The Hollow Man

Wind in Dry Grass

Bremen’s duties were legion.

He had never visited a ranch before, never imagined the scope and variations of physical labor possible on a working ranch of some six thousand acres, surrounded, as this one was, by half a million acres of “national forest,” although there was hardly a tree in sight above the relatively wet canyonlands of the ranch proper. The physical labor, he found in the coming weeks, was not just daunting, it was a backbreaking, ball-breaking, blister-making, lung-racking, sweat-inducing, blood-and-taste-of-bile-in-the-mouth level of labor. When starting, as Bremen was, from the point of a malnourished, inactive, pale and pasty shadow of a skid-row alcoholic, the level of work expected took on new dimensions of challenge.

He had imagined ranch life—when he had ever thought of it at all—as a romantic horseback riding of range land, with short intervals of herding cattle or horses, perhaps fixing the occasional stretch of wire. He did not count on the maintenance tasks around the ranch itself, the postdawn feedings of animals ranging from geese around the lake to the exotic llamas Miz Morgan collected, the long excursions by Jeep to bring in strays, the endless tinkering with the machinery—vehicles, pumps, electric motors, the air-conditioning unit on the bunkhouse itself—not to mention the gory glories of castrating animals, hauling bloated lamb carcasses out of the stream after an overnight flood, shoveling manure out of the main barn. There was a lot of shovel work: digging postholes, digging trenches for the new sewer line, digging sixty feet of new feeder ditch for the irrigation canal, digging out Miz Morgan’s three-quarter-acre garden. Bremen spent hours each day on foot, in the new work boots Miz Morgan had him buy the first week, and more hours bouncing around in the dusty, open Jeep, but he never rode on horseback.

Bremen survived. The days were longer than any he had experienced since his undergraduate days at Harvard when he was trying to get a four-year degree in three years, but the dust and grit and barbed wire and muscle strain ended eventually with the sun setting behind the mountains to the west and then—while indigo shadows crept across the canyon and flowed down into the desert like slow wine—he would return to his bunkhouse, take a thirty-minute shower, fix a hot meal for himself, and collapse into bed before the coyotes started howling in the hills above the ranch. Bremen survived. The days turned into weeks.

There was a quiet here that was nothing like the true internal quiet of the Florida fishing shack; this silence was the deceptive calm at the eye of the storm. Indeed, the roar of Miz Morgan’s strange mindshield of raw, white noise made Bremen think of stepping out under white-tossed skies in the false calm of a hurricane’s center, where the only noise was the background rumble of the great winds pinwheeling around in their vortex of destruction.

The noise was welcome to Bremen. It shut out the dome of neurobabble that seemed to rise from the entire continent now: whispers, entreaties, shouts and declarations, midnight confessions to the soul of self, and violent justifications. The universe had been filled with these umber shiftings and selfish self-loathings, each wavelength darker than the last, but now there was only the white noise of Miz Fayette Morgan’s powerful personality.

Bremen needed it. He became addicted to it. Even the Thursday trip the twenty miles into town became a punishment for him, an exile he could not bear, as Miz Morgan’s protective wash of mindnoise faded and the neurobabble rushed in from either side, individual thoughts and hungers and desires and filthy little secrets slicing at him like so many razor blades to the eye and palate.

The bunkhouse was more than adequate for a home: it was air-conditioned for the August extremes of heat; its bed was comfortable, its kitchen impressive, its shower was fed by water from the holding pond half a mile uphill so the water never ran out, and it was situated in a private cul-de-sac between boulders so that the lights of the main hacienda were not visible. The bunkhouse even had a telephone, although Bremen could not call out; the phone line ran only to the hacienda and chimed when Miz Morgan wanted him to carry out some task that she had forgotten to list on the previous evening’s “work list”—a single sheet of lined, yellow paper that she would leave clipped to the bulletin board on the bunkhouse’s narrow porch.

Bremen quickly learned the areas out of bounds. He was not to approach the hacienda. The six dogs were well trained, they came to Miz Morgan in an instant when she shouted a command, but they were vicious. His third day at the ranch, Bremen watched them pull down a coyote that had made the mistake of coming too close in the wide pasture that ran down to the stream. The dogs had worked as a team, like wolves, surrounding and hamstringing the poor confused coyote before pulling him down and finishing him.

He was not to go anywhere near the “cold house,” a low cinderblock building set back behind the boulders near the hacienda. The cold house held a cylindrical water tank on its roof and Miz Morgan had explained that first day that the fifteen-hundred-gallon tank was for fire only; she had pointed out the heavy-duty hoses and couplings at the side of the cold house. These also were out-of-bounds for hired help, unless personally directed there by Miz Morgan.

Bremen knew from the first day’s tour that the cold house had its own generator, and he could sometimes hear it chugging in the night. Miz Morgan explained that she liked to dress out her own beef and the game that she brought back from her weekly hunting forays into the hills, and that the cold house held thousands of dollars’ worth of prime meat. She had had problems—first with power outages that ruined a fortune’s worth of beef, then with hired hands who felt that they could help themselves to a side or two of beef before departing in the night. Miz Morgan allowed no one to approach the cold house now, she said, and the dogs were trained to attack any intruder who even went up the stone walk toward the heavily padlocked doors.

Days blended into weeks for Bremen, and he soon fell into a mindless cycle of toil and sleep, punctuated only by his silent meals and his ritual of watching the sunset from the front porch of the bunkhouse. The few forays into town grew increasingly unpleasant because he was out of range of Miz Morgan’s white noise and the razor blades of random thought slashed at his mind. As if sensing this, Miz Morgan began doing the Thursday shopping herself, and after his third week there Bremen never left the ranch.

One day, seeking one of the belted Galloways that had not come down to the main pasture, Bremen came upon the abandoned chapel. It sat up behind the hogback ridge, its flesh-colored walls half-hidden among flesh-colored rocks. The roof was gone—not merely tumbled in, but gone—and the wooden shutters, wooden doors, and wooden pews had rotted to dry dust and largely blown away.

The wind blew through the paneless window sockets. A tumbleweed moved across the pile of bones where the altar once had been.

Bones.

Bremen moved closer, crouching in the shifting dust to study the pile of bright, white artifacts. Bones, brittle and pitted and near petrified. Bremen was fairly sure that most of them were the bones of cattle—he saw a heifer-sized rib cage here, a cow-length xylophone of vertebrae there, even a Georgia O’Keeffe clichéd skull sunken in the tumble—but there were so many of them. It was as if someone had piled the corpses here, on the altar, until the altar collapsed under the weight of so much dead and decaying meat.

Bremen shook his head and walked back to the Jeep. The wind rattled dry twigs over the unmarked graves out behind the chapel.

Returning from the south range in the Jeep that same late-summer evening, Bremen saw someone up by the cold house. He slowed while driving by the barn, not approaching the cold house itself, but curious. There were no dogs out.

Fifteen yards away, along the side of the cold house where the array of hoses ran down from the water tank, Miz Fayette Morgan was bathing under a shower arranged from the fire hose on low with a sprinkler head attached. For a second Bremen did not recognize her with her hair wet and plastered back and her face turned to the spray. Her arms and throat were tanned; the rest of her was very, very white. Droplets of water on her pale skin and dark pubic hair caught the evening light. As he watched, Miz Morgan turned off the water and reached for a towel. She saw Bremen in his Jeep and she froze, one hand on the towel, half-turned toward him. She said nothing. She did not cover herself with the towel.

Embarrassed, Bremen nodded and drove on. In the side mirror of the Jeep he caught a glimpse of Miz Morgan still standing there, her skin very white against the flaked green of the cold house. She had not yet covered herself and she was watching him.

Bremen drove on.

That night Bremen drifted to sleep, the air-conditioning off, the screenless windows open to let the dead desert air creep in, and awoke to the first of the visions.

He awoke to the sound of violin strings being stretched and scratched at by carious teeth. Bremen sat up in bed and blinked at the violet light flooding the room through the swinging shutters.

The shadows near the ceiling were whispering. At first Bremen thought it was neurobabble slicing through the protective blanket of Miz Morgan’s white noise, but this was not mindtouch sound, merely … sound. The shadows near the ceiling were whispering.

Bremen pulled the damp sheet up over himself, knuckles white against white cotton. The shadows were moving, separating themselves from the whispers and sliding lower along walls gone suddenly and totally black in the violent surges of stormlight through the windows.

Bats came down the walls. Bats with baby faces and obsidian eyes. They whistled and beat their wings as they came.

Outside, in the violet rage, bells tolled and a multitude of voices sang dirges from empty cisterns. Somewhere close by, perhaps from under Bremen’s bed, a rooster crowed, and then the sound died off to the rattle of bones in a dry cup.

The bats with baby faces crawled head downward until they tumbled onto Bremen’s bed like so many wriggling rats with leathery wings and sharp infant smiles.

Bremen screamed as the lightning stirred and the thunder dragged ahead of the rain like a heavy curtain scraping across old boards.

The next day Bremen did not eat, as if fasting would cure a feverish mind. There was no phone call from Miz Morgan, no morning note tacked to the bulletin board outside.

Bremen went south to the edge of the ranch, as far from the hacienda as he could get, and dug postholes for the new stretch of fence that would run between the woods and the pond. White noise roared around him.

On the eleventh hole, almost three feet down, his postholer bit into a face.

Bremen dropped to his knees. The dirt in the jaws of the postholer was soft, red clay. There was a bit of brown flesh and white bone there, too. Bremen took his spade and spread the hole wider, opening it out into a cone-shaped pit.

The face and skull were arched backward, almost separated from the white-wedged bones of neck and collar, as if the buried man had been trying to swim up through the soil toward air. Bremen dug out the grave as carefully as any archaeologist who had ever widened an excavation. There were tatters of brown cloth across the crushed rib cage. Bremen found bits and pieces of the left hand where the swimmer had raised it; the right hand was missing.

Bremen set the skull in the back of the Jeep and drove back toward the ranch, changing his mind just before coming into sight of the hacienda and heading up and around the hogback ridge to sit awhile and listen to the wind through the chapel windows.

When he got back to his bunkhouse at sunset, the phone was ringing.

Bremen crawled into bed, turned his face to the rough wall, and let it ring. After several minutes the noise stopped.

Bremen covered his ears with the palms of his hands, but the mindnoise continued like a great, white wind from nowhere. After it grew dark and the insect sounds from down by the stream and up by the cold house began in earnest, Bremen rolled over, half expecting the phone to ring again.

It was silent. Next to it, oddly luminescent in a sliver of moonlight through the shutters, the skull watched him from its place on the plank table. Bremen did not remember carrying it in.

It was somewhere closer to midnight than dawn when the phone did ring. Bremen studied it a moment, only half-awake, thinking for a confused second that it was the skull that was calling him.

He padded across rough boards in bare feet. “Hello?”

“Come up to the house,” whispered Miz Morgan. In the background Bremen could hear a muffled stereo sounding like voices singing in dry cisterns. “Come up to the house now,” she said.

Bremen put down the phone and went out the door and up through the moonlight toward the sound of baying hounds.