Wild Thing: A Novel (9 page)

“Ag, fuck!” Dylan says. While his mouth is still open, McQuillen slots his tooth back into his jaw, which he then holds shut.
^*

Dylan hums in pain.

“Stay closed now for a few minutes. Let it set.” McQuillen puts the earpieces of his stethoscope in. “Shh. I need to be able to hear.” He runs the stethoscope across Dylan’s back, then listens to Dylan’s chest and abdomen while using his other hand to feel for liver and spleen abnormalities. Turns the head of the stethoscope side-on to use as a reflex hammer up and down Dylan’s arms and legs.

It’s fun to watch. It’s the kind of routine that makes you wonder if you’ll ever be that expert at anything.

McQuillen prods Dylan’s spine and kidneys. “You’re going to need stitches in two or three places, and you’re going to need to stay here so we can watch you. Otherwise, you’ve gotten very lucky.” He pinches one of Dylan’s triceps,
^*
causing Dylan to squeal.

“What about the CT scan?” I say.

“What about it?” McQuillen says.

“Are you going to give him one?”

“I see no reason to. His jaw is intact, as are both zygomas—at least to an extent that would rule out surgical intervention. There’s no evidence of a LeFort or a suborbital. We’ve checked him for anosmia. He’s not visibly leaking CSF, which means he’s unlikely to require brain surgery. And as for hematomas, this one has a pretty hard head.” To Dylan he says “What hurts most right now?”

“My nose,” Dylan says through his teeth.

“See? We’ll need to check for renal injury, but I have a perfectly
good microscope. There are a lot of things you can tell about a patient without irradiating him, you know. In the nineteenth century, gynecologists operated blind.”

“I think the standard of care may have changed since then.”

McQuillen smiles. “Nobody likes a smart-ass, Doctor.”

“That’s right, Lionel,” Dylan says.

“As for you,” McQuillen says, “keep smoking meth. You won’t be a smart-ass for long. First you’ll be stupid. Then you’ll be dead.”

“I’m not smoking it.”

“You will be. Then you’ll be injecting it. I’ll give you some clean hypodermics before you go. No need for you to get hep C while you’re killing yourself with methamphetamine. I’m seventy-eight. I would appreciate it if you outlived me.”

Dylan rolls his eyes.

“What about C-spine injury?” I say.

“Not worried about it,” McQuillen says, in a condensation of a much longer discussion we then have.

“You’re at least going to do plain films.”

“I’d be treating you instead of the patient. Were you never in a scrap like this when you were young?”

“Not exactly.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. People barely act like physical beings now. Do you know what percentage of severe head injuries will cause a subarachnoid?”

“No.”

“Five to ten.
Severe
head injuries. And a fast-moving subdural will show signs in the next two hours. A slow-moving one isn’t going to show up on CT yet anyway.”

“And what if he
does
get symptomatic while he’s here? What are you going to do, drill a hole in his head?”

“Yes, actually,” he says. “Don’t worry, Dylan. It’s not going to happen. Doctor, you don’t worry either. If there’s one benefit to practicing medicine in these parts, it’s that you don’t tend to get sued.”

I go around to look Dylan in the face. “Dylan, Dr. McQuillen thinks it’s all right for you to stay here. My advice is to come with me to the emergency room in Ely.”

Dylan, still clenching his teeth, says “I think you’ve made that clear, dude.”

“Good, then,” McQuillen says. “Mr. Arntz, having been one my patients since approximately nine months before his birth, has chosen for now to remain one.” To Dylan he says “All this being predicated on your willingness to stay here for observation, of course. Do you think you can go two hours without doing meth?”

“I only did meth once,” Dylan says.

“What happened to twice?” I ask him.

“Thanks a lot, Lionel,” Dylan says. “I’m gonna need a cigarette, though.”

“You won’t get that either,” McQuillen says. “Deal or no deal?”

“Deal,” Dylan says.

To me Dr. McQuillen says “Would you care to sew him up while I do the urinalysis? I’m guessing microscopy wasn’t a large part of your medical school curriculum.”

He’s guessing right. “Sure.”

“Dylan, you know where the bathroom is. Sample cups are in the medicine cabinet.”

“Where’s the drill?” I say. “In case we need it while you’re gone.”

“Second drawer down. It’s a Black and Decker. Kidding, Dylan!
Although it is
,” he whispers to me as he walks past.

“Dude, he schooled you,” Dylan says, still without opening his mouth. I’m sewing his forehead closed, holding the skin together with tweezers.

“Say that again when we’re drilling through your skull.”

“You are one weird-ass doctor, man.”

“Uh huh.” So weird-ass I’m about to grill him for information. Before I have time to think about how sleazy that is, I say “So if that lake we passed wasn’t White Lake, where is White Lake?”

“It’s not near here.”

“I thought Ford was the closest town to it.”

“It is. But White Lake’s out in the Boundary Waters.”

“Out in the Boundary Waters where?”

“Way out. Few days, at least. Pends how fast you can paddle.”

“And what’s the deal with it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Violet and I are thinking of going there.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“It sucks.”

“Sucks how?”

I possibly say this with a bit too much interest. He goes quiet.

“Dylan?”

“I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

He fidgets, forcing me to stop sewing.

“What?” I say.

“Dude, if you’re some kind of cop, could we wait on the stitches till the real doctor gets back?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Come on, dude. I don’t know anything about that shit.”

“What shit?”

“The people who got killed. That’s what you want me to say, right?”

“The people who got
killed?
What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You brought it up.”

“Not people getting killed.”

I back away to look him in the face, but he avoids my eyes.

“I didn’t know them. They were older’n me,” he says.

“What happened?”

“Oh, come on, man. I don’t know.”

“What
might
have happened?”

“They got eaten. Okay?”

“They got
eaten?
”

“It’s this thing creatures do with their teeth.”

“Thank you for that. What did they get eaten
by?
”

But before he can tell me—or avoid telling me—McQuillen interrupts us from the doorway. “Doctor. If you’re not in the middle of a suture, I’d like a word with you alone.”

From his tone I’m worried McQuillen has found something in Dylan’s urine. But once we’re in the examining room across the hall—it’s empty, not even a table—it turns out he’s just furious.
“Doctor, if you’re going to behave like a moron, I would appreciate your not doing it in front of my patients.”

I’m relieved and embarrassed at the same time.

“You were asking Dylan about a monster in White Lake,” he says.

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Why?”

“I heard there was one. Now Dylan says there is.”

“Heard there was one from whom?”

“A guy named Reggie Trager.”

“Under what circumstances?”

I see no point to lying about it. “He sent a DVD about it to the man who hired me to come find out if the monster was real.”

McQuillen sags against the doorframe. “Oh, Christ. Not this again.”

“What do you mean?”

“And this time it’s
Reggie Trager
who’s publicizing it?”

“He’s running a tour for rich people who want to see the monster. What do you mean, ‘Not this again’? It’s happened before?”

McQuillen squints and stretches the skin of his face all around in a gesture of frustration. “Some people tried to organize a monster hoax in Ford a couple of years ago. Not a tour, as far as I know, just a rumor that a monster existed. They picked White Lake because it’s hard to get to and it isn’t on maps. The one smart thing about that plan.”

“What was the point?”

“Ford’s a mining town. In 2006, Norville Rogers Ford the Ninth or whatever he was sold the mine so he could buy real estate in North Florida. The company that bought it from him
shut it right down—their only interest in it was as a hedge in case high-hematite iron ever got expensive again. Which it won’t. The Chinese can strain ore out of dirt now. They’re not about to pay people in Minnesota to dig it out pure.

“All Ford has left is its position on the edge of the Boundary Waters. You can’t build waterfront anymore—Reggie’s place is grandfathered in—but you could probably convert the permit of the iron plant. And even if you couldn’t, there’s plenty of available space. Tourism is the only hope this town has. Some people thought that was worth lying for.”

“And Reggie was one of them?”

“I never heard that he was, although most of the town was involved in some way or another. I can tell you I never heard anything about Reggie leading a tour to White Lake.
That
I would have remembered. I’ve never even seen that boy in a canoe.”

“So what happened? Why didn’t the hoax take off?”

“A lot of fools put a lot of effort into trying to make sure that it did. But right before they were going to unveil their monster to the world, a couple of teenagers got killed out at White Lake in a boating accident. I don’t know if people saw it as some kind of divine punishment or they just felt it would be in particularly bad taste to launch a monster hoax right then, but the result was that people came to their senses, and the project was shelved.”

“Reggie’s got an unfinished documentary about the monster. There’s something called ‘The Dr. McQuillen Tape’—”

He shakes his head. “Of course there is. If you’ve seen it, you may have noticed that it’s of a pike eating a loon. Not a particularly big pike either. I did take that videotape. I certainly never
gave those idiots permission to use it, though, let alone for them to drag my name through any of this.”

“There’s also a man—”

“—who claims his leg was bitten off by the monster. Yes, I’ve seen that part as well. The documentary was being made for the hoax two years ago. Reggie probably hasn’t added to it at all.”

“So… what about that guy?”

“With the leg? If you believe his story, I suggest you write it up for the
New England Journal of Medicine
. I’m fairly certain it would be a first.”

“Do you know him?”

“If I did, and he was a patient, I wouldn’t gossip about him. But I will say this: I have never treated anyone for a bite wound from a lake monster. Now perhaps I can ask
you
a question. What the hell does someone who calls himself a man of science think he’s doing going on a tour to see a mythical being? Never mind that: I can see you have no good answer. What the hell are you doing encouraging Dylan Arntz’s fantasies about what happened to his friends out there two years ago?”