North American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  Nick decided fuck the protocol, he was getting up. “I gotta get out of here,” he said, jumping out of bed and fishing for his clothes.

  “I’m getting at something though, Nickie.”

  He stopped. “What.”

  “Responsibility. Heritage. You can’t just be selfish anymore. You got to decide who you are, and what you owe your family.”

  “What family.”

  “The one you already have, and more importantly the one you’re going to have.”

  “You want me to prove something to the Hammers.”

  “Why don’t you start by proving something to me? I need you to be more than just a sweet boy, Nickie. There has to be more than that.”

  Nick didn’t look at her as he dressed. “Do you have a gun?” he asked.

  She clearly hadn’t been expecting that. She stared at him for a moment. “I can get one,” she said.

  Tyrone still lived with his mother. Nick had overheard him talking about it to Big Jake one day, how she worked second shift out at a hotel by the university on Elysian Fields, and he had to pick her up every night at ten and drive her back home. It was still not quite nine; it would be a simple thing to stake the place out and follow them home. In fact, all of it would be simple. He’d shot a rat once, when he was a kid stalking the neighborhood with a BB gun. He didn’t think this could be much different.

  Trixie was the only one who summoned any feeling from him anymore. He would do anything it took. If it took something grandly catastrophic, all the better. Maybe he would feel that, too.

  While they had been inside, the sky had really opened up. By the time Trixie drove them through the torrential rain to Matt’s house in Midcity, it was well past nine o’clock.

  “We need a gun,” she said to Matt after he ushered them inside. Matt was dressed in boxer shorts and nothing else. He sat on the edge of the couch and stared at the TV, which was showing some war movie.

  “You wanna beer?” he asked Trixie. He had not looked at Nick even once.

  “No thanks.”

  “What you need a gun for?”

  Nick waited for Trixie to explain it to him, but when she remained silent, he knew the question was meant for him.

  “I need to shoot somebody,” he said.

  “No shit.” He kept watching the TV.

  “I’m ready to do my duty.”

  That seemed to get through, but not in the way he wanted. Matt looked up at him with naked contempt. “By shootin some nigger? All that’s gonna do is get you thrown in jail. Next thing my ass is right there with you. Get the fuck out of here, dude.”

  “I won’t get caught.”

  “Not with my gun you won’t.”

  Trixie spoke up. “I know you got some disposables here,” she said.

  “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Trix?”

  “This is what Derrick wants, Matt. Come on.”

  Nick stared at her, suddenly off-kilter. When had Derrick become a factor in this?

  “Well, he didn’t mention it to me,” Matt said, looking back at the TV. He seemed unaccountably engrossed in a commercial for an electric razor.

  “There’s a lot he don’t mention to you,” Trixie said coolly. “Not to any of you. Not unless you been climbin in bed with him . . . but I don’t remember seein you there.”

  Something in Nick’s chest dropped; he felt suddenly heavy, and wondered if he would be able to move if he had to. Matt stewed silently for a few minutes, then cursed under his breath and went into the bedroom. He came back a few moments later with a small black piece of metal wrapped in a washcloth. He handed it directly to Trixie, and said, “This is on you. If things get fucked up, it’s on you.”

  She took the gun from him. “You act like I don’t know what I’m doing.” She turned for the door. Nick turned to follow, but Matt said, “Hey.” When Nick looked at him, he smiled. “So, how does Derrick’s dick taste?”

  Matt was still laughing when Nick shut the door.

  Streams of water flowed along the passenger window as the car sped down a raised stretch of I-10, and behind the water the city flowed by too, bejeweled with light, like a dream of an enchanted kingdom. Nick leaned his head against the glass and tried to pretend he was somewhere else, somewhere far from this city and the people who lived in it, somewhere you didn’t have to fight a war every day to justify who you were. Trixie sat beside him, steering the car through the rain, her fingers clenching the wheel like it was a lifeline.

  “What about his mother?” she said, breaking his lovely illusion.

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Well, now’s a good time to start.”

  He decided not to respond. Trixie nodded, thinking her own thoughts. The rain increased its intensity, and she clicked the windshield wipers on high. New Orleans was behind them now; Nick had to look in the side mirror to see it. The deluge slowed the traffic, making the rain seem even heavier. Headlights from cars in the opposite lane smeared across the windshield, growing and fading like pulsars.

  “You knew I was with him,” Trixie said.

  “Was, I knew you was with him! I didn’t know you came straight from his fucking house!”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well—whatever, Trixie! What the fuck!”

  “It’s not like I’m his girlfriend or anything, okay? We just fuck sometimes. It’s no big deal.”

  “Right, no big deal.”

  “Oh, fucking grow up, would you?”

  A green BMW cut in front of them and Trixie stepped on the brakes. The tires locked for a moment and the car hydroplaned nearly halfway across the lane before it regained traction.

  “Motherfucker!” she said, lips peeling back from her teeth.

  “You want me to drive?”

  “No, I don’t want you to drive.”

  “You sure?”

  “Nick! I can drive the goddamned car!”

  The BMW in front of them veered to the right and accelerated down the highway. Someone leaned on a horn. A pick-up truck eased into the vacant spot, pulling a horse trailer. Nick could see the animal’s vague white shape inside, and he wondered where it needed to go in all this rain, what urgency compelled it.

  After a few moments, he said, “Did you even want to sleep with me? Or were you just following orders?”

  “Nick . . .”

  Tires squealed on the pavement somewhere ahead of them, followed by the dull, muted thud of crumpling metal. Red brake lights splashed over the beaded water on the windshield. The pick-up swerved to the right, but it moved too quickly and the horse trailer yawed over on its left wheels and for one moment it seemed to freeze there, as though weighing consequences, and beyond it Nick saw the green BMW on its roof, its wheels sending gleaming arcs of water into the sky as they spun, and another car further ahead with its front end crushed against the concrete divider in the middle of the highway. Then the horse trailer fell, sending a rooster-tail of sparks into the air; the walls came loose, and the horse careened along the pavement in a grotesque tumble of limbs and flying hair, until it collided with the BMW and stopped.

  Trixie hit the brakes and the car spun in a half circle, sliding across the lanes until the rear bumper hit the divider with the sound of breaking glass and folding metal, and they stopped. The car faced backwards; they watched approaching regiments of headlights ease to a slow crawl.

  They breathed heavily for a few moments, hearing nothing but the drumming rain. A burnt, metallic odor filled the car. Someone outside started to scream.

  Nick grabbed Trixie and turned her face towards him. “Trix? Are you okay?” She nodded, dazed. He felt blood on his own face, and reached up to feel a small split between his eyes; apparently he’d hit the das
hboard. He looked out the back window at the accident’s aftermath and said, “Stay here.”

  He opened the passenger door and climbed out into a cold brace of air. The rain was a frozen weight, soaking his clothes instantly. A confused array of lights speared through the rain, giving the scene a freakish radiance. He noticed that he was casting several shadows.

  The horse’s big body jerked as it tried to right itself, and Nick heard bones crack somewhere inside it. The horse screamed. It lay next to the overturned car, amidst a glittering galaxy of broken glass, its legs crooked and snapped, its blood spilling onto the asphalt and trailing away in diluted rivers. It was beautiful, even in these awful circumstances; its body seemed phosphorescent in the rain.

  Nick knelt beside it and brushed his fingers against its skin. The flesh jumped, and he was overwhelmed by a powerful scent of urine and musk. Its eye rolled to look at him. Nick stared back, paralyzed. The horse’s blood pooled around his shoe. It seemed an astonishing end for this animal, that it should come to die on some hard ground its ancestors never knew, surrounded by machines they never dreamed. Its absurdity offended him.

  Someone splashed by him and dropped to his knees, peering into the overturned BMW; he shouted Oh my God, oh my God, and tugged frantically, futilely, at its door. Nick sensed a larger movement around him as people left their cars and began shouting, milling around the scene in a vortex of chaos and adrenaline.

  “Nick!”

  Trixie materialized behind him and pulled at his shoulders.

  “Come on, we have to get out of here!”

  He came to his feet.

  “Nick, let’s go. The police are coming. We can’t get caught with that gun.”

  The gun. Nick brushed roughly past her, nearly knocking her to her knees. He retrieved the gun from her glove compartment and headed back to the horse. Trixie intercepted him, tried to push him back. “No, no, are you fucking crazy? It’s gonna die anyway!”

  He wrenched her aside, and this time she did fall. He walked over to the horse and the gun cracked twice, two bright flashes in the rain, and the horse was dead. A kind of peace settled over him then, a floating calm, and he stuffed the gun into his trousers, ignoring the heat of the barrel pressing into his flesh. Trixie had not bothered to get up from the pavement. She sat there, watching him, the rain sluicing over her head and down her body. Her face was inscrutable behind the curtain of rain, as was everything else about her. He left her there.

  Behind her, the car was hopelessly ensnared in the traffic jam. He would have to walk home, to his mother, broken and beautiful, crashed in her own foreign landscape. Bewildered and terrified. Burning love like a gasoline. He started down the highway, walking along the edge of stopped traffic. He felt the weightlessness of mercy. He was a striding christ. Sounds filtered through to him: people yelling and pleading; footsteps splashing through the rain; a distant, stranded siren. From somewhere behind him a man’s sob, weird and ululating, rose above the wreckage and disappeared into the sky, a flaming rag.

  The Crevasse

  (with Dale Bailey)

  What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky. Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive.

  There were fourteen of them. Four men, one of them, Faber, strapped to the back of Garner’s sledge, mostly unconscious, but occasionally surfacing out of the morphine depths to moan. Ten dogs, big Greenland huskies, gray and white. Two sledges. And the silence, scouring him of memory and desire, hollowing him out inside. It was what he’d come to Antarctica for.

  And then, abruptly, the silence split open like a wound:

  A thunderous crack, loud as lightning cleaving stone, shivered the ice, and the dogs of the lead sledge, maybe twenty-five yards ahead of Garner, erupted into panicky cries. Garner saw it happen: the lead sledge sloughed over—hurling Connelly into the snow—and plunged nose first through the ice, as though an enormous hand had reached up through the earth to snatch it under. Startled, he watched an instant longer. The wrecked sledge, jutting out of the earth like a broken stone, hurtled at him, closer, closer. Then time stuttered, leaping forward. Garner flung one of the brakes out behind him. The hook skittered over the ice. Garner felt the jolt in his spine when it caught. Rope sang out behind him, arresting his momentum. But it wouldn’t be enough.

  Garner flung out a second brake, then another. The hooks snagged, jerking the sledge around and up on a single runner. For a moment Garner thought that it was going to roll, dragging the dogs along behind it. Then the airborne runner slammed back to earth and the sledge skidded to a stop in a glittering spray of ice.

  Dogs boiled back into its shadow, howling and snapping. Ignoring them, Garner clambered free. He glanced back at Faber, still miraculously strapped to the travois, his face ashen, and then he pelted toward the wrecked sledge, dodging a minefield of spilled cargo: food and tents, cooking gear, his medical bag, disgorging a bright freight of tools and the few precious ampules of morphine McReady had been willing to spare, like a fan of scattered diamonds.

  The wrecked sledge hung precariously, canted on a lip of ice above a black crevasse. As Garner stood there, it slipped an inch, and then another, dragged down by the weight of the dogs. He could hear them whining, claws scrabbling as they strained against harnesses drawn taut by the weight of Atka, the lead dog, dangling out of sight beyond the edge of the abyss.

  Garner visualized him—thrashing against his tack in a black well as the jagged circle of grayish light above shrank away, inch by lurching inch—and he felt the pull of night inside himself, the age-old gravity of the dark. Then a hand closed around his ankle.

  Bishop, clinging to the ice, a hand-slip away from tumbling into the crevasse himself: face blanched, eyes red rimmed inside his goggles.

  “Shit,” Garner said. “Here—”

  He reached down, locked his hand around Bishop’s wrist, and hauled him up, boots slipping. Momentum carried him over backwards, floundering in the snow as Bishop curled fetal beside him.

  “You okay?”

  “My ankle,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Here, let me see.”

  “Not now. Connelly. What happened to Connelly?”

  “He fell off—”

  With a metallic screech, the sledge broke loose. It slid a foot, a foot and a half, and then it hung up. The dogs screamed. Garner had never heard a dog make a noise like that—he didn’t know dogs could make a noise like that—and for a moment their blind, inarticulate terror swam through him. He thought again of Atka, dangling there, turning, feet clawing at the darkness, and he felt something stir inside him once again—

  “Steady, man,” Bishop said.

  Garner drew in a long breath, icy air lacerating his lungs.

  “You gotta be steady now, Doc,” Bishop said. “You gotta go cut him loose.”

  “No—”

  “We’re gonna lose the sledge. And the rest of the team. That happens, we’re all gonna die out here, okay? I’m busted up right now, I need you to do this thing—”

  “What about Connell—”

  “Not now, Doc. Listen to me. We don’t have time. Okay?”

  Bishop held his gaze. Garner tried to look away, could not. The other man’s eyes fixed him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Garner stood and stumbled away. Went to his knees to dig through the wreckage. Flung aside a sack of rice, frozen in clumps, wrenched open a crate of flares—useless—shoved it aside, and dragged another
one toward him. This time he was lucky: he dug out a coil of rope, a hammer, a handful of pitons. The sledge lurched on its lip of ice, the rear end swinging, setting off another round of whimpering.

  “Hurry,” Bishop said.

  Garner drove the pitons deep into the permafrost and threaded the rope through their eyes, his hands stiff inside his gloves. Lashing the other end around his waist, he edged back onto the broken ice shelf. It shifted underneath him, creaking. The sledge shuddered, but held. Below him, beyond the moiling clump of dogs, he could see the leather trace leads, stretched taut across the jagged rim of the abyss.

  He dropped back, letting rope out as he descended. The world fell away above him. Down and down, and then he was on his knees at the very edge of the shelf, the hot, rank stink of the dogs enveloping him. He used his teeth to loosen one glove. Working quickly against the icy assault of the elements, he fumbled his knife out of its sheath and pressed the blade to the first of the traces. He sawed at it until the leather separated with a snap.

  Atka’s weight shifted in the darkness below him, and the dog howled mournfully. Garner set to work on the second trace, felt it let go, everything—the sledge, the terrified dogs—slipping toward darkness. For a moment he thought the whole thing would go. But it held. He went to work on the third trace, gone loose now by some trick of tension. It too separated beneath his blade, and he once again felt Atka’s weight shift in the well of darkness beneath him.

  Garner peered into the blackness. He could see the dim blur of the dog, could feel its dumb terror welling up around him, and as he brought the blade to the final trace, a painstakingly erected dike gave way in his mind. Memory flooded through him: the feel of mangled flesh beneath his fingers, the distant whump of artillery, Elizabeth’s drawn and somber face.