I Work For A Secret Government Organization, We Collect Cryptids...

Only 15% that watch my videos are subscribed. Please don't forget to if you like my content. This helps me out a lot. Enjoy the video. I'm not supposed to say which state signs my checks, day or night. Daylight pays by the pound and mile. Night pays by the secret and scar. But if you want the truth that matters, it's this, there are roads you think, you know. And then there are the roads you remember with your eyes closed, Elvis idled like he had a pack a day habit and a grudge against winter. Bodies dented, souls tuned. He's carried L quarters and busted refrigerators, and one time a man who decided he didn't want to be a man anymore until I convinced him to try another day. He's carried me too, and that's the heavier load. I told you about the mile wolf. The jobbins. The furball and the Salem child. The fungus that thought it was a city. And the purple man who strung a harp of cable across a county road and taught me I can be stopped with a look. You said you wanted more. Fine. You can have the pieces I didn't write because they were still too hot to touch. You can have the hunt that started as a theory and ended with a hole the size of a silo. The night with the skin thief that learned my name. The long drive that turned into a chess game. And the bill Elvis paid for me because I couldn't pay it myself. You can have the grave I dug that wasn't mine, and the one I didn't have to dig because something older took the shovel away. You want eight thousand words? You want the whole belt of knights? Climb in. Buckle up. Don't open the glove box unless I say when. The viper and the bell. The skunk rode in the bed like a warning label. The smell leaks through steel and rubber if you give it time. Good, I needed time to work for me. The call came from a place locals pronounce crick and mapmakers pronounce creek. Dog's gone. Goat's nervous. Ground breathing, when big rigs pass. Except the breathing doesn't stop when the trucks do. I asked the man on the radio if he heard a bell. A what? Bell. Like a jar tapped with a fork. Low. Linger wee. He didn't laugh, I'll ask. Twenty minutes later, neighbor says she heard it in the field. Didn't think nothing. It's never nothing. Sound tells on everything. Wind learns trees and plays them. Water plays pipes. Muscle plays dirt. If you get good at listening you can hear intention disguised as accident. The field was rye gone stiff. Winter silver and rattly. I parked Elvis on the access road so the tires wouldn't translate my weight too loudly. The viper on the card. Capricorn oped. Someone in the office loves jokes, doesn't smell. It doesn't see the way we do either. It tastes vibration and maps the world by the way it rings. That's why I told you about bells. That's why I brought a bell too. The bell was welded from a brake drum with a handlebar welded on top. I set it on a fence post and tied a line to the clapper so I could snap it from 20 yards. The skunk went in a wire cage with holes just large enough for the smell to want to leave. That cage I set halfway between the post and a bare patch where the rye had decided life was optional. I poured a ring of rock salt around the cage. Snakes don't care about salt. Men do. If a man came walking to see what I was doing, he'd smell it and remember road ice and move different. The gun for this hunt was the double loaded with dragon's breath in the first tube and plain cold lead in the second. Fire doesn't kill things that live under dirt the way you hope but it sends messages deeper than footstep and sometimes you're not killing you're writing. I stood still and drank the field. Wire hum from the fence, my own breath like a zipper in the cold, a tractor complaining to itself 200 yards away. I pulled the line. The bell went taunting and the field went quiet eager. Ground doesn't breathe, not really. It shifts. The shift came like a long slow sigh under the rye. A ripple traveling from the far ditch toward the cage. The viper surfaced the way bad ideas do. First a small sure sign, then too much to ignore. A circle of dirt domed up split. Out came a head that wasn't a head so much as a tool shaped like one. Wedge skull, map of veins, eyes, mouth that could be pretty if you were something easy to crush. It didn't strike. It listened. The bell told it where all the soft things were and then the skunk told it where the best soft thing was. It surged. The ring of salt failed to offend it as planned and the skunk did the work he'd been dead to do. The viper flared its mouth and the air inside that circle went still. Pressure loves an excuse. It bit into mesh and metal. The cage groaned. I pulled the line again, toning, and the viper reared in irritation. I shot the first tube under its chin. Dragon's breath is theater and pain. The fire spattered that soft inner mouth and licked backward into tubes meant for breath and taste. It thrashed like a flag. The second tube I buried in the hinge where jaw meets skull. The head didn't explode. It caved like a boot on wet cardboard. That should've ended it, snakes are spines pretending to be bodies. Break the hinge and you break the lie. But I told you they heal. I told you everything down here heals. The mouth found itself again. The bell line cracked under my boot as I backpedaled and the bell rolled off, tumbled, and rang itself like a panic. The viper dove. Not at me. At the bell. At the sound. It swallowed the break drum like a sampler on a dare. It locked on the handlebar and the bar jammed in the throat and suddenly I had something that could be pulled. I dropped the shotgun and haul-lined the bar like a hand over hand ladder, every pull a hymn to poor choices. The viper fought. The field rippled and then the ground did breathe, or maybe I was the one out of air. We tugged each other into a standstill that wasn't. I needed an anchor. Elvis was too far. The fence was too thin. The only thing heavier than both of us was the earth itself, so I drove the bell handle down and pinned it between two roots. The viper choked itself against the bell, writhed, compressed. I stepped forward, put the barrel inside the mouth this time, and fired the second tube straight down. Fire and light and the smell of pennies in a can. When it shuddered out, the field took a long look at itself and decided to be quieter. The bell handle steamed. I threw a tarp over the head and dragged the first five feet toward Elvis like a man trying to tow a barge with a leash. Ten feet in the body parted with a noise like tearing carpet. The rest of it, the long wrong majority slid back into the hole. It moved for a long time without moving. The break drum thumped its way through meat tunnels toward whatever passes for digestion in a thing like that. I kept the head, because it had learned something about me while we danced and I wanted to learn something back. If you're asking if I was proud, no. Pride comes later if it comes at all. Mostly you feel grateful that your body did what it was told while your mind was busy drawing a picture of you dead. On the way out I met the neighbor. Hairnets. Nightrobe. Slippers with a cartoon cat. She stared at the bloody tarp in the bed and then at me the way people look at a weather station. Not admiration. Dependence. You hear the bell? I asked. She nodded. Thought it was church at the wrong hour. She squinted at my shirt. Boy, you're cold. I looked down. Both sleeves were wet. I hadn't noticed the wind until she named it. Yes, ma'am. You want a thermos of coffee? She asked. I wanted three. I took one. It tasted like someone had been kind to it. I drove it to the shop and set it on the bench next to the viper head in the skunk cage. The mechanic looked at the mess, then at me, then at Elvis. I can weld something stronger across the crossmember, he said. You pay cash. I always do. Purple fella back? He asked too casually. I didn't let my eyes do what they wanted. He's not my problem tonight. That's not what I asked. I know, I said, and left the head in the cold room with the other truths. The skin thief and the door. The radio pops like a campfire when bad news crackles down it. That night it sounded like a log with an opinion. We've got a walker, the woman said. Not your kind of walker. Our kind. Where? Berkeley Springs side of nowhere. Reports of an old woman, then a sick dog, then a child with a voice like a tape chewed by a VCR. Avoid silver. You won't get close enough. Skinwalker, I said. We don't use that word. You don't, I said, and felt the old sermon about names trying to schedule an appointment I didn't have time for. We believe names are a leash. They are. They're also collars we put on ourselves to feel like owners. I took the back road south. Elvis has a sound that tells deer he's not a deer. Twice I saw the turn of eyes in the ditch and the decision not to run. Twice I said thank you out loud because habit matters. It's a way of asking the dark to keep pretending you belong in it. The house was one of those old ranches that never learned to be proud. A porch light burned like a prayer. No dog on the chain. No toys in the yard. The front door stood open like a mouth with something it couldn't swallow. I went to the back instead. Hunters die in doorways. I found her in the kitchen with the fridge door open. Light blue from the bulbs washed the whole scene. A pitcher of tea on the counter. Two glasses. She had a hand in the freezer like she was looking for ice cream, and maybe that's how the body remembered it. Bodies remember what they live next to most. The skin sat wrong on her. You don't always see it when they're good at wearing. But the shoulders carried weight like they'd learned on four legs. The head turned without the neck. Her smile was bones deciding to be kind. Jack, she said in a voice like something scraping the inside of a jar. Old women don't say my name like that. Old women say it with a sun in it. I didn't answer with my name. Ma'am, I said. Where's your husband? Sleeping. The jaw moved late. The way a ventriloquist realizes they should act like a puppet. They like to take the place they can hold longest. The old or the young. The sick. The sleeping drunk. The already gone. The body is a house that accepts tenants if the door is left open. We teach our children to lock doors. We forget to do it for our skin. You want to sit? I asked, moving my hand toward the table where two chairs sat wrong, closer than any two people ever sit on purpose. I want to leave, she said, and the word leave came out in a chew. You can, I said. You can leave him. You can leave me. You can leave this house. I put both hands wide on the table, palms down to show I wasn't reaching for pockets. You can walk out the back into the trees. There are always trees. She tilted her head like a camera crane. You want me to. I don't want you to eat anybody else while you're wearing their face. You killed Ragmire, she said. I didn't flinch on purpose. I flinched because the name was new and familiar at once. Ragmire was the fern wolf the purple man had whistled up like a dog the night he introduced himself to my doorway and my drywall both. Ragmire was trying to make me meet God, I said. You killed Ragmire, she said again, but the she in her now was a dog with a dictionary. I watched the seam at her throat where skin had been taught to be zipper. It pulsed. I did, I said. You tried to kill me first. Mercy, she said with a smile that wasn't. Next time I won't be so merciful. You weren't merciful this time, ma'am. You're in a man. He's sleeping or dead. And there's a kid in this house or the one next door because there are always kids in houses like this. You can leave before I make you, or you can stay and find out what I brought. That got her interest. Curiosity is a leash on anything that thinks. Bronze? She asked. They always guess bronze. It hurts most of them. I let her guess wrong. I lifted the towel off the counter. Under it sat a mason jar full of a viscous, translucent green. Calvier contaminant slush. Dormant. Dead. Poison if you asked anyone with a degree. Religion if you asked me right then. I fed a city to this last week, I said. I taught it to sleep. I can wake it up and ask it to pray at your altar. You'd die too, she said. I die anyway, I said, and put my thumb on the lid. We looked at each other in the fridge light. Her in a face that wasn't hers, me in the reflection on the glass door where my eyes look older because they are. The jar sang a little porcelain song under my grip. The smell in the kitchen changed. And I realized the smell wasn't smell. It was intent. Fine, she said, and the jaw clicked. We'll play later. She walked past me. On the way, she pulled my knife from my belt with fingers that had learned to steal. She licked the blade like an insult and tucked it back where it belonged. Edge toward me. I like you, she said the way children tell each other they have a new enemy. Leave the body, I said. She didn't answer because her answer was the sound of a door opening somewhere I couldn't see. I found the man on the couch, mouth slack, chest rising shallow. Neck bruise. My knife had traced his stomach. Not deep enough to keep, deep enough to wake and bleed. He had a pulse. He had a wife. Pictures on the walls told me that. He had no idea he had been a suit someone wore to the fridge. I cleaned him and called in a favor with a paramedic who owed me more than one. I didn't tell him the truth. I never do. People like to make their own when they smell too much of mine. On the way out, the porch light flickered twice. Across the street, a dog I hadn't noticed before stood very still and watched me with eyes that reflected my face back smaller than it is. I tipped my hat. He tipped nothing. Dogs owe you nothing. I like them for it. The long drive and the purple roadblock. The thing about roads is they remember you. You put weight on them in the same order long enough, and you might as well be writing your name with the letters the tires leave behind. If I skip a drive, some days I feel the road calling like a missed appointment. I took the long way back up. Past a diner where the waitress fills the coffee too high because she likes watching you blow on it. Past a bridge with initials carved by people who needed to prove something to wood. Past a meadow that looks quiet until the wind shifts and a thousand red eyes lift and fly because jobbins don't believe in fences either. Purple man wasn't waiting. That would have been too obvious, and he isn't a man who makes the same move twice when he can enjoy two different ones. What I got instead was a line of orange barrels and a detour sign that pointed to a road I knew had been washed out in 09 and never repaired. I didn't take it. I stopped Elvis and got out and walked. The barrels smelled wrong. Not wrong like gasoline. Wrong like the old vine that grows around the oaks down by the river and makes a shape that isn't a plant. I laid my hand on plastic and felt it hum. I rounded the corner and there it was. The roadblock in the middle of nowhere with the same black cable strung at shoulder height, this time between two iron posts that had no holes dug for them. They grew from the asphalt like teeth. If you're hoping for a clever trick, I didn't have one. You spend all your luck in one place and the machine keeps the receipt. I didn't touch the cable. I didn't try to step under it. I put one of the orange barrels in the bed and backed Elvis down the shoulder and did the thing I tell everybody I don't do. I trespassed across a pasture to a different road. The farmer would be mad if he saw my tracks. He didn't. Sometimes the world is smart enough to let you sin for a cause. I left the barrel in the cold room next to the viper head and it hummed a note I couldn't hear unless I put my teeth on it. I did not do that because I am sometimes smart. At home I slept like a patient on the wrong floor. I dreamed of fence wire singing. I woke to the radio saying my name the way it does when the voice has something it doesn't want to hand me. Jack. Yeah. Wendigos, she said. Where? Winchester side. Cavern system where tourists like to play with echoes. We lost a man. Hunter? I ask. Already loading. Already hating every knot my fingers tied. Guide. She said. Hunter went in after him. Hunter didn't come out. Name. Silence. The kind that decides what kind of night it's going to be. Briggs, she said. I sat down very carefully on the edge of the bed and felt how the room tilts when a name is heavier than it should be. Briggs is not a friend. He's a man I respect because he kills fewer things than most and kills the right ones with a speed that makes mercy look like precision. He taught me the trick with copper wire on fast jackets. He taught me to listen to caves the way I listen to fields. On my way. The caverns and the choir. If you've never been underground you should try it with a guide who likes you. If you don't have one, stay above. Caves are organs in the earth and everything inside is designed to pull you in and keep you until you are part of the song it sings. The mouth of this one was a child's drawing. Rock teeth. Black throat. The parking lot had two trucks. A ranger's and one I recognized as Briggs's. Because he paints his bumpers like a 12-year-old given access to a powder coat gun. I took rope. Lanterns that don't care about batteries. A backpack full of cruelty for the things that deserve it. Wendigos aren't the northern story here. They aren't men who ate the wrong winter and turned their souls inside out. They're bigger than stories about hunger punished. They're the hunger the story tries to name so it feels controllable. The card calls them C-A-V-I-T-A-R. The part of me that grew up says don't. Inside the air went from cold to old. That's the only way to say it. Age has a smell. It smells like stone that learned to sweat and never forgot how. My light made the stalactites look like teeth and the stalagmites like bones storing wax. I followed reflective twist ties on the wall. Briggs's way of leaving breadcrumbs that don't rot. I hate to say it, but I smiled. The man is tidy even while the world tries to chew him. I heard them before I saw anything. Not steps. Never steps. The sound that told me I had gone far enough was a soft, almost polite knocking. Like someone tapping a knuckle on a door they own. Wendigos mark stone with bone when they talk. That's what the guides say. The guides also say they hate bright, they hate loud, and they hate the smell of living. They love the smell of fear like we love bread. I found the first body in a room the size of an auditorium. He was a guide. The light on his helmet was cracked like an egg. He had no face from the nose down. The rest of him looked carefully arranged, which is what predators do when they figure out how to refrigerate with air. I said sorry and meant it, because he had brought families down here so their kids could say wow, and the world should let men like that die in beds that smell like cotton and grandchild. Briggs lay beyond, ten yards past a chalk line someone else had drawn, his rope trailed into a hole that wasn't a hole until someone crawled into it. His leg was caught in a pinch where two rocks decided they were tired of being apart. I said his name and the cave said it back in a thousand small voices that sounded like children who had learned to mimic. Jack, he said, somewhere between a breath and a laugh. I crouched. His eyes were open. You can smell blood in a place with no wind, and there was a lot of it. You chose a place to nap, I said. Sometimes jokes are flotation devices. Tripped the wire wrong, he said, and pointed with his chin at the copper tinsel he'd strung across an opening. It had burned through in one place where something hot and bored had walked. Came in like they owned it. Ate the helper. Took the kid. I grabbed the dad and shoved him back the wrong way. Rock bit me for being rude. How many, I asked. Three for sure. An echo of more. He looked down into the hole. You're going after them. Yep. You smell like salamanders and regret, he said. Viper day, I said. Good, he said, like that meant something it shouldn't. They hate heat more than they hate loud. Bring the sun in your pocket. I rigged a sling across the rock pinch and built a lever with a pry bar and a piece of stalagmite that had died of old age and fallen. Rock moved like it felt insulted. His leg came loose. He didn't scream, which is the closest thing to prayer I've heard in a while. Can you crawl? I can aim, he said, and lifted a bag I recognized as his church. Bronze dust. A spray bottle full of something that kills healing slow. A little jar of job and wings. Don't ask how. And a lighter older than both of us. Don't let them sing. I know. You don't, he said, and his hand came up and grabbed my sleeve with the strength of someone who had saved it all for one more squeeze. Jack. Don't let them sing. He meant it, so I believed it. And because I believed it, I brought more noise than I normally do. I strung firecrackers along the rope. I filled the bottle with the green from the jar and cut it half and half with alcohol. I stuffed the pockets of my coat with flare sticks and copper nails. I took a breath that tasted like pennies and water that forgot the sun. Then I went where the rope went. The tunnel narrowed to the size of a man who regrets yesterday. My shoulders scraped. My light made the world into a circle. I crawled the way you do when turning around isn't a direction anymore, only a thought. The first chamber on the other side was empty, which is worse than full if you don't know what you're looking for. I listened and heard the singing. Not human. You can call it a hum and I won't stop you, but a hum is a machine thinking out loud. This was a choir of throats that forgot words a hundred winters ago. It vibrated my ribs. It tried to make my pulse tap a different rhythm. I broke three flares at once. Red washed the room. I lit the firecrackers and kicked them ahead of me. Pop, pop, pop, pop, and the singing hiccup the way a child does before he cries. I found them in the next room. Tall and thin in the way starvation makes saints out of sinners. Skulls like deer without faces. Fingers like needles. One held a child by the shirt and the child was not crying because the song had taken the part of him that remembers what tears are for. I do not shoot around children unless I am made of someone smarter than me. I threw copper dust and it landed on gray skin like glitter. The nearest one rattled its head and the dust smoked where it touched. I sprayed the green mix in an arc and it hit the second one's chest and sank. Colors fighting in ways chemistry will write down someday. The third one came at me screaming a note that tried to reach inside my ear and turn a key. I jammed a flare in its mouth. It bit down and the flare popped. Its skull shook like an old heater. I drove copper nails into its ribs because sometimes I am a carpenter and sometimes I am a man who can't think of any other verbs. It reeled. I took the kid by the belt and shoved him behind me into the tunnel. Then turned to meet the first two who had decided they liked anger better than dinner. They sing. You do too. Your body hums when it wants to steady itself. You bite down your hands remember. The first reach for my throat. A nail kissed the wrist and came away black. The second tried to low crawl past me for the hole. I put the dragon's breath into the seam where its shoulder wanted to be and its shoulder decided it could be smoke instead. The first one lost interest in my neck long enough for me to decorate it with a circle of green. The spray bottle emptied in a heartbeat. The heartbeat again and the bottle didn't care. That's always how it goes. I shifted left and it followed and I realized the chamber had a drop off at the edge and I realized I could make gravity be my friend just this once. I took a step that wasn't mine to take and it lunged and we both fell. I hit a ledge. It didn't. The sound a wendigo makes when it realizes the song is only for itself is a small one. It learns humility at the bottom of holes no boy should find. When it was quiet enough to hear the kid whimper it wasn't quiet at all. I crawled back to the tunnel, shoved him toward the rope where the world gets bigger again. Climb, I said. My dad, he said. Climb, I said, and he did. Briggs met us at the pinch, face white around the mouth. He grabbed the kid and said a word I didn't know he knew out loud and proud and the word was please. Then thank you. Then to the boy, breathe. Your leg, I said. Later, he said. Can you drag? I can try. He hooked his belt to a loop on mine. I became a mule. He held the kid under his bad arm and pushed with his good and we made it to the big room with the stalagmites like broken teeth. The guide no longer looked deranged so much as asleep in a way that means the air is done with him. We didn't touch him, we said his name in case somebody old was listening. Outside the air felt like a new religion. The ranger's truck had blankets. The boy learned to shiver again. We got Briggs into Elvis, legs splinted with a signpost because medicine is mostly insisting. The ranger put his hand on my shoulder like men do when they are trying not to shake. You a contractor? He asked. Garbage man, I said. And he nodded because lies this size are easier to carry than truths you can't put down. Briggs looked at me over the boy's head. You let them sing? A little, I said. Don't, he said. And the light from the parking lot made his eyes look like a man underwater. The barrel and the bargain. I drove Briggs to a clinic that doesn't ask and paid in cash wrapped in an old church bulletin. The boy's mother took him back with both hands and hit me with one. I let her. People should get to do the things that help them stay human. At home the orange barrel on the bench hummed like it had found a note it liked and wanted to move in. The viper head looked like a lesson. The mason jar with the green slept so deeply it might have been a mirror. I sat in my kitchen with the revolver on the table and the silver bullet on the sill and the ring on my chest and did the thing you never want your children to see you do in a chair. The radio did its little log crackle. Jack. Here. Winchester reports two singers down and one missing. Child returned. Guide dead. Hunter alive. You did good. I did something, I said. You're not the kind we brag about. I know, I said. A knock at the back door. The kind you pretend you didn't hear so the person will think you're out and leave a note. It came again and the note attached was a voice I recognized. Come on, boy, the purple man said through wood. Natural order. Come talk to it. I opened the door because some men you don't make knock twice. He stood in the yard with his hat tilted like a painting tries to make you think time isn't real. He looked at the two graves and tip the brim like he was at a funeral where he knows the wrong people. His eyes were lantern. Somebody forgot to douse. You touch the choir, he said. I shut it off, I said. You took a suit away from my friend, he said. She wore a man, I said. She wore him well, he said, and there was something like pride in it. You keep killing teeth and calling it kindness. You keep teaching cities to stop breathing and call it mercy. You keep putting bells where there shouldn't be bells at all. You strung a cable across a road and called it a warning, I said. He grinned with a corner of his mouth. And you survived that lesson. You're teachable. What is this then? I asked. Another class? Another midterm? You want me to switch majors? You want to keep hunting, he said. Yes. You want to keep breathing? Yes. Then stop interfering with things that were here before your father learned how to stand, he said. You want to shoot the ones who drag children? Fine. Shoot them good. Stop dabbling in courts you don't understand. I don't bring courts, I said. I bring shovels. Worse, he said. And his eyes softened like the lanterns were turned down. You bring balance in places that learn to live on a tilt. What do you care, I asked. What are you? Correct, he said again. And I wanted to punch him for being right. Bring me Ragmire's tooth. I don't have Ragmire's tooth. You do, he said and pointed at the cold room like he could see through cinderblock and soap. Bring it to the old bridge off County 9 tomorrow night. Throw it in the river. Don't bring the gun. Don't bring the green. Don't bring your bell. Bring the tooth. And bring the promise you made in dirt. If I don't, I asked. You'll meet me again, he said. And tipped the hat like he knew the line needed a flourish. He turned to go, then stopped with his back to me. Jack. Yeah. Don't let them sing, he said. And disappeared around the corner of my shed like there was a door where the wall isn't. The bridge and the tooth. Ragmire's tooth looked like a polished piece of oak the day after a fire. I had kept it because it looked like something you could tell stories about when you're older and have children who like to be scared before sleep. I put it in my pocket and drove to County 9 without Elvis making a fuss. He was tired of me. I could feel it in the way the engine asked for, more than I gave. The bridge is where teenagers go to spit and promise and lie. Nobody was there because the hour was honest about the kind of people it wanted. I walked to the middle and looked down. The river ran black and important. I held the tooth out and felt ridiculous, like the part of a ceremony where the congregation says a word that was never theirs. I thought about the graves. I thought about the boy in the cavern saying my dad like a prayer. I thought about the purple man saying order like he had a deed. You want a tooth, I said to the wrong sky. Fine. It left my hand and hung in the air just long enough to decide it wanted the dark more than me. When it hit the surface, there was a sound that wasn't water, not a splash, not a plunk, a note. Low. Linger. Why? Like a bell at the wrong hour. The cable across my road was gone the next day. The orange barrel had stopped humming. Elvis's frame had a new strength in it that the mechanic swore he didn't weld. What did you do? He asked. Paid a bill, I said. You don't pay bills, he said. I did this time, I said, and rubbed the ring on the chain where it lives. Promises are made of metal when words won't stick. The long night and the long list. I could tell you about the sugar creep that turned out to be a raccoon with mange until it wasn't. The hornet doves that built a nest in a steeple and made the whole congregation sleep through Sunday until I smoked them out with coffee grounds and a song my mother used to hum while she washed dishes. I could tell you about the Calvier relapse two towns over that wasn't a relapse at all, just a garage full of mushrooms nobody should eat. I could tell you about the family that asked me to bring back their dog from the river and meant a different word than dog but couldn't say it, and how we all stood in the yard after with our eyes on the ground because we couldn't agree about the kind of grief we were having. But the one you're waiting for is the skin thief and the promise I made it in the kitchen with the fridge open I saw her again, not as an old woman, not as a dog, as a teenager sitting on the hood of a car in the parking lot of a bowling alley that gave up. She had a soda can in her hand. She had my knife in her pocket, because some things you don't have to guess. She swung her legs like a girl who hasn't learned reasons, and her face was the kind of pretty you hate yourself for noticing when you know too much. Jack, she said. Ma'am, I said. You like to make deals, she said. I like to leave bodies as bodies, I said. You killed Ragmire, she said, and this time there was a laugh in it the way tires laugh when you peel out. You need a new story, I said. You need a new ending, she said, and slid off the hood like water. What do you want? I asked. To see what you do when the thing wearing your face is better at it, she said. She reached into her pocket and tossed my knife. I caught it because my hand has known that weight longer than its known friends. The blade had been honed with something that wasn't a stone and smelled like something that wasn't oil. Next time, you'll spill your own, she said, and she walked away into the bowling alley like there were lanes in there that led to someplace people like me don't get to go. I stood in the lot like a man who realized he's been dancing with a partner that might not be imagining the same music. Elvis watched me without comment. He's polite like that. I looked at the ring. I looked at the graves. I went home and put the knife on the table with the bullet and the revolver and the key to the cold room. I made a list on the back of a bill I'd pretend I didn't see. Replace flare stock. Buy more copper nails. Teach my hands to stop shaking before I pick up a cup. Ask Briggs about the wire trick he uses when he sleeps. Bring coffee to the neighbor who heard the bell. Don't let them sing. The last hunt in this telling. You think I'm winding down. I am and I'm not. There are more nights than I have breath for and more mornings than I deserve. There are jobbins that look like Christmas when they left a field and a boy who learned to wake up in time because his mom threw water on him when the song came through the window. There's a farmer whose corn grew in circles the next year because the field remembered that it had been a mouth. There's a ranger who quit and started a small engine shop because he told me he wanted to fix things that screamed less. But you asked for long and I heard you. So I'll give you the last hunt before I decide whether to sleep for a week or just go stand by the river where a tooth sank. The call said mile wolf again but they say that about anything white and wrong that moves along a fence line and scares men who carry rifles. I went because saying no to the woman on the radio feels like lying to a house you owe rent on. I brought the same old tricks and a new one. A strip of cloth soaked in a mix I made from the viper and the fungus and the bitterness in my mouth. Sometimes you can make a new thing by putting two bad things together and asking them to argue somewhere that isn't you. The lane dead ended in a stand of pine that remembers an army camped there in a different century. Bells would have made men think of church. I didn't bring a bell this time. I laid the cloth across the road and waited in the ditch with the ghillie itching like regret. The wolf came not hungry but angry. Its tube body had a bulge where something fresh worked its way towards someplace that would be safe to digest it. It stepped across the cloth and every hair on it lifted like it had licked a battery. I didn't shoot it. I stood up and said, Hey. It froze and rotated front on now thin legs shivering, eyes going bright. I said hey, again quieter. The cloth is an insult you can feel in your teeth if you eat with teeth. I didn't want it to do anything but leave. Sometimes that's the mercy you can afford. It made a noise like paper ripping backward and then unfolded the other way and went long to the side and was gone. The insult had been accepted. The apology was in the not shooting. On the way back to Elvis a shape stepped out from between two pines that had decided to be a gate. You're learning. The purple man said. And it angered me that the praise felt good. I'm choosing. I said. Same thing. He said. Different century. What are you? I asked. Because sometimes you ask the question you know he won't answer just to hear him not answer it again. Correct. He said. And tipped the hat and walked away into trees that decided they were a door for him and a wall for me. I went home. I wrote this down because memory is a liar long term and I don't trust mine to be better than a page. There are two graves behind my house. There is a ring around my neck. There is an orange barrel in my cold room that doesn't hum anymore and a viper head that taught me bells aren't always in churches. There's a boy who breathes because a man with a leg turned the wrong way said please. There's a teenage girl in a bowling alley who may be the oldest thing alive. There's a truck named Elvis that will die before I do if I have anything to say about it. There's a list on my table. I added one more line. When the radio cracks answer. And when it does and it will. I'll go. Because roads remember you and you owe them for that. If you want a moral, pick one. Mercy is sometimes a hot thing. Killing is sometimes quiet. The natural order isn't a straight line. It's a crooked fence that keeps different things on either side depending where you touch it. Rings mean promises even when you don't speak them out loud. Bells mean attention. Green means stop if it's in the wrong place. Purple means you're not the only one keeping score. And don't let them sing. Never that. Never again.