The cop motions me over to the curb in front of number twenty-two. He’s a funny-looking creature in a Kevlar shell whose precise movements give the impression he’s still doing drills at the police academy. He skitters to the car as I roll down the window.
Sorry sir but you have to turn back.
But this is my street.
There’s been an incident.
A TV news van rolls up and the cop smiles and waves it along. I watch the bulging-eye logo brush past the cop, and looking further up the street, I see that my yard has been cordoned off by yellow tape.
Wait a sec’. I open my door and step onto the pavement. That’s my house. What’s going on?
The cop raises his hands in a placating gesture but I’ve pushed past him and am breaking into a trot. The cop pulls out a big radio and, while the antenna is still bobbing back and forth, he calls his sergeant. Uh … we’ve gotta man comin’ t’wardsya … Static. Then more talk. But it’s indistinct and fades as I approach my house and leave the cop standing by the open door of my car.
There are five police cruisers scattered at crazy angles in front of my house and their lights are flashing and their radios are blaring. They’ve strung yellow tape around my yard using trees and shrubs and the fire hydrant and a couple of my kids’ hockey sticks as supports. Neighbours have gathered just beyond the tape and they’re speculating amongst themselves the way neighbours are inclined to do and it reminds me that Mister Rogers didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Standing in the middle of this group is the Brandt kid from two streets over, a greasy worm of a thing who looks as if his camcorder is glued to his eyeball. The house seems fine—no broken windows or forced doors, no smoke billowing into the sky, no trampled flowers or spilled pots of earth.
Then I notice two CSI types grubbing around on the front lawn taking pictures with their expensive DSLR’s and then using long pincers to drop evidence into clear plastic baggies. When I look closer, I nearly heave. The evidence they’re pulling from the front lawn is bloodied bone fragments and tufts of hair. Because it’s evening and the light is low, I didn’t notice at first, but now, as my eyes adjust, I see that the yard is also littered with shreds of fabric—like what happens to Kleenex when it goes through the wash. Some of the fabric comes from socks and some of it comes from underwear and some from jeans and jackets and T-shirts.
Another cop approaches me. He looks more senior because he has a bushier mustache. You live here?
Ya.
We don’t really know yet what happened. Alls we know is that something happened. One of your neighbours heard some noises and phoned it in—some whirring, then some screaming, then—the sergeant refers to notes in a black notebook he holds flipped open in his left hand—uh, and I quote: “a ripping, tearing, shredding sound—some chomping and belching—then silence for a second and then more whirring.” When your neighbour came out there was nothing much to see—just some stuff scattered across your front lawn. Tell me, Mr. … uh …
Barker
Mr. Barker. Do you know where your children are?
I shrug. I guess I do. Usually they’re home from school by now. But the sergeant wants to be sure so he holds up the tape for me. I duck under it and we walk together to the front door. Behind us, the Brandt kid sneaks underneath too and follows us up the walkway yelling Mister Mister and tugging at the police sergeant’s sleeve.
The sergeant turns to him with a scowl. Not now kid. I’m busy with important police stuff. And we leave the kid standing on the front porch.
Things look normal inside the house. The fridge door is wide open and I explain to the sergeant that both my boys have ADD; they’re pretty scatter-brained. In the living room the TV is on, and while normally I expect the sergeant would be walking from room to room carrying a flashlight, there’s no need because the kids have left the lights on in every room. I’ll have to give them yet another lecture on energy conservation as soon as I find them. We go downstairs to the rec’ room. I don’t understand why but the sergeant checks under the sofa cushions and peers inside the bar fridge. We go into the work room where the sergeant whips out his notebook and writes detailed notes about all the different brands of pesticides I keep above my work bench. There’s chlordane and Raid and Off and flypaper and roach motels and ant traps and aphid dust for the rose bushes and a special soap you can spray on houseplants. Upstairs we go into each of the bedrooms and I remember too late that I’ve left something embarrassing in the master bedroom. Oh, well. The sergeant is a mature adult and he’ll understand. Finally we go into each bathroom and the sergeant checks under each toilet seat. This puzzles me since it’s unlikely we’ll find either of my boys hiding under a toilet seat. So I ask why the sergeant did this and he’s straight with me: it has nothing to do with the investigation; he’s got OCD and feels compelled to look underneath sofa cushions and toilet seats. It’s just one of those things.
In the front hall, the sergeant says that clearly the boys aren’t in the house so we’ll have to start canvassing the neighbours. When we step outside, the Brandt kid is waiting for us with his Mister Mister and his insistent tugging at our sleeves. Leave us alone kid. We got work to do. ‘Sides which you’re supposed to be on the other side of that tape.
Kids these days!
Mister Mister I know what happened to the Barker boys.
The sergeant kneels and asks for more.
Got it all here. And the boy holds the camcorder above his head.
The sarge and I (we’re on more familiar terms now) we take the camcorder back inside the house so we can watch the tape on my big-screen TV. The sound will be mono but my audio system has some fancy software that can simulate surround sound so it shouldn’t be too disappointing. We rewind the tape and hit play then sit back on the sofa (after the sarge has looked underneath the cushions once again) and devour the half-bowl of popcorn the boys left behind. At first there isn’t much to see because the Brandt kid’s hand is about as steady as a grand mal seizure, but the whirring noise comes through nicely. Finally he steadies himself (probably against the fire hydrant) and points the camera above the roof line. At first he’s got the zoom on all the way so we get a wobbling close-up of the chimney bricks. You can hear the boys taking slap shots against the garage and yelling insults at the Brandt kid who tells them both they’re fucking idiots who’re going straight to hell. His comment about how they’re both sons of a whore comes through real clear and I’m thinking I should’ve bought a Sony instead of the JVC. The autofocus clicks in and you can see what’s making all the whirring. It’s Asian longhorn beetles, the kind that come from Korea or Honduras or another of those goddam middle eastern countries and have infested the north shore of Lake Ontario. I had always thought there were laws against foreign infestment.
These aren’t your average Asian long-horn beetles. These ones are big. Real big. There are three of them and each one has a wingspan probably the width of the roof. And they’re fast. Real fast. The one swoops down with its big ugly mandibles wide apart and in a single quick motion nabs my oldest and slices off his head. The other two fight over my younger guy, one pulling away at a leg and the other with a firm clutch on the head. More swoop down and there’s a frenzied blur of wings and limbs and multi-faceted eyes and mandibles and exoskeletal plates. And the sound effects are nasty: flesh ripping, bones snapping, screaming, grunting and tearing, and high-pitched whining and burping. When the bugs are finished, the boys are gone. The beetles spring into the air and whirr their way into the bright afternoon sky.
Well I’ll be damned. The sarge picks flecks of popcorn from the sofa. This ain’t a police matter after all.