Wild Thing: A Novel (21 page)

On a similar theme, I say “And why do you want to move to Cambodia?”

He laughs. “It’s not like I’m gonna move into a hut on stilts in a swamp there. They do have land-based real estate. And Cambodia’s still pretty free of tourists, long as you stay out of Angkor Wat. You can live on the beach, there’s lots of prostitutes…” He glances at me. “I like prostitutes. What can I say? And northern Minnesota is
not
good for prostitutes. It’s like going to Mecca for beer-battered pork.”

“They make beer-battered pork?” I say. I always forget how hungry marijuana makes me.

“Del does, sometimes. Weather here sucks also. You ever been here in the winter?”

“No.”

“It’s cold. Like the outside of an airplane. During the summer the mosquitoes are worse than they were in Nam.”

“But… isn’t Cambodia a little
close
to Nam?”

“Hey, the Vietnamese didn’t come over here to kill
us
.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Anyway, I figure if Chris Sr. had the guts to buy this place, and Chris
Jr
. had the guts to do whatever the fuck it was he was planning to do with the whole White Lake Monster thing, the least I can do is get in a canoe for a week and finish what they started. I mean, I do rent the pieces of shit out for a living. Chris Sr. used to ride in canoes sometimes, and he hated boats as much as I do.”

“Why?” I say. I’m still thinking about the pork.

“The usual. Vietnam.”

“He was there too?”

Reggie looks surprised. “He was my CPO.”

“The one who gave you the LSD?”

“Yeah. He saved my ass a million times.” He points to the scarred half of his face. “Cluding this one.”

Reggie’s narrative is starting to feel claustrophobic and paranoid. Or else I am. “What happened?”

“We all got put on swift boats eventually,” he says. “One night Chris—that’s Chris Sr., obviously—and I were out in one and we had the running lights on so we wouldn’t get strafed, and a P4-Phantom strafed the shit out of us because the pilot thought we were an NVA helicopter. I got fuel on me and got lit on fire and all that shit—I didn’t even
want
to live. Chris swam me to shore.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep. Bitch of it is, NVA didn’t even use helicopters.”

When he falls silent, I say “Were Del and Miguel in the military too?”

“Del was in Nam, but he never got north of a fire base. Might have had to drink a warm beer once or twice. Miguel just likes guns.”

“Do
they
believe there’s a monster in White Lake?”

“You’ve met them.”

“Right…”

Reggie, eye running, smiles his wicked and goofy half smile. “Those guys’ll believe anything.”

CFS Lodge, Ford Lake, Minnesota

Still Saturday, 15 September

At six a.m. I call Dr. Mark McQuillen from the phone on the desk of the back room of the registration cabin, hoping to impress him and catch him groggy enough to answer questions.

“This is Dr. McQuillen.”

“Dr. McQuillen, this is—”

Phoning another doctor this early has thrown me off: I almost say “This is Peter Brown.” Someone I stopped pretending to be three years ago.

“It’s Lionel Azimuth. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”

“Not at present. I’m on my way out.”

“It’s six.”

“Then I’m already late. Sunrise is at six-fifty-two, and I need to be out on Hoist Bay by then. I’d invite you to come with me, but fish can smell horseshit from a mile away.”

“That’s a good one. How’s Dylan?”

“He left here in the peak of health.”

“What about Charlie Brisson?” The guy with the leg bitten off.

McQuillen laughs. “Have a good day, Doctor,” he says as he hangs up.

Back in the cabin, Violet’s asleep on her stomach with one knee fetched up and the sheets pushed down across her thighs. The two-inch stripe of her black cotton underwear is somehow perfectly centered over her pussy. You can crunch the pheromones with your teeth.

I try to get my shit together without waking her, but she turns over as I’m about to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to McQuillen’s.”

“What time is it?”

“Little past six.”

“Will he be awake?”

“I just talked to him on the phone.”

It becomes a game after a while, the lying by telling the truth. Like doing crosswords.

“Can I come?”

“Sleep. I’ll be back before you wake up. I’ll get gas for the Mystery Machine.”

She grinds her palms into her eyes. “Don’t say that. I hate
Scooby-Doo
.”

I should leave.

“Why?” I say.

“The fucking monster always turns out to be fake. It’s always just some loser in glow-in-the-dark paint, trying to steal money from a yuppie who doesn’t even know the money exists. The only person who ever gets anything out of it is Daphne.”

“That’s the blond one?”

“Her hair’s red. She gets herself kidnapped all the time, because the only way she can come is by being fucked in the ass while she’s tied up.”

Now I
really
should go.

“How do you know that?”

“Didn’t you ever watch that show?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“The blond one is Fred. Daphne’s boyfriend.”

“So…”

“Daphne’s frigid with Fred. She gave him a handjob once and puked. Fred titty-fucks Velma every time they build a monster trap together, then feels guilty about it.”

Watching Violet stretch as she says this, her skin matte from the cold, is surreal.

“I thought Velma was gay,” I say.

“She just tells Shaggy that so he’ll stop hitting on her. She’d rather fuck the dog.”

“Interesting. Anyway…”

“Wait. I’m coming with you.”

I’m about to tell her not to, but she gets out of bed. As she walks to the bathroom, the twin motions of her pulling her
underwear back down over her butt and retucking the sides of her breasts leave me speechless.

I go stand by the bathroom door to try again. “You know, I would have thought that what you’d
like
about
Scooby-Doo
was that the mystery always had a logical explanation.”

“Are you kidding?” she says. “Nobody likes that. It’s like that piece-of-shit
Wizard of Oz
, where the wizard turns out to be a fake even though the whole thing’s a dream anyway. Who has a dream about a fake wizard?”

“So what’s the option—
Twilight
, and
Harry Potter
? Kids growing up knowing more about the physiology of vampires and werewolves than they do about human beings?”

“Wow. Somebody is
grumpy
in the morning.”

The toilet flushes, and a minute later she opens the door brushing her teeth. She’s got sexy sleep notches beneath her eyes.

“In the first place, Grumpy Grampa, don’t be getting on
Twilight
,” she says. “In the second, I’m not sure you want to be holding up
Scooby-Doo
as a physiology textbook. It’s about a talking dog.”

At McQuillen’s I peel the magnetic “GONE FISHIN’ ” sign off the clinic door before Violet can see it, and make a show of ringing the buzzers on both doors, then knocking. Finally I ask Violet to walk around the house and try to see in through the windows, at which point I slide the polymer lock pick and tension wrench out of the lining of my wallet and spring the deadbolt on the second rake.

I really should have told Violet not to come. Since I didn’t, I’ll have to either get in and out before she notices or else think of something to tell her when she does.

Depends what’s inside, I suppose.

The waiting room’s dark, but I know where the desk lamp is. In the closet behind the desk, unmarked boxes: too difficult to search. I move to the hallway.

Most of the clinic I’m already familiar with, like the examining room McQuillen put Dylan in and the one that’s empty. A hall closet has janitorial and medical supplies. I open the locked door next to it, but when I go up the carpeted steps I’m suddenly in someone’s house. Midway between the dining room and living room, with a nasty
déjà vu
that I’ve broken in to kill someone. I go back down to the clinic and try the door at the end of the hall. File room.

It’s got an armchair with medical journals and a mostly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red on it. Next to that a lamp table with a framed photo: McQuillen, maybe forty years younger, standing next to the desk in the reception room. On the desk itself a woman with her legs crossed.

The woman’s in every photo in the room. Sometimes alone, sometimes with McQuillen. From the evolution of her eyeglass frames, it looks like she left his life, for all I know life in general, around 1990.

It’s a bummer, and along with something I can’t quite figure out makes me worry about the old man, but I don’t have time to think about it. I check the medications locker, grab a few items I’ve been wishing I brought with me from the ship, then start on the files. Luckily, of all McQuillen’s patients named Brisson, Charlie’s chart is the easiest to find. It’s the thickest.

Charles Brisson is sixty-four years old. Way too young to look like he did on the video. So young that McQuillen’s first note on him is from when Brisson was fourteen.

Reason for first visit: constant thirst and hunger paired with weight loss. McQuillen diagnoses juvenile diabetes and starts him on a drug I don’t recognize but was probably zinc-preserved pig insulin. I fan through McQuillen doing a reasonable job of keeping Brisson stable through the usual struggles and crises you get treating diabetic teenagers.

After a while, though, Brisson stops cooperating. Becomes more interested in proving that just because one fucked-up thing happened to you doesn’t mean a whole bunch more can’t. Particularly if you help them along.

It’s like a particularly unfunny flip-book. Alcoholic car wreck in his early twenties. Alcoholic liver enzymes in his late twenties. Bad sugar control the whole time. Leg amputated for diabetic gangrene while he’s still in his forties. Five years later, onset of Korsakoff’s syndrome.

Fuck
should I have thought of that before. In Korsakoff’s, people whose memories have been wrecked by thiamine deficiency—usually, in developed countries, from alcoholic malnutrition—start unconsciously creating new memories in real time. Suggest to someone with Korsakoff’s that something
may
have happened, and there’s a good chance they’ll suddenly remember that it did, and give you the details. It should have been the first thing I considered.

I replace the chart. Pull the ones on Autumn Semmel and Benjy Schneke.

Autumn’s is two pages long, about a sprained ankle five years ago. Apparently McQuillen wasn’t her usual doctor. Which, given that she lived in Ely, makes sense.

Benjy’s chart starts with a certificate of live birth eighteen years ago and ends with a note from two years ago that just says
“d. MMVA.”
^*
Both the birth certificate and the close-out note are signed in McQuillen’s distinctive, lost-art handwriting.