North American Lake Monsters (3 page)

After he left, she was faced with a few options. She could put on her stupid pink uniform, take Gwen to daycare, and go back to work. She could drive up to New Orleans and find Donny. Or she could say fuck it all and just get in the car and drive, aimlessly and free of expectation, which is what she is doing.

She cries for the first dozen miles or so, and it is such a luxury that she just lets it come, feeling no guilt.

Gwen, still feeling the dregs of sleep, as yet undecided whether to be cranky for being awakened early or excited by the trip, pats her on the leg. “You okay, Mama, you okay?”

“Yes, baby. Mama’s okay.”

Toni sees the sign she has been looking for coming up on the side of the road. Rest Stop, 2 miles.

When they get there, she pulls in, coming to a stop in an empty lot. Gwen climbs up in the seat and peers out the window. She sees the warm red glow of a Coke machine and decides that she will be happy today, that waking up early means excitement and the possibility of treats.

“Have the Coke, Mama? Have it, have the Coke?”

“Okay, sweetie.”

They get out and walk up to the Coke machine. Gwen laughs happily and slaps it several times, listening to the distant dull echo inside. Toni puts in some coins and grabs the tumbling can. She cracks it open and gives it to her daughter, who takes it delightedly.

“Coke!”

“That’s right.” Toni kneels beside her as Gwen takes several ambitious swigs. “Gwen? Honey? Mama’s got to go potty, okay? You stay right here, okay? Mama will be right back.”

Gwen lowers the can, a little overwhelmed by the cold blast of carbonation, and nods her head. “Right back!”

“That’s right, baby.”

Toni starts away. Gwen watches her mama as she heads back to the car and climbs in. She shuts the door and starts the engine. Gwen takes another drink of Coke. The car pulls away from the curb, and she feels a bright stab of fear. But Mama said she was coming right back, so she will wait right here.

Toni turns the wheel and speeds back out onto the highway. There is no traffic in sight. The sign welcoming her to Texas flashes by and is gone. She presses the accelerator. Her heart is beating.

Wild Acre

Three men a
re lying in what will someday
be a house. For now it’s just a skeleton of beams and supports standing amid the foundations and frames of other burgeoning houses in a large, bulldozed clearing. The earth around them is a churned, orange clay. Forest abuts the Wild Acre development site, crawling up the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, hickory and maple hoarding darkness as the sky above them shades into deepening blue. The hope is that soon there will be finished buildings here, and then more skeletons and more houses, with roads to navigate them. But now there are only felled trees, and mud, and these naked frames. And three men, lying on a cold wooden floor, staring up through the roof beams as the sky organizes a nightfall. They have a cooler packed with beer and a baseball bat.

Several yards away, mounted in the back of Jeremy’s truck, is a hunting rifle.

Jeremy watches stars burn into life: first two, then a dozen. He came here hoping for violence, but the evening has softened him. Lying on his back, balancing a beer on the great swell of his belly, he hopes there will be no occasion for it. Wild Acre is abandoned for now, and might be for a long time to come, making it an easy target. Three nights over the past week, someone has come onto the work site and committed small but infuriating acts of vandalism: stealing and damaging tools and equipment, spray-painting vulgar images on the project manager’s trailer, even taking a dump on the floor of one of the unfinished houses. The project manager complained to the police, but with production stalled and bank accounts running dry, angry subcontractors and prospective homeowners consumed most of his attention. The way Jeremy saw it, it was up to the trade guys to protect the site. He figured the vandals for environmental activists, pissed that their mountain had been shaved for this project; he worried that they’d soon start burning down his frames. Insurance would cover the developer, but he and his company would go bankrupt. So he’s come here with Dennis and Renaldo—his best friend and his most able brawler, respectively—hoping to catch them in the act and beat them into the dirt.

“They’re not coming tonight,” says Renaldo.

“No shit,” says Dennis. “You think it’s ’cause you talk too loud?” Dennis has been with Jeremy ten years now. For a while, Jeremy thought about making him partner, but the man just couldn’t keep his shit together, and Jeremy privately nixed the idea. Dennis is forty-eight years old, ten years older than Jeremy. His whole life is invested in this work: he’s a carpenter and nothing else. He has three young children, and talks about having more. This work stoppage threatens to impoverish him. “Bunch of goddamn Green Party eco-fucking-terrorist motherfuckers,” Dennis says.

Jeremy watches him. Dennis is moving his jaw around, working himself into a rage. That would be useful if he thought anybody was going to show tonight; but he thinks they’ve screwed it all up. They got here too early, before the sun was down, and they made too much noise. No one will come now.

“Dude. Grab yourself a beer and mellow out.”

“These kids are fucking with my
life,
man! You tell me to mellow out?”

“Dennis, man, you’re not the only one.” A breeze comes down the mountain and washes over them. Jeremy feels it move through his hair, deepening his sense of easy contentment. He remembers feeling that rage just this afternoon, talking to that asshole from the bank, and he knows he’ll feel it again. He knows he’ll have to. But right now it’s as distant and alien as the full moon, catching fire unknown miles above them. “But they’re not here. ’Naldo’s right, we blew it. We’ll come back tomorrow night.” He looks into the forest crowding against the development site and wonders why they didn’t think to hide themselves there. “And we’ll do it right. So for tonight? Just chill.”

Renaldo leans over and claps Dennis on the back. “Mañana, amigo. Mañana!”

Jeremy knows that Renaldo’s optimism is one of the reasons Dennis resents him, but the young Mexican wouldn’t be able to function in this all-white crew without it. He gets a lot of crap from these guys and just takes it. When work is this hard to come by, pride is a luxury. Nevertheless Jeremy is dismayed at Renaldo’s easy manner in the face of it all. A man can’t endure that kind of diminishment, he thinks, and not release anger somewhere.

Dennis casts Jeremy a defeated look. The sky retains a faint glow from twilight, but darkness has settled over the ground. The men are black shapes. “It’s not the same for you, man. Your wife works, you know? You got another income. My wife don’t do
shit.
”

“That’s not just her fault, though, Dennis. What would you do if Rebecca told you she was getting a job tomorrow?”

“I’d say it’s about goddamned time!”

Jeremy laughs. “Bullshit. You’d just knock her up again. If that woman went out into the world you’d lose your mind, and you know it.”

Dennis shakes his head, but a sort of smile breaks through.

The conversation has undermined whatever small good the beer has done for him tonight: all the old fears are stirring. He hasn’t been able to pay these men for three weeks now, and even an old friend like Dennis will have to move on eventually. The business hasn’t paid a bill in months, and Tara’s teacher’s salary certainly isn’t enough to support them by itself. He realizes that their objective tonight is mostly just an excuse to vent some anger; cracking some misguided kids’ heads isn’t going to get the bank to stop calling him, and it isn’t going to get the bulldozers moving again. It isn’t going to let him call his crew and tell them they can come back to work, either.

But he won’t let it get to him tonight. Not this beautiful, moonlit night on the mountain, with bare wood lifting skyward all around them. “Fuck it,” he says, and claps his hands twice, a reclining sultan. “’Naldo! Más cervezas!”

Renaldo, who has just settled onto his back, slowly folds himself into a sitting position. He climbs to his feet and heads to the cooler without complaint. He’s accustomed to being the gofer.

“Little Mexican bastard,” Dennis says. “I bet he’s got fifty cousins packed into a trailer he’s trying to support.”

“Hablo fucking inglés, motherfucker,” Renaldo says.

“What? Speak English! I can’t understand you.”

Jeremy laughs. They drink more beer, and the warmth of it washes through their bodies until they are illuminated, three little candles in a clearing, surrounded by the dark woods.

Jeremy says
, “I gotta take a piss, dude.” The urge has been building in him for some time, but he’s been lying back on the floor, his body filled with a warm, beery lethargy, and he’s been reluctant to move. Now it manifests as a sudden, urgent pain, sufficient to propel him to his feet and across the red clay road. The wind has risen and the forest is a wall of dark sound, the trees no longer distinct from each other but instead a writhing movement, a grasping energy which prickles his skin and hurries his step. The moon, which only a short while ago seemed a kindly lantern in the dark, smolders in the sky. Behind him, Dennis and Renaldo continue some wandering conversation, and he holds on to the sound of their voices to ward off a sudden, inexplicable rising fear. He casts a glance back toward the house. The ground inclines toward it, and at this angle he can’t see either of them. Just the cross-gables shouldering into the sky.

He steps into the tree line, going back a few feet for modesty’s sake. Situating himself behind a tree, he opens his fly and lets loose. The knot of pain in his gut starts to unravel.

Walking around has lit up the alcohol in his blood, and he’s starting to feel angry again. If I don’t get to hit somebody soon, he thinks, I’m going to snap. I’m going to unload on somebody that doesn’t deserve it. If Dennis opens his whining mouth one more time it might be him.

Jeremy feels a twinge of remorse at the thought; Dennis is one of those guys who has to talk about his fears, or they’ll eat him alive. He has to give a running commentary on every grim possibility, as if by voicing a fear he’d chase it into hiding. Jeremy relates more to Renaldo, who has yet to utter one frustrated thought about how long it’s been since he’s been paid, or what their future prospects might be. He doesn’t really know Renaldo, knows his personal situation even less, and something about that strikes him as proper. The idea of a man keening in pain has always embarrassed him.

When Jeremy has weak moments, he saves them for private expression. Even Tara, who has been a rock of optimism throughout all of this, isn’t privy to them. She’s a smart, intuitive woman, though, and Jeremy recognizes his fortune in her. She assures him that he is both capable and industrious, and that he can find work other than hammering nails into wood, should it come down to it. She’s always held the long view. He feels a sudden swell of love for her, as he stands there pissing there in the woods: a desperate, childlike need. He blinks rapidly, clearing his eyes.

He’s staring absently into the forest as he thinks this all through, and so it takes him a few moments to focus his gaze and realize that someone is staring back at him.

It’s a young man—a kid, really—several feet deeper into the forest, obscured by low growth and hanging branches and darkness. He’s skinny and naked. Smiling at him. Just grinning like a jack-o’-lantern.

“Oh, shit!”

Jeremy lurches from the tree, yanking frantically at his zipper, which has caught on the denim of his pants. He staggers forward a step, his emotions a snarl of rage, excitement, and humiliation. “What the fuck!” he shouts. The kid bounds to his right and disappears, soundlessly.

“Dennis? Dennis! They’re here!”

He turns but he can’t see up the hill. The angle is bad. All he can see through the trees is the pale wooden frame standing out against the sky like bones, and he’s taking little hopping steps as he wrestles with his zipper. He trips over a root and crashes painfully to the ground.

He hears Dennis’s raised voice.

He climbs awkwardly to his feet. The zipper finally comes free and Jeremy yanks it up, running clumsily through the branches while fastening his fly. As he ascends the small incline and crosses the muddy road he can discern shapes wrestling between the wooden support struts; he hears them fighting, hears the brute explosions of breath and the heavy impact of colliding meat. It sounds like the kid is putting up a pretty good fight; Jeremy wants to get in on the action before it’s all over. He’s overcome by instinct and violent impulse.

He’s exalted by it.

A voice breaks out of the tumult and it’s so warped by anguish that it takes him a moment to recognize it as Dennis’s scream.

Jeremy jerks to a stop. He burns crucial seconds trying to understand what he’s heard.

And then he hears something else: a heavy tearing, like ripping canvas, followed by a liquid sound of dropped weight, of moist, heavy objects sliding to the ground. He catches a glimpse of motion, something huge and fast in the house, and then an inverted leg standing out suddenly like a dark rip in the bright flank of stars, and then nothing. A high, keening wail—ephemeral, barely audible—rises from the unfinished house like a wisp of smoke.

Finally he reaches the top of the hill and looks inside.

Dennis is on his back, his body frosted by moonlight. He’s lifting his head, staring down at himself. Organs are strewn to one side of his body like beached, black jellyfish, dark blood pumping slowly from the gape in his belly and spreading around him in a gory nimbus. His head drops back and he lifts it again. Renaldo is on his back too, arms flailing, trying to hold off the thing bestride him: huge, black-furred, dog-begotten, its man-like fingers wrapped around Renaldo’s face and pushing his head into the floor so hard that the wood cracks beneath it. It lifts its shaggy head, bloody ropes of drool swinging from its snout and arcing into the moonsilvered night. It peels its lips from its teeth. Renaldo’s screams are muffled beneath its hand.

“Shoot it,” Dennis says. His voice is calm, like he’s suggesting coffee. “Shoot it, Jeremy.”

The house swings out of sight and the road scrolls by, lurching and violently tilting, and Jeremy realizes with some dismay that he is running. His truck, a small white pick-up, is less than fifty feet away. Parked just beyond it is Renaldo’s little import, its windows rolled down, rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror.