Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

  Humans, incidentally, are even more compressible than fish.

  “Violet!” I yell when I break the surface.

  I think the reason I’ve been thrown so far, and in such a disorienting way, is that the canoe deformed when the harpoon hit it, then snapped partially back into shape, shooting me into space like an arrow from a bow.

  “Here!” she says.

  I swim toward her fast, head down because it’s too dark to see her anyway, my clothes trailing every movement with the wrong rhythm. I’d ditch them, but I don’t want to take the time, and I’m still fooling myself that there’s something in them I’ll be able to use later.

  One of Violet’s hands swipes my side. I grab onto her and surface. She’s mostly invisible, but her eyes and hair glint like the lake.

  I say “We go down, hold hands, swim as far as possible, surface, don’t speak, do it again till we get to shore. Okay?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  We quickly kiss, if that’s the kind of thing you believe we’ve been doing, and go under. Into the high-pitched silence of the water, which seems to be waiting for either an explosion or a creature that wants to bite our heads off, whichever shows up first.

  We swim what feels like a long distance, in as straight a line as we can, then Violet squeezes my hand and we come up gasping. Go down again and this time swim until our hands touch the rocks along the bottom and we know we’ve reached the shallows. Raise our heads out of the water just in time to hear the rattlesnake hiss of a fuse.

  I don’t think the dynamite lands all that near us. I don’t feel a splash, either when it hits the surface or when it explodes. I just feel the force go through me like something kicking me in the balls, shredding my muscles, and quadrupling my blood pressure at the same time. Then I realize I’m back under water, drowning.

  But only for a moment. This is no time to lounge about. Violet and I claw our way onto shore. Then lurch, unable to stand upright, into the pitch-dark woods.

  Which are like a birth canal lined with midgets trying to trip us. As we speed-stumble deeper, I keep hammering into things that are either vertical or horizontal, I can’t tell which, and hearing Violet do the same. When I reach back to grab her hand, hers or mine is slick with blood.

  We seem to go on like this for about an hour, although it’s really probably more like ten minutes. Because how long can it take to land an amphibious boat, follow a couple of people who can’t see into some woods, and start shooting at them with a hunting rifle?

  The first bullet cracks into a tree just ahead of us with the noise of someone hitting a home run. The second smashes close enough to spray moss into my mouth, and splinters into the right side of my face and neck.

  Conveniently, Violet and I both trip over things around then, and end up face-to-face.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I say, trying not to spit moss on her. “We have to split up. You go left, I’ll keep going straight. If he follows you instead of me, I’ll circle back and get behind him.”

  “I’ll do the same if he follows you.”

  “Don’t. It’s too dangerous. He’ll see you.”

  “And he won’t see you?”

  “No. Go.”

  This time there’s no kiss even if you believe that kind of thing is going on, maybe out of a shared recognition that I’m back to lying to her. But she does trail a hand down the side of my face that has splinters in it.

  Then I’m bashing forward again, peeling off my jacket to leave a trail, patting it down before I drop it for items that might help me kill this fucker. Finding only a digital camera in a Neoprene pouch. If I were Professor Marmoset, I’d be set.

  Being someone else entirely, I dedicate thirty seconds of half-concentration to figuring out a way to turn the piece of shit into a night-vision scope. Is there some kind of filter you’re supposed to remove? Some submenu of a submenu you’re supposed to reprogram? Then I give up on it. Turns out I’m not an electrical engineer.

  What I am is someone who’s supposedly good at taking out maniacs in the woods. And it’s true I’m looking forward to completing the rightward curve I’ve been trying to make outside this fucker’s peripheral vision. As far as I can tell I’m almost back to the spot where I split off from Violet.

  Which is why the next rifle shot I hear makes my blood go cold.

  It doesn’t come from where it should come from. Not if he’s following me, and not if he’s following Violet. It comes from a completely different direction, and from too far away.

  Meaning he is following Violet, and I have no idea where the fuck I’ve been going. Nor do I have any chance of moving fast enough and far enough to keep him from killing her.

  I yell “HEY! FUCKER!” Lunge in the direction the gunshot seemed to come from. Get enmeshed in a web of branches. Hear another rifle shot.

  It’s then that I decide to smash the camera. Not because that might work, but because I can’t think of anything that might work. Or maybe I should throw the camera instead. Bean that fucker in the head right before he shoots her, pure luck.

  As I draw back my arm, though, I realize that neither of those things is what it’s time for.

  What it’s time for is for me to repeat my mantra. Which is:

  I am one dumb fucking shithead.

  I turn the back of the camera away from me so it won’t blast my retinas, cover the front with my palm, and press the “on” button. To my wide-open pupils, the glare from the monitor lights up everything around me.

  It’s interesting. I’m not even on the ground. For the last little while I’ve been moving upward through a tangle of branches. I drop back to the dirt through the first hole I see.

  After that I’m in motion. I can’t see very far ahead, but I can run. I can duck around trees I would have otherwise had to find with my face, and can spot dead ends before flailing into them. Eventually I even learn to put the camera on picture display so it doesn’t keep automatically retracting the lens and turning off.

  I hear a close-by rifle shot and start to move faster. Come around a tree and almost slam into the shooter’s back.

  I’m shocked that he’s moving so slowly. Faster than I was when I couldn’t see anything, but barely. He’s just ambling along, doing leisurely terminator head sweeps with his night-vision goggles while keeping his rifle still, like he’s used to all this and doesn’t want to tire himself out.

  He hasn’t heard me or noticed the light from the camera yet. I’m tempted to just kill him—straight punch to the fifth vertebra, Nice being chased by ya—but if Violet’s dead I’ll want him around to answer for that. And if she’s alive she probably has some questions of her own.

  I grab the man’s rifle away and use my hand with the camera in it to lift his night-vision goggles off and illuminate his face.

  “Aw, fuck,” I say out loud.

  It’s Dr. McQuillen.

  On the way back to the boat, with Violet in the lead wearing McQuillen’s goggles and me at the back still holding the camera, I let McQuillen bang his head on the occasional branch. I’m cold and I’m in pain, and Violet was sheathed in blood when I gave her McQuillen’s anorak. I would have given her his shirt, too, but I wasn’t sure someone his age would survive the cold, no matter how fit he obviously is.

  In case I need to feel worse, I also think about how I went all the way through his office without realizing his CT scanner was missing. Sold, I’m now thinking, to pay for the amphibious boat.

  We reach the boat in question.

  I say “All right. What’s in the water?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I don’t ask again. Just grab the back of his shirt and wade thigh-deep into the lake with him. Use my teeth to open the knife I took from his coat and cut his shoulder enough to bleed. Plunge him under.

  Violet gets the boat’s running lights on behind us. It’s weird to be able to see normally.

  “What is it?” I say when I pull him back up.

  “I’ll tell
you!” he screams. “Get me out of the water!”

  I do.

  He does.

  EXHIBIT I

  From: Editors’ Choice, Science, 12 December 2008, 322: 1718

  MARINE BIOLOGY

  Carcharhinus? You Don’t Even Know Us!

  There may be an exception to every rule, but the bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, can claim to be the exception to at least three. Long famous among ichthyologists for its fierce aggressiveness (bull sharks resemble short, wide great whites; the five shark attacks on humans that occurred on the Jersey Shore between July 1 and July 12 of 1916, and inspired the book and film Jaws, are now thought to be the work of a single C. leucas), it is also the only shark to retain the elasmobranchial ability to not just survive but hunt and thrive in both marine and freshwater environments. C. leucas accomplishes this neat trick through an impressive grab-bag of adaptations, including decreased urea production by the liver, diffusion of urea by the gills, the ability to increase its urine output by twenty-fold, and the ability to switch between active and passive transfer of electrolytes, via Na+, K+-ATPase, in both the distal tubules and rectal glands. The third unique distinction of C. leucas is its range: bull sharks have been found as far north as Massachusetts and as far south as the Cape of Good Hope, in a band that circumnavigates the globe.

  Despite being geographically widespread, however, individual bull sharks are sufficiently rare that in the past they’ve been thought to incorporate over a dozen different species. Specimens from places as diverse as the Ganges, Zambezi, and Mississippi rivers (bull sharks have been found as far up the Mississippi as Illinois) have been subsumed into C. leucas only gradually, usually on the basis of anatomical comparison. For example, the Nicaragua Lake shark, or Carcharhinus nicaraguensis, was declared C. leucas by taxonomical agreement in 1961.

  One holdout to this process, because of its particular rarity and presumed population fragility, has been the Vietnamese river shark, Carcharhinus vietnamensis. Gordon et al. now use dye-terminator sequencing to compare the genome of C. vietnamensis sampled in the wild with that of C. leucas, and find that the two are the same. The authors theorize that the Mekong Delta may be the northernmost passage available for bull sharks to cross between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

  Journ. Exp. Mar. Bio. and Eco. 356, 236 (2008)

  34

  White Lake

  Still Sunday, 23 September

  “A shark?” I say. “It’s a motherfucking shark? You heard Reggie’s crackpot story and you put a shark in the lake?”

  McQuillen spits water. “What do you want? A dragon?”

  “No, actually a shark is fucked up enough. It’s a shark!” I shout to Violet.

  I’m slightly high on how easy it’s being for me to think and say “sharks.” Later on I’ll figure out why and get depressed,* but at the moment it just seems cool.

  “There may be more than one,” McQuillen says, avoiding my eyes. “Originally there were four.”

  “Originally?” Violet says.

  “When Chris Semmel Jr. bought them.”

  “You mean when you told him to buy them,” I say.

  “Not so they would kill anyone, if that’s what you’re thinking. Autumn and Benjy were an accident. The bulls were never supposed to survive the first winter.”

  “So what was the point of them?”

  “We wanted to get some video of them attacking something. A dog, or a deer. Ideally a moose. But the bulls must have been too small back then. All we got was one eating a loon.”

  “I’d say you got a little more than that.”

  “What about the bite marks?” Violet says.

  McQuillen answers me instead of her. “I told you: Autumn and Benjy were an accident. It was a year later. We didn’t think anything was still in the lake.”

  “Bite marks,” I say.

  He clears his throat. “It was a board. Just a two-by-four with some nails at the end of it. I only needed to modify the front of the bites to make it look like they were from Liopleurodon ferox instead of Carcharhinus leucas.”

  “You were the one who recovered the bodies?” I say.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then how—”

  I realize how.

  “You’re the county coroner.”

  He nods.

  “You said they’d been killed by a boat propeller, then altered the bites to make it look like they’d been attacked by a dinosaur. Maybe that was the most you could do. Too many people had already seen the bodies for you to make it seem like they’d been through an actual accident. But at least that gave you some evidence for your hoax. And established your credentials as a skeptic at the same time.”

  Violet, both saddened and disgusted, says “You did all that so you could fool people?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try her,” I say.

  “Ford was dying. People there needed a way out. And it was my responsibility.”

  “In what way?” she says.

  “I was their doctor.”

  “Were you Chris Jr. and Father Podominick’s doctor?” I say. “Because I’m pretty sure arranging to meet your patients on a dock at midnight and then shooting them because they’re your co-conspirators in a hoax that’s already killed two teenagers is outside current medical guidelines. Particularly if you then use one of the patients you’ve just murdered to front a boat purchase.”

  “Chris Jr. agreed the bulls needed to be put down. We all did.”

  “But Chris Jr. and Father Podominick didn’t want to keep the way Autumn and Benjy died a secret. Which is why you murdered them. You’d kept them quiet as long as you could.”

  “Chris Jr. and Father Podominick were two people in a town of two and a half thousand.”

  “So worth killing to save your reputation?”

  “My reputation?” McQuillen looks up at me with what seems to be genuine anger. “I don’t give a damn about my reputation. Everyone who knows me is either an alcoholic or a junkie. Or both. You think they’ll remember me? Or thank me? And before you get any ideas, I’m not scared of prison, either. I’m seventy-eight. I probably wouldn’t survive a trial.”

  “You seem pretty spry to me.”

  “I have to be. I’m the only doctor Ford’s ever going to get. I couldn’t give my practice away. You’re a sorry excuse for a doctor—would you take it?”

  It’s actually kind of a thought-provoking question. Just not for this lifetime.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I respectfully decline. Let’s get out of here. How does the radio work?”

  “I can figure it out,” Violet says.

  McQuillen says “Wait.”

  Violet swings her legs over the side of the Zodiac to go fuck with the radio.

  “You’re planning to turn me over to the police?” McQuillen says. “Get yourself some revenge?”

  “More or less,” I say.

  “What about Ford?”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure whoever picks us up can take us straight to Ely. We can skip Ford entirely.”

  “I mean what’s going to happen to it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Yes you do. You’ve been there. You’ve seen what those people are doing to themselves.”

  “Right…” I say.

  “We can still help them.”

  “Bringing you in is helping them, McQuillen.”

  “Horseshit! We have the opportunity, right now, to make the White Lake hoax real. Benjy and Autumn died. That was an unintended tragedy, and the rumors it started eventually blew over. Then the Chinaman died—also unintended, and partially your fault: if you two hadn’t interrupted me, I might have caught the bulls that night. But this time the rumors won’t blow over. Twice now people have died here. And I know you’ve seen the autopsy photos of Autumn and Benjy. Together that is easily enough to turn this place into a tourist destination.”

  I stare at him. “That’s some kind of joke, right?”
/>
  “I don’t believe in humor. I’ve got sonar and dynamite. We can clear out the sharks tonight. No one will ever know they existed. After which you can do whatever the hell you want to me.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Hurst?” I say to Violet.

  “Keep going with the lying and killing?” she says. “No thanks. But if he calls Teng Wenshu ‘the Chinaman’ again, I might change my mind.”

  35

  White Lake

  Still Sunday, 23 September

  This time Sheriff Albin drives us back to CFS himself.

  On the way I tell him who I really am, and give him the names of some people who, while they might not be able to find me, will at least be able to answer questions about me that come up in the future. I figure he deserves to know. And it may come out anyway.

  Even leaving aside Albin’s own involvement in it, this case is going to be a mess. Missing body, missing witnesses, Teng’s cause of death unclear—bullet? shark?—with no guarantee it will ever get clearer. The county prosecutor likely to give up chasing Reggie for felony murder after a while and content himself with fraud charges—which won’t be easy to work with either. Something turned up on Reggie’s tour, and his guests who brought firearms broke his clearly stated rules, and on top of that he’ll never get paid. No matter what her percentage is, Palin won’t certify any escrow that links her to Ford.*

  So Albin’s a tad stressed. He’s also enough of a justice addict to blame McQuillen and not Violet and me for what’s likely to be a rough year or two, and to be grateful to us for figuring McQuillen out, even if we didn’t tell him we were going to do it.

  He takes us down to the marina. Violet and I figure we can say goodbye to Henry and Davey and Jane and anyone else who’s at the outfitters—including Bark the Dog, I suppose—on our way out. Right now we just want to get our shit and leave.

  The lodge itself is abandoned. The deputy stationed there gets the key to our cabin, and the four of us walk over together.