Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  It’s a nice question, but I don’t think Violet’s headed where Albin is. “Can we see Autumn and Benjy’s autopsy reports?” I say.

  “No. I don’t believe that’s legal.”

  I don’t know if it is or isn’t.* I try “Is there anything you need to tell us to keep us out of danger?”

  I don’t know what oaths to protect people sheriffs here or anywhere else are required to take, but I assume there are some. And maybe they allow, or even require, Albin to cough up information it would otherwise be illegal or unethical to share.

  At least, I think that’s what he’s been getting at.

  “Ideally, walk away now,” he says. “I look at this, I see a lot of downside and essentially zero upside. If you do insist on going through with it, don’t give Reggie Trager the benefit of the doubt just because I don’t think he’s guilty. I’m not a grand jury. Don’t go anywhere in Ford except CFS—the town’s too dangerous. And keep me posted on absolutely everything that happens. Which I don’t mean as an option. I’ll give you my direct line and my e-mail address. If I decide at any point that you’ve withheld information that even might be useful to a criminal investigation, I will make certain you become sorry to have done that. Do we understand each other?”

  We nod. Violet says “Yes sir.”

  “And one last thing. When you get out to White Lake—don’t go in the water.”

  11

  Ford, Minnesota

  Still Friday, 14 September

  “That guy totally thinks Aquabigfoot is real,” Violet says.

  “I agree.” We’re back on U.S. 53, headed to Ford to check into the CFS Lodge. She’s driving. “So do we need to discuss it?”

  “What?” she says. “That the sheriff of Lake County thinks the monster is real, or that the monster might actually be real?”

  “The sheriff part.”

  “Whew. For a second I was worried you were getting all spandrelly on me.”*

  “You got the wrong guy.”

  “Although I would like to know why somebody as unstupid-seeming as Sheriff Albin thinks it’s possible.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”

  CFS Outfitters and Lodge isn’t just on the highway exit that’s one past greater (so to speak) Ford—it is the highway exit. You curve under a giant CFS billboard into the parking lot of the store, which is a three-story A-frame with posters for shit like North Face all over its glass front and back. From there you follow the signs to a road that runs from the far corner of the lot down to the lodge.

  The start of the road’s blocked off by traffic cones, but a tall, thin, early-twenties kid in a bush hat but sunburned anyway comes over to your car with a clipboard. “Ki help you folks?” he says, after Violet rolls down the window.

  “We’re here for the tour Reggie Trager is running.”

  “Get your names, please?”

  “Violet Hurst and Lionel Azimuth.”

  The kid checks for us on his clipboard, which seems strange for someone expecting only six or eight people. Then again, maybe clipboards are like guns, and people who carry them start wanting to use them.

  “Doctor. Doctor,” the kid says. “I’m Davey Sugar. I’ll be one of the guides on your trip. Welcome to CFS.”

  He looks so earnest, and so unlike someone involved in a sordid fake-monster tour, that I feel compelled to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. I lean over Violet to say “What do you think? Is the White Lake Monster real?”

  The kid smiles broadly as he backs up to move the cones. “I’d have to say I’m agnostic about it. Be pretty great, though, wouldn’t it?”

  The road crests the hill, and suddenly we can see all of Ford Lake below, light flashing off it like a chain-link fence made of sun. Even the brick hulk of the old Ford Mine—with, presumably, Dr. McQuillen’s house hidden in the bend beyond it—looks good.

  The lodge itself is idyllic: a dozen lakeside cabins painted the yellow of Smurfette’s hair, on turf that looks as lush as moss. Beside it an inlet with an “E” shape of floating docks, tarp-covered boats parallel-parked along the docks’ edges.

  In the rutted and tree-shaded dirt parking area next to the marina are three pickup trucks, including one with a contractor’s cage over its bed, a couple of injured-looking compact cars, and one big, black, perfectly shiny SUV with Minnesota license plates.

  We leave our shit in the car in case we have to flee.

  Two guys in polo shirts and painter’s pants are coming around the registration cabin when we reach it. We know it’s the registration cabin because it’s got a line of sunflowers along its back wall and a wooden sign above them that says “CAMP FAWN SEE—Registration” in log font, or whatever you call it when the letters are burned into wood. One of the two guys is white and in his sixties, with white hair and rimless glasses. The other one’s Hispanic, in his thirties, with a mustache.

  “Evening,” the white guy says.

  “Are either of you Reggie Trager?” Violet says.

  “Hell no.” He turns and yells “Reggie! Customers!” Then he and the other guy head toward the pickup truck with the contractor’s frame.

  Violet and I continue to the front of the cabin, which faces the lake. On the lawn there’s a man talking on what used to be called a cordless phone, and also drinking a beer and steering his crotch away from a large black Labrador that’s jumping at it.

  He holds up a hand to acknowledge us while he says “No, listen, Trish, I gotta run. I know. I’m sorry. You too. You too. Okay. I’ll call you later.” He’s got a slight southern accent: Arkansas or Alabama, or some other state I can’t actually recognize the accent from.

  The man’s boyish, with muscular legs and dark hair in a thick buzz cut, but he’s wearing corduroy shorts smaller than anyone under sixty would be caught dead in. They show off a long, rubbery burn scar down the outside of his left leg. He smiles at us lopsidedly as he turns off the phone. “Sorry. My mother.”

  The dog, seeming to notice us for the first time, springs at us. Throws itself sideways against Violet’s legs, then against mine, where it stops and leans on me, thumping its heavy tail.

  “Bark,” the man says to it. It doesn’t bark. To us he says “Dr. Hurst and Dr. Azimuth?”

  “Right,” Violet says.

  “I’m Reggie Trager.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Violet says. “Can we pet your dog?”

  Interesting opener. Not that the dog isn’t cute.

  “She’s not mine, but go ahead,” Reggie says. “Take her home with you. Her name’s Bark Simpson.”

  “Oh: Bark,” Violet says, causing the dog to hurl itself off my legs and back onto hers.

  Just as well. Reggie’s coming in for the handshake.

  Up close, he’s not quite the same person. The left side of his face is a fishnet of scars. Not burns, like on his leg, but fine lacerations, like from shrapnel or spraying glass. The reason his smile is lopsided is that the left side of his face is paralyzed. His left eye stares wider than his right, almost fully round.

  The weird thing, though, is that it’s not a bad effect. The paralysis gives his face a slight cartoonishness that goes well with how young he looks. It kind of works.

  “You met Del and Miguel?” he says.

  At their names, the dog abruptly stands and looks bereft. Turns around a couple times, then gallops off toward the parking lot.

  Reggie shakes his head. “She just realized that Del left. Bark! Don’t go on the highway!”

  “They the two guys who got in the truck?” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “We didn’t actually meet them. Who are they?”

  “We all work together. They’re sort of the Tattoos to my Mr. Roarke, if that means anything to people your age.” He winks at me with his nonstaring eye. “Come on in. I’ll introduce you to some of your fellow guests.”

  12

  CFS Lodge, Ford Lake, Minnesota

  Still Friday, 14 September

&nbs
p; In the registration cabin, though, there are just four Asian guys, and the two who are standing—tracksuits, sunglasses, coming up on their toes when they see me—are obviously bodyguards.

  The other two, on opposite couches, are harder to figure. One is punk-chic, with chunky-cool glasses and a sleek suit over an expensive-looking western shirt. Early forties, hair dyed brown, reading a guidebook. The other is about the same age but fat and sprawling, with the wet lips, coarse features, and bad shave of the mentally disabled or whatever they’re being called these days. Jeans and a T-shirt that says “NOW IS COLA ONLY.” He’s playing a video game on a cell phone.

  The stylish one stands when he sees us, causing his bodyguards to move closer to his sides.

  Reggie introduces us. His name is Wayne Teng. The slob’s his brother, Stuart. The bodyguards are allegedly both named Lee.

  “Sorry,” Teng says. “My brother and our associates do not speak English.”

  “But you do,” Violet says.

  “Very poorly.”

  “It doesn’t seem like it.”

  “Thank you. You are medical doctors?”

  “He is. I’m a paleontologist.”

  “Like in Jurassic Park?”

  “More or less.”

  Teng translates for his brother and bodyguards. I recognize the words Jurassic Park. Even the brother looks up.

  I follow Reggie over to the registration desk. “Is this it? The whole group?” Assuming Teng’s bringing his bodyguards, it puts us at six.

  Reggie pulls out some forms. “Not really sure. We’ve got five more RSVPs in the affirmative.”

  “Won’t that be too many?”

  “The only real limit is what you guys are willing to accept. But I’ll worry about that when it happens. I’m sure someone will come to their senses.”

  “Why? Is the monster fake?”

  He winks at me. “Shit, I hope not.” Puts two keys on the desk. “Cabin Ten.”

  “Both of us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were supposed to be in separate cabins.”

  “You were? Shit. Let me think.” He chews a nail. “Problem is, we got a lot of people coming in with the referee.”

  “Who’s the referee?”

  “I’m not allowed to say till he or she physically gets here.”

  “Which is when?”

  “Few hours. Let’s see: Del’s already bunking with Miguel…. ” He looks up at me, half his face wincing. “The room you’re in now, you can separate the beds, if that helps.”

  “It’s fine,” Violet says, coming up behind me. “For one night, I think Dr. Azimuth can handle it.”

  Cabin Ten is nice enough, but the air’s a bit moldy and filled with sexual tension, so Violet and I decide to go to Omen Lake, where the rock paintings are.

  Davey, the kid with the clipboard, sets us up with a canoe. Green Kevlar, looking like canvas that’s been shellacked. Light as shit: it’s got a yoke like a toilet seat across its middle bench that you’re supposed to put your head through so you carry the canoe upside down on your shoulders, but if you don’t want to do that—because you can’t really see anything that way, or because anybody who wants to can break your neck—you can just carry it above your head with your hands.

  Violet teaches me some strokes, and after you get your mind out of the gutter we make our first portage halfway up the west side of Ford Lake. Cross a couple more lakes and we’re there.

  Omen Lake: not that ominous. It’s dumbbell shaped, with orange-red cliffs facing each other across the narrow part, where the pictograms are. The water’s so clear you can see boulders on the bottom, and the leaves on the trees are already turning colors that, relative to green, absorb less infrared light.* We’re the only ones there.

  Violet takes us right to the base of the cliff. Then stands in the boat and grabs hold of the rock.

  “Push out from the left to keep us steady,” she says.

  “What are you doing?”

  She swings out onto the cliff face before I can get my oar in place. The canoe spins away from the wall. By the time I get it under control, she’s ten feet off the water.

  “You can rock climb,” I say.

  “All paleontologists can rock climb. And this is a nice rock. It’s probably four billion years old.”

  I lie back to watch her do it. It’s not the worst view in the world.

  So when the lake does suddenly turn ominous, it feels like a trap’s been sprung. One minute: sun, and Violet from behind and below. The next: water that smells like salty rot and pumps malice off its surface like sound from the face of a speaker. The previously minor splashes and drumming against the membrane of the canoe now feeling like the exploratory peckings of hungry underwater animals.

  I search for something that’s changed: a cloud across the sun or a new vein of cold water that I can feel through the Kevlar. But there’s nothing. Just invisible darkness, and the fact that I’m sweating all over, and gone.

  What I tell my patients with PTSD—of whom, in the desperate world of cruise ship labor, I have many—is that the panic attacks are currently thought to be of physical rather than psychological origin. The reminder of whatever shitty thing happened to you communicates directly with the most primitive centers of your nervous system, which from their own strange memories cue the physiological changes before you even know you’re afraid. The panic comes in reaction to the sweating palms and the shortness of breath, not the other way around.

  Knowing this is supposed to make people feel better, or at least less responsible for their craziness. It may even be true. But out on Omen Lake, with my vision dimming and my sides wet with sweat, terrified of a freshwater lake that’s been photographed and visited a million times, it doesn’t do me much good. The only thing I can focus on besides fear is raw anger.

  Eleven years?

  All this because of some ugly things I saw in a shark tank eleven years ago?

  Magdalena died the next day. Most of me died with her. But guess what? Freaking out all the time doesn’t seem to be bringing her back.

  Was signing up for a twelve-day canoe trip a particularly good idea? Survey says no.

  How bout working on a cruise ship?

  Still: For fuck’s sake. Get over it.

  “Lionel!”

  The spookiness evaporates like it doesn’t want to be seen with me. Violet’s come back down the rock face. The canoe has drifted ten feet away. I use something called a J-stroke to get it back to the rock.

  Once she’s seated, Violet stays twisted around, looking at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You don’t look okay. What happened?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine. How were the paintings?”

  “About what we expected.”

  We didn’t expect much. Books describing the paintings in English go back at least to 1768, and both carbon dating and the Ojibwe say the paintings are twice that age. Which doesn’t entirely rule out a hoax—the Ojibwe could have painted them in 1767, using two-hundred-year-old fish oil—but does make Reggie Trager unlikely to have been involved.

  Violet’s still staring at me. “Are you sure there isn’t something you want to tell me?”

  “No,” I say, pushing off the wall with the end of my oar to get us going.

  Which at least is true.

  Back at the lodge, there are a couple of nice pieces of distraction. First, Del—the guy who works with or for Reggie or whatever—meets us at the dock to tell us Reggie wants us to join the rest of the group in the registration cabin for an announcement. Second, when we get to the registration cabin, in addition to Wayne Teng’s party and what looks like every employee of the lodge, there are five new guests. One of whom, Tyson Grody, is famous.

  Grody has to be in his mid-twenties by now. He’s a singer-dancer thing who came out of a boy band. Pop songs you hear in a cab en route to some expat bar and think are sung by an actual middle-aged black man. Women on cru
ise ships always have him on their fuck mixes.

  In person Grody’s tiny, bug-eyed, smiling, and twitchy, but at least he’s got a pair of actual black men with him. They’re enormous. When they first see the Teng brothers’ bodyguards, there’s a four-way sunglass stare-off that makes you hope for some Super Street Fighter IV action later on.

  The two other new guests are a grim-faced couple in their late fifties. His and hers Rolexes, hair and skin the color of their safari outfits. Same pushed-out lower lips.

  “People, I’ve got some bad news,” Reggie says from the front.

  When everyone’s quiet, he says “The ref’s not here, and won’t be until tomorrow afternoon. So we won’t be leaving tomorrow morning. We could leave as soon as the ref gets here, but there wouldn’t be much point, since we’d still get to White Lake a full day late. We’d only end up spending an extra night in the field. So I’m going to delay the start of the trip by a whole day and leave Sunday morning instead.

  “If that’s a problem, and any of the guests can’t stay, I understand. If any of the guests do choose to stay, we can go into the field for one day less than we were planning and still get back here on schedule. Or we can stay in the field for the full length of time and get back a day later. Whichever you decide. Obviously, your extra night at the lodge will be free of charge, along with any activities we can interest you in while we’re here. Fishing, canoeing—whatever you want. And whether you come with us or not, I hope you’ll join me and Del and Miguel and some of the guides for dinner.” He looks at a clock on the wall. “Which should be right after this.”

  “Can you at least tell us who the referee is?” Violet says.

  Reggie shakes his head. “You know, I just asked that question and was told it has to remain secret, even with the delay. Legally and personally, I have to respect that. Again, I apologize.”

  He looks tired, and maybe disappointed, but not particularly anxious. I wonder if there ever was a specific referee. Someone Reggie thought he could rely on but then got fucked by. Or whether all along it’s been a gamble, with offers out to anyone even possibly sucker enough, or greedy enough, to accept whatever Reggie’s offering. Which, after all, is for a single corrupt act in the privacy of the woods.