The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (2 page)

The day I saw Edwin for the first time, I stared at the concrete expanse of the runways at the San Jose International Airport while my mom fretted beside me. “You don’t have to do this, Bonnie,” she said. “I’m sure all this unpleasantness will blow over. I mean, no one can really believe you
meant
—”

“It’s better this way, Mommy,” I said, patting her knee. I still have a hard time believing I share genetic material with someone as flighty and distractible as Miranda Grayduck—but having a mother who loses her train of thought anytime she hears a loud noise or sees something shiny had proven useful over the years. “Just until things blow over.”

“But you haven’t spent any time with Harry since you were twelve years old,” mom went on, digging through her suitcase-sized purse in search of something—who knew what. “You two have barely even talked on the phone if it wasn’t your birthday or Christmas. I know he loves you, but—”

“Are those new earrings?” I interrupted, and Miranda touched her earlobes, smiled, and rattled on about the little shop in Santa Cruz where she’d found them long enough for me to say, “Goodness, I’ll miss my flight. I’ll call you as soon as I get there, I love you, don’t worry, it’s all for the best.”

She spent a little more time rummaging and babbling, but I managed to peel myself away and get my bags out of the trunk, and eventually Miranda took the hint. At least with the security checkpoints she couldn’t come with me to the gate. Once she drove away in her ridiculous yellow hybrid—a gift from my stepfather-to-be—I instantly felt lighter, as if part of me were soaring through the clouds already. I wasn’t particularly excited about spending my senior year of high school in the tiny Minnesota town of Lake Woebegotten with my dad Harry, better known to the locals as Chief Cusack. (As a bastard in the original sense of the word, I’m saddled with my mother’s last name instead of Harry’s. Miranda says Grayduck is a Native American name, but really, doesn’t every other white person in America think they have some Choctaw or Blackfeet or Cherokee blood back in their ancestry somewhere? Or, what were the Indians up near Lake Woebegotten called—Ojibwe?)

Anyway. A little lake town way up north, where I hadn’t even visited in five years, was hardly my idea of paradise, but staying in Santa Cruz had become decidedly uncomfortable because of some recent unpleasantness. It was really just a misunderstanding, or maybe not a misunderstanding, more of a misfortune, since I’d been reasonably sure no one would ever trace the whole thing back to me. And who would have expected anyone to care so much about something so unimportant, some
one
so insignificant… Oh, well. Just because you’re smarter than everyone else doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes. Santa Cruz and I just needed a little mutual cooling-off period.

I made a big production out of struggling with my luggage when I got into the airport, and soon enough a scruffy twenty-something with a huge backpack hurried over, gave me his best impression of a winning smile, and offered to help carry my bags. I gave him a half-strength smile of my own, loaded him down with my bags, and directed him toward the desk for my airline. People are willing to do all sorts of things for a pretty girl (I’m not being conceited; I just know my strengths, and being pretty isn’t even the strongest of them), but it’s better if you act like you don’t
know
you’re pretty. If you position yourself as too sophisticated and cool and aloof, the losers are afraid to approach, but if you act clumsy and lost and helpless, they decide you might be just barely in their league after all: and losers are easy to manipulate. Being cold and distant and perfect has its uses, but it attracts a different sort of prey: smug, confident, arrogant men. Men like that are good if you’re playing a longer game, though. They can pay great dividends, especially if you’re not yet eighteen and can mention your jealous father the cop—even better because it was true, and no reason to mention he was chief of police in Lake Nowheresville, Minnesota thousands of miles away—and statutory rape and oh, didn’t I mention I was underage, oh dear, I thought you knew, I thought that’s what you were
into
!

But I decided that once I got to Lake Woebegotten I wouldn’t play any of those games anymore. The place was too tiny, anyway, and who would I play with, Norwegian bachelor farmers? Some bald bank manager or the guy who ran the car dealership or the podunk grocery store? No thanks. This was a chance for a fresh start. To simplify and purify my life, and just be The New Girl… which meant I’d probably have my pick of country bumpkin boys. There might be some entertainment value there. I vaguely recalled they grew them big in the Upper Midwest.

I ditched the loser bag-boy at the security line, not even bothering to thank him—no incentive, when I’d never see him again—and breezed through the gates without being groped or bombarded with radioactivity. Having translucent skin as pale as milk (or “the color of lutefisk,” as one of my Minnesotan relatives had memorably said once, shudder) is an advantage in a world of scary foreign terrorists, even with brown hair and eyes to go with the paleness; I don’t look dangerous at all. Which just goes to show how much faith you can put in looks.

Once I got to the gate, I upgraded my flight to first class—it was on Miranda’s credit card, and she’d never notice. She didn’t even look at her statements when they came in the mail, just threw them in a pile for a year and then shredded them. I got on board as soon as the jetway opened, took my seat and my complimentary beverage—I didn’t bother trying to get booze, because alcohol doesn’t do much for me, just takes the edge off the world—and frowned when a businessman sat down beside me. First class was booked solid. Disappointing. Fortunately, the doughy man paid me no attention—gay, probably—and to my surprise he opened his briefcase and took out a
book
, of all things, not even a Kindle or an iPad, but a big fat hardcover printed on actual paper. There was no dust jacket, but I could read the title:
The Historian
. Bleah. Who’d want to read about a stupid historian? Or about anything, for that matter, apart from the occasional book of useful non-fiction? Why read about other people’s imaginary lives when you could have a real life of your own?

I took out the MP3 player I’d stolen from Dwayne, my mother’s boyfriend. Dwayne was dreadful, in his late thirties and at the tail end of a career as an arena football player, which was the kind of football you played when you’d never been good enough for the real game or just weren’t good enough
anymore
. Despite being a cliché jock, Dwayne went to a lot of rock shows and thought he was hip, but there was nothing on his iPod from the past fifteen years, just a lot of grungy alterna-junk from the ’90s. Oh well. Better than listening to the mooing and lowing of the other passengers getting on board and shuffling to their cramped coach seats, to travel in discomfort and misery and empty-headedness like the livestock they were.

I put in the earbuds, scrolled through Dwayne’s playlists—they were named things like “Rockin Good” and “Brutal Jams” and “Break Shit”—until I found something that looked promising. I closed my eyes, listened to some classic rock band called Soundgarden sing about how they were feeling Minnesota, and began the journey into the rest of my life. Once we started taking off, I considered looking out the window to see the world drop away, shrinking until all the people bustling around the tarmac looked like ants, but I didn’t bother. That’s pretty much what people look like to me most of the time anyway: ants.

PHENOMENOMENON

NARRATOR

“I
t was one of them unexplainable phenomenomenons,” Gunther said, swaying a little on his customary stool at the Backtrack Bar, while Ace the bartender ignored him. Gunther had forgotten his resolution to keep quiet about what he’d seen in the woods, which didn’t matter much, because no one paid any attention to him anyway, so he embellished. “Red eyes he had, and fangs as long as ice axes, and he tore that deer to pieces. Completely to pieces. Nothing left but red sludge, like cherry pudding.”

“Never heard of cherry pudding,” Ace said, flipping channels on the TV, though one station full of fuzzy snow looked more or less like another to Gunther’s untrained eye.

“It’s pudding,” Gunther told Ace, or maybe his beer, since that’s what he was looking at most intently. “But cherry-flavored. Maybe I should’ve said ‘blood pudding.’ Since there was so much blood?”

“What’s this about blood?” The town’s head (and very nearly only) cop Harry Cusack eased onto the stool next to Gunther, who grunted a greeting. Harry was all right. He’d been known to lock Gunther up for drunk and disorderly, but he always let him go after he’d dried out, and true, he made you clean up your own puke if you let loose in the cell, but he’d give you a cup of coffee afterward to clear out the taste. “Don’t tell me you witnessed a crime, Gunther, because I can’t think of anyone in the world who’d be a worse witness than you, officially speaking.”

“A blind deaf-mute, maybe,” Ace said. “With a felony conviction and a history of mental illness.” He paused. “Or that boy Clem who works over at the Half Good Grocery for Dolph, he’s dumber than a bag of hog snouts.”

“But if you did see something,” Harry said, putting a companionable arm around Gunther’s shoulders, “I’d be pleased to hear about it. My daughter’s coming into town tonight to stay with me for a while, and if there’s a criminal element hanging around, I may as well clean it up before she gets here.”

“No crime,” Gunther muttered. “Unless killing a deer with your bare hands is a crime.”

“Maybe animal cruelty, depending. And killing animals is part of the homicidal triad, you know, indicative of a budding serial killer, right along with bedwetting and setting fires.”

“You’d think with a name like ‘homicidal triad’ that actually committing homicide should be one of the three,” Ace said, to general lack of response. Some bartenders stood there, not paying any attention, as their regulars babbled on about this and that. Ace was pretty much the opposite.

“So when and where and who was this?” Harry said, peeling the label off his bottle of Krepusky’s Red Ribbon Beer.

Gunther marshaled all his mental powers and attempted recollection. He wasn’t a stupid man, not at all; he was just an extremely drunk man, and it was his grave misfortune that stupid and drunk were often indistinguishable even from a very slight distance. “Yesterday, ’round about twilight, out near my place. Don’t know who. Some fella, maybe seventeen, eighteen. He didn’t look like anything special, but he moved fast as a greased pig with a lightning bolt up his ass.”

“That’s pretty fast,” Harry allowed.

“He jumped on the deer, and it was like a bird of prey falling out of the sky and landing on a little bunny rabbit or something. Just bite, tear, rip. When the fella saw me looking, he ran away.”

“Hmm,” Harry said. “I reckon you ate the deer? Turned my evidence into steaks and jerky?”

“Uh,” Gunther said, and Harry sighed.

“That’s all right. Keep your eyes open, though, and if you see that fella around, let me know? Somebody who’d run down and kill a deer bare-handed… I’d say that at least warrants a friendly conversation.”

“You missed the part where he said the guy was some kind of supernatural wolfman dracula monster,” Ace said. “With red eyes and big teeth and who knows whatall else.”

“Hmm,” Harry said, and drummed his fingers on the bar. “Well, that’s all right. What good’s a story if you don’t gussy it up a little to make it even better?” Harry laid his money on the bar, and Ace pushed it back to him, a little ritual Gunther had witnessed with jealousy a million times—he damn sure paid for
his
drinks, and sometimes Ace got a wild hair and wouldn’t even
sell
him any booze, let alone go giving it away—and told Gunther to stay out of trouble.

“Another whiskey,” Gunther said, after ascertaining that enough of his Army pension money remained in his wallet to justify the extravagance of whiskey you drank inside a warm bar instead of a cold fishing shack.

“Only if you promise not to tell any more stories about pudding,” Ace said. “You’re making me hungry.”

“You really want me to go tromping around the woods, what, looking for tracks or something?” Stevie Ray said. He was Harry’s assistant and the only other employee of the Lake Woebegotten Police Department, though he was only a part-timer, and in his other job as back-up bartender and sometime bouncer at the Backtrack Bar, he’d become very well acquainted with Gunther Montcrief. “On the say-so of the most notorious drunk in town?”

“I take your point, but Gunther doesn’t usually tell wild stories.” Harry propped his feet up on the big desk. “He usually tells
old
stories about the combat he’s seen and the women of negotiable virtue he met during his years stationed in the Pacific, but this? This is new. If there’s a feral fella running around the woods eating deer, don’t you think we should know about it?”

Stevie Ray sighed and pulled on his earflap hat. He went outside and walked around the back of the police station—which was more a general-purpose civic building that happened to have a jail cell in it—and took a moment to breathe the autumn air. Tomorrow was the first day of September, and winter would be along a month or so after that. Stevie Ray tried to live in the moment, but it was hard not to think about what the future might bring.

After making sure he was alone, which wasn’t too difficult in a town as small as Lake Woebegotten, he took out his cell phone and scrolled through the contacts to a name that just read “Dr. S.” He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, doc, Stevie Ray here. I just thought you should know, somebody saw one of your boys running down a deer out by the lake.”

He listened a moment, then sighed. “It matters because it was the part of the lake by the Ojibwe reservation. You don’t want to upset the Woebegotten Band—” Another pause to listen. “Well our witness didn’t say anything about the hunter being
hairy
, and was pretty specific about it just looking like a normal fella apart from the super-speed and whatnot, so no, I don’t think it was one of the boys from the rez. If it wasn’t one of yours, then who? Don’t tell me there are other—no. Okay. No, I don’t know which one it was, probably Edwin or Garnett, if it’d been Hermet the witness probably would have mentioned the fella was the size of a grain silo. Just have a talk with them, okay, before I hear from Mr. Noir? I don’t know how I got roped into being the go-between and peacemaker between you… Ha. Yes, all right, I’m a peace officer, fair enough. So help me by keeping things peaceful.”