Bulls Rush In

Once Upon a Time, Samuel Blanco lived in a cave, or at least a small, dark house with all of the curtains drawn. The home was squatting brown and unadorned in a residential neighborhood that was technically lower class but not really; most of Samuel’s neighbors were retirees, young couples, and Latino families who had come to the area because of the furniture and textile factories, and they were still fighting the good fight against entropy. The houses might be old, but their windows were intact, their lawns were mowed, and nothing was rusting in the front yard. In fact, almost all of the homes had flowers planted in front of them instead of
FOR SALE
signs. It was why the word
RETARD
painted on Samuel’s driveway was such a shame. Some effort had been made to blast that ugly slur off the pavement with a pressure sprayer, but you could still see the faded outline from thirty feet away.

It was raining pretty heavily because it was fall, but also because I’d hung around for several days waiting for it to rain heavily, and I’m the one who gets to decide when to start telling this story. Neighborhood watch signs were posted around—there had been a lot of petty vandalism like the example in Samuel’s driveway recently—but I didn’t see any actual signs of neighbors or anyone watching. So, I went up to Samuel Blanco’s house and let myself in.

“So you admit to breakin’ and enterin’?” I was being interrogated across a small table in a smaller room by Jim Reedy, a deputy with the Vista  Verde’s a sheriff’s office. Vista Verde was a small mountain town in West Virginia, pronounced Vur-duh Viss-tuh Vur-duh rather than like the Spanish name it was, even though thirty percent of the town residents were from Nicaragua or El Salvador or Mexico. I only mention that because I spent two months picking pumpkins outside the town limits, and Vista Verde’s name was the most interesting thing about the place. Deputy Reedy looked like he was in his late twenties and maybe five foot nine if he stretched. His chest was big, his head was small, and his biceps were the size of baby cantaloupes. He had probably played football for the Vista Verde Whatevers.

“So, you’re not gonna give me some load of bull about bein’ drunk and the door bein’ unlocked and you thinkin’ it was your house?” He seemed to find my apparent cooperation a little disappointing.

“No.” I took a sip of my coffee, more to finish it before it cooled down than anything else. Warmth was about the only thing the coffee had going for it.

“And you do know this is bein’ recorded, right? You heard that part about havin’ a right to an attorney, right?” Deputy Reedy persisted.

“Right,” I agreed.

He settled back in his seat, a little nonplussed. “So, why were you there, Mr. Morris?”

“Because my real name is John Charming,” I told him. “And I’m a monster hunter.”

I could smell mold the moment I opened the door. The place was all tan carpeting and patched furniture, and there weren’t a lot of paintings or posters or vases or ceramic figures, no pianos or flowers or pets or any of those little touches that people sprinkle over a house like salt to give it flavor. I took my time looking—Samuel was working a shift at the furniture factory—and I didn’t find many signs of a happy or fulfilled life. There were no pictures of his parents or little Sammy at a birthday party or an obvious love interest, no signs that Samuel had ever had a past at all. To be honest, it looked a lot like the homes I rent when I settle down in one place for a year or two, though I usually have some books lying around.

Something bad had happened there, but I couldn’t tell how recently or how I knew it, not exactly. All animals can sense bodiless presences, even humans, but most humans are trained from childhood to rationalize such instincts away. The order of knights who raised me had trained me to do the opposite, and there was definitely a bad vibe lingering in the house. It didn’t prove that Samuel had killed anyone, but it was something to think about.

There was less dust in the TV room than anywhere else. Just for the hell of it, I turned on the TV. There was a golf game on. Samuel Blanco was a big guy, a solid six-foot-six slab of hard fat and muscle, and the cushions of the couch were sagging in the middle. It wasn’t the couch’s fault; if somebody that big was sitting on me all the time, I’d be permanently depressed too.

I walked through the doorless opening into the kitchen and stepped into an orchard of empty brown beer bottles that had sprouted up from the table and counters. Samuel hadn’t bothered to put a lining in the grimy white plastic trash can next to the back door either, and it was filled with empty plain white paper bags and torn snack cake wrappers. The sink was full of bowls and glasses left tilted at haphazard angles, holding gulp sized sips of milky gray water.

I had to ask myself: If Samuel was such a slob, why were the floors so clean? Why had the living room carpet been shampooed?

Deputy Reedy was still hung up on my name. “Charmin’,” he said. I don’t tell many people my real last name, but when I do, they always repeat it like that, and always the same way. You’d think I’d have a standard comeback for them by now, even if it was just
Thank you
or
Yeah, what do you want?

But instead I said: “There used to be a lot of us. You know all of those guys in the stories? The Prince Charmings who are always going around breaking enchantments and slaying dragons and killing ogres and such? That’s my family tree.”

Oddly enough, my words seemed to relax Deputy Reedy rather than aggravate him. At least now he knew what he was dealing with: a fruit loop. “Of course it is. So, you’re a prince, huh, John?”

“Give me a break, Jim,” I said. He glared at my use of his first name, but he’d started it. “Did you ever hear of a Charming dynasty anywhere, in any country? They just called my ancestors princes because it was ye olde days and storytellers had to suck up to nobles.”

“Yeah, what was I thinkin’?” the deputy wondered. I’m not sure, but there might have been a hint of sarcasm there. Then something else seemed to register. “Wait a minute. Are you sayin’ that Sam Blanco was a monster?”

“Yes,” I said.

I decided it was the bathroom sink I wanted, so I headed for the single restroom. Nothing at the edge of the drain, nothing on the floor, so I removed a dental mirror from my front pocket, the kind with a round dime-sized reflective surface angled at the end of a plastic handle. I took the dental mirror and angled it in that hard-to-get-to space between the back of the sink’s hot water faucet and the wall. There it was: a sticky-looking spot of dried blood, red and rust-colored, beneath the back of the grooved plastic hot water handle. Of course, Samuel could have cut himself shaving, so I kept looking. When I angled the small mirror beneath the metal groove in the top of the washing machine’s lid, I saw more recently dried blood on the inside of the handle.

The bathroom connected to a bedroom, and I got hit by a gush of stale air when I opened the door, as if the room had been holding its breath. There was dust everywhere, but the place was neat, and all of the clothes in the closet were way too small for Samuel. One of the drawers in the dresser was full of unopened envelopes, but when I dug under the pile, I found neatly folded financial forms, bills, bank statements, and a rental lease agreement going back fifteen years. Someone named Luis Blanco had arranged it so that Samuel’s salary at the factory was electronically deposited into a checking account, and his bills were automatically deducted from that same account: electric, water, cable, a landline phone, and a cleaning service that implied that the house only represented one week’s worth of mess. Samuel didn’t have a car or health or life insurance, no gym membership, no Netflix account, no website fees, no cell phone plans. He never seemed to go to the hospital or the dentist. It looked like Samuel wrote one check once a week, and always at the same bank and always for the same amount of money. Keeping his routine simple.

Samuel Blanco also didn’t have any pictures of this Luis, no personal letters or religious icons or even items with a favorite sports team logo. Where had Luis Blanco gone? And why had he left a shotgun and a box of shells behind in his closet if he wasn’t planning on coming back?

Samuel’s room turned out to be the guest bedroom. It smelled like Samuel didn’t always remember to shower. In contrast to Luis’s room, the bed was unmade and clothes were thrown around everywhere. I found a couple of sketch pads jammed between the nightstand and Samuel’s bed. Most of the pads were full of pencil drawings of people and trees and dogs and different seasons. The pad on top, probably the most recent one, was the darkest. It was full of shadows and lonely landscapes and jagged lines, and the few people in it looked unhappy or angry. Toward the back, there were sketches of the acts of vandalism that had taken place in Samuel’s neighborhood recently, a penis that had been spray-painted on a car, a caricature of a naked woman on the side of a house, the words
GO BACK TO MEXICO
on a wooden fence, and the slur on Samuel’s driveway.

I also found pictures of two teenaged boys who looked demonic. They didn’t have horns or fangs or anything, but their faces were twisted into evil, leering expressions.

I was pretty sure it was their blood in Samuel’s bathroom.

“Hold on!” Jim Reedy interrupted. “What two teenage boys are you talkin’ about?”

“Colton and Ben Sigler,” I replied.

The deputy visibly pulled his shoulders back and raised his chin, his eyes narrowing. “They were killed by a bear.”

“I read the paper,” I said. According to the sheriff’s office, Colton and Ben Sigler went out into the woods so that they could try to make a homemade flamethrower with spray paint cans. Colton and Ben either burned themselves alive and got messed up by a wild animal later, or somehow their pyro-foolishness wound up pissing off a large wild animal, and the small fire they started got out of control after the animal killed them. Either way, a couple of miles of woods burned down around Colton and Ben’s broken and crushed bodies before the police finally found what was left. “That story is some serious bullshit.”

The place where Samuel Blanco liked to eat was a large plain building made out of yellow cinderblocks and covered with a red roof. The sign in the gravel parking lot was home-made and said
LA COMIDA UNIDA
. Most of the customers seemed to be young Latino workers looking to catch a quick, cheap meal after their factory shift, and they generally ran in and bustled out of the place with big, white, greasy paper bags that smelled delicious.

Samuel elected to stay, though.

I walked into the place. It had a nice energy. There was music coming from a CD player rather than a sound system, and it was loud and distorted, but it was lively. The men eating or drinking cervezas at the small square tables –and at this time of day, most of the customers were men—seemed relaxed enough, even though they all clocked me coming into the place right away. I recognized two guys from the pumpkin fields and gave them a brief nod while they leaned forward over their tables and filled their friends in on what they knew about me, which wasn’t much. It was a small town.

Samuel was the only person eating by himself, projecting a kind of sullen misery that seemed self-defeating—one of those you’d-better-stay-away-from-me-I’m-pissed-because-no-one-will-get-near-me attitudes. The only two empty tables in the place were the ones around Samuel, and I could see why. There were already three empty beer bottles on the table and Samuel was working on a fourth. The guy was seriously massive, not just tall but wide, his head somewhere between the size of a bowling ball and a basketball. He was pale-skinned, but that’s probably not what his family name was about. Names that mean white or black usually come from areas where there was a lot of coal mining, and I was pretty sure the Blancos started in Basque country.

“Hold on a second!” Jim Reedy protested. “There’s somethin’ you’re not tellin’ me here.”

“There’s a lot of things I’m not telling you here,” I said. “Could you be more specific?”

The deputy’s eyes narrowed until I could barely see his pupils. “What made you go to Sam Blanco’s house in the first place?”

“Did I forget to mention that I’m also an Amway rep?” I asked.

The deputy stared at me. “You broke into a house to sell vitamins and water purifiers?”

I stared back at him. “I have a
very
aggressive marketing strategy.”

He just kept staring.

“Damn you!” I slapped my palm lightly on the table. “You’ve worn me down with your steely resolve and your dogged pursuit of the truth. What was the question again?”

He didn’t react to that one way or the other. A lot of his Barney Fife routine was just to make the condescending northerner underestimate him. “What made you think Sam was a killer in the first place? And how’d you know to find him at the Comida Unida? Have you been stalkin’ him?”

“Sort of,” I admitted. “Samuel has a very strong smell. I followed his scent trail all the way from the fire site where Ben and Colton died to the word they spray-painted on Samuel Blanco’s driveway.”

“You tracked his smell,” the deputy repeated.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s funny,” Reedy informed me. “We tried to get some coon dogs to track down whatever kilt Ben and Colton ourselves.”

“No luck?” I guessed.

His expression became uneasy. Some memory the deputy didn’t like was scratching at him. “Those ol’ hounds wouldn’ even take the scent. They just whined and slunk off or laid down, and old man Melton couldn’t get ’em to do nothin’. I never seen anythin’ like it.”

“Dogs are smarter than people give them credit for,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Jim grunted. “So, I guess your dog is better trained. You bein’ a monster hunter and all. Where is this dog, anyway? Where have you been stayin’?”

“I didn’t need a dog to track Samuel’s movements,” I said, “any more than Samuel needed one to track Ben and Colton’s. I’m a werewolf.”