Aftertaste Read online

  Once the boys are out of sight, Zilch steps into the aisle formed by a hybrid station wagon and Jolby’s Accord. The guts are back in place, the duct tape replaced—but something still isn’t quite right. He coughs again and again, and he can feel something moving when he does. His abdominal wall is torn, naturally, and coughing is more of a chore than it should be. Something feels broken deep inside, beyond repair.

  All the while, he’s wondering why Galavance didn’t mention that Jolby was apparently the area’s unofficial expert yesterday. Does she not know that besides keeping himself good and baked every hour of the day, he also dabbles in amateur cryptozoology? If she knew, she would’ve said something, he’s sure. Jolby is not only lying to his girlfriend about looking for work, but keeping secrets about his hobbies, too?

  Zilch sputters, wheezes, and the very moment he manages to drag a full breath into his lungs, he cough-cough-coughs it back out. His mouth loads with phlegm. Spitting it onto the gravel, he sees the loogie isn’t foamy and white, but pink. He takes a knee to examine it. Dead scarabs. A lot of dead buggies. Great.

  “You coming or what, dude?” either Chev or Jolby shouts for him—Zilch can’t tell.

  “Yeah,” he says, hobbling in a crooked line along the trail after them. “I’m on my way.” Adding, to himself: “But not in the way you mean.”

  The lake is quiet, aside from the battering wake of occasional passing speedboats that threaten to capsize them. Along the park, under the gazebos and shelters, there is a smattering of people on the beach, tanning or grilling out. The farther they row out from the shore, the more isolated it feels out on the murky water. Zilch rides in the middle, telling them he needs a minute to get his sea legs before rowing. In front of him is Jolby and behind him is Chev, both pulling in slow, splashy revolutions. They move crookedly through the water, Jolby’s strokes much more powerful than Chev’s.

  Once out in the middle of the lake, and gliding along without either man paddling, Zilch feels the rocking sensation hit him. The wind kicks up and the boat moves in soft sways that make his head pound and he finds himself blinking slowly and staring at the water.

  “Dude, are you gonna barf?” Jolby asks. “I mean, I’ve heard of some motherfuckers getting seasick real easy, but this is a canoe.” Jolby and Chev have a good laugh about that one.

  “No, nothing like that. Just got a bit of a bug,” Zilch says. Or a lack of them. “Either of you holding? That’d probably smooth out the landlubber’s queasies.”

  “Here, but don’t light up until we drift out a bit further,” Jolby says, taking his hand from one of the paddles long enough to hand Zilch the baggie and glass pipe. The glass is cold in Zilch’s hands.

  He takes a pinch of the green and has to fight to get it to settle in the bowl properly, it’s so twiggy and loaded with seeds. The wind is blowing and some of the weed scatters along the middle bench and over the edge of the canoe.

  “Dude, you’re fucking losing it!” Chev cries, as if it’s their air supply slipping away. Zilch slaps his hand down before one of the green tumbleweeds can scamper over the canoe’s edge.

  “Relax.” He crams it into the soot-rimmed bowl of the pipe and looks back to shore. Another hot breeze comes by and the water becomes even choppier and nausea hits him again. He can feel a scarab needling his cheek—he accidentally crushes it between his molars. It snaps like a poppy seed and for a moment he has the taste of ozone in his mouth.

  Jolby pulls the oars in, favoring his bandaged wrist. He’s looking over his shoulder. “Okay, we’re out far enough. But when you light up, turn that way. The life guard has binoculars; Rick Coogan got busted out here last summer that way.”

  “Coogan,” Chev snorts. “What a stooge. Stoogin’ Coogan.”

  Zilch sparks the lighter and takes a long pull. The weed tastes just as bad as the crushed nanobug.

  Jolby kicks on a ghetto blaster lashed to his bench. Some radio station that plays strictly electronica comes over the speakers. It sounds like fire engine screams and random prepubescent shouts. Both boys nod their head to it, seemingly moved by a frantic rhythm that eludes Zilch.

  Ignoring it, Zilch takes his second hit, momentarily fearing what might come out besides smoke when he exhales, and passes the lighter and pipe over his shoulder to Chev, seated behind him. He speaks in that stifled, corked voice of someone holding their breath, asking Jolby, “So, what do you know about the Lizard Man of Old Man Weatherly Bog? A deal’s a deal, right?”

  Jolby sits splay-legged, twin lengths of pale, hairy thigh uncovered by his cargo shorts. He’s a pudgy guy, kind of turtle-like in posture, with a heavy face and small, inset eyes. If he smiled after saving someone’s life, it would probably still look like he was scheming. It’s just that kind of face.

  Jolby says: “You mean Picturesque Bay?”

  “Sure.”

  He seems to mull the question before looking away and chortling, going with something else other than what he had thought first. “Can’t believe they call that fucking shit-pond a bay. That place is and always will be a goddamn swamp. Can’t imagine living there. Mosquito Central, once everything settles.”

  “I thought you guys were draining it,” says Zilch.

  “We be trying,” Chev says, holding his toke. “Speaking of which,” he adds, speaking over Zilch’s head to Jolby on the other end of the canoe, “Beefy Ben might need to get a talking to as well, bro.”

  Jolby looks startled for a moment, sees Zilch scrutinizing him, then shoots a withering glare at Chev. Chev shuts up. Zilch caught it too: As well? As well as who? Me?

  “Guys, I sorta feel like I missed something,” Zilch says. “Did you bring me out here on this boat to give me the Sonny treatment?”

  “What?”

  “The Godfather.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sonny was a bitch.” Jolby recovers for Chev’s slip. “But naw, dude. We’re trying to get the property drained so we can put up some retaining walls on that side of the lot,” Jolby says, sidestepping talk of Beefy Ben altogether like it never even came up. He sighs, glares at Chev for a beat, then stares out into the water. “But once they decide to expand the neighborhood and drain the whole thing … it’s really going to cause some problems, then.”

  “It hasn’t killed anybody,” Chev answers and again, Jolby gives him another shut-your-stupid-face scowl.

  “You mean the Lizard Man?” Zilch asks.

  Jolby sits up straighter. “It’s like this,” he begins, and exhales his hit. “Those dudes that all work down there—Ben, Darryl, all them—they’re what you’d call morons. If they knew what we knew, they’d leave Whispering Pines right quick.”

  “Yeah,” Chev contributes, “like in the cartoons when some dude bolts and there’s just a smoke outline of where they were standing, dude. Zoom!”

  “Exactly right, dude,” Jolby says, eyes still on Zilch.

  “Because of the Lizard Man?” Zilch asks.

  Jolby drops the boombox’s volume knob to a whisper. Somewhere, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” is suddenly playing, quiet and tinny. Zilch wonders if it’s the last twinkle of his earlier hallucinations, but out of the recesses of Jolby’s short pockets comes a cellular phone.

  “It’s my bitch. Hold on.” He points to an alcove in the distance where the shore makes a bent S-shape, with plenty of wild growth forming a cave of foliage over the water. “Get us over there,” he instructs Chev and answers the call. “Hey, babe.”

  Since there is nowhere to go for privacy, Jolby subjects Zilch to the entire conversation he has with Galavance. Zilch is sitting close enough that he can hear her voice faintly through the phone’s earpiece. She sounds worried.

  He covers the mouthpiece. “Dude,” he calls over Zilch’s head to a panting Chev, rowing, “what covers up a fishy taste?”

  “Summer’s Eve. My mom swears by it, dude,” Chev says.

  “What? Nasty. No, for food, stupid.”

  “Lemon juice,” Zilch says. “Fresh squeezed, preferably.
”

  Jolby looks at Zilch a moment, before uncovering the mouthpiece. “Chev says lemon juice, babe. Fresh squeezed.”

  Galavance says something Zilch can’t make out. Maybe “I’ll suggest that” or “Let’s ingest fat,” he isn’t sure. Jolby puts his phone away, and stares at Zilch as Chev rows on, humming to himself. They move into the alcove, the shade not unwelcome.

  Thumping a paddle against the bank crawling with tree roots, they sit in the half-dark, Jolby lit from behind in the foliage cave’s mouth. He reaches into his pocket and produces, pinched between finger and thumb, a black button. He flicks it at Zilch, where it ricochets off his nose and lands on the canoe floor among the dead soldiers and blackened, sundried bait. Zilch picks it up, and puts it to his coat approximately where it once had been attached, where the broken threads are still hanging.

  “Missing something?” Jolby says.

  Zilch tosses the button overboard. Plunk. “Quit jerking me around. If you know where it lives, spit it out.” Then it hits him. He tries to not let his face betray it. Play dumb, let them join you in stumbling, and make your move, Zilchy.

  Jolby looks Zilch up and down, sneering. “I can only assume you tried some shit with my girl and she ran you down. I can smell it on you—that’s not fake blood. The fuck are you, man?”

  “Just some guy,” Zilch says.

  “So, what, you couldn’t get nothing out of her so you decided to press your luck, dupe Chev’s dumb ass into bringing you straight to me?”

  “Hey,” Chev whines. “Not cool.”

  “Do you know when it takes over?” Zilch says. “I’d appreciate some answers—because so far it’s just been shitty music and even worse weed.”

  Jolby shakes his head, eyes closed. “It ain’t bothering nobody, man. There ain’t nothing down here for you to find. I’ll give you one chance to say you’ll leave it alone or your ass is grass, dude.”

  Chev says: “Dude, he knows. He knows, dude.”

  “Shut up,” Jolby says, leaning past Zilch to scold his friend. He resettles his eyes on Zilch. “But yeah, you’re right. Chev. The shit’s blown.”

  “Do you want me to … you know … clonk him?”

  Twisting in his seat, Zilch sees Chev going through a travel cooler, taking out an ice pack and brushing some frost off of one end for a better grip. Chev’s eyes catch Zilch watching him and the galoot moves to stand, leaning forward with one hand bracing the aluminum edge of the canoe, the other raising the frozen-solid freeze pack to brain him.

  Zilch goes for the utility knife in his back pocket but for a big guy, Chev is quick with the ice pack and bats the thing right out of Zilch’s hand. It drops into the dark lake water and vanishes. On the backswing, Zilch catches Chev’s wrist and pulls him off of his seat, smacking his arm against the rim of the canoe until the ice pack falls into the water, too. Chev twists around like he probably could’ve gone to state in wrestling, and before Zilch can snag a wrist or take a handful of Chev’s spiky coif, he finds himself in a full-nelson.

  Caught, Zilch doesn’t struggle. “Okay, okay,” he says. “You win.”

  Jolby, at the other end of the long canoe, waits for the canoe to stop rocking. He looks above Zilch’s head and nods to Chev. “You got him?”

  “Got him.”

  Jolby looks at the palm of his open hand. When he turns it to look at the reverse side, Zilch can see what he was eyeing: a discoloration, like a bruise taking color but fast—yellow rapidly darkening to a dark green.

  “Do you at least know what’s going on when you’re … it?” Wriggling against Chev is no use; the guy must have some serious muscle under all of that padding. “I’m just a special effects guy … a location scout,” Zilch attempts.

  “Let him go, he ain’t going to put up any fight now,” Jolby says. When Chev releases him, Zilch sinks down off the bench between the front and back and gives it one last go at getting to his feet, but nothing is cooperating. His lungs burn like he’s just done a line of dish detergent and he’s not sure if he’s actually hallucinating, but Jolby’s head is changing shape, making bone-cracking sounds as his flesh squeaks like rubber while it’s stretching.

  “You can’t know about this,” Jolby says, his voice sounding pained. He puts on a sweatshirt and brings up the hood, struggling it to slip it over his rapidly broadening cranium. He’s growing greener by the second. His eyes swell, their whites turning speckled and brown. His skin becomes a forest of tiny raised lumps, bumpy like a pickle. Finally, the green young man turns, grips the side of the canoe, and contributes a bellyful of stringy, pale yellow bile to the lake.

  “A were-amphibian,” Zilch says, every stationary thing in his line of sight dancing, wiggling, singing. “Does Galavance know?”

  “Why are you so interested in my goddamn girl, man?” Jolby sprays. He has his head turned over his shoulder, spraying yellow strings from green lips with each shout. “She’s mine, dude. She can’t know I’m like this. Just look at me, man.”

  Zilch looks and says, “I see it, Jolby. And she’s a good chick and I know you want to do right by her. For her benefit, you should work with me and we can let her move on with her life.”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what you’d want, isn’t it?” Jolby tries to get the zipper to cooperate, but with clumsy, thick webbed fingers it proves too tricky a task and he gives up. “I mean, what are you here for—you gonna put me in some zoo or something?”

  “My bosses, they’ll get you a good story,” Zilch says. “They’ll say you saved somebody from drowning. Right here, you can be the Champion of Cardinal Park. They might even put your picture on the sign, or rename the park altogether. Jolby Park.”

  “What are you talking about, man? You gonna put me in some witness relocation thing? Fuck that. I like my life.” He pauses after the last part, speckled eyes cutting away from Zilch briefly, doubting his own claim. “Is that what you wanna do? Take me away from her?”

  “No,” Zilch says. “I’m supposed to kill you.”

  Jolby laughs a phlegm sound. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “No, it’s not. But think about Galavance.”

  “Don’t fucking say her name, man. She’s mine. We’re together.”

  “But you’re a were-amphibian.”

  “Don’t you fucking think I know that?”

  “If you know it,” Zilch says, “then that means it’s far enough along that you’re starting to remember when you turn, right? Do you remember what you do when you’re … like this?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “It’s taking over, Jolby. I think it’s too late. Do this, for Galavance, man. Let her get on with her life.”

  “You just wanna steal her. I take one look at you, with your fucking suit and … I can just see it, man. Plain as motherfucking day. I got your number. Oh I got it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I want,” Zilch says. “This is what has to happen. I’ll make it quick. You get found out by the public and you get a bunch of guys like Ben who’re really itching to kill something—they’ll take their time. They’ll hunt you down, trap you, drag you back to wherever, and keep poking at you and siccing the dogs on you …”

  “Dude, stop. Fuck.” Jolby, perhaps picturing that, is unable to look up. Zilch watches him peer out over the water, at the people grilling and sunbathing in the distance. “I believe you,” he says finally, quiet. “I bet Ben would do that if he knew what I was. Especially since it’s me. We’ve never gotten along. Why are people like that?”

  “Because as a species, we like to point fingers and say, ‘Them. They’re not like me.’ We like having enemies maybe even more than having friends.” Zilch struggles to sit up. “So let’s just get back to the beach and we’ll zip over somewhere nice and peaceful. Either of you own a gun? Or a really thick pillow, like goose down maybe? I’ll be Chief and you can be Jack Nicholson.”

  “I can’t tell her about this.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” Zil
ch says, his patience waning. Just let me kill you so I can have those couple of minutes without a fucking skull-splitter before I’m sent onto the next one. Please.

  “Because if I do,” Jolby says, “then all the other shit, man … it’ll … I can’t, once I start talking, I know it’ll all fall out. I know it. She’s all I got and I can’t lose her and if I tell her about this,” he stares at his own slimy palms, “I’ll have to tell her about everything else.” Desperation makes his already-large, froggy eyes even bigger. “But that’s how it should be, right? Get it all out at once.”

  Zilch asks, “What do you mean?” Jolby coughs. “Talk to me, man. What do you mean you’ll end up telling her everything? Did you kill somebody?”

  “No. What? Come on, dude. No, all the chicks.”

  “Chicks … you killed?”

  “No, man! Listen to me. I haven’t killed anybody. I … fucked some other women.” He pauses. “Eleven other women.” Jolby’s head is in his webbed hands. “Fuck, what am I gonna do?”

  “Let’s take this thing back to the beach,” Zilch says. “One quick second it can all be—”

  “You’re not killing me!” Jolby cries. “I can’t, not before she knows everything. I’ve been cheating on her, dude. All the time. Not with just a couple of chicks, but … eleven. Eleven different chicks, man.” He sobs. “Before we moved in together. Sarah Le Croix, Bobbi-Jo Lumley, Tara Harwood …”

  “Tara was hot,” Chev adds.

  “Dude, not helping!”

  “Before this started happening to you?” Zilch asks.

  Jolby can only manage to nod. “Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Chev?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Do him.”

  “Hold on a second, fellas,” Zilch says.

  “But dude,” Chev says, “that’s … murder.”

  “Do him, Chev,” Jolby says. “Off your fat ass and do it, dude.”

  “I don’t wanna kill anybody.” Chev looks down at Zilch like he’s a half-squashed bug. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Let’s talk about this,” Zilch says, knowing he’s in no shape for a fight. Negotiation is all he has.