Wild Thing: A Novel (26 page)

She hears footsteps. A man coming down the narrow space between the water and the wall. Well dressed, good posture, expensive overcoat. Wingtips. Celia always notices wingtips, because her grandmother once told her they’re made to be durable, so men who wear them are cheap. Celia’s not sure anyone born after 1940 is aware of that, but still.

“Excuse me. You work here?” the man says. Smiling. Not out here for his car.

“I’m working right now,” Celia says.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

He stands with his hands at his sides, not too close, like he’s trying not to scare her. It makes her back crawl.

Celia remembers Lara, who taught her how to do all this, telling her
If it feels wrong, it is wrong. Get the fuck out of there
.

Like Celia has that luxury.

At least the man’s too well dressed to be a cop. An honest one, anyway.

“Why?” she says. “You need some work done?”

“I was thinking about it.” He turns to look out into the rain. “Do you have someplace we can go?”

“I got a van right over there. It’s clean. It’s nice. What kind of work were you thinking about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the man says. “Nothing too weird.”

Celia wishes just one of these creeps would say that what he wants
is
too weird. It would probably involve space aliens or something.

The guy says “You know: you blow me, I fuck you from
behind, maybe with a little choking, you call me John, I call you Sarah. You don’t act too Indian.”

“You’re in luck, John. My name
is
Sarah.” Celia checks it off on her fingers. “You want me to suck your cock, you want to do me doggy-style, and you want to choke me, and I keep the wigwam talk to myself.”

His eyes narrow, not sure if she’s making fun of him.

“It’s good you know what you like,” she says to reassure him. “Are we talking bareback?”

“Yes, on both. How much would you charge for something like that?”

“For double bareback with choking? Two sixty. Nonnegotiable. I got a kid.”

“Two
sixty?
”

“Up front, baby. Can’t take promises outside a casino.”

“Fine.” The man reaches inside his overcoat.

“Not here. We don’t want to get busted.”

She turns her back on him and runs to the van, holding her collar up against the rain. She’s wearing hooker shoes, and the jeans are ridiculous, but having her back to the man inspires her to move as quickly as possible. At the van she turns around. Says “All right. Show me.”

The man leans over to keep his flat European-style wallet dry while he counts, and to keep her from seeing how much is in there. “Two forty?”

“Two sixty.”

The bills are crisp and mealy, like they’re fresh from an ATM. Celia counts them and fans them up to the light. The rain causes blooms to form on them. She sticks them in her pocket.

“We’re good to go,” she says. “We’ve gotta be careful, though. Okay?”

“Fine. Let’s do it.”

“You know this is illegal, right?”

“Of c—” The man stops himself. “Why would you ask that?” he says.

“You do know this is illegal,” she says flatly.

For a moment she thinks the guy’s going to hit her. But instead he just turns and runs, splashing through puddles toward the front of the casino.

“Stop! BIA!” she says, pulling her badge and gun out of her jacket pockets. “You’re under arrest for soliciting on property patrolled by federal agents!”

He doesn’t stop. Whatever. The back door of the van’s already open, and Jim and Kiko—both Hispanic, like Celia—played football in college.

She watches them tackle the creep face-first into the asphalt. Sees no reason to go over and help with the arrest.

Jim and Kiko are in Asics and tracksuits. But in
these
shoes and pants?

Negro,
please
.

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

Sunday, 16 September–Wednesday, 19 September

We get kind of a late start.

Shortly before four in the morning Palin makes a speech in front of one of the cabins about adversity being whatever and Reverend John would have wanted and it’s a trial we’ve been given and so on. It’s actually kind of inspiring, mostly for its assumption that anyone other than Palin gives a fuck whether Reverend John Three-to-Sixteen-for-Soliciting, as Del and Miguel have started calling him, comes with us or not.

Afterward everyone’s strangely giddy but not all that psyched about waking up in two hours to go canoeing. So we end up not
pushing off onto Ford Lake until around noon—a slim ninety minutes before Reggie’s supposed to meet with Sheriff Albin. Someone’s problem, not my own.

The flotilla is eleven giant flat-bottomed canoes, with an early-twenties guide at the front and back of each. Where Reggie gets these kids, who all seem to know what they’re doing despite being from places like Santa Fe, remains mysterious. We passengers sit two to a boat in the middle, facing each other with our backs against tarped-down piles of camping shit.

Not once in three days do I end up sharing this inter-baggage space with Violet. Del’s dog is along with us even though Del and Miguel stayed back at CFS to run the outfitters, and she and Violet and Palin’s young relation Samsung form a pack on the first day. Violet and I sleep in the same small tent, so I get to spend six hours every night rock hard and breathing her in, but as we set up the tent for the first time, she says to me “Can we just, maybe, act like professionals?”

“Professional whats?” I say. Because apparently shit comedy is how I respond to stabbing feelings in my chest.
^*

“I don’t know. Professional Hardy Boys?”

Which only makes it worse.

The setups and teardowns are elaborate.
^*
I don’t know why I thought going into the woods would require less high-tech equipment than, say, golfing or designing race cars, but I was wrong. And this is a luxury cruise: Reggie’s guides are cooking three hot meals a day on white gas stoves. Freeze-dried courses out of Mylar bags, maybe, but these days you can get freeze-dried lobster bisque.

The guides, with their sun-blond forearm hair, also do all the portaging. At one point I have to relocate one of their shoulders. The guests aren’t even supposed to paddle, although once the guides decide they can trust us to at least not slow the boats down they let us, to fight the boredom.

I’m fine with that. There might be nine other people on this trip whose job it is to pay attention, but without an organized schedule—which not even Palin’s guards are on, because it’s too hard to sleep in the canoes—having that many eyes just gives you a sense of complacency. Which sets in fast: Palin’s guards don’t even find the meth camp we pass on the afternoon of the first day. Violet and Samsung and Bark do.

It’s small, but it’s near the trail, and Palin’s guards shouldn’t have missed it. Next to a modern octagonal tent there’s a wrecked wooden picnic table with one end on a tree stump and an organic chemistry setup across the top. Someone’s been bad about washing their glassware. On the other hand, they’ve managed to string a tarp overhead and get an industrial fan out here. The fan, leaning up against a tree, isn’t connected to anything but turns slowly in the wind anyway, Coke Zero bottles tied to its blades.

Inside the tent itself—besides body stench, three sleeping bags, and a whole lot of food wrappers—there’s an empty cardboard bullet box marked “7.62 x 39.” Like you’d use in an AK-47.

Nothing about this facility says it’s been vacated for any other reason than to wait till we’re gone. Palin’s guards are in favor of breaking all the cooking equipment to encourage the owners to go elsewhere, but my feeling is that we should live and let live, because pissing off a bunch of junkies who might have us in their sights right now seems like kind of a bad idea. Grody’s guards are with me on that. It’s like a convention for bodyguards, that clearing.

We end up leaving the meth camp intact, possibly because Palin’s guards are embarrassed about not finding it in the first place.

The whole incident reminds me of Dylan, and makes me wish I’d tried harder to find out what happened to him before we left Ford.

I’m not saying the trip isn’t scenic. Early on the third day a pair of actual otters schools the boat I’m in, corkscrewing to stay on their backs and smiling right at me like a pardon from God. From some of the hills we portage over you can see trees and water to the horizon in every direction. A few of the lakes are big enough to have whitecaps, and being on them in a fog feels like being part of a Viking invasion of Avalon. Here’s a campfire under a starry sky. There’s a field of flowers. Here’s some more fucking rocks and trees.

To be fair, there’s probably an aspect to the Boundary Waters you just don’t get when you’re in a group of forty-four people. There’s always a thumb on the lens, so to speak.

Palin seems as interested in avoiding me during the trip as I am in avoiding her, but she also seems to legitimately enjoy being outside, and to be a good sport about the incredibly minor deprivations that do come our way. Tyson Grody too. He bops all over the place.

Just about everybody seems to be in a good mood. People I meet by patching their blisters, like Mrs. Fick, or because we’re both pretending to urinate in the woods while setting waypoints on the handheld GPS recorders we’re not supposed to have, like Wayne Teng, I often end up sitting with for one or more legs of the trip. Barricaded in by the mounds of luggage, face-to-face
with no one else to talk to, you can’t help but learn a lot about someone.
^*

Mrs. Fick tells me a story she keeps saying she shouldn’t—with good reason, it turns out—but which I appreciate hearing. One of Palin’s guards tells me he and the others wear curly-tube earpieces because the tubes conduct sound from outside, so they don’t mute your ear. Then he tells me there’s a newer device that attaches
behind
your ear and transmits sound directly through your temporal bone, so it keeps your ear canal from being constantly eczematous from the curly-tube plastic, but it’s so expensive only
real
Secret Service guys get to use it. Which these guys aren’t. He even tells me the story of how he went from being in one category to being in the other, another thing I’m happy to listen to.

But the story that affects me most—and the one I spend by far the greatest number of hours reviewing later, in the hopes of figuring out what the fuck just happened to us—is the one Wayne Teng tells me on the morning with the otters.

Xinjiekou South Street, Beijing University

Beijing

Wednesday, 17 May 1989
^*

“Wild Thing”—the Troggs version. Teng Wenshu drops it onto turntable one and brings the volume up just as Link Wray bangs to an end. “Wild Thing” is an annoying song to play, because two minutes and thirty-four seconds later you have to play something else, but it seems appropriate. The world has lost its fucking mind.

Teng has today’s
People’s Daily
open on the mixing board,
and unless he’s dreaming, it’s filled with photos of the protesters in Tiananmen Square. He’s looking at a two-page spread of students from the Central Academy raising a forty-foot Goddess of Liberty statue opposite the portrait of Mao at the Jinshui Bridge.

Bracketing the photos—snaking through the entire giant edition—are articles about what an evil dickhead Mao was. The one Teng can see, about the Great Leap Forward, has the phrase “thirty million starved to death.”

To Teng, whose parents were theater actors in Beijing before the Cultural Revolution, and lucky-to-be-alive subsistence laborers in a television factory in Xiaoqiang after it, the fact that Mao was an evil dickhead isn’t news. Neither is the fact that students in Beijing are protesting, or that the rest of the city is supporting them. Tiananmen Square is six kilometers south of here. His roommates have been going every day.

But for the
People’s Daily
to admit shit like this? The
Daily
is the official newspaper of the Communist Party. It’s in homes in six hundred and fifty cities in China alone, and probably half that number again around the world. And yesterday you could have read it cover to cover with no idea that the protests—or the past forty years—had ever happened. Or that Mao was anything but a god.