North American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  Left to itself, though, his self-righteousness dissipated, and he fell into examining his own behavior. These women had been his beacons while he was in prison, and within days of his return he had driven them into hiding. He remembered it being like this sometimes, but it seemed worse now.

  What’s the matter with me? he thought. Why do I always fuck it up?

  Eventually Sarah came out of her room. She was dressed to go outside, and she held a large pad of paper under her arm. She strode through the living room with a purpose and without a word. Just like her mother, Grady thought.

  “Where are you going?”

  She stopped, almost at the door, her back to him. She raised her face to the ceiling, as though imploring God. “Outside,” she said.

  “I can see that. Where to?”

  She half turned, looking at him finally. “What does it matter?”

  His teeth clenched. He stood up quickly, in a fluid motion: it was an abrupt and aggressive action, meant to convey threat, a holdover from the vocabulary of violence he’d spent years cultivating. “Because I’m your father,” he said. “Don’t you forget that.”

  She took a startled step backward; Grady felt a flare of satisfaction, and was immediately appalled at himself. He sat back down, scowling.

  “I want to draw the monster,” Sarah said, her voice markedly subdued.

  “You—why would you want to do that?” All the anger had drained from him. He tried speaking to her now in a reasonable voice, the kind he thought a regular father might use.

  She shrugged. She looked at the floor in front of her, looking for all the world like a punished child.

  “Sarah, look at me.”

  Nothing.

  He put some steel into it, not wanting her to make him angry again. “I said look at me.”

  She looked at him.

  “You don’t need to be going out there,” he said.

  She nodded. She tried to say something, failed, and tried again. “Okay.”

  But as she turned and headed back to her room, her face a cramped scrawl of defeat, his resolve washed away completely. He hadn’t expected her to acquiesce so quickly, and he experienced a sudden need to show her that he could be giving, and kind. “You know what? Go ahead.”

  Sarah stopped again. “What?”

  “Just go on. Go ahead.”

  She seemed to consider it for a moment, then said, “Okay,” and turned back to the door. She walked out, shutting it quietly behind her.

  She’s so weak, he thought. How did this happen?

  Despite the fact that she’d only been staying there three days, Sarah’s room was a wreck. Her suitcase was open and clothes were stacked precariously on the bed, the ones she’d already worn strewn across the floor. He went into the little bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet, which was empty, and into the trash can, where he found spent cigarettes. They were only half-consumed, which he supposed was a small blessing. He figured she was training herself to like them. Maybe there was still time to put a stop to it. He spent a futile moment at the sink, trying once more to clean his hands.

  Back in the bedroom he opened the bureau drawers, thinking that he might find her diary. He was encouraged when he saw a spiral-bound notebook in one of them, until he opened it to find lists of chores and a draft of a letter to someone named Tamara about an impending trip—his mother-in-law’s notebook, which made it eight years old at least. He looked under her mattress; he looked beneath her clothes in the suitcase. In a large zippered pouch on the lid of the suitcase he found large sheets of paper covered in pencil sketches.

  They were drawings of a nude teenage boy. Her boyfriend, he guessed. The infamous Travis. He sat carefully on her bed and looked at them, breathing carefully, concentrating on holding his hands steady. He tried to reason with himself: the drawings were not lewd: he supposed they were classical poses. He even recognized, dimly, that the drawings were good. There was talent at work here. But mostly he felt a rising heat, a bloody flush of anger. A bead of sweat fell from his forehead and splashed onto the sketch, obliterating the boy’s shoulder like a gunshot.

  Well. No hiding it now.

  He tore the drawings down the middle, turned them sideways and tore them again. He returned the quartered papers to the pouch in the suitcase, and determined that she would never, ever see that predatory little fuck again. He would see to it.

  He left her room and stationed himself in front of the TV again. He couldn’t decide what he should do. He would wait for her and reason with her. He would scream at her and put the fear of God into her. He would go into the other bedroom and beat Tina until she bled from her ears. He would let it all go, and not say a word. He would go outside and get the goddamned axe or chainsaw or whatever he could find and go down to the lake and lay into the moldering pile of garbage until his arms hurt too much to move, until he filled the air with blood, filled his lungs and his heart and his mouth with blood.

  What he did was watch more TV. After a while he even began to pay attention to it. He forced himself to focus on whatever nonsense was on display, forced himself to listen to the commercials and consider the shiny plastic options they presented to him. It was a trick he’d cultivated in prison, a sort of meditation, to prevent himself from acting rashly, to keep himself out of trouble with the guards. Most of the time it worked.

  He would not go down to the lake. He would not go into Tina’s room, where she was steering herself into oblivion. He would sit down and be calm. It was easy.

  He went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the pantry. He left the one in the freezer for Tina; unlike her, he liked to feel the burn.

  A couple of hours passed. Sarah stayed gone. He killed half the bottle. The TV show became something else, then something else again, and his thoughts blundered about until they found Mitch. Tina had told him about Mitch while he was in jail. She started seeing him after he’d been in about four years, well after Sarah stopped coming to see him. He’d received the news stoically—he was proud of himself for that, even to this day. He inflicted catastrophic violence on some guy later that day, sure, but no one who wasn’t going to get it anyway. On the whole he thought he handled it all exceptionally well. And good news: Mitch got dumped after about six months.

  Grady told himself he could live with it, and he did.

  But it ate at him. Just a little bit.

  Now seemed as good a time as any to explore his feelings on this matter with his wife. To have an intimate discussion with her. It might serve to repair some of this breakage between them. Grady lifted himself off the couch and plotted a course to the bedroom. He placed his hand on the wall to steady himself; the floor was trying to buck him. He would show it. He took a few lurching steps and halted, one arm held aloft for balance. When it seemed that doom had been skirted, he took a few more steps and reached the far wall. There was a window there, and he cracked it for some fresh air. The sun was failing, little pools of nighttime gathering beneath the trees. He smelled something faintly sweet riding the air, and he breathed deeply and gratefully before he realized it must be the moldering corpse of the monster. Shaken, he pulled away from the window and went into the bedroom.

  Tina was awake, lying flat on the bed and staring at the ceiling. A photo album was open at her feet; some of the pictures had been removed and spread atop the covers. When he came in she rolled her head to look at him, and flopped an arm in his direction. “Hey babe,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  He sat heavily on the bed. The room was mostly dark, with only a faint yellow light leaking through the curtains. He picked up one of the loose photos: it was a picture of her father standing by the lake, holding up a big fish. “What the hell are you looking at?”

  She plucked the picture from his hand and tossed it to the floor, laughing at
him. “‘What the hell are you looking at?’” she said, rolling her body onto his legs.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “‘Don’t do that.’”

  He laughed despite himself, grabbing a handful of her hair and giving it a gentle tug.

  “Ain’t you mad no more?” she asked, her fingers working at the button of his pants.

  “Shut up, bitch,” he said, but affectionately, and she responded as though he’d just recited a line of verse, shedding her robe and lifting herself over and onto him, so that he felt as though he were sliding into a warm sea. He closed his eyes and exhaled, feeling it down to his fingertips.

  They moved roughly, urgently, breathing in the musk of each other, breathing in too the smell of the pines and the lake and the dead monster, this last growing in power until it occluded the others, until it filled his sinuses, his head, his body, until it seemed nothing existed except that smell and the awful thing that made it, until it seemed he was its source, the wellspring of all the foulness of the earth, and when he spent himself into her he thought for a wretched moment that he had somehow injected it with the possibility of new life.

  She rolled off of him, saying something he couldn’t hear. Grady put his hand over his face, breathed through his nose. Tina rested her head on his chest, and he put his nose to her hair, filling it with something recognizable and good. They lay together for long moments, their limbs a motionless tangle, glowing like marble in the fading light.

  “Why couldn’t you wait for me?” he said quietly.

  She tensed. For a while he could hear nothing but her breath, and the creaking of the trees outside as the wind moved through them. She rubbed her fingers through the hair on his chest.

  “Please don’t ask me that,” she said.

  He was quiet, waiting for her.

  “I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know a whole lot about that time. But I just don’t ever want to talk about it. I wish it never happened.”

  “Okay,” he said. It wasn’t good enough. But he was just drunk enough to realize that nothing would be. He would have to figure out whether or not he could live with it. It was impossible to say, just now. So he lay there with her and felt the weight of her body against his. When he closed his eyes he imagined himself beneath deep water, part of some ruined structure of broken gray stone, like some devastated row of teeth.

  “I should make dinner,” Tina said. “Sarah’s probably hungry.”

  Her name went off inside him like a depth charge. He lurched upright, ignoring the swimming sensation in his brain. “Sarah,” he said. “She went out.”

  “What?”

  “To that thing. She went out to that thing.”

  Tina seemed confused. “When?”

  “Hours ago.” He swung his legs out of bed. “God damn it. I’ve been drunk!”

  “Grady, calm down. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  He hurried through the living room, his heart crashing through his chest, a fear he had not believed possible crowing raucously in his head. He pushed her door open.

  She was there, illuminated by a slice of light from the living room, lying on her belly, her feet by the headboard. Her arms were tucked under her body for warmth. Her suitcase was open, and the pictures he had destroyed were on the floor beside it.

  “Sarah?” he whispered, and stepped inside. He placed his hand on her back, felt the heat unfurling from her body, felt the rise and fall of her breath. He crept around the bed and looked at her face. Her eyes were closed and gummed by tears; her mouth was slightly parted. A little damp pool of saliva darkened the blanket underneath. The rings in her ears caught the light from the living room.

  He stroked her hair, moving it off of her forehead and hooking it behind her ear. Anything could have happened to her, he thought. While I was drinking myself stupid in the other room, anything could have happened to her.

  Tina’s voice came in from the other room. “Grady? Is she all right?”

  Christ. I’m just like her. I’m just as fucking bad. He went to the door and poked his head out. “Yeah. She’s sleeping.”

  Tina smiled at him and shook her head. “I told you,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He went back into the room. He pulled off Sarah’s shoes and socks, slid her jacket off her shoulders. After a lot of careful maneuvering he managed to get her turned around and underneath the covers without waking her. He leaned over to kiss her on the forehead, and smelled the vodka on his own breath. Self-loathing hit him like a wrecking ball. He scrambled into her bathroom and barely made it before puking into the toilet, clutching the bowl with both hands, one leg looking weakly for purchase behind him. He’d had nothing but vodka and coffee all day, so there wasn’t much to throw up.

  When he felt able, he flushed the toilet and headed back to the bedroom. He leaned over and picked up the torn pictures, so he could throw them away. Beneath them he found the new ones, the ones she’d spent all day working on.

  He didn’t recognize them at first. She’d used colored pencils, and he initially thought he was looking at a house made of rainbows. Upon closer inspection, though, he realized that she’d drawn the dead monster: as a kaleidoscope, as a grounded sun. His mind reeled. He dropped it to the ground and here was the monster again, rendered larger than it was in real life, its mouth the gaping Gothic arches of a cathedral, its eyes stained glass, ignited by sunlight. There was another, and another, each depicting it as something beautiful, warm, and bright.

  Why couldn’t she get it? Why was she forever romanticizing vileness? His breath was getting short. He rubbed his temples, his body physically rocking as waves of anger rolled through him. She was just stupid, apparently. It was too late. Maybe he’d fucked her up, maybe Tina did, but the damage was done. She’d have to be protected her whole goddamned life.

  Might as well start now, he thought. Tina was in the living room as he walked through it, shrugging into his jacket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Is the shed locked?”

  “What?”

  “Is the shed fucking locked? ”

  “I, no, I—”

  “Good. Stay here.”

  When he opened the front door the cold slammed into him like a truck. The temperature had dropped precipitously with the sun. He paused to catch his breath, then jumped down the stairs and headed around back to the shed. He slid the door open and flipped on the light. Inside was a dark, cobwebby tomb of stacked wood and garden appliances with the untroubled appearance of dead Egyptian kings. No chainsaw was evident, but he did find an axe leaning against the wall behind a rusting lawnmower. He reached gingerly through a shroud of webs, wary of spiders, and grasped the handle. He pulled it out, trailing dust and ghostly banners.

  It had changed since this morning. It actually was shedding light, for one thing, though it was a dim phosphorescence, the result of some strange fungus or bacterium running amuck through its innards. The creature looked like some ghastly oversized nightlight. The gash that was either a mouth or a wound had borne fruit: a weird and vibrant flora spilled from it like fruit from a cornucopia, pale protuberances with growths like outstretched arms listing this way and that, a dozen vegetable christs. Life abounded here: small chitinous animals hurried busily to and fro, conducting their miserable business in tunnels and passageways in the body, provided for them by nature or their own savage industry; a cloud of insects, drunk on the very perfume which had driven him into fits, alternately settling on its carcass and lifting away again in graceful curtains, like wind blowing through a wheatfield.

  Grady raised his axe and took a few tentative steps toward it.

  Something moved near him: a raccoon startled from its feast and gone crashing into the underbrush. The flesh around where it had been eating sloughed away, and more light spilled into the forest: hundre
ds of small insects, their backs coated with the glowing fluids of this dead thing, moved about the wound like boiling suns.

  The axe was heavy, so he let it drop. He couldn’t process what he was seeing. He had to figure it out. He sat down in the mud several feet away from all that incandescent motion and stared at it for a while.

  He looked at the palms of his hands. They cast light.

  The Way Station

  Beltrane awakens to the smell of baking bread. It smells like that huge bakery on MLK that he liked to walk past on mornings before the sun came up, when daylight was just a paleness behind buildings, and the smell of fresh bread leaked from the grim industrial slab like the promise of absolute love.

  He stirs in his cot. The cot and the smell disorient him; his body is accustomed to the worn cab seat, with its tears in the upholstery and its permanent odor of contained humanity, as though the car, over the many years of carrying people about, had finally leached some fundamental ingredient from them. But the coarse, grainy blanket reminds him that he is in St. Petersburg, Florida, now. Far from home. Looking for Lila. Someone sitting on a nearby cot, back turned to him, is speaking urgently under his breath, rocking on the thin mattress and making it sing. Around them more cots are lined in rank and file, with scores of people sleeping or trying to sleep.

  There are no windows, but the night is a presence in here, filling even the bright places.

  “You smell that, man?” he says, sitting up.

  His neighbor goes still and silent, and turns to face him. He’s younger than Beltrane, with a huge salt-and-pepper beard and grime deeply engrained into the lines of his face. “What?”

  “Bread.”