I threw money at the table and pulled Anne out of her seat before it landed. We threaded through the tables too fast, and I ended up bumping into our hostess as we neared the door, knocking a stack of menus out of her hand. I yelled an apology over my shoulder, and she yelled something back at me, but I didn’t catch it. I’m sure it was nice, though.
Two seconds later I was standing by Anne’s passenger door trying hard not to yank at the handle as Anne fumbled with the keys. I was in the seat before the car’s unlock chirp faded from the night air, and moments later we were jerking backwards out of the parking space.
“What are we doing?” she asked, eyes darting between her windows and mirrors.
“Going back to my farm. Fast as you can.”
She threw the car onto the road before she started asking more questions. Anne would have made a great soldier. No hesitation and no arguing when taking action. Of course, if I knew anything about good soldiers, the latter would change at the first opportunity. We merged smoothly onto the long, empty highway before she spoke.
“It was the same men, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. I think that van was coming from my farm, and the men who killed your grandfather wouldn’t have had time to get there and back since we saw them. Was the smell the same?”
“Will you stop with that? I couldn’t have smelled anyone on the highway from inside the diner.”
“You smelled them right before you picked out the van. We both know it wasn’t the pie. It’s not even a smell, according to your grandfather, it’s just your brain trying to interpret information from a sense you don’t have an organ for. Now, was it the same?”
She paused to think. “I don’t think so. It was the same kind of smell, like garbage and swamp gas or something, but it was different than back at the home. Like bad fish and bad steak both smell like rotten food, but not like each other. Why?”
“Patty used to say that they all smelled different. He could always tell if the same one came creeping around.”
“The what came around? The baitbags or whatever?”
“Them, or things like them.” I shrugged in the dark car. “Unnatural things, I guess.”
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me! What does that mean, unnatural? They’re people, right? Why do you call them baitbags? Is that some kind of army slang?”
I glanced at the speedometer. She was keeping a steady but brisk eighty on the highway, even while she was frustrated and scared. Patty would have been proud.
“It’s a nickname that Shadroe came up with. Shad was with your grandfather and me in the squad.”
I looked out into the familiar darkness. Each day was different, but every night was the same one, stretching back forever. You might leave it during the daylight hours, but it was always there, waiting for you to come back.
“It was nighttime, and we were hunkered down in a farmhouse outside of Warsaw. The owners had left after artillery had blown off one corner of the building. At least I hope they left, there was part of a bedroom in that corner. Anyway, that had happened months before we got there.
“So we were trying to get out of the rain for the night in the part of the house that still had a roof, when somebody started shooting into the house. Well, wartime etiquette being what it was, we shot back. This went on, back and forth, for maybe ten minutes. Felt like an hour, easy.
“The funny thing was that we were pretty sure it was only one guy, and like a crazy person, he would come right up close to the house to shoot in through a window. We would wait, rifles pointing at all the windows we could see, and sometimes we would get a shot off just as his silhouette appeared. We’d swear that he was hit, but a couple of seconds later, he’d come right back up at another window. Never said a word. Just one guy running from window to window, shooting into the room, keeping us pinned down and helpless.
“Now don’t get me wrong, we were pretty hard by that point in the war, but it scared us. Shadroe threw down his rifle and pulled out a grenade. Yanked out the pin and tossed it away before we knew what he was doing. That should give you an idea of how scared he was. How scared we all were.
“He was planning on throwing that goddamn grenade out the window, but nobody in his right mind would even think of doing that. Miss that window by a hair, and that potato is going to bounce right back into your lap.
“So now we’re scared of the shooter outside and of Shad with the grenade inside. His face is all white and he’s trying to look at all the windows at once to see where the guy is. I’m thinking about tackling him to try and get the grenade away from him before he lets go of the spoon, because I know that if the shooter does pop up in a window, the grenade will just bounce off of him and roll back into us anyway.
“All of a sudden, Patty points at the wall and keeps pointing. He moves his finger slowly towards a window, and Shad tosses that grenade out of it right before the finger gets there.
“After the smoke clears, we run outside and we see the guy. That grenade must have practically landed at his feet, because he’s really tore up. I’ve seen guys blown to bits by every piece of bloody-minded ordinance you can think of, but this was worse. One of his legs was off and he was split all up the belly and chest. That part I expected. But the crazy part was that what spilled out of him wasn’t just his workings, it was something else, too.
“There were long black wormy things in there, and they were thrashing around like crazy in the open air. Jumping and flipping around like fish out of water, only faster and harder. Like a movie reel sped up. You could hear this kind of snapping sound when they whiplashed around in the mud.
“Shadroe said the guy must have been a lousy fisherman, because he ended up having to eat his bait, and we all broke up. I know it sounds crazy, standing in the rain and laughing at a dead guy, with those worms all over the place, but we laughed until we cried. After that, when Patty would point out that it was one of them, we’d call ‘em baitbags, cause they were just sacks of fishing bait on two legs.”
“Oh my God, that’s disgusting. What were they?”
“Dunno,” I lied. That conversation goes places that I haven’t talked about for sixty years. After tonight, only one other man besides me knows anything about them, and that’s plenty.
“But why don’t they stop when you shoot them? Is it because of the worms or whatever inside them?”
“I don’t know. But it’s not true that you can’t stop them by shooting them. The worms seem to need the brain to drive the body, so headshots work pretty well, and of course you can always slow them down by hitting them in the knees and hips. Pain won’t stop them, but they need joints to move, same as we do.” I didn’t tell her about my preferred way of dealing with bags. She was upset enough already.
She didn’t ask any more questions for the rest of the trip. The both of us just went quiet and listened to the wind and the engine, trying to keep the fragile feeling of calm intact. We were both hit pretty hard by Patty’s death, and everything else on top of that just seemed to make things spin around out of control. We sat there trying to keep it together and hoping the other wouldn’t bring the whole house of cards down with the wrong words.
It worked pretty well until we got within a mile of my farm. By then we could see the ruddy orange glow reflecting off of the low clouds overhead. It was a fire, and it looked like a big one. I could feel my heart clench up in my chest.