Wolf Point (14 page)

“So you’re thinking,” T said, “something like: Monday morning we all get up bright and early and go find a bank in
town. I make arrangements to have forty thousand wired to me. And then what? I give you the money and you and Jenny take off for Chattanooga? How? You want me to give you the Rover too?”

“Actually,” Lester said. “I was actually hoping you’d part with fifty or sixty thousand. That’d give me and Jenny a little something to get our lives back together with after we paid back the forty.”

“Fifty or sixty thousand.”

“How much is that to a rich guy?” Lester asked. “I mean, is that a whole lot of money?”

“And this is a loan, of course.”

“Like I said…”

Lester seemed to have forgotten about fishing. His line dragged behind the boat, as did T’s. They watched each other in silence while the boat drifted toward a big island close to the center of the river. A small section of a shingled roof was visible above the island’s tree line.

“Let’s say I get you fifty thousand,” T said. “And let’s say we make some sort of arrangements for transportation, since I’m assuming you don’t want to hitchhike with a bag full of money. Then what you’re saying is: you and Jenny would go your way, and I’d go mine? Is that right? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Lester turned his attention to his fishing pole, reeling in the line before setting the pole down beside him, as if all pretext of fishing was over. “I might could try to talk Jenny into staying,” he said, “if that makes a difference. I mean, I know she’s
got a thing for you. The only reason she’d want to go at all is to put her stuff back together at home. I mean, my understanding is she’s got a thing for you. That’s right, isn’t it? You two hit it off?”

“Before she what?” T said. “Before she came back to Virginia with me?”

“That’s all Jenny,” Lester said. “I got nothing to say about what Jenny does.”

“Fifty thousand is a lot of money,” T said. “I’m not that rich.”

“Sixty thousand be better,” Lester said.

T said, “You think that’s something Jenny’s considering? Coming with me?”

“I don’t know,” Lester said. “It could be. She’s got a house in Chattanooga. She tell you about that?”

“She told me it got wrecked by bikers. You didn’t mention anything about bikers, did you?”

“That’s Short Willie.” The boat drifted into the shadow of the island, and Lester leaned over the side to look past T. Beyond a rocky promontory, the island curved gently inward to a stretch of narrow beach. He leaned over the outboard, tilted the engine, and locked it in place with the propeller out of the water. “His crew’s about eight guys,” he continued, “but they’re hooked up with bikers’cross the country. It’s like a big crank conglomerate.”

T watched the island come up at them. The house on the other side of the trees was completely hidden. The sky had
turned a creamy blue with only a few scattered clouds to block the sun. “You do crank?” he asked.

“Rarely. Stuff’ll kill you in a heartbeat.”

“What about Jenny?”

Lester looked at him as if he were out of his mind. “Look,” he said. “Jenny’s got it all over most people. How much she tell you about herself?” He cast an annoyed glance at T, as if frustrated at having to talk to him about Jenny. “She was doing fine,” he said, “till her mother blew her father away. She tell you that? Woman put a shotgun in her husband’s mouth and pulled the trigger. Turned the back of his head into tomato paste.”

“Colorful,” T said.

“You think so? Did Jenny tell you she practically paid for the whole trial herself?”

“She mentioned—”

“Jenny’ll talk about the way men look at her; she’s got this ability to peg a guy dead-on after one look. It’s unbelievable. Do you understand what I’m saying? People, because of where she comes from, they miss how special the girl is. They don’t get Jenny, most people.”

Beneath them, the water was rapidly growing shallow. The bottom vegetation, long fields of green weeds and thin clouds of moss, wavered in the watery light. The island, thick with skinny pine trees and tangled scrub, loomed up over the boat, blocking any view of the river beyond it. Without explanation, Lester took off his pants and jumped acrobatically out of
the boat feet first into the water, which came up to his chest, soaking his T-shirt. “Son of a bitch,” he said. He looked shocked.

T said, “Water’s usually deeper than it looks.”

“Thank you,” Lester said. He took off his shirt and tossed it sopping into the boat.

“Any particular reason you’re in the water?” T asked.

Lester went around to the bow without answering. He took the bow line in hand and pulled the boat behind him as he waded to the beach. The sandy part near the shore was at most a foot or two deep, and when the bow was up against it, T stepped out and helped Lester pull the boat out of the water, up into the scrub.

“Son of a bitch,” Lester said again. He took off his underwear and wrung it out, water pouring in a stream out of the tiger’s mouth, then laid it on a rock in the sun and sat down on the sand with his knees up. Except for a slight paunch, he was built thick and solid, with the kind of biceps and chest and shoulder muscles that only came from lifting weights. A colorful tattoo of a Bengal tiger prowling a green forest covered a good portion of his right shoulder blade. “You should pull in your line,” he said, gesturing toward the back of the boat.

T looked behind him, in the direction of the house, and decided it was probably empty at this time of year, as were most of the vacation houses on these islands after Labor Day. He took his pole from the boat and sat next to Lester. “You must think,” he said, “that you’ve really stepped in shit, Lester.”

“Why’s that?” Lester said, suddenly pensive, barely interested in T.

“Here you are one day, broke, hitchhiking with your girlfriend; the next day, you’re talking to some asshole with money actually seems to be considering giving you fifty thousand dollars. In cash.”

“Sixty,” Lester said. “Jenny’s not my girlfriend.”

“But I am an asshole with money.”

“You said it, dude.”

“Why should I give you fifty grand, Lester? Really?” He started slowly pulling in line. Virtually all of the reel had played out.

“For Jenny’s sake,” he said. “Girl’s been through a nightmare the last few years.” Lester turned to look at him. “How much she tell you about her mother?”

“All she said was the murder. I didn’t ask for details.”

Lester turned back to the river and was quiet a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. “Jenny’s whole family,” he said, “is her mother and father and two uncles. That’s the whole thing. The grandparents are dead, no cousins or anything like that. Then her uncle—the guy whose guitar it was, the one we got with us—he drowned himself in the lake. That was like the beginning. Jenny was close to him. A couple of years after that, her mother kills her father. Then they send her mother away for life without parole, this after Jenny put everything she had into trying to save her from that. Probably did save her from the death penalty.”

“I don’t doubt any of that,” T said. He had stopped reeling in line. “I think she’s an extraordinary girl.”

“She’s got a body to die for, don’t you think?”

T went back to slowly reeling in line.

“That was actually a kind of sick joke,” Lester said.

“What was?”

“Came out during the trial,” he said, “that her mother killed her father because of her, because of Jenny.”

T stopped reeling again. He put the pole down between his legs.

“Turned out her uncle, Chuck, guy whose cabin this is, been taking pictures of Jenny from the time she was a baby. I’m talking three, four years old.”

“What do you mean by pictures?”

“You know what I mean,” Lester said. “I’m not talking about family snapshots.”

“From the age of three or four?”

“Jenny says long as she can remember, he’d get her alone, give her some present. She didn’t know. He’d tell her to take off her clothes, what did she know? When she got to be older, it was just…Uncle Chuck. She liked the presents.”

“So this went on…?”

“Till she was fifteen, sixteen.”

“And only the pictures?”

“Far as I know.”

T picked up the pole again and looked out at the water a while before continuing to reel in line. “And what—” he asked
after thinking a moment. “What did that have to do with her mother killing her father?”

“Sick shit,” Lester said. He picked up a rock off the beach and skimmed it over the water. “Babs found the pictures, shit-loads of them, in the basement with all the rest of Johnny’s porno.”

“This is her parents?” T said. “Babs and Johnny?”

Lester nodded. “Come out during the trial, though, that Johnny wasn’t Jenny’s real father. It was some other guy; no one knew.” He paused, as if remembering something, then added, “Well, Johnny knew. He married her anyway, when she was knocked up with this other guy’s kid.”

“But Jenny didn’t?”

Lester shook his head. “That cleared up a whole lot of questions, though—since no one could ever figure out how an ugly character like Johnny Cross could ever have anything to do with a girl looks like Jenny. Or even Babs, who was gorgeous before she put on like a hundred extra pounds.”

“So she found the pictures and just went and got the shotgun.”

“Exactly.” Lester pointed to T’s line, which had suddenly grown taut. “You snagged on something?”

“Looks like it,” T said. He tugged at the line, and it gave a little.

“Babs testified she saw the pictures and imagined him jerking off over Jenny, went and got the shotgun, found him sleeping, stuck the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

T yanked back hard on the fishing pole, intending to either free the snag or snap the line. He was surprised when the pole jerked back with several hard snaps in succession, pulling line off the reel in short squeals.

“Sum’ bitch,” Lester said. “You got something.”

T yanked at the pole, hoping the line would snap, but the creature on the other end yanked back harder, bending the pole in a near U. “What test is on here?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Lester said. “Why? You worried it’ll snap?”

“I wish.” T stood and put his whole body into pulling back on the pole. “It’s an eel,” he said. “I hope there’s a knife in that tackle box.”

Lester got up and reached into the boat for the tackle box. He seemed to have forgotten he was naked as he bent over and mooned T. “How do you know it’s an eel?” He came up from the tackle box with a filleting knife in hand.

“Look at the way the line is twisting.” He gestured toward the water, where the line was spinning in tight circles as T reeled it in.

“Can you eat eels?”

“Not these,” T said. He and Carolyn had caught several of the long, snake-like creatures on their fishing trips. They were notoriously toxic from all the chemicals scrounged off the bottom of the lake. Signs were posted at all the boat ramps warning against eating them.

“How come?” Lester waited with his hands on his hips. He watched the water with fascination.

“They’re bottom-feeders,” T said. “They’re full of garbage.”

T jumped back away from the eel as he yanked it out of the water and onto the sand. It was unlike any eel he had ever seen. Rather than the long, snake-like creature he was familiar with, this eel was short, not much more than a foot, and thick, a good four or five inches at the head, tapering down to an inch or less. Its skin was the color of wet sand, and it had two otherworldly pink eyes. “God, that’s disgusting,” T said as the eel frantically spun and twirled on the beach, making a mess of the fishing line.

Lester knelt alongside it with the filleting knife. When he tried to hold it with one hand so he could cut the line with the other, it spun so violently that it leaped onto his knees, spinning over his crotch and onto his stomach before he could jump away from it. “Son of a bitch,” he said. The eel had left a thick layer of slime everywhere it had touched him. He tried to wipe it away with the back of his hand. “It’s all over me,” he said. Then he stepped on the eel, holding it still long enough to cut the line close to the hook before he kicked it back into the water, where it instantly disappeared. “Thing looked like a big corkscrew,” he said.

T said, “Looked like the slug from hell.”

Lester took his wet T-shirt from the boat and waded out into the water. “You see those pink eyes?” He wiped at the slime with his shirt and then held it to his nose. “Stinks,” he said.

T slid his pole under a thwart and then went around to the bow to push the boat back into the lake. “I’m ready to go.”

Lester grabbed the boat by the transom and pulled it the rest of the way into the water as T leaped into the bow.

“How come I do all the hard work?” Lester said, retrieving his tiger underwear from its rock.

“Because I’m the old guy,” T said.

Lester said, “You think that’s it?” He waded out into the water again and then pulled himself into the boat, where he dropped the engine down and squeezed a rubber bulb attached to a hose that ran from a red gas container.

“Or it could be because I’ve got the fifty thousand you want,” T said.

“Sixty,” Lester said, and then started the engine with a single pull on a black cord.

At the back entrance to the cabin, T stopped a minute and watched Lester drifting a few feet out from the shore, standing upright in the boat and casting his line toward the rocks with what looked like intense concentration. He was barefoot and shirtless, wearing only his jeans. From where T looked down at him, with a frontal view, in bright sunlight, he appeared boyishly innocent, his hair wet and pulled back, his chest and arms muscled and almost completely hairless. From the back, T imagined, with his long hair pasted against his neck and the orange Bengal tiger prowling the green woods of his shoulder blade, he’d cut a different picture.

It was obvious to T, when Lester dropped him off on the rocks and told him he wanted to fish a little more, that he was
intentionally being left alone with Jenny, and he felt anxious now as he was about to enter the cabin. He felt as if he and Lester had negotiated a deal and now he was here to sign the contract—though in fact they had agreed upon exactly nothing. They hadn’t said another two words to each other on the trip back across the lake, and Lester had dropped him off with a simple “I’m going to fish a little more.” Still, he felt as though something had changed, as though Jenny were his for the taking now, and he hesitated outside the cabin. He imagined her in bed, still warm from the bath, waiting for him, and the thought made him flush a little as he recalled the image of her throwing off the quilt and walking naked away from his bed, that shock of blond hair bouncing over a catlike harmony of muscle and skin—and there was something more than that, more than her body alone, her youth alone, that he could feel pulling at him. It was as if, when he was with her, with Jenny, there was something in the interaction that made him feel… He couldn’t find the words for it. And maybe it wasn’t even that she made him feel it but only that she made him feel the possibility of it. She made him feel… comfortable, or at ease, or maybe just more human. Whatever it was, he realized it was something he hadn’t felt in a long time—and that thought, that he hadn’t felt that way in a very long time, seemed somehow dangerous.