I’m used to being an imaginary gunshot victim. It’s an occupational hazard. Every day was the Shoot-Out at the Kid-O-Korral. Bananas are guns. Fingers are guns. Naked Barbie dolls bent in the middle so the legs are the barrel: guns. Even guns are guns. But right now the real gun is in the bottom of my sleeping bag in a crusty sock. I’m invincible.
“This would be great place to hide out,” says Odd, then he turns and takes the last few steps out into the sunlight at the other end of the tunnel.
It wouldn’t be a good place for a standoff for the same reasons it wouldn’t be a great bomb shelter. But I’ve finally figured out my situation. I’m babysitting. Only I won’t get paid. And this particular toddler is bigger than average. Babysitting. It is my damn depressing destiny I guess.
We’re alone on the platform at the moment. I’m glad about that. I go and stand at the right edge. If anyone else comes, I’ll look normal at first. My ruined side will be observed only by snarls of barbed wire and the hillside made of mine waste. There isn’t even any grass on that hill. It is deader than the moon.
“This would be a great place to make a movie,” says Odd. “Look at that water.”
The water in the pit looks purple and dark in this light. The wind has roughed it up so much it doesn’t even shine.
“Something would come up out of that water, out of that pit—” Odd continues.
“That water is poisonous acid laced with heavy metals,” I say.
“That’s why it would be great. You know, monsters like that shit.”
He has a point. During my extended study of monster movies, there were plenty where the key was toxic something.
“Yeah, but how would anything even get in there?”
“Maybe somebody gets murdered and the body gets thrown in,” Odd says
I lean over the rail. “It would be hard to get a body all the way in. They’ve got chain link and barbed wire. It’s not a straight drop. And humans make lame-ass monsters anyway. They are always sort of remembering being human and being all tortured about being monsters. ‘I don’t want to drink blood. I don’t want to howl at the moon.’ Bunch of whiners. Except for zombies. Zombies have no memories as far as I can tell.”
“Well, OK, not human.” A raven flew past, on cue. “And not a raven,” says Odd.
“Why not?”
“Not fierce enough,” says Odd. “I mean, they peck out eyes, but . . . meh. An eagle—nope, I got it. Totally got it. An osprey.”
“Well, that’s fiercer, but how would it end up in the water? The only reason would be if it saw a fish. It isn’t going to see a fish. Not in that.”
“An osprey,” says Odd, “Is carrying a fish, a rainbow trout, and it drops it in there.”
“So then we have a dead fish in a lake full of acid. I think the story ends with it dissolving.”
“No. Like, a thunderstorm comes up.”
And it does look like there is a storm coming; dark sky is clotting up behind the mountains to the east.
“Wham! Lightning hits the giant Mary statue up there. And there is a shot where she explodes. Then lightning hits the water in the pit and Zap! The fish is alive, baby. It’s alive! Shocked alive! Like Frankenstein, but it’s FrankenTrout!
“There’s already a movie called Frankenfish. And what’s so scary about a zombie trout? It’s kind of stuck down there. It needs to be bigger. But, hey, the electricity could do that too. You see the cells dividing really, really fast, and then, the next shot, the fish is the size of something. . .something. . .something huge.” I look at Odd. He totally gets it. He appreciates my genius.
“It’s Troutzilla! And it jumps up out of the water,” says Odd, waving his arm in an arc like a rainbow, “and SPLOOSH!”
“Acid splashes fuckin’ everywhere!” I yell.
At that moment a couple of little kids scamper out of the tunnel and onto the platform. They look at me. They scamper back to the door of the tunnel, back to their mom. She lasers a look at me. I’m supposed to know better. I’m not supposed to speak like that in public. She looks away. I’m not supposed to look like that in public, either.
The happy family moves over to the other side of the platform. The mom is teaching her kids how to ignore bad people, bad people like me. I head back to the gritty parking lot. I can hear Odd’s slightly limping footsteps behind me in the tunnel.
Odd pulls into a gas station-liquor store. There are plenty of places that will sell you a gallon of milk and a gallon of gas. There are plenty of places where you can fill up the tank and buy beer by the case. It’s a little unusual though, a place with gas and shelf after shelf of vodka and tequila. I suppose an argument could be made that it is a very bad idea, but the place seems to be doing OK.
“Hey, Polly, get us some chocolate,” says Odd. I’d rather just run the card through the machine. If I buy candy I have to go in. This isn’t a freaking candy store, but the gas is pumped. I get my hat and the pink glasses of relatively less horror and go inside.
Odd comes in a couple of seconds later. He’s got his pant leg rolled up so his robot leg is exposed. He heads for the bathroom, but on his way he stumbles, falls against a rack full of chips and snacks, and takes it down with him. In the process he knocks bottles down, off the shelf, thunking on the floor. Most of them just roll, but one of them shatters.
“Oh, shit, man, I’m sorry,” says Odd, and he’s scrambling, crawling, trying to put bottles back on the shelves. In the process, he’s makes a bigger mess. His robot leg flails around and crunches bags of chips. He gets the rack upright, but then it tips onto a different shelf and more bottles go down. Every time he sets one bottle up, three fall down.
The guy behind the counter moves fast. My card, receipt, and candy bar are in my hand and the clerk is beside Odd faster than I could be.
“You OK? Look, don’t worry about it. I’ll get it squared away. You sure you’re OK? You didn’t get cut?”
“I’m sorry,” says Odd again.
“Hey, just as long as you’re OK.”
“I’ll get out of your way,” says Odd, and he heads for the door. Somebody comes from the back with a bucket and a broom.
“Thanks,” I say, and walk out the door.
Odd is waiting like nothing happened. If he needed to use the bathroom, he forgot about it. I guess he just needed an attention fix.
I send a message to my dad, “All good.”
I delete twenty-three messages from my mom.
We’re thirty minutes outside of Butte before Odd reaches into the kangaroo pocket on his hoodie and pulls out a pint of whiskey.
“During Prohibition,” says Odd in his history-narrator voice, “Butte moonshiners sold their liquor in small bottles like this labeled as furniture polish.” Then he drops the voice, “Let’s get polished, Polly. Let’s get polished.”
I reach out and take the bottle from his hand. A car passes. There is a little girl in the backseat. She waves a naked doll at us and sticks out her tongue.
“I think maybe we should wait on the getting polished until later, maybe,” I say. What-to-do-what-to-do-whatto-do to distract him? “I’m going on a trip to Albuquerque, and I’m taking my alcohol,” I say.
“No. You’re going to Bonner and you’re taking your booze. Hey! That’s it. That’s what you should do, Polly. Write a book for kids. You know, ‘A is for . . .’”
“Not alcohol. That’s never going to fly. I’ll tell you that.”
“Well, monsters, Polly! The little boogers would love a book about monsters.”
I’m not so sure about the little boogers’ parents, but the distraction is working. I put the bottle into the Caddie’s glove box and say, “A is for . . .”
“Aliens!” says Odd. “Aliens are great.”
“A is for Aliens
From dark outer space.
They come here to probe you
And laugh in your face.”
“That’s it! That’s it! Do another one,” says Odd.
“OK, let me think. It isn’t easy to be all rhymey.
“B is for Bugs
Of gigantic size.
Their blood is called ichor.
Their mouthparts have eyes.”
“Bug blood is called ‘icky’? I’m disappointed. Meh,” says Odd.
“Not ‘icky,’ ichor, i-c-h-o-r. Bug blood is called ichor. It’s, like, poisonous, oozy stuff that comes out of festering wounds or giant bugs.”
“Alrighty then. Ichor. What’s C for?”
C is for Cyclops, the one-eyed monster. I’m not ready to tell the truth. I’m not ready for C.
“What’s C for?” repeats Odd, “Blowing shit up! Highly explosive! C4!” He thinks this is hilarious.
We drive. I think. I take an easy way out.
“C is for Creatures
There’s plenty of those
That live underwater
And have webby toes.”
“Again, not your best work. Is D going to be for Dracula?”
“No, Odd, no D for Dracula. No V for Vampire. No W for Wampyre. No W for Werewolf, either. You know how I feel about humany monsters. Just give me a minute, I’ll think what D is for.”
We cruise by a sign, Deerlodge. D is for Deerlodge, home of Montana State Prison, but that doesn’t work. Another sign warns about picking up hitchhikers, the prison again. It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours. We can find a place to camp, and I can give the bottle to Odd and he can self-medicate himself to sleep.
“D is for darkness
Where monsters might hide,
But they’re out in the daylight,
Hitching a ride.”
“I thought you said no humany monsters. Murderous hitchhikers are pretty humany.”
“That’s not what I was thinking about,” I lie, because that was where the thought started, but I’m also telling the truth, because the thought is changing, right now, in my head. “I was thinking about this parasite that infects mice and makes them find cats attractive—because the parasite needs to be in a cat to reproduce. So this parasite moves up into the brain of the mouse and screws around with its brain chemistry and makes it love the smell of cats. So it’s like a murderous hitchhiker . . .”
“Bullshit,” says Odd. “You were talking about homicidal hitchhikers.”
“No. The parasite thing is for real. My dad knows about it because he’s a vet. My mom knows about it too. It’s another reason we don’t have a cat. The parasite doesn’t just move from the mouse to the cat, it moves from the cats into another host—like humans. That’s why pregnant women shouldn’t clean cat boxes. It can cause miscarriages and brain damage. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like there is anything wrong and the baby grows up just fine until it’s an adult. Then the person just goes blind.”
“Polly, you have a dark, dark little mind,” says Odd, and he reaches for the radio.
That parasite is pretty disturbing. A thing that rides in your brain and steers you right into danger, because that’s what it needs. And what you need doesn’t matter, not even to you. You just go along with the parasite’s plan.
God gets a lot of airtime on the radio. More than I thought. Way more.
“. . . unless you accept the talking snake and the burning bush! Examine your heart! Look into your heart! Is there doubt there? Doubt is an offense . . .” says the radio. But Odd’s not in the mood for talking snakes. He turns it off in midsentence.
“Maybe we don’t need jobs. Maybe we should start a religion. People are godaholics. We could sell god on the radio,” says Odd.
“There’s already people selling god on the radio.”
“That just proves it works. We just have to make sure that we offer new and improved product.”
“Like what?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be totally new. Just different. My Norwegian ancestors had a one-eyed god. What you got?”
“My ancestors believed in magical talking trout.”
“Well, there it is,” says Odd. “The god is a one-eyed trout.”
“But what’s in it for the customer? What did that one-eyed god thingy do?”
“All the usual god stuff: made shit up, lived in the sky, stole things, wandered around. How about the trout?”
“It mostly inspired poetry.”
“Crap. One-eyed god did that too. What’s with the poetry thing? I think we need to leave that part out. Who is going to worship that? Seriously. There is no money in poetry. The one-eyed trout doesn’t give a shit about poetry.”
“Does it live in the sky?”
“Well, duh! Ever see a rainbow?”
“This could actually work. I mean, a rainbow is pretty convincing.”
“But it is also a cutthroat, because of the sacrifice. There’s always sacrifice. And it’s a golden too. That’s why they need to send us the money. ”
“And if they don’t?”
“That sacrifice thing goes both ways. It’s an eye for an eye. In a game like that you don’t want to piss off the one-eyed god.”
“It would be a mighty, mighty god,” I say, “And the name of that god . . .”
“. . . Troutzilla!” We say it together because we both know it.
A car passes. It has a Jesus-fish sticker on the back.
“Look,” says Odd. “We already have converts.”
We are off the interstate and driving up the Blackfoot. It’s rising twilight by the time we come to a campground and pull off the road. When I open the door, I can hear the sound of the river. There’s a cinder-block toilet a little way beyond some trees. There is a picnic table and a fire pit with a grill.
The door on the toilet is heavy and the little room behind it is full of flies. A sign on the wall says, “NO TRASH in the TOILET! PLEASE!!! KEEP lid CLOSED!” The lid is wide open. Nobody plays by the rules. When I’m done, I use the toe of my shoe to close the lid. Not that it matters. The flies don’t even notice.
Odd is sitting on the table with the bottle he swiped in Butte in his hand. The plastic milk crate is beside him. The chocolate is gone. The chips and salsa and beans and cheese—all gone. The only thing in the Lucky Charms box is Odd’s prescription. We have half a roll of Nekko wafers we found in the glove box, a mushy banana, and a can of Crisco. I’m not sure there’s any reason to get a fire started in the grill pit. The best plan may just be to drink myself to sleep. Odd seems to have worked that out already. The vodka flask and the pint of whiskey are on the table, too. It’s going to be a three-course meal—four if we eat some Nekkos.
“Why’d you swipe this, Odd?” I ask when he hands me the flask.
“No reason. Just wung it,” he says.
“You just wanted it?”
“Naw. I wung it. Wing, wang, wung it. I just wung it.”
I open the Crisco and scoop some up with a gray Nekko. Licorice grease. It’s what’s for dinner.
I check my phone. No bars here. The canyon is steep and there’s nothing to do about it. These things happen.
“You know, I think we should still make that movie,” says Odd. “And we should both be in it—you know—the way that old fat guy was always in his own movies. The one about those fuckin’ birds is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen, because that could happen. That would be a shitty way to die, pecked to death by birds. And Stephen King, he does that too. So we should totally do that.” He takes a few steps away from the picnic table and then lies down on the dirt.
“Want me to pitch your tent for you? It’d just take a minute,” I say.
He’s still talking about the movie. “You can be horribly disfigured by the acid. I can be a guy who got bit by Troutzilla and loses a leg. So we’re like after revenge and shit.”
“Odd, that sounds like Moby Dick.”
“Moby Dick,” Odd snorts, “Moby Dick. What’s bigger than Winnie’s poo? Moby’s dick. His dick!”
I don’t say goodnight. I pitch my tent. I crawl into my sleeping bag. I poke around with my toes until I can feel the lumps. This little blood
y sock is full of bullets, and this little bloody sock is full of gun, and this little bloody sock says, “Pee, pee, pee, you can’t make me go home.” Goodnight socks. Goodnight gun. Goodnight flies. Goodnight scum. Goodnight monsters. Goodnight bears. Goodnight noises everywhere.
“Blemish,” says Mom. She points at her own cheek, but I know she means on mine. The damn zit has been bugging me since this afternoon. “Make sure you put something on it before you go to bed—don’t touch it! Polly, how many times to I have to tell you to keep your hands away from your face?”
More than a kajillion? Because she’s said it that often. But it’s almost impossible not to reach up and touch that thing.
“Is Bridger coming home this weekend? Is he calling tonight?”
“No. Not this weekend. He might call, but it will be late. He’s got this study thing on Wednesday nights.”
“You think this little dab of leftovers is worth saving? It’s not enough for a real meal, is it? I’ll just throw it out. Nobody ever wants leftovers.”
“Night, Mom.”
“Night-night,” says Mom, and she steps closer, tucks my hair behind my ear, and squints at the zit. “Make sure you put something on that.”
Sometimes homework is interesting, but honestly, I have zero interest left in the fantasy life of W. B. Yeats. Nothing like ten pages, double-spaced, one-inch margins to suck the fun out of an idea. But Ms. Kimmet has already decided I’m going to get an A, so I have to live up to her prejudice. When I hand it in next Monday, it’s going to look like something. It’s going to have that Polly Furnas sparkle: a companion CD, illustrations, a bibliography in exact MLA style.
The zit is more like an angry little blister, but I scrub the top right off it while I’m exfoliating. It hurts, especially when dab the zit cream on it. I’m probably going to have to use some concealer in the morning.
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