The Day Baron von Sickle Disappeared
by Craig Donegan
part 1
The day was almost done in the shrinking town of Baron von Sickle, Texas. Park Ranger Bruce Honeycutt, as he did most Saturday evenings, stood atop the earthen dam that overlooked Schubert’s Pond on the outskirts of town. There, he squinted into a sunset that painted the sky and flooded the westward plain in radiant hues of blood-orange.
Spring-fed, the pond was a blue-eyed beauty, a source of local pride and sporadic tourist income. For more than a century, the townsfolk proudly claimed the pond was 300 feet deep, though no one ever had truly plumbed it to the bottom. Instead, nearly all Baron von Sickleans accepted the old-timers’ intuitive soundings on faith. Yet this failure of true measurement to its natural end left the task to scientists from the university in Austin. With an echo-sounder they pin-pointed the depth at 238 feet.
The introduction of such a machine, with its sonic pulse, rolled through town like a cloud of locusts. Some called it the “Devil’s machine.” Others proclaimed it “ungodly.” Whichever it was, all agreed it had ripped open a seam in the town’s conventional wisdom as if it had been stitched together with rotten thread. In time, the split had grown nearly large enough to provoke a latter-day monkey trial reminiscent of Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee. But gone were the fossilized dinosaur bones and the “Rock of Ages.” This time the split featured a limestone sinkhole polluted with watery echoes.
But on this day, all seemed calm, as Bruce scanned beyond the banks of the pond. The land he observed, through his WWII field binoculars, had all the markings of a wasteland. Its stony ground bristled with desert plants: spindly ocotillo, mouse-eared prickly pear cactus, and scraggly mesquite.
All was silent except for the chirping crickets and the occasional chittering of sparrows until Bruce’s cell phone sounded.
Caller ID showed “Roscoe Silverback,” Bruce’s boss, whose mood, according to the uneven tone in his voice, was somewhere between unbridled rage and profound depression.
“Honeycutt. That you?” asked Silverback, his voice gruff and cracking.
“Well let’s see. Yep,” said Bruce, patting his chest and then thighs. “It’s me alright. So, what do you want?”
“Cut the crap, Honeycutt. That mad woman is on the loose again. This time it’s alligators.”
The mad woman, Mrs. Annabelle “Peaches” Moczygemba — which was how she signed all her letters of complaint to Silverback — had once been known with affection in the ranger station as the eccentric Mrs. M. Yet, as the wildlife dynamics of the area around Baron von Sickle changed, so did Peaches’ behavior until one day “eccentric” morphed into “Mad.” So, in time she became the “Mad Mrs. M. ”
“We’re too far north. There aren’t any gators up here,” Bruce insisted.
“Okay. Tell you what. Why don’t you go over, knock on her door, and convince her of that,” said Silverback. “But of course, what you do won’t matter because she’s after me. And sure as shootin’, she won’t let up until I pay. I don’t mean just with money. She won’t rest until she takes it out of my hide. I’m sure of that. And it’s all because of that floppy-eared rabbit of hers that the coyotes ate in her back yard last year. Then there was the flock of ferruginous hawks that moved into town for easy pickings.”
Bruce remembered, as did everyone else in town. The hawks had wounded the over-fed rabbit; it was too heavy for them to lift and carry away. So, there it was on the ground. Rolling and kicking and squealing while the hawks did their best to tear it to shreds and fly away with bits and pieces. The creature was helpless and made the most awful sound that echoed through town as darkness settled.
Then came the coyotes with their yipping and yapping, that death chatter they’ve got. A weird nervous laughter that gave locals the willies for weeks, as if they’d seen gangs of psychopaths roam through town raping, robbing, pillaging, and committing other such atrocities. Barbaric stuff.
In the end, however, the townsfolk chalked it all up to nature. The nature of things, anyway. A version of the old tooth-and-claw business, which, for a growing number of von Sickleans, made the increasing weirdness around them seem sensible somehow.
“It’s like a spreading virus,” said Bruce. “And no one in town is immune. Go to the barber shop and people chalk it up to natural cycles that are inevitable somehow. But that’s not all. Seems almost no one in Baron von Sickle wants to ask why, or even to know. It’s not like the olden days, when citizens banded together and got to the bottom of things.”
“What’s to figure out?” asked Silverback. “Why hawks and coyotes kill rabbits? It’s what they do. God made ’em that way. The real question is, why did that crazy old bat have a floppy-eared rabbit in the first place? I mean, really. That kind of rabbit is a crime against nature. I’ll bet that son-of-a-bitch weighed fifty pounds or more. I don’t even know if you can call such a thing a rabbit.”
Silverback continued, “Then, of course, there’s always logic. We might use that to figure some of these things out. The strange migration patterns. Mass extinction at scales of nature too small to see, unless you’re really looking. And who around here is looking?”
Bruce wondered for an instant if Silverback, who’d found Jesus and been on the wagon for six months, might be at the start of a crack-up and was drinking again. When did the boss start talking or thinking this way? he wondered and then added out loud: “Oh, who’s got time for logic these days? No need to relive that rabbit episode again anyway.”
“Well, she’s losing her grip. She’s turning into one of those people who believe that all this aberrant animal behavior is the cause, not the effect, of something larger. What’s it been so far this summer? Three months of no rain and sixty-eight days of over a hundred degrees in a row? No furred or feathered creature, not a rabbit, hawk or coyote causes that. But now there’s this alligator,” said Silverback, his voice tinged with sadness, frustration, and signs of resignation.
“Okay, so now there’s an alligator. Or not. Have you seen it?” asked Bruce.
“Hell no, I haven’t seen it,” said Silverback. “It was enough to hear Mrs. M. tell about it. I don’t need to see the damned thing. I don’t even need to know if it’s real. All I need to know is that this dog of hers — she calls it Randy — isn’t torn to shreds or eaten or drowned. How many animals have died trying to drink from that Blue Hole this year since the aquifer fell and the water went down? We’re on a slippery slope, my friend. and the whole town’s going to blame us when the slipping and the sliding turns into big-time sinking and dying.”
“Okay, so what do I do? Pray?” asked Bruce.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” said Silverback, “but right now you go on a dog hunt. You’re looking for a white poodle. Its collar has rhinestones and sequins. She told me, and these are her exact words: ‘Damned prehistoric beast has my Randy, and they’re headed for town.’”
Bruce looked again at the sky, and saw a swarm of vitreous floaters as if he had gnats in his eyes. He wondered why Silverback was so intent on saving this dog from a creature that most likely didn’t exist, at least not in Baron von Sickle. Were his screws coming loose under the constant pressure from Mrs. M? Was it the heat? Had he gone soft on the old lady? Or was it the growing cadre of suspicious von Sickleans who claimed that the hawks, coyotes, bobcats, and buzzards, which had moved into town, were forming the vanguard of dark days to come? In their cosmography, these days would fall upon the good and the evil alike with no distinction, no fault, no blame. And all this would surely be far too much for guileless von Sickleans to bear. Such were the times in which they lived, when animal behavior, not human conduct, when the messenger, not the message, was to blame.
“You’re at the pond, yes?” asked Silverback.
“Of course I’m at the pond,” answered Bruce.
“Well, Mrs. M. wants you to wait there and kill the beast before it eats her dog.”
“Will do,” said Bruce, as he hung up, shifted his gaze to the fading sunset, and wondered how Mrs. M. — or Silverback, for that matter — could think that the gator, perhaps an imaginary gator, would snatch up a dog and parade it through town before settling down to eat it. Then, along the ragged horizon, a buzzard caught Bruce’s eye as it slipped through the air with delicate grace in search of nourishment, which for the scavenger meant the product of some other creature’s death.
Bruce watched the bird’s sharp silhouette, like a black cutout from the heart of the sun. And he wondered:
Am I to be one of the few credible witnesses to understand the truth behind Baron von Sickle’s decline? Do the buzzards continue to thrive as scavengers, birds of no special importance? Or have they become signs and portents away from which increasing numbers of von Sickleans avert their eyes?
* * *
Bruce sat on the pond-side rim of the dam and waited. He opened the binocular case on his belt and then checked the cylinders on his service revolver to make sure all were loaded. Then he holstered the gun uncocked, recalling the time that Silverback dozed off, cocked pistol in hand, and shot off one of his own dog’s hind legs. In the twilight between sleep and wakefulness, he’d mistaken his mongrelly pet for a coyote. In Bruce’s mind, his boss had been primed for overreaction. So, predictably, he overreacted.
The phone rang again.
“You seen the damn thing yet?” Silverback queried.
“Give it some time,” said Bruce. “If the gator’s real and has got the dog, then I figure five minutes before the shooting commences. No dog, and I don’t shoot the gator. No gator, I go home, bust out a six-pack, and imagine Louie Armstrong singing ‘What a Wonderful World.’”
“What?” Silverback shouted, but Bruce heard only scratchy noise.
“Static. The signal’s all twisted. It’s happening again,” he told his boss.
“What?” Silverback hollered again, followed by a bang that Bruce recognized. His boss had slammed his phone face-down on his desk.
Cellular signals had become impossibly irregular over the past few years. Many in town said it was ants building nests in the transmission tower circuitry, although no one even tried to uncover these ants. A lack of curiosity? Afraid of what they might not find? Bruce, on the other hand, thought it more likely that the air through which the signals traveled had become densely vaporized and electrified from water evaporating at alarming rates from nearby rivers, lakes and even Schubert’s Pond. This, combined with an almost supernatural increase in electrical storms, had converted the atmosphere into turbulent seas of ionized air through which all broadcast signals must navigate.
Bruce hung up, disgusted, and raised his binoculars. Scanning the landscape, he kept his aim close to the ground. There he saw two squirrels trying to work up the energy to mate. Next, a dead snake in the street. Finally, a buzzard on a low branch in a rotting tree eying the snake, apparently pondering the risk of being attacked on the ground by a coyote or bobcat.
As Bruce slid an index finger along the butt of his pistol, he thought of the spiral-bound history he’d written about Baron von Sickle, which he sold through the one-time Chamber of Commerce building during down time when he’d worked as a Level 3 Technician in the Sanitation Department.
The project had given him a strong proprietary interest in his little town. But by the time he finished the history, the town’s population was in freefall; people were dying or just leaving for cooler climates like so many others — humans and all variety of creatures — across the land. Irrational though it was, he came to believe that, like the captain of an ocean liner struck by disaster, he was sworn, even destined, to go down with the ship.
Just then, the buzzard flapped frantically from the dead tree and flew north out of town as if never to return. The two near-mated squirrels disengaged, bounded across the street, hurdled the snake, and shot up a drainpipe at the front of Alexander’s Pharmacy, whose shelves were depleted of all first-aid items but still held scattered bags of stale chips and warm six-packs of club soda that so-called looters had left behind. The town was turning. Its storied cohesion, as celebrated in Bruce’s spiral-bound history, was now, some said, on the chopping block.
Seeking the cause of all the commotion, Bruce scanned to his right and then he saw it. A huge alligator, legs churning, on a beeline toward the pond. The reptile looked like a high-tailed lizard running across hot desert sand. Between its crocodile-size teeth, a white poodle struggled, its collar studded with rhinestones and sequins.
As shocked to see the dog as he was to witness the gator, Bruce reached for his pistol. Yet his hand, as if in a dream, seemed to move in slow motion. And this gave the gator just enough time to slip by unmolested into the Blue Hole’s water, where it disappeared with Randy the dog.
Angry beyond words, Bruce thought surely he could wait it out. The thing must come up for air. But there was also the dog. What to do about that other than wait? So he did wait until the moon was high, its mellow light spread across the quiet surface of the pond.
After an hour in the moonlit darkness, Bruce, wearied by the weight of defeat, returned to the Ranger office. There he found Silverback in his desk chair, asleep and snoring, a Bible opened to the book of Revelation on his desk. As he came closer, he spotted a large yellow sticky note, which the office secretary, Mrs. Wiggins, had fixed to Silverback’s forehead. “Bruce,” it said, “the moment you read this, call that poor Mrs. Moczygemba and tell her, if God’s willed it, Randy’s alive and doing fine.”
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Craig Donegan
