The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  “Hi Dad,” I said. “How’s Marmon?”

  Harry wiped his forehead, but unfortunately the rag in his hand was grease-smeared, so it didn’t make him any cleaner—quite the opposite. “Me and Willy been working on it and we’re almost there. You lost almost all your brake fluid, and damned if we can figure out why, since we’ve been looking high and low for a leak without much luck. It’s like some kind of, I don’t know, brake fluid vampire came along and sucked old Marmon dry. I swear, I checked everything before I let you get behind the wheel, and it was fine before, it’s really a mystery, and I don’t like those, occupational hazard in my line of work.”

  Ah, I thought. So maybe Marmon’s failing brakes were an attempt to murder me. Interesting. More subtle than cutting my brake lines, too, which would have been obvious, but an old truck being low on fluids? Who’d think twice about that? But who had a grudge against me here in Lake Woebegotten, nasty enough to try and off me subtly?

  Maybe I was being paranoid. But I’d leave my mind open to the possibility. After all, sabotaging someone’s car and letting nature take its course—it was exactly like something I might do, in the right circumstances. Harry wasn’t thinking of a criminal angle at all, though, despite being a cop—because I was his wonderful perfect inoffensive Bonnie, probably, and thus immune to murderous plotting.

  “Will I be able to drive it this weekend? I was going to go over to the lake with a bunch of kids from school.”

  Harry frowned. “Which kids?”

  Ah, wonderful. Pop quiz time. I dredged up their names from somewhere: Ike, and J, and Kelly, and “a bunch of other kids.”

  “Oh, they’re a good bunch,” he said, and I wondered what kids he would’ve disapproved of—if there was a bad element in Lake Woebegotten, I hadn’t encountered it yet, unless you counted the Scullens and the Scales, and they were awfully well-behaved, just weird and reclusive.

  “Glad to hear it. Can I take the truck?”

  “Should be able to,” he allowed. “But if you’re going with the boy you almost hit, you might want to, you know, drive extra careful around him, so he doesn’t get nervous.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t think brake failure strikes the same kid twice.”

  PRES DU LAC

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  Saturday, mid-afternoon, I met up with the other kids in the school parking lot. J and Kelly were there with a cluster of other girls I thought of by somewhat seven-dwarfish names: Chunky, Asthmatic, Pimples, Dyejob, Bangs, Eyeshadow, like that. There were a couple of Ike’s friends, Derek and Skyler and enough others to achieve rough gender-parity. There were far more people than vehicles—a mini-van and a couple of SUVs would carry the excess, I guessed.

  After milling around in the gravel and making small talk for a while, Ike did a head count and said, “We’re all here! Everybody got a seat?”

  Dyejob, who piloted one of the mini-vans, said she was full up, as were Derek and Skyler in their SUVs. “Uh oh,” Ike said, “looks like I don’t have a chair.”

  Oh, Ike, you mastermind of social engineering, I thought, but I didn’t speak up. “Do you mind if I ride shotgun with you?” Ike said.

  “You sure you want to be that close to my truck? After it nearly flattened you?” I didn’t look at J. I didn’t need to: I could envision her venomous glare perfectly. I would have been amused by it, but I wanted her to neutralize Ike’s infatuation with me.

  “I think I’d feel safer inside the truck than outside,” Ike said, grinning. His attempt to manipulate his way into a car ride with me was adorable, in a way, like watching a newborn fawn try to stand up.

  “I was really hoping to ride with J,” I said apologetically, looking over at her in time to see her glare turn to surprise. “I feel like we haven’t had a chance to talk in forever.” In truth we’d never really talked, but who was counting? “Do you think you could switch places with Ike, J?”

  J looked over at Kelly, and some complex best-friends-forever telepathy passed between them in a flurry of eye-widening and eyebrow-raising and micro-shrugging and nostril-flaring and lip-tightening, and then J gave me a giant smile as fake as Dyejob’s blonde hair and said, “Sure, I’d love to.”

  Ike sulked off to sit by Kelly in the SUV, and J climbed up into Marmon’s passenger seat. I waited for the rest of the procession to pull out, and fell in at the end of the line. I wasn’t sure how long the ride would take—twenty minutes or half an hour, I guessed—and I needed to make the most of the time I had. I’m normally all about implication and suggestion and backhanded compliments and indirect nudging, but J had certain queen-bee pretensions, and she spoke the language of passive-aggression and subtle snideness fluently, if not as well as I did, so I decided to surprise her with the direct approach:

  “So how long have you been in love with Ike?”

  She went rigid in her seat and stared out the windshield, at the back of the SUV carrying the baby-faced object of her jealous affections. After a moment, she said, “Since kindergarten, I guess. How long have you been in love with him?”

  Ah. Projection. Since she thought his chubby cheeks were squeezably sexy, she assumed I did too. No surprise there. “I only have eyes for one boy at this school,” I said. The truth would make me vulnerable, to an extent, but it could also show J I was willing to open up to her. Which I wasn’t, really, but the illusion of such openness could be useful. “Ike’s great,” I said, because if I told her I thought he was podgy and dull she’d get offended, “but… I like Edwin.”

  She looked at me, now. “Really? Scullen? You don’t like Ike?”

  “I like him, what’s not to like, but… not that way.”

  “I don’t understand you,” J said, voice heavy with mistrust. “Ike is so sweet and good and kind, and Edwin… he’s so cold and condescending and superior.”

  I gave a great sigh. “I know. I’ve always been attracted to boys like that. I don’t know why. Maybe I think I can fix them.”

  “So… Ike… I think he likes you, though.”

  “Only because I’m the new girl. Once he realizes I’m nothing special, he’ll get over it. Besides, when I talk to him, you know who he talks about? You.”

  “Get out. He does not.”

  True, but the lie would serve me better. “He does, really. I don’t even think he realizes he does it, but yeah, he thinks you’re great. It’s just, he’s known you so long, you’re so much a part of his life, you’ve been such good friends—I’m not sure he can see the forest for the trees. I don’t know how you feel about him, but I think if he… got a new perspective on you… he’d realize what he’s been looking for all along is right in front of him.” Matchmaker, matchmaker, fetch me a bucket to vomit in.

  “But how do I get him to think about me that way? The way I think about him?”

  I’ve always found that offering a guy a blowjob concentrates his mind, I thought, but the moment wasn’t right for that level of frankness, so I said, “I’m not sure, but I think if you get alone with him, maybe have a couple of beers, you might be able to think of something.”

  Another long silence, which was good, since talking to J was like watching mud dry. I looked out the windows at the scenery, such as it was: field, bunch of evergreen trees, field, barn, field, more trees, field, farmhouse. Off to the side, glimpses of the lake twinkled in the afternoon sun, just bright flashes of water, pretty just like anything that sparkles is pretty, no matter how shallow or deep it really is.

  “Thanks for talking to me about this,” J said finally. “I really thought you must like Ike.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I tried to run him over with my truck,” I said.

  She laughed. “Edwin Scullen, huh? Well, he’s pretty, no doubt about that. You aim high. I wish I had some advice for you, but even though his family’s been in town for a couple of years, I don’t know them well at all. At first we all thought they must be Amish or something, or part of a weird cult, but I guess they�
�re just… weird.” She lowered her voice. “I mean, they’re from Canada, so maybe that explains it.”

  “That could be it,” I said. If all Canadians had the power to shoulder moving trucks out of the way. “Maybe I should take up curling or socialized medicine to make him feel more at home.”

  The vehicles in front turned right, down a gravel path through the trees, past a sign that said, “Welcome to the Pres du Lac Reservation,” and under that in smaller letters, “Home of the Woebegotten Band.”

  “Oh, we’re going onto tribal land?” I vaguely remembered Ike blathering about that.

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah, technically we’re not in the United States anymore, weird, huh? There are only a few hundred Indians, sorry, Native Americans or Ojibwe or whatever, on this reservation. Maybe twenty teenagers, you’ve probably seen them around town, but they’ve got their own school here.”

  I nodded. Coppery skin, black hair: they were what passed for ethnic diversity in the Land of the Lily-White. I’d only seen one black guy, my dad’s deputy Stevie Ray. Must be tough to be even a little bit different in a town like this. Good thing I was so adept at blending in. “My dad is friends with a guy from here, Willy Noir, I think his name is? He’s the one who sold us this truck.”

  “Sure,” J said, “I think his son, Joachim or something, is around our age, maybe a little younger. I’ve seen him around. Pretty cute, actually, and he doesn’t look 15, he’s taller than Ike.”

  Big deal; I was taller than Ike, though I figured he just loomed unusually large in J’s mind.

  The caravan wound through the trees, taking more turns down increasingly poorly maintained roads which I figured would be impassable with anything short of skis come winter. Eventually we reached… not a parking lot, but a wide patch of dirt that had obviously been used as a parking lot a bunch of times over the years. And there, before us, was the lake: a vast expanse of deep blue water, surrounded in all directions by towering trees, a slice of nature primeval, apart from the crushed cigarette packs in the parking lot and the beer cans I could see in some of the bushes. Everyone tumbled out of the cars hauling coolers and dragged their things down toward the beach, which was an actual beach, though the sand was rather too brown and rocky and flecked with pine needles for my taste—but then, I’d been spoiled by the beaches of Santa Cruz. I’m sure this was a tropical paradise by local standards.

  There were a couple of ancient picnic tables, and a ring of stones full of blackened bits of wood from past fires, and plenty of fallen logs and big flattish rocks to sit on. Someone had brought an acoustic guitar—shudder—and as promised, Kelly had a little bag of weed and Ike displayed his surprisingly non-terrible rolling-paper prowess. I joined the circle of people seated near the firepit and took a hit off the joint to be polite, not pulling the smoke into my lungs, just taking a mouthful, holding it long enough to look halfway convincing, and blowing it back out.

  I sat next to J, and when Ike sat next to me, I gave him a smile, then stood up, gave J a significant look, and said I wanted to go stick my feet in the lake. I took off my shoes as I walked, falling over once or twice in the process to make myself look like a clumsy dork and, I hoped, give J an extra boost of contempt-based confidence. Once I had my shoes and socks in my hands I walked down toward the edge of the water, some distance from everyone else. It was maybe 65 degrees, pretty pleasant, though hardly warm enough to go wading. I dipped a toe into the water, and it was pretty icy, though not a patch on the Pacific ocean surf.

  “I know some people who jump in the water in winter,” a voice said from behind me.

  I glanced over, annoyed, because I hadn’t sensed anyone’s presence, and I tend to be really finely attuned to that sort of thing: Mom always said I have eyes in the back of my head, and I was the absolute champion of hide-and-seek as a child. Makes sense: I’m a predator, and predators are hard to sneak up on. But this guy had managed it. He was clearly one of the reservation boys, not one of our bused-in party, with black hair in a long ponytail, dark eyes, and an angular but attractive face. His smile was endearingly toothy.

  “Why would anyone do that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Guess it makes them feel more alive? And bragging rights, of course. But mostly because there’s not a whole lot else to do out here in the winter. I’m Joachim.”

  “Oh! Willy’s son?”

  “Yeah, how do you—oh, wait. Are you Bonnie? Bonnie Cusack?”

  “Grayduck,” I corrected. “I’ve got my mom’s last name, but yes, I’m Harry’s daughter.”

  He grinned even wider. “Me and you used to play together when we were kids, I guess. That’s what your dad says, anyway, I don’t really remember.”

  “I don’t remember you either,” but now that he mentioned it, I sort of did—running around the woods with a miniature version of this boy, playing… “Wait, did we used to play… wolf pack?”

  He squinted, as if peering at something distant—maybe the past—then brightened. “Wait, that was you? I remembered this little blonde girl, we used to run in the woods, one of us would pretend to be a deer and the other would be a wolf, or sometimes we’d both be wolves and we’d chase down some other kid… But that was you?”

  I touched my hair. “I was blonde until I was six or so,” I said. “Then it got darker. Wow. Well, nice to meet you again, Joachim. You still play wolf?”

  “Nah, mostly I work on old cars and stuff.”

  “And jump in frozen lakes.”

  “Not me! I don’t need to feel that alive—being that cold would feel more like being dead anyway. My dad said you’re living with Harry now?”

  “Yeah. Just needed a change of scene I guess.”

  “I thought you lived in Los Angeles or San Francisco or something? Why would you want to move here?”

  I marveled at his poor grasp of geography. That would be like saying, “I thought you lived in Boston or Washington, DC or something,” as if they were remotely close together—though maybe he’d say that, too. If he’d never strayed from Lake Woebegotten, the rest of the world might just look like a vague undifferentiated vastness. “Santa Cruz, actually. Closer to San Francisco than L.A. And sure, Santa Cruz was nice, but… I had my reasons. And it’s good to spend some time with my dad.”

  “Harry’s a good guy.” Joachim picked up a flat stone and skipped it expertly across the surface of the lake. “He goes fishing with my dad a lot, sometimes they spend a few days out here together in the winter, ice fishing.”

  We were rapidly moving into boring territory. I glanced over to the ring of my classmates, and saw J leading a dumbstruck Ike toward the trees. Perhaps J had arrived at my blowjob-as-icebreaker theory on her own, developing it from first principles. Good for her. “So you live on the reservation?” I said. Joachim might not be thrilling me conversationally, but at least he was differently boring; I knew exactly how the other kids would bore me if I returned to them, and the one with the guitar was butchering some country song, which gave me even more incentive to stay mostly out of earshot.

  “Yeah, there aren’t too many of us left, a lot of my relatives have moved up to Leech Lake, we’ve got some family there, but my dad says it’s important for our people to keep occupying this land.” He rolled his eyes. “Otherwise, who’ll keep the wendigo away?”

  I perked up. “The who?”

  He looked embarrassed. “Oh, it’s just some stories the old timers tell, though some of them take it really seriously, it’s kind embarrassing, like having relatives who believe in little green men or bigfoot or vampires or something.”

  “Now you have to tell me. What’s a wendigo? Sounds like some kind of recreational vehicle old people would drive around the country in.”

  He laughed, and sat down on a fallen log. I joined him. “Basically, they’re cannibals. Or man-eaters, anyway, I guess since they aren’t technically human, you can’t call them cannibals. Unless they ate another wendigo…”

  “Anthropophagous,” I said to derail his ta
ngent, and he looked at me blankly. “It means they eat people,” I said. “Fun word, huh?”

  “I’ll have to remember that one, though I don’t think I could spell it.” Another toothy grin. “Okay, so here’s how the legend goes, at least the way I heard it: there’s a monster that lives in the woods and comes out especially in the winter. He, or it, or they, there are probably more than one—they roam around the woods, and anyone they find, they eat. The wendigos live forever, and they’re strong, and almost impossible to kill, and have other sorts of powers, like maybe they can change their shape, or something—people say different things. Sometimes they just look like people, you know, only they’re always very thin because no matter how much they eat, they can’t ever get full—the hunger never goes away. Their skin is pale like snow or gray like death, and their lips are shredded and bloody because they chew at their own mouths when they get hungry enough. Other times, they look like monsters, or giants, much bigger than people, because every time they eat someone, they grow larger, and that’s why they’re always hungry—as soon as they get a full belly, they grow in size, so they’re starving again. Who knows.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Like an abominable snowman with a taste for human flesh.”

  “But that’s not all.” Despite his protests, Joachim was warming to the subject. Well, why not? Who doesn’t love a good monster movie? “See,” he said, “they’re not just monsters—some of them are people who turned into monsters. Sometimes in the old days, during hard winters, people would run out of food, and get pretty desperate. The really desperate people might even resort to cannibalism. Eating other people is taboo, and the, I don’t know, say the gods, they punish you for that, by transforming you into a wendigo. It’s a curse.”

  “Huh. So, like, does the bite of a wendigo turn you into one of them? Like a werewolf or a vampire?”