Wild Thing: A Novel (4 page)

There are a few surprise empties lying around—he’s not claiming to
remember
last night, just to be able to reconstruct it from available evidence—but nowhere near so many cans as to indicate that he drank all the beer. And no way bears took it. Brisson has personally seen a bear drink beer from a bottle two-handed, but he knows they don’t like aluminum.

Brisson kicks through his tent and the rest of his shit, then goes back to check the canoe. Like there’s going to be a couple of six-packs in it that he somehow didn’t notice while he was fishing.

There aren’t, but the view from there reminds him of what he did with the rest of the beer.

He put it in White Lake.

Not like White Lake is really its own lake. It’s a dogleg off Lake Garner, separated by a spit of land that doesn’t even reach all the way across.

But neither is it the
same
lake. Brisson’s never seen fog on Lake Garner, for example, whereas White Lake seems to have it more often than not.
^*
And though Brisson’s never heard of a kid or even a dog drowning in Lake Garner, White Lake is some kind of death trap. White Lake is where Jim Lascadis’s six-year-old died, that poor motherfucker. Meaning Lascadis. Poor motherfucker of a kid, though, also. Jesus.

Lake Garner’s nice and White Lake’s a hellhole.

Except to store beer.

Brisson slip-slides down the White Lake side of the spit of land. The spit’s made mostly of roots, as if the scraggly-ass birch trees along its spine have eaten away all the dirt. The roots are slimy—cold, sharp, and rotten smelling.

But Brisson’s got to do it. It looks like he tied a bungee cord to the trunk of one of the trees and then tied the beer to the other end of the cord. But for some reason the bungee now runs taut from the tree trunk to the water—something’s snagged down there. He should be careful the six-pack or whatever it is doesn’t get shot at his face like a rubber band as it comes free.

Fuck
, though, the water is cold when his feet reach it. Brisson’s in his tighty-whiteys, which are now soaked and muddy, and probably torn, but he has no interest in taking them off. The idea of being entirely naked on this wall of thorny roots is frightening.

He sits and plunges his legs in up to the knees, then pulls them out again. The water’s so cold that he can feel the individual rivulets of it heading toward his groin.

Fuck that. He stands back up. Turns to face the wall and takes hold of the bungee cord like a rappelling line. So what if he gets clobbered by beer in the back of the head? Maybe it’ll kill him. Won’t be the worst thing that’s happened to him this week.

Brisson backs slowly into the water. The roots above the waterline were slimy, but the ones underneath are
mossy
and slimy. Standing on them is like balancing on rolling pins, particularly now that his feet are numb. In fact, before he’s taken half a dozen steps, Brisson’s feet fly out behind him and he flops, face-first, onto the spiny wall.

He bounces off from the pain. Retracts into a sideways fetal position, which feels like it does some more damage but at least gets his legs out of the freezing water.

His teeth are chattering. He looks down at his chest and stomach, expecting to see them gushing blood in a dozen places. But all he sees is mud and a few bright and leaky spots of opaque red. He tries to wipe away the mud to look at them, but this just ends up making a kind of blood/dirt paste. He gets a horrified premonition that he’s punctured his balls, and checks.

Intact. Like
that
matters.

But he’s alive, and now he has an idea. He climbs back up the roots like a ladder. Tries to untie the bungee, and when he can’t, goes back to his campsite and finds his Gerber knife. Cuts the bungee at the tree trunk and walks it halfway back down the slope to give it slack.

It works. Three six-packs, the bungee woven through the plastic rings that hold them together, bob to the surface. Hauling them up causes three or four cans to flip loose and either fall back into the lake or slip down between the roots, but there’s not much Brisson’s willing to do about
that
except say “fuck” a bunch
of times. As soon as he’s got the survivors in hand he pops one open and drinks from it. Figures this time he can use the Jim Beam for a chaser.

Then he’s sitting on the spine of the spit of land, leaning back against the tree, left leg on the White Lake side, right leg—significantly warmer, since it’s in the sun—on the Lake Garner side. Wishing he’d thought to get the Jim Beam before he sat down. Or brought it when he got the knife.

Where is the knife? He doesn’t really know or care. He wants to nap.

He

Brisson wakes up with a strong urge to twitch his left leg. Breathes in air that’s pure hot rotten fish, and chokes. Looks down.

His left leg, to mid-thigh, is in the mouth of a gigantic black snake stretching out of White Lake.

The snake’s rocky head is shaped like a piece of pie, with its eyes on the sides of the wedge like on an eagle’s. The pupils are vertical slits.

The snake’s teeth don’t look like snake teeth, though. They’re serrated triangles, with just their tips pressing into his flesh.

Right then and there Brisson pretty much loses his mind. He thrashes, and the snake hisses and bites down, snapping bone. Brisson’s body tries to throw itself down the other side of the spit, into Lake Garner and away from White Lake.

The snake doesn’t let him go. It raises its body partly out of the water to gain leverage.

It’s no snake. It’s got
shoulders
.

Whatever the fuck it is, it slowly moves its head side to side,
scissoring its teeth through what’s left of Brisson’s leg. Already blacking out, Brisson falls backward toward Lake Garner.

Which is essentially all he remembers until he wakes up in the hospital.

But fuck: he sure as hell remembers that much. Remembers it
clearly
.

And if you don’t believe him, he’s got something to show you.

Portland, Oregon

Still Monday, 13 August

The video pans down the front of the old man’s pants. His left leg is tied off in a stump. The video ends.

Rec Bill turns the lights back on.

“What do you think?” Rec Bill says after a moment.

My entire fucking skin is crawling with sharkiness. Bullshit though this guy’s story clearly is, it was brilliantly told. That old man wasn’t acting. Nobody can act that well. And if he was lying, which is the only other option, he’s perfect at it. He’s a full-on psychopath.

“About what?” I say.

“Wait. Read this,” Rec Bill says. He slides the padded envelope across to me.

I pull it off the table with my palm so it won’t be so obvious that my hands are shaking. Turn it over in my lap. There’s no postmark.

So much for not leaving fingerprints. I pull out a folded piece of paper: