by Lee Klein
The rest of the session was spent conceiving glorious ways to catch the beast, what we’d do if we had the chance to encounter and overcome our quarry.
Moss described it according to what he had read online. It was mostly accurate except for my legs, which were not, as Moss said, like an ostrich’s. Things would have been different with ostrich legs. Now that my capabilities for flight were getting shaky, I would rely on speed and power. And because he described the horns, wings, and kangaroo-like torso well enough, I didn’t correct him when he said my feet were like talons.
Whatever Kirsch drank did a number on him. He was several steps beyond us in terms of inebriation. He talked about ensnaring the beast with a mind warp, using Jedi powers, singing some sweet song to soothe the savage beast.
“The only weapon I need.” He held up his cell phone. “I’ll mesmerize the monster with ringtones.”
He fidgeted with the interface and managed to emit the tinny introduction to Beethoven’s Fifth. All our phones were on the table.
It was clear we needed this hunt, now more than ever. I thought it would be the four of us, old friends on a mission, but then Moss’s girlfriend, Corrine, and Kirsch’s girlfriend, Mack, piled into Moss’s Cherokee. Corinne was a lapsed tomboy who erred these days on the side of femme. To see Moss and his mate together was to understand the notion of a perfect match. If “opposites attract” always applied, these two would live on either coast.
They’d met soon after I re-met Moss. Maybe as a consequence of the few times I’d accompanied him watching sports, he realized it was time to dig out of the ruins of a long-term relationship that had ended, I later found out, around the time his mother had fallen ill. All the women around him had disappeared within six months. His world had belonged to them, and then he belonged only to himself. His father had long ago left for south Florida, more interested in the sun than his son, or so it had seemed to Moss. He’d inherited all his father’s characteristics, so perhaps the father understood he’d become redundant once the son returned home to settle and design constructions and maybe raise a Moss of his own.
I always assumed he knew I knew about the burial in the woods, knew I only looked a few years older, whereas he was now twice his age. Either his lack of curiosity or his restraint let us be friends. A more inquisitive, active, curious friend would have forced me into back-flipping lies. But he rarely asked about my history, content it seemed to have someone there who was reticent to the point of being almost neurotically unwilling to offer information about his past, allowing Moss thereby to fill in the blanks with anything at all, most likely nothing. Corinne only existed in our conversations as someone he’d do something with on weekends, a fixture of the perpetual near future. The more I knew of her, the more I hoped Moss didn’t turn her away. He was not quite a complete person. Just the fact of Corinne made Moss twice the man he was. Without her, how might he survive? I pictured him naked, shivering, emaciated, gray, sharp vertebrae breaching the flesh of a hunched back.
It was strange to think that Moss and Kirsch undressed with these women—more so, that these women undressed with them. Kirsch’s girlfriend made eye contact when talking with me in a way that made me question the strength and the boundaries of my friendship with Kirsch. Whatever deep beauty there was in him, she’d found it, I suppose. She must have, because otherwise life was deeply unfair. What I mean is: I found her incomparably attractive. Being in her presence was a treat. Her name was Mc-Clain, shortened to Mack since before she could remember. I never caught her first name or thought to ask. But Mack was perfect. She taught at Rutgers, same as Kirsch. Journalism. Like Kirsch, she’d lived elsewhere, mostly in the west, Portland, San Fran. And then Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then she settled for a semblance of tranquility in central New Jersey. She was a little older than Kirsch. It was hard to tell. Maybe a quarter Iranian. Or Italian. Dark, straight nosed, distractingly pale-eyed, dimpled when she smiled, with small, lovely, perpetually coffee-stained teeth. She wrote pieces about the end of the world, or at least the extinction of humanity. Kirsch must have sensed my interest, my bashfulness, my politeness, my inability to look at her. I did what I could to conceal it, unlike Riv, who, since the end with Francesca, had become overtly goofy in Mack’s presence, all too sensitive to the irresistible qualities of her charms.
I sat in the back of the Cherokee, left cheek pressed to the window like a dog, the four of us squeezed in back for the ride to the Pine Barrens. Mack sat next to me. She leaned into me on curves, her elbow dug into my thigh like an armrest.
Not so many years had passed, really, since I’d left. A blip in the grand scheme of things. It looked the same, mostly. In some spots, swatches had been converted to retirement developments, or the land seemed freshly burned. We drove along the outskirts of Fort Dix. Military activities of some sort were underway on the other side of barbed wire fences. Some seemed to involve artificial sand dunes. It was deep into growing season: melons, berries, tomatoes, sweet corn. Vegetable stands along the highway. Elsewhere, we passed one-story businesses long ago ruined, their parking lots overgrown. After an hour, we came to the town of Leeds Point and entered the Jersey Devil Tavern, where we would meet our guide.
This establishment—a dank old roadhouse updated to quasigastropub status—was not here when I was younger, not to mention the T-shirts and bumper stickers it sold proclaiming someone had seen me. Jersey Devil burger was the chef’s specialty. Eight dollars for a filet of medium-rare Jersey Devil served on a bun, a dollar more if you wanted caramelized onions and cheese. Five bucks for a bumper sticker proclaiming sight of the beast. Twenty dollars for a T-shirt decorated with something better suited for the back of a leather motorcycle vest. An industry was based on a legend I did nothing to promote.
We still had about an hour to wait for our guide, a guy named Christian Duven, another profiteer, exploiting a nonexistent natural resource. I made enough as a grocery clerk, but what if I managed to sue for five percent of all proceeds, could I quit my job and devote my time to philanthropy, dedicate a wing to a local library in the name of Larner or Titan Leeds? This could all be exploited for far greater profit. If we all pulled together. If I allowed myself to be seen, the tourist industry would explode.
Why have I spent the last few years so humbly in a provincial college town, hardly able to spend a dollar without worrying about its effect on my finances. I should dream big, live large, make the right associations and work them, start right now by demanding to speak with the manager: The Jersey Devil burger is perfectly fine for the price, I’ll say, but the margins would be better if we went into business together, maybe with this Duven guy, our tour guide for the night. I’d make regular appearances but not too many to ever become commonplace. Just enough to charge the pines with the supernatural. We’d get Mack to write about it. Moss and Kirsch and Riv and even Corrine would sell souvenirs, work on a documentary and then a biopic. And, most importantly, I could once and for all forget about ever trying to be anything other than what I am.
But then I would be responsible for the livelihoods of so many, the children of all our employees, their mortgages and college tuitions, everything would rely on busloads of tourists, the Japanese, the French, and then what if I continued to age and one day found myself as an elderly monster unable to elude a teen hopped up on too much Mountain Dew? But even then, what a sensational end to the story, a centuries old legend, older by almost forty years than the United States of America itself, wrestled to the ground and strangled by an enraged kid who thereafter appears on the cover of every national newspaper. Autopsy reports follow. Biographies. Films. Then silence forever. Or maybe Leeds Point continues to prosper and the tourists continue to come to search for a beast they know is dead, believing rumors about apparitions, a proliferation nightly through the trees, a hoax involving lights and eerie sounds, whatever it takes so happy tourists recommend the experience to friends.
I dreamed of a theme park, then humbled myself, running through t
he list of Franklin’s commandments as we waited for our food to arrive, a pint in front of me. Moss appreciated the most glaring, least attractive qualities of the décor, the nautical theme, the nets, the plastic marlin, as though the place had been a Red Lobster that closed, only to reopen in homage to me. All commandments converged in this case on resolution: “Resolve to perform what you ought, perform without fail what you resolve.” To perform what you ought was key. But what was I ought?
So far, in so many years, I have done nothing truly honorable. I tried to maintain Franklin’s commandments of silence and moderation, but what else? What could I do without fear of regret, what could I do that would animate me and propel my words as I spoke, possessed by the assuredness that what I did was what I ought— resolved and confident in my resolution?
I scarfed a Jersey Devil burger and fries, observed Franklin’s second virtue of silence, and otherwise prepared for a long night ahead—the shortest of the year, really. Whatever was decided tonight would flourish this summer and bear fruit by October. Jersey Devil Land maybe would become a reality with the help of Mack, inspired by her, doing what I could to impress her, what I ought to do a function of what she wanted me to do. Her will, my command. My only desire and ambition was to please her. She seemed like she’d seen it all and emerged unflappable, assuming that all men were monsters once a layer or two of domestication were removed. I bet she’d shrug if I showed myself to her.
Looking at Riv, at Moss, at Kirsch, at all the other men at this tavern in shorts, sneakers, T-shirts, jeans, baseball caps, beards, it seemed like a step or two down the evolutionary ladder before they once again were cavemen, hooting, pillaging, their most affectionate moments coming when they picked beetles from the hair of their mates. Could it be so hard to profit off them? Imagine all the good we could do with the money. What if the Jersey Devil Adventure Pinelands Experience were intended as a preservationist non-profit or an organization that directed its profits to rebuilding areas of cities devastated by chronic neglect. I’ve lived in holes in the sand, caves, orchards, and now a studio apartment above a garage. What did I need a house for, a car I can’t drive? All profits from the biopic and documentary and even my life story I’d donate so others lived a better life.
What did this Jersey Devil hunt mean to us? Clearly, as we’d toasted a few weeks ago, this was something we needed, something I needed, too. At first for obvious reasons I’d found the trip to the Pine Barrens and the hunt for the legendary beast not much more than amusing, at most a rare experience with friends, at worst an ambush as they unleashed their knowledge about everything I am, taking me into the woods, netting me, subduing me with an injection, disrobing me, flaying me, displaying my skin for all to see, using tonight as a launch pad for the rest of their lifework, profiting from their association with the infernal monster of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
A man burst into the tavern. He was tall and thin and perpetually tanned as though for breakfast every morning he ate egg whites and motor oil. Moss stood to meet him. It was Christian Duven, our guide for the night. He pumped our hands and pulled a chair from an empty table, sat on it backward, crossed his dully tattooed arms along the top of the backrest, his soiled trucker’s hat turned catcher’s style to better bask in our light. He was Pastor Dade and Branley Jukes reincarnated in the 21st century as a carnie tour guide, almost militaristic—paramilitaristic, that is—but also there was something sweet there, like he had a secret soft spot for the films of Nora Ephron, which revealed to him the presence of so-called heartstrings in a lean and narrow chest. He wore a black wife beater and cut-off denim jeans, a pair of heavy black boots and white athletic socks pulled over nonexistent calves. He was unshaven and the mustache area seemed to have a head start on the rest of his face. His eyes seemed black, without a hint of iris. He paid special attention to the ladies of the group. The way he leered at Mack incited in me a protective instinct. Kirsch, I felt, suspected my attraction but registered no real threat, perhaps thinking I was asexual, too ashamed of what I had said was my burned skin to ever open up to another person that way. (A problem I had in summertime was that I always needed to wear long sleeves and pants, and the solution of course was to concoct a story about being terribly burned as a child. Suggestion of fire damage preempted further questions.)
“Ladies and gentleman, my friends, oh boy are we in for a night tonight, okay. The summer solstice, best night for it. I start taking groups in January. Now that’s rough. It’s night by six, but now we got hours till we need headlamps or night-vision goggles.”
Mention of night-vision goggles activated a gender-specific reaction. The women seemed deaf to the prospect, but night-vision goggles accessed every nascent commando reverie in the men. What would it matter what we saw, the world would be transformed and the concealed would be revealed.
Duven noticed and smiled. He had a movie star smile, and his smile also seemed to have a gender-specific response. Corrine especially mirrored it, responding to something clever relayed beyond speech.
“My friends,” Duven said, “this entire area, everything you’re standing on, dry as it is, it’s like a camel or a cactus. That’s right, filled with water. Beneath these trees and sand, there’s more than enough, turn any city into Atlantis. You think you’re walking on dry land but beneath your feet, not that far down, it’s water. Some say that’s where the Jersey Devil lives, a dinosaur throwback that’s survived because he’s been underground feeding off whatever’s down there. But he spends a lot of time up here, too. There’s more room to spread his wings and I figure the food choices might be a little more various up here.”
“Does he eat humans?” Kirsch asked.
I imagined eating Kirsch’s beer-battered flesh. His arms roasted in garlic.
“That’s a good question, my friend. He’s no vegetarian, but historically I’d say you’re in much more trouble if you’re a rabbit or small game like that. Us big game, there really hasn’t been evidence to say he did it or not when parts of a body are found in a peat bog. He comes in handy, sometimes, sure, when we need to blame something, okay, but I don’t want to tell you we’re not endangering ourselves tonight. We are most definitely endangering ourselves more than, y’know, safe at home. People disappear in these pines, a few a year. They find an entrance into that underground aquifer maybe and are still exploring it now, or maybe the Jersey Devil finds ’em and swallows ’em whole or captures ’em. Lots of people say he’s more vampire than anything else, happy to live off the blood of livestock until he comes across a fine human example.” Duven leered now in the direction of Mack and Corinne, and it seemed clear to me—maybe to all of us then—that the only devil we had to fear that night was our guide.
A vampire? How commonplace, though I suppose we both suffer from immortality-related sadness. Or perhaps I should say I once had sympathized with the vampire, for something had changed in the atmosphere—or at the very least, something had changed in me. I could soon find myself transformed into an elderly man, though it seemed that all was proceeding at a slow pace. Still, each day was marked by an urgency otherwise absent from my first few centuries.
Moss was blissfully oblivious to this, of course. He set his face to serious mode: we paid for this, we’re gonna get our money’s worth, we’ll catch the thing, definitely. Be the first to bring back more than sketchy evidence. Moss alone would domesticate the monster with a stern word and finger snap. Thereafter, his pet would vanquish whatever devils persisted from the days of Marshall, or since his mother’s death.
Through my native territory at dusk, our guide drove in circles, loop-de-loops, until we left the world we knew. We fishtailed through pools of hourglass-grade sand as Kirsch and Riv exaggerated the jostling, rammed shoulders in the backseat like boys on a school bus. Duven took us to an area not far from where the ferryman had long ago helped travelers cross the river, where December and her brother ran when we first met. So much still looked the same.
Each summer, fires redu
ced thousands of acres to charred spikes. You could smell the burn beneath the scent of evergreen and ocean. It will all be underwater once the ice caps melt, but for now the sea seemed distant. Supernatural territory. Older pines armored in thick gray scales. Some evergreens looked like cheerleaders radically deformed by environmental tragedy: stunted limbs, crooked spines, spiky pompoms.
Moss wanted to try the night-vision goggles. “Rejects from Fort Dix? Can’t wait.”
Duven took us deeper into the pines. “I got a special deal worked out with a cousin works up there. Outdated technology, okay, but they come in handy.”
“Reuse, recycle, et cetera,” said Corinne.
“That’s the motto, my dear,” Duven said. They laughed though no one else did.
Riv frowned. Like someone emerged from a traumatic accident, he’d developed extrasensory perception: the ability to tune into and exaggerate the volume of what’s obvious yet insignificant to others.
Riv asked why the Army didn’t sweep the area and catch the beast once and for all.
“They’ve got bigger fish,” Duven said. “But maybe we’ll see the Kid tonight.” He tapped a camera bag strapped to his waist like a holster. “Long as ya don’t scare him off.”
Silence had overtaken me. It felt like wet concrete drying in my chest after it had been poured down my throat. I had to force it from me before it set. I muttered something about how I liked thinking of a shy monster in the woods, ashamed of itself, wings demure, its ten-foot tail coiled between weird crane legs. “The poor fellow, I feel for him,” I said more clearly. “Last of an endangered species, a reluctant freak of nature.”
We walked deeper into the pines.
Duven was about 6′1″, but seemed taller when he stood next to the stocky-short Riv. About the same age as his clients, he seemed older, as though he had lived his life with his body in such a way that showed in his face. He had spent his time in the pines, whereas my friends had floated through a college town that had become progressively touristy and expensive. A change, too, that could be seen in their faces.