by Jamie Zerndt
Jerkwater
Jamie Zerndt
Copyright © 2019 Jamie Zerndt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.
ISBN: 9781072842477
For Jack Zerndt
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Shawna
Chapter Two: Kay
Chapter Three: Douglas
Chapter Four: Shawna
Chapter Five: Kay
Chapter Six: Douglas
Chapter Seven: Shawna
Chapter Eight: Kay
Chapter Nine: Paris
Chapter Ten: Shawna
Chapter Eleven: Kay
Chapter Twelve: Douglas
Chapter Thirteen: Shawna
Chapter Fourteen: Kay
Chapter Fifteen: Douglas
Chapter Sixteen: Shawna
Chapter Seventeen: Douglas
Chapter Eighteen: Sun Ceremony
Chapter Nineteen: The Scamp
Chapter One:
Shawna
There were spots in the lake where the anchor never hit bottom. The murkiness always fascinated Shawna. She knew it was only tangles of muskgrass and pondweed down there, but a part of her couldn’t help but imagine strange, never-before-seen creatures dwelling among the coontails and duckweed. Like Wisconsin anglerfish. Or some rare breed of dwarf whale. And maybe the lake was bottomless, like in those stories her mother used to tell her where Nanaboozhoo was always stumbling and laughing his way through the world.
Shawna dug around inside the cooler. Her journal was peeking out from under a tin of sardines. Ever since the day her stepfather had taken her mother away from her, the journal had become a sort of artificial limb for Shawna. Or maybe an artificial organ, a somewhat bulky and awkward replacement for what had been her heart.
“It’s not the world’s fault you’re lonely,” Shawna said out loud. It was something her mother used to say. The words came to her like that sometimes, like ghost ships sailing across the years, reminding her of who her mother had once been: a strong woman who’d been haunted by demons. White demons. Shawna picked up her journal and was sitting with her hand hovering over the page, waiting to take dictation from a dead woman, when she heard the muffled sounds of voices on the water. Then there was the echo of oars being worked in their sockets and a tackle box being slid across a metal hull. She lay flat on the ground, peering through the reeds, and spotted a man rowing quietly toward the island. There was a little boy in the boat, too, a little lump of a thing bundled up in a too-big camouflage coat and looking barely old enough to handle the pole he had dangling over the edge. Then, just as she thought they might row past, the man dropped anchor about forty feet out.
Shawna lowered her head and wondered about her boat, if they could see it. As she lay there frozen, she noticed a turtle sunning itself on one of the larger rocks near the island. It was an ugly thing with a head like a wrinkly old penis. The shell, though, was beautiful, almost like the yellow undercoating and the elaborate black hatch-marks were trying to make up for its unflattering head.
“You want me to do it?”
“No. I can do it.”
“Then take this one. He’s nice and fat.”
Shawna couldn’t see their faces all that well, but it was definitely them. It was like they were all in the same room together, the walls made of the mist still clinging to the lake. There was the crack of a can opening. Soda maybe. Or beer.
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The room became hushed, and Shawna watched the two figures hunched over their rods, waiting. For the man, the waiting seemed like a kind of forced meditation, like something he wasn’t all that interested in but that came with the territory of fishing. As for the boy, he didn’t seem to want to be there at all. That much Shawna could tell without seeing his face.
“Here.” The man handed the boy something. “Eat.”
“When we get back can we--?”
“Quiet. You’ve got a bite.”
Shawna watched the boy’s bobber. There were little ringlets pulsing out from it like sonar. Then nothing.
“I think he ate my worm.”
“Maybe. Reel it in a little.”
The boy slowly reeled his line in, letting it stop every few feet or so. Then the bobber suddenly disappeared.
“Look!”
“Okay, okay. Let him take it now. That’s it.”
“Can I reel him in now? Can I?”
“Did you set the hook?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give it a little tug. Not too hard now.”
Shawna could see the boy yank on the line, lifting the pole over his head.
“Jesus, you’ll be lucky he still has a mouth left on him.” The man went about getting his net ready and leaning over the side of the boat as the boy pulled the fish closer. “See, I told you this was a good spot. Didn’t I tell you?”
The man lowered the net into the water, but when he brought the fish up, it didn’t appear all that big to Shawna. Maybe a bluegill or sunfish. She watched as the boy reached into the net and was sprayed with water as the fish flipped and arched about. The man put the net down on the floor of the boat, no doubt stepping on the fish to keep it from flopping about, then ruffled the boy’s hair before carefully pulling the fish from the net and placing it on a stringer. Shawna figured they’d probably go home now, but the boy went back to staring blankly out at the water while the man began casting a bright yellow lure closer and closer to the bank of the island. Shawna guessed he was going for Muskie now since they were known to hide in weed beds. Ojibwa called them maashkinoozhe. Or “ugly pike.”
“Can we go soon?”
“Soon, Jack.”
Shawna knew all too well who they were: Peyton Crane and his little boy. She’d made a sort of hobby over the past year or so of casually stalking them. Lately, though, it had become less casual. She noted the day and time in her journal next to the others.
Something was slid across the hull of the boat. “Here, have a pretzel. We’ll go back soon. I promise.” Peyton stood up in the boat, and Shawna got her first clear look at him. He was wearing a brown flannel jacket and a camouflage baseball cap, his dumb brown hair sticking out the back like burnt straw. The beer belly pushing out against his flannel made him appear older. And pregnant. Shawna smiled to herself. If that were true, ninety percent of the white men in town would be knocked-up.
Shawna watched as the turtle, apparently having had enough of all the commotion, waddled off his rock and into the water. The turtle reminded her of a story her mother used to tell her about the world being flooded and Nanaboozhoo sitting on a log searching for land. In the story he tried to swim to the bottom of the lake to grab a handful of earth so he could create a new place to live, but the lake seemed bottomless. A loon, a mink, and a turtle also tried to reach the bottom, but all of them failed. Finally, a little muskrat tried. The muskrat didn’t survive, but when his lifeless body floated to the surface, they found a ball of earth still clutched in his paw. Nanaboozhoo put the ball on the turtle’s back and with the help of the wind from the four directions, the dirt grew into an island which is now North America. Ever since then, Ojibwa have revered the muskrat for his sacrifice, and, also the turtle for literally bearing the weight of the world.
As Shawna daydreamed about the turtle down below holding up the island, she heard something clatter in the branches overhead. Ther
e, not a foot away, was a lure with a treble hook swaying and glinting in the sunlight.
“Jesus H. Christ.”
Peyton stood up and began yanking on the snagged line, rocking the small boat back and forth so that the boy was forced to set his pole down and grab the oars for support.
“Shit if I’m going to lose another lure to a goddamn tree.”
When he eventually gave up and began reeling in the anchor, Shawna pulled the lure down and set the line between her teeth. It took a few bites but soon the lure came free and the line went slack. Shawna could see the boy staring intently at the island, and, for a brief moment, it seemed like they were staring at one another. Almost like the boy had seen what she had done but had decided to remain quiet.
“Look. It came free.”
Peyton turned to see his line lying limp and flaccid on the water, and Shawna thought she could see a smile spread across the boy’s face.
“You promised we could play video games, ‘member?”
Peyton stared hard at the island, like the thought of leaving the lure there somehow meant the island had won.
“Yeah, I remember alright.”
He then worked the boat around with one of the oars and began rowing them back across the lake. Shawna rolled over on her back and studied the lure in the sunlight wobbling its way through the leaves. It was a simple lure. Wooden. Handmade. She wondered idly if Peyton had ever caught anything with it. Save Two Walleyes – Spear A Pregnant Squaw. Too Bad Custer Ran Out Of Bullets. She remembered the protests and the bumper stickers on the boats from when she was a girl. She remembered, too, the hate white people had spewed at her relatives as they tried to dock with their boats full of walleye. “Ignorance,” her mother had told her, “is a dangerous thing. But now at least you know its face.”
She turned the lure over in her hand, her fingers tracing the lines of the treble hook, pushing the barb gently against her thumb. She found herself thinking about the ceremonies the Plains Indians used to have where the boys pierced their skin with hooks and suspended themselves from chains as a rite of passage. She rested the lure against her shirt, brushing the metal back and forth across the cotton. She wondered how much pain a person could endure. She wondered if enjoying it would somehow invalidate it.
Just as she was imagining her own skin being pulled and stretched, a moth landed on her knee. A gypsy moth. She recognized it because she always thought their floppy antennae made them look like little flying rabbits. They were hated by both whites and Chippewa alike because they were destroying large swaths of Wisconsin forest. It was one of the few things both agreed on. Shawna shooed the moth away, watching as it flitted up into the tree to work its mayhem, and rolled over onto her stomach before tossing the lure into the cooler.
She watched the now tiny boat as it docked along the southern edge of the lake. The poor kid didn’t stand a chance. Whether he wanted to be or not, he was a racist-in-training. Half the kid’s heart was probably already polluted, and by the time he reached high school, his insides would be entirely black. And what was worse was that things would continue on like that, the kid growing up, having his own kids, and then infecting them. And on and on and on. Like a cancer. Or like a gypsy moth making its home in the family tree. There was nothing for it to do but spread disease.
Chapter Two:
Kay
At sixty-four years old, Kay O’Brien found herself half-drunk and sitting inside an old camper wishing her dead husband would emerge from a deepening fog. She angled the flashlight up against the window and pressed the on/off button a few times, scattering a kind of gibberish Morse code out across the lake. In the twilight, the silhouette of the small island resembled a small, hairy elephant. She had been to the island just once before; Norm had taken her in the boat. Just for kicks, he’d said. But there wasn’t much to the island, a few trees and a fire pit dug out in the center, the entire length of the island no more than twenty feet long, barely enough room for a couple of sleeping bags. A person could live on it, she supposed, but who’d want to?
The Scamp had rolled down the hill years ago, coming to rest against a stand of paper birch along the edge of the lake where it has stayed ever since. Kay sat in the back of the small camper, near the window closest the water, staring out at the foam on the lake. A noise had brought her out of the house, a yelling of some sort. That’s when she noticed the boat was missing. Douglas couldn’t have taken it out because he’d only just left for Ruggers. And even though she knew it wasn’t possible, a part of her couldn’t stop from hoping that maybe Norm was out there.
Earlier, when she’d found the neighbor girl’s horse wandering around their backyard, she’d tied him to the old tin fishing shack near the dock. The girl must have forgotten to corral him. Either that or she was out on the island. Seven was a monster of an animal. One hoof from him and Kay would be done for. A mercy, perhaps, at this point, but still the beast awed her. Just the way its muscles twitched and rippled whenever it took a step was enough to put Kay into a sort of trance. Never in her life, except for maybe when Douglas was born, had she stared at another human being with that same depth of wonder and appreciation.
She fooled with the flashlight again, moving the beam across the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of what? An apparition of some sort? Or maybe the Loch Ness monster? She wondered for a moment what the monster would be called if she did find one. The Little Pike Lake Monster. Not exactly the stuff of legends. Kay waited and listened to the bleating of bullfrogs and crickets, the blustering and snorting of Seven. On the counter was a sketchbook of her son’s. Douglas had been spending more and more time in the camper since his father had died. She left him alone for the most part, but there were times like these when she couldn’t help but do a little snooping. She flipped through the sketches slowly, like she was reading a diary. What made her sad was that the only other audience for them were the weevils and roly-polys infesting the old camper. And soon there wouldn’t even be Kay. Not really anyway. The Alzheimer’s diagnosis had come only months after Norm died. She hadn’t even told Douglas yet. The poor kid had enough on his plate.
She looked out at the water again and thought she could see the dark outline of a boat gliding toward the dock. With the fog, the oar sticking up resembled a scythe, like Death itself were floating across the water toward her. She set the sketchbook down, leaving it just as she’d found it, open to a slightly disturbing sketch of a loon with a broken neck, and went outside to wait alongside Seven.
“You like me a little bit, don’t you?” Kay whispered and stroked the coarse hairs on the animal’s great neck as he began to lightly stamp and hoof at the ground. The boat, it turned out, was real and gliding straight for their dock. Again Kay caught herself waiting for Norm to come into view, holding up a fat bluegill for her to praise. She switched on the flashlight and this time caught a flesh-and-blood person in the beam: the girl from next door.
“Shawna? That you out there caterwauling?” Kay called out as the girl clipped the johnboat to one of the steel rings along the edge of the dock. As Kay stood studying her, something about the way the girl hugged her sweatshirt tight against herself made Kay think she’d been swimming out there. But when Shawna came closer, she noticed there wasn’t a drop of water on her.
“You okay?”
“I guess.”
The girl silently greeted the horse, her hand on his nose, the two of them as familiar with one another as an old married couple.
“You’re trembling,” Kay said.
“It’s cold out.”
“Not that cold.”
There was another noise, another oar working away at the water out there. Kay considered getting the flashlight out again but thought better of it. It was none of her business who the girl had been with.
“That boat I’m pretending not to hear the reason you’re borrowing mine?”
Shawna nodded. “
My naan thinks I’m at a girlfriend’s house.” She began to untie the horse. “It’s just some boy I’m seeing. It’s nothing. Nothing important enough to tell anybody about anyway.”
Kay stared at the girl. She was far from all right. Just about a canter away from very much not alright. “It sounded pretty important to me. Important enough for it to interrupt my show.”
Again the girl busied herself with the horse, looking everywhere but at Kay. She’d make a good boxer, ducking and weaving the way she did.
“Come inside and have a beer with me.”
“Is Douglas home?”
“Out drinking with Marty.”
“I can’t stand Marty.”
“Marty’s okay. He’s just a little confused sometimes. C’mon, we’ll steal some of Douglas’s Leineys.”
Kay, not bothering to wait for a response, started up the hill using the old walking stick her husband had carved for her. Lately, she found herself using the cane more and more. Even on flat ground she was feeling a little off-balance these days. Like the very ground beneath her was moving, the world tilting imperceptibly. The cane did help a little, but for how much longer she wasn’t sure.
Kay left the screen door open and went rummaging through the fridge for a beer, but there were none left. “Because you weren’t any fun,” she said out loud as she began making a Manhattan for herself, and another, smaller one, for Shawna.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Was I talking? I was, wasn’t I?”
“You said somebody wasn’t fun.”
“Sorry. Just finishing a conversation I was having in my head. My Norm was asking why I never drank much when he was alive. Here,” Kay said and handed the girl a drink. “This will have to do. Looks like we’re skint in the beer department.”
“Skint?” Shawna said, taking a seat at the kitchen table.
“Broke. Busted. What I mean is we’ve got no beer.”
