement. He inhaled the chill mountain air, tasted it like stars on a clear winter’s night.
“I can see why.” Constantine pulled on a pair of disposable vinyl gloves.
“What are you looking for?”
“Hold your horses. We’ll see soon enough.”
Not five minutes later, Constantine paused in his tracks. A smile crinkled his scarred lip. “Here we are. Veratrum californicum.” He poked with his hiking staff at a torpedo of nestled green leaves, these protruding from the warmed soil as if folded in prayer. “Also known as false hellebore, or the corn lily.”
“This?”
“What did you expect, a black-eyed Susan? That’s a joke. A flower with eyes, one eye, get it?”
Hunter didn’t laugh.
“It’s too early in the season for false hellebore to send up an inflorescence. Those can reach almost six feet in height.” The vet raised his arm to above eye level. He then jabbed with his staff and lacerated a leaf near the tip of his Lucchese boot. “There’s your culprit.” He held the impaled leaf fragment up for Hunter’s examination.
Hunter backed away.
Constantine grinned wickedly and returned the point of his staff to the soil. He removed the leaf with his boot toe. “False hellebore is poisonous. The poison, not surprisingly, is called cyclopamine. You catch the allusion?”
“Like in the fairy tale.”
“Yes, but the cyclops is real. Consume false hellebore and, instead of giving birth to liddle lamzy diveys, pregnant ewes birth liddle lamzy cyclopseys.” Constantine tapped his forehead for emphasis. “Luckily, the lambs are usually stillborn. Like yours.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“The obvious. Don’t let your pregnant ewes graze here. Should you have the time and inclination, you could spray the weeds with Roundup. Kill them off.” The vet then added, seemingly as an afterthought, “I’ll hang onto your one-eyed lamb, if you don’t mind. There are people who have an interest in such things.”
Hunter remembered the pickled pig in the jar at Coney Island. The one cyclopean blue eye and how it stared at him, never blinking, a window into his future as it turned out. He smiled. For the first time that afternoon, the vet was speaking a language Hunter understood. “A fifty-fifty split on whatever you make?”
“Shake on it.”
Love is two hearts burning as one. Sharon had said this to Hunter back when they were both undergrads at UC Davis and lying on their backs, fingers entwined, naked under a scimitar moon. At the time, Hunter had thought it the most romantic thing he had ever heard. But young love, despite movies to the contrary, is not eternal.
Sharon had a temper. There were arguments, some exorcised by feverish lovemaking, others not. Sharon had initially helped with the sheep herding, had claimed to love the slow moving and silent days, vaporous clouds in the sky and wooly clouds on the hillside. But after the stillbirth, the birth of that thing, that wet and twisted creature with the one horrible eye…
“It was staring at me.”
“It was dead.”
“Dead or not, it saw me. I still see it in my dreams.”
“I can’t do everything alone.”
“I threw up. I was physically sick.”
There were fights. Sharon threw a dinner knife at Hunter. It missed him by a good foot, perhaps on purpose. The wall preserved a dent from the knife handle like a memory that could not be forgotten or forgiven. Hunter shoved Sharon and she fell to the floor, heavily. She clutched at her stomach. That was when, Sharon still on the floor and snarling in pain from her bruised hip, Hunter weaving above her like a punch-drunk prize-fighter unsure whether he should return to his corner, that she announced her pregnancy.
Who’s to say why a man does what he does? Neurobiologists propose that 98% of our brain’s activity occurs unconsciously. Most decisions are made by the evolutionarily ancient reptile brain in concert with the limbic brain where our emotions reside. The more recently evolved neocortex, the pride of Homo sapiens, operates at a much slower rate and, if it accomplishes anything to our benefit, rationalizes decisions after the fact. After the fact. In other words, all that millions of years of evolution, all that this insanely complicated neural wiring of our neocortex has granted us is an ability to congratulate ourselves over what a dinosaur did instinctively.
Or to put it another way, after an exhausting day of herding sheep on the slopes of the San Juan mountains, not a week after their knock-down, drag-out fight, a fight in which Sharon revealed she was pregnant, Hunter returned home and served her a salad of hand-picked wildflowers.
“What’s this,” she said.
“An apology,” he said.
Assuming some level of intent on the part of Hunter, whether conscious or unconscious, and not eliminating an all-too-likely mistake in plant taxonomy, the most parsimonious rationale for the contents of the salad was a desire to abort Sharon’s pregnancy as a prelude to separation or divorce. The truly cynical might remember the enthusiasm with which Hunter greeted the possibility of making a few extra dollars from selling that first stillborn, one-eyed lamb. How much more might a similarly featured and stillborn human fetus fetch if brought to the attention of certain connoisseurs of the monstrous?
Regardless, after learning of Sharon’s pregnancy, Hunter demonstrated an almost obsessive level of concern for the health and status of their fetus, this increasing in proportion to the ballooning of Sharon’s belly. Such an attitude is not unusual for first-time fathers, and is readily excused as the only manner by which they may participate in the miraculous transformation that occurs within the body of their pregnant wife.
There was a heartbeat.
The ultrasound, although of typical poor quality, was sufficient to reveal the tiny, bent penis. These milestones settled Hunter’s edgy emotions. He looked forward to the birth of the child he could now refer to as his son.
“We’ll call him William, after my grandfather,” Hunter said.
“I never met your grandfather, but I like the name.” Sharon said.
Whatever Hunter’s thoughts, conscious or unconscious, he could not have anticipated a poisoned fetus coming to term. He could not have envisioned Sharon grunting in the delivery room, her hair sweat-plastered to her skull, her fist white-knuckled and knotted with his.
The baby was born blue-tinged and bloody but alive. The midwife cursed and left the room. Hunter and the doctor exchanged whispers. Her voice ragged, Sharon demanded to hold her newborn son, her baby Billy. A nurse administered a sedative, and waited ten minutes for the sedative to take effect before allowing Sharon to clutch her Billy to her chest. Sharon had been forewarned that the faces of the newborn are ugly, that they are wrinkled and ruddy as discarded apples, but she was not prepared for the blank skin where a nose should protrude. She was not prepared for the single, mercifully lidded, eye centered in Billy’s forehead.
Sharon gasped. Her body spasmed. Billy rolled sideways and found the nipple of her left breast and began to softly suckle. Sharon pushed the creature away. Milky saliva dribbled down her engorged breast. Her newborn’s mushy lips puckered with embryonic lust, dank as rotten fruit. It was then that Billy opened his eye and stared back into hers, an ocean of misery to drown in, the pupil of his singular eye the same pale blue as that of her own two eyes.
Who can blame Sharon for finding a lover? She was married, but Hunter hardly looked at her and, when he did, he bit back his words and disappeared for a week to herd sheep in the mountains. The doctor had assured them that this thing they had brought into the world could not survive, that they should not become attached to it. But a month passed, and then another, and another, and the nightmare did not end.
Two long horrible years passed and the creature, that thing, their son, Billy, sequestered in his bedroom and administered to by humming, gurgling machines, clung to life as tenaciously as a twisted, stunted mountain pine. Sometimes he called out in a language of grunts and howls. Sometimes he clenched the muscles of his arms and legs and curled up like a spider. And then there was his eye, always that eye, a saucer pale and blue, the rarity of his blinks, a gaze that could not be met without tears and recriminations. By this point, Hunter and Sharon had established a cover story to address any malignant rumors: they had lost their first child but were recently blessed with another. It wasn’t a compelling story but it was the best they had.
It was just bad luck that the lover Sharon took was the veterinarian. Although perhaps not surprising. After all, Constantine Hurley’s job as a vet required he pay regular visits to the ranch. Still, bad luck just the same.
Constantine was tracing the areola of Sharon’s left breast with a wetted forefinger, his attention rapt while her nipple hardened to his touch, when he foolishly mentioned how her husband had sold him three stillborn lambs afflicted with cyclopia. “Not that I’m complaining,” he said. “It’s good money for the both of us. For all of us.”
Constantine then proceeded to give Sharon a detailed account of the effects of false hellebore and its toxin, cyclopamine.
Sharon focused on the ceiling for two long minutes, the veterinarian’s attention to her breasts, formerly to the left and now to the right, a distraction at best. The baby monitor emitted the glottal rhythm of Billy’s mouth-breathing. He was awake. He might have but a single eye but sometimes it felt as if he could see further with it than she ever could with her own two eyes, that he watched and judged her, always, even through walls. Sharon’s cheeks, drained of blood, were cool and gray as week-old snow. She shivered. She threw aside the sheets, stumbled from her bed, and, behind the locked bathroom door, puked an acidic sludge into the sink.
The murder weapon was a Henckels knife, from a ten-piece block set Hunter and Sharon had received as a wedding present. The target was Hunter’s brain, the three-pound blob of electrical jelly that contained all his memories and desires: his courting of Sharon, their mobile home scarred by her hurled dinner knife, the sheep drifting like somnolent clouds across the New Zealand hillsides, later ranging across the San Juan’s and nuzzling at a broad-leafed weed, Veratrum californicum. A weed, a lamb, a child. The last, the vital link that joined Sharon and he together, separable only by death.
The murder occurred in June, the month that heralded the arrival of mountain spring with floral fireworks. Often as not Hunter camped out with his flock, sometimes for weeks at a time. Not so this night. He called an acquaintance on his cell phone, a Peruvian herdsman named Angel Alverez who was employed at a nearby ranch and who relished the isolation of the slopes. Angel reports the deceased seemed happy on the night of his murder, that he cantered home in mountain shadow, and called out in parting, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Dinner that night was linguini, a favorite of the deceased. The sauce was commercial, but the deceased’s wife, Sharon, augmented it with hot pepper flakes, canned artichokes, and homemade meatballs. The deceased drank two glasses of wine with his meal, and a third thereafter. An emptied bottle of Barn Owl Red was recovered from the recycle bin, the liquid residue consistent with a recent discard.
The deceased fell asleep on his couch, in front of the television, the combination of carbohydrates and alcohol taking a predictable toll on his faculties. The deceased’s wife Sharon retired to and slept in their bedroom. The door to the bedroom was closed, and she claims to have heard nothing, to have been unaware of the murder until she arose the following morning to make coffee.
Sharon remembers hearing a morning talk show on the television. She doesn’t remember which network, or who hosted the show, just the background mutter while she puttered around the kitchen. She tip-toed so as not to wake her husband. She pulled the kettle from the burner before it whistled and chose instant coffee rather than risk the cacophony of fresh ground. All this is in the police report. She claims not to remember a thing after that, not dropping the cup of coffee on the living room carpet, not dialing 911, not hearing the shrill siren of the cruiser, not clutching and hanging onto, of hyperventilating, of blubbering onto the decorated chest of the policeman she admitted into her murder home.
That was when Sharon exhibited “suspicious behavior,” according to the police report.
Sharon attempted to block the door to her son Billy’s room, crying out, “My son’s in there. You mustn’t disturb him. He’s sick. Sick.” At the time, there had been no call for the police to investigate that particular room, they being needed to document the bloody and horrific murder of Hunter Wilson on the living room couch. Subsequent investigation revealed that Sharon’s son suffered from a congenital deformity—cyclopia—and she may have been embarrassed to have this revealed. Or, based on the police needing to forcibly remove her and the murder weapon then being discovered in Billy’s crib, perhaps she wanted to protect her son from a murder charge.
The blood on the blade of the Henckels knife was confirmed to be that of Hunter Wilson, as were the bloody stains on Billy’s blanket. Fingerprint analysis confirmed Billy’s prints on the knife handle, and no others. There was some conjecture the handle had been wiped clean prior to the appearance of Billy’s fingerprints.
What was the motive for the murder? This question was not resolved. The marriage of Sharon and Hunter had been a loving one, according to Sharon’s deposition, the birth of Billy bringing them even closer together in the face of adversity. Could Billy, given his infirmities, have escaped his crib, obtained the knife, and then had the wherewithal to commit such a horrendous act? Billy’s physical abilities were revealed, at least in part, by a movie retrieved from Sharon’s iPhone. It’s not much, and some might find it painful to watch. Billy curls and uncurls his limbs, and then performs some sort of parody of a crawl on the vinyl pad of his crib, one in which his chest and cheek never leave the pad. “You can do it,” Sharon says. “He’s crawling, he’s really crawling,” Hunter says.
Even granted the potential culpability of Billy, could it have been an accident? Cheese and crackers were found on a side table proximate to the deceased, a late-night snack, but missing the knife employed to slice the cheese. Billy, having escaped his crib, may have been searching for his long-absent Daddy. Two eyes are needed to establish depth of field. Two eyes are needed to establish a three-dimensional world. Could the murder have been a mistake, horseplay come to a bad end?
There are discrepancies if you compare the police and the coroner’s report. The police report notes a likelihood of instantaneous death, no resistance by Hunter Wilson to the fatal blow, consistent with the subject being asleep at the time or, if awake, knowing the identity of the assailant. The coroner’s report notes a slice across the interior of the fingers as if the victim might have come to a sudden realization of his impending mortality even as the blow was struck. The police report suggests that death might have been painless. A charitable interpretation of the coroner’s report suggests otherwise.
In the end, what does it matter? A man does what he does. The man was stabbed through the eye. The man is dead. Instead of flowers, a donation is requested by the surviving family to support the efforts of a local veterinary clinic.
Originally published in Voice of the Stranger, a collection.
