Imago

Amy Sterling Casil

Chapter Three

Tommy Lee Tucker the pig man was Camp Roberts’ seventh runner. Under the knife-bright Central California sun, three DisLex guards squinted through their mirrorshades while Tommy broke from Dorm B jogging group. He veered past the pea green barracks, straight toward the electrified fence.

Tommy was fifteen yards from the fence when the nearest guard raised his Remington 870 twelve-gauge and took aim at his back.

“Hey, man, he’s headed for the fence!” called another guard.

Tommy didn’t turn. His ankle gave as he hit a ragged chunk of cement, hidden amid the tall spears of sawgrass near the fence. Time seemed to stretch as he fell to one knee. The internees watched: fish twins barely out of their teens, the three other pig men, the bear man who liked to brag he’d been a technodance dee-jay, and the dozen other freaks of assorted sizes, shapes and colors who occupied the bunks in Camp Roberts Dorm B.

The guard in the tower slammed the alarm button and screamed down at the others, “Stop the runner!” One guard, open-mouthed, stared at the tower instead of Tommy. One who had been trotting broke into a full run.

He paused and brought his hand to his mouth. “Damn it, he’s gonna fry!”

Tommy was on his feet again, limping. He turned back, eyes like black olives in his fleshy pink face, and held up his right arm, fingers forming a “v.”

That night, when the XO debriefed the security staff, the guard who’d trotted after Tommy, a forty-five year-old divorcee named Karl Hehle, insisted that Tommy had flipped everyone off. Meantime, in Dorm B, the freaks whispered in their bunks, evenly divided as to whether Tommy had given a peace sign or a victory sign. No one was going to ask them for their opinion, but they argued anyway.

Karl Hehle was within twenty feet of the running pig man. He stopped, went to one knee, and took aim with his twelve gauge. It was a riot gun and he was armed with it in case the freaks got out of hand and decided to charge. It wasn’t the kind of gun anyone was supposed to fire at a running target. Running away, at any rate.

“Hey, freak,” he yelled. “The fence is on.” Then, he squeezed the trigger and discharged a sandbag. The sandbag hit Tommy square between his shoulder blades. Tommy’s arms flew up and his chest slammed into the fence. Some of the freaks said later that a blue spark shot from the back of his head. Not everyone saw that, but everyone saw the flash. Everyone heard the sick, crackling sizzle. Tommy’s sneakers smoked as he jerked like a dancing puppet. The freaks made a few steps forward, but everyone knew not to touch him.

Raymond the dog man started to cry.

“Fried shit,” said Karl Hehle, cradling his weapon.

The tardy guard who’d been gaping at the tower arrived and took out his comm. “Runner on the fence,” he said. “Sector five jogging track. We need the truck.”

Three miles away, the comm roused the Camp Roberts paramedics from their backgammon game. The tallest of them swore under his breath as he crumpled his can of Sunkist Orange and tossed it through a miniature Lakers hoop into the recycling bucket.

“Another three-pointer,” he said. They were still laughing about the lucky shot as they climbed leisurely into the truck and pulled on their gloves and masks.

“You know what’s the worst?” the driver said as they bounced along the one-lane ribbon of asphalt toward the jogging track. “They stink so damn bad.”

Yeah, yeah, the others agreed. Lewis Starr, Jr., the tall paramedic who’d made the three-pointer, was wishing he had another Sunkist Orange. “Like barbecue,” Lewis said, staring out the window at the rolling green hills. Come summer, the grass would be golden brown. The fires would begin. Lewis Starr was from South Carolina and he’d eaten a lot of barbecue. The favorite meat there was pork, cooked for hours with brown sugar and vinegar and a touch of crushed red pepper. They called it chop meat or pulled meat. People drank Pepsi while they ate it on a squishy white bun with coleslaw on top. When it got seared in the pot with some melted Crisco it smelled just like one of the runners did after they got racked up on the fence. Lewis Starr kept his thoughts about pulled meat and barbecue to himself.

His thoughts grew even worse when they got to Tommy Lee Tucker and Lewis Starr saw that he was a pig man.

They had finally turned the fence off and Tommy Lee Tucker’s charred corpse lay crumpled in the grass. When Lewis Starr bent down, he saw that the pig man’s orange polyester coveralls had burned clear through to his broad chest, and the fabric and flesh had sealed together in a blue-black welt. Karl Hehle stood by, gabbling about how he’d tried to stop the disaster. Lewis couldn’t read the pig man’s I.D. off the coveralls. It had been blackened away, except for the last two numbers.

“It was Tucker,” Hehle said. “I saw his face. Man, he was the one that rescued that family. I saw him on the news.”

“They’ll make certain tonight when they count heads,” Lewis replied. The pig man’s face was turning purplish. He looked like a black hog. Maybe a little like a black man. The one who rescued the family? Yeah, Lewis guessed he had heard something about that.

Back in South Carolina, they didn’t have many freaks. Nothing like California. When he’d left Carolina, Lewis had felt no misgivings about going out West and taking the job at Camp Roberts. DisLex paid well, and Lewis needed the money to get through medical school. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, even though before he had left Greenville, his oldest auntie had asked him whether or not he felt right being around all those “ugly niggers.” That was how all the church ladies of a certain age referred to the freaks; Lewis guessed it was because most of them were dark, or had dark fur.

Lewis Starr would never eat pulled meat again. Not with cole slaw, not with anything else.

The surviving freaks from Dorm B crowded around as Lewis and the others lifted Tommy Lee Tucker’s body onto the stretcher and wheeled it toward the truck. They knew Tommy Lee was dead but they still stared, some with angry glares, others with expressions of sympathy or sadness on their godawful faces.

“He shot him,” Raymond the dog man said, pointing at the guard Karl. “Then he hit the fence.”

“Damn murderer,” said one of the fish boys under his breath.

Lewis searched their faces. Then, he looked at Karl Hehle. Shiny mucus ringed Hehle’s mouth and there were flecks of food on his chin. A few paces away, Lewis spotted the mess where the guard had lost his breakfast. It looked like something a puppy might do.

It wasn’t Lewis’ business to ask anything, but he caught Hehle’s eye. “He was heading for the fence?”

“Yeah,” the guard said. “Everybody was hollering at him.” He looked at Tommy Lee Tucker’s body, then back at Lewis. “The stupid shit flipped me off.”

“Man, if they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it,” one of the other paramedics said.

Lewis cinched a black woven strap across the body. “Did you try to stop him?” Lewis knew the answer. Like all the freaks, the pig man was hot with HMV, the human mutational virus that made people pray for AIDS instead; worse than any killer out of Africa or Asia.

“Hell, yeah!” Hehle crossed his arms, indignant. The man reminded Lewis of his middle school football coach, only his crewcut was shorter, the skin showing bluish white beneath the bristly hair. There were liver-colored moles here and there on his scalp. Lewis figured that if the guard’s barber shaved too close, he’d cut one of those moles clean off. Maybe he had. There was a crusty scab above Hehle’s right temple. HMV insinuated itself right through torn skin. A little gob of spit from the dead man’s cheek could get on the guard’s fingers, then the guard might rub his head. Not that Hehle or any of the others would have thought that far ahead, or in that much detail. Hehle just wouldn’t have touched the pig man if he could help it.

One of the twin fish boys stepped forward. “It ain’t right,” he said in the wet, mucousy voice all the fish people had. Lewis had to avoid looking straight at the fish boy, because his narrow, almond-shaped eyes were not at all human. The pupils were too big, not quite round. Periodically, a bluish, filmy membrane would slip up like a window shade, obscuring both iris and pupil.

The fish boy grabbed Lewis’ arm. “Do something, man,” he said. “It ain’t right.” Lewis remembered that the fish boy’s name was something crazy, like an old-time rock star. Elton. Or Elvis.

Lewis shook his head. With a hard look on his face, Karl Hehle stepped in and shoved the fish boy aside. The others stepped back, unwilling to confront the guard.

As Lewis climbed in the truck, he looked over the group of freaks. “You all take care now,” he said, his voice sounding childish and sanctimonious, as if he had been back in church choir. “It’s all over.”

The fish boy’s weird eyes were full of impotent pain and rage. Lewis wondered if maybe that was how his great-grandfather had looked when they told him he never had owned his farm and called him a “squatter.”

The driver squirted Ozium into the truck as they left. It did nothing for the stink, just adding a sharp odor of chemical disinfectant to the stench of burnt meat. Lewis gagged, remembering the fish boy and the others. He had no idea what it would feel like, seeing your friend break and run toward a high-voltage fence. Seeing him fry, jumping around like a six-inch trout on a hot iron griddle.

Lewis knew about trout and griddles. Back in his locker, Lewis had the card of a man he’d met fishing a couple of Sundays before at Lake Nacimiento. Lewis went out early most weekends. He hardly ever saw anyone until he’d been out a couple of hours, but this man had been out on the lake one morning, with his line in the water, sipping hot coffee. They’d got to talking. Lewis had shared the man’s thermos of coffee, and he had taken the man’s card. His name was Frank Curtez and he said that he was a DA in San Luis. He had been interested in what went on at Camp Roberts. Said he’d heard some stories.

Lewis had almost thrown the card away. But maybe just from laziness, he’d thrown it in his locker. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand to stop the burnt odor. The man who said you’d get used to that kind of stink didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Maybe he’d go fishing again on Sunday, out in that clean lake air. Maybe he’d call Frank Curtez. God knew he couldn’t stand by and watch another man rack himself up on that fence without doing something.

The body of Tommy Lee Tucker slipped from the stretcher as Lewis and the driver wheeled it up the steep ramp of the morgue. The other paramedics weren’t very careful about picking him up, and they let his burnt head slam against the cold cement.

Tommy Lee Tucker’s eyeballs had been cooked way back to the nerve and that makes changes in the flesh, no matter whether you were a freak or as tall, straight-limbed and normal as Lewis Starr. The eyeball slipped out of its socket and flopped wetly against Tommy Lee Tucker’s temple.

The driver started laughing. “Anybody for a couple holes of golf?” Everyone chuckled nervously except Lewis. An eyeball isn’t much smaller than a golf ball. It looks a lot bigger than most people think, once it’s out of someone’s head.

Lewis Starr always followed procedure and unlike two of the others, he still wore his rubber gloves. Very gently, Lewis pushed Tommy Lee Tucker’s eye back into place. He couldn’t shut the pig man’s eyes, but he drew the sheet up over his swollen face. None of the paramedics laughed.

The pig man’s cooked egg white eyes haunted Lewis Starr that night. He had to call that man, Frank Curtez, because if he didn’t, he knew that those opaque blind eyes would haunt him forever.