Angler’s Bend

i

So far, all things considered, it was a good start to the day. Gull and Wallace hadn’t fought yet. Not that there was anything especially to fight about – simply that it’d been a week since their last knock down, drag out and the unpleasant itch at the back of Wally’s neck said they were due for another. He wanted to address it. At least just to say how nice it’s been to be getting along so well but he said nothing for fear he’d be loading some metaphysical Chekhov’s gun. Instead he looked out the passenger window, watched the trees go by, their leaves just turning, green speckled with red and gold. He saw the oncoming sign for Angler’s Bend and said, “We’re here.”

ii

In the densely wooded mountains of western North Carolina there are a multitude of resort and novelty towns. “Towns” best said in quotation marks. Most of them little more than a cluster of buildings on a mountaintop: a hotel, a general store and one helluva view. Call these places Little Switzerland, Maggie Valley, Lake Junaluska, Hot Springs. Also there is Angler’s Bend.

Like Maggie Valley, Angler’s Bend rests in the cleft between two anonymous tree-thick ridges of smokey mountain. It is made up of a collective of restaurants, businesses and drive-in motels that pepper both banks of Wilbur Creek (truthfully a river); the very river that, with all the patience of the eternal, carved that cozy valley out from the ancestral stone long before anyone sought to degrade it with the improbable name of Wilbur. See him – Wilbur Theophilus Puck – as he was in 1741; stinking of sweat, of campfire, of applejack, damp curls of hair poking out at odd ends from under a coonskin cap, his teeth black, his breath foul; see him standing over the river it pleased him to claim to have discovered. By the icicles in his beard and the odor in his furs he banished the river’s ancient name and took prisoner the living waters, delivering them onward, inexorably, into the clutches of the colonizer.

Since that time of log cabins and homesteads, of dirt roads and horse dung, when the white men, bearded and unwashed, limpid hair pulled back in pigtails, so-called “surveyors,” first descended upon the valley with their axes and their guns to clear away the land and kill and kill and kill, shooting dead any Cherokee misfortunate enough to toe the line of their new property – since that time, the yoke of modern America was dropped upon the shoulders of a people who desired all of none of it. Open air markets became general stores, inns and saloons became motor parks and barbeque restaurants. The roads were paved and the power lines snaked along them. A new church, First Methodist of Angler’s Bend, was built across the street from the original Angler’s Baptist to further minister to the spiritual needs of the miniscule community. Then came a schoolhouse and a town hall that served additionally as selectman’s, post, and Sheriff’s office all in one.

These unrequested amenities came at the behest of an increasingly bureaucratized America that mystified and agitated the people of Angler’s Bend. They exchanged their fires and oil lamps for electricity with a bitter taste in their mouths. Time wore on and by the twenty-first century only the elderly could remember the lighting of the first electric lights (Bryson’s Feed, 1948). The sparse collective of remaining residents now served the sole purpose of, like an automatic bird feeder, tending the needs of those who drifted by. They ran antique and junk stores, flea markets, country restaurants and folk art galleries; peddling jams and pickles and vegetable soups canned by unknown grannies in antiquarian kitchens for the pleasure of the outside people who, on fine days, swung into their town with that city confidence that everything there was just for them.

iii

Gull saw the green sign marking the exit for Angler’s Bend at the same time Wally pointed it out.

“I see it, I see it.” He popped on his blinker – not that he needed to, they were on the old highway and it was virtually deserted – and took the exit.

Neither of them had ever heard of Angler’s Bend until two days prior when Wally saw it mentioned in an article online listing great weekend spots in western North Carolina. Wally was always doing things like that. The two of them had both only lived in Asheville a short time before they’d met, each hailing from much larger cities – Wally from New Orleans and Gull from New York – and, in the year and a half of their relationship, it was as much as if they were still getting the feel for the newfound smallness of their lives as they were for each other. They coped in different ways. Gull suggested they go out to eat much more than he ever had in single life and shopped significantly more, even when he couldn’t really afford it. Wally couldn’t bear repetition, not frequently anyway. It was clear enough that he was one of those people who needed always, not something more necessarily, but something new. Asheville’s principal diversions exhausted in a few months, next thing he was planning weekend trips to explore neighboring towns, day trips to the country, hiking, tubing, ziplining.

“Check out this little place,” Wally had said, scrolling through pictures showing off the town to its best advantage. “Isn’t it cute?”

Gull had looked at the pictures – of the outdoor dining area of a riverside restaurant, the water in the background sparkling green and inviting; of the general store built from irregular stone, two old-timers drinking root beers in rocking chairs on the covered wrap-around veranda; of the actual location in Wilbur Creek from which the town took its name, the Angler’s Bend (no fishing, no swimming), a sharp hook in the river nestled in a verdant clearing surrounded by stands of pine where the fish once were plenty and anglers took delight. He looked at these pictures and was not immune to their charm, their quaintness, their natural beauty.

“It’s three hours away,” he’d said, knowing exactly what Wally wanted. “We could head out early Saturday and make a day of it.”

Wally, child-like in a way that both endeared and frustrated, was obviously pleased. “It’s a date,” he’d said.

iv

On Saturday morning they’d risen with the alarm at eight, dressed hurriedly, piled high the food in the cat dish and spilled out of the house through the banging screen door, yelling over their shoulders at the disgruntled, blinking tabby: “We’ll be back in a couple of hours!” Then there was an obscenely large breakfast at the Countryside Diner (intended to hold them over until dinner) before at last they were on the road, estimated time of arrival shortly after noon.

The first thing seen upon entering Angler’s Bend is its diminutive bureaucratic building, red brick and unassuming, more than likely with both the town’s police cruisers parked out front. The first thing of interest to Wally and Gull, however, was the general store they recognized from Google Images.

“Isn’t that the one?” Wally, who hated long car rides, pointed like a kid at the end of an exhausting road trip who thinks they just might see Disney World in the distance.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Gull said, already pulling over.

Over the door, hand painted in faded red script, the sign read: Riverside General, est. 1869. The windows on either side of the push door were dominated by two large electric signs. To the left, in a scarlet circle perfect and holy as the sun of Ra were illuminated those always inviting words: Coca-Cola. To the right, eye-stinging fluorescent capital letters declared CHRIST IS KING. No picturesque old-timers blocked the way today as Wally tripped up the steps of the veranda, flung himself through the door to the ringing of a genuine bell and disappeared from Gull’s sight.

It was cool in the general store, slightly dim with both windows primarily blocked by the signs, a musty smell like old sawdust in the air. Once in, Wally proceeded slowly. No one stood behind the counter but the wall there was prominently adorned with a large Confederate battle flag, the blue star-spangled bars slicing an X in the livid red of the background. Wally was white, but he was aware that the accompanying privilege only took him so far in such places. His hair was long for one – hung in auburn ringlets down his back. He wore a white tee-shirt with a print of a young Debbie Harry exposing one breast, skin-tight black jeans with rips that rose up the thighs, black leather boots with a floral design – daisies, pansies, African violets – stitched along the sides. These things alone could still potentially receive a pass but, taken with Gull at his side – Gull with his earrings and mustache and leather jacket covered with lascivious patches lining the sleeves – it was plain to see. Wally could always tell when they caught on. Straight people. How agonizingly obvious they were when they saw him with his partner and the pieces came together. There was a light in their eyes that made Wally want to die as they undressed him with a look and imagined him with a cock in his ass.

Wally moved away from the counter, backing to the far wall and almost upturning a display of pickled spring onions in the process. He surveyed the store. It was all the usual, he assumed. Jams, jellies, preserves, etc. Pickles and soups and homemade bread and muffins. Real butter and iced cream. Soaps and candles scented with locally sourced flowers and herbs. A rumbling cooler that had probably been chilling drinks for half a century before he was born. All the standard provisions for campers passing through town on their way to the Blackwood Preserve just west of “the Bend” – hot dogs and buns and the usual condiments, potato chips, cans of beans, beer and soda, bottled water, toilet paper, bug spray, lighter fluid, paper plates.

“You going camping, little lady?”

Wally looked up and the questioner noticed the two-day old stubble on his cheeks (Wally, so particular about the neatness of his surroundings, often failed to apply the same judgment to his person).

“Oh – young man. Sorry, there.”

“No worries,” Wally said, crossing over to the cooler where he saw cold sodas glistening in old style glass bottles. “And no, just exploring Angler’s Bend for the day.”

Wally selected a peach Nehi and turned to face the man who had materialized behind the counter. He was short, inclined to fat but not obese; a bald pink piggy man with drooping jowls and coke bottle glasses that made his watery green eyes seem comically large. Under a slightly upturned nose, the man’s thick lips unfurled into an almost obscene grin.

“Well you couldn’t have picked a better day for it, son.”

“I hope so; the weather’s supposed to stay nice, I saw, mid-seventies all day.” Wally responded, bringing the bottle forward.

“Mmhm, you can’t beat these mountains for a good mild autumn. Used to be this was my favorite time of year for fishing down at the Bend. Before it got too cold but after the tourists all went home. Back when I was a boy, this would be.”

“No fishing anymore, I read.”

The piggy man didn’t have a barcode scanner and so carefully marked Wally’s three dollars in a crumpled pocket notebook before accounting for the forty-nine cents change. “No sir,” he almost whispered, closing his old style cash register, “not no more.”

“What happened? New paper plant upriver?”

The piggy man’s eyes shrunk as much as they could behind their magnifying lenses. “Nah,” he said. “Same old shit, government intrusion, I guess.”

The bell rang and Wally heard the familiar sound of Gull’s footsteps creaking their way across the wooden floor.

“Diet Cokes?”

Wally pointed behind him roughly in the cooler’s direction while asking, “What do you mean by that?”

“Overfishing, they said. Damage the local ecosystem, they said. Bitch of it was, wasn’t no overfishing before the outsiders found out about the spot. Now folk that fish there to feed themselves is breaking the law if they’re caught. Never mind if their family been fishing there a hundred years or more.”

Not sure whether or not this was intended to sting him, Wally nevertheless recoiled slightly. Then Gull was beside him, diet Coke in hand, and he leaned against him gratefully. It was only a second, not even, before he recalled where he was and immediately straightened back up. But the piggy man had seen it while taking Gull’s money and the changemaking in his notebook was not the math he was doing in his head. The shift in the eyes was subtle but Wally could read the repulsion writ upon those pale, myopic orbs as the piggy man did his best hand Gull his change without touching him.

“Let’s bounce, Gulliver,” Wally said.

“You two enjoy the weather now.” The piggy man did not smile and, until the door was shut behind them, he watched them go.

v

They didn’t hurry to the car but neither did they linger on the veranda as Gull had initially hoped they would. At no point did he suspect danger, nor did he really know what was going on, but he too had felt the shift in the vibe at the cash register.

“Fucker had a problem with queers, couldn’t you tell?” Wally said once they were back in the car. “We might have to butch it up here.”

“Wally,” Gull shook his head with a smile. “You’ve got your nails painted.”

“Blue is for boys, though.” Wally wiggled his fingers, all ten painted electric blue. They both had a laugh for a moment before Gull started the car.

Deeper in the Bend they found a long low building akin to a strip mall filled with strange local shops. A year round Christmas store. A beef jerky store. A store that only sold pocket knives where the proprietor had desperately attempted to convince them to purchase a pair of ballpoint pens that in fact concealed stiletto blades. A tobacco shop which, for Wally, three months off the butt, had required great personal resources to walk past without going in. A candy shop where, again Wally, insatiable sweet tooth, spent an exorbitant sum on a three pound bag of jelly beans. At the end of the line was Tanner Hyde’s, Local Arts.

Inside was a man who might have been Walt Whitman. Elderly, hunched back in his chair behind the counter, his white beard truly remarkable – long, hardly kempt, obscuring his mouth, hanging down nearly to his lap. He was reading, eyes behind the sort of half moon spectacles one pictures on Ben Franklin darting across the page. A shift of the hand revealed the title: In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner, an author neither Wally nor Gull had ever heard of.

“Welcome in,” Walt Whitman did not look up from his reading. “Yes, everything you see is local. No, I did not make any of it. No, Tanner Hyde is not a real person.”

“Then who does make it all?” Gull asked as Wally drifted off towards a cluster of watercolor landscapes.

Whitman put his book down. “It’s all here and there. You know. The nephew does that whittling there. Got some old ladies what do that quilt making. Them dreamcatchers is genuine Indian made. Got a Cherokee fellow over on the rez what makes ‘em for me. Don’t know if dreamcatchers is a Cherokee thing or not but he makes ‘em for me so that’s genuine Indian enough I say.”

In the ensuing silence, the old man’s hand began creeping back towards his book – a collection of horror stories, Gull could now see, the cover dominated by an image of a skull painted in lurid yellows while, out of one cavernous eye-socket, the spirit of a woman appeared to be emerging from the darkness, arms outstretched, beckoning to the reader. As if to hide that he’d been staring at the Death’s head, Gull pointed to the photographs hanging on the wall behind old Whitman.

“Local photographer?”

“No – well, yes – but not art, just memories.”

Gull leaned forwards and saw among the pictures a black an white image of a man who just might be a much, much younger Walt Whitman with a catfish half as big as he was snagged in a headlock.

“Where was that taken?”

“Here. Wilbur Creek.”

“No way,”

“Over at the Bend, that was, back when fishing was still legal out there.”

“You get fish that big in the Wilbur?”

“Bigger even, especially by the Bend. Wilbur Creek can be a hell of a river in some places. Deep, too. Got trenches going, oh, a hundred, a hundred fifty foot deep. Lots of room for things to grow.”

“If they live long enough.”

“Things can live a long time down there in the cold dark, a long time,” the reincarnated Whitman said. “That ain’t nothing. Not nothing at all.”

“When was that taken?”

“1953. That there’s my daddy. Lost him to the Bend four years after that was taken. He was thirty-seven then. Only thirty-seven. It’s a strange thing, living most of your life older than your daddy.”

“I’m so sorry. What do you mean lost to the Bend?”

“I told you it was deep, didn’t I? He was far from the first person to get lost out there and far from the last. It is a dangerous river, make no mistake about that. Got currents will grab you by the ankles and drag you under for good. That’s why they closed the Bend. No fishing, no swimming. For public safety, see.”

“Really? I thought I heard it was an overfishing thing.”

“Oh no, no, the fish are plentiful enough, there and up and down the rest of the Wilbur. Lots of room, ya know.”

“What’s up?” Wally seemed done with the store.

“Just learning a little local history,” Gull said.

vi

After Tanner Hyde’s they switched to combing through the plethora of antique and junk stores in the area, arriving lastly at Doreen’s Angler Antiques – promised to be the largest store of its kind for over a hundred miles in any direction. The sign looked like it hadn’t been touched up since about 1975 and Wally doubted if the boast still held true.

It was large, however. A labyrinthine series of rooms that collapsed and folded into one another, each stacked to the ceiling with milk cans and cast iron skillets, fake wedgwood china and chipped uranium glass cocktail sets, racist lawn jockeys and black mammy shaped cookie jars with bulging white eyes and red clown mouths. There was a room full of paperback novels where, after thirty minutes of combing through Nicholas Sparks, Danielle Steele and Dean Koontz, Wally managed to resurface with a copy of Joyce Carol Oates’ Black Water – available for one dollar. In another room was a horde of war memorabilia. Mostly U.S., mostly WWII, but there was also a considerable amount of Confederate mementos – uniforms, medals, mock dollars decorated with the likeness of Jefferson Davis. In the same room, in an unassuming corner, a sight that made Wally suck his breath through his teeth. Five red arm bands emblazoned with swastikas. Many more Iron Crosses in a bowl made out of an inverted panzer helmet marked with SS lightning bolts. A silver belt buckle on which the words GOTT MITT UNS were stamped in all capitals around the likeness of a leering skull.

“Isn’t all of this illegal?” Wally asked, gazing down in shock at a half sheet of stamps from which fifty identical Hitlers glared up at him.

“Yeah the Nazi shit is, but who the hell’s gonna report it out here?”

“I guess so. The local cops are probably in the Klan anyway.” Wally turned away from a tie pin decorated with an eagle perched over a swastika. Gull nodded and silently they agreed to leave, back tracking their way through the junk filled maze to purchase Wally’s book at the front counter.

Behind the counter, working a quilt square, was a woman of perhaps seventy; her bottle black hair, far from cultivating a youthful appearance, only making her appear five years older.

“You boys find anything you’re looking for?” She asked, voice sweet as a peach.

“Found something good,” Wally said, trying very hard to sound like he hadn’t seen the Nazi collection, like it didn’t bother him. It wasn’t working, he could tell, but it did not seem particularly to faze her one way or the other.

“What have you got? Oh, this was such a good book! I read this two, three years ago. All the books back there are mine. My collection got so impossible I had to start selling the ones I’ve already read.” She seemed pleased to be holding the book again, if only to say goodbye. Wally understood the feeling.

“I’m glad to hear it. I’ve read a couple of her books already; loved them all.”

“Yeah, she’s good,” the woman said, taking Wally’s dollar. “No tax.”

“Thank you,”

“Where you boys headed next?”

“Dinner, I think,” Gull piped up.

Wally realized at that moment that he was suddenly quite hungry. It was already six p.m. and the shadows were long.

“Well if you’ll take some local yokel advice, try Puck’s on Wilbur back downriver. Barbeque. You can’t go wrong over there.”

“We will, thanks!” Wally, who’s favorite food behind Chinese and Italian was barbeque, was already picturing a pat of butter melting over a warm square of cornbread.

“And boys!” She looked suddenly very tired, aging even more before their eyes. “You seem like nice boys. You’ve just got to understand, the people here, they’re good people – really, they are – simple people. What you’ve got to understand is really they’re just trying to preserve a way of life, you understand? What I mean to say is, if you get my meaning, enjoy your dinner but, it’s just that some folk–” She broke off, played with her quilting as if unsure of herself. Then she gathered her strength and looked up at them again. “What I mean to say is, this town, for boys like you, it’s not the kind of place you want to still be after sundown.”

Wally and Gull were too shocked to speak.

“You understand.” She was flushed, her mortification palpable, and she would not meet their eyes again.

“Yes,” Wally’s voice came back finally. “Thank you.”

vii

It was five minutes by Google Maps to Puck’s on Wilbur and they were completely silent for the first two and a half.

“Did that lady just threaten us?” Gull asked.

“I – I don’t – I’m not sure.”

“Because it sure sounded like–”

“I know–”

“Like the whole ‘sundown town’ thing you hear about with racists in the south.”

“I know.” Wally looked out the window. The yellowing leaves on the trees were catching golden in the late afternoon sun. “It sounded more like a warning than a threat to me.”

“Some could say those are two sides of the same coin.”

“Look, it’s the fucking south, ok? She probably knows some latent homosexual good ol’ boys that would fuck us up if they knew what we are and she doesn’t want us to get hurt.”

“You’ve experienced this kind of thing before?” Gull was thinking, he realized, of lost nights in Greenwich.

“I’ve lived below the Mason-Dixon my entire life, what the fuck do you think?”

“Should we just head out now?”

“Screw that, I’m hungry and outside of town there’s only a Bojangles for the next fifty miles. Let’s go after we eat.”

As if lying in wait, the restaurant sprang into view when they cleared a bend in the road, passing a two story motel that looked very out of place – plastered as it was in pink stucco. Puck’s on Wilbur, however, belonged exactly where it was and it looked it. The core of the restaurant had been converted out of a genuine-honest-to-God-Abe-Lincoln-style log cabin; lovingly cared for and refurbished and easily two hundred years old. To the right and left of the original structure stretched out new wings designed to hold additional customers and stylized to match the cabin where they converged. The wood, of course, was different. Too yellow and fresh and new. An outdoor dining area was arranged on a deck that cantilevered out over Wilbur Creek, allowing Wally to recognize the restaurant from the pictures online.

“Must be the tourist hot spot,” Gull joked when Wally mentioned it.

Wally snorted, “Shut up, dummy, I’m hungry.”

Inside it looked exactly how one would assume. The interior walls were of the same exposed wood and adorned with stuffed deer heads and portraits of John Wayne. Over the host stand was a sign reading: Puck’s on Wilbur Cafe, with ‘Wilbur Theophilus Puck V, Founder’ in smaller lettering below and ‘Wilbur Theophilus Puck VIII, Current Owner’ yet below that. Beneath the sign were four photographed portraits of four similar looking men. Judging by the increasing modernity evinced in the photos, these were presumably the likenesses of Wilbur Pucks five, six, seven and eight. They were all rather round headed, tending towards baldness, and each wore a mustache though all styled differently in accordance to their times.

“Been around a long time, has it?” Wally gestured to the historical display when the hostess appeared to seat them.

“Oh yes,” she replied, ginger-haired and sullen. “We celebrated our ninety-fifth anniversary last April.”

“Ninety-five years?”

“Consecutive, in the same location,” she added, gathering menus and rolls of silverware. “Inside or outside?”

“Outside,” Wally said and the hostess led them to a two person table on the balcony overlooking the water which lapped and gurgled beneath them. It was lovely and cool. A breeze was stirring the branches of the trees across the river and sending the first red leaves of autumn down to the water to be swept onward and away.

A waitress came, took their drink orders and recommended the brisket. When she returned with the drinks Gull ordered the pulled pork and Wally the catfish. Not being able to decide on only one side item, they ordered a mess of greens, macaroni and hushpuppies to share between them. When she left to put in their order, a silence fell over them. Wally realized they were the only ones on the balcony. Gull was taking slow sips of his beer, looking very dour.

“What’s wrong with you?” Wally asked.

“What?”

“You look like somebody pissed in your beer.”

“The sun’s going down soon.”

“We’ll leave after we eat.”

Silence again. Gull did not appear satisfied.

“Is that all?” Wally, probing gently. “Are you sure there’s nothing else?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say anything but since you asked, it really burns the fuck out of me how you make decisions for me all the time without ever actually asking my opinion.”

“What do you–”

“Like just now was a perfect example. The hostess asked us where we wanted to sit and you didn’t even blink, didn’t even look at me, just said ‘outside’ like you could read my mind or something.”

“I figured–”

“Figuring isn’t knowing. As your luck would have it, I did want to sit outside but you didn’t know that. You just assumed that I would want what you want.”

Wally felt unable to defend himself in the face of such unassailable logic. He’d answered the waitress as he had because he’d believed it was what they both wanted and the fact that he’d been correct now seemed irrelevant.

“I’m sorry,” Wally said. “I just wanted to have a nice evening out here with you.”

“I know, just think.”

Wally felt himself withdrawing into himself. In times like this he felt like he was always doing the wrong thing. He would try to make Gull happy only to frustrate him, or even make him outright angry, and then would leave (or be sent away) thoroughly chastened.

“Don’t pout.”

“You’re the one who called me an asshole,” Wally countered.

“I didn’t,”

“And ladies who say ‘bless your heart’ aren’t calling you an idiot.” Wally looked away, over the ancient, unending flow. A fish jumped and was gone.

“Ok, maybe you’re right.”

The waitress reappeared with their food and they stopped and smiled up at her as if yes, yes they were having a lovely time at historic Puck’s on Wilbur. They ate in silence at first, both still feeling bitter. But the food was good. Excellent even. Certainly too good to keep a sour mood while eating. Tension dissolved like the breading on Wally’s catfish under a thick spread of tartar sauce. Gull tried to squeeze a lemon in the tea he’d ordered after his beer and instead squirted himself in the face. They both laughed as Wally wiped it off for him, Gull’s only free hand dripping with barbeque sauce.

After their meal, they shared a cup of banana pudding and finished their tea and watched as the sun went down over the river, dyeing the waters a magnificent crimson.

viii

It grew dark quickly in Angler’s Bend. With the lack of light pollution the stars were out in droves. The moon was full that night, and very brilliant.

“Werewolf weather,” Wally said from the passenger seat.

Gull didn’t seem to hear. “Shit.”

“What?” Wally asked, but his question was immediately answered.

Heading out of town they had to pass by the town hall again as they had when they’d entered. It was much the same except now the police cruisers were no longer in their parking spots. They were parked instead in the road, horizontally, bumper to bumper, blocking the exit. The Sheriff and deputy stood in front of them, outside in the night, waiting.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

“Calm down,” Wally said. “We’re not doing anything wrong. There’s a prison a few miles north of here. Probably somebody escaped and they’re on the trail. You have your ID and registration right? And your tag’s in date?”

“Yes, to all of it.”

“Ok then. Just come to a stop at a respectable distance so these pigs can do their thing and we can go home.”

Gull stopped ten feet away from the roadblock, turned on his overhead light, gathered his documents and, together, they waited. In the beams of the headlights Wally could see the Sheriff and the deputy discussing something. He had no idea which was which; they were dressed identically and looked roughly the same age – one was a little shorter and fatter but that was it. He couldn’t hear what they said. They played their cards close, expressing little emotion during their discussion, making it impossible to judge the true tone of their conversation.

They finished speaking abruptly and turned in unison. They could almost be brothers – both pale white with thick freckled arms hanging limply from their short sleeved khaki shirts, blonde hair buzzed to their scalps and petulant, upturned noses. They strode to the car in step, diverging at the hood, one coming to each front window. Using the automatic switch, Gull rolled down both before they had a chance to ask him to.

“Having a good evening, officers?” Gull made a valiant effort to sound calm.

“Oh sure, sure,” the shorter one on Wally’s side responded, leaning down to look in the window. “You two the faggots?”

“Shut the hell up, Virgil,” the one on Gull’s side said. “You know it’s them.”

“Aye, aye, Sheriff.”

“Now what the hell is this?” Wally sensed an approaching sting to his civil liberties.

“What this is,” the deputy drew himself back up to his full height and Wally couldn’t help but notice the holster of his gun was unclasped, the better for quick drawing, “is whatever we Goddam fucking shitting say it is.”

“It’s after sunset,” Gull said softly. “That’s what it is.”

“Smart boy,” the Sheriff said, slapping the hood of Gull’s car twice with one large hand. “Time to step out that car now. That goes for both of you.”

Wally was on his feet only a second before the deputy had his service weapon trained on him. “Slowly now, cocksucker, we’re going for a ride in the Sheriff’s car. All four of us going for a little night drive.”

At gunpoint the deputy ushered Wally and Gull into the back of one of the cruisers and locked them in. That done, the deputy assisted the Sheriff in moving Gull’s and the other patrol car out of the street before they returned together and climbed in front. The deputy leered at them through the metal grating. “Buckle up, faggots.”

“Shut the fuck up, Virgil.” The Sheriff started the cruiser.

In the dark, thinking of every God awful hate crime he’d ever ready about, Wally reached out and clasped Gull’s hand. He felt Gull squeeze back but neither were much reassured.

ix

Virgil, the deputy, did not mock and jeer the whole way as Gull had assumed he would. Perhaps the long term presence of the Sheriff had a restraining effect. Perhaps the mood of his mission was finally getting to him. Gull had no doubt that they were planning murder and that he and Wally were the intended victims. How many were involved and how long had the plan been in motion? Gull hadn’t seen either officer all day which could only mean that they’d set up their ambush at the instigation of an informant.

The ride wasn’t terribly long, no more than twenty minutes, and it terminated in the place which, somehow, Gull knew would be their only, last, inevitable destination. He recognized where he was as soon as they dragged him from the cruiser. He recognized the stands of pine. He recognized the clearing, bright and luminous under the moonglow. He recognized the sharp curve in the river as Angler’s Bend. This was where he and Wally were going to die.

No quiet moonlit lynching this. Most of the town was already there, waiting for them. They stood in two parallel rows, one facing the other, creating an aisle that stretched from land to knee deep in the river.

In addition to the moonlight, the clearing was illuminated by torches. They were arranged in two semi-circles skirting the edge of the clearing, the second cupped within the bowl of the first. In their orange, flickering light Gull could only guess the color of the robes the waiting townsfolk wore. These were not the hooded, starched white cloaks of certain racist crusaders. They were something more like monk’s robes, gray-green, the color of rivermud, with ropes lashed about each waist from which dangled, not rosaries, but gleaming metal hooks – the size you’d use to reel in a marlin or a shark.

“Wally,” Gull blurted, as the two police officers began pushing them down the aisle towards the river. “Wally, I’m so fucking sorry for any shitty thing I’ve ever said or done to you. I fucking love you.”

“I love you too.” Wally was slightly behind him and Gull couldn’t see his face, but he could hear the fear in his quaking voice. “I’m sorry I’m such an idiot, Gull. I’m sorry I’m always bored. I’m sorry I made us come out here.”

“Yeah, the stupidest mistake you ever made, faggot.” The voice of Virgil sprouted up from behind him. The Sheriff did not silence his deputy this time. Perhaps he agreed.

The river water splashed cold against his jeans, a cold that immediately seeped to his skin; from skin to bone. Jesus Christ, they’re gonna drown us out in this, he thought. Pushed onwards into the river, Gull spied among the rows the piggy man from the general store, at his side was dime-store Walt Whitman from the gallery and further down, Doreen of Angler Antiques – she saw him seeing her and turned her face away. Only a few steps more and they were forced to their knees at the end of the line. A man waited for them there, standing above them in his silt colored vestments. Wilbur Puck VIII. Gull recognized him from his photograph in the restaurant.

“My good people,” Puck addressed his fellows, spreading his arms like a preacher. “It’s that time again, isn’t it?”

To a man, both rows answered, “Yes.”

“We got something special here,” Wilbur Theophilus Puck VIII resumed. “Something to be protected. Our ancestors built Angler’s Bend before America was America – carved it out against the hostilities of bear and wildcat and Indian. We cleared our waters of moccasins, our brush of rattlers, our countryside of roving free niggers after the war of the states. Yessir, we did. And when you make something special, you keep it special, am I right?”

“Yes!” They replied more fervently.

“Hell yes!” Puck slapped his thighs, the movement sending a tiny spray of river water in Gull’s face. “And do we ask for much out here? Do we need much?”

“No!”

“Nosir! Just the right kind of tourists to fill our streets, true Americans like us, nice good white families and – and all the fish to feed ‘em, of course!”

The two rows cheered at these words until Puck held up his hands to gently silence them. “But the price is the price. We all know that. It’s a full moon now and the stars–” he gestured vaguely up at the heavens, “The stars are just as they should be. It is the year, the month, the week, the day, the hour. It is time.”

The hammer blow that struck Gull in the back of the head broke through his skull and burrowed into his brain. As the metal was jerked roughly out of him, he pitched forwards only for a strong hand to catch hold of his collar, preventing him from being submerged. He could hear Wally screaming, shrieking his name. The pain was extraordinary and, somehow, difficult to comprehend. To know someone intends to murder you is one thing. To understand ‘I am being murdered’ is another. Perhaps finding it easier to do his work this way, the killer did not release his collar as he brought the hammer down a second time, directly next to where the first blow had landed, widening the wound. He was lowered closer to the surface then, his nose barely an inch above the water. Hot blood spilled down every contour of his face, blinding him, filling his nose with its stink, his mouth with its taste of copper.

The hammer, yanked out from the wound a second time, did not swing down a third. Instead the metal claws of the hammer’s reverse end, typically used for pulling out nails, was inserted into the wound. The real pain began then, his howls in harmony with Wally’s as, with the ripping of scalp and the cracking of bone, his skull was pried open and everything that made him Gull was dumped into the river. Then the hand released him and he fell. For a moment he saw the moon, but he did not understand what he was seeing or even that he was seeing. Then he was under and the icy black waters carried away his mind and licked clean the emptied basin of his skull.

x

Wally had never screamed before, not really. The startled squeak at a jump scare in a movie or at a haunted house bore no resemblance to the noise which erupted from his contracting abdomen, clawed its way up his throat, exploded horrifying and primeval past lips pulled back in disgust from bared teeth. It kept coming, bubbling, spilling upwards like vomit or oil as he watched Virgil break open his boyfriend’s head. He was hoarse when Gull went under, when all that was left of him were the bloodied gray bits that floated across the slick of Gull’s lifeblood, ink black in the night. At least three, possibly four people were restraining him, how hard he’d fought, unimaginable for someone as physically weak as he. The noise continued after Gull’s blood was dispersed by the waters, diminished perhaps, choked by tears and snot, while he waited for his own pair of hammer blows that never came. The noise, the scream, the wail, the keening, still went on, uncontrollably coming out of him. It did not stop until the water about a foot in front of him began to bubble. Then his jaws snapped shut so quickly that he bit his tongue and his mouth filled with blood. He swallowed, hardly noticing; his eyes were fixed on the disturbance in the waters in front of him. Rapt, he watched.

What started as a few bubbles that could be explained away as a freed pocket of gas or perhaps an atypical swirl in the current only escalated until it was as if the river was boiling all around him – but there was no heat and looks on his captors’ faces were, to varying degrees, all masks of feverish excitement; the faces of a community about to see God. Then he felt, beneath the force of the bubbles, the shift of purposeful movement course throughout the waters, the movement of something very large that had hidden submerged in this place for longer than he could guess. He felt his bladder go, briefly warming the waters around him.

What emerged, its great back swelling out first like an inflating balloon before it lifted its head, was something not of this time or any other that Wally knew. Great shifts of water, mud, drowned grass sloughed off its shoulders as it pulled itself up and forwards on a pair of crocodilian forelegs. The skin of the creature, the same color as the townsfolk’s robes, lacked both reptilian scales and amphibian smoothness, assuming more the texture of rough-hewn stone. From each corner of a mouth wider than a man is tall, whiskers thick as a child’s arm drooped limply into the swirling murk while within the rubbery catfish lips many hooks were embedded. The eyes, watery and yellow, were set far back on its strange horseshoe shaped head and looked dull, all instinct and little intelligence. Above the mouth, two slimecaked nostrils flapped open and shut, sending a spray of hot mist into the air each time they opened.

Wally screamed again, bucking against his captors, but the hands that restrained him were stronger than he. His bladder convulsed again, attempting to re-release the urine it no longer held, as the monstrosity opened its maw, blasting him with its acrid breath, revealing rows of jagged teeth designed to tear and shred. He imagined it ripping him apart bit by bit as they restrained him but instead the thing continued to widen its mouth, distending its jaw like a snake, opening its throat like a well of midnight, before it hunkered down, ready.

Ready to receive him, Wally’s breaking mind realized as strong arms yanked him up from his knees and off of his feet. A gift from its subjects, fed to it alive and whole. Crying, begging, pleas for God’s mercy would not stop them from lowering him down into that well. How long would he writhe in the acids of the creature’s stomach, dissolving slowly in the dark before at last he mercifully asphyxiated in the great cavern of its belly? When the mouth was shut, his screams could still be heard from within.

Wilbur Puck VIII gently stroked the creature’s snout before, contented, it went back under. “That’s a good girl,” he said.

***

Aaron Romano (they/them) was born in New Orleans, LA and has been obsessed with all things spooky since they were about five years old. They have been writing since childhood and in college they were twice published in the Headwaters Creative Arts Magazine, winning that publication's Thomas Wolfe Award in Fiction for both stories. They now live outside of Asheville, NC with their partner and their two cats, Oliver and Penny. They can be located on social media via their Twitter (a.k.a. X) handle, @SpookyA_A_Ron.