O’Neil’s Gulf Station out on Town Road by the entrance to the turnpike, a tourist
starts giving Pucky O’Neil some lip about the price of gas and Pucky brains the
fellow with the gas-pump nozzle. The fellow, who is from New Jersey, needs four
stitches in his upper lip and goes away muttering balefully under his breath about
lawsuits and subpeonas.
“I don’t know what he’s bitching about,” Pucky says sullenly that night in the Pub.
“I only hit him with half of my force, you know? If I’d’a hit him with all my
force, I woulda knocked his frockin smart mouth right the frock off. You know?”
“Sure,” Billy Robertson says, because Pucky looks like he may hit him with all his
force if he disagrees. “How about another beer, Puck?”
“Your frockin-A,” Pucky says.
Milt Sturmfuller puts his wife in the hospital over a bit of egg that the
dishwasher didn’t take off one of the plates. He takes one look at that dried
yellow smear on the plate she tried to give him for his lunch, and pounds her a
good one. As Pucky O’Neil would have said, Milt hits her with all his force. “Damn
slutty bitch,” he says, standing over Donna Lee, who is sprawled out on the kitchen
floor, her nose broken and bleeding, the back of her head also bleeding. “My mother
used to get the dishes clean, and she didn’t have no dishwasher, either. What’s the
matter with you?” Later, Milt will tell the doctor at the Portland General Hospital
emergency room that Donna Lee fell down the back stairs. Donna Lee, terrorized and
cowed after nine years in a marital war-zone, will back this up.
Around seven o’clock on the night of the full moon, a wind springs up-the first
chill wind of that long summer season. It brings a rack of clouds from the north
and for awhile the moon plays tag with these clouds, ducking in and out of them,
turning their edges to beaten silver. Then the clouds grow thicker, and the moon
disappears … yet it is there; the tides twenty miles out of Tarker’s Mills feel
its pull and so, closer to home, does the Beast.
Around two in the morning, a dreadful squealing arises from the pigpen of Elmer
Zinneman on the West Stage Road, about twelve miles out of town. Elmer goes for his
rifle, wearing only his pajama pants and his slippers. His wife, who was almost
pretty when Elmer married her at sixteen in 1947, pleads and begs and cries,
wanting him to stay with her, wanting him not to go out. Elmer shakes her off and
grabs his gun from the entryway. His pigs are not just squealing; they are
screaming. They sound like a bunch of very young girls surprised by a maniac at a
slumber party. He is going, nothing can make him not go, he tells her … and then
freezes with one work-callused hand on the latch of the back door as a screaming
howl of triumph rises in the night. It is a wolf-cry, but there is something so
human in the howl that it makes his hand drop from the latch and he allows Alice
Zinneman to pull him back into the living room. He puts his arms around her and
draws her down onto the sofa, and there they sit like two frightened children.
Now the crying of the pigs begins to falter and stop. Yes, they stop. One by one,
they stop. Their squeals die in hoarse, bloody gargling sounds. The Beast howls
again, its cry as silver as the moon. Elmer goes to the window and sees somethinghe
cannot tell what-go bounding off into the deeper darkness.
The rain comes later, pelting against the windows as Elmer and Alice sit up in bed
together, all the lights in the bedroom on. It is a cold rain, the first real rain
of the autumn, and tomorrow the first tinge of color will have come into the
leaves.
Elmer finds what he expects in his pig-pen; carnage. All nine of his sows and both
of his boars are dead- disembowelled and partly eaten. They lie in the mud, the