Red Mass

The horses got out sometime around midnight by Bobbie’s estimation.  The barn door showed no sign of being forced open and her theory was that Dylan hadn’t latched it.  Mrs. Decker had called Bobbie about 1 saying one of her palominos was hiding under the eave of her garage.  Poor Bobbie spent the rest of that storm driving around gathering up all the horses. 

Not like Bobbie was getting any sleep anyway. I sure wasn’t.  I spent the night sweating, huddled under three comforters for protection. Every single thunderclap shook my house like a meteor strike, like a giant’s footsteps. Beams groaned in the wind.  Windowpanes rattled.  I couldn’t blame those horses for getting spooked.  At one point I even tried to take off, head downstairs away from the lightning and the hail and wind throwing shorn leaves and sticks against my window,  my parents were already on the couch, as was their habit during bad storms because Mom was always convinced the huge tree outside their bedroom was going to blow over and crush them.

I remember that night so clearly.  I remember so much of what happened before, and so clearly. What came after makes up the bigger part of my life by now, and yet from then to now I barely remember anything.  Nothing seems to stick.  

Bobbie worked through the night. By noon the next day all the horses were all accounted for except an American Paint mare named Nibbles.  I was the one who ended up finding Nibbles.  I was walking along the river in the bright still of afterstorm seeing what had changed. The river had swelled out of its bed and the rushing water had shorn huge globs of soil away from the banks.  There was probably a good two feet missing all around. I would gingerly lay my foot on the edge and heavy waterlogged chunks, glistening like flesh, would tumble in.  I rounded a bend coming to a familiar shady creek bed and there was Nibbles.  

She had probably run in somewhere upriver and drowned.  The current had carried her body down river a ways until it lodged here.  Couldn’t have been dead very long but the smell was already powerful. It didn’t smell sour like when meat goes bad in the fridge – there was a muddy, swampy overtone to the smell, a smell that coated my nose with guck and made my lungs feel heavier. I stayed there looking at her body for a long time.  There was something I couldn’t pick out – some slackness in her limbs, or the already-apparent bloat of her trunk in the midday sun, which was ever so slightly misaligning her proportions, changing her form, her category.  

Sheriff Holder came out right away. I met him in the gravel lot at the head of the walking trail and he used his skeleton key to unlock the steel dividers.  “Parks department folks were swamped,” he said apologetically.  We drove down the trail and I pointed out the spot Holder needed to turn off and we followed the creek through the woods. 

 “Well, that’s some shit,” Holder said when he saw it.  He was a little bleary.  He’d spent the night in the sheriff’s office because it was expected of him, which of course meant long stretches without much to pass the time with except a bottle of Black Velvet he kept inside the ammo locker.  His young deputy Colton had been there too and Holder had roped him into the festivities.  It seemed Colton couldn’t handle his liquor as well as Holder. When the smell hit him he stopped dead like he’d just walked into a chain link fence.  “Ugh” he groaned.  

Holder went back to his truck and made some calls over the walkie.  He leaned out the window and told me to skedaddle.  “Thanks for letting us know kid but we can handle things from here.” I had no intention of leaving now and I don’t think he really expected that I would, but I got the hint and scurried back into the woods a ways, finding a wide oak trunk to hide behind and peep from afar.  

Bobbie showed up first.  Nibbles was a favorite of hers, a sweetheart, the one picked each year to teach all the first year 4-H campers how to groom since she always stood there like a saint on the pillory and let those kids’ inexpert brushings scour her skin half off without chuffing or nipping them even once. Bobbie was pissed.  “I’m gonna fuckin kill that kid,” she said. 

Another truck pulled up soon after, the only help Holder was able to rustle up. The big F-350 had Department of Natural Resources markings on the side and a big winch on its front bumper.  The mulleted driver took the truck up to the very edge of the riverbank. The weight on that soft soil crumbled it under the truck’s front tires like a cake beneath an elephant’s foot.  “The hell you doin?!” shouted Holder. Frantically the driver threw the truck into reverse and tried to back up before he tumbled into the river.  The tires threw up a solid wall of pudding-soft mud seven feet tall in front, completely drenching Bobbie and Colton as well as Nibbles’ corpse. After a few heartstopping moments the truck just barely managed to claw its way back to safety.  

Once the truck was on sure footing the driver stepped out and got a horse sling from Bobbie.  The four walked down the bank to Nibbles and tried to wrap her up.  This was harder than it looked at first.  Nibbles was jammed into the creekbed in an awkward position and no matter what they did they couldn’t get the sling completely around her.  At one point they had to sling just her front legs to try to lift her up to get enough room to slide the sling further down her flank.  This took a couple tries to get right.  

To make matters more complicated Nibbles was lying on her left side and her left hind leg was sunk into the soft mud almost halfway up her thigh.  The mud was like quicksand and created a vacuum that pulled back harder and harder every time they tried to pull the leg out.  Their efforts made reverberant sucking noises, loud enough to carry over to where I was.  They must have tried pulling and rotating that leg this way and that for nearly an hour.

Finally they settled on a plan suggested by Colton, who was only a few years out of Boy Scouts and vaguely remembered a lesson on how to get out of quicksand.  They had to pull directly opposite the direction the leg stuck in, going slowly in many stages to let the mud fill in underneath the hoof. Doing this required the DNR man to move his truck parallel to the bank, and he almost fell in again.  

 The truck’s engine rumbled to a start and the winch made a high whine as it started up.  The cable went taut.  I scrambled over to a clearing to get a better view of Nibbles through the trees.  The cable went chk-chk-chk as it tightened.  I saw Nibbles’ body twitch and flex upward as if she’d been animated by electricity.  I heard another loud sucking noise as the creek bed fought the winch, refusing to give up its prey.  

The driver eased his foot onto the gas pedal, adding the truck’s pull to the winch’s.  Holder motioned him with his hands to proceed slowly.  The horse’s body gave a small jerk and a bit of cable retracted.  Holder was pressing his flattened hand down again indicating more gas.  

The driver pumped the gas and in one fluid motion Nibbles’ leg separated from her flank. The skin opened up as neatly as a slice of cheese pulled in half. Bones cracked and ligaments tore and flesh rent and blood vessels snapped and a long gouge appeared on the skin of Nibbles’ belly and flank releasing hundreds of pounds of dead greasy-looking innards which spilled in a pile and threw fluids everywhere within a twenty-foot radius.  Poor Colton completely lost it and began puking full-body heaves, leaning over with his legs spread and his head between his knees going “HUAAAAAH! HUAAAAAAAAAHAHAUGH”.  The vomit was a smooth salmon color and the consistency of pancake batter, and it splattered over the mud coating his shirt and made a long trail as it floated down the river to mix with the blood and goo that was already painting the bank downstream. 

“Oh God!” shouted Bobbie.  She pointed at Nibbles’ intestines.  Coating the long rubbery tubes were patches of an off-white substance, vaguely the same color and texture as cottage cheese and as the intestines began unraveling in the river’s current the stuff was already coming loose, floating down the river getting lost among the heaps of foam kicked up by the storm.  

“That’s TB!” shouted Holder, motioning everyone away.  “Horses don’t get TB!” Bobbie answered. “What the hell is that?” 

You can probably guess what happened next.  The water around the cottage cheese blobs began to turn red, not red like blood but red like red house paint, and the red patches grew and spread out further and further from the blobs. In quite a short amount of time the waters around Holder’s and Bobbie’s feet were a deep red.  They were standing in that stuff up to their knees. It’s so weird to think about now.  I’m getting anxiety shivers just remembering it.   

“What do you think is going on with this stuff?” Holder asked.  “It’s going against the current.” Bobbie dipped her hands into the water and pulled out a large clump. The red mass was soft and sinewy, moist and seemingly run through with millions of tiny strings and filaments, like overcooked angel hair pasta, like grated ginger root.  Though it could obviously move on its own it sifted through Bobbie’s fingers and hung limp in her palm.  

  Colton was standing a fair distance away on the tail end of the process of unloading his guts into the river.  A long string of viscous vomity spit connected the river with his mouth.  Before anyone even noticed that the red mass was spreading over to his area the stuff had mounted the spit string and surged into his mouth.  The effect was immediate.  “Ugh! Ugh!” he cried.  He had to have gotten a couple ounces of the stuff in his mouth.  He clawed his hands and scratched his throat frantically.  

“What’s wrong?” demanded Bobbie.  Colton tried to answer and instead of words a saucer-sized glob of blood flew out of his mouth and landed in the river.  He coughed and bent over, wheezing, face turning purple.  He lost consciousness and fell right into Nibbles’ torn-out midsection, tangling himself up in her intestines.  Holder jumped to assist him, and as his leg flew out of the water I could see his exposed ankle where his sock rode down was covered with the red mass.  Bobbie looked at her own shorts-clad legs and there was red matted on them straight up and down.  She shrieked and tried to claw the red off.  She rubbed and clawed with her fingernails and got some sort of tool out of her pocket and tried to pry it off.  The tool came away bloody.  Large sheets were ripped away but Bobbie’s shins and calves were still wallpapered with red. 

I rushed over to them.  The mulleted truck driver came with me. “Don’t come any closer!” Sheriff Holder warned.  “Don’t get it on you!” Bobbie collapsed into the river sitting on the bottom, lifting one leg to scratch at it frantically.  The mass seemed to be tightening somehow, squeezing blood out – Bobbie’s frenzied movements were making blood droplets rain into the river.  Holder grimaced in pain but tried with all his might to stay upright as he stumbled toward the river bank.  I glanced over at Colton lying inside Nibbles’ abdomen.  He was completely still and the red mass was growing outwards in a ring around his mouth like mold climbing out of a drain.  Meanwhile Nibbles’ cavity was invaded by the mass.  

The driver had doubled back and was now hollering into his walkie.  I looked at him for some sort of clue as to what to do.  The look he shot me was so dazed, so displaced, the mute electric fear of the prey animal in dire flight. His eyes were like two white holes in the world.  I turned around without another word and sprinted back to my parents, hovering at least five feet above the forest floor, zooming ahead insensate to uneven ground and logs that tripped, whanging my thigh on this, jamming a pinky toe on that. 

Over the coming days and weeks I kept what happened on the back burner. I barked out my story to my parents as soon as I flew in the door.  They were confused to say the least and by the time the strage outside events began to convince them there was something to what I was saying, it was too late to get the word out to anyone who could do anything.  They’re both gone now.  Barely lasted a week.  

From then on I decided to keep it all to myself.  What if people blamed me, I thought. What if they were right to do it.  Logically I knew that someone else would have found the horse. Either that or she would have rotted away eventually and let all that shit into the river.  It’s no one’s fault.  I didn’t put it in her.   But who would see it that way?  So I sat on it.

  I figure it’s safe now.  No one’ll take me seriously anyway.  Just file me away as another crank full of bullshit and pet theories.  And even if I’m believed, what’s the use of holding a grudge now?  

That happened outside Redfield, a little town on the Raccoon River.  Flows into the Des Moines river where it’s the main drinking water reservoir for the Des Moines metro area, 600 thousand souls.  Or was.  From then on into the Mississippi and once that happened it was all over.