Jerkwater

by Jamie Zerndt

  Jenna flipped through the book until she found the one she wanted and held it up for him to see. It was the one of the loon with the broken neck. “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. It’s different. It’s not always about how well you can draw something, right?” She caught the look he was giving her. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. You can definitely draw. Think of it like a song. You know how you can hear someone with a pitch-perfect voice, but their singing doesn’t move you at all? Well, drawing is pretty much the same thing. Think Mick Jagger. Tom Waits. You think they’d get laid without having style?”

  Douglas’s mouth was dry. His tongue felt like a loaf of bread. One of those fat European kinds. He’d never been with a woman who talked like this. When she spoke, she twisted something over inside him, like she was looking under all the rocks of him. The underside of him. The phrase worked its way into his head all on its own and while he didn’t exactly know what it meant, he knew it described the feeling perfectly.

  “But you like Seven,” he mumbled, thinking he was being funny.

  “Um, what?”

  He looked over at her, but she wasn’t smiling even a little. “Nothing,” he said stupidly. “I had a dream about you, that’s all.”

  “Okay, so now you have to tell me.”

  He remembered something somebody had told him once about people only wanting to hear your dreams if they were about them. Which was most likely true, though maybe not in this case. “Maybe later, okay? I think I need some more of this coffee first.”

  Jenna got up and put some music on, a band Douglas wasn’t familiar with, but that wasn’t all that unusual. The song was slow, atmospheric, like the guitar had been dipped in hangover. Douglas watched her sway to the music with her back to him.

  “You want to see what I used to do, don’t you? But you’re too shy to ask.”

  When she turned to look at him, Douglas nodded, which was pretty much all he was capable of doing besides drooling right along with the dog.

  “Okay, hold on. It’s been a little while so I might be rusty.” He watched as she dug through a closet by the front door and returned holding a long, black scarf. “I’m used to a pole, so we’re going to have to improvise a little.” There was a potted plant of some kind hanging from the ceiling which she took down before tying the scarf to the hook so that it dangled there like a long silk snake. “Ready?” She lit a candle on the coffee table, then dimmed the lights before skipping a few songs ahead. When she slid off the sweat pants she’d been wearing and was down to just a pair of black panties, she turned to Douglas and somewhat shyly said, “Not fair just me showing you everything, is it?”

  She bent over, sliding the panties down to her ankles. “Please,” she said in a pouty voice, and Douglas unbuckled his jeans and kicked off his shoes. When he stood and took them off, his junk bobbing there dumbly in front of him, she smiled that crooked smile of hers at him.

  “Good boy.” She sat down in a chair across from him with her legs closed. “Now sit down, okay?”

  Douglas, of course, did as he was told.

  “Do you want to see?” she purred, rocking her thighs from side to side with her hands resting on her knees.

  Douglas nodded, the loaf of bread in his mouth expanding.

  “If I do, will you touch yourself for me?”

  Again, Douglas nodded. She could ask him to saw off his arm right now and he’d nod yes. Who was this woman? Did other men have girlfriends who did this sort of thing for them? Maybe, he figured, but definitely not someone with legs like Jenna’s. Not in Mercer, anyway. When Douglas took hold of himself, she got up and made her way to the bathroom. When she came back, she carefully laid a towel on the floor in front of him. “Don’t worry, it’ll turn me on if you just let yourself go.”

  When Jenna sat back down and slowly opened her legs for him, Douglas no longer felt inside his body. Or maybe he felt entirely inside his body. He wasn’t sure. Every single emotion and sensation was fused together now. He was both absent and extremely present, like he was floating somewhere up above, watching both himself and Jenna. He could feel himself tiptoeing to an edge, then stepping back, his whole body condensed and pulsing. But even as he watched Jenna slide her fingers between her legs, even as she moaned and whimpered for him, the shadow of why he had gotten drunk in the first place hovered there around him, too.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Well...” she said, nodding toward his hand. “You seem a bit, um, distracted.”

  Douglas looked down, saw that he’d gone soft. “Shoot,” he said. “It’s just the whiskey. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  Jenna got up, walked over to him and knelt before him. “It’s not just the whiskey,” she said. “Something’s obviously bothering you. We don’t have to talk about it tonight if you don’t want to, though.”

  “Will you do something for me?”

  “It depends,” she said playfully.

  Douglas stood up. “It’s nothing weird. Wait, yes, it’s totally weird.” Douglas kicked his jeans fully off then squatted down with his back to her. “Hop on. I want to give you a ride.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “C’mon, it’ll be fun. Trust me.”

  “Famous last words.” Jenna placed her hands on his shoulders. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff before, but, yeah, this is a new one for me.”

  She hopped onto Douglas’s back, her legs wrapped around his waist as he hoisted her up and started moving about the living room at something like a trot.

  “Giddy up,” Douglas called out and Jenna started to laugh.

  “Wait, wouldn’t you be the horse in this scenario?”

  “Oh, right. Ha.”

  The novelty of the situation soon wore off, though. Mainly because drunk horses, it turned out, had weak thighs and couldn’t carry riders for very long no matter how light and sexy they were. So Douglas carried them into the bedroom, collapsing them onto the bed.

  “You’re a strange one, Douglas. Lucky for you I’m a big fan of strange.”

  With her legs still around his waist, she kissed him. And the kiss, the way her lips lingered before slowly pulling away, was full of dirt, layers and layers of it and he couldn’t get enough. He wanted to do everything all at once to her. That’s what it felt like.

  “You’re a nice combination,” she said when she pulled away from him.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Both sweet and dirty, I guess.”

  “Then that’s a good thing?”

  “It’s a very good thing.”

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Shawna

  Shawna was about to head out to the back porch for her nightly stalking when she heard her naan snoring in her mother’s old bedroom. They’d kept the house after the murder. Her step-dad’s side of the family insisted on it, said it was the least they could do. Shawna hated living there, but they’d be leaving next year if everything went as planned. Shawna poked her head in the door, watched her naan’s chest rising and falling. Her naan was magic. When they found out about it, she held Shawna in her arms for hours and sang all kinds of songs to her. And not just Ojibwa songs. She sang the Beatles and Neil Young and even some Neil Diamond. But they all sounded Indian the way her naan sang them in her low husky voice, the rhythm sort of jumping in slow motion. Her naan was medicine. Elmer was medicine. Seven was medicine. And all of that medicine still seemed like it was barely enough to keep her from getting sick. And there were so many ways for people to be sick. Shawna saw it everywhere. In town. On the reservation. At the casino. So much of it that she’d come to think of the world as an open-aired hospital ward, everyone shuffling around in their hospital gowns, lugging around invisible IVs, carrying on as best they could. When her naan’s time came, Shawna didn’t know how she was going to h
andle it. Just the thought of it made her throat close up. But if she’d learned anything so far it was that we don’t handle death: death handles us.

  The first month after it happened Shawna didn’t eat much. She felt like a rag doll. Like a rag doll without rags. And on those rare occasions when she was around other people, she found herself filled with the irrepressible urge to spit on them. She never did it, of course, though she remembered spitting on the ground once uncomfortably close to some people passing by. She still had the urge some days. And there had been the voice of her mom floating in and out of her head. Talking. Always talking.

  “Shawna, eat for me please.”

  “Love yourself for me, baby.”

  “You’re making me cry. Don’t make your mother cry.”

  And her naan bringing her fry bread, potato chips, ice cream, grilled cheese with turkey, mac and cheese, hot dogs... anything to get Shawna to eat. And she did eat eventually. Just enough to put a few rags into the doll. Which were more like tissues than rags: flimsy things propping her up inside just enough to get through the day. Just enough to appease the incessant voice of her mother.

  Shawna went out to the back porch and sat in the rocking chair her naan liked to nap in, putting her feet up on the railing. The lights were out across the lake. Which meant he was either asleep already or still at the bar. Normally this was would have bothered Shawna, the not knowing, but tonight it didn’t. She pulled the brochure out from her pocket and, under the starlight, tried to imagine herself studying at a coffee shop in Madison, Elmer sitting across from her smoking a cigarette, not a slot machine in sight.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Kay

  While it was true Kay sometimes forgot what day it was, or why she had come into a certain room, it was also true that lately other memories were vividly flooding back. She was sitting on the couch reading one of Norm’s poems about a fish when one such memory resurfaced. She hadn’t thought about it in years but now she could see herself lingering outside a young Douglas’s door, listening as Norm told him a bedtime story..

  Once upon a time there was a little fart.

  No...

  Sorry. Once upon a time there was a little boy who went fishing.

  That’s me.

  Maybe. And this little boy was minding his own business, just trying to catch a fish on the lake behind his house, when suddenly he felt something tug at his line. And it wasn’t just any kind of normal tug. The boy’s pole bent nearly in half from the weight of whatever was under the surface of the water.

  Probably a whale. I bet it’s a whale.

  But just then a whale popped his head out of the water and said, “I’m not a whale!” and then disappeared back under the water.

  Aww, but I wanted it to be...

  Doug.

  I’ll be quiet.

  So just as the boy was wondering if his pole was going to break, the line went completely slack. The boy, thinking he’d lost the fish, slowly began to reel his line back in. He reeled and reeled, but there seemed to be no end to the line. What had happened to his hook and worm? And where was all this extra line coming from? The boy, his arms now starting to hurt from all the reeling, eventually had to stop because his spool couldn’t hold any more. Baffled, he set his pole down in the boat and stared out across the water. It was quiet out, not a ripple on the water, and the boy was thinking about cutting the line and going back home when he thought he heard something scratching along the bottom of the boat...

  Don’t make it too scary. Sometimes you make it too scary.

  A little scary is okay, though, right?

  Yeah. Just a little.

  Okay. So the little boy...

  And could you maybe stop calling him little? Maybe he’s not as little as people think.

  Fair enough. Okay, so the sound, the scraping sound on the bottom of the boat kept getting louder and louder, like the boat was dragging against the bottom. But that couldn’t be because the boy, a very mature boy for his age, knew he had dropped anchor right in the middle of the lake. Just then the boat started rising out of the water. Only a little bit at first, like there was a giant hand under the water carefully lifting the boat out of the water to inspect it. The big boy sat down and gripped the bench seat with both his hands. He was about to call out for help, maybe yell for his mother, when the boat slowly settled back into the water again. But the boy couldn’t move now. He felt glued to his seat, frozen there so that even if he wanted to move, he couldn’t.

  I don’t like this part. Does it get better soon?

  It’ll get better. Just wait.

  Okay.

  Then the line on the boy’s pole started running out again, racing out over the side of the boat, threatening to carry the pole and spool and everything over the side. The boy lunged for the pole, grabbing it just as it was about to be dragged into the water. And suddenly the boy wasn’t afraid anymore. He knew what he had to do: he had to catch whatever it was that was pulling on that line. He set the drag on the spool and then grabbed the reel tight in his hands so that the line stopped running. When he looked out over the water, there, not twenty feet from the boat, he saw the back of a monster-sized sunfish breach the surface. But it wasn’t just any sunfish. This sunfish really did look like an actual sun. Its scales were a fierce yellow that seemed to burn there in the water, and little bubbles erupted all alongside the fish like maybe the water was boiling.

  Cool.

  The boy thought it was cool, too, although he had no idea how he could reel him in without burning a hole in his fishing line. Even so, he started reeling, and, much to his surprise, he found that the sunfish wasn’t all that difficult to bring in. It seemed, in fact, to be swimming toward the boat rather than away. Faster and faster the boy reeled the line in and soon the giant fish was there beside his boat. As the boy stared in awe at the fish, wondering if it would burn a hole through his net, or worse, through the hull of the boat, the fish smacked the water with a fin, splashing water on the boy’s face. “What’s the matter with you?” the fish said to the boy. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” The boy was stunned. He’d never seen a talking fish before.

  Only in cartoons.

  Exactly. Only in cartoons. The boy kicked his tackle box across the floor of the boat with his foot to make room for the fish, already planning in his head how he’d bring the fish back home and introduce him to his mom.

  I’d show him to you, too.

  “Please,” said the boy timidly, “come into my boat. I won’t hurt you.” The fish laughed at this. “You won’t hurt me? Ha. How about I won’t hurt you?” The boy didn’t know what to say to this, but he could see that the fish was right: if he were to touch it, there was little doubt he’d get burned badly. So, with a quick twist and arch of his body, the fish jumped from the water and into the boat causing the boat to rock back and forth violently as if a giant wave had struck it.

  “Well,” the fish said, his scales shimmering with heat, “are you going to remove this thing from my mouth or what?”

  The boy had been so awestruck by the fish that he hadn’t noticed the hook through its upper lip. “Oh,” said the boy. “I’m so sorry. Hold on a second and let me see what I can do.” Nervously, the boy rummaged through his tackle box and pulled out an old pair of needle-nose pliers.

  The ones you gave me.

  The fish scooted back a little in the boat. “Easy there, fella. You sure you know how to work those?” The boy lied and told the fish he was an expert hook remover. The truth, however, was that the boy had mangled a few mouths in his short career as a fisherman, not to mention the countless esophagi he’d accidentally ripped from the throats of innocent fish who had been unfortunate enough to swallow one of his hooks.

  What kind of guy?

  Esophagi. I’ll explain later. So, not knowing any better, the massive talking sunfish scooted closer
to the boy, offering up his lip to him. As the boy carefully set about removing the hook from the poor fish’s lip, he noticed a hole in the side of the fish. When he looked closer, he saw that it went clear through the sunfish.

  “Dibbn’t any slubby eber smell you it boob poo slare?”

  The boy, realizing the fish couldn’t speak very well with the pliers in his mouth, removed them and the fish tried again.

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the boy. “It just looks so painful. What happened to you?”

  The fish then told the boy a strange story about a giant metal stick bursting through the water and nearly cutting him in two. “I was lucky. If I had been a few inches to one side or the other, I wouldn’t be here right now talking to you.”

  “But what was it?” the boy asked.

  “At the time I didn’t know what it was. But later I found out it was called a spear. Some people were trying to kill a different kind of fish, what you call Walleye, but it accidentally hit me.”

  “Wow,” the boy said, “you got really lucky.”

  The fish laughed, and rays of sunlight scattered out from his mouth. “You call a hole in my side and a hook in my mouth lucky?”

  The boy wagged his head apologetically and returned to the work of removing the hook. After a few minutes of extremely careful tugging and twisting, the hook released itself from the fish’s mouth, leaving only a small hole. “I’m sorry about that,” said the boy. “Will you be okay?”

  The fish gulped down some air, making big Os with his mouth, almost like he was imitating a normal fish. “What, this? Oh, I’ll be fine. It kind of goes with the other one, don’t you think?”

  But the boy was too busy trying to figure out how to keep the fish to answer him. Maybe he could just row back with the fish there like he was. But just as the boy was starting to reach for the anchor line to pull it up, the fish gave a giant slap with his tail and launched himself into the air. Seeing that the fish was trying to escape, the boy lunged and tried to grab hold of it, but the fish was too smart for that and raised his dorsal fin just as the boy was reaching for him. “Ouch!” yelped the boy and pulled his hand back as the fish made a giant splash and disappeared under the water.