North American Lake Monsters (9 page)

“Come on, Mom.”

“No wonder this girl likes you so much.”

“You don’t even know that.”

“No, I do. You’re too much like your dad. You even sound like him.”

Nick elected not to respond. He hadn’t seen his father since he was a little boy, and the notion that he was growing into him, like a disease with a single prognosis, was hardly encouraging.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing a girl over?”

He sat there in front of her, looking at her mauled appendages.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. She pushed her right leg toward him, the nub hovering just over his right knee. Nick tried to remain stoic as he unwrapped her bandages, the gauze tugging at the scabby undergrowth. A ripe odor wafted from the wound; he closed his eyes and steadied himself against it. Blood still seeped from the place she had shaved more of herself off. He squeezed soapy water from the washcloth and applied it gently to her leg, dabbing the raw areas, wiping down in smooth, clean strokes in the places where the wounds had closed. Nick didn’t cry, but that was no kind of victory; tears would be better than this numb separation.

His mother watched him while he performed these ministrations, her face graced by something like a smile.

When he was done cleaning her wounds, he applied some alcohol to her leg. Then took the bowl of bloody water back to the bathroom, where he poured it into the sink. He returned with fresh bandages, which he wrapped around the leg. His mother’s hand slipped off the armrest and grasped at the empty air; Nick put his own hand into it, and she squeezed it tightly. “If I could change it all, I would, Nicky. I would.”

He shook his head, though she wasn’t even looking at him.

He climbed to his feet, tucking the blanket back over her ravaged legs. He noticed a plate on the floor by her bed, a smear of blood on its face. He stooped to retrieve it. He wondered what she would do when she ran out of leg. He wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten anything cooked.

I should feel something, he thought. Where is the part of me that feels?

From elsewhere in the house, they heard the sound of Nick’s bedroom door opening.

Trixie’s voice floated down the hall. “Nick?”

His mother touched his hand as he moved to walk by. The light from the candle she carried made of her face a study of soft golds and darkness. A Madonna in Hell’s ink. “I want to meet her.”

He built a smile. “We’ll see, Mom.”

He pushed Trixie back into
his room. “What the fuck were you doing!”

“What? I was looking for you. Get your hands off me!” She slapped his arm away. “What the fuck!”

He closed the door and sat on his bed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

His room was lit by the crossbeams of six or seven flashlights placed at various opposing points; the net effect was, if not complete illumination, then at least a kind of flat radiance. Though not as distressingly fetid as the rest of the house, his room was still the refuge of a fifteen-year-old boy, and cluttered even at its best. His bed was unmade; a leaning stack of CDs tottered on the edge of his bureau, comprised of bands like Hatecrime and RaHoWa and Midtown Boot Boys; posters of seventies slasher flicks and zombie epics covered the walls. He suddenly noticed that his small collection of pornographic movies, which he had neglected to hide, had been aligned in a neat row behind him across the mattress. He opened his mouth to offer an explanation that would preserve his dignity, but of course there was none. He considered braining himself into oblivion with one of the flashlights.

She leaned against the desk and looked him over. “How often do you do it?”

“What?”

“You jerk off, right? That’s what these movies are for.”

“Um, I don’t . . . .”

“Are you embarrassed?”

He laughed too loudly. “Yeah, I guess, kinda.”

“How do you like to do it? Do you use a lubricant? Spit on your hand or something?”

“Um, no.” His body temperature was escalating to dangerous levels. She looked at his crotch, put her hands on her hips, and cocked her head at an angle.

“Show me.”

“Come on, Trix.”

“Why do you think I came here tonight? Show me.”

He gave up trying to subdue his fluttering heart, hoped she wouldn’t see his hands shake, wondered if she knew that he had never been with a woman before, wondered if that fact blasted from him like bright radiation. He undid his jeans and took his penis out, and began to do as she wished.

“Do it slow,” she said, stepping closer. She watched for a moment, then started to unbutton her shirt. She wore nothing underneath, and she moved her shoulders so that her blouse slid behind her to the floor; she stepped out of her jeans like a woman stepping out of water. Tattoos were inscribed all over her thin flesh; their bright colors made them luminescent in the harsh glow of the flashlights: a snake coiling over her upper right arm and looped halfway down to her elbow; a naked pixie with a devil’s face under her collarbone; a series of words—poems or mysterious lists—beginning at her pelvis and wrapping around her thighs; the crossed hammers over a Confederate flag on the slope of one breast; a black swastika, like a clumsy snare of stitches, on the other. They glowed on her naked body like an incandescent language. He had once heard the phrase “illuminated manuscript,” and although he did not know what such a thing was, he thought that it must be something like Trixie’s body, which was covered with the letters of a holy alphabet, and which was itself a supple word, or a series of words, a phrase which she whispered to him now as she moved his hand aside and replaced it with her own. She moved them toward his bed, and he abdicated himself to the study of her.

“I have fat thighs,” she said
. They lay atop his sheets, still naked. The event had lasted only a few awful minutes; he’d spent himself almost immediately, after which she had rolled abruptly off of him and stared at the ceiling. He wanted to get up and clean himself off, but he didn’t know what the protocol was. He felt scooped out, doomed, as though he had seen an emptiness behind the face of things. So he followed her direction and just lay there silently, until this revelation.

He craned his neck and looked down at her thighs. But his attention, despite his honest effort, was drawn powerfully away from them. “They look all right,” he said.

“I got ’em from my mom. There’s nothing I can do about it.” She popped her hands against them, making them shake. “Fuck,” she said.

“Hey, stop. You’re beautiful.”

“Yeah, whatever. Derrick says they’re good for the movement, though.”

“He said what?”

“Big thighs. You know. Child-bearing hips. It’s our duty to produce pure white babies.”

“Oh.” He imagined Derrick examining her hips, running his hands over them. He was pretty sure Derrick lasted a lot longer than two or three minutes.

“It’s funny when you think about it,” Trixie said. “The things we pass on to our kids. I got my mother’s elephant thighs, which sucks, but I also got my pure blood. Which is, you know, really fucking important. And which I gotta pass on, too. So I guess you can’t complain too much.”

Nick watched the ceiling. They had turned off all but one of the flashlights, which burned like a star in the far corner. Everything in the room threw an exaggerated shadow. “How many kids do you want to have?”

“Five or six, I guess. We got to. White people are the minority now. We’re losing our country. It’s my duty to have lots a kids.”

Nick tried to imagine being a father. He didn’t know what fathers acted like, what they looked like or how they spoke. “I don’t know if I could do it,” he said.

“You’d make a good dad. You’re sweet.”

It was not the word he was hoping to hear moments after losing his virginity.

“What did you get from your parents?” Trixie said.

“I don’t think anything,” he responded after a moment’s consideration.

“You had to get something. Your looks, the way you act. It’s kinda weird, the only way you might get to know something about your dad is through the kind of man you grow into. It’s like a special hidden message he left you, or something.”

Nick decided fuck the protocol, he was getting up. “I gotta get out of here,” he said, jumping out of bed and fishing for his clothes.

“I’m getting at something though, Nickie.”

He stopped. “What.”

“Responsibility. Heritage. You can’t just be selfish anymore. You got to decide who you are, and what you owe your family.”

“What family.”

“The one you already have, and more importantly the one you’re going to have.”

“You want me to prove something to the Hammers.”

“Why don’t you start by proving something to me? I need you to be more than just a sweet boy, Nickie. There has to be more than that.”

Nick didn’t look at her as he dressed. “Do you have a gun?” he asked.

She clearly hadn’t been expecting that. She stared at him for a moment. “I can get one,” she said.

Tyrone still lived with his
mother. Nick had overheard him talking about it to Big Jake one day, how she worked second shift out at a hotel by the university on Elysian Fields, and he had to pick her up every night at ten and drive her back home. It was still not quite nine; it would be a simple thing to stake the place out and follow them home. In fact, all of it would be simple. He’d shot a rat once, when he was a kid stalking the neighborhood with a BB gun. He didn’t think this could be much different.

Trixie was the only one who summoned any feeling from him anymore. He would do anything it took. If it took something grandly catastrophic, all the better. Maybe he would feel that, too.

While they had been inside, the sky had really opened up. By the time Trixie drove them through the torrential rain to Matt’s house in Midcity, it was well past nine o’clock.

“We need a gun,” she said to Matt after he ushered them inside. Matt was dressed in boxer shorts and nothing else. He sat on the edge of the couch and stared at the TV, which was showing some war movie.

“You wanna beer?” he asked Trixie. He had not looked at Nick even once.

“No thanks.”

“What you need a gun for?”

Nick waited for Trixie to explain it to him, but when she remained silent, he knew the question was meant for him.

“I need to shoot somebody,” he said.

“No shit.” He kept watching the TV.

“I’m ready to do my duty.”

That seemed to get through, but not in the way he wanted. Matt looked up at him with naked contempt. “By shootin some nigger? All that’s gonna do is get you thrown in jail. Next thing my ass is right there with you. Get the fuck out of here, dude.”

“I won’t get caught.”

“Not with my gun you won’t.”

Trixie spoke up. “I know you got some disposables here,” she said.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Trix?”

“This is what Derrick wants, Matt. Come on.”

Nick stared at her, suddenly off-kilter. When had Derrick become a factor in this?

“Well, he didn’t mention it to me,” Matt said, looking back at the TV. He seemed unaccountably engrossed in a commercial for an electric razor.

“There’s a lot he don’t mention to you,” Trixie said coolly. “Not to any of you. Not unless you been climbin in bed with him . . . but I don’t remember seein you there.”

Something in Nick’s chest dropped; he felt suddenly heavy, and wondered if he would be able to move if he had to. Matt stewed silently for a few minutes, then cursed under his breath and went into the bedroom. He came back a few moments later with a small black piece of metal wrapped in a washcloth. He handed it directly to Trixie, and said, “This is on you. If things get fucked up, it’s on you.”

She took the gun from him. “You act like I don’t know what I’m doing.” She turned for the door. Nick turned to follow, but Matt said, “Hey.” When Nick looked at him, he smiled. “So, how does Derrick’s dick taste?”

Matt was still laughing when Nick shut the door.

Streams of water flowed alo
ng the passenger window as the car sped down a raised stretch of I-10, and behind the water the city flowed by too, bejeweled with light, like a dream of an enchanted kingdom. Nick leaned his head against the glass and tried to pretend he was somewhere else, somewhere far from this city and the people who lived in it, somewhere you didn’t have to fight a war every day to justify who you were. Trixie sat beside him, steering the car through the rain, her fingers clenching the wheel like it was a lifeline.

“What about his mother?” she said, breaking his lovely illusion.

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Well, now’s a good time to start.”

He decided not to respond. Trixie nodded, thinking her own thoughts. The rain increased its intensity, and she clicked the windshield wipers on high. New Orleans was behind them now; Nick had to look in the side mirror to see it. The deluge slowed the traffic, making the rain seem even heavier. Headlights from cars in the opposite lane smeared across the windshield, growing and fading like pulsars.

“You knew I was with him,” Trixie said.

“
Was
, I knew you
was
with him! I didn’t know you came straight from his fucking house!”

“I didn’t.”

“Well—
whatever
, Trixie! What the fuck!”

“It’s not like I’m his girlfriend or anything, okay? We just fuck sometimes. It’s no big deal.”

“Right, no big deal.”

“Oh, fucking grow up, would you?”

A green BMW cut in front of them and Trixie stepped on the brakes. The tires locked for a moment and the car hydroplaned nearly halfway across the lane before it regained traction.