Jerkwater

by Jamie Zerndt

  Shawna stood, grabbing one of the ropes, and together they lifted it out of the water. “What are we doing?”

  “It deserves a proper burial,” Douglas said and started to sway the chicken-wire box back and forth between them. “On three, okay?”

  When they launched the thing off the dock, though, it only made it a couple of feet out.

  “I can still see it,” Shawna said, trying not to laugh. Half of the box was still sticking out of the water.

  They sat down again, drinking and watching like maybe it would sink, but it never did budge. When Shawna started tapping the top of the water with her shoe, Douglas asked what was bothering her.

  “Who said anything was bothering me?”

  “Your feet did.”

  “Whatever.” Shawna studied the rings pulsing out around her shoe. “I’m just tired of it all, tired of sitting here watching Peyton Crane live his happy life. Maybe it’s time I sent a message.”

  “Okay,” Douglas said. “And how exactly do we do that?”

  “We?”

  “Yeah. We.”

  Shawna took a drink, grimaced. “Come with if you want, but you won’t like it.”

  “Come with where?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, and the tapping stopped. “We’re going to do a little fishing. Ojibwa-style.”

  Shawna left Douglas on the dock, returning a few minutes later with a duffle bag she’d prepared weeks ago.

  “We going to spear fish?” Douglas said, half-kidding.

  “Something like that.”

  Once they were afloat in Norm’s john boat, Shawna took out a bag of tobacco and laid some on top of the water. She then pulled a helmet with a car headlight mounted on it from the bag and placed it on her head. She connected it to a car battery at her feet.

  “It’s how we find the walleye,” she said. “Disappointed?”

  “Not even a little.”

  “Good. Because we’re not hunting walleye.”

  Shawna scanned the mud flats along the bank. The walleye were there, huddled just beneath the surface, the light reflecting off their eyes as her helmet flamed away.

  “Then what are we doing?”

  “Counting coup,” Shawna said and aimed the light to where she wanted Douglas to paddle. Soon they were on the other side of the lake in front of a small house. There was a truck in the driveway, toys in the yard. On the dock sat a child’s lunchbox. Shawna’s lamp came to a stop, and the light stayed frozen there. She could just make out the word Spider-Man on the front of the lunchbox, the red of a costume pushing through rust.

  “I had one of those as a kid,” Shawna said, killing the light. “My mom bought it for me. My naan always teased me, said our people had our own heroes, our own stories. I kept it secret after that, had to hide all my comics under my mattress. Mom never cared though. She said heroes came from all sorts of different places.”

  Her mother had married a white man. That had been her first mistake. Shawna’s real father had bailed when Shawna was just four. Last she heard he was living on a Hopi reservation in Arizona, re-married to someone who liked to drink and fight just as much as he did. Her own mother never touched the stuff. Which Shawna always found strange as she seemed attracted to men who seemed to do nothing but touch the stuff. But all men had liked her mother. She was what her naan called an “ogichidaa.” A warrior. A big tree. And lightning was always attracted to big trees. Split asunder. That’s what they all wanted to do to her mother. And that’s exactly what they did. Split her asunder. With a muzzleloader.

  Today made it exactly six years since she was shot outside a restaurant in neighboring Minocqua at 3:48 p.m. Her mother had gone there armed only with the conviction that her husband was having an affair (which he was) and that she desperately wanted out of their marriage. Over the years Shawna has heard from a lot of people who were there that day. The stories were all mostly the same: there was a confrontation, her mother yelling, grabbing the other woman by her hair briefly before seeming to have a moment of clarity, whereupon she calmly told her husband that she was divorcing him, that he was free to carry on with his white-trash whore. And then her mother walked out into the parking lot.

  From there on out it got a little blurry. Some said the two spoke in the parking lot, that her mother said something into his ear before walking to her car. Shawna had gone through a million possibilities of what her mother’s final words might have been before her step-father reached into his truck and grabbed the rifle.

  -You aren’t a real man.

  -I never loved you.

  -My daughter has always hated you.

  -You fuck like a donkey.

  -Without your whiteness you are nothing.

  -Your balls are filled with death.

  -Go ahead. I will haunt you for the rest of your sad, empty life.

  This last one gave Shawna the most comfort. Not that there was much comfort to be had when a man shot your mother through the front window of her car in broad daylight. The police said he might have been coming after Shawna next since when they eventually stopped him on his way back into Mercer, the rifle on the seat beside him had been reloaded. There were times Shawna wished he’d gotten to her. Times she wished she was wherever her mother was now. And her mother was somewhere. Shawna knew that much. And she knew that if it wasn’t for her naan and Elmer, Shawna would be in that somewhere too.

  Shawna took the helmet off, placed it on her lap. “Spidey powers,” she said. “I wish I’d had them the day that fucker shot her.”

  “What are we doing here, Shawna?”

  For an answer, Shawna nudged the duffle bag at her feet. In the moonlight, Douglas could see a bow, some arrows. Socks were balled up on the ends of the arrows, wire holding them to the broadheads. The plan had been to set fire to the house. Her step-dad’s best friend. And also the closest thing to her actual step-dad since, unfortunately, he was safe in prison.

  “Soaked them in lamp oil,” Shawna said. “I was going to set his house on fire.”

  “Because he’s friends with your step-dad?”

  “Because he’s evil.”

  Shawna could feel Douglas staring at her, could feel his concern, and something about it made her want to jump right out of the boat. He would never understand what it was like. Why had she brought him there anyway? He was white. Like Peyton. Like all of them cheese-and-Slim-Jim-eating bastards. Elmer. That’s who should be with her. But she knew even Elmer would have tried to stop her. Nobody, whatever color, had the same thing growing inside them. Shawna felt her heart pounding, her hand tightening around nothing.

  “C’mon,” Douglas suddenly said, startling her. “You want to set something on fire? I know just the thing.”

  A spot-light safeguarded the town Loon as they sat on a bench used by tourists. The duffle bag rested at Shawna’s feet.

  “I got my picture taken under this thing when I was a kid,” Shawna said, staring up at the black beak looming over them.

  “Me, too. Except my dad used to call this The Ugly White Duck. I thought that’s what loons were called until, like, the third grade.”

  Shawna remembered what she’d said about his dad’s spirit being trapped in the Loon. If that were somehow true, she wondered if what they were about to do might somehow help him on his way. “You know what the word Ojibwa means?”

  “No.”

  “It means to roast until puckered. Something to do with how we used to make moccasins.”

  “Then I bet when we’re finished, it’ll look like a giant roasted marshmallow.”

  “C’mon,” she said, picking up the duffle bag. “You’ll need to light them. I think four ought to do it.”

  They positioned themselves with Douglas holding the lighter under the socks, the broadheads just pushing through the material. In seconds, they came to life dripping with
flame.

  “The bow is pretty low-poundage,” Shawna told him. “So the flame won’t go out when I release. I’ve been practicing.”

  Without another word, Shawna let the first one fly. It lofted and arched through the air before thunking into the Loon’s breast. Two more found their way into the head and another, just for good measure, into the bird’s crotch. It all happened faster than Shawna expected, the giant flames whooshing up, the fat white belly of the Loon quickly engulfed.

  Chapter Five:

  Kay

  Kay woke at 3:23 a.m. in a cold sweat and shuffled into the living room, patting the urn on top of the TV as she passed. “How about a little tennis? No? Well, too bad. Change the channel if you don’t like it.”

  Because they didn’t have cable, she could only get the tennis matches early in the morning. It was one of the few perks of insomnia, though she rarely managed to stay awake all that long. This night was no different; hours later she woke in a field of bristling static. She’d been dreaming of him again. Norm giving their young son a bath back in their home in Michigan, the one Kay had never really wanted to move from. Her best friend Corky had been in the dream, too. They’d been sitting on the edge of a pool somewhere, legs dangling, the sound of children playing nearby. Corky never did have children. She had both pitied and envied that in her friend. Up until the very end, Corky had been strong, refusing, after the first round of chemo had failed, to return to the hospital no matter what her family might have wanted her to do. And she’d done it all without God. Even that, her not-believing, no matter how much it may have differed from Kay’s own beliefs, impressed her.

  Kay had been there for those last days. Corky had asked her to come, to “watch” as she put it. There were others there, of course, other family members, other friends, but there had always been a special connection between her and Corky. Like Corky had always been trying to teach Kay something, show her how life could be lived. And maybe that’s why she wanted Kay to be there at the end, too. To show her how to die. To show her how death could be.

  Kay made her way back to bed. From atop the dresser, Don Quixote stared down at her. Douglas must have placed the statue there recently; she hadn’t seen the thing in years. She remembered how sometimes Norm would mention the statue when telling her about his day at the shop. Somebody asked about Don again today. I told them he was a trophy I won at a jousting tournament. They thought I was serious. Doesn’t anybody read anymore? God, how she missed him. Even all his irritating habits. The way he’d groan when getting up and down from the sofa, something she now found herself starting to do. Even his god-awful snoring she missed. She’d gotten used to it at some point over the years, relied on it the way some people did the hum of a fan or those soothing CDs with whale sounds.

  As she lay there looking up at the solemn wooden face, she found herself wondering what horses dreamt of. Galloping, probably. Through fields of apples and little girls in bonnets. Something like that. Or maybe being ridden into battle, their manes being gripped tight, nostrils flaring, muscles screaming with life. As for her own dreams, they kept Corky and Norm alive. And maybe they were alive, at least in the world of dreams. Maybe that was part of death. Maybe not everything was accounted for. The thought calmed her for some reason. “Take me into the trenches, Seven,” she said to the blanket as she pulled it up under her chin. “Let’s go.”

  She cringed when she saw it was after eleven in the morning. What would Norm think if he could see her now? She glanced irritably up at the ceiling as she eased herself out of bed. “I know, I know,” she muttered. “But it’s not like anybody’s waiting for me.” Douglas had, no doubt, already come and gone by now. She shuffled to the bathroom and began brushing her teeth. “Not like I’ve got to cook you breakfast, is it? Not like Douglas needs lunch made.” She spit into the sink. On the countertop, tucked under the round swivel-mirror Norm had used for shaving, was a book. Animals Attack! The old fool was always reading books about people surviving out in the wild or people being attacked by animals. The man could fashion a bear trap from twigs and a length of squirrel gut but figuring out how to put up a curtain rod in the front room had conveniently remained a mystery to him.

  Kay picked the book up, opened it to a spot held by a faded, green sticky note. While being drug off by the leopard, the bloody outer garment had fallen from the woman’s body. Kay closed the book, left it on the sink as a reminder to herself to remove it from the bathroom. “I never understood you or your fascination with these things,” she said to the mirror as she combed her hair. “Such a dark mind you had. What were you thinking in there all those years?” Her hair was still mostly black. Lately, though, the silver had started weaving its way through. “A tough old bird,” she said to the mirror and smirked. “A tough old bird who wakes up at noon. What do you think of that, Norm?”

  After a breakfast of toast, Kay grabbed her walking stick and headed outside. Seven was there in his pen. When he heard her coming, his ears stiffened and began to twitch. Kay understood it to mean she should tread lightly, that he wasn’t yet comfortable with her, so she sat in an old plastic lawn chair outside the gate that Shawna sometimes used.

  “It’s just me,” she said more loudly than she intended to. “Not scared of a little old lady, are you?” He had to have been cold out there last night even with the thick blanket Shawna had him wear. It could get bad, dipping down into the forties sometimes. Kay shivered at the thought of it and snuggled into the oversized Carhartt she’d taken to wearing. It had been Norm’s, the one he’d worn to the shop every day. It stank of grease and engine oil and cigarettes.

  While she waited for the horse to settle down, Kay found herself staring at a clod of dandelions at her feet. There weren’t many in the yard, at least not like when they’d lived in Michigan. She nudged the weeds with her foot. Just this, she thought. If I could somehow grasp just this one thing, hold it and digest it fully and completely in my head, then I’d understand everything. She’d been having these kinds of thoughts, these little side conversations with God, more and more frequently lately. A part of her wanted to dig up the weed and bring it inside to study, but she stopped herself before doing such a silly thing.

  The horse snorted, wagging its head from side to side like it had water in its ears. “I’m already losing it, Seven. What do you say to that?” Kay peered out through the trees toward the lake. The water was choppy, the wind creating miniature waves that would push the foam further up the bank. Soon the foam would cover the entire lake, then slowly turn darker and darker shades of yellow until it looked something like ash, like a volcano in a nearby town had erupted. It surprised her every year how the ice crept like a living thing over the water come winter. She sat forward in the chair, the arms and legs twisting as she did. Such a durable thing and yet so flimsy. There was something to that, something significant maybe, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  Seven pawed at the ground, snorted. She couldn’t imagine the animal sick, couldn’t imagine him having something like a massive heart attack. Seven was pure life. It emanated from him. He was a spark. A spark waiting to turn into flame. Kay stood up slowly, took a step toward the animal. He was calmer, only stamping lightly at the ground now. She remembered something Douglas had told her one night while she had been drinking but hadn’t been sure if she’d heard him right. Shawna says that what we call a hoof is really just a toe. Apparently they used to have five toes but over time it evolved into just the one. She remembered how the girl wanted to be a veterinarian one day. And she wished it for the girl. More than anything she wished it. But it wouldn’t be easy. Nothing, really, would ever be easy for the girl. “So you had feet a long time ago?” she said quietly. “Well, not you, but your ancestors. What do you think about that? Would you like to have five toes? Probably make it hard to run. You’d constantly be getting rocks stuck in there.”

  Kay looked at the chair, then back at Seven again. S
he wanted to know what it felt like to be spark and flame. Or maybe what it felt like to be Don Quixote. Maybe she could use her walking stick to joust at the old ladies down at church, the ones who were always gobbling cookies and gossiping in the church basement. She took another step closer to the pen and Seven’s gigantic head swung toward her, his nose bobbing up and down like he was agreeing with her every thought. She dug into her pocket, pulled out a handful of baby carrots she’d brought from home. “Don’t eat me,” she said, cautiously sliding her hand through the metal bars. “Just the carrots now, okay?”

  Seven’s head lowered and his lips and muzzle engulfed the carrots in one take. Kay took a step back, wondering what the equivalent in human food was that she’d just given him. Probably something like a tic-tac. Kay hugged Norm’s coat tight against her and noticed some hay stacked against the garage. It looked like alfalfa, but Kay couldn’t be sure. She hadn’t really touched a bale of hay since she was a girl helping her uncle on his farm in Michigan. She remembered tagging along after him as he fed the goats and cows. Wasn’t there a sow she’d taken to? It was all so fragmented now. What she wouldn’t give to be transported back into her little girl body for just a few hours. She’d run and run across that farm and through the fields and just keep running until her time ran out.

  She continued on her walk, inhaling and savoring as she went. There was still magic in the air, though she had to breathe deep to taste it, and it hurt a little to do so. It was like the magic from her childhood was hanging there on the end of a long string, tethered like a brittle kite that was threatening to disintegrate if she tugged too hard at it. Just like an old memory, she mused as she moved down the road in something like a half-hobble.

  When she got home over an hour later, she made herself a drink and nestled into Norm’s old spot on the couch. She pressed the button on the remote a few times but nothing happened. “Christ, are you kidding me?” She aimed it again at the TV like a gun and pressed down harder on the red button. Nothing. She noticed a little silver screw on the back. She rocked herself back and forth, gaining momentum to propel herself upright. In the kitchen, she dug through the “crap drawer” with all the batteries and stamps and other miscellaneous things, and when she found two triple-As hiding in the back, she felt a tiny rush of accomplishment. Once she made it back to the couch and was comfortably settled in again, she realized she’d forgotten to grab a screwdriver. Something about this irritated her to no end, and, for a brief second, she could feel herself wanting to cry. The frustration was there behind her eyes, the squeeze of it coursing through her whole body and wanting out. She took a deep breath. You’re okay, she told herself and reached for her drink.