North American Lake Monsters (8 page)

“You know those meetings I go to every Thursday?” said Trixie.

Of course he did. They meant he couldn’t hang out with her much on Thursdays; the two of them had to forego the Quarter altogether and hang out in one of those insufferable Uptown coffee shops, which he hated almost as much as he hated going to school. He tried not to speculate about what she did at those meetings, but because she told him nothing, even telling him to mind his own business on the one occasion he did ask, they had become cauldrons of evil possibility: maybe she got drunk with older, more sophisticated boys, or posed nude for some college art class.

“Yeah,” he said. “I always figured it was church or something.”

“Stupid. Can you see me in a church?” She thought about it, and he watched her face settle into a more serious cast. “Although maybe that’s not too far off. It
is
people who believe in something more important than themselves. So I guess it’s like a church. Or a family.”

He nodded. “I see.” He wondered if he was about to get dumped. He felt suddenly light, as though he had no real substance, as though if she said the words he was waiting to hear he would just dissolve into the atmosphere, like a sigh.

“You seem like you could use a family,” she said.

He looked at her. Time snagged around her words, where it fluttered, waiting to be set free again.

“I been telling them about you. They want to meet you.”

It came loose and drifted free, a red silk banner twisting into a blue sky.

“And now he’s all, he’s blu
bbering like a little baby, he’s got snot coming out of his nose. ‘Oh please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, I’ll suck your dick, please don’t kill me!’” Derrick’s voice goes high in a falsetto imitation. “And dude, what did you do, Matt? What did you fuckin do?”

Matt shrugged. “I took my dick out.”

“He did! Matt here whips it out and says well go on then! Get to it!” Derrick paused while the others laughed. He was telling this story to all four guys sitting on stools at the bar in this little dive tavern on the Westbank, across the bridge from downtown New Orleans. The four guys Nick was with were all heavily muscled, with shaved heads and elaborate tattoos. Derrick was the biggest of them; he wore a thin wifebeater, and Nick couldn’t help but stare enviously at all his muscles, at his arms and back covered with swastikas, bloody-fanged skulls, and, over his heart, crossed hammers against the backdrop of a Confederate flag. He looked to Nick like the apotheosis of man, some rarefied ideal of physical and mental presence. It was a little past seven and the bar was not crowded. Nick felt the atmosphere change when they walked in, felt the gravity of their presence draw every eyeball in the building. When they settled in and ordered beers, the fat man behind the bar who brought the drinks to them wouldn’t even look them in the eye. Nick, clearly underage, didn’t warrant a glance.

Matt, a little fireplug of a kid, was on the other side of Derrick. “Tell him the rest of the story before he starts thinking I’m some kinda fag.”

“So this little queer crawls over to Matt and starts to reach out for his dick, still bawling, and Matt fucking balls up his fist and fucking drills him in the head!
Crack!
Motherfucker drops like he’s dead.”

“I thought he was,” Matt said, taking a sip from his bottle. “I was like, goddamn, he really
is
a pussy.”

“He wasn’t dead, though. He was still crawling around, making this weird little sound. We kicked him around a little bit, and then I fucking curb-stomped him to make my point.”

“Shit,” Matt said. “You did that boy a favor. He probably sucks
good
dick now.” While the others laughed and shook their heads, Derrick said, “You believe that story, Nick?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Oh, he guesses. My man here guesses.”

The bar had gathered all the residual heat of the afternoon and hoarded it with a miser’s resolve. A ceiling fan whickered pointlessly, stirring the thick air like a spoon in a honeypot. Trixie was back at Derrick’s apartment with the other girls, hanging out doing whatever until the boys were done talking business. They would give them time to talk and then they’d show up later. Women were rarely welcomed into meetings such as this. The point of the meeting, Trixie had told him, would be to judge his worth as a recruit to the Confederate Hammers, the regional chapter of the white nationalist movement called the Hammerskin Nation.

“Do you even get that point of that story, Nick? That dude was a junkie. He was sucking cock for drugs. Now you know, whatever, the world’s full of human cockroaches, I can’t worry about all of that shit or I’ll go crazy, right? But it was in my neighborhood. He’s walking up and down the goddamn street, cracked out of his mind, talking all this shit a mile a minute so it made you crazy just to hear it. In
this goddamn neighborhood
. We got kids that live here, you know what I mean? Got so I just couldn’t stand for it anymore.”

He touched his fingers to a swastika on his chest. “You see this here? That’s what it means. That’s why we wear it on our skin. All that German secret police shit, forget all that. That was just one manifestation. We’re the new manifestation.” He tapped the symbol. “White family. White brotherhood. Now, sometimes you gotta do ugly things for the family’s sake. Just like me and Matt had to do. And you know what? Niggers and fags might not be the brightest creatures on this earth, but they can take a message if you deliver it right. I ain’t seen that boy back here since.”

The other boys nodded. “Damn right,” one said.

“Violence is the only language they understand,” said Derrick. “So if you don’t know it, you better learn it.”

Nick nodded again. He resisted the impulse to check his watch. It seemed like Trixie and the other girls should have been here by now. He figured when the girls got back they would set aside business and just sit around and get drunk, which is what he really wanted.

“You got what it takes to earn the broken cross, Nick? Put the S.S. on your skin? You know, you got to earn it.”

“I know,” said Nick.

“Can you handle yourself in a fight?” The others looked him over like they couldn’t really believe it. “’Cause I mean, no offense dude, but you’re kind of a scrawny little fuck.”

Somebody laughed.

“I can handle myself,” Nick said.

“You hear that Matt? He think’s he’s hard.”

“He don’t look too hard,” Matt said.

“Well. I guess we gotta ask Trix about that.”

Nick flushed. Derrick leaned toward him and said, “Our girl, she knows all about hard. You think you can fill her up, little boy? She let you in there yet? She ain’t a little kid. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you ain’t gonna fool her.” He grabbed his crotch, spreading his fingers to indicate he had quite a handful. “Besides, I stretched her out pretty good. I don’t know if she’ll be able to feel your little needle.”

“Fuck you,” Nick said.

“Uh-oh, here we go,” said Matt. Nick glared at the floor and stood up. Derrick rose to meet him, but Nick turned toward the door.”

“What?” said Derrick? “Are you going to cry? Oh my God, you are.”

Nick strode toward the door. A stinging heat pressed behind his eyes.

Derrick laughed. “You sure you want to go? We got four of us, only three girls. I think Matt could use a bitch, couldn’t you, Matt?”

“Fuck you dude,” Matt said.

Nick opened the door and stepped outside; the evening air felt cool after the dense heat of the bar. He felt an absurd impulse to ask them to tell Trixie that he’d gone home, but crushed it. One of the boys said, “What a little bitch,” and then the door shut behind him. He started the long walk to the ferry, which would carry him across the river and back into familiar territory. Streetlamps along the way shed cold trees of light. The dark sky was close and heavy.

After that, he was sure she
was done with him. But this morning’s phone call at the restaurant gave him new hope, and he found himself waiting for her on his front porch. He watched the evening settle over New Orleans like some great hunched buzzard, the sky deepening into the star-spiked blue of twilight. Fitful gusts of wind carried a cold undercurrent and occasionally pelted him with a few fat, isolated raindrops. Across the street, the thrashing fronds of a palm tree tossed around a bright shard of moon.

Nick and his mother lived in a shotgun house a few blocks lakeside of St. Charles Avenue, and like many other houses on their street it existed on the cusp of total dereliction. Paint peeled from its walls, and the wood was so riddled with termites that, during mating season, huge swarms of them would choke the air inside the house. Their tiny lawn seemed eager to make up for its size with outright belligerence, as though it harbored aspirations to junglehood and resented its confined circumstances. As porch lights and windows began to glow along the street, his own home grew darker by comparison, until it looked like an abandoned house, and would have likely attracted the usual doomed human ecology of abandoned houses were it not for the occasional errant stabs of light glimpsed through windows, and the mournful sounds which from time to time seemed to exhale from the building itself and spoil the air around it.

A small band of black kids made their way down the street, one of them swinging a long stick in a sweeping arc, like an explorer hacking his way through heavy foliage. They talked easily, loudly, apparently indifferent to anything in the world other than themselves and their own immediate impulses. Nick watched them come with a puzzling lack of emotion: they were just kids tonight, kids he didn’t know. He tried to summon the anger he believed was justified and proper, and failed. The one with the stick whacked it against the fenders of parked cars, sending little detonations ricocheting down the street. Normally this would throw Nick into a fury, which he would nurture from the near-obscurity of his front porch; but tonight each crack of the stick vanished into a gulf inside him. As they passed in front of his house, they fell abruptly silent. They did not look at him or his house, and they held their heads back and sauntered with their customary loose-limbed bravado, but he knew the place spooked them. Sometimes that embarrassed him, other times it made him proud. Tonight he just felt defeated.

Finally they disappeared around the corner. Their voices picked up again, and soon he heard the steady, diminishing whack of the stick against metal. He waited several more minutes; the wind increased, and heavy clouds moved in to obscure the moon. Nick watched as two headlights glided around a distant corner and made their steady way to him. Trixie had finally arrived.

Before he opened the door for her, he said, “It’s dark inside. They ain’t cut the power back on yet.”

“That’s okay.”

He led her inside. By now he had become accustomed to the darkness, but he remembered his first time coming home to it, and knew how Trixie must feel. It had been so overwhelming that he had actually experienced a rush of vertigo, and a brief, terrible conviction that he had been struck blind, or that perhaps he had died.

He dug a little flashlight out of his pocket and flicked it on. The grim state of their home bobbed into sight, like surfacing detritus from a sunken ship. Clothes lay in careless piles on the floor, unwashed plates and empty or nearly empty glasses—insides rimmed with coagulated syrup from soda and sweet tea—were stacked and strewn across the coffee table. Furtive shapes clicked and darted amongst them, erupting every now and then into violent skirmishes: cockroaches, which had found in his home a kind of Eden. They cloying stench of fried meat and stagnant air covered them like a shroud.

“Jesus, Nick,” Trixie said.

A sound crawled toward them out of the darkness: a broken, lurching squeal, like a rat being ground beneath a boot. It was so alien, and so painful, that he half expected some nightmare creature of tall, scraping bone to amble into view, its jaw swinging loosely beneath a searching, serpentine tongue.

Nick ushered Trixie into his bedroom, located right off the living room, and gave her the flashlight. “Wait here,” he said. “I got more flashlights in here you can light. I’ll be right back.” He shut the door on her, and turned toward the sound coming down the hallway.

It was his mother, in her grandmother’s old wheelchair, looking so much older and smaller than she had before the accident. It was as though some ancient version of herself had bled back through time to confront him, dismayed and death-haunted. A blanket was bunched around her legs, which only barely registered as two thin ridges underneath. She held a votive candle in an ashtray; it was the only light she would permit herself.

“Nickie, you’re home,” she said. “I was worried.”

“I’m okay, Mom.”

“Who’s here?”

“Um . . . a girl. Trixie. She’s my friend.”

“A girl?” She looked at the shut door of his bedroom. “Oh, my.”

“I really don’t wanna do this now, Mom.”

“Please, Nickie. Please. I need it so bad.”

“Godammit,” he said. “Fine. Let’s make it quick.”

“Okay,” she said meekly.

She led him down the hallway, the little candle casting a golden corona onto the wall as she wheeled along, so that it seemed he was following a ghost. They went into her bedroom, which was nearly unnavigable, strewn with clothes and bloody bedsheets, exuding the cloistered funk of a shut-in, even more powerful here than in the rest of the house.

“You gotta wash the sheets or something, Mom. It’s rank in here.”

“I’m sorry, Nickie.” Her voice sounded childlike and bereft, and he felt ashamed of himself.

“Forget it. It’s okay.”

“I know I’ve been a terrible mother.”

Fuck’s sake, he thought, not now. He was determined to head this one off at the pass. “No, you’re not. You just had a hard time.”

“It’s no excuse.”

“Look, can we just do this?”

She said nothing. He stepped into her bathroom and ran the faucet until the water was warm, then filled a mixing bowl halfway full. He pumped a few dollops of soap into it, and dropped a washcloth in. Returning to his mother, he knelt before her and pulled the blanket from her legs. She wore old cotton underwear and nothing else, permitting easy access to her thin, bleached legs, which ended in rough stumps just above her ankles. The calf muscles of her left leg were shaved nearly to the bone; her leg was wrapped in bandages, stained a deep rusty brown.

She touched her fingers to his back, making him jump. “You look just like your father,” she said. “So handsome.”