Wild Thing: A Novel (20 page)

He notices someone’s hands coming in from the sides of his peripheral vision, but he can’t look away from the snake. Even when the hands grab the snake’s neck and lop its head off with a Ka-bar.

The snake’s body flails all over the room, slapping and spraying Reggie’s bare shins. He tries to get out of its way, but he still can’t move.

The lieutenant just stands there with the knife and the cobra head, looking at the fangs. White bubble from one, pink from the other.

“Uh oh,” the lieutenant says.

Reggie wakes up on the roof of the wheelhouse. Bright sky.

There’s something heavy on his chest. It lifts. It’s the CPO’s head, mouth covered in gore. Reggie screams.

“Hang tight,” the CPO says. “I’m sucking the venom out.”

The CPO goes back to it. Or doesn’t. Reggie can’t feel anything specific happening. The whole front of his body is a vibrating ache.

The CPO raises his head and spits. Some of it lands on Reggie’s neck. Then, as an afterthought, the CPO leans over the side of the wheelhouse and vomits. All of which is cool with Reggie, as long as he doesn’t have to move.

“Hold on,” the CPO says, wiping his mouth. “I’ll get the antivenin.”

He vanishes from sight only to be replaced by the lieutenant, who leans down to stare at Reggie’s chest, then stands up again and says “Only way that’s survivable is if it didn’t go all the way through the chest wall.”

“How about some morphine?” the CPO says, somehow
already back at Reggie’s side. Reggie feels the shot spread through him as a warmth that doesn’t stop the pain but walls it off, as if he’s fine but has a tray of pain resting on his chest.

“Breathe!” the CPO yells.

Was Reggie not breathing? He breathes.

When the pain is distant enough to allow him to focus, he listens to the lieutenant and the CPO arguing just past his feet.

The lieutenant says “We’re leaving him in the village.”

“Is there anyone in the village who can take care of him?” the CPO asks.

“Don’t leave me in the village,” Reggie finds himself saying, though without any actual air passing his lips.

“Are you questioning an order?” the lieutenant says to the CPO.

“No
sir
,” the CPO says, with an angry sarcasm Reggie’s never heard from him before. “I’m just asking what the point is of bringing him all the way to the village. Why not just dump him in the river?”

The lieutenant glances at Reggie. Sees that Reggie’s listening. Crouches down to talk to him.

“Son, we can’t take you along on the mission. There’s no room for you in any of the wheelhouses, and I can’t have you on deck during a firefight. And I can’t spare anyone to stay behind with you. You know an E-4 doesn’t rate a mission abort.”

Reggie wonders if there’s a requirement that he respond to any of this.

“You’re safer—and we’re safer—with you in the village. And we need to get you there fast so we don’t miss the ambush. End of discussion, okay?” The lieutenant looks at the CPO. “End of discussion.”

The CPO and the coxswain from the CPO’s boat swing Reggie out over the water on a cloth stretcher, and on a count of three lower him into the aluminum canoe that’s tied up near the village temple. Of course: God forbid Reggie gets off the water at some point before he dies. The CPO pulls the canoe close to the walkway and puts a canteen and a C-ration box alongside Reggie’s body. Starts to unroll a mosquito net over him.

Before he covers Reggie’s face, the CPO looks around. Says “Shh. Open your mouth. Stick your tongue out.”

“What—?”

“Do it quick.”

Reggie does. The CPO touches Reggie’s tongue with his rough, salty fingertip. When he removes it, something stays behind on Reggie’s tongue. He scrapes it off with his front teeth, and it rolls up: paper, like the dots you get from emptying a hole-punch.

Reggie swears that if he lives long enough to use a hole-punch again, he’ll try to appreciate it more. Appreciate
all
office supplies.

“Swallow,” the CPO says, pouring plastic-tasting water from the canteen into Reggie’s still-open mouth. Reggie chokes but gets some down, including the piece of paper. Or at least he can’t feel it anymore. The CPO lays the canteen down beside him and pulls the rest of the net over his head.

“What is it?” Reggie tries to say.

“LSD. My wife sent it to me under a postage stamp. I’ve been afraid to try it, but maybe it’ll help with the pain.”

Then the CPO pulls the net aside for a moment and reaches into Reggie’s shirt for his lariat. “Sorry,” he says. “Forgot to grab your keys.”

Reggie wakes up clawing the net off of him, his eyes and throat burning from the DDT it’s impregnated with. Tries to lean his head up along the inside of the canoe, but his neck is thick and claylike, and the attempt spikes pain through his chest. His head has gotten clearer, though.

Much clearer. There’s some bamboo visible against the sky, and even though it’s evening, Reggie can see every pole of it—including the ones that are hidden by the ones in front. He
knows
they’re there, because he can deduce them. And what’s the difference between that and seeing them with your eyes?

It’s like water. Right now, Reggie can’t see any. But he sure as hell knows there’s some around. And how much of water do you ever see anyway? Just the surface—the least important part, the part it’s most willing to share.

Water is letting the canoe rest on it right now. Not pulling the canoe down under, but not spitting it out either. Just being its own thing. Sharing, but staying pure. It’s like what Reggie’s doing now with the mosquitoes: letting them take their one millionth of him in peace. But what’s that chanting?

Reggie focuses. The chanting is real. He can hear it, he means, not just deduce it. It’s men. Not a lot of men, but nearby.

A God-awful squealing rips into Reggie’s ears like from something being tortured. There’s a splash, and the squealing stops but is replaced by a weird kind of snuffling. Then there’s a
bigger splash, a brief squeal worse than the earlier ones, and the snuffling stops too.

All the while, though, the chanting.

Reggie suddenly feels like a missionary waiting for some natives to put him in their soup, or tie him to a pole and throw spears at him.

There’s more squealing. Now Reggie
has
to see.

He shoves himself farther up in the canoe with his feet. The pain from bending his chest almost blacks him out, but something in him suspects this might be the end anyway. Who cares if pain is spreading through him like the rivers of the delta that he’s floating on? This isn’t some groove poem, dickhead. This is
death
we’re talking about.

The boat is rotating now from his efforts. He can see the edge of the stone temple. Then the entryway. Men from the village are seated cross-legged on the platform in front of it. Chanting. The one at the end of the line has a bag. He pulls a piglet out of it. It squeals.

The men pass the writhing piglet down the line. Reggie’s canoe rotates as if to follow it. When the piglet reaches the man at the end of the line, he takes it, touches his forehead to it, and throws it out over the water with both hands.

The piglet screams and wheels in the air. Lands hoofs-down and bobs right back to the surface, doggy-paddling and huffing pathetically as it tries to swim for one of the lily pads, as if that could support the piglet’s weight.

Then something huge rises up in the water behind the piglet and swallows it whole.

The thing is at least as long as the line of men. It has to be: at the same moment its horrible toothed mouth rises up and
engulfs the piglet, a muscular ripple half the length of the platform swells outward from the middle of the water. It causes Reggie’s canoe to bob.

The temple rotates out of sight. Reggie can once again see only bamboo and the darkening sky. Inside himself, he’s screaming.

Outside too, he realizes.

Camp Fawn See, Ford Lake, Minnesota

Still Saturday, 15 September

“That’s a hell of a story,” I say.

“Innit?”

“You had dysentery, you were on morphine and LSD, and you’d been bitten by a cobra.”

Reggie shakes his head. “I was on acid and morphine half the time I was in Nam. I had dysentery the
whole
time. And a cobra bite’s just not that big of a deal, long as it doesn’t kill you outright. What I saw out there was for real.”

“Okay,” I say. “So what was it?”

To whatever extent I was before, I’m no longer enjoying this
conversation. It’s reminding me of my own canoe freakout from earlier, and, worse, it’s reminding me of the guy in the video with one leg. Like that guy, Reggie’s just told me, with complete conviction, a story that cannot be true.

What is this, a tiny town of psychopaths? Of people who lie so constantly and skillfully they should be in a logic puzzle, or at least running a Fortune 500 company, but have instead elected to participate in a rat’s-ass lake monster hoax?
^*
When people go through the kind of shit Reggie’s clearly gone through they sometimes turn flat, because nothing they do or say is remotely as charged as what happened to them before. But Reggie doesn’t even come across as flat.

“I think it was a water dragon,” he says. “It sure as hell wasn’t a catfish. Or an Irrawaddy dolphin, unless it was one with huge teeth that ate pigs. Which isn’t normally the case: I’ve checked. It could have been a snakehead, based just on how ugly it was, but if it was, it was bigger than any snakehead on record. I mean, a snakehead that big would just be its own kind of monster anyway.”

“What’s a water dragon?” I say.

“Something Cambodians believe in.”

“But not Vietnamese people?”

“I don’t know. Woman who told me about it was in Cambodia.”

“And now you think there might be one in White Lake?”

Reggie holds his empty can above his mouth and taps it to dislodge drops. “Fuck, I don’t know. Obviously it’d be a hell of a coincidence. Water’s a lot colder here, for one thing. Wouldn’t shock the hell out of me, though. I’m done being surprised by scary motherfuckers that live in the water.”

“So now you want to lead a trip to go find one?”

He lowers the can. “Yeah. The actual leading of the trip is not something I’m looking forward to. Being on the water, I mean. But I have to figure that’s what alpha-blockers and marijuana are for.”