Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  The two rear humps go flying off, split open and flailing. Two gloved hands dart up from the water in a surrender motion, then jerk back under when a finger gets shot off.

  The tourists and their various paid protectors keep shooting—even the ones in back, who don’t have a clear line of fire through the people ahead of them. Grody’s yelling and waving his hands in front of the people in his canoe, which is brave as fuck, but he’s got enough sense to stay too low to actually stop anyone.

  People keep shooting even after a rowboat comes around the bend with Miguel and a couple of other guys standing in it like George Washington, pointing guns back at the tourists. At one point Palin hurls the sword, end over end. Not a bad arm on that woman.

  “GOD DAMN IT, MIGUEL,” Reggie yells right next to me, just before Miguel and Co. release a single fusillade of bullets. Which, depending on whom you later believe, is aimed either at or above the heads of the people shooting at whoever was working the fake monster.

  A silence comes down. Except for the sound of a dog barking: sure enough, Bark is swimming out toward Miguel’s boat. Intermittently visible through the fog, she looks a lot more like a lake monster than the tubing did. I don’t know why the people in the canoes hold fire.

  For a moment, everyone but Grody, who’s crouched down weeping, remains standing. Then Wayne Teng bends abruptly at the waist and goes headfirst into the lake, and the counter-roll topples everyone else in his canoe off the other side.

  I dive into the water. The cold makes me saner immediately, though at surface level I can barely see through the fog. When I reach Teng, his bodyguards are struggling to keep his face above the water. I consider trying to get him up into one of the canoes, but that would be close to impossible—we’d just capsize another boat. I jerk my thumb toward shore and start to pull Teng with me.

  “Call for a MedEvac! Don’t let anybody drown!” I yell, like there’s someone who’s going to listen to this and act on it.

  I try to find where Teng’s been shot. It isn’t difficult: blood’s pumping out of his lower left pelvis like a Jacuzzi nozzle, hard enough to break the surface of the lake. If it’s coming from the iliac artery, which it probably is, he’s got almost no chance. The artery’s elastic, and the severed ends you’d have to pull back together are probably retracted into his chest and calf by now.

  I push into the wound with one fist, using my other hand to support his weight. As I kick us toward the shore, I try to ignore the fact that when water sluices into Teng’s mouth, he doesn’t choke or blink his eyes.

  Then, when we’re about twenty feet from the beach, the real White Lake Monster rips into Teng from behind me, and tears him out of my arms.

  THIRD THEORY:

  MONSTER

  29

  White Lake / Lake Garner

  Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

  Still Thursday, 20 September

  Karl Weick, the organizational psychologist:

  A cosmology episode occurs when people suddenly and deeply feel that the universe is no longer a rational, orderly system. What makes such an episode so shattering is that both the sense of what is occurring and the means to rebuild that sense collapse together…. [So that people think] I’ve never seen this before. I have no idea where I am, and I have no idea who can help me.

  I believe Violet Hurst described it as someone taking a dump on your conceptual framework.

  The creature that slams past me in White Lake, swiping me with its slimy leather skin as it drives Teng under water and out of sight, then slapping me with something that feels a fuck of a lot like a tail, does exactly that. It turns me inside out, so that now the nightmare is on the outside.

  But here’s the thing: in nightmares I never break down, because whatever awful thing I’m looking at seems normal. It’s only in real life that I wake up screaming and have panic attacks that hit like seizures.

  Now that real life is the nightmare world, I find myself just calmly treading water. Looking in the direction Teng’s body was carried off, thinking, If that thing wants to eat me, it will. Not much I can do about it. Or maybe that’s the antipsychotic.

  “Teng Wenshu! Teng Wenshu!” Teng’s bodyguards are calling out. Then, after a while, “Teng Shusen!”

  Teng’s brother answers from over near the beach. Reggie’s guides have triumphed again, keeping everyone who ended up in the lake alive and herding them back toward land. We all come onto the rocks together like we’re evolving from the sea, water streaming from our heavy clothes.

  The cold is sharp. “Hey,” I shout. “Reggie gave us all LSD. If anybody didn’t drink the coffee, or just doesn’t feel fucked up, take charge of whoever you’re with. Everybody wet needs to get dry as soon as possible. If anybody’s got benzos, now’s the time to share them.”

  Reggie’s farther down the beach, helping Miguel’s boat land with Del in it, Bark shaking water off her coat. Reggie looks at me and looks away. I’d ask him if I’m right about the coffee, but I wouldn’t trust any answer he gave me.

  “Who’s got a satellite phone?” I say.

  “I’m taking care of it,” one of Palin’s bodyguards yells back, phone to his ear. The canoe he’s in is still on its way to the beach. Palin’s kneeling in the prow, barfing.

  I prepare a shot of Anduril for Teng Shusen, but decide at the last moment to give it to one of his bodyguards instead. Teng Shusen isn’t freaking out, just looking around confused, and maybe it’s better that someone capable of taking care of him be the one thinking clearly.

  The other two canoes reach shore. Violet and Froghat aren’t in either of them, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t in the one that spilled, so I run back to the campsite calling their names. They’re huddled together in the tent I’ve been sharing with Violet.

  LSD in the hot chocolate too. Nice, Reggie.

  I inject them both. Go back to the boat with the outboard to check on Del.

  Del’s got his right hand under his left arm. Not just because he’s had a finger shot off, I realize when I pry his arm away, but because a bullet has grazed his left side, opening up Neoprene, skin, and bright yellow fat. Blood runs down the side of his wetsuit in a pink wash. It’s a miracle he wasn’t shot up worse.

  Miguel hands me a towel without my asking for it, then holds it in place for me as I reposition Del to keep both wounds above his heart. “Find some more of these,” I say, meaning the towels.

  “Fuck off, Bark,” Del says, the first words I’ve heard from him. The dog keeps licking his face as if to wake him up.

  When I stand, my muscles are like sand from the Anduril.

  “I know,” Reggie says, holding his hands up defensively.

  “You have no fucking idea.”

  Sarah Palin doesn’t say goodbye. I barely catch sight of her before she leaves. One of her guards puts her in her tent and stands in front of it, while the other two hack at tree limbs with their tactical knives like the druid in Astérix. They basically seem to have gone insane, but ultimately they assemble the branches into a grid held together by plasticuffs, and when Palin’s Sikorsky lands on Lake Garner it uses the grid as a ramp to nudge onshore.

  Did Palin’s bodyguards call for her evacuation before they called the paramedics? All I know is that Palin and her group, which has somehow come to include Grody and his group, and even the fucking Ficks—like perhaps the Ficks aren’t just sour rich people who like clothes from Costco and shooting things, but also host fund-raisers in their castle—are gone before the Parks and Rec rescue Seawolf shows up in the sky. Let alone the Piper Cub with Sheriff Albin in it.

  I don’t try to keep them around. I’m not sure how I would, and anyway I believed them when they said they didn’t see anything. It was foggy as hell, and everyone was bananas.

  Albin’s not too happy about it, though. In fact, he’s got an attitude like maybe he, or Violet and I, should have done more, or at least something, to prevent all this from happening.

  In movies, cop
s always put you on the tailgate of an ambulance after shit like this, with blankets and coffee for the crane shot. Albin sends everybody else off to various jails and hospitals, but keeps Violet and me—and Bark, who’s somehow become our responsibility—around, yelling questions at us between his radio calls to Bemidji. Doesn’t get us a plane ride back to Ely for hours, and even then has a deputy meet us at the dock and make sure we check into the Ely Lakeside Hotel so we’ll be available later on.

  Once the deputy leaves, I bribe the Lakeside’s courtesy van driver to take us to CFS so we can pick up our car.

  “You don’t want to just wait?” Violet says.

  “First I want to get Bark back to CFS.” Right now the dog’s tied up on the putting green, and I know freeing her will soften Violet up.

  “What comes after first?”

  Maybe it is possible to get to know me.

  “Supposedly the Ojibwe have known about the thing at White Lake for years,” I say. “They’ve painted it and they have a name for it: the Wendigo. So I want to talk to a fucking Ojibwe.”

  30

  Chippewa River Reservation

  Still Thursday, 20 September

  “Let me explain why that’s so offensive,” Virgil Burton of the North Lakes Ojibwe Tribes says.

  We’re seated across from him at a low-rise cafeteria table for children in the lunchroom of the community center. I don’t recall ever being small enough to fit at a table like this.

  “It’s not that white people talk about First Nations people being magical,” Burton says, “although that is kind of moronic when you look at what’s happened to us. It’s that white people don’t bother to look at what’s happened to us. They’d rather look at the teepees. And the Wendigos.”

  It’s embarrassing as fuck.

  “The First Nations had societies,” Virgil says. “I’m not talking about Robin Hood camps in the wilderness. I’m talking about civilizations. Before Columbus got here, one in four people on Earth lived in the so-called New World. Tenochtitlan was the biggest city on Earth. We had books, and governments, and courts of law, and the best armies in existence. When Hernández and de Grijalva attacked the Maya, the Maya kicked their butts. The Aztecs kicked Cortez’s butt in 1520. A year after that the Florida killed Ponce de León. Then European smallpox hit, and ninety-five percent of the indigenous population died. Which the Europeans pushed to ninety-seven percent through slavery and extermination.

  “After that, of course, this place was wide open. Domesticated crops and animals everywhere the Europeans looked. Gold that was already mined. Do you know how much Pizarro’s first shipment of stolen gold back to Europe was worth?”

  We shake our heads.

  “Four times as much as the Bank of England. But white people, if you’ll excuse the expression, want to romanticize the way the survivors lived after that. Like First Nations people wanted to be wandering tribes ruled by warlords and living in the woods. We didn’t want that. That was forced on us by the white man. Those were our Dark Ages. But you people would rather talk about shamans, and spirit guides, and the nobility of the simple life. Of course it was the simple life: the whole world had ended.”

  Changing tack or something, he says “Did you know Hitler had a painting of Geronimo in his bunker?”

  “No,” Violet says.

  “Hitler loved the First Nations people. You know what the First Nations people thought of Hitler? They joined the U.S. Army to fight him. First Nations got some history with the U.S. Army. But Hitler didn’t care about that. He just went on loving us. And here’s another thing: he had syphilis. He did. You can look it up. He had syphilis and he blamed the Jews for it. There’s a whole chapter in Mein Kampf called ‘Syphilis.’ ”

  “I’ve read Mein Kampf,” I say, not realizing how that sounds till it comes out.

  “Do you know where syphilis comes from?” Burton says. “That’s right. The New World. Like potatoes. And corn. And tomatoes. But did that make Hitler hate us? No it didn’t. Cause he would have had to look at the facts about us to do that. Which he didn’t want to do. He loved us, but he didn’t want to see us.

  “And now you folks come here asking about Wendigos. You’re both doctors, man. Do you ask about educational programs? Do you ask about diabetes rates, and whether anyone’s doing anything about that? Have you got any idea how many people here are on dialysis? I’ll show you the center if you want. Teenagers hang out there, cause if they’re not on dialysis yet, they will be. We show movies in there. We got Netflix. We got ladies coming around helping people do their taxes. People running for tribal council, they campaign in the dialysis center. If one in four white people had diabetes, there wouldn’t be diabetes.”

  “We’re sorry to have bothered you,” Violet says.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Virgil says. “Just be open-minded. You know what a Wendigo is?”

  We both shake our heads.

  “A Wendigo’s a story for children. Children and white people. It’s a guy who’s starving to death in the winter, so he eats his family. As a punishment, his spirit gets cursed to live in that spot forever. Always hungry. Always trying to kill people so he can eat them, but so weak he has to do it by drowning them. You see where I’m going with this? It’s just more Road Warrior shit. You’ve got a people so afraid of starving to death they have to tell their kids not to eat each other. That’s all the Wendigo story is: don’t eat each other. Stay human, no matter how bad things get. Now, what Europeans hear is the opposite: First Nations people are magic, and they know how to talk to Bigfoot. But if Bigfoot was real, he would have died of smallpox a long time ago.

  “White Lake’s a dangerous place. Anywhere kids go to party is dangerous—particularly white kids. If there’s something going on there, please don’t blame it on us.”

  In the car, at the end of a mud turnoff, looking out at a lake we don’t know the name off, rain battering the windshield, the whole day seems to fold in on us. Violet starts to cry. If I hadn’t been anorgasmic for that shit for years, I probably would too.

  “Teng seemed so nice,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “He was nice to his brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now he’s dead? And nobody even knows why?”

  I try to think of something to say that isn’t “Yeah” but can’t.

  “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  “You’re not,” I say. “Or at least, if you are, I am too. And a lot of other people. We still have some pretty heavy drugs in our system.”

  “That’s not it. It’s Teng. And the fact that there’s something living in White Lake. Which goes against everything we know.”

  Or used to know.

  “I don’t even feel like I can trust anything back here,” Violet says. She turns her wet face to mine. I can smell her tears. Her lips look slick and soft.

  It’s too much.

  “Violet,” I say. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Her eyes widen and she shakes her head almost imperceptibly. She doesn’t want to hear it.

  Tough luck, though. For both of us. Among the things that have ceased to make sense in the last eight hours is continuing to lie to Violet Hurst.

  “My name isn’t Lionel Azimuth,” I tell her. “It’s Pietro Brnwa. I grew up in New Jersey. I went to medical school in California. Before that I worked as a killer for the Sicilian and Russian mafias.”

  She just looks at me. Studying my face for some sign that I’m kidding.

  “What?” she says.

  “I murdered people.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Even so, it’s true. It’s the one true thing I’ve told you.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were… what?”

  “A killer. For money. For the Mafia.”

  “Really?” She just seems puzzled. “Does Rec Bill know?”

  A question I deserve. “I don’t know.
I don’t think so.”

  Then, all at once, it hits her.

  “Oh, my fucking God.”

  She slams out of the car.

  I get out on my side. It’s pouring. “Violet—come back. I’ll drop you off somewhere.”

  “Stay away from me!”

  “Then at least take the car. It’s too far to walk.”

  “Fuck off!”

  I back away from the car. “The keys are in the ignition.”

  She pauses, scared and confused.

  “You killed people?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. Around twenty.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “There were some situations where some of them might have lived.”

  “So you’re a serial killer.”

  “Yes, technically.”

  “Technically? Oh, fuck.”

  There’s stark fear in her eyes, and disgust. But what am I supposed to say? That I’ve never killed anyone like her? That I once went eight whole years as an adult without killing anybody? That I’m almost back up to three?

  I keep backing away toward the road. Try to get far enough from the car that she can run to it without worrying I’ll attack her.

  I squelch along the highway till I get to the CFS Outfitters. It takes about an hour and a half.

  Now that the rain’s letting up, a kid I don’t recognize is rebuilding the barrier to the lodge road, this time with sawhorses instead of traffic cones.

  “Help you, sir?” he says. He looks at me like not all that many people stop by this place on foot. Or soaking wet.

  “I’m Lionel Azimuth. I was on Reggie’s tour. Did a woman come through here in the last couple hours?”

  “The paleontologist lady?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s down at the lodge. Are you the doctor?”

  “Yes. Did she leave a message for me?”

  “Not her. But some Indian guy was looking for you.”