North American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  “I’m goin to bed, girl. It’s late!”

  She appraised him for a moment, then smiled. “You fucked up!”

  He laughed, like a little boy caught in some foolishness.

  She saw the bag he still clutched in his hand. “I ain’t had nothing to eat, ’Trane. I’m starving.”

  He held the bag aloft, like the head of a slain enemy. “I got some food for ya right here.”

  She held out a hand and offered him her best smile. It lit up all that alcohol in him. It set him on fire. “Well give it over then,” she said.

  “You must think I’m crazy. Come on back with me, to my place.”

  “Shit. That old cab?”

  Beltrane turned and walked in that direction, listening to her footsteps as she trotted to catch up. The booze in him caused the earth to move in slow, steady waves, and the lights to bleed into the cloudy night. A cold wind had kicked up, and the buildings swooned on their foundations. Together they trekked the short distance to United Cab.

  He found himself, as always, stealing glances at her: though she was gaunt from deprivation, she seemed to have an aura of carved nobility about her, a hard beauty distinct from circumstance or prospect. She was young enough, too, that she still harbored some resilient optimism about the world, as though it might yield some good for her yet. And who knows, he thought. Maybe it would.

  The first hard drops of rain fell as they reached the cab. It had died where it was last parked, two years ago. It sagged earthward, its tires long deflated and its shocks long spent, so that the chassis nearly scraped the ground as Beltrane opened the door and climbed in. It smelled like fried food and sweat, and he rubbed the old air freshener hanging from the rearview in some wild hope he could coax a little life from it yet. The front seats had been taken out, giving them room to stretch their legs. The car was packed with blankets, old newspapers, and skin magazines. Ivy stared in after him, wrinkling her nose.

  “This is it, baby,” he said.

  “It stinks in here!”

  “It ain’t that bad. You get used to it.” He leaned against the seatback, stretching his legs to the front. He hooked one arm up over the backseat and invited her to lean into him. She paused, still halfway through the door, on her hands and knees.

  “I ain’t fuckin you, ’Trane. You too damn old.”

  “Shit, girl.” He tried to pretend he wasn’t disappointed. “Get your silly ass in here and have some food.”

  She climbed in, and he opened the bag for her. The shrimp retained a lingering heat from the microwave at the Pub, and they dug in. Afterwards, with warm food alight in their bellies and the rain hammering on the roof, she eased back against the seat and settled into the crook of his arm at last, resting her head on his shoulder. Beltrane gave her a light squeeze, realizing with a kind of dismay that any sexual urge had left him, that the feeling he harbored for her now was something altogether different, altogether better.

  “I don’t know nothing about you, ’Trane,” she said quietly. “You don’t talk very much.”

  “What you mean? I’m always talking!”

  “Yeah, but you don’t really talk, you know? Like, you got any family around?”

  “Well,” he said, his voice trailing. “Somewhere. I got a little girl somewhere.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him. “For real?”

  He just nodded. Something about this conversation felt wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The rain was coming down so hard it was difficult to focus. “I ain’t seen her in a long time. She got married and went away.”

  “She just abandon you? That’s fucked up, ’Trane.”

  “I wasn’t like this then. Things was different.” Sorrow crested and broke in his chest. “She got to live her life. She had to go.”

  “You ever think about leaving too? Maybe you could go to where she live.”

  “Hell no, girl. This is my home. This is everything I know.”

  “It’s just a place, ’Trane. You can change a place easy.”

  He didn’t want to think about that. “Anyway,” he said, “she forgot me by now.”

  Ivy was quiet for a time, and Beltrane let himself be lulled by the drumbeat over their heads. Then she said, “I bet she ain’t forgot you.” She adjusted her position to get comfortable, putting her head back on his shoulder. “I bet she still love her daddy.”

  They stopped talking, and eventually she drifted off to sleep. He kissed her gently on her forehead, listening to the storm surrounding the car. The air was chilly, but their bodies were warm against each other. Outside was thrashing darkness, and rain.

  Beltrane awoke with a fearful convulsion. The car was filling with water. It was pouring from Ivy, from her eyes and her mouth, from the pores of her skin, in a black torrent, lifting the stored papers and the garbage around them in swirling eddies, rising rapidly over their legs and on up to their waists. The water was appallingly cold; he lost all feeling where it covered him. He put his hands over Ivy’s face to staunch the flow, without effect. Her head lolled beside him, her face discolored and grotesquely swollen.

  He was going to drown. The idea came to him with a kind of alien majesty; he was overcome with awe and horror.

  He pushed against the car door, but it wouldn’t open. Beyond the window, the night moved with a murderous will. It lifted the city by its roots and shook it in its teeth. The water had nearly reached the ceiling, and he had to arch his back painfully to keep his face above it. Ivy had already slipped beneath the surface, her lamplit eyes shining like cave fish.

  All thought left him: his whole energy was channeled into a scrabbling need to escape. He slammed his body repeatedly into the car door. He pounded the glass with his fists.

  Beltrane awakens to pain. His limbs are wracked with it, his elbow especially. He opens his eyes and sees the pavement of the alley. Climbing to his feet takes several minutes. Morning is near: through the mouth of the alley the streetlights glow dimly against a sky breaking slowly into light. There is no traffic, and the salty smell of the bay is strong. The earth has cooled in the night, and the heat’s return is still a few hours away.

  He takes a step toward the street, then stops, sensing something behind him. He turns around.

  A small city has sprouted from the ground in the night, where he’d been sleeping, surrounded by blowing detritus and stagnant filth. It spreads across the puddle-strewn pavement and grows up the side of the wall, twinkling in the deep blue hours of the morning, like some gorgeous fungus, awash in a blustery evening rain. It exudes a sweet, necrotic stink. He’s transfixed by it, and the distant wails he hears rising from it are a brutal, beautiful lullaby.

  He walks away from it.

  When he gets to the street, he turns left, heading down to the small harbor. The door to the church is closed when he passes it, and the lights are off inside. There’s no indication of any life there. Soon he passes the shelter, and there are people he recognizes socializing by its front door; but he doesn’t know their names, and they don’t know his. They don’t acknowledge him as he walks by. He passes a little restaurant, the smell of coffee and griddle-cooked sausage hanging in front of it like a cloud. The long white masts of the sailboats are peering over the tops of buildings. He rounds a corner and he is there.

  The water of the bay glimmers with bright shards of light as the sun climbs. The boats jostle gently in their berths. A pelican perches on a short pier, wings spread like hanging laundry. He follows a sidewalk along the waterfront until he finds a payphone with a dial tone. He presses zero, and waits.

  “I wanna make a collect call,” he says, fishing the slip of paper Davis gave him out of his pocket and reciting the number.

  He waits for the automated tone, and announces himself. “It’s Henry. It’s your dad.”

&nbs
p; A machine says, “Please hold while we connect your call.”

  Leaning over the small concrete barrier, he can see the shape of himself in the water. His reflection is broken up by the water’s movement. Small pieces of himself clash and separate. He thinks that if he waits here long enough the water will calm, and his face will resolve into something familiar.

  The Good Husband

  The water makes her nightgown diaphanous, like the ghost of something, and she is naked underneath. Her breasts are full, her nipples large and pale, and her soft stomach, where he once loved to rest his head as he ran his hand through the soft tangle of hair between her legs, is stretched with the marks of age. He sits on the lid of the toilet, feeling a removed horror as his cock stirs beneath his robe. Her eyes are flat and shiny as dimes and she doesn’t blink as the water splashes over her face. Wispy clouds of blood drift through the water, obscuring his view of her. An empty prescription bottle lies beside the tub, a few bright pills scattered like candy on the floor.

  He was not meant to see this, and he feels a minor spasm of guilt, as though he has caught her at something shameful and private. This woman with whom he had once shared all the shabby secrets of his life. The slice in her forearm is an open curtain, blood flowing out in billowing dark banners.

  “You’re going to be okay, Katie,” he says. He has not called her Katie in ten years. He makes no move to save her.

  Sean shifted his legs out of bed and pressed his bare feet onto the hardwood floor; it was cold, and his nerves jumped. A spike of life. A sign of movement in the blood. He sat there for a moment, his eyes closed, and concentrated on that. He slid his feet into his slippers and willed himself into a standing position.

  He walked naked across the bedroom and fetched his robe from the closet. He threw it around himself and tied it closed. He walked by the vanity, with its alchemies of perfumes and eyeshadows, ignoring the mirror, and left the bedroom. Down the hallway, past the closed bathroom door with light still bleeding from underneath, descending the stairs to the sunlit order of his home.

  He was alert to each contraction of muscle, to each creak of bone and ligament. To the pressure of the floor against the soles of his feet, to the slide of the bannister’s polished wood against the soft white flesh of his hand.

  His mind skated across the frozen surface of each moment. He pushed it along, he pushed it along.

  They’d been married twenty-one years, and Katie had tried to kill herself four times in that span. Three times in the last year and a half. Last night, she’d finally gotten it right.

  The night had started out wonderfully. They dressed up, went out for dinner, had fun for the first time in recent memory. He bought her flowers, and they walked downtown after dinner and admired the lights and the easy flow of life. He took her to a chocolate shop. Her face was radiant, and a picture of her that final night was locked into his memory: the silver in her hair shining in the reflected light of an overhead lamp, her cheeks rounded into a smile, the soft weight of life turning her body beautiful and inviting, like a blanket, or a hearth. She looked like the girl she used to be. He’d started to believe that with patience and fortitude they could keep at bay the despair that had been seeping into her from some unknown, subterranean hell, flowing around the barricades of antidepressants and anxiety pills, filling her brain with cold water.

  When they got home they opened up another bottle and took it to the bedroom. And somehow, they started talking about Heather, who had gone away to college and had recently informed them that she did not want to come home for spring break. It wasn’t that she wanted to go anywhere special; she wanted to stay at the dorm, which would be nearly emptied of people, and read, or work, or fuck her new boyfriend if she had one, or whatever it was college girls wanted to do when they didn’t want to come home to their parents.

  It worked away at Kate like a worm, burrowing tunnels in her gut. She viewed Sean’s acceptance of Heather’s decision as callous indifference. When the subject came up again that night, he knew the mood was destroyed.

  He resented her for it. For spoiling, once again and with what seemed a frivolous cause, the peace and happiness he was trying so hard to give her. If only she would take it. If only she would believe in it. Like she used to do, before her brain turned against her, and against them all.

  They drank the bottle even as the despair settled over her. They ended the night sitting on the edge of the bed, she wearing her sexy nightgown, her breasts mostly exposed and moon-pale in the light, weeping soundlessly, a little furrow between her eyebrows but otherwise without affect, and the light sheen of tears which flowed and flowed, as though a foundation had cracked; and he in the red robe she’d bought him for Christmas, his arm around her, trying once again to reason her away from a precipice which reason did not know.

  Eventually he lay back and put his arm over his eyes, frustrated and angry. And then he fell asleep.

  He awoke sometime later to the sound of splashing water. It should have been too small a sound to reach him, but it did anyway, worming its way into the black and pulling him to the surface. When he discovered that he was alone in the bedroom, and sensed the deepness of the hour, he walked to the bathroom, where the noise came from, without urgency and with a full knowledge of what he would find.

  She spasmed every few seconds, as though something in the body, separate from the mind, fought against this.

  He sat down on the toilet, watching her. Later he would examine this moment and try to gauge what he had been feeling. It would seem important to take some measure of himself, to find out what kind of man he really was.

  He would come to the conclusion that he’d felt tired. It was as though his blood had turned to lead. He knew the procedure he was meant to follow here; he’d done it before. Already his muscles tightened to abide by the routine, signals blew across his nerves like a brushfire: rush to the tub, waste a crucial moment in simple denial brushing the hair from her face and cradling her head in his warm hands. Hook his arms underneath her body and lift her heavily from the water. Carry her, streaming blood and water, to the bed. Call 911. Wait. Wait. Wait. Ride with her, and sit unmoving in the waiting room as they pump her stomach and fill her with a stranger’s blood. Answer questions. Does she take drugs. Do you. Were you fighting. Sir, a social worker will be by to talk to you. Sir, you have to fill out these forms. Sir, your wife is broken, and you are, too.

  And then wait some more as she convalesces in the psych ward. Visit her, try not to cry in front of her as you see her haunting that corridor with the rest of the damned, dwelling like a fading thought in her assigned room.

  Bring this pale thing home. This husk, this hollowed vessel. Nurse her to a false health. Listen to her apologize, and accept her apologies. Profess your reinvigorated love. Fuck her with the urgency of pity and mortality and fear, which you both have come to know and to rely on the way you once relied on love and physical desire.

  If they could save her.

  And if, having saved her, they decided to let her come home at all.

  She will never be happy.

  The thought came to him with the force of a revelation. It was as though God spoke a judgment, and he recognized its truth as though it had been with them all along, the buzzard companion of their late marriage. Some people, he thought, are just incapable of happiness. Maybe it was because of some ancient trauma, or maybe it was just a bad equation in the brain. Kate’s reasons were mysterious to him, a fact which appalled him after so many years of intimacy. If he pulled her from the water now, he would just be welcoming her back to hell.

  With a flutter of some obscure emotion—some solution of terror and relief—he closed the door on her. He went back to bed and, after a few sleeping pills of his own, fell into a black sleep. He dreamed of silence.

  In the kitchen, light streamed in through the bay window. It w
as a big kitchen, with a stand-alone chopping table, wide crumb-flecked counters, ranks of silver knives agleam in the morning sun. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on the counter beside it. The trash hadn’t been taken out on time, and its odor was a dull oppression. The kitchen had once been the pride of their home. It seemed to have decayed without his noticing.

  A small breakfast nook accommodated a kitchen table in a narrow passage joining the kitchen to the dining room. It still bore the scars and markings of the younger Heather’s attentions: divots in the wood where she once tested the effectiveness of a butter knife, a spray of red paint left there during one of her innumerable art projects, and the word “kichen” gouged into the side of the table with a ballpoint pen, years ago, when she thought everything should carry its name. It had become an inadvertent shrine to her childhood, and, since she’d left, Kate had shifted their morning coffee to the larger and less welcoming dining room table in the adjoining room. The little breakfast nook had been surrendered to the natural entropy of a household, becoming little more than a receptacle for car keys and unopened mail.

  Sean filled the French press with coffee grounds and put the water on to boil.

  For a few crucial minutes he had nothing to do, and a ferocious panic began to chew at the border of his thoughts. He felt a weight descending from the floor above him. An unseen face. He thought for a moment that he could hear her footsteps. He thought for a moment that nothing had changed.

  He was looking through the bay window to the garden out front, which had ceded vital ground to weeds and ivy. Across the street he watched his neighbor’s grandkids tear around the corner of their house like crazed orangutans: ill-built yet strangely graceful, spurred by an unknowable animal purpose. It was Saturday; though winter still lingered at night, spring was warming the daylight hours.