“But it’s not an animal,” I tell her. “It’s a threshing machine. Granted, they may very well be torturing that threshing machine.”
Jenny does not appreciate my attempt at levity.
“I’m not kidding, Mark,” she says. Her facial expression confirms this.
Jenny is one of those women whose sympathy for living things is unconditional. Any time a dog or cat is discovered lost in the neighborhood, she champions the effort for its safe return, printing fliers and insisting we house it until the owners can be contacted. We’ve acquired two cats this way, Boomer and Travis. Once, Jenny found an injured fox pup in the front yard. She built it a nest in a cardboard box and nursed it back to health.
“You’re such a caring soul,” I tell her.
“It’s my maternal instinct,” she says, looking everywhere except at me.
“Would you like me to go over to Rolson’s and ask what’s going on? Because I will, if it will make you feel better,” I tell her.
She says no, and I am relieved.
The Rolson Meth Lab is a dilapidated white farmhouse. The paint is peeling and the front porch is bowed. It is, even for a passerby, a place of unsettling noises and smells, some human, some not. Chet Rolson is the only full-time resident. Sometimes there’s a woman around: Chet’s girlfriend. Shortly after we moved in, the couple had a series of loud and upsetting fights that once ended with police intervention, but no charges pressed. Things have been quiet between them lately though. There’s a pair of shifty looking dudes who hang around on the front steps most days, others who come and go, and, from time to time, a middle school-aged boy with a BMX bike. We believe this is Chet’s son. That Chet Rolson could have partial custody of a kid is horrifying to me. Doubly so to Jenny, who has suggested we call Child Protective Services, but worries we won’t be able to provide sufficiently damning evidence to warrant investigation. All we have is speculation and conjecture. What actually goes on at Chet Rolson’s house is a mystery to us.
Needless to say, we’re pretty sure he’s making meth in there.
I don’t want to give the impression we live in a dodgy part of town. I’ve been in Indiana for seven years and it seems to me our rural suburb is pretty much the same as every other suburb in this predominantly rural state. I imagine an aerial view must look like someone puked up Monopoly pieces in a field. There’s no real sense of planning or consistency. Clapboard houses sit at varying distances from Derring Street, our main thoroughfare. Behind the homes on our side of the street runs a sprawling corporate soybean farm. Our immediate neighbors to the right, the Wengers, keep chickens. In our own backyard, Jenny has cultivated a truly excellent garden. Jenny and I moved here from Bloomington shortly after we got married. We bought the biggest house we could afford with the intention of “growing into it.” Three years later, it’s still just the two of us, plus the cats.
The Rolson Meth Lab aside, our neighbors are a quiet and drama-free crowd. They’re almost all large families, with the exception of the Wengers who are, like Jenny and me, a childless couple. But being well into their sixties, people have probably stopped asking them all the fucking time when they plan to reproduce.
Tom and Darcy Wenger invite Jenny and me over for Sunday lunch every week after church even though we don’t go to church. “Come by after church and we’ll put together a little spread,” Darcy says each Sunday morning, appearing on our porch, presumably on her way to the local house of the Lord. “Okay,” we say, “will do.” Lunch is always lovely and our absence at church is never discussed. It has recently occurred to me that maybe the Wengers don’t go either.
The Rolson Meth Lab is a hot topic with the Wengers. Chet Rolson’s property borders theirs on the other side and they are privy to all sorts of oddity that stays under the radar for the rest of Derring Street.
“I’m sure you’ve been hearing all that howling going on,” Darcy says almost as soon as we sit down to eat. “It must be keeping the whole block up half the night.”
Her use of the word “howling” signals to me that she, too, has pegged the sound as animal. This conversation will follow Jenny and me home, I’m certain. I want to change the subject, but I know it won’t do any good. Darcy always finds a path back to talking about whatever she wants to talk about.
“That man, I swear, it’s always something,” Darcy says.
Jenny stops eating her egg salad sandwich and leans forward. “Do you know what it is? What’s making the sound?” she asks.
“No,” says Darcy, “but there’s a cage.”
Jenny puts her hand to her mouth.
“I’m positive he’s got a creature locked up back there,” Darcy continues, though I wish she wouldn’t. “Me personally, I think it sounds like a lion.”
“It’s not a lion,” Tom says.
“Tom’s been on safari and he says that’s not what a lion sounds like,” Darcy says, “but I got a glimpse of it over the fence the other day. I think a lion probably has different cries in captivity than it does out in the wild. Don’t you think, Tom?”
“It’s not a lion,” Tom replies with his usual curtness. The man is the picture-perfect Middle American husband. Hard working, silent, long-faced, he may well have been the model for “American Gothic,” if the picture featured a curly-haired gossip for the farmer’s bride.
“Can we have a look at the cage?” Jenny asks.
“Of course, hon,” Darcy says, as sweet as if Jenny had just requested seconds on pie.
Single-file, the four of us walk out the Wengers’ back door to the tall picket fence that divides the two properties. We line up, faces pressed to the fence’s slats. I imagine Darcy doing this every afternoon, making tsking sounds and taking mental notes on the Rolson crew’s comings and goings to share with the rest of the neighborhood.
There’s a shed and some patchy grass dotted with a few pieces of rusted farming tools.
“Look, Jenny,” I say. “I think that thing on the far left is a threshing machine.”
She hisses at me to be quiet even though there’s no one around except the Wengers to hear me.
“See back by the trees?” Darcy says. “That’s where the cage is.”
Sure enough, tucked between a cluster of maple trees and half covered with a blue tarp is a big damn cage, all metal with wrist-thick bars. It looks like the kind circus animals get carted around in, like the cartoons on Animal Crackers boxes. From our vantage point at the fence, the interior of the cage is dark and still. It could hold a large, violent, angry animal. It also could be empty.
“How long has the cage been there?” I ask. “Has it maybe just always been there?”
“Oh Lord, I have absolutely no idea,” Darcy admits.
At home, Jenny is distressed.
“What if it escapes?” she wants to know.
“What if what escapes from where?”
“Mark, we’re not playing this game anymore,” she says.
I remind her we don’t know for certain that there’s anything in the cage.
“Who keeps a cage without an animal inside?”
“Who keeps cars without wheels and tractors that don’t run? Same guy.”
“It’s not safe,” she says. “It’s not safe and it’s not humane and it’s not right.”
I have no answer to this.
“We should call animal control,” she says.
“And