Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  He pulled the smaller suitcase close to the writing table, where he was sitting. He flipped the latches and carefully opened it on the floor. Inside, securely wrapped in cloth hand towels, were eight bottles of Jim Beam, along with Joe’s favorite Waterford crystal whiskey tumbler. He put the drinking glass and one bottle of the bourbon on the desk, closed the suitcase, and set it down on the floor, right next to the night table beside the bed. He cracked open the bottle, poured a couple of fingers, and took a good sip. That helped. He lit a cigarette, then took another gulp of the whiskey, savoring the mixed flavors of bourbon and tobacco in his mouth. That’s more like it, he thought, feeling a little better already.

  I fetched a heavy glass ashtray from the supply cupboard and then went to the ice house, where I chipped off enough small chunks of ice to fill a large thermos. I wasn’t expecting another tip, and didn’t get one. He took the ice and the ashtray from me at the door of his room, muttered thanks and kicked the door shut with his foot.

  I saw him again that first evening when he came down to the dining room for supper. The season at Sommerwynd didn’t really start until after the Memorial Day weekend, so the only other guests were an older couple, the Gaults, who visited every year. McCarthy nodded politely to them when he entered the room, and then sat as far away from them as he could. He looked like a man with a lot on his mind—more than once I saw him wipe his hand down across his face and give a slight shake of the head, as if he were trying to change the subject of his thoughts.

  My mother explained to me how McCarthy had been a kind of national hero, rousting out Reds who had infiltrated the American government, leading the fight to preserve the American way of life and protect our country from the threat within. But his enemies struck back and somehow managed to get the U.S. Senate to censure McCarthy in a vote the previous December. So that was what he had come to Sommerwynd to get away from.

  At the time, I didn’t understand much of it and I wasn’t curious to learn more. I just nodded as my mother went on about what a good man McCarthy was and my father chimed in to say how gutless, shameful, and treasonous the Senate was in their action against him. I remember trying to translate it into baseball terms. He was like a pitcher who made it to the big leagues, a rising star, but then his opponents figured out how to hit him, and beat him. Guys like that—if they don’t learn a new pitch or change their delivery, they don’t often make it back to the top.

  It was a nice evening to sit out on the front veranda or back patio, or for a stroll down to the boat dock, but McCarthy finished his meal, skipped dessert and coffee, and went back upstairs to his room. I did catch a glimpse of him a little while later, about the time when the frogs start up their chorus. I was taking the day’s food scraps out to the compost heap near the vegetable beds. On my way back to the house, I saw him sitting at the table on the small balcony off his room. McCarthy didn’t appear to notice me; he was probably just staring off at the view across the lake and the rising moon. I saw a curl of smoke in the dusk light, and a sudden glow from his cigarette as he inhaled.

  The frogs were having a party, somewhere down the right shoreline some distance from the lodge. They began croaking and thrumming away even before the sun’s descent reached the high tree line on the far side of the lake. At first, Joe didn’t mind listening to them. It was the kind of nature sound you would expect to hear in a place like Sommerwynd—frogs croaking, owls hooting, bats flapping in the night air, a fish jumping and slapping back into the water. Sounds that felt right.

  But after an hour and a half of it, Joe began to wish they would just shut up. “Come on, give it a rest, guys,” he muttered as he poured another drink.

  It amazed him how loud they were. The frogs didn’t appear to be close to the lodge, their ribbity croaking seemed to come from a fair distance away—and yet, the volume they produced was quite strong. And the numbers of them. It didn’t sound like a group of six or eight frogs, more like dozens and dozens of them. As darkness settled in for the night, their noise and numbers actually appeared to increase. Maybe the sound just carried very well in the deep stillness of the location, with the lake surrounded on all sides by forest.

  Joe finally had enough of it and went inside, shutting the door to the balcony. He could still hear the frogs, but their sound was greatly diminished. He fixed another drink and pulled out Triumph and Tragedy, the final volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War. He knew he would need something to occupy time like this at Sommerwynd, and he figured that Churchill was a good man to read when you were in a tough spot. He had already tried the radio in his room, but the only station he could pick up faded in and out of static—he caught a bit of a song that sounded like Patti Page being electrocuted.

  Joe read for a while, then set the book aside. It was one of those moments—occurring more frequently of late—when he felt he had little or no patience left for anything. Not the book he was reading, not the room he was sitting in, not the building or place he was in, nobody he knew or encountered, not the weather, the season, the time of day or night. Nothing, not even himself.

  He picked up one of his pistols and toyed idly with it in his hands. There was a certain comfort to be found in the kind of inanimate object that is simple in design and serves its purpose, and needs no other reason to be. A spoon, a fork, a knife, a shovel, a clay tile, a garden hose. A gun. Like this one. There had been moments in the past year when he was almost tempted to go that route. But his enemies would have loved it if he did, and he would never give them the satisfaction.

  He could still hear the frogs. Jesus Christ, didn’t they ever stop? It was a low throbbing sound, boombadaboombadaboom in an endless beat. Fat, slimy creatures rumbling in the muck. Joe undressed, crawled into bed, and turned off the table lamp. He quickly fell asleep, but drifted back up very close to consciousness some while later, again dimly aware of the frogs—still going at it.

  Croak—you’re croaked.

  Croak—you’re croaked.

  Joe didn’t turn on the light. In the darkness, he got out of bed, got a hold of his tumbler and the bottle of Jim Beam, poured one more large one, fumbled for a cigarette and the matches, and eased himself into the armchair. He did all this without opening his eyes, because to do so would make him more awake, and the whole point of getting up was to maintain this state of semi-consciousness, drifting along the edge of the one and the other, not quite awake or asleep. He knew without forming the thought that it would take two cigarettes to finish this drink. Then he would transport himself back to bed, and sleep would come again, and then it would finally hold.

  Croak—you’re croaked.

  Joe made a kind of sighing, humming noise, not much more than a low, droning murmur within himself. It didn’t sound like anything, but he knew what he meant by it. He meant: Fuck you. Fuck all of you.

  McCarthy didn’t come downstairs for breakfast the next morning. He did just make it in time for lunch, but all he wanted was coffee, and a lot of it. Mom brewed up a fresh pot for him and he drank most of it while sitting on the front veranda, one cup after another, each with its own cigarette.

  I was nearby, working again on the flowerbeds, but I didn’t say anything to him. It seemed pretty clear that he wanted to be left alone. He looked as washed-out and beat-down as anybody I’d ever seen. I tried not to keep glancing up at him, but it wasn’t easy. Just knowing he was somebody important, or had been.

  When he’d had enough coffee, McCarthy went back inside and I didn’t see him for almost an hour. Then he came on the veranda again, this time with a little bounce in his step. He clattered down the front stairs and came over to me.

  “Tell me something, kid,” he said. “What’s with those frogs?”

  “You mean their croaking at night?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. They kept me up all night.”

  He said it almost as if it was my fault, and his blue eyes bored into me like I knew something I wasn’t telling him. Which I didn�
��t.

  “It’s the time of year when they do that,” I replied with a shrug. “It can be annoying at first, but you get used to it and don’t even notice after a while.”

  “If they make that kind of racket every night, I won’t be here long enough to get used to it.” McCarthy started to step away, but then he turned back to me. “I’m going to go for a walk. Are there any good trails here, so I don’t get lost?”

  “Sure. There’s one that goes all the way up to the top of that ridge,” I said, pointing off to the rising tree line to the east. “There’s a nice view at the top, and then the path circles down and around, back here to the lodge.”

  “Uphill,” McCarthy said. “That sounds kind of strenuous.”

  “There’s another trail that goes all the way around the lake,” I told him. “It sticks pretty close to the water and it’s mostly level ground.”

  “That sounds better.”

  I gave him directions to find the path—out behind the house, beyond the generator building, the boat dock, and my grandfather’s workshop. McCarthy nodded his head and set off on his hike.

  A little less than an hour later, I heard the gunshots.

  Joe took note of his surroundings as he walked. It was an odd kind of place, Sommerwynd. The lodge itself was nice enough. The lake was small but picture-perfect, and had no other development on it. According to Billy, some well-connected and well-off people visited Sommerwynd from June through September, valuing it for its remoteness and natural setting. Free use of a canoe or rowboat, fishing, swimming, hiking. There was supposed to be a tennis court, though Joe hadn’t seen it yet, and would not be interested anyhow. Still, he wondered how the Wirth family managed it all, with just the four of them there at present. But then he figured that they probably just hired a few temporary workers to help out in the busy months.

  He passed the first cinderblock building, which had four large propane tanks attached, and he could hear the generator humming inside, providing the electricity that kept the lodge going. A little farther on, he found the second cinderblock building, also painted white. It had no windows. The kid had referred to it as his grandfather’s workshop. In other words, Joe thought, that’s where Grandpa goes to get away from his family for a while. Have a drink in peace, flip through the few issues of Playboy he had smuggled in, and remember what it was like back when.

  He soon found the trail, and before long it swung in with the shoreline of the lake, so that the trees behind him cut off any view of the lodge, and he was alone in the woods. A fly or a bug of some kind buzzed him for a couple of seconds—he swatted at it and kept walking, and it went away. Joe thought, not for the first time in his life, that Nature is overrated.

  The path hugged the water for a good stretch, and there were a couple of times when Joe spotted small fish in the shallows. That was nice. Then, maybe a half hour into his hike, he came to a spot where the trail swung to the right, away from the lake and into the woods. He stood on a large flat rock that sat at the edge of the water and he studied the scene for a moment. He figured it out. A stream entered the lake here, but over time enough silt had accumulated to back up some of the flow, which created a small, swampy lagoon. The path went inland to get around this obstacle.

  Joe was about to continue his walk, but then didn’t. The lagoon itself was kind of pretty. It was too early for lily pads, but the glassy black water was already laced with duckweed. The rock he was standing on was in the shade, making this a good spot to take a break. He pulled the hip flask out of his back pocket and sat down on the rock, his feet dangling a few inches off the ground. A sip, a cigarette. There was a cool breeze coming off the lake, and he sat facing into it, enjoying the way it felt on his skin, the way it rippled the water. Yeah, Nature was overrated, but it did have its moments.

  Part of him wanted to go back to DC and resume the battle. Or restart it, more accurately. But another part of him said that the battle was over, finished, and that he had lost it. Forget it, move on. But move on to what? What was left? For a while, it was as if the whole world watched him and listened to him—how do you get that back? Because now, he was invisible.

  An odd sensation crept over him, that he was not alone. He turned around, wondering if someone from the lodge had come with a message, but there was no one on the trail. Then Joe looked at the lagoon—and he saw a pair of eyes in the water. Dozens of pairs of eyes, just breaking the surface, looking at him. It startled him, but he quickly realized that this lagoon was where those noisy frogs lived, and there they were, looking at him. The lagoon was full of them, more than he could count.

  Joe stood up, flicked his cigarette into the water, and stepped down off the rock. A few feet away, a frog crawled forward, partly out of the water. It was huge, the size of a watermelon. Jesus. Joe looked around, spotted a pebble, picked it up and flung it into the lagoon. It splashed close to one frog, but the creature didn’t move. A couple of frogs had emerged from the lagoon and were now crawl-hopping toward him. Joe pulled his right foot back and kicked one of them back into the water. The frog was so heavy that Joe felt the strain in his ankle muscles. The frog flopped backward, just a couple of yards away, righted itself, and began to move forward again. The other frog, now on the ground, jumped and caught Joe’s ankle in its mouth. Teeth, the damned thing had teeth! Joe tried to shake it off, but the frog held on. Joe raised his other foot and slammed it as hard as he could down on the frog’s head.

  Nothing—that was what he got for wearing sneakers in the woods. And that was when he noticed that the frog had whiskers around its mouth, which shot out like small blades, one of them piercing Joe’s calf. What kind of frogs were these, that had teeth and sharp barbels like a catfish?

  Think about that later. The pain began to hit him. Joe reached behind his back, got his .22 out, held it to the side of the frog’s head and squeezed the trigger. Blood and flesh flew, and the frog at last dropped off his ankle. But Joe was astonished to see that other frogs were coming forward, at him. Calmly, he aimed the pistol and shot them in the head or face, until the gun was empty. He had a couple of boxes of bullets back at the lodge. He reached down to get the .38 from his good ankle, and proceeded to empty that into another bunch of frogs as they got closer to him.

  Then, he knew it was time to leave. Joe grabbed one of the dead frogs by the leg and hurried away with it, back to the lodge.

  Well, we’d seen these frogs, of course, and thought nothing of them. They never bothered us and we never bothered them. My grandfather, Klaus Wirth, claimed to have refined some of their unusual features through cross-breeding. He was a biologist, a great admirer of Luther Burbank. He had returned to Germany in the 1920s to continue his research work. He was not a Nazi, but after Hitler came to power he was not allowed to leave the country, and was pressed into government scientific service. In my family, none of us ever seemed to know quite what that meant. In any event, my grandfather returned to Wisconsin after the war, refused to seek work at any university, and declared himself in retirement. Still, he conducted what he called "research.” He and my father converted the old chicken coop into what became my grandfather’s workshop. We knew that he had scientific equipment, and animals imported—even that he had obtained frogs from Africa, with teeth. Still, whenever my grandfather hinted at a "breakthrough,” my mother and father rolled their eyes.

  Now we had Senator Joseph McCarthy sitting on the patio, one bare foot propped up on a chair, my mother carefully wiping his wounds with disinfectant, me and my father standing nearby, not knowing what to say. My grandfather hung back a couple of yards from the rest of us, looking as if he hoped that this would all blow over and he wouldn’t have to move to Argentina.

  And on the flagstone, a dead frog. With half of its head blown off. With nasty-looking teeth and whiskers. I’d seen them, but never one close up. It was very big, green and black, and it looked heavy, although I didn’t try to lift it. The animal was so slimy and ugly, I wanted nothing to do with it.
/>   My parents were endlessly apologetic, but McCarthy kept going on and on, asking questions they couldn’t answer, suggesting that there was some actual plot or plan in place—yes, there, in the middle of nowhere in northern Wisconsin—to somehow create a vicious creature that would eventually wreak havoc on the land.

  “This is the goddamn uber-frog,” McCarthy shouted.

  At that point I actually reached down and ran my fingers along the teeth in the open mouth of the dead frog. They were not large, but felt very sharp. I stood up and backed away, wiping my fingers on my pants. My grandfather gave me a little nod of the head and I stepped back to see what he wanted. He whispered in my ear.

  “They eat fish and bugs, nothing more, that I know of.” Then he added, “They grow too quickly, this new stage.”

  My mother had McCarthy’s leg all cleaned and wrapped by then, and he did seem to be a little more composed. Still, he glanced at my grandfather and said, “I’d like to take a look at that workshop of yours, Pops.”

  My grandfather suddenly turned icy—something I cannot remember ever seeing until that moment. His eyes narrowed and he spoke quietly through a slight smile.

  “I do not believe you have security clearance for that.”

  McCarthy did a little double-take at that, but before he could come up with a response, a woman screamed. I knew right away it was Mrs. Gault, since she and her husband were the only two people not on the patio. Sure enough, the Gaults came around one of the hedges screening off the generator building, Mrs. Gault limping, sobbing, and assisted by her husband.

  “She’s been attacked,” he said. “By a frog!”

  “They’re coming,” Mrs. Gault wailed.

  “Masses of them,” her husband added.