Xeno Sapiens (48 page)

Though her pale skin hinted at Celtic or
Gallic roots, her dark eyes and hair, and almost Roman nose told a
different tale; a story of a bloodline further east. A bit of the
Wallachian or Moldavian in her, a thin trickle of Romany blood from
centuries past.

I was smitten -badly smitten- for no good
reason I could dope out or discern. At least not then.
Charisma
is a word you hear, but until you have firsthand
knowledge of it, you can't really know what it means. And when God
doled out her share, she got it paid to her in spades. She was like
a queen bee, but instead of drones it was an unpromising mix of
fifty know-nothing duds and ten watt bulbs buzzing around her every
day. Of course, my opinion
was
a little colored. I was more
attracted to her than any woman I had ever known, and this from a
man who has known the company of a wide and varied array of ladies
over many years. I'll not tell you how old I am, but the candles on
my birthday cake look like the firebombing of Dresden, the Great
Chicago Fire, or the eruption of Krakatoa. I thought with better
than half a century churning in my wake, such things as crushes
were long past me. Still, I knew if she came into the store
barefoot, wearing a bulky flannel nightgown, with her hair rolled
up in beer cans, I would have turned to look. You know, there is
nothing more beautiful in God's Creation than a woman in the
moonlight, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that only a man
who was a fool wouldn't wonder what it would be like to look down
and see her face in that moonlight, her eyes closed, lips partway
open, that ink-black hair untidy, tousled across her brow and
forehead. And I'm no fool.

She fascinated me, but getting her to talk
about herself was like giving CPR to a corpse, or trying to teach
color to the blind. She was outgoing, but always left aside the
best of herself for someone else. It was a sad recognition that I
was never going to be that someone else. I was never going to be
her fair-haired boy; she was never going to have eyes for me.

We were, I guess, friends, but always a
little distant. She may not have even realized it, but there was
always some barrier between us: a cart, a counter, even something
as inconsequential as a clipboard or a piece of paper, but always
there. And that bothered me. I didn't know then why she seemed
always a little afraid of me. It was ever down there, buried so
deep you could barely see it, skulking beneath the sparkle; that
mistrust in her eyes from some previous, great hurt that had become
a slothful, unevictable squatter.

Since I worked only part time I would once
in a while, only half teasing, hit her up to let me come to work in
the sandwich shop full time. The last time I did that, she looked
up at me, eyes bright and coy, and said: “If you had to work for
me, you wouldn’t like me anymore.”

“I’d like you less,” I answered, “for
letting me starve to death.”

But that was okay. I didn't want to
not
like her.

And I liked her very much. Some things just
stick with you, small sketches that seem trivial to most, but mark
the beholder deeply. Like the time she came out of the store
shaking out that mane of coffee-black hair. She caught me looking
at her and, in saving my soul from perdition by telling the truth,
she gave it a little extra flip, knowing I was watching. But that
was just her, and just me. Dark haired women have always
monkey-hammered my brain into hot oatmeal. Even if I just acted
normal I would be fool enough, but she rocketed me into full-metal
moron territory. I would think of the times I heard her laugh
carrying through the store, and wonder who it was that caused it,
and think:
if only I could make her laugh like that.
But we
did
laugh now and again and my best times with her were when
she would smile, the lines crinkling up at the corners of her eyes
and the bridge of her nose, and I knew we had shared a genuine
chuckle.

Of course, we were both sinners and saints
in this thing. I tried not to be up her ass all the time, as my
dear, departed mother was fond of saying, but sometimes I just
couldn't resist speaking to her. And that could be a problem. Most
times she was lively and laughing, but when she did lose it, she
lost her shit completely. More often than I want to confess, I’d
say something that would set her off to the point that if I were to
go running through the store on fire, she would sprint after me
with a pack of hot dogs and a bag of marshmallows, and those
watching would acclaim her actions. There were other moments she
was so sweet that honey would have seemed vinegar in her mouth. But
I suppose it’s fair to say that about all women, isn’t it? If they
weren’t dynamite and blasting caps, gunpowder and matches, we
wouldn’t love them so, would we? If I was a writery sort of fellow,
I might have written down all these things I could never say to her
out loud. But I'm not, so I never did. Until now.

Even so, events pile up, and the thing that
started the train wreck for fair was when we had to attend some
mandatory work function. Who could have guessed that something that
started off so well would end so badly?

At a pleasant enough lunch, we sat at a
table supplemented with one of those stylishly trendy kiosks that
let you order from the table without need of a server, as if the
passably fashionable sit-down restaurant we had walked into had
somehow unluckily devolved into Jack in the Box before we even got
settled. She asked me if I wanted to use it.

“If I'm going to pay ten dollars for a
hamburger,” I said, “I'm not going to order it from a clown's
head.”

And that, I guess, was the last smile I ever
got out of her.

After lunch we ended up sharing an elevator.
It struck me again how tiny she was, standing there by the lighted
panel. She told me she didn’t like elevators and when I asked her
why, she said she was “afraid of the drop.” A peculiar thing, but
not so curious that it should have made a sudden chill raise goose
pimples on my arms.

Which brings me to the first thing.

I heard it last night, the woman screaming
behind my house. I sat upstairs at my computer, finally contriving
to let it all out, pecking out this very thing you're reading now,
when I heard the scream drift through the open window above my back
porch. I stopped abruptly, listening, my hackles raised, not quite
believing what I had heard. A screaming woman is not a reassuring
or usual sound and I was taken aback by the inconsistency of the
thing. Such a sound didn't fit my world view, where women were at
home or at work, being watched over and cared for by husbands or
fathers, not beaten and raped and killed by predators. And it was
that cognitive dissonance – that belief that what I was hearing was
incompatible with what should be- that made me stop typing, move my
chair back, and listen.

The scream came again a few seconds later.
It seemed to have moved a little from left to right, coming from
somewhere in the one hundred-yard-deep woods that set apart my back
yard from the fields of the next door neighbor. It was just loud
enough to be upsetting -not so far away that it would be useless to
try to render aid, and not so close that I could have seen what was
happening and helped. It seemed to be…
baiting
me.

I got up from my desk, chilled, and walked
across the creaking boards of the next room to the open window
above the back porch, looking out into the darkness of a moonless
night. I could see nothing save the hulking trees in the woods, fat
and lazy with summer growth, the stars pulsing dimly in the humid
murk above their crowns. The scream came again as I leaned my palms
against the window sill, straining to hear. The sound had moved
again, now coming again from my left, but no closer. And this time
I sensed something a little off key. Yes, it
sounded
like a
woman screaming, but not
exactly
. And a screaming woman
would likely not be moving back and forth and voicing those screams
at precise, eight to ten second intervals. Still, it was a close
enough thing that I grabbed my cell phone, walked downstairs and
outside into my back yard, and called the police. I would never
forgive myself if, after everything, it actually
was
a woman
screaming for her life.

I waited a harrowing ten minutes for the
police to show up, listening to the screams track back and forth
every few seconds, but unable to see anything. Sometimes the
screams moved away, sometimes they came so close that I believed
they were coming right from the edge of the woods that came up onto
the cleared lawn of my back yard, the maker slyly hidden just
inside the tree line. Then they would move off again.

Finally, with no sign of the police after
ten minutes, I could stand it no more. I waded into the woods,
exhibiting as little good sense as I usually did. As a young man,
when I normally wandered around like a gasoline-soaked scarecrow
looking for a spark, fist fights and gun-play were a weekly feature
and I wouldn't have thought twice about such a foolhardy effort.
But I wasn't a young man anymore, and still I rushed blindly into
what might have been real danger. I carried no flashlight, no arms,
bumbling through the blackberry thorns and poison oak hither and
thither, wearing nothing for protection but a pair of navy-blue
sweat pants.

I could have been no more than twenty yards
into the woods when I heard the scream again, off to my left. I
jerked my eyes that way and saw it for the first time. The
summer-sweat streaming down my arms and bare back turned clammy and
cold.

Whatever it was was low to the ground,
lissome and muscular, sable and blending with the black pastels of
the night. A pair of green-brown eyes stared back at me from
twenty-four inches above the ground, a tapetum reflecting back far
more light than was available. I couldn't see it, but I had the
impression of a stalking quadruped, crouched, its tail swishing
back and forth. When the scream came again, there was no doubt it
issued from this creature. I was looking right at it.

I froze, still as a gravestone, fear
speeding my heart like the jolt of a cattle prod. With what seemed
synchronous thought, I began to slowly back away and the creature
moved in the opposite direction, weaving sinuously through the
undergrowth, shuffling aside dried leaves and slipping through low
hanging vines, its passage plainly heard in the windless night.
Neither of us, this night at least, wanted to push the
confrontation.

By the time I backed out of the woods, I was
shaking and sweating uncontrollably, my legs as soft as hot taffy.
I turned to hurry back into my house when the Deputy Sheriff's
cruiser pulled into my driveway.

The deputy was a big man and as I told him
what had happened, the screams started up again. I felt foolishly
relieved. At least there was
some
confirmation of what I had
reported. We both stood there, listening as the screams moved back
and forth with little pattern, the deputy's face betraying the same
consternation mine had: it was impossible to believe it was a woman
screaming, but equally impossible to just dismiss it out of hand.
The deputy clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the woods,
its critical beam picking out nothing but more shadow. Even with
his badge and his gun, the big man reassured me very little.

Some two hundred yards to the north of my
house, a dirt road ran adjacent to the fields that curved around
the woods behind my house. Probably in contravention to every
police procedure known to man, the deputy had me ride with him down
this dirt road to a spot where the cleared fields butted up against
the woods on my property, but on the opposite side.

We stood silent in the muggy night, the
deputy's cruiser spotlight playing over the nodding heads of wheat.
It happened to land on movement in the field. There it was, moving
around in the field, its back below the tops of the wheat, just out
of sight. We could see the wake it left as it began to move off. We
stood there for twenty more minutes and heard no more screams. The
deputy drove me back to my house and left. There seemed to be
nothing else we could do.

I didn't hear the screams anymore that
night, but I didn't sleep, either. A more reasonable man would have
closed his upstairs window, but I didn't. I didn't think I was
meant to.

Instead, I spent the next few minutes
searching the interwebs for an animal sound that mimicked a
screaming woman.

And I found it.

As I listened to the electronic file
faithfully playing back the primeval sounds on the cool, digital
circuits of my computer, I was possibly more chilled than when I
had heard the actual screams. I played it over and over again,
trying to make sure I wasn't injecting any bias into it. But it was
unmistakable. I could have recorded the sound myself with a tape
recorder out of my window that night.

The most terrifying thing was knowing it had
been only twenty feet away from me. And it was still out there.

It was the sound of a Mountain Lion
screaming.

Now for the third thing. When I said before
that she always reserved the best of herself for someone else, I
didn't necessarily mean a different person, but perhaps a different
incarnation
. She never appeared to truly dislike me, but was
always wary of me. It seemed a conundrum I would never riddle out.
The puzzle began to fit together a little better when I finally
admitted to myself that I had known her before. Not years ago, but
lifetimes ago, and, when you think about it, why should that really
be any different? It's one of those inexpressible things that you
really can't explain, like seeing a ghost or discerning Jesus in
the butter. You could never tell anyone for fear of being labeled
disturbed, but it is real enough.