Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  “Are you questioning an order?” the lieutenant says to the CPO.

  “No sir,” the CPO says, with an angry sarcasm Reggie’s never heard from him before. “I’m just asking what the point is of bringing him all the way to the village. Why not just dump him in the river?”

  The lieutenant glances at Reggie. Sees that Reggie’s listening. Crouches down to talk to him.

  “Son, we can’t take you along on the mission. There’s no room for you in any of the wheelhouses, and I can’t have you on deck during a firefight. And I can’t spare anyone to stay behind with you. You know an E-4 doesn’t rate a mission abort.”

  Reggie wonders if there’s a requirement that he respond to any of this.

  “You’re safer—and we’re safer—with you in the village. And we need to get you there fast so we don’t miss the ambush. End of discussion, okay?” The lieutenant looks at the CPO. “End of discussion.”

  The CPO and the coxswain from the CPO’s boat swing Reggie out over the water on a cloth stretcher, and on a count of three lower him into the aluminum canoe that’s tied up near the village temple. Of course: God forbid Reggie gets off the water at some point before he dies. The CPO pulls the canoe close to the walkway and puts a canteen and a C-ration box alongside Reggie’s body. Starts to unroll a mosquito net over him.

  Before he covers Reggie’s face, the CPO looks around. Says “Shh. Open your mouth. Stick your tongue out.”

  “What—?”

  “Do it quick.”

  Reggie does. The CPO touches Reggie’s tongue with his rough, salty fingertip. When he removes it, something stays behind on Reggie’s tongue. He scrapes it off with his front teeth, and it rolls up: paper, like the dots you get from emptying a hole-punch.

  Reggie swears that if he lives long enough to use a hole-punch again, he’ll try to appreciate it more. Appreciate all office supplies.

  “Swallow,” the CPO says, pouring plastic-tasting water from the canteen into Reggie’s still-open mouth. Reggie chokes but gets some down, including the piece of paper. Or at least he can’t feel it anymore. The CPO lays the canteen down beside him and pulls the rest of the net over his head.

  “What is it?” Reggie tries to say.

  “LSD. My wife sent it to me under a postage stamp. I’ve been afraid to try it, but maybe it’ll help with the pain.”

  Then the CPO pulls the net aside for a moment and reaches into Reggie’s shirt for his lariat. “Sorry,” he says. “Forgot to grab your keys.”

  Reggie wakes up clawing the net off of him, his eyes and throat burning from the DDT it’s impregnated with. Tries to lean his head up along the inside of the canoe, but his neck is thick and claylike, and the attempt spikes pain through his chest. His head has gotten clearer, though.

  Much clearer. There’s some bamboo visible against the sky, and even though it’s evening, Reggie can see every pole of it—including the ones that are hidden by the ones in front. He knows they’re there, because he can deduce them. And what’s the difference between that and seeing them with your eyes?

  It’s like water. Right now, Reggie can’t see any. But he sure as hell knows there’s some around. And how much of water do you ever see anyway? Just the surface—the least important part, the part it’s most willing to share.

  Water is letting the canoe rest on it right now. Not pulling the canoe down under, but not spitting it out either. Just being its own thing. Sharing, but staying pure. It’s like what Reggie’s doing now with the mosquitoes: letting them take their one millionth of him in peace. But what’s that chanting?

  Reggie focuses. The chanting is real. He can hear it, he means, not just deduce it. It’s men. Not a lot of men, but nearby.

  A God-awful squealing rips into Reggie’s ears like from something being tortured. There’s a splash, and the squealing stops but is replaced by a weird kind of snuffling. Then there’s a bigger splash, a brief squeal worse than the earlier ones, and the snuffling stops too.

  All the while, though, the chanting.

  Reggie suddenly feels like a missionary waiting for some natives to put him in their soup, or tie him to a pole and throw spears at him.

  There’s more squealing. Now Reggie has to see.

  He shoves himself farther up in the canoe with his feet. The pain from bending his chest almost blacks him out, but something in him suspects this might be the end anyway. Who cares if pain is spreading through him like the rivers of the delta that he’s floating on? This isn’t some groove poem, dickhead. This is death we’re talking about.

  The boat is rotating now from his efforts. He can see the edge of the stone temple. Then the entryway. Men from the village are seated cross-legged on the platform in front of it. Chanting. The one at the end of the line has a bag. He pulls a piglet out of it. It squeals.

  The men pass the writhing piglet down the line. Reggie’s canoe rotates as if to follow it. When the piglet reaches the man at the end of the line, he takes it, touches his forehead to it, and throws it out over the water with both hands.

  The piglet screams and wheels in the air. Lands hoofs-down and bobs right back to the surface, doggy-paddling and huffing pathetically as it tries to swim for one of the lily pads, as if that could support the piglet’s weight.

  Then something huge rises up in the water behind the piglet and swallows it whole.

  The thing is at least as long as the line of men. It has to be: at the same moment its horrible toothed mouth rises up and engulfs the piglet, a muscular ripple half the length of the platform swells outward from the middle of the water. It causes Reggie’s canoe to bob.

  The temple rotates out of sight. Reggie can once again see only bamboo and the darkening sky. Inside himself, he’s screaming.

  Outside too, he realizes.

  17

  Camp Fawn See, Ford Lake, Minnesota

  Still Saturday, 15 September

  “That’s a hell of a story,” I say.

  “Innit?”

  “You had dysentery, you were on morphine and LSD, and you’d been bitten by a cobra.”

  Reggie shakes his head. “I was on acid and morphine half the time I was in Nam. I had dysentery the whole time. And a cobra bite’s just not that big of a deal, long as it doesn’t kill you outright. What I saw out there was for real.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So what was it?”

  To whatever extent I was before, I’m no longer enjoying this conversation. It’s reminding me of my own canoe freakout from earlier, and, worse, it’s reminding me of the guy in the video with one leg. Like that guy, Reggie’s just told me, with complete conviction, a story that cannot be true.

  What is this, a tiny town of psychopaths? Of people who lie so constantly and skillfully they should be in a logic puzzle, or at least running a Fortune 500 company, but have instead elected to participate in a rat’s-ass lake monster hoax?* When people go through the kind of shit Reggie’s clearly gone through they sometimes turn flat, because nothing they do or say is remotely as charged as what happened to them before. But Reggie doesn’t even come across as flat.

  “I think it was a water dragon,” he says. “It sure as hell wasn’t a catfish. Or an Irrawaddy dolphin, unless it was one with huge teeth that ate pigs. Which isn’t normally the case: I’ve checked. It could have been a snakehead, based just on how ugly it was, but if it was, it was bigger than any snakehead on record. I mean, a snakehead that big would just be its own kind of monster anyway.”

  “What’s a water dragon?” I say.

  “Something Cambodians believe in.”

  “But not Vietnamese people?”

  “I don’t know. Woman who told me about it was in Cambodia.”

  “And now you think there might be one in White Lake?”

  Reggie holds his empty can above his mouth and taps it to dislodge drops. “Fuck, I don’t know. Obviously it’d be a hell of a coincidence. Water’s a lot colder here, for one thing. Wouldn’t shock the hell out of me, though. I’m done being surprise
d by scary motherfuckers that live in the water.”

  “So now you want to lead a trip to go find one?”

  He lowers the can. “Yeah. The actual leading of the trip is not something I’m looking forward to. Being on the water, I mean. But I have to figure that’s what alpha-blockers and marijuana are for.”

  On a similar theme, I say “And why do you want to move to Cambodia?”

  He laughs. “It’s not like I’m gonna move into a hut on stilts in a swamp there. They do have land-based real estate. And Cambodia’s still pretty free of tourists, long as you stay out of Angkor Wat. You can live on the beach, there’s lots of prostitutes…” He glances at me. “I like prostitutes. What can I say? And northern Minnesota is not good for prostitutes. It’s like going to Mecca for beer-battered pork.”

  “They make beer-battered pork?” I say. I always forget how hungry marijuana makes me.

  “Del does, sometimes. Weather here sucks also. You ever been here in the winter?”

  “No.”

  “It’s cold. Like the outside of an airplane. During the summer the mosquitoes are worse than they were in Nam.”

  “But… isn’t Cambodia a little close to Nam?”

  “Hey, the Vietnamese didn’t come over here to kill us.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Anyway, I figure if Chris Sr. had the guts to buy this place, and Chris Jr. had the guts to do whatever the fuck it was he was planning to do with the whole White Lake Monster thing, the least I can do is get in a canoe for a week and finish what they started. I mean, I do rent the pieces of shit out for a living. Chris Sr. used to ride in canoes sometimes, and he hated boats as much as I do.”

  “Why?” I say. I’m still thinking about the pork.

  “The usual. Vietnam.”

  “He was there too?”

  Reggie looks surprised. “He was my CPO.”

  “The one who gave you the LSD?”

  “Yeah. He saved my ass a million times.” He points to the scarred half of his face. “Cluding this one.”

  Reggie’s narrative is starting to feel claustrophobic and paranoid. Or else I am. “What happened?”

  “We all got put on swift boats eventually,” he says. “One night Chris—that’s Chris Sr., obviously—and I were out in one and we had the running lights on so we wouldn’t get strafed, and a P4-Phantom strafed the shit out of us because the pilot thought we were an NVA helicopter. I got fuel on me and got lit on fire and all that shit—I didn’t even want to live. Chris swam me to shore.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yep. Bitch of it is, NVA didn’t even use helicopters.”

  When he falls silent, I say “Were Del and Miguel in the military too?”

  “Del was in Nam, but he never got north of a fire base. Might have had to drink a warm beer once or twice. Miguel just likes guns.”

  “Do they believe there’s a monster in White Lake?”

  “You’ve met them.”

  “Right…”

  Reggie, eye running, smiles his wicked and goofy half smile. “Those guys’ll believe anything.”

  18

  CFS Lodge, Ford Lake, Minnesota

  Still Saturday, 15 September

  At six a.m. I call Dr. Mark McQuillen from the phone on the desk of the back room of the registration cabin, hoping to impress him and catch him groggy enough to answer questions.

  “This is Dr. McQuillen.”

  “Dr. McQuillen, this is—”

  Phoning another doctor this early has thrown me off: I almost say “This is Peter Brown.” Someone I stopped pretending to be three years ago.

  “It’s Lionel Azimuth. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”

  “Not at present. I’m on my way out.”

  “It’s six.”

  “Then I’m already late. Sunrise is at six-fifty-two, and I need to be out on Hoist Bay by then. I’d invite you to come with me, but fish can smell horseshit from a mile away.”

  “That’s a good one. How’s Dylan?”

  “He left here in the peak of health.”

  “What about Charlie Brisson?” The guy with the leg bitten off.

  McQuillen laughs. “Have a good day, Doctor,” he says as he hangs up.

  Back in the cabin, Violet’s asleep on her stomach with one knee fetched up and the sheets pushed down across her thighs. The two-inch stripe of her black cotton underwear is somehow perfectly centered over her pussy. You can crunch the pheromones with your teeth.

  I try to get my shit together without waking her, but she turns over as I’m about to leave.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to McQuillen’s.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Little past six.”

  “Will he be awake?”

  “I just talked to him on the phone.”

  It becomes a game after a while, the lying by telling the truth. Like doing crosswords.

  “Can I come?”

  “Sleep. I’ll be back before you wake up. I’ll get gas for the Mystery Machine.”

  She grinds her palms into her eyes. “Don’t say that. I hate Scooby-Doo.”

  I should leave.

  “Why?” I say.

  “The fucking monster always turns out to be fake. It’s always just some loser in glow-in-the-dark paint, trying to steal money from a yuppie who doesn’t even know the money exists. The only person who ever gets anything out of it is Daphne.”

  “That’s the blond one?”

  “Her hair’s red. She gets herself kidnapped all the time, because the only way she can come is by being fucked in the ass while she’s tied up.”

  Now I really should go.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Didn’t you ever watch that show?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “The blond one is Fred. Daphne’s boyfriend.”

  “So…”

  “Daphne’s frigid with Fred. She gave him a handjob once and puked. Fred titty-fucks Velma every time they build a monster trap together, then feels guilty about it.”

  Watching Violet stretch as she says this, her skin matte from the cold, is surreal.

  “I thought Velma was gay,” I say.

  “She just tells Shaggy that so he’ll stop hitting on her. She’d rather fuck the dog.”

  “Interesting. Anyway…”

  “Wait. I’m coming with you.”

  I’m about to tell her not to, but she gets out of bed. As she walks to the bathroom, the twin motions of her pulling her underwear back down over her butt and retucking the sides of her breasts leave me speechless.

  I go stand by the bathroom door to try again. “You know, I would have thought that what you’d like about Scooby-Doo was that the mystery always had a logical explanation.”

  “Are you kidding?” she says. “Nobody likes that. It’s like that piece-of-shit Wizard of Oz, where the wizard turns out to be a fake even though the whole thing’s a dream anyway. Who has a dream about a fake wizard?”

  “So what’s the option—Twilight, and Harry Potter? Kids growing up knowing more about the physiology of vampires and werewolves than they do about human beings?”

  “Wow. Somebody is grumpy in the morning.”

  The toilet flushes, and a minute later she opens the door brushing her teeth. She’s got sexy sleep notches beneath her eyes.

  “In the first place, Grumpy Grampa, don’t be getting on Twilight,” she says. “In the second, I’m not sure you want to be holding up Scooby-Doo as a physiology textbook. It’s about a talking dog.”

  At McQuillen’s I peel the magnetic “GONE FISHIN’ ” sign off the clinic door before Violet can see it, and make a show of ringing the buzzers on both doors, then knocking. Finally I ask Violet to walk around the house and try to see in through the windows, at which point I slide the polymer lock pick and tension wrench out of the lining of my wallet and spring the deadbolt on the second rake.

  I really should have told V
iolet not to come. Since I didn’t, I’ll have to either get in and out before she notices or else think of something to tell her when she does.

  Depends what’s inside, I suppose.

  The waiting room’s dark, but I know where the desk lamp is. In the closet behind the desk, unmarked boxes: too difficult to search. I move to the hallway.

  Most of the clinic I’m already familiar with, like the examining room McQuillen put Dylan in and the one that’s empty. A hall closet has janitorial and medical supplies. I open the locked door next to it, but when I go up the carpeted steps I’m suddenly in someone’s house. Midway between the dining room and living room, with a nasty déjà vu that I’ve broken in to kill someone. I go back down to the clinic and try the door at the end of the hall. File room.

  It’s got an armchair with medical journals and a mostly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red on it. Next to that a lamp table with a framed photo: McQuillen, maybe forty years younger, standing next to the desk in the reception room. On the desk itself a woman with her legs crossed.

  The woman’s in every photo in the room. Sometimes alone, sometimes with McQuillen. From the evolution of her eyeglass frames, it looks like she left his life, for all I know life in general, around 1990.

  It’s a bummer, and along with something I can’t quite figure out makes me worry about the old man, but I don’t have time to think about it. I check the medications locker, grab a few items I’ve been wishing I brought with me from the ship, then start on the files. Luckily, of all McQuillen’s patients named Brisson, Charlie’s chart is the easiest to find. It’s the thickest.

  Charles Brisson is sixty-four years old. Way too young to look like he did on the video. So young that McQuillen’s first note on him is from when Brisson was fourteen.

  Reason for first visit: constant thirst and hunger paired with weight loss. McQuillen diagnoses juvenile diabetes and starts him on a drug I don’t recognize but was probably zinc-preserved pig insulin. I fan through McQuillen doing a reasonable job of keeping Brisson stable through the usual struggles and crises you get treating diabetic teenagers.