Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (2 page)

Reptilicus thinks of Kong’s defiance, waving the Ken doll, the Barbie in his teeth. He thinks of Godzilla, laughing as he died.

Reptilicus finds a lot of old feelings resurfacing. They’re hard to fight. He locates a lonesome spot and a dark house and urinates through an open window, then goes home.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon
Jim Shepard

Before they came, I went about my business in pond muck, slurry, roiling soups and thermoclines of particulate matter and anaerobiotic nits and scooters. I’d been alone for somewhere between 250 and 260 million years. I’d forgotten the exact date. Our prime had been the Devonian, and we’d been old news by the Permian. We’d become a joke by the Triassic and fish food by the Cretaceous. The Cenozoic had dragged by like the eon it was. At some point I’d looked around and everyone else was gone. I was still there, the spirit of a fish in the shape of a man. I breast-stroked back and forth, parting underwater meadows with taloned mitts. I watched species come and go. I glided a lot, vain about my swimming, and not as fluid with my stroking as I would have liked to have been. I suffered from negative buoyancy. I was out of my element.

Out of the water, I gaped. In the hundred percent humidity it felt like I should be able to breathe. My mouth moved like I was testing a broken jaw. My gills flexed and extended, to pull what I needed out of the impossible thinness of the air. The air felt elastic and warm at the entrance to my throat, as though it had breath behind it that never got through. The air was strands of warmth pulling apart, dissipating at my mouth.

My mouth was razored with shallow triangular teeth. I lived on fish that I was poorly equipped to catch. I killed a tapir out of boredom or curiosity but it tasted of dirt and parasites and dung. For regularity I ate the occasional water cabbage. I’d evolved to crack open ammonites and rake the meat from trilobites. Instead I flopped around after schools of fish that moved like light on leaves. They slipped away like memories. Every so often a lucky swipe left one taloned.

How long had it been since I’d seen one of my own? We hadn’t done well where we’d been, and our attempt at a diaspora had been a washout.

I’d gotten pitying looks from the plesiosaurs.

Was I so unique? In the rainforest, the common was rare and the rare was common.

The lagoon changed over the years. It snaked out in various directions and receded in others. Most recently it had become about nine times as long as it was wide. The northern end was not so deep and the southern end fell away farther than I’d ever needed to go. Something with bug eyes and fanlike dorsals had swum up out of there once seventy-five hundred years ago, and hadn’t been seen since.

Every so often the water tasted brackish or salty.

There was one crescent of sandy beach that came or went by the decade, depending on storms, a wearying expanse of reedy shoreline that flooded every spring (silver fish glided between the buttress-roots, gathering seeds), and a shallow-bottomed plateau of thickly cloaking sawgrass that turned out to be perfect for watching swimmers from concealment. There was a minor amphitheater of a rocky outcrop suitable for setting oneself off against when being probed for at night with searchlights (stagger up out of the waist-deep water, perform your blindness in the aggravating glare, swipe ineffectually at the beams). There were two seasonally roving schools of piranha with poor self-control, a swarm of unforgiving parasitic worms in a still water cul-de-sac, five or six uninviting channels that led to danger and mystery, one occasionally blocked main artery in from the bend of the Amazon, one secret underwater passageway which led to an oddly capacious and echo-y chamber of stone, and a gargantuan fallen stilt palm which seemed to be still growing despite its submarine status. From below, the water was the color of tea. From above, even on sunny days, the deeper levels looked black.

During the day, the air was humid and blood-warm. In the morning, orchid-smelling mists surrounded columns buttressed with creepers. Lines of small hunting vireos moved like waves through the trees. Wrens sang antiphonally, alternating the opening notes and completing phrases with their mates.

Night fell in minutes. Bats replaced birds, moths replaced butterflies. In the close darkness, howler monkeys roared defiance. Nectar-gathering bats side-slipped through the clearings. Fishing bats gaffed pickerel and ate them in flight.

I didn’t go far. I entertained dim memories of thickets of stinging insects, poisonous snakes and spiders, and the yellow-eyed gleams of jaguars. Away from the water, all trees looked the same and there were no clues to help with orientation. Everything considered me with a diffident neutrality: the bushmaster in the leaf litter, the army ants in the hollow tree, the millipede spiraled into its defensive position. I chewed leguminous beans and certain fungi for the visions their hallucinogens provided. The visions stood in for insights.

One afternoon after 470 million years of quiet a boat chugged-chugged into the lagoon. Old rubber tires hung over its side. It leaked black oil and something more pungent that spread small rainbows over the water. It made a lot of unnecessary and fish-scaring noise. Once it settled into quiet, I fingered its bottom from below with a talon, scraping lines in the soft slime.

Later, across the lagoon, I hovered in the black water, invisible in the sun’s glare. The figures on the boat had my shape. Naturally, I was curious.

They spoke over one another in headlong squabbles and seemed to have divided their tasks in obscure ways. Just what they were doing was something I could not untangle. Had I found Companions? Was I no longer completely alone? Had the universe singled me out for good fortune? My heart boomed terror.

I had not one single illusion about this group. Spears were unpacked. Nets. Other ominous-looking instruments. Nothing about any of this suggested diffident neutrality.

A smaller boat steadily brought minor hills of junk ashore. A canvas tent went up. Floating off by myself, savoring that moment of illusory coolness when I’d rise from the water in the early, early morning, I watched a bare-chested native lead a hurrying scientist in a Panama hat to an exposed bank of rock. They arrived to confront a conspicuous claw waving menacingly from the shale
.

I paddled over for a listen.

What was it, Doctor
?
the native asked.

The Doctor admitted he didn’t know. He was fumbling with a cumbersome flash camera. He said he’d never seen anything like it before.

Was it important? the native wondered.

The Doctor took pictures, his flash redundant in the sunlight. He said he thought it was. Very important. He set the camera aside and pickaxed the fossil arm right out of the rock. So much for the preciousness of the find.

He announced he was going to take it to the Institute. Luis and his friend were to wait here for his return.

First, he said, he had to make some Measurements. Then he fussed about for days.

There were four men: a figure with a hat who remained on the boat, and Luis, Andujar, and the Doctor on the shore, their sagging tent beside that still water cul-de-sac with the swarm of parasitic worms.

The foreclaw that they kept in the center of the tent in a box had some sentimental value for me. In the middle of the night at times I stood beside the open tent flaps, dripping, ruminating on whether or not to go in for it. The Doctor’s breathing was clogged and he sounded like a marine toad.

In the morning they made their waste down the end of a trail leading to a stand of young palms that turned from orange to green as they matured.

One day the foreclaw was gone; I could feel it. The Doctor was gone with it. The boat was gone.

Luis and Andujar sang as they worked. They didn’t work often. They played a game with a sharp knife they used to hack down plants.

I watched them and learned their idiosyncrasies. I learned about camp stools, and toilet paper. I learned about rifles. They enjoyed disassembling and oiling rifles. The procedure for loading rifles and killing animals with rifles was patiently walked through every morning, as though for the benefit of those creatures like myself watching interestedly from the bush. I was impressed with the rifles.

That night beside their camp I rose so slowly from the water that the surface meniscus distended before giving way. With my mouth still submerged, my eyes negotiated the glow of their lanterns. The tent canvas blocking the light was the color of embers. On a nearby hibiscus, the light refracted through an insect disguised as a water droplet.

I stood beside their tent in the darkness. One of them looked out and then withdrew his head.

Even with my scales glimmering moonlight and water seeping from my algae, I had a talent for invisibility, for sudden disappearance, the way blue butterflies in the canopy vanished when entering shade.

On the other side of the canvas Luis and Andujar nattered and thumped about. I waited as quietly as an upright bone. My chest was stirred by an obscurely homicidal restlessness.

They fell silent. This was more annoying than their noise. I stood before the closed flaps of the tent’s entrance, spread a taloned claw, and extended it slowly into the light. No response.

I pulled the flap aside. Luis gaped, goggled, brandished one of the lanterns; threw it. Andujar sprang from his cot swinging the big sharp knife. They weren’t as much exercise as the tapir.

I enjoyed throwing them about. I raked meat off the bone, lathed, splintered, and shredded; wrung, wrenched, rooted, and uprooted. I noted my lack of restraint. I opened them to the jungles. I unearthed their wet centers.

I sat outside the tent, not ready to return to the water. I held my claws away from my body. Space in the upper canopy turned blue and paled. Two tiny scarlet frogs wrestled beside me. Leaf-litter beneath them slipped and scattered. Along the water, one set of noisemakers retired and the next took its place.

I swam off my murderousness. I floated on my back in the center of the lagoon. Fish nipped at my feet. I had even less appetite than usual.

Days passed. Luis and Andujar, slung across shredded cots and canvas, became festive gathering places. In the evenings, even a jaguarundi stopped by. In the opened chest cavities, beetles swarmed and tumbled over one another. Compact clouds of emerald-eyed flies lifted off and resettled.

The big boat came chug-chugging back into the lagoon.

I watched it come from out of the east. My head ached. The sunrise spiked my vision.

I dove to the bottom, corkscrewed around in the muck, and startled some giant catfish.

I resurfaced. Once again, the boat stopped and settled into quiet. Once again there was oblique activity back and forth on deck. Once again the smaller boat was loaded and sent to shore.

The Doctor stood in the front. Three other men spread themselves across the back. They centered their attention on a slender figure between them that I could smell all the way across the water. She smelled like the center of bromeliads torn open, mixed with anteater musk and clay. Anteater musk for years had made me pace certain feeding trails, obscurely excited.

Female scent tented through the membranes in my skull. I gawped. I sounded. I hooted, their nightmare owl.

The group looked off in my direction, startled by the local color. The Doctor called for Luis and Andujar. Luis and Andujar weren’t answering. The boat rocked and pitched and scuffed up onto the same muddy bank it had left. The Doctor clambered out and marched off toward his tent. The men called the female Kay and helped her out and followed.

I cruised over, a lazy trail of bubbles.

They made their discovery. I hovered nearby in the deeper water, stroking every so often to remain upright. A few of them picked up shattered objects and examined them. There were a number of urgent motions and decisive gestures. Kay was trundled back to the small boat and the entire group returned to the bigger one. On its deck, crates were wrenched open and still more rifles passed around. Rifles were exchanged and admired.

The sun toiled across the sky. Above the wavelets the steamy air was thick enough to bite. I dozed, watching them bustle.

The water cooled. The moon rose. Frogs made their early evening chucking noises. A giant damselfly pulled a big spider out of its web and bit it in half, dropping the head and legs and devouring the rest.

By the next day the visitors were again anxiety-free. In the morning they putt-putted back ashore in their small boat, and scooped and chipped away at the bank of rock. Fragments piled up and were sifted. The sifters complained.

Kay, reclining in the shade with her back to the work, looked entranced. “And I thought the Mississippi was something,” she mused to her companions, who kept working, pouring sweat. In the afternoon, everyone returned to the bigger boat and slept like lizards on the deck in the heat, heads or arms sprawled over one another.

I decided to spend more time on the bottom of the lagoon. I was alternately appalled and bemused by my need to spy. I got the sulks. I kept my distance.

Over the years I’d been continuously taken aback by the ingenuity with which I could disappoint myself.

I heard a splash.

Kay swam on her back away from the boat in my direction, cutting widening wake-lines into the sunlight above her. I watched her cruise by. I left the bottom, and swam on
my
back beneath her for a stretch, as if her reflection.

When she stopped, I sank lower into the murk. She turned, did somersaults; played, in some obscure way. Resting, she treaded water.

I ascended and drifted a talon into one of her kicking legs, which jerked upwards. I dove. She dove. Vegetative murk billowed up around us. She surfaced, and swam back to the boat. Suddenly ferocious, I followed. It was an exciting race, which I lost. She climbed a ladder out just ahead of my arrival.

Braced on the bottom in the ooze, I took the keel and uprooted it with both arms. Tons of displaced water surged and rocked. On the deck above, boxes slid and smashed and shinbones barked against wheelhouses.

I climbed up a convenient rope to give them a look. They each produced individualized noises of consternation. I made my peccary snarl and backhanded a lantern hanging on the rail into the water. Everyone held up their favorite rifle and I dove back in.