The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten Read online

  I ditched the loser bag-boy at the security line, not even bothering to thank him—no incentive, when I’d never see him again—and breezed through the gates without being groped or bombarded with radioactivity. Having translucent skin as pale as milk (or “the color of lutefisk,” as one of my Minnesotan relatives had memorably said once, shudder) is an advantage in a world of scary foreign terrorists, even with brown hair and eyes to go with the paleness; I don’t look dangerous at all. Which just goes to show how much faith you can put in looks.

  Once I got to the gate, I upgraded my flight to first class—it was on Miranda’s credit card, and she’d never notice. She didn’t even look at her statements when they came in the mail, just threw them in a pile for a year and then shredded them. I got on board as soon as the jetway opened, took my seat and my complimentary beverage—I didn’t bother trying to get booze, because alcohol doesn’t do much for me, just takes the edge off the world—and frowned when a businessman sat down beside me. First class was booked solid. Disappointing. Fortunately, the doughy man paid me no attention—gay, probably—and to my surprise he opened his briefcase and took out a book, of all things, not even a Kindle or an iPad, but a big fat hardcover printed on actual paper. There was no dust jacket, but I could read the title: The Historian. Bleah. Who’d want to read about a stupid historian? Or about anything, for that matter, apart from the occasional book of useful non-fiction? Why read about other people’s imaginary lives when you could have a real life of your own?

  I took out the MP3 player I’d stolen from Dwayne, my mother’s boyfriend. Dwayne was dreadful, in his late thirties and at the tail end of a career as an arena football player, which was the kind of football you played when you’d never been good enough for the real game or just weren’t good enough anymore. Despite being a cliché jock, Dwayne went to a lot of rock shows and thought he was hip, but there was nothing on his iPod from the past fifteen years, just a lot of grungy alterna-junk from the ’90s. Oh well. Better than listening to the mooing and lowing of the other passengers getting on board and shuffling to their cramped coach seats, to travel in discomfort and misery and empty-headedness like the livestock they were.

  I put in the earbuds, scrolled through Dwayne’s playlists—they were named things like “Rockin Good” and “Brutal Jams” and “Break Shit”—until I found something that looked promising. I closed my eyes, listened to some classic rock band called Soundgarden sing about how they were feeling Minnesota, and began the journey into the rest of my life. Once we started taking off, I considered looking out the window to see the world drop away, shrinking until all the people bustling around the tarmac looked like ants, but I didn’t bother. That’s pretty much what people look like to me most of the time anyway: ants.

  PHENOMENOMENON

  NARRATOR

  “It was one of them unexplainable phenomenomenons,” Gunther said, swaying a little on his customary stool at the Backtrack Bar, while Ace the bartender ignored him. Gunther had forgotten his resolution to keep quiet about what he’d seen in the woods, which didn’t matter much, because no one paid any attention to him anyway, so he embellished. “Red eyes he had, and fangs as long as ice axes, and he tore that deer to pieces. Completely to pieces. Nothing left but red sludge, like cherry pudding.”

  “Never heard of cherry pudding,” Ace said, flipping channels on the TV, though one station full of fuzzy snow looked more or less like another to Gunther’s untrained eye.

  “It’s pudding,” Gunther told Ace, or maybe his beer, since that’s what he was looking at most intently. “But cherry-flavored. Maybe I should’ve said ‘blood pudding.’ Since there was so much blood?”

  “What’s this about blood?” The town’s head (and very nearly only) cop Harry Cusack eased onto the stool next to Gunther, who grunted a greeting. Harry was all right. He’d been known to lock Gunther up for drunk and disorderly, but he always let him go after he’d dried out, and true, he made you clean up your own puke if you let loose in the cell, but he’d give you a cup of coffee afterward to clear out the taste. “Don’t tell me you witnessed a crime, Gunther, because I can’t think of anyone in the world who’d be a worse witness than you, officially speaking.”

  “A blind deaf-mute, maybe,” Ace said. “With a felony conviction and a history of mental illness.” He paused. “Or that boy Clem who works over at the Half Good Grocery for Dolph, he’s dumber than a bag of hog snouts.”

  “But if you did see something,” Harry said, putting a companionable arm around Gunther’s shoulders, “I’d be pleased to hear about it. My daughter’s coming into town tonight to stay with me for a while, and if there’s a criminal element hanging around, I may as well clean it up before she gets here.”

  “No crime,” Gunther muttered. “Unless killing a deer with your bare hands is a crime.”

  “Maybe animal cruelty, depending. And killing animals is part of the homicidal triad, you know, indicative of a budding serial killer, right along with bedwetting and setting fires.”

  “You’d think with a name like ‘homicidal triad’ that actually committing homicide should be one of the three,” Ace said, to general lack of response. Some bartenders stood there, not paying any attention, as their regulars babbled on about this and that. Ace was pretty much the opposite.

  “So when and where and who was this?” Harry said, peeling the label off his bottle of Krepusky’s Red Ribbon Beer.

  Gunther marshaled all his mental powers and attempted recollection. He wasn’t a stupid man, not at all; he was just an extremely drunk man, and it was his grave misfortune that stupid and drunk were often indistinguishable even from a very slight distance. “Yesterday, ’round about twilight, out near my place. Don’t know who. Some fella, maybe seventeen, eighteen. He didn’t look like anything special, but he moved fast as a greased pig with a lightning bolt up his ass.”

  “That’s pretty fast,” Harry allowed.

  “He jumped on the deer, and it was like a bird of prey falling out of the sky and landing on a little bunny rabbit or something. Just bite, tear, rip. When the fella saw me looking, he ran away.”

  “Hmm,” Harry said. “I reckon you ate the deer? Turned my evidence into steaks and jerky?”

  “Uh,” Gunther said, and Harry sighed.

  “That’s all right. Keep your eyes open, though, and if you see that fella around, let me know? Somebody who’d run down and kill a deer bare-handed… I’d say that at least warrants a friendly conversation.”

  “You missed the part where he said the guy was some kind of supernatural wolfman dracula monster,” Ace said. “With red eyes and big teeth and who knows whatall else.”

  “Hmm,” Harry said, and drummed his fingers on the bar. “Well, that’s all right. What good’s a story if you don’t gussy it up a little to make it even better?” Harry laid his money on the bar, and Ace pushed it back to him, a little ritual Gunther had witnessed with jealousy a million times—he damn sure paid for his drinks, and sometimes Ace got a wild hair and wouldn’t even sell him any booze, let alone go giving it away—and told Gunther to stay out of trouble.

  “Another whiskey,” Gunther said, after ascertaining that enough of his Army pension money remained in his wallet to justify the extravagance of whiskey you drank inside a warm bar instead of a cold fishing shack.

  “Only if you promise not to tell any more stories about pudding,” Ace said. “You’re making me hungry.”

  “You really want me to go tromping around the woods, what, looking for tracks or something?” Stevie Ray said. He was Harry’s assistant and the only other employee of the Lake Woebegotten Police Department, though he was only a part-timer, and in his other job as back-up bartender and sometime bouncer at the Backtrack Bar, he’d become very well acquainted with Gunther Montcrief. “On the say-so of the most notorious drunk in town?”

  “I take your point, but Gunther doesn’t usually tell wild stories.” Harry propped his feet up on the big desk. “He usually tells old stories
about the combat he’s seen and the women of negotiable virtue he met during his years stationed in the Pacific, but this? This is new. If there’s a feral fella running around the woods eating deer, don’t you think we should know about it?”

  Stevie Ray sighed and pulled on his earflap hat. He went outside and walked around the back of the police station—which was more a general-purpose civic building that happened to have a jail cell in it—and took a moment to breathe the autumn air. Tomorrow was the first day of September, and winter would be along a month or so after that. Stevie Ray tried to live in the moment, but it was hard not to think about what the future might bring.

  After making sure he was alone, which wasn’t too difficult in a town as small as Lake Woebegotten, he took out his cell phone and scrolled through the contacts to a name that just read “Dr. S.” He waited a moment, then said, “Hey, doc, Stevie Ray here. I just thought you should know, somebody saw one of your boys running down a deer out by the lake.”

  He listened a moment, then sighed. “It matters because it was the part of the lake by the Ojibwe reservation. You don’t want to upset the Woebegotten Band—” Another pause to listen. “Well our witness didn’t say anything about the hunter being hairy, and was pretty specific about it just looking like a normal fella apart from the super-speed and whatnot, so no, I don’t think it was one of the boys from the rez. If it wasn’t one of yours, then who? Don’t tell me there are other—no. Okay. No, I don’t know which one it was, probably Edwin or Garnett, if it’d been Hermet the witness probably would have mentioned the fella was the size of a grain silo. Just have a talk with them, okay, before I hear from Mr. Noir? I don’t know how I got roped into being the go-between and peacemaker between you… Ha. Yes, all right, I’m a peace officer, fair enough. So help me by keeping things peaceful.”

  He closed his cell phone and sighed again, this time just for his own benefit, because if you couldn’t feel sorry for yourself once in a while, where was the pleasure in life? He trudged around the building toward where his truck was parked by the curb. He’d have to go wander around in the woods for a while now, just to keep up appearances for Harry.

  Ordinary people like me shouldn’t have to mess around with folks like the Scullens, he thought. The ones on the other side—the few elders on the reservation who knew the secret of the Scullens, and had secrets of their own—were bad enough, but at least they were human most of the time. The Scullens were never human at all anymore. Really made a guy want to pause and reflect on how his life had gotten to this point, maybe wish things had gone a different way, but oh well. If wishes were horses, beggars would eat.

  IMITATIONS

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  I got off the plane in Minneapolis and went to the baggage claim, where I made a great show of almost falling over while attempting to haul my bag off the carousel. On cue, a couple of frat boy types jumped in to help me carry them. Nobody likes to see a pretty girl overexert herself, except in certain situations of a private nature, the dream and hope and imagination of which situations certainly motivated the strapping young men who offered to serve as my luggage-bearers.

  So they were probably none too pleased when a police car—rather mud-splattered but still recognizable—pulled up to the curb and a big man in a law officer’s uniform climbed out of the driver’s seat, gave the fellas his best hard-eyed cop glare, and took the bags from them. “Much appreciated,” he said, “but I can help my daughter from here.” The brothers frat exchanged a glance and mumbled something to me which I didn’t bother to hear before they slumped off into the terminal.

  “Thought I was going to have to take a cab, Daddy,” I said, leaning in to kiss his slightly stubbly cheek.

  “Aw, I’m sorry, hon, I’m not used to all this big city traffic, I didn’t time it right.”

  “And a police car? Do you want me to ride in the back like a criminal?”

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” Harry said, popping the trunk and loading my bags in. What an interesting trunk. I noted with interest that Harry had to shove aside crime scene tape, road flares, orange traffic cones, boxes of ammunition, and some interesting-looking gray plastic cases which probably contained more lethal cop supplies. Harry went on. “I make the drunks clean up their puke when they have an accident back there, but drunks are, as a rule, pretty terrible when it comes to hungover car detailing. You can ride up front with me.” He grinned. “I’ll even let you run the lights and sirens. You loved doing that when you were little.”

  “I’m not so little anymore, Dad.” I thought about pointing my chest at him and giving him that look, the one I use to make Miranda’s boyfriend uncomfortable and to distract male teachers and other officials who were maybe starting to make dangerous mental connections that linked me and certain unsavory events, but I held back. Harry was predisposed to be on my side, a protector and ally, and there was no reason to poison a well that could be so useful. Funny how I’d never thought about the advantages of living in a town where I was the only daughter of the chief of police. You could never underestimate the benefit of having friends in high places, even in a low place like Lake Woebegotten. “But that sounds like fun.”

  Once we were in the car and on our way, Harry said, “How’s your mom?”

  “Oh, you know Mom. She’s fine.”

  Harry grunted. “Listen, I know being driven to school in a cop car wouldn’t be much fun, so… I got you a car.”

  “Really? But all those years when I was a little girl I asked for a pony,” I teased.

  He laughed. “I don’t see you cleaning up after a pony, Bon-bon.”

  Ha. I’d cleaned up worse things. I gave him the laugh he thought he’d earned, but I had to grit my teeth a little. “Bon-bon.” I’d forgotten that nickname. “Seriously, Dad, a car? That’s really nice of you.” Saying “dad” felt funny, but it didn’t take a genius at social engineering to know that calling him “Harry” would cool the warmth he felt toward me.

  “Well, don’t expect anything too fancy. You remember my friend Willy Noir?”

  “Hmmm… no.”

  “Old buddy, lives down by Pres du Lac, we used to go fishing with him when you visited in the summers, and we still go hunting together sometimes.”

  I’d come to stay with Harry in the summers from ages five to twelve, but the years from before I was nine or so were pretty fuzzy, all running together into one blurry boring summer. But I remembered Pres du Lac, the itty-bitty Indian reservation on the far side of Lake Woebegotten, even if I didn’t remember Mr. Noir. “Ah, fishing, my favorite activity. Was there ever a year when I didn’t fall out of the boat?”

  He laughed. “Maybe one. I thought you did it on purpose, just for the attention. Anyway, Willy’s getting on in years, doesn’t drive much anymore, so he sold me his old truck. Like I said, nothing fancy, but it runs good, and it’s survived a lot of winters—”

  “How many winters are we talking about?” Being the exotic new girl in school wouldn’t work as well if I had to drive some old beater. I could work around it, but it was certainly a handicap I’d need to overcome.

  “Let’s just say the truck remembers when Eisenhower was president.”

  Oh well. I made grateful noises, and after that we lapsed into a silence that might have been uncomfortable for Harry, but wasn’t for me. We drove away from the city limits, such as they were, and into the endless flatness of the prairie. Less the middle of nowhere than the far outer reaches of nowhere. I was used to cliffs, ocean waves, hills, redwoods, cars with surfboards or kayaks on top… but this was just flatness, and trucks spattered with mud. I was thousands of miles from the sea. How awful. Without the ocean, where do they hide the bodies?

  I kid. I’d never hide a body in the ocean, at least, not without taking a boat some ways out first. Tides are a bitch.

  After an interminable period, we reached the tiny town of Lake Woebegotten. Downtown was like something from a movie: park with a bandstand, City Hall with
a dumb little dome, square grassy town common, little mom-and-pop stores. One stop light. A single parking meter, which was pretty funny, since there were a million empty places to park for free. It looked like the kind of place tailor-made for fourth of July parades and speeches by local politicians and ceremonies crowning the Pig Queen or whatever they had here. The sun should have been shining and making everything look even more corny, like Pure Americana Extract, but it was pretty overcast. Funny, I remembered summers in Lake Woebegotten—hot, sticky, and humid—but I had no idea what autumns and winters were like. Guess I was going to find out soon.

  Harry pulled the police car over to the sidewalk. “I know you probably just want to get home and stop traveling, but there’s not a thing to eat in the house but a freezer full of walleye and maybe some maraschino cherries, so how about I pop into Cafe Lo here and get us something to eat?” A horrible thought must have occurred to him. “Uh, are you, you know… Like your mother?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “A vegetarian,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” I assured him. “Absolutely carnivorous.”

  He made a show of wiping sweat off his forehead in a broad gesture of relief. “I remember you used to eat a hamburger of your own and then do your best to eat mine too, but all those years you’ve been out in Santa Cruz, I wasn’t sure…”

  “The hippies did not convert me,” I said.

  “Burgers it is. Julie makes the best ones I’ve ever had, even better than her grandpa who used to run the diner.”

  I was happy to sit in the car while Harry went inside. I’d been traveling all day, and I was tired and puffy and probably a bit smelly—hardly ideal for a first impression, and I had a feeling anyone I met in this town I’d be seeing again and again.