The Cruelest Species

No one liked Einer Clark.  No one. He was the kind of guy who pushed little kids down, cheated at cards, shot stray dogs that wandered onto his land, raised livestock in barely humane conditions, and abused every square inch of land. Everything had to produce or it was gone. Rusty equipment littered his property, lying where it last ran.  Time and cheapness had enabled him to accrue lots of money. Funny how money can make a jerk seem more likable. Didn’t matter now. He was dead and I apparently was the last person to see him alive.

     The local cops were sure I knew something and were making my life miserable. I certainly hoped that was a temporary thing, because I didn’t know anything and I wasn’t having fun.  Was I being considered of murderer?  Seemed so.

     I had only been back in town for about six months. I moved back to Mapleton, after having been away for twelve years.  I moved back to open my own investment firm. I believed that small towns were friendly, and people here would trust me since I was one of their own. Now I was in a tiny room in the back of what was called the Community Center.  It was just a brick building, with too many fluorescent lights, too much tile and it housed the local fire truck, the tornado siren, the cop shop and the  jail. 

     The questioning room must have doubled as the lunchroom because the table had a coating of grease and there were crumbs all over the place. Most of the crumbs were on Chief of Police Don Steer’s side of the table. That is those that weren’t stuck to the front of his shirt.

     “Mr. Otto, what time did you show up at Einer’s on Tuesday?” the fat policeman asked. He was probably about 39,  three years older than me.  I think he was two or three years ahead of me in school. I vaguely remembered him. He’d been a lineman on the football team and had inflated some since then, in terms of ego and girth. He was approaching 350 pounds the way a meteor approached the earth, fast. Huge sweat rings spread under his arms. His head seemed the size of a basketball with all the features squeezed into the center. Too much space and not enough to fill it. For a minute I felt sorry for him, but just for a minute. His head was adorned with a flat top, a weird hairstyle that only looked good on Frankenstein’s monster.

     “I had an appointment with him at 10:30 a.m. He told me to meet him out in his barn. When I got there, he was sitting on his tractor staring out at his back forty. He seemed kind of out of it, really. I thought he was a busy man but he didn’t seem too busy that day. I walked into the barn and sat down on that old tree stump Einer had in there for a stool.  I petted his two dogs and started talking to him about some investment ideas. He didn’t like my ideas so I left. I was there for maybe forty minutes.”

     “John . . . can I call you John?” After I nodded, Chief Steer stumbled on with his line of questioning. “You say you was pettin’ his dogs? Funny thing is Einer didn’t have no dogs.”

     “Hey, I don’t know whose dogs they were but, yeah, I was petting them. I like dogs.” I was getting irritated because this seemed to be a trivial point. “Like Siberian Huskies. “Wolflike markings, one black and white, the other kind of red and white. So what?”

     “Well, Mr. Otto, Einer didn’t own any dogs. I may just be a fat cop and you’re a smart investment guy, but if two dogs was there, just maybe those dogs belonged to whoever killed Einer. Unless, of course, you killed him.”

     Okay, he was fat, but that made sense. I hadn’t thought about someone else being in the barn watching us talk. He must have seen the light bulb go on over my head because he gave me a wiseass grin.

      “John, did those dogs stick around while you was talking or did they wander off?”

     “They stayed right next to me the entire time I was talking to Einer. Now that you mention it, it was like he was staring at them. And they were staring right back at him.” 

     I played it back in my mind to make sure that’s what happened. I remembered sitting on the stump. The two dogs sat to my left. Einer had been about ten or twelve feet away sitting on his tractor which was backed into the barn. The barn was not the idyllic red structure of American folklore. It was a dumpy, white, dilapidated, leaning shed, full of hand-me-down tools, tractor parts, grease, and dust. He didn’t move from that perch the entire time I was there. Looking back, he had seemed kind of nervous.

     “So it could be that they were trained to hold him at bay until you left. Then the killer came in and finished up. Make sense to you?”  He didn’t wait for me to agree.  “Would you mind taking your shoes off, John?” He proceeded to pull a couple of blank sheets of paper, a small paint roller and an inkpad out of a briefcase on the table.

     “Give me a good reason,” I challenged

     “Well, John, you know about fingerprints? Feet make prints, too. And, whoever killed Einer was sittin’ on that very same stump you claimed you sat on. Then that person walked over to where you say Einer was. And that person walked barefoot. Left perfect prints in the dust on the barn floor. We even took plaster casts of the prints and now I mean to take prints of your feet and compare. So if you don’t have any more questions, take off your shoes and socks and raise your stinky feet.”

     I decided to cooperate. 

     After I took off my shoes and socks, the fat cop delicately painted the bottoms of my feet and had me stand on the sheets of paper. Chief Steer made a big show of looking at my prints and photos of those found at the crime scene. His wiseass grin slowly faded as if dissolved by the sweat running down his face. He briskly said “Put your shoes on and get out of here. Don’t leave town.”

     “Does that mean I’m cleared? The prints didn’t match, right?”

     “Lucky you. Now go.” He seemed mad. I’d ruined his moment of glory.

     Blue feet and all, I was out of there. The elation of being cleared didn’t erase the event from my mind. Maybe someone had been at Einer’s waiting for me to leave so they could kill him. You could rattle off a hundred people who wished they had whacked Einer and probably still be a couple hundred short. You’d be harder pressed to find a handful of people who liked him.

     Instead of turning right at the corner of Main and Eighth and going home, I turned left. Probably not consciously but I did it just the same. Eleven miles later, I was parked at Einer’s place, a ramshackle array of buildings and equipment sitting on 360 acres of fertile Iowa farmland. Not that Einer took good care of anything, but the place seemed even more dilapidated since his death.

     My ego told me that the clodhopper cop was at least three bricks light of a load mentally and anything he could do, I could do better. But what if I found something out? I was also smart enough to realize death wasn’t a big aspiration of mine. Was knowing the truth worth dying for?

     I stopped talking to myself and jumped out of the car. I could see the barn about twenty yards away. Yellow crime-scene tape was pulled across the barn door. I was surprised that crime tape was in Mapleton’s budget.

     As I neared the barn, I saw two shapes lying in the dust in the middle of the barn. I froze in mid-step. Only gravity enabled me to finish my stride.

     I recognized that shapes were the dogs I had seen that day. They rose and began ambling toward me. Inside I was yelling to myself “Run you fool!” I was an okay athlete in my day but I had no thought that I could outrun the dogs.  WHile I wanted to scream, I couldn’t have made a sound if ordered by God himself.

     My legs were cemented to the ground and the blood in my body ceased to 

flow. I felt dizzy and sure I would soon join Einer in a dog-induced hell. The dogs were 

less than two strides from me now. The larger of the two seemed to gather himself, lifting 

his front legs off the ground. All I could imagine was him leaping for my throat. A braver 

man would have watched his attacker and prepared some defense. I just turned my head 

and flinched.  I resigned myself to the fact that his fangs would soon pierce my throat.

I felt the dog land on my chest, knocking me backwards. I fell like a board, stiff and hard. 

     The fangs never came. My eyes opened to see the dog standing on my chest. He

sniffed me. The other dog was sitting on his haunches to my right, brown almond-shaped 

eyes conveying a canine smile.

     The dog on top of me, seemingly satisfied with my odor or lack thereof, jumped off of  

me and headed toward the back forty. The smiling dog joined him like an overly eager 

puppy, bounding rather than running. My head turned to follow them into the distance. 

No other part of my body moved. Minutes may have passed; I don’t know how many. 

     Eventually I got to my feet.

     “Damn! Damn!” I muttered.

     I have been knocked over by a dog before, but this felt different. Something else had 

happened. I walked toward my car, occasionally looking over my shoulder in case the 

dogs were on their way back, my mind spinning.

     I saw a third dog sitting three feet from my car and twenty feet from me.  That dog took  

a jump toward me.  I heard an odd crackling sound as it jumped, like a stick breaking 

sharply, followed by a muffled thump. There standing two feet in front of me was a man. 

A naked man with brown, almond-shaped eyes and black hair that formed a widow’s 

peak on his forehead.

     “Hello, John. Good to see you again.” said the man crisply.

     “Huh?” was all I had in the way of a response. I was sweating bullets and 

conversation wasn’t within my power.

     “John, don’t be frightened. I am not going to hurt you,” the man continued.

     “Cool…uh…Thanks…But. . .You were just a dog, right?” I croaked.

     “I don’t know if ‘dog’ is the right term, but yes, I was in canine form.      

     “How . . . how did you change from that to this?” I asked, pointing to where he had been and then at him.

     “One might just as well ask you how you breathe,” he shrugged. “You can’t explain the process, you just do. I don’t have the words to explain our abilities. I presume the ability was passed on from our elders. We have been told that earlier humans called us shapeshifters or tricksters. Like chameleons can change color, like some moths developed wing patterns that resemble predators, my kind developed the ability to appear in human form. Few of us had the ability at first. But over the years, more and more of us inherited the ability.”

     “My kind watched humans. In our natural form.   We developed skills that complimented those of humans so that we could combine our packs to make hunting easier. And at times, it proved advantageous to appear human to get along with the humans.  Collectively, man has always been a cruel animal with no respect for other beings, wanting only to own, conquer or kill. We found it easier to defend ourselves from humans as humans. Perhaps that is the explanation for our ability, protection.  The man who lived here wasn’t good,” he continued matter-of-factly. “Even so, we would have let him live. But he tried to kill one of us, so we defended ourselves.”

     “Are there a lot of you? Is every dog one of you?” I couldn’t imagine that this could be the case, but . . ..

     “Not every canine is one of my kind. There are fewer of us than we wish, but more than you imagine,” he smiled. “But I think you will look at every canine differently from now on. Am I right, John?”

     I looked away from him, trying to gather a thought or form a response. I heard the crackling noise again. I jerked my head around and saw the dog trotting into the field on the same path as that the previous two dogs had taken. In the dust in front of me I saw the history of our brief meeting. Canine prints led to human footprints which gave way to more canine prints.

     In the dust, the picture of Einer’s demise became very clear. But that didn’t mean I was in the mood to tell anyone. Yet.