Reverend Red and the Wildcats by Susan Falco

March 2021

The sound of claws on metal sickened him. Reverend Red was rocking in his Lazy Boy when he heard it rise from beneath his feet. He realized his poison had failed to kill them. Two wildcats, the old Tom missing one eye, had been tearing around under the trailer’s foundation for three nights now. He didn’t know what they wanted. Thirsty and trying to reach the water in the pipes? Claiming the space as their den? Mating? The noise sounded like demons trying to come up through the floor.

Red took the shotgun from above the door and stepped into the rain, droplets glowing red under the porch’s bulb. He stooped down to look underneath the trailer. Three red eyes shone back at him, as if from a single creature. He stumbled backward, then fired two shots into the sky. He hoped the noise would scare the motherfuckers off. What were they doing down there? What did they want with him? It made no sense. Or it made too much sense.

The kids should be here by now. Red propped the door so he could watch for the cats while he waited. Waiting was hell for an old man in pain, so he made a game out of trying to follow the path of a single red-lit raindrop. He always lost sight of it. The sickness was setting in, coming on mean. Waves of fever heat would build under his skin and sweat that smelled like fear seeped from his pores. The sweat would chill his skin, goosebumps pricking up. His muscles trembled as if shot through with electricity. Electric like a life force perverted, something sick and cruel. Tears and mucous rolled over his lips, but his hand was too heavy to wipe his face. He yawned again and again. His jaw ached with the effort but he still couldn’t fill his lungs. Bouts of compulsive sneezing racked his body.

The kids were bringing him pain pills from the Dark Web. The Dark Web. It sounded like something he might have written a sermon about in the old days, when his congregation hung on his words. Those were good days. Before he knew who he was and who was really walking beside him. Jesus would be leaving no footprints at his side. Deer were common enough, but sometimes when he saw their cloven tracks in the dust it looked like proof. Proof of the one who walked alongside him, carrying him when he was weak. The Reverend Red had not preached in many years, his fall from grace a story the town tried to forget out of respect for his mother and father. They tried to forget because of their shame at having had any part of his story. Red’s parents were Decent People, and small towns are proud of their decency. The ways of the town had been steadfast for centuries. They went to church every Sunday, held their judgments tight and silent behind their eyes. They looked away and allowed Red his plot of dirt.

Maybe it was spite that kept him going, but Red was unkillable. He’d inject cocaine till his ears rang and his vision went black, then he’d do it again. He chewed Fentanyl patches like breath strips, ate Little Debbie’s, and never filled his insulin. He provoked the violent and insane, and yet Red lived and lived and lived. It was as if Death was too disgusted to call on him. Red’s continued existence made even the most faithful person start to ask questions about God and His methods.

Every minute that passed he hated the kids a little more, but he forgave them as soon as their red headlights swung through the rain, bouncing over the railroad tracks. Red leaped up like a child waiting for gifts, raising the shotgun in a salute. He laughed when he saw them jump back, eyes wide.

“The look on your faces!” he laughed, “This is for them cats, not you. If I wanted you you’d never see me coming.”

The kids pale and lanky, something flat behind their eyes. They looked like brother and sister, androgynous wraiths. They were still young enough to have an angelic prettiness to their features. Red had not looked at his own eyes in the mirror for a long time. He used a toilet brush to scrub his back. The brush came in a novelty demon-skull-shaped holder. Who were these things made for? Other people like him? Was the commercial viability of demon-skull toilet bowl cleaners an argument against the existence of God’s grace?

The kids saw that Red’s eyes were small and red-veined, vague in color, set in fatty folds of skin. While his mouth smiled, his eyes never did. They filed in, blank-faced as bureaucrats. The girl looked up into the glass eye of the taxidermy Gar hanging over the rifle rack. The fish’s mouth bristled with fangs, smiling primly.

“Hurtin’ bad, huh?” she said, addressing the fish. There was a fetus in formaldehyde to the right of the Gar. She hoped it was a Halloween prop from the flea market the Reverend had loved so much.

Red had loved the Super-Flea before he got barred from the premises: he had invited an 11-year-old girl into his car and drove her off the property. He said he wanted to buy her cotton candy. He said she looked mature. To himself, he thought she was a shameless tease. He would have taught her shame.

“Hurtin’ for sure,” Red replied. “I’d like to get to business.”

They followed him down the dark hall. He sat on the toilet seat and examined his veins like a fortune teller, the flesh purplish and raised with scars under the fluorescent bulbs. Sunken lines mapped where abscesses or collapsed veins had required surgery over the years. Red looked up at the girl, held out one of his shaking hands. “Will you do it for me? I don’t think I can hit anything like this.”

She went to the kitchen and gathered two spoons, a lighter, alcohol, cotton, and a syringe while the boy exchanged a roll of cash for a cigarette cellophane filled with tiny blue pills. “How many now?” she asked. Red held up a hand, five fingers extended as if in blessing.

“Five? Are you sure?” The tablets were 80 milligrams.

“Christ, child!” he sputtered, “What do you know about me, what I need?”

“Shhh, shhh,” she said. After using two spoons to crush the tablets between them, she added water, held the flame, and watched as the mixture came to a gentle boil. Smell of hot metal and the ghost of poppies. She rolled a cotton filter, drew up the liquid, and swabbed the veins on the back of his hands with alcohol. His papery skin reminded her of her grandmother’s hands. Red closed his eyes as if waiting for forgiveness, or transcendence. A bright ribbon of blood swirled back into the syringe. The sight of the red ribbon made her stomach clench in envy. Depressing the plunger, she watched as the wave of peace spread gently through his nervous system.

“Thank you,” he whispered before his head slumped over. They closed the door gently as they left.

Alone in his trailer, they looked around. Since Reverend Red had lost his congregations, he had changed his spiritual allegiances. He’d go to flea markers every weekend and come home with overflowing bags of bizarre artifacts, anything that had a look of evil about it. Despite his naïve sense of what “evil” looked like, the trailer had become deeply fascinating. Disfigured dolls, taxidermy, pentagrams, and erotica from other centuries glowed under the red lightbulbs. The smells of his smoke and dirt and disease permeated the space. The irony behind his horror-movie aesthetic was that Red was not playing at being a bad man. It looked like theatre, but the house had teeth and claws. Red still collected angels strung around the trailer, their porcelain faces so pink they looked feverish. Their round painted eyes looked wide with worry.

Sitting in the TV room waiting for Red to come to, the boy began to flip through a large-print Bible. “And woman shall be subservient to man as if he were her master,” he read.

“Ugh,” the girl said, “Find me something pretty,” the girl said. “Try Psalms, mama used to read from those.”

The boy looked up and straightened his back, “The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit.”

The sound of claws on metal vibrated the floor. Something was moving underneath their feet. They leapt to their feet as one body.

“Fuck this,” the boy said, “I’ll check on Red.”

Red was nodded out on the toilet but breathing. The noise shuddered underneath them. They took two tablets out of Red’s bag without waking him. The boy injected first himself and then the girl. He kissed the top of her hair and the three of them huddled in the bathroom for a while like that, hiding in the light. Then the scratching came back directly beneath them, as if it had followed them to the bathroom. It sounded as if it might break through the thin vinyl flooring.

“It’s those wildcats he had the shotgun out for,” the boy said in a reasonable voice.

“But what do they want? Why do they want in here so fucking bad?” she asked.

They looked at Red’s body still slumped on the toilet. The boy held out his hand to check for a pulse, breathing, something, but the girl caught his wrist. “No one knows we’re here,” she said.

“No one knows we’re here,” he repeated.

As they spoke, the rain started up louder.

“We should leave,” the boy said, “stupid to stay as long as we have.”

“But how about that noise?” the girl asked. “Is something trapped under there? Is something trying to come in from the rain?”

The boy furrowed his brow, “Yeah, baby, probably.” He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. “But don’t it sound like it was coming from somewhere real deep? Like the very center of the earth?”

The girl lit a cigarette. “It sounds like it's just about to break through.”

When the shrieking sound of claws rending metal started up again, they ran for the car. As the car peeled out across the wet gravel, the girl saw three red eyes watching her from underneath the trailer. Two animals, she knew. One with its head turned in profile. But it seemed that the three eyes watched her as one. She knew that whatever it was, it knew her, recognized her. As they sped away, she couldn’t shake the fear that if she listened closely, she’d hear the beast calling her name.

Susan Falco is a writer living in the Little Haiti district of Miami, FL. When asked if, in life, a plot tends to find you or you tend to find a plot, she answered that you are the plot: your fatal flaws shape your fate.