Wolf Point Read online

  “Really? He’s that bad, huh?”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen. Okay? Tom? Aloysius?”

  T put his fishing pole down, wedging the butt under the rowing thwart. He crossed his arms.

  Lester tossed his lure toward the shoreline angrily, let it sink a moment, and then began reeling it in. “The money was in the house, forty thousand, sitting there in a cardboard box. I set up a deal with some Mexicans to buy coke with the forty, and then I was going to sell it to this rich asshole I know for almost twice that. Guy’s name’s Walter Lyse. His family owns half of Chattanooga.”

  “And the Mexicans ripped you off.”

  “I had good reason to believe they were trustworthy,” Lester said, pulling the lure in and snapping it out again with a flick of his wrist. “Walter I’ve been dealing drugs to since I was in grade school. The whole thing should have been over in less than an hour, the money back in the box; I’m about thirty thousand dollars richer.”

  “What happened with the Mexicans?” T said. “Describe it to me. Where did you meet them? What did the place look like? How’d they rip you off? Did they have guns? How many of them were there?”

  “Fuck,” Lester said. “You think I could make this shit up? I met them at the Super 8 off I-24. Ordinary motel room with a television hidden inside a dresser across from a king-size bed and a little round table by a window and pictures of trains on the wall, if I remember right. I walked in, said something brilliant like, “Hey, dudes.” There were three guys in the room, two sitting facing me on the bed, one of the guys on the bed with a blue do-rag, the other guy bald. I’d guess they were all three of them in their thirties. The one who opened the door for me—I had the money under my arm in a shoebox—looks out into the hall, doesn’t even close the door. He puts a knife to my throat, takes the box. On the way out the door, the bald guy kicks me in the balls so hard I swear to God I go blind for a minute. While I’m on the ground moaning, one of them frisks me, and that’s it. By the time I can stand up, they’re gone.”

  T picked up his pole again and began taking in line. Behind him, the first cabin was slipping away.

  Lester said, “You’re looking doubtful, T. You’re looking like you don’t believe me. What do you want me to do? Describe their tattoos? Fine. The guy with the knife—”

  “What I’m finding hard to believe,” T interrupted, “is that you’d go into such a thing with no protection. No guns. Nobody with you. That’s not how it is in the movies. Plus, the huge discrepancy in what you’re buying it for and selling it for. These things, they don’t—”

  “I told you, I screwed up.” He pulled in his line and turned to look at the outboard as if he were considering firing it up. “Still,” he added, “I had reason to believe I’d have no problem with the Mexicans. And I don’t carry a gun. People that carry guns get shot. I couldn’t bring anybody else into it because if it ever got back to Willie, I’d be dead. And also, I was greedy and didn’t think I needed anybody else. So. That’s what happened.”

  “All right,” T said. “Tell me one more thing.”

  “We’re heading out toward the middle,” Lester said. He looked back and forth quickly from the shore to a big island in the middle of the river. “What do you think? We weren’t having any luck along the shore…”

  “Why not?” T said. “Just keep your eyes out for the big ships. They can sneak up on you.”

  Lester shrugged and turned his attention to the tackle box, picking up and examining a silver jig with a blue feather.

  “How did you know the Mexicans?” T said. “Just explain that to me, and then we can drop it. How did you know these Mexicans? Where did you meet them? Why did you think there’d be no trouble?”

  Lester didn’t answer for a second. He seemed to flush slightly.

  “Because,” T pressed, “Mexicans —it’s awfully generic, don’t you think?”

  “Look,” Lester said, “it’s what happened. I didn’t know them. I knew of them. From some guys I know. Guys connected with my dancers.”

  “Guys you know…” T said. He felt his fishing line come up off the bottom as they moved out into the deeper water, and he flipped the bail to let it play out again. “Listen,” he said, “so? What? What is it you’d like me to do?”

  “You can loan us the money to pay back Short Willie.” Lester dropped the silver jig over the side of the boat and watched it in silence a moment as the blue feather disappeared into the depths. “I mean,” he continued, “I’m not going to bullshit you and say we have any idea when or how we can pay you back, or anything like that. We’re both fucked for money right now. But, you know, at some point, when things turn around in my life—”

  The current was picking up as they moved farther from the shore. T looked away from Lester and watched the line of cabins grow smaller. “So I’d give you a check for forty thousand dollars,” he said, “and you’d, what, go find this Short Willie and give him his money back? You and Jenny would take the money and go back to Chattanooga?”

  “Checks don’t work in my world,” Lester said. “You’d need to get us the cash.”

  “So, cash,” T said. “You take the cash and you and Jenny’d go back to Tennessee?”

  “We’d have to get the money back to Willie somehow. We’d make some kind of deal, I guess.” Lester’s expression turned genuinely worried as he apparently considered how to give the money back. “Fuck knows what’s happened to Lyle,” he said. “He didn’t have anything to do with my shit, but— If Lyle’s still around, we might could go through him.”

  “To get the money back to Short Willie?”

  “If Lyle’s not rotting in the Smokies somewhere.”

  “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 t
old 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.