Wild Thing: A Novel (31 page)

Palin herself has a
sword
.

Reggie Trager’s following the armada along the beach, coming toward me as he jumps up and down waving, yelling “Stop!”

I don’t see Violet anywhere. Or Frodo. I’ve chosen them and Wayne Teng’s brother to receive the other three doses of antipsychotic, Violet because she’s Violet, Frodo because she’s young, and Teng’s brother because he’s been through enough shit already. Right now the brother’s kneeling in one of the boats, staring ahead with his face slack.

Then one of Teng’s bodyguards points and shouts something that
has
to mean “Look! There it is!”

Because look: there it is. Even with the LSD starting to abate.

William the White Lake Monster.

Or, as it resembles from my angle and through the fog, three humps of ribbed black plastic vent hose, twenty inches or so wide, waving cheaply and being made to move across the lake by means you can’t see but can guess from the bubbles coming up through the water.

“WAIT,” Reggie says. “DON’T—”

“No!” Tyson Grody screams.

Everyone who can opens fire. It’s louder than the foghorn, or whatever that was.

The two rear humps go flying off, split open and flailing. Two gloved hands dart up from the water in a surrender motion, then jerk back under when a finger gets shot off.

The tourists and their various paid protectors keep shooting—even the ones in back, who don’t have a clear line of fire through the people ahead of them. Grody’s yelling and waving his hands in front of the people in his canoe, which is brave as fuck, but he’s got enough sense to stay too low to actually stop anyone.

People keep shooting even after a rowboat comes around the bend with Miguel and a couple of other guys standing in it like George Washington, pointing guns back at the tourists. At one point Palin hurls the sword, end over end. Not a bad arm on that woman.

“GOD DAMN IT, MIGUEL,” Reggie yells right next to me, just before Miguel and Co. release a single fusillade of bullets. Which, depending on whom you later believe, is aimed either at or above the heads of the people shooting at whoever was working the fake monster.

A silence comes down. Except for the sound of a dog barking: sure enough, Bark is swimming out toward Miguel’s boat. Intermittently visible through the fog, she looks a lot more like a lake monster than the tubing did. I don’t know why the people in the canoes hold fire.

For a moment, everyone but Grody, who’s crouched down weeping, remains standing. Then Wayne Teng bends abruptly at the waist and goes headfirst into the lake, and the counter-roll topples everyone else in his canoe off the other side.

I dive into the water. The cold makes me saner immediately,
though at surface level I can barely see through the fog. When I reach Teng, his bodyguards are struggling to keep his face above the water. I consider trying to get him up into one of the canoes, but that would be close to impossible—we’d just capsize another boat. I jerk my thumb toward shore and start to pull Teng with me.

“Call for a MedEvac! Don’t let anybody drown!” I yell, like there’s someone who’s going to listen to this and act on it.

I try to find where Teng’s been shot. It isn’t difficult: blood’s pumping out of his lower left pelvis like a Jacuzzi nozzle, hard enough to break the surface of the lake. If it’s coming from the iliac artery, which it probably is, he’s got almost no chance. The artery’s elastic, and the severed ends you’d have to pull back together are probably retracted into his chest and calf by now.

I push into the wound with one fist, using my other hand to support his weight. As I kick us toward the shore, I try to ignore the fact that when water sluices into Teng’s mouth, he doesn’t choke or blink his eyes.

Then, when we’re about twenty feet from the beach, the real White Lake Monster rips into Teng from behind me, and tears him out of my arms.

White Lake / Lake Garner

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

Still Thursday, 20 September

Karl Weick, the organizational psychologist:

A
cosmology episode
occurs when people suddenly and deeply feel that the universe is no longer a rational, orderly system. What makes such an episode so shattering is that both the sense of what is occurring and the means to rebuild that sense collapse together…. [So that people think] I’ve never seen this before. I have no idea where I am, and I have no idea who can help me.

I believe Violet Hurst described it as someone taking a dump on your conceptual framework.

The creature that slams past me in White Lake, swiping me with its slimy leather skin as it drives Teng under water and out of sight, then slapping me with something that feels a fuck of a lot like a tail, does exactly that. It turns me inside out, so that now the nightmare is on the outside.

But here’s the thing: in nightmares I never break down, because whatever awful thing I’m looking at seems normal. It’s only in real life that I wake up screaming and have panic attacks that hit like seizures.

Now that real life
is
the nightmare world, I find myself just calmly treading water. Looking in the direction Teng’s body was carried off, thinking,
If that thing wants to eat me, it will. Not much I can do about it
. Or maybe that’s the antipsychotic.

“Teng Wenshu! Teng Wenshu!”
Teng’s bodyguards are calling out. Then, after a while,
“Teng Shusen!”

Teng’s brother answers from over near the beach. Reggie’s guides have triumphed again, keeping everyone who ended up in the lake alive and herding them back toward land. We all come onto the rocks together like we’re evolving from the sea, water streaming from our heavy clothes.

The cold is sharp. “Hey,” I shout. “Reggie gave us all LSD. If anybody didn’t drink the coffee, or just doesn’t feel fucked up, take charge of whoever you’re with. Everybody wet needs to get dry as soon as possible. If anybody’s got benzos, now’s the time to share them.”

Reggie’s farther down the beach, helping Miguel’s boat land with Del in it, Bark shaking water off her coat. Reggie looks at me and looks away. I’d ask him if I’m right about the coffee, but I wouldn’t trust any answer he gave me.

“Who’s got a satellite phone?” I say.

“I’m taking care of it,” one of Palin’s bodyguards yells back, phone to his ear. The canoe he’s in is still on its way to the beach. Palin’s kneeling in the prow, barfing.

I prepare a shot of Anduril for Teng Shusen, but decide at the last moment to give it to one of his bodyguards instead. Teng Shusen isn’t freaking out, just looking around confused, and maybe it’s better that someone capable of taking care of him be the one thinking clearly.

The other two canoes reach shore. Violet and Froghat aren’t in either of them, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t in the one that spilled, so I run back to the campsite calling their names. They’re huddled together in the tent I’ve been sharing with Violet.

LSD in the hot chocolate too. Nice, Reggie.

I inject them both. Go back to the boat with the outboard to check on Del.

Del’s got his right hand under his left arm. Not just because he’s had a finger shot off, I realize when I pry his arm away, but because a bullet has grazed his left side, opening up Neoprene, skin, and bright yellow fat. Blood runs down the side of his wetsuit in a pink wash. It’s a miracle he wasn’t shot up worse.

Miguel hands me a towel without my asking for it, then holds it in place for me as I reposition Del to keep both wounds above his heart. “Find some more of these,” I say, meaning the towels.

“Fuck off, Bark,” Del says, the first words I’ve heard from him. The dog keeps licking his face as if to wake him up.

When I stand, my muscles are like sand from the Anduril.

“I know,” Reggie says, holding his hands up defensively.

“You have no fucking idea.”

Sarah Palin doesn’t say goodbye. I barely catch sight of her before she leaves. One of her guards puts her in her tent and stands in front of it, while the other two hack at tree limbs with their tactical knives like the druid in Astérix. They basically seem to have gone insane, but ultimately they assemble the branches into a grid held together by plasticuffs, and when Palin’s Sikorsky lands on Lake Garner it uses the grid as a ramp to nudge onshore.

Did Palin’s bodyguards call for her evacuation before they called the paramedics? All I know is that Palin and her group, which has somehow come to include Grody and
his
group, and even the fucking
Ficks
—like perhaps the Ficks aren’t just sour rich people who like clothes from Costco and shooting things, but also host fund-raisers in their castle—are gone before the Parks and Rec rescue Seawolf shows up in the sky. Let alone the Piper Cub with Sheriff Albin in it.

I don’t try to keep them around. I’m not sure how I would, and anyway I believed them when they said they didn’t see anything. It was foggy as hell, and everyone was bananas.

Albin’s not too happy about it, though. In fact, he’s got an attitude like maybe he, or Violet and I, should have done more, or at least something, to prevent all this from happening.

In movies, cops always put you on the tailgate of an ambulance after shit like this, with blankets and coffee for the crane shot. Albin sends everybody
else
off to various jails and hospitals, but keeps Violet and me—and Bark, who’s somehow become our responsibility—around, yelling questions at us between his radio calls to Bemidji. Doesn’t get us a plane ride back to Ely for hours, and even then has a deputy meet us at the
dock and make sure we check into the Ely Lakeside Hotel so we’ll be available later on.

Once the deputy leaves, I bribe the Lakeside’s courtesy van driver to take us to CFS so we can pick up our car.

“You don’t want to just wait?” Violet says.

“First I want to get Bark back to CFS.” Right now the dog’s tied up on the putting green, and I know freeing her will soften Violet up.

“What comes after first?”

Maybe it
is
possible to get to know me.

“Supposedly the Ojibwe have known about the thing at White Lake for years,” I say. “They’ve painted it and they have a name for it: the Wendigo. So I want to talk to a fucking Ojibwe.”

Chippewa River Reservation

Still Thursday, 20 September

“Let me explain why that’s so offensive,” Virgil Burton of the North Lakes Ojibwe Tribes says.

We’re seated across from him at a low-rise cafeteria table for children in the lunchroom of the community center. I don’t recall ever being small enough to fit at a table like this.

“It’s not that white people talk about First Nations people being magical,” Burton says, “although that
is
kind of moronic when you look at what’s happened to us. It’s that white people don’t
bother
to look at what’s happened to us. They’d rather look at the teepees. And the Wendigos.”

It’s embarrassing as fuck.

“The First Nations had
societies
,” Virgil says. “I’m not talking about Robin Hood camps in the wilderness. I’m talking about
civilizations
. Before Columbus got here, one in four people on Earth lived in the so-called New World. Tenochtitlan was the biggest city on Earth. We had books, and governments, and courts of law, and the best armies in existence. When Hernández and de Grijalva attacked the Maya, the Maya kicked their butts. The Aztecs kicked Cortez’s butt in 1520. A year after that the Florida killed Ponce de León. Then European smallpox hit, and ninety-five percent of the indigenous population died. Which the Europeans pushed to ninety-seven percent through slavery and extermination.

“After
that
, of course, this place was wide open. Domesticated crops and animals everywhere the Europeans looked. Gold that was already mined. Do you know how much Pizarro’s first shipment of stolen gold back to Europe was worth?”

We shake our heads.

“Four times as much as the Bank of England. But
white people
, if you’ll excuse the expression, want to romanticize the way the survivors lived
after
that. Like First Nations people
wanted
to be wandering tribes ruled by warlords and living in the woods. We didn’t
want
that. That was forced on us by the white man. Those were our
Dark Ages
. But you people would rather talk about shamans, and spirit guides, and the nobility of the simple life. Of course it was the simple life: the whole world had ended.”