17

Camp Fawn See, Ford Lake, Minnesota

Still Saturday, 15 September

“That’s a hell of a story,” I say.

“Innit?”

“You had dysentery, you were on morphine and LSD, and you’d been bitten by a cobra.”

Reggie shakes his head. “I was on acid and morphine half the time I was in Nam. I had dysentery the whole time. And a cobra bite’s just not that big of a deal, long as it doesn’t kill you outright. What I saw out there was for real.”

“Okay,” I say. “So what was it?”

To whatever extent I was before, I’m no longer enjoying this conversation. It’s reminding me of my own canoe freakout from earlier, and, worse, it’s reminding me of the guy in the video with one leg. Like that guy, Reggie’s just told me, with complete conviction, a story that cannot be true.

What is this, a tiny town of psychopaths? Of people who lie so constantly and skillfully they should be in a logic puzzle, or at least running a Fortune 500 company, but have instead elected to participate in a rat’s-ass lake monster hoax?^[48] When people go through the kind of shit Reggie’s clearly gone through they sometimes turn flat, because nothing they do or say is remotely as charged as what happened to them before. But Reggie doesn’t even come across as flat.

“I think it was a water dragon,” he says. “It sure as hell wasn’t a catfish. Or an Irrawaddy dolphin, unless it was one with huge teeth that ate pigs. Which isn’t normally the case: I’ve checked. It could have been a snakehead, based just on how ugly it was, but if it was, it was bigger than any snakehead on record. I mean, a snakehead that big would just be its own kind of monster anyway.”

“What’s a water dragon?” I say.

“Something Cambodians believe in.”

“But not Vietnamese people?”

“I don’t know. Woman who told me about it was in Cambodia.”

“And now you think there might be one in White Lake?”

Reggie holds his empty can above his mouth and taps it to dislodge drops. “Fuck, I don’t know. Obviously it’d be a hell of a coincidence. Water’s a lot colder here, for one thing. Wouldn’t shock the hell out of me, though. I’m done being surprised by scary motherfuckers that live in the water.”

“So now you want to lead a trip to go find one?”

He lowers the can. “Yeah. The actual leading of the trip is not something I’m looking forward to. Being on the water, I mean. But I have to figure that’s what alpha-blockers and marijuana are for.”

On a similar theme, I say “And why do you want to move to Cambodia?”

He laughs. “It’s not like I’m gonna move into a hut on stilts in a swamp there. They do have land-based real estate. And Cambodia’s still pretty free of tourists, long as you stay out of Angkor Wat. You can live on the beach, there’s lots of prostitutes…” He glances at me. “I like prostitutes. What can I say? And northern Minnesota is not good for prostitutes. It’s like going to Mecca for beer-battered pork.”

“They make beer-battered pork?” I say. I always forget how hungry marijuana makes me.

“Del does, sometimes. Weather here sucks also. You ever been here in the winter?”

“No.”

“It’s cold. Like the outside of an airplane. During the summer the mosquitoes are worse than they were in Nam.”

“But… isn’t Cambodia a little close to Nam?”

“Hey, the Vietnamese didn’t come over here to kill us.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Anyway, I figure if Chris Sr. had the guts to buy this place, and Chris Jr. had the guts to do whatever the fuck it was he was planning to do with the whole White Lake Monster thing, the least I can do is get in a canoe for a week and finish what they started. I mean, I do rent the pieces of shit out for a living. Chris Sr. used to ride in canoes sometimes, and he hated boats as much as I do.”

“Why?” I say. I’m still thinking about the pork.

“The usual. Vietnam.”

“He was there too?”

Reggie looks surprised. “He was my CPO.”

“The one who gave you the LSD?”

“Yeah. He saved my ass a million times.” He points to the scarred half of his face. “Cluding this one.”

Reggie’s narrative is starting to feel claustrophobic and paranoid. Or else I am. “What happened?”

“We all got put on swift boats eventually,” he says. “One night Chris—that’s Chris Sr., obviously—and I were out in one and we had the running lights on so we wouldn’t get strafed, and a P4-Phantom strafed the shit out of us because the pilot thought we were an NVA helicopter. I got fuel on me and got lit on fire and all that shit—I didn’t even want to live. Chris swam me to shore.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep. Bitch of it is, NVA didn’t even use helicopters.”

When he falls silent, I say “Were Del and Miguel in the military too?”

“Del was in Nam, but he never got north of a fire base. Might have had to drink a warm beer once or twice. Miguel just likes guns.”

“Do they believe there’s a monster in White Lake?”

“You’ve met them.”

“Right…”

Reggie, eye running, smiles his wicked and goofy half smile. “Those guys’ll believe anything.”