BABA YAGA

She lined the bed of her truck with gray tarp. 

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Sometimes she went out to clean her homeland, between the white lines and the honeysuckle bush. Refuse is imbued with power, despite what many would tell you, but I understand this isn’t something people do. That’s why she had so much trouble. 

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Mostly at night, in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest, West Virginia. Headlights shocking the figure in the back of a Ford Ranger, a perched silhouette atop a small mound of travelers’ chaff. This is how legends spread. 

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But it actually started earlier, or else stories got combined. After they finished the dam, in 1979, somebody took someone’s husband down to Lake Moomaw and cracked him over the head with an oar. His body was caught in the far-right spillway a week later. 

She had a shovel, or maybe it was a trash picker, and it caught the headlights in the dark. Many saw this. 

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The Gillis boy disappeared in ’83. This was within a year of Johnny Gosch; even the holler heard about that boy in Des Moines. Cops didn’t stop to talk anymore, didn’t take off their aviators. People were upset…you spend so long looking between the trees, where the actual dark begins, and you hear the cry of a bobcat. 

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They formed a posse at the Elks Lodge in Lexington. Nothing ever came of it. Cruising the back roads with lightbars on full-blast felt like doing something – better than staying at home with your little monsters, that’s for sure. She was smarter. 

The Gillis boy never turned up and still hasn’t. Maybe he’s in Hollywood. Maybe he’s fucked and slimy in a grave. 

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The cry of a bobcat sounds like a baby crying, and sometimes a woman screaming, if the cat is mature. You know what coyotes sound like. People claimed it was neither. 

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She saw that things were changing. The headlights slowed down; the flash of disposable cameras was like a vulture’s circle. Eventually the posse figured which road she came out of. Everyone brought their favorite guns, the thick, scratchy rope. 

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And when they finally caught up they all swore she stood in the back of the pickup, laughing and screaming as the truck flew around corners without a driver, never once slowing down till it got out of sight. 

I never saw it.