Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  “What Indian guy?”

  “He came into the outfitters.”

  “When?”

  “Bout an hour ago.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He probably left. I told him you weren’t down at the lodge.”

  “Did he give his name?”

  The kid scratches guiltily. “He might have.”

  “Was it Virgil Burton?”

  “I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  “What did he look like?”

  He shrugs. “Older’n you, I think. He had gray hair, but he didn’t look that old.”

  Sounds like Virgil Burton.

  “I’m gonna need a ride,” I say. “Or to borrow your car.”

  It’s raining hard out of a bright white sky, and the community center is closed and locked. Henry, the kid who drove me here, stays in his Subaru while I look in the community center’s windows. I hold up a “one minute” finger to him and jog across a baseball diamond and a small gully to the first house I can see. Clean planks of wood. No one answering the door.

  I keep moving. A couple houses down, a woman in her early thirties answers. Around my age, which is weird to see on someone who so clearly has a life.

  “Yes?” she says. Suspicious but, thank God, not scared-looking.

  “Do you know Virgil Burton?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  There are tire noises in the driveway behind me. I assume it’s Henry, who’s been rolling along the street after me at a more or less even pace.

  It isn’t, though. It’s Virgil Burton, getting out of his pickup. When I glance back, the woman is closing the door.

  “What’s going on, mister?” Virgil says.

  “I heard you were looking for me.”

  “How? From smoke signals?” He sees my face and stops moving toward me. “Look, man, are you all right?” He nods toward Henry, parked along the street. “That your friend?”

  “You didn’t tell him you were looking for me?”

  “No. I promise.”

  “Sorry. I don’t—”

  “No need to apologize,” he says. “Just get yourself some help. Take care of yourself.”

  There’s nothing more to say. I go and get in the passenger seat of Henry’s car.

  “Is that the guy you said was looking for me?”

  Henry looks surprised.

  “No. I didn’t say he was First Nations. I said he was Indian. Like from India.”

  31

  CFS Lodge, Ford Lake, Minnesota

  Still Thursday, 20 September

  Professor Marmoset—whose family, yes, is from Uttar Pradesh, and whose Al Pacino hair does make it kind of hard to guess his age—is on one of the couches in the registration cabin. Legs up, Violet next to him the same way, Bark the Dog between them. Marmoset and Violet loll their heads in my direction when I come in. Violet lolls hers away.

  “Ishmael,” Professor Marmoset says. “You look like shit.”

  “I am like shit,” I say. The whole cabin smells like Bark’s wet fur. “What are you doing here?”

  “Rec Bill called me. He heard that Sarah Palin gave the surprise keynote address to the American Association of Chromium Processors in Omaha this morning, and wondered if something had happened that required her to arrange an alibi.”

  “This morning?” Out the window, the sun’s just going down.

  “Late morning. Pre-lunch. Still, someone’s got a pretty good booking agent.”

  “No shit.” I’m almost as impressed by Palin’s turnaround as I am by the fact that Rec Bill managed to get Professor Marmoset on the phone.

  As if he can read my mind, Professor Marmoset looks at his watch.

  “How long are you here for?” I say.

  “Not long. I’m on my way to the Mayo. I’ve got one of Rec Bill’s planes at Ely Municipal. I can give you guys a ride to Minneapolis if you want.”

  “Violet can go. I need to return the car.”

  He gestures to the armchair. “Then sit. I at least need to hear your version of this business.”

  I tell him. He doesn’t interrupt much. At the end he says “You know, you can make a passive nightscope out of a digital camera.”

  I just stare at him.

  “In case you ever need to.”

  I say “You can make a passive nightscope out of an active nightscope and a piece of tape.”

  “For three times the price.”

  “I’m on an expense account. Any thoughts on the lake monster?”

  Marmoset yawns. “What’s your take on it?”

  “That there’s something fucking down there.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if it’s mechanical, it’s the best piece of engineering I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Which means it’s probably not mechanical. Which means it’s probably some kind of actual fucking creature.”

  He frowns. “By ‘actual fucking creature,’ you mean an animal not generally understood to exist?”

  “Yes.”

  “That seems implausible.”

  “Of course it seems implausible. It seems fucking insane. But I saw it.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Felt it. Well enough to be able to tell it wasn’t anything else.”

  “So…”

  “So I think it’s like that thing Sherlock Holmes says. Where anything’s possible if there’s no other explanation.”

  Violet looks at me in surprise.

  Marmoset says “That’s actually the one stupid thing Holmes says. You and I discussed it once on the shuttle to Mercy Hospital. That and how Houdini did the removable-thumb trick for Arthur Conan Doyle and Doyle thought it was actual magic. Anyway, it’s wrong: there’s always another explanation.”

  Violet doesn’t smile, just keeps looking at me. It’s worse.

  “And there will be an explanation for this,” Marmoset says. “In fact, we even know how we’ll get it.”

  I turn back to him. “We do?”

  “Of course. Why was someone so convinced the monster was real that they felt compelled to chase it down in an amphibious boat? At night, in secret? Reggie doesn’t seem to have believed in the monster. Debbie told you she didn’t. Dr. Hurst’s friends in the bar said they did, but neither of them seems to have enough at stake to feel strongly one way or the other. So what makes the person in the boat so certain? What do they know that we don’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “What?”

  He raises his palms. “No idea. We don’t even have enough information to say for sure whether the person on the boat shot Chris Jr. and Father Podominick. But I think finding that person, or even identifying him, will get us the answers to every question we have.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

  Marmoset looks at me sharply. “I didn’t mean you literally, Ishmael. I meant the police.”

  “The police have had two years to deal with this.”

  “Yes, and I imagine they’ll consider it a higher priority now.”

  “Right. Unless Teng’s death gets covered up.”

  Marmoset looks skeptical. “To protect Palin?”

  “Or Tyson Grody,” I say. “Or the Ficks, whoever they are—or even Teng, or Teng’s company, or his reputation or whatever. Or all of them.”

  Marmoset wrinkles his nose. “I think that’s unlikely. And even if someone does manage to keep it quiet, this situation is no longer our responsibility. I wouldn’t have gotten you involved in the first place if I’d known there had been actual deaths at White Lake.”

  “And you’re not worried there’ll be more?”

  “I think we can rely on Parks and Recreation to put up a ‘No Swimming’ sign.”

  “What about a ‘No Getting Shot with a Hunting Rifle’ sign?”

  “Ishmael,” Marmoset says quietly. “Do you really think your staying here is going to make people less likely to get killed?”

 
Oh, snappity.

  “The police will find the person with the boat,” he says. “There can’t be that many companies that make amphibious boats, and those companies can’t sell that many of them.”

  I’m not about to let it go, though. “What do you want to bet the boat turns out to have been charged to Chris Jr.? Like the nets and harpoons no one seems to have wanted?”

  Marmoset nods. “It’s a possibility I’ve considered.”

  “I’m going back to White Lake. I’m going to find the guy with the boat and make him tell me what’s going on. Now is when he’ll be there.”

  “As will the police.”

  “There may be some cops, but not like there will be once they start dragging the lake. Not to mention what will happen when word does get out that Palin was here. The journalists alone will rent every canoe Reggie owns. We know that, and the guy in the boat knows that, so now is when he’ll try again. He couldn’t even stay away when Reggie’s tour was nearby.”

  “Assuming he or she was aware of that.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have been?” I say. “Everybody else was. You know what I’m saying is right.”

  “In some respects, but—”

  “I’ll go alone. There won’t be anyone to get hurt.”

  “Except you, Ishmael. You do count for something, you know. There are other, more important things you’re capable of.”

  “No,” Violet says.

  We both look at her.

  “Not alone. I’m going with you. Whatever the fuck your name is.”

  I stare back at her. “Forget it. No way.”

  “You owe me. We started this together and we’ll finish it together. And you’re going to answer some fucking questions on the way.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Both of us or neither of us.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “And you can’t stop me,” she says. “And I’m a lot better at canoeing than you are.”

  “But—”

  Why would she even want to?

  I turn from her to Marmoset. “What have you been telling this woman?”

  Marmoset shakes his head with an expression I’ve seen on him a million times before. Dismay without surprise.

  “Nothing I don’t now regret,” he says.

  32

  Lake Garner / White Lake

  Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

  Saturday, 22 September–Sunday, 23 September

  There are a couple of cops—a woman and a man—on chaise lounges on the beach of Lake Garner, both stripped down to their undershirts. At one point she blows him against a tree. Which doesn’t make it at all uncomfortable to be waiting with Violet at the other end of the lake.

  With the help of maps drawn up by Henry, the trip back has taken less than two days. Our instructions to him: give us the direct route, fuck how hard the portages are. We’ll use GPS and a twenty-nine-pound canoe.

  And thank the Christ for that. I’ve just spent two days having a series of exchanges I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to avoid.

  Like:

  “Have you ever killed someone just to intimidate someone else?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Anyone by accident?”

  “No. Well—once someone I took with me on a job killed someone I didn’t mean to kill.”

  “Someone innocent?”

  “Underage.”

  “A kid?”

  “Around the same age as Dylan Arntz.”

  “But not innocent?”

  “Like I say: underage.”

  “What did you do to the guy who killed him?”

  “Eventually? Killed him.”

  “Because of that?”

  “It didn’t help.”

  “Are there people you’re glad you’ve killed?”

  “Glad I killed personally? No. I wish I’d never killed anybody.”

  “But there are people you killed who you’re glad are dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever kill anyone you didn’t know anything about?”

  “Yes. I tried not to, but yes. Some people I killed just because David Locano asked me to.”

  “How many?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “Would you kill David Locano if you could?”

  “That’s giving me a minute? Yes.”

  “Because of Magdalena? And because of your grandparents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Both?”

  “Yes.”

  “Equally?”

  “Fuck!”*

  Except for the tent Palin was using, which her bodyguards took with them, Reggie’s campsite is still mostly intact, only now with fluttering crime scene tape around it. When the cops go back to sunbathing, Violet and I discuss the possibility that they’re sleeping here, and that we’ll have to row past them in the dark and go over the spit at its far end. But exactly at five p.m. the Parks and Rec floatplane glides in to pick them up, using the ramp Palin’s bodyguards left in place on the beach.

  Violet and I paddle the length of Lake Garner, skirt the tape, and cross the spit. Take the beach as far along White Lake as it goes, then get back on the water.

  We try not to talk as we paddle. It’s bad enough that the sound of every stroke I screw up comes back at us off the walls of the canyon. And that I’ll probably flip out the way I did when we went to Omen Lake to look at the rock paintings. I’m not sure why I haven’t flipped out already.

  Maybe it’s the need to focus. After the second zigzag, we’re in geography we haven’t seen before, and the cliffs are full of indentations conceivably large enough to hide a boat. Why that should successfully distract me from the idea of an animal conceivably large enough to eat a boat, I don’t know. But being back on White Lake in clear daylight is somehow easier than it was to have to think about it in advance.

  Which is not to say that when we reach the last, and widest, segment of White Lake, where the cliffs are gone and there’s forest on three sides, I’m not covered in sweat that has nothing to do with exertion.

  Or that when we spot a gap in the shoreline undergrowth that looks large enough to stash our canoe, we don’t get ourselves and our boat off the water and into the brush as quickly as fucking possible.

  The sun goes down as fast as it did three days ago.

  The moon’s bigger, though, and for a couple of hours it’s brighter. Then the clouds slide over it, and things turn suddenly dark. So dark the branches in front of your face are only slightly purer black than the space around them, and you can hear the lake right in front of you but not see it.

  It’s an interesting situation. Our senses are jacked from anticipation and the physicality of getting here. And we’re invisible, which even the ancients knew is asking for trouble.

  Things you could do in that kind of darkness:

  Lean against each other for warmth.

  Lean toward each other, with your foreheads on each other’s shoulders, out of boredom as well as for warmth.

  Put your hands between each other’s thighs, for even more warmth.

  Tackle each other to the ground and fuck like Orpheus and Eurydice, Tarzan and Sheena, and Watson and Holmes all at once, for the kind of warmth that makes it okay to take a while to find your clothes afterward, and leaves your abs trembling and your mouth bruised from having hot wet crotch stubble ground into it.

  I’m just saying: those are some things you could do.

  Just after midnight we hear something crashing through the trees, then engine noise, then the sound of an amphibious Zodiac flopping onto the lake just across from our position. I put on my new night-vision goggles from CFS and slot their narrow angle of view onto the Zodiac. Its wheels are still rising out of the water as it passes us.

  The fucker driving it has his hood up again. But I don’t think he knows for sure someone’s watching him, because he lights a plastic-wrapped stick of dynamite and tosses it off the rear of the boat with
out looking around too much.

  “Dynamite,” I say.

  “I see it.” Violet’s got her own night-vision goggles.

  The noise of the explosion still makes us both jump.

  The reason you can fish with dynamite, if you’re so inclined, is that water isn’t compressible, whereas fish are. For a fish, particularly a shallow-water fish, being in the water near an explosion is like being at one end of a Newton’s cradle made of wrecking balls. Everything else just transmits the force and stays put. The fish absorbs it, and ruptures. It’s the same concept as dropping a depth charge near a submarine.

  All that noise makes the time we spent practicing how to silently relaunch the canoe seem a bit silly, but we follow procedure anyway, and as we move into the wake of the Zodiac I take a moment to appreciate how much better our tandem rowing has gotten over the past few days.

  Then I take a moment to appreciate how I really should have asked myself a couple of basic questions before getting into this situation. Like whether this guy is or is not using sonar, and if so whether he can pick out a trailing canoe with it.

  The Zodiac suddenly leans into a U-turn tight enough to make me conclude that the answers are yes and yes. Particularly since the guy’s now scrambling toward the harpoon gun at the front of his boat.

  Violet and I check our canoe sideways to stop its motion. We’ve taped over the IR lights on our goggles so the guy won’t be able to see them, but he seems to be doing fine without them. In any case, the searing light of his own goggles is showing us everything we need to see. Like him aiming at us. And firing.

  I shout “Hang on!”

  I wonder if Kevlar’s any good against harpoons.

  That’s all I have time for.

  33

  White Lake

  Still Sunday, 23 September

  My face punches through the surface, I’m swallowed whole, things get more real than they were a moment ago. When they were already pretty real, just not as real as being in cold black water with something awful living in it and a guy just above the surface with night-vision goggles, a hunting rifle, and dynamite.