“Well, ain’t you gonna get up and greet her?” Gale jostled Maxwell with a dimpled elbow.
“Why don’t you get up, you lazy bastard?” Max whined.
“Me? Hell, I’m waitin’ for a challenge,” a broad smile split Gale’s face like an overripe tomato.
“A challenge, huh?” Max leaned back in his seat. “Well, I got one for you. We gotta sell three cars by five o’clock. Whoever comes up short buys wings and pitchers tonight, and whoever wins…” Maxwell made a casting and winding gesture with his hands, “…gets to take tomorrow off … do a little fishin’.”
Gale hitched his eyebrows. Wings and beer. To hell with a day of fishing, but those eats sounded pretty dadgummed good. He agreed to Maxwell’s terms with an obligatory hand shake.
“Dibs on Grandma!” Max leapt up and trotted down the steps toward his victim.
“Y’dirty bastard,” Gale muttered.
Christ almighty it was hot, and that dank fishy smell, so redolent in the air didn’t make sitting outdoors any more enjoyable. Gale waddled down the length of the porch to gaze painfully across the verdant bean fields. A dark stand of cottonwoods on the eastern border betrayed the secluded body of water, tucked just beyond the treeline.
Tagged a decade earlier, the little lake got its name when Dwarf Chemical was indicted for making midnight runs to that location to dump their toxic byproducts. Occasionally, a massive eructation would roil the surface of Dwarf Lake as those corroding drums and cylinders that hadn’t ever been recovered would detonate far below, releasing God-knows-what into the environment. It went without saying that the locals never fished there.
“Gale?” The robotic voice of Curtis Keen piped through the external intercom system. “Got one out front, if you want him.”
“Hell yeah, I want the sumbitch,” Gale murmured, ambling back around front, mopping his brow with a white handkerchief.
One look at his customer and his heart nearly threw a rod.
“Jesus Harold Christ, you scared me son,” Gale recomposed himself, offering a reluctant paw to the vapid-eyed teenager, who teetered on the balls of his feet in a puddle of murky water.
The kid was soaked to the bone. And his bleached, wrinkled hide suggested an extended period of immersion. Boy, did he ever stink -- like putrefied seafood, a greenish sort of spoil. Cocked doglike to one side, his malformed head was ensnarled in old fishing line.
“Say, you ain’t been fishin’ back there, have you?” Gale dabbed at his face with his hankie, covering his nostrils. “Don’t go eating anything you happen to catch back in there. Water’s awful polluted.”
The kid did not respond.
“So, are we lookin’, buyin’ or replacin’ today?” The salesman clapped a friendly hand on the kid’s shoulder with a wet smack, rotating him back around toward the car lot. Gale quickly averted his eyes upon noticing the kid’s bare butt, glistening through a tattered aperture on the backside of his britches. Looked as though he might’ve snagged a flag of denim on a barbed wire fence somewhere.
Across the lot, Grandma was shaking hands with Gale’s coworker. Then together, they shuffled back toward the office to start the paperwork. Unbelievable. Maxwell furtively licked his index finger and drew an imaginary point in the air, winking slyly over the top of Grandma’s head. Gale responded with an extended middle finger.
“What’d you say your name was, son?” Gale paused to flick several mayflies off the kid’s soaked sweatshirt. “Sorry about all the goddamn bugs ... They blow in from the lake, I guess. Maxwell’s the fisherman. He could tell you more about it than I could.”
The kid halted before a forest green Jaguar, gaping mindlessly down at its hood. His skin was so loose, so colorless. Was he some sort of a burn victim? What exactly was wrong with him? Gale prodded the conversation back into motion, fighting the powerful urge to gawk at the strangest customer he’d ever seen.
“She’s a peach. She’s a peach. But, more than a little outta the price range of most folks. How much was you lookin’ to spend, roundabouts?”
As if some remote facet of the kid’s psyche suddenly realized that it was being addressed, he turned, with a detectable element of uncertainty, to disarm Gale with a cold stare through those awful milky eyes. Was he blind? Surely not. He’d made it up onto the lot without the aid of a dog or a cane. Perhaps he was visually impaired in some way.
The kid emitted a lugubrious gurgle. A black water beetle squirmed from between his ragged lips and dropped to the pavement with a clitter.
“I think may be we ought to go around back and have a look at a little better fit for you. I can get you into a great ride today for just pennies on the dollar. Now, she’s a four-banger, but that’s an awful important consideration, gas prices high as they are these days.”
Gale directed his reeling customer to the rear of the service garage, halting him before an old Mustang hatchback. In the early eighties, the paint might have been cherry red, but after so many seasons under the sun, the color had oxidized to the hue of an under-ripe tomato.
“Now lemme show you something,” Gale opened the driver’s side door and stroked the inside of the door jam with the tip of his pudgy index finger. “No ridges. Check all the jambs and you’ll find the same thing. Right there, that’ll tell ya she’s never been wrecked and repainted. See what I mean?”
Without missing a beat, Gale popped the hood and led the boy around front of the vehicle, where he promptly removed the air filter, holding it aloft for the boy’s examination. “We maintain every car that rolls onto this lot as if she were our own. New oil …” Gale withdrew a dipstick. “New trannie fluid …” withdrawing another. “New brake pads all around …” kicking a tire. “New wiper blades ... hell, I’d take her home myself if my daughter wasn’t all growed-up already. This car’s ready to roll, and if you’ll do business with me today, I’ll even throw in your first oil change for free.”
The kid gaped through the riot of fishing line. An olive snail oozed up the cusp of his chin, weaving through muddy rivulets that wept from both his nostrils. No response. The only sound was the hot wind through the beans, and the chorus of churning insects in the distant cottonwoods.
“Wanna feel her out?” Gale coaxed the kid into the driver’s seat. Once he’d situated his customer, he slammed the door as if he’d just trapped a rat, and hustled around to the passenger side.
“Let’s take her out for a quick spin,” Gale suggested, dumping himself into the seat with a stifled grunt. The car listed starboard on squealing shocks. “Go ahead and start her up.”
Fumbling for an elusive seat belt, Gale glanced over at his customer, who hadn’t moved a muscle. “Y’with me, son? I said start her up.”
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Shaking his head, Gale reached over and cranked her up himself. The alternator screamed like a banshee. Gripping the T-bone automatic shift, Gale clunked the transmission down into gear. “Now, just press the dadgummed gas pedal.”
Without touching the wheel, the kid stomped the accelerator all the way to the floorboard, launching the vehicle headlong into the beans.
“Christ al-freakin’-mighty!”
The “Rustang” was off, tearing through the crop like a farm implement gone haywire. Bean pods, leaves, and lime-green katydids bombarded the windshield, spattering the glass with their respective juices. Blasting across the field and out the far side, the vehicle barreled into the willows, right for Dwarf Lake.
“Stop! Stop!” Gale begged.
As if to mock his pleas, the Rustang slammed into the trunk of an old cottonwood. The windshield detonated into a billion chiseled diamonds. A tranquil shower of cottonwood leaves rained down into their laps from above.
“Get out from behind the wheel!” Gale ordered, hauling himself out into the rough. Circling the ruined car, he opened the driver’s door and dragged the boy out onto his feet.
Gale stared at his mesmerized customer, who appeared to be entranced by the lovesick dron
e of the gossamer katydids, all rasping their summer serenades through the beans.
The kid’s lips parted with a hiss of gas. Over the hump of his tongue, a darting antennae flicked anxiously back and forth. Gale took two steps back. The horrid feeler stroked the edges of the boy’s teeth.
“Y’got something there in yer ...” Gale gestured toward his own lips. But he was distracted by something churning in the kid’s throat, stretching the skin, and behind those marbled eyes. Something was alive in there. He could see the dark segmented thing, writhing around back there in the kid’s sockets, causing his eyeballs to bulge and recede. “What in the Sam Hill’s wrong with you?”
Gale’s impuissant gaze traveled over the boy’s distended abdomen, where a gentle bulge protruded outward, tenting the colorless skin. A gaseous release of internal pressure fizzed through the boy’s navel, dripping globules of banana froth onto the tips of his sneakers.
“You gotta get to a doctor, son.” Gale lowered his voice. “And you’re really gonna need a good reliable vehicle, now more than ever, to get back and forth to all your medical care.”
Gale checked his watch. 4:17. If he could get back to the lot, there might still be time to win the bet. But he had to settle up with Fishboy, first. Mayflies drifted between them like cotton in the wind. One crawled onto Gale’s throat. He slapped at the squirming thing, mashing its guts between his crinkled digits. “How much money you got on ya?” Gale glowered into the boy’s dead eyes. “Seriously, I’m willing to cut you a deal, here … all under the counter, y’see?”
Cautiously, Gale reached behind the kid and extracted his wallet, grimacing when his fingertips stroked a clammy buttock. He’d forgotten about the hole, back there.
The wallet popped free, and pissed a stream onto the ground. Without breaking eye contact, Gale spread the ruined leather to extract a surprisingly substantial stack of bills.
“Twenty, forty, sixty ... two-sixty ... sold, at two hundred and sixty seven dollars. Now, might need to call yourself a tow truck, but I think she’ll do nicely. I’d shake your hand, Son, but I guess you know how it is.” Gale tucked the wet roll of bills into his shirt pocket and let the boy’s empty wallet fall to the dirt with a wet slap.
“Now then. You get the fuck on outta here. And if you ever set foot on my lot again, you’ll be talkin’ to the cops.”
Gale turned to walk away. And the freak attacked.
Arms like iron rebar twisted around Gale’s torso, interlocking across his chest. The thing’s strength was inhuman. Gale had no breath to scream as he heard his ribs crack. The ineffable stench behind him was a beach-comber’s nightmare, and Gale could feel his cold fishy lips against the back of his neck.
“Just take the money.” Gale toppled forward into the weeds with the thing latched onto his back.
But the abomination made no attempt to retrieve its wet wad of cash. No. Something else was on its mind. The creature’s intentions were becoming alarmingly clear, as its torso began to seize rhythmically in very purposeful pelvic thrusts. Gale felt the throbbing cap of some sort of a prong nosing deeper into the cleft of his rump. He tried to squirm loose of its wet embrace, but his struggling only seemed to arouse the goddamned thing. Its fingertips clawed into his chest.
With a terrifying “pop”, the monster’s organ, or whatever it was, burst through the seam of Gale’s khakis and plunged right through the knotted eye of his backside.
Releasing a girlish squeal, Gale palpitated as the donkey-sized proboscis inched deeper and deeper into his colon, anchoring itself with successive collars of spines, until it engorged him to the tearing point.
Oh Lord! What was happening, back in there? It dabbed. It probed, exploring the inner walls of his cavity with what felt like a spear-tipped yam. And when it dumped its chilly payload inside of him, Gale’s agonized howl erupted through the cottonwood canopy to mingle with the chorus of mating insects.
*
“Here’s to you. Finally sold the Rustang.” Maxwell licked the ochre wing-sauce off his lips and hoisted his mug up off the bar, but Gale failed to meet him with a toast. “Hey now! If you’d have won today, I wouldn’t have bitched a lick. What’s your problem, anyhow? Still cryin’ over falling into Dwarf Lake? Man, I wish I could’ve seen that. I’m sure going to be thinking about you tomorrow when I’m out there in the boat all day. I promise I won’t laugh.”
“No, I just -- don’t feel so awful good.” Gale sagged over the bar, his heavy body drenched in cold sweat. After the unspeakable incident back there in the willow patch, he’d have certainly rather gone on home after work to enjoy the meager cleansing of a hot shower. But Maxwell wouldn’t have stood for it. He’d won their bet, and Gale knew how insistent he’d be about claiming his prize. So, he’d washed off in the lake as best he could, and untucked his shirt tail to conceal the bloody hole in the back of his britches. He’d be damned if Maxwell ever found out what really happened. He’d never hear the end of it.
Whatever that monster had dumped in his rump was feeling a little funny, back there. It kind of fluttered sometimes, like a weird stream of little bubbles deep inside his guts. The hot wings and beer weren’t sitting so well, tonight.
“It was human,” Gale muttered. “Just a damned burn victim, escaped from some loony bin.” But that godawful appendage, Gale recalled with a shudder. It felt like a pythonic earthworm, all snorting around back there in his pooper. “I’m thirsty,” Gale croaked, mopping his brow.
“Well, shut up and drink your beer, then.”
“No ... I need some water.” Gale waved feebly at their waitress, but she was preoccupied with another table. “I need some water now.” Gale lurched off his barstool, leaving a ring of gore on the seat.
Maxwell stopped in mid-chew, pointing his gnawed drumstick at the bloody puddle. “You all right, Gale?”
“No!” Gale hobbled the length of the bar to the servers’ prep station, where he snatched-up two pitchers, tilted back his head, and dumped them both into his quivering maw. Half the light-beer spilled down his chest. Goddamn, it was hot. Gale seized a pitcher of sweet tea and poured it directly over the top of his head, attracting more than a little attention from the wait-staff and patrons.
“He don’t feel well, he said,” Maxwell explained to a mystified barkeep. “I guess he’s awful hot … got a bad wing, may be.”
Gale plodded across the dining area, exuding a trail of droplets from his rump, snatching glasses off random tables and dumping the contents of each over his head. Plowing through the front doors, Gale lumbered into the night.
Lordy, it was hot. He’d barely made it out of the bar before his tee-shirt fell to the moonlit pavement. Ambling back toward Amen Autos, he unfastened his belt and shook loose his ruined pants.
Gale didn’t really know where he was headed, and he didn’t care, because he was no longer in control of those decisions. Another presence had gone and switched things all around inside his head, allowing Gale to focus on more meaningful things, like cold bathtubs of water, deep blue oceans and murmuring mountain streams. Boy, did he ever yearn for water’s cool caress to soothe his crawling skin. Maybe he’d go for a midnight swim in a nearby lake, have himself a skinny-dip, just like he used to do back when he was a kid. Yes sir, a moonlight swim. Maybe he’d go ahead and kick his way on down to the bottom there, and in those inky depths just a-wriggle all around in the nice cold mud. And he didn’t figure he’d be alone, down there. Gale wasn’t sure how he figured this. He just did. There’d be others down there, with the same pearly eyes. And they’d be undulating around down there in that tumulus of corroded chemical drums, finding good spots to deposit their mounds of eggs. And by next summer, when the hot winds started hissing through the beans, and the fish were all in a frenzy, popping mayflies off the surface, then he’d know it was that time of year again, and his cycle would begin anew.
The Old Man and the Puddle.
By Hayden Williams
Ernest had little to do with the
other Kaumatua anymore. They’d called him pourangi for a long time, and some now even said cursed or possessed. His wife of over fifty years had been talking of leaving him. She couldn’t handle not being well thought of within the iwi. She glared at him with her crazy green eyes. Although she was from the same tribe as him, she was less than a quarter Maori in truth. But man, she was fierce. Ernest only had to look at his fishing tackle box and she was up dancing a haka.
“Don’t even think about going fishing this week,” she growled, her mean mouth puckered with aggression, the snakes of her steel grey hair all shaking. “You know it’s Rangi’s graduation.”
Rangi, their youngest son, had just completed a master’s degree in microbiology, and would be staying on at university to undertake further research. Rangi was the only child left in New Zealand, the rest having all buggered off to Australia, attracted by better wages. None of Ernest’s children believed, and the older ones even made fun of him behind his back. Rangi had stopped accompanying his father on fishing trips years ago. Every time they’d rolled out of the driveway the neighbourhood kids – Rangi’s schoolmates – would stand at the street corner, watching and cracking jokes. It wasn’t fair to force the boy, so Ernest had allowed him to choose from his fourteenth birthday on. Ernest regretted that now, because the boy had of course chosen not to go.
Ernest didn’t really blame him. Who’d choose the humiliation, if they hadn’t seen what he’d seen? But in the event of his never catching the beast, he would’ve liked his son to have had the chance of at least a glimpse. Ernest knew a glimpse was enough to hook a man forever. The monster became an intimate part of a man’s life from that moment on. You had to keep returning, you had to prove to yourself that you weren’t just dreaming or being tricked by the evil spirit of the place. Though now it seemed that no-one would return there after he was gone, and no-one would remember the old stories of his people. The family tradition of taniwha hunting would die with him, now that Rangi had become such an ungrateful swell-head, obsessed with tiny parasitic creatures and not even believing in the existence of lake monsters at all.
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