Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  “Nah... it's a distant possibility, but not likely. He pissed someone off and/or someone was trying to move on him, and the fire was a symptom. I think he got close enough on the night of the fire to see that we'd find the money he had hidden inside the wall, as well as the writing on the metaphorical wall.” He pushed up his glasses with his middle finger when he saw me raise my eyebrows at his use of the word 'metaphorical', “George decided to drop everything, and hit the road with what he had, before his choices were prison or a pine box.” It was a relief to see that I wasn't the only one who could draw incorrect conclusions from data and jump in the wrong direction based on those conclusions. The good news was that the lack of information and leads that they would find about George in the future would only serve to reinforce their misapprehensions.

  “Cool. I've got some ideas about where the labs or farms might be, and I'll check them out in the next couple of days. If I find something, I'll give you a call.” Frank nodded happily, as I had thought that he might.

  “I've always got my cell on me, and that may be the easiest way to reach me.” he clapped me on the back and started the two of us towards the door. I wasn't exactly going to be working for, or with, him, but Frank had invited me inside his investigation of George, and given me tacit approval to poke around looking for the labs (which was exactly what I wanted as well... for my own reasons). He had gotten the business portion of the visit out of the way, along with getting us fed, and now he was ready for us to go, so he could walk around the house in his boxers and eat some leftover tiramisu.

  Dorothy was waiting in the front hall for us, and we did kisses and handshakes all around, and congratulated ourselves on a perfectly wonderful evening (which it certainly was, as Frank had not arrested me for the three murders I'd committed in the last 24 hours). We walked out and climbed into my Element, and I aimed the car towards Dorothy's apartment.

  “Nope, to the shelter.” she said.

  “There really is a dog that you need to check on?” I had figured that that was an excuse to help ease me out of the house before my shoulder fell off.

  “Yeah, and he's sitting right next to me. I'll check the shoulder, and see if I need to add some more or different antibiotics to the mix. Have the pain meds been ok?” She looked over at me.

  “Sure they've been ok. I sometimes felt a little spacey or queasy, but I figured that could have been getting shot or having to feed the bad guy to hungry pigs.”

  “Boars,” she corrected, “male pigs are called boars, and female pigs are sows. The ones raised for meat are always boars because they eat and convert feed to meat faster and more efficiently than the sows do.”

  I giggled, and thanked her for the information. We pulled into the shelter and around to the back, where we wouldn't be seen by people driving by on the road. There was no need for that level of care anymore, but it had very quickly become a habit, and might take a week or two to lose again. We got inside and Dorothy actually did check on a couple of dogs with minor health issues before she gave the cold steel table a spray and wipe-down with the blue sterilizing/antiseptic stuff they seem to use on everything, and I undid my shirt, pulled it off, and hopped up to give her a look under the bright overheads and her headlamp.

  She grunted and whistled and poked and squeezed and had me move my left arm in a big windmill, noting the points where I slowed, or made a noise, or my circle wavered. At the end of the exam, she made a happy noise, and affixed a pair of much smaller bandages, big Band-Aids almost, after smearing them with some triple-antibiotic goo. She went away for a minute, and came back with more of the same antibiotics that I had been taking, enough to take the course through three weeks.

  “I'm going to talk to a friend of mine about range of motion issues in your shoulder. Your bones were unaffected, but a chunk of muscle got torn out by the bullet; it may heal and regrow, but you might benefit from some PT. At some point a physical therapist or your doctor is going to see that you were shot, but if you can put it off for six months or a year, it'll be less of an issue... so you've got to balance those things against each other.”

  “So give me the good news, bad news spread in 25 words or less.”

  “The bad news is that you're gonna die... the good news is that it's not likely to happen for 40-50 years.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “So, having gotten through dinner tonight without anything awkward coming up, what do we do in the time between now and when you, and I, do eventually die? I mean, Cynthia being gone is certainly going to come up; same with George and maybe his minions, Jason and Barney.” Another of the thirteen things that I like about Dorothy is her directness; her ability to cut away conversational fluff, leaving only the important things. Her inability to remember names is not one of the thirteen things that I like about Dot.

  “Justin and Barry…I don't think that they'll come up; there's no reason that we should know them, much less where they are, even if someone does report them missing. I think that George is going to go away even more effectively; the police have an answer that they like, and they'll make the information that they already have, and that which they accrue as time goes by, fit that answer. Cynthia...” I took a deep breath, and sighed it out while I put my shirt back on, and slid off the exam table.

  “Cynthia is an entirely different matter. She is missing, and more to the point, will be missed. Ben will report her to the police before long if I don't... and if I'm not the one to report her missing, it'd look weird because we're close... were close... in a way that doesn't fit into a neat box, and people may assume 'boyfriend' or some analogous descriptor. The good news is that I already grabbed everything that I could find that linked her to George. The creepy net-nanny program is still running at the library, but the logs aren't going anywhere, or to anyone, so nobody's privacy is actually being invaded. I should go to her house and check on her fish tank.” I was starting to run down, and trying to distract myself from the shittiness of admitting that Cynthia was gone, and it didn't really make a difference in the world, except to me. She had disappeared, and it didn't... matter.

  “What about the bodies?” Dorothy asked. I'd worked at forgetting about the bodies, who knew how many, in that deep spot in Lower Saranac Lake, only about a mile and a quarter from my campsite on Lonesome Bay.

  “I was thinking that I might take scuba lessons at Paul Smith’s College or NCCC this winter, and see if I can find Cynthia in the spring. The others don't bother me much, to paraphrase Josey Wales, 'fish got to eat, same as worms'. But Cynthia had ideas about being in the Earth after she was dead, and I know a great spot. There's an abandoned old cemetery, back in the woods down south a bit, with trees growing up in and amongst the tombstones; I went there once with Cyn while I was trying to get her into geocaching, and she loved the spot.”

  “I'd like to come, if that's ok. Cynthia and I weren't friends, but she loved you, and that counts for a lot; she deserves more than one mourner.”

  “I'd like that, Dorothy, and I think she would too, although she said that you always smelled like wet dog and cat litter.” I smiled at the end, and hugged it out with Dorothy, because I knew that's how she saw the world working. I dropped her at her apartment, and went over to Smart Pig, with the idea of feeding and topping up my fish tank, but the couch looked so good that after a perfect coke from the coke fridge, I went to sleep, still fully dressed, and with my shoes on.

  Smart Pig Thneedery, 2:46a.m., 9/11/2012

  I woke up in darkness, except for my saltwater tank; I'd turned on the tank lights when I'd come in after dropping Dorothy off (despite it being a weird hour and potentially messing up the circadian rhythms of all the beasties contained within). My twenty gallon saltwater tank has timers on the lights, but I sometimes override them when feeding the beasties during off-hours or as a kind of night light (with the blue LEDs lighting the tank). It's nice to sit in the dark, watching the shrimp doing their custodian schtick all over the tank in the soft blue ligh
t, checking for food, cleaning the coral and anemone and algae, and exploring their world... continuously mapping the changes as well as the stuff that stays the same.

  I had originally started keeping a saltwater tank because it was different and difficult, and I was at a stage in my life when being noticeably contrary seemed like a good idea. I have stayed with it over the years because I find the beasties and ecosystems and relationships much more interesting than I did in the freshwater tanks that I used to keep.

  My clownfish, Pennywise and Poundfoolish, have an amazing habit of grabbing chunks of my homemade tank food that are too big for them to eat, and hauling it back to feed the anemone in which they live... home improvement and maintenance. The corals and anemones are complex cities/colonies of plants and animals that are symbiotic to a degree that is unheard of on land or in freshwater. I keep a number of shrimp and crabs and snails and starfish and a sea cucumber (who reminds me of an Arrakeen sandworm) as custodians of the tank, and they work ceaselessly keeping the streets and neighborhoods clean. I change twenty percent of the water monthly, top it off every couple of days, and my biological filtration system takes care of the excess nutrients (from poop and overfeeding) by growing algae under lights in one of those hang-on-the-back filters; the main hassle is figuring out what to do with all of the algae that my filter grows (I don't know of any other saltwater tank owners or pet stores within an hour of the Tri-Lakes, or I'd give it away... as it is, I end up chucking a tennis ball sized lump every month, and feeling guilty about it).

  I like to watch and think about the creatures and colonies and systems living together and getting along (mostly) in a volume of water smaller than a bathtub. I sometimes (the last week for example) have trouble living in a six million acre park with less than 150,000 people, mostly because of boundary and behavior issues and rules that I don't understand, or don't have hardwired like other people and the things in my tank do. Seeing complex systems work in my tank gives me hope for my being able to come to terms with the rest of my world, for at least some flavor of grudging truce or co-existence, if not an actual series of alliances. Other times, I just see it as a tank of salty water with a handful of critters from around the world just getting by, sometimes eating each other for fun or profit (which felt a bit like this last week).

  I stretched and noted that my shoes were still on, which was odd, and immediately I found them to be wildly uncomfortable despite my having slept nearly five hours in them. I grabbed a coke from the coke-fridge, and ripped off a hunk of Sadie-bread, dipping it in some blueberry preserves from a huge mason jar. I had a few things running through my head, none of them likely to involve anyone killing me or vice-versa, which was a welcome relief.

  I needed to retrieve the research on George's operation and figure out how/when/where to scout them and/or find other/new production spots; or determine if, in fact, they had just closed up shop and gone to work for someone else when George vanished.

  I needed to move my gear to a new camping spot, and start switching out summer gear for the heavier stuff for winter (fall would take care of itself, as it always does in the Adirondacks… quickly).

  I needed to report Cynthia missing, or get someone else to do it, in a way that didn't garner me any negative attention, distract Frank from his misapprehensions about George, or help connect the dots in a way that made things more complicated.

  I needed to do some trading of fragments of life from my saltwater tank in exchange for new/different fragments from other saltwater hobbyists in New York State before we lost our hospitable temperature window (it is possible to ship them cheaply/effectively using the USPS Priority boxes, but only during a period of a few weeks in the spring and fall when the temperatures are balanced between too hot and too cold to sit in trucks and on loading docks and in mailboxes). These four projects would keep me happily busy and hopping for the next week or two, which was about as far ahead as I liked to plan.

  I noticed in my planning that I was not gripped by the lethargizing (yup, totally made up that word) sadness that September 11th has brought me the last ten years, and felt around inside my head for possible reasons. I miss and love my parents as much as I did on that morning; they drank coffee while I slurped a slightly too warm coke, and we made plans for dinner... Chinese, mainly dumplings, from Noodles on 28th. I can see both of their faces; I check from time to time, worried by the idea that if I forget, there might not be anyone on Earth who knows, or remembers, what they looked like. It occurred to me that something about the last week's trials had forced significant changes to happen to my person and my worldview, in some way solidifying the map in my head of the people and places in my life. It may have changed the Adirondacks from a place into HOME in a way that eleven years of explorations had not, and could not. I was no longer living in the psychological shadow cast by the events of that day; it was history, not forgotten, but not actively informing my day to day existence to the same degree that it had for the last decade. I had turned the page and started a new chapter.

  My 'map of the world' had changed in all sorts of ways in the last week. There were new warnings and markings in places like Tahawus and Jacob's hog-barn and that stretch of Lower Saranac, which until recently had only seemed like a nice place to hunt for deep-water fish. Beyond that though, I had made those, and other chunks of the Park mine; not through purchase (which was just money, after all), but by choosing to stay and fight (even if I didn't fight fair). My parents had made New York City theirs and then given it to me, but with them gone it was no longer mine; so I'd had to head north and find a new place to make my own. The trouble was that I never had to earn my world until last week; it had all been given to me too easily, which was fine (in its way) when parents do it for their children, but lacked a certain ooomph for an adult.

  Tons of summer people with too much money drop a chunk of their millions to build McMansions on Lake Placid or Upper Saranac Lake, but it's not a part of them, just a bed with a pretty view, until/if they have to earn it in some way. I wouldn't have chosen to lose Cynthia or get shot, or kill Justin and Barry and George, to make this place my home (one certainly hopes that there are easier ways), but that's how it had shaken out, and the Park and I now had a different relationship. Last night with Frank, I'd agreed to help him for the same reason that I generally helped the others that I'd gotten involved with through the years of my tenure in the Adirondacks: it seemed like it might be a fun and interesting way to explore and learn and expand my world a bit. This morning though, I found that I wanted to help because the idea of those people using my wilderness to make their poison, useful only for creating money and misery, bothered me. It was like watching someone come into Smart Pig, piss on the wall, and leave.

  I'd planned to wait until first light to go out and get the cache containing both Cynthia's and my notes and maps, but suddenly I was ready to go... NOW. I stuffed my GPS and headlamp, some spare batteries and snacks, a trio of cokes from the coke-fridge, and a fleecy hat into a largish pack, and headed out with a bounce in my step that had nothing to do with my longish nap. I was still sore and stiff and tired and recuperating, but I had a goal. I was motivated, and everything in Smart Pig and the world outside seemed a bit more sharply focused, a bit more lovely, and a bit more mine. The wall clock clicked over to 3:14a.m. just as I was crossing the threshold, which I took as an auspicious launch as well as a hint from the world to stop for pie at the Kwik-E-Mart on my way out of town.

  Woods near Second Pond, 4:24a.m., 9/11/2012

  The woods were dark and quiet and cold and damp, and there wasn't another human for miles. The moon was waning, with less than a quarter remaining, so not much light filtered through the trees, and first light was two hours away; it was my favorite time in the woods. Night beasts were just starting to wrap things up, and the daylight beasts were starting to move and call and get ready; I could hear them all. The first few minutes out of my car and into the woods, I reverse-stalked myself to listen for people following;
I'd take a bearing with the GPS, jog for 300 yards with my headlamp on, shut the light off and wait for five minutes before repeating the process. There wasn't anyone there, but I hadn't quite lost the scared/paranoid feeling that the previous week had engendered, and it seemed a habit worth holding on to, at least for a bit. At the end of the fourth such cycle at the end of the waiting time, I noticed that I could see pretty well through the open/mature forest; I was in a huge tract of red pines that had been planted the last time someone had clearcut the woods here. The trees had been planted in lines, if not rows, and I could take a bearing and check every few minutes, making adequate progress with much less light-pollution (and human footprint) in the woods.

  Walking in near darkness requires focus and care, but is not actually difficult. You need to lift your feet a bit higher, and place them as if the ground is fragile. Your walking speed should be reduced, but once you get into the pattern, you can still cover a fair amount of ground. I walk with my mouth open and turning my head slowly from side to side; I don't claim echolocation, but the scuffing of my shoes over the needles and twigs sounds a little different whether there is a bush or a rock-wall in front of me. If you let your body try, the lizard-bits at the back of your brain know quite a bit about the natural world that we try to forget because at heart we're scared of the dark. My hands out in front of me, I ran into less trees and bushes than would seem statistically probable, and I avoided a couple of huge glacial erratics more by feel than by the dim light filtering down through the tree canopy.