Wild Thing: A Novel

  “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. B
ut 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?”

  Like I have a good answer to that either.

  McQuillen says “I would appreciate it if you refrained. I have a telephone that I do sometimes answer. If you have other ludicrous questions, please hesitate to call me. If you find you can’t resist, I’ll try my best to answer them. In the meantime, I’ll walk you out. I can finish up with Mr. Arntz alone.”

  “Dylan, the visiting doctor is leaving,” Dr. McQuillen says as he ushers me past the examining room.

  “Bye, dude,” Dylan says with his jaw clenched.

  “Take care of yourself, Dylan,” I say. To McQuillen, I say “How’s his urine?”

  “Undefiled.”

  We get to the waiting room and both stop.

  Except for a lamp on the reception desk, all the lights are out.

  Violet’s gone.

  EXHIBIT D

  Ford, Minnesota

  Slightly earlier on Thursday, 13 September*

  Violet gets bored of hanging out in McQuillen’s waiting room, reading Time from six months ago and Field & Stream from who gives a shit. It’s not that she doesn’t sympathize with hunters: she understands people’s need to pretend the world’s still full of resource-intensive animals they can party-kill out of fucked-up rage, just like she understands people’s need to reenact the Civil War because they don’t like the way that turned out. The problem is that the two groups overlap so heavily.

  Violet’s pretty sure she remembers seeing a bar a ways down Rogers Avenue from Debbie’s Diner. McQuillen definitely mentioned one. And she’s pretty sure she can take a more direct route than Azimuth did driving here. Cut out some distance and avoid the restaurant at the same time. No reason not to walk.

  She uses the yellowing prescription pad on the receptionist’s desk to write Azimuth a note, which she leaves under the car keys. Turns the desk lamp on and the room light off so he won’t miss it.

  It’s gotten dark out, sliver moon over the lake but everything inland mostly blackness with occasional streetlights. The chill and the smell of woodsmoke remind her of Halloweens back in Lawrence. She can see her breath.

  She figures it’s about fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Which—the Fahrenheit part—pisses her off. Violet will never be able to instinctively judge temperatures in Celsius. She wasn’t raised to. And being raised without the metric system is like being raised with a harness on your brain.

  In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

  Whereas in the American system, the answer to “How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?” is “Go fuck yourself,” because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.

  Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, she should calculate the temperature using cricket noises. Because the equation she knows for that—like most equations she knows—is in metric.

  By cricket it’s ten degrees centigrade out. Which by conversion is fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

  It gets her off the porch. Whatever’s out there is better than thinking about this bullshit.

  Whatever’s out there is pretty damn eerie, though.

  Past the three-blocks-long fancy district, the number of streetlights drops off sharply. Most of the houses don’t have lights on either, and a lot of the ones that do have papered-over windows for no reason Violet can guess. The small boats in some of the driveways are mummified in blue tarps and chains, with the chains spiked to cement blocks. Everything she passes has a “FOR SALE” sign on it.

  For a while she can hear what sounds like a Tom Petty album playing somewhere ahead of her, but the source, when she reaches it, turns out to be the open front door of a house with all its lights off. Later, what seem at first to be red flares on the horizon resolve into the cigarette tips of a ring of people standing in the middle of the street, talking in murmurs.

  No reason for them not to be in the middle of the street, Violet supposes. There aren’t sidewalks here, just loud gravel shoulders, and she has yet to see a car.

  Still, she circles the smokers without alerting them, half expecting them to put their faces into the air and start sniffing for her.

  The bar turns out to be four blocks past Debbie’s. It’s called Sherry’s—raising the possibility, Violet supposes, that if she goes inside, a woman named Sherry will come after her with an ax. Worth the risk.

  Inside, it’s a deep, narrow space of dark wood and Christmas lights, with only four stools and two people: the bartender and, on the left-most stool, one customer.

  Both are males in their early thirties or so, which in Portland would make them hipster man-boys, but here means they’re grown men in practical haircuts who look like they’ve been through some shit. The bartender in particular has the electrocuted expression Violet associates with people who have been through rehab. The guy on the stool has the sloping back and lowered shoulders of a bear. They’re both big, and neither of them is leering.

  Violet likes the big guys. The little ones always want to resent-fuck her. It may explain why Dr. Lionel Azimuth, with the forearms and the laugh like a garbage disposal, makes her want to take her bra off.

  Or maybe nothing explains that.

  She takes the right-most stool. Says “Got any interesting beer?”

  “All beer is at least mildly interesting,” the guy on the other stool says.

  Violet couldn’t agree more. Beer is the perfect population-overshoot scenario: you put a bunch of organisms into an enclosed space with more carbohydrates than they’ve ever seen before, then watch as they kill themselves off with their own waste products, in this case carbon dioxide and alcohol. Then you drink it.

  “You mean like a hefeweizen or something?” the bartender says.

  “Maybe not a hefeweizen per se.”

  “I was just using that as an example.” He pokes through the refrigerator under the bar. “Doesn’t look too good. If you’re not from around here, you might find Grain Star interesting.”

  The guy on the stool raises his bottle. Cool retro label.

  “Sounds good.”

/>   “Grain Star it is,” the bartender says.

  “But what makes you think I’m not from around here?”

  Both men laugh. “Saw this place in the Michelin guide, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Violet says. “It was under ‘Bars in Ford that are actually open.’ ”

  The bartender spins two St. Pauli Girl coasters onto the bar and puts a pint glass on one and a bottle on the other.* The bottle steams water vapor when he opens it. “I don’t have St. Pauli Girl either,” the bartender says. “The coasters were here when I bought the place. I’m still going through them.”

  “Then we should use them up,” Violet says. “One more for the bartender, please.”

  “Thank you, but I’m a Diet Coke guy, myself.” The bartender raises his glass to show her, and Violet and the guy on the left-most stool lean to clink it with their bottles. Violet’s liking this place more and more.

  “Not bad,” she says after she’s swallowed. Not good, particularly, either. Grain Star is sweet, thin, and metallic, though she supposes it’s unusual enough that you could form an attachment to it if you did something fun while you were drinking it.

  Doesn’t seem too likely. Not unless Dr. Azimuth shows up and takes her to their hotel wanting to pull her hair from behind.

  Violet didn’t just think that. She belches. Says “Fuck’s the matter with this place?”

  The bartender and the guy on the stool trade glances. “There’s a couple good bars in Soudan you could check out,” the bartender says.

  “I’m not talking about the bar,” Violet says. “The bar’s great. I’m talking about the town.”

  “Oh, that,” the bartender says.

  “Right. Ford,” the guy on the stool says.

  “Yeah,” Violet says. “Ford.”

  The guy on the stool says “Personally, I blame the mayor.”

  “Most people do,” the bartender says.

  “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s something of a dickhead,” the guy on the stool says.

  “Who hangs out with even bigger dickheads,” the bartender says.

  “Who he makes look good by comparison.”