Red Tooth (chapter 1)

Prologue:

The rabbit had been attacked as the large diamond back had made its way to the shaded place under the railroad tracks of the trestle. The snake moved fast and the rabbit made a series of bad moves and boxed itself in, its back against granite rocks supporting one end of the bridge.  Diamond backs usually eat rodents and have been known to dine on carrion when hungry. This one was about 37 inches long. She was around 15 years old, was hungry and wanted that rabbit.

This rattlesnake could lift itself around twenty inches off the ground to strike. It knew it had its prey cornered. The shadow of the raised head waved across the panting hide of the terrified rabbit.  The snake was targeting the dusty fur of its prey just behind the ears. As it prepared to strike, a cloud of dust drifted upwards from the dirt behind it and a boy’s hand darted out grabbing the scaly tissue right behind the poison glands of the rattler. The snake went ballistic and tried to coil around the boy’s tanned arm, hissing, venom spilling from hollow fangs.

The boy pressed the head against a vandalized petroglyph on the granite rocks and crushed it quickly with a large stone. The small brains and skull smeared the hot rock surface as the snake kept coiling and uncoiling. The boy waited for the thing to die properly, its blood smeared across the concentrically expanding circles of the Ghost dancer petroglyph ruined with purple spray paint. Once it had died he turned it around and took out his greasy hunting knife from the black scabbard on his belt and cut the snake from the head and across the belly to where white meets black. Cutting the meat at the base of the tail he peeled it away from the hide.

The head had been crushed but he knew enough to not handle it. The poison could still kill him. He chopped the meat into three inch pieces and ate it raw. Rattlesnake meat doesn’t taste “like chicken.” It’s stringy and tastes more like Cornish Hen or pork. He had not eaten for two days and anything was good to him at that moment. The blood and tissue of the snake smeared his dirty fingers and hands and darkened the area around his mouth.  The desert dirt made him look like some subhuman creature emerged from a prehistoric hiding place in hopes of avoiding the steamy breath and long fangs of the Saber Tooth to score a modest meal.  

The rabbit, spared death in the belly of the diamond back watched the boy wipe his hands on his filthy pants and turn towards the valley that loped into the dirt roads bounded by rusted barbed wire. The rabbit flitted off through the dry mesquite. The sun was high and hot as the boy shuffled his dirty tennis shoes through the dust, and it caused distant things to ripple and wave with the heat. The temperature was hovering around 110 when he finally arrived at the main gate of his father’s cattle ranch. He paused as his hand unconsciously touched at the belt marks on his sparse ribs. He padded his way up the dirt road to the house, hoping his father was gone and he could find something to eat or at least wash the dust down.  To him, this road lined with rusted barbed wire was the road to Hell.      




In This Place There Be Monsters:
Many years ago it is said that the Nevada Desert was the home of great, oceanic monsters. They moved to and fro meeting in relentless feeding frenzies gouging flesh from hapless victims in bloody prehistoric waters. It is fitting that these monsters once prowled these ancient oceans. The desert feels like a place that would host them nicely. It  is a cauldron of heated hunger, things killing and eating under the relentless sun in summer, and then trying to hide themselves from winter snows at higher elevations. The food chain steams and ripples in the hot noon day sun.
The “Great Basin” confederation is defined as a contiguous watershed. It sits between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada’s like a scar. It has no natural outlet to the sea and covers most of the state, half of Utah and parts of California, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. Lake Lahontan extending in prehistory across much of Northern Nevada left us the Carson Sink, Humbolt Sink and Walker and Pyramid Lake. All that is left of the monsters that lurked in the depths of its ancient seas are bones on display in the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park.  
The land can be harsh. The heat must have driven early settlers mad at times. The cool winds from the great seas that ebbed and flowed under a prehistoric moon had long fled the parched earth. But sometimes relief can come. Rain has fed the playas that wet the land and then dried up almost overnight but somehow, that was enough for life. Water was always a prime commodity. It could be that in generations to come seismic events could once again make the valley a teeming ocean full of toothy killing machines. If there was ever a fitting place for something beastly and ravenous to be born in, it would be the Nevada desert.
It is this cauldron of dust, rain, and snow that a tortured life came to be, the son of Alex Kehoe and Justine Hallweather. It would be Ethan Kehoe, who would stalk the trucker’s long-haul routes of the west coast for years in various hijacked semis, littering the silence of the desert with his cold blue mannequins, homely decorations for the dry, bitter desert dust. This is his story told as best as it can be told, the story of “Red Tooth.”  

Alex Kehoe had herded cattle since he was a little boy riding with his father up and down the west coast to meat processing places, the cattle bawling and shuffling in the herds driven from station to station. He remembered loading the stock on trains that would take them to the packers centered on the rails. No one killed the heifers then.
He recalled seeing refrigerator cars loaded with the carcasses of beef with boxes of ham, bacon, and lamb butchered animals wrapped in cheese cloth, and veal with the hide still on. He learned to understand the bovine consciousness as he led them to their death and often would look into their eyes as they were herded into the processing pens. He always saw nothing there, no fear, no hopelessness, no anxiety, nothing.          
Cattle have panoramic vision. They can see all around themselves without turning their head. The cattle in this load today moved deliberately past pressure treated posts towards the “squeeze,” a device that squeezes the cattle and calms them for shots, vet examinations and such. Cattle follow the leader. This is why the single file chute should be anywhere from 30 to 50 feet. If you isolate them, cattle can become distressed. If one balks you need to release it from that group, and put it with the next one. Kehoe was careful with the stock. Very few made it to “the knocker” with injuries.
There had to be no sudden changes in lighting, floor level or texture. Cattle have a tendency to move towards the light. At night a frosted light bulb can guide them where you want them to go. But cattle will balk if they are headed directly into the sun. Kehoe was aware of this and built his loading chutes and squeeze pointing south to manage the sun angle.
Once the cattle were delivered to the Ormsby Meat Packing Plant they faced the knocker. They would come there fat and awkward in their gate. Their fate would be sealed by the words “This pen is ready.” At the plant they would be put in a holding place and await their turn. When the time came they would go through the blue door. No one can go in there but slaughter house personnel.
The animal’s go in single file and pass over a bar, their legs on both sides. The floor drops away and they’re carried along on a bar. They pass through a station where a man stands on a catwalk. He’s holding the “stunner.” It’s pneumatic. This shoots a bolt about the size and length of a large pencil into the cattle’s brain, between the eyes.
Chains are attached to its rear legs, and the animal is lifted. It is carried along by an overhead trolley to another station where a man sticks a long knife into its aorta to finish the kill. From there the cattle gets cleaned up, gutted, the hide removed…all the while trying to keep the shit the animals have lived their whole life from infecting the meat. This happens at 300, to 400 cattle an hour.
Alex Kehoe had seen the cattle go into the slaughter house one way and come out another many times. Before heading home he would sit in the cab of his Freightliner semi and listen to country and western music while sipping hot coffee, and then fire up the truck and return to his ranch in Snake Valley Nevada. The ride was long and he always had plenty of time to think. Mostly it was about Justine Hallweather. Beside him in the cab of the truck his son Ethan sat on the warm seat picking desert dust out of his nose and carving on a cut-off broom stick.  He was trying to shape the head of a horse.
As Alex double clutched is way down 395 he thought about the blond woman in the kitchen of his ranch house. Once he had to call Child Welfare on her for locking Ethan in a closet the week he had to make a haul to California. Ethan had bruises and had lost about ten pounds. He screamed when Alex opened the door of the closet and came out swinging. Alex had to knock him out with the leg of a broken chair. Now the boy rode with him.
When he arrived at the ranch and got out of the truck cab to investigate the open door of the trailer he discovered Justine with a guy in a red baseball cap. They were humped over a dirty mattress and she was moaning as he hammered her from behind like a red capped woodpecker. Alex let them finish and then he strolled back to the house to get his shot gun.
Ethan watched this still sitting in the truck cab. He had stopped whittling and was watching his dad now trying to look over the large steering wheel above the dirty tachometer.  Alex came back out of the house and from the driveway fired two shots into the trailer. Birds blew out of the rafters of the barn in a small storm of feathered bodies at the shot gun blasts and spun shrilling like banshees into the hot desert sun. Ethan hopped on the warm seat material, startled and thrilled by the noise at the same time. The guy in the red baseball cap came out struggling to get his pants up while Justine howled with laughter.
She was laughing hysterically. Snot blew out of her nose as she tried to tuck a tit back into her bra. She was naked from the waist down and stood in the door of the trailer trembling with laughter while she was trying to dress herself.
“Get out here,” Alex said gesturing with the barrel of the shot gun.
She did what he said for once.
Ethan braced himself on the steering wheel raising himself up watching the drama unraveling in the dirt driveway below him. No one seemed to notice he was even there.
“You came back sooner than I expected,” she giggled. “I just needed a little money. You don’t leave me shit to live on around here.”
Alex used the shotgun to gesture what he meant when he said. “Kneel right here.”
The barrel dipped at a place a foot or two in front of him. Still smiling but not giggling any more Justine complied, licking her tongue across her lips as she did it. She winked at him.
She was drunk.
He raised the shotgun holding it like it was his sex organ and gestured to her with a nod. She waddled closer on her knees and looked at him, squinting her eyes at the sun that tried to peek past his left ear.
“Do it,” he ordered. There was no anger in his voice which made him all the more frightening.
She hovered her mouth around the hot metallic exit of the shotgun barrel. He could see her teeth fillings it was so wide. She coughed from the dust. He drew back the hammer on the shotgun. It made a slick, ratcheting noise.
“I told you if I ever seen you trying to fuck the neighbors again I’d shoot you didn’t I?” She wasn’t smiling or laughing now. She nodded as best she could without letting the hot metal scorch her lips.
“I want to see what it’s like for a human head to bust like a pumpkin, and today you just gave me an excuse.”
Ethan could feel his heart beating in his chest. His hands were burning on the part of the steering wheel still in the sun but he couldn’t tear himself away from what was happening there in the driveway. Was he going to kill her? What did a head look like exploded like a pumpkin anyway? He was riveted to the scene before him, the pain in his hands almost unnoticed. He was frozen to the moment, fear and a creeping sense of dark delight washing over his senses.  Would that bitch get hers today?  He wasn’t moving from this place, he wanted to see this and not miss a minute of it.
She tried to move her knees in the sand to avoid a burn. Her hands were resting on her breasts and she was sobering up quickly. She moved her head away from the barrel and looked away from the sun emerging over the crown of his wind blown hair.
“Come on Alex this ain’t sexy any more,” she said.
He pushed the metal of the muzzle against the area over her right ear and made it hurt. She let out a squeal but didn’t move. Her left hand threatened to brush the barrel away but it remained suspended frozen inches from its target.
“Let me up you asshole,” she said through clenched teeth.
“All I got to do is blow your brains across this drive, hang you up and take you apart with my cattle knives and no one would miss your sorry ass.”
She said nothing in response, just wiggled.
“Yes!” Ethan hissed from his position in the cab. “Oh yes!” His back and thighs tensed.
A dog barked in a stockyard in the distance. A zephyr danced a cloud of sand around the driveway tugging at their hair and clothes damp with sweat. Alex’s finger tensed around the trigger of the shotgun. He was looking down the shiny barrel to where the muzzle had secreted itself in her wet blond hair. He watched sweat trickle from her hair line and down her white neck. It was starting to blush with the sun. His finger tensed a little more.
“Let me up you sonofabitch,” she growled and tried to rise to her feet but he kept her pinned there with the tube of the shotgun barrel.
This was the moment Alex had ached for those long hours in his semi, the cattle bawling in the trailer behind him, their urine sloshing out at every turn. He had visualized in his mind her death, her lengthy dismemberment, his triumph over her nasty, dirty ass. He had thought of each step in her demise, the “stunning,” then the gutting, the skinning and the dissection and maybe he would eat something, anything…to make it final, to seal it with some sort of primitive gesture of total control over her.
“Come on Alex, let’s go inside,” she said, sober now and a little scared. She tried to get up and he forced her back down again, the muzzle of the gun bruising the scalp over her ear. “Ow,” she said weakly.
The she heard the sharp click of the hammer and felt the gun barrel butt against her head as he squeezed the trigger. She gasped for breath.
“You bastard, you would have killed me just then.”
“Get in the house and fix me some lunch and if I catch you spitting in anything I’ll beat the shit out of you again.” Alex cuffed her across the head sending up a lazy, wet tuft of hair flipping on her damp scalp.
She got up giggling now and ran into the house slamming the door behind her. Alex stood in the driveway drenched in sweat feeling the weight of the shotgun in his right hand. He raised it and ejected two spent shells. They tumbled into the dry sand. Stiffly, he walked towards the house, his eyes fixed on the dirty front door.
Ethan could feel the sun from the hot steering wheel now. He sucked in breath from the pain shaking his fanned fingers. His eyes were glazed a little, not so much from the sun and heat but what had charged all his senses seconds ago, and made him hungry for what he felt now in the pit of his stomach, and the chambers of his quickly beating heart.
He climbed out of the truck cab almost tumbling into the dry earth below. He moved towards the spent red shells. He grabbed them up and fled into the barn where he sat behind a hay bale and chewed on the red plastic, hungry for something that he knew would never fill the pit of his stomach or his heart. But he wanted it any way. From the house he could hear shouting and dishes breaking. He chewed the red plastic tasting the spent powder, and his gums bled. As he stared into the sun spilling in a sliver flash of light from behind a broken set of roofing boards the blood made his incisors first pink, and then red.