My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(115)
Connie the Librarian looks over, crosses her index finger over her lips to shush Jade.
What Jade wants to yell back is to clear the beaches, that the theater’s on fire, that there’s a werewolf in the subway, but she doesn’t have enough breath, and Connie’s just playing the role that goes with her float, anyway. Shushing people on tonight of all nights would be hopeless. Like every Fourth, there’s elementary kids with shark fins tied to their backs, snorkels wrapped around their faces, there’s junior highers wading among the boats, sneaking up on ready-to-shriek friends, there’s sophomores making out in the water, seniors going further under cover of gunwales and blankets, and then there’s dads keeping one hand in the water, to guard the beer they’ve got on a stringer, and those dads’ wives drifting in innertubes, already on the day’s second bottle of wine.
Somewhere in there is a hero in yellow glasses, Jade knows.
He’s trying to save two little girls whose father is dead, whose whole lives have turned into a screaming nightmare, who are probably chattering their teeth with hypothermia right now, since no way do they have enough body fat. Jade’s not a good person, she knows she’s not and never can be, it’s too late for her, but that doesn’t mean she can’t try to find them, help them onto a boat, onto the pier, into one of Hardy’s crunchy silver blankets.
Shooting Glasses, Shooting Glasses…
She steps up onto a raft built to be a living room, complete with couch and standing lamp, the man on the couch in comical boxers, a swimsuit under them—it’s Lonnie, from the gas station—looking over to her in a drunken way, then lifting his beer to her as if to tell her, Look, I’m not in just an innertube anymore. Jade gives him a nod and holds on to the lamp, casing the crowd. Three or four boats over is a bass boat made into a bassinet, which must be someone’s baby announcement, and there’s Hardy’s airboat tied to the pier like a guard dog, and—seriously?
Her father and Rexall are in a wooden paddleboat draped in what looks like ratty old elk hides that are taking on water. But who cares about their stupid boat. It’s their idiot selves Jade is wincing from: her dad’s got his face painted like Johnny Depp from The Lone Ranger—half-black, half-white, all “Indian”— and is drunk enough already to be shirtless in the open air. The better to see his gut, the skin stretched tight as a drum, his ribs traced in yellow for some reason. Maybe he saw it in a vision, was told by an eagle that if he painted his ribs yellow like that then he could fit not just two or three more beers into his body, but a whole twelve-pack.
Score.
Rexall’s worse, and… maybe it’s because he’s white? The headdress he’s in says he’s the chief of their two-person tribe, though, and if beer guts are a status symbol, a sign of prosperity, of having enough buffalo to eat, then… he doesn’t even need the turkey-feather headdress, really.
Jade’s not sure how the eyepatch he’s wearing is supposed to be part of his Halloween getup, but the monkey-doll clamped onto his shoulder probably isn’t culture-specific either—what did she expect, really?
From him: nothing.
From her dad, who actually is Indian?
Jade makes herself pull her eyes away from the insult they are, fixes for a moment on the cheerleaders in their matching bikinis, all of them sitting front to back on some giant shark built over a canoe, it looks like—real original, girls, nobody’s ever thought of that one for this movie. And talking canoes: like every year, Principal Manx is just past them in his clear plastic canoe, sitting alone, looking like he’s just floating there, like if you believe hard enough that you’re in a boat, then you can float.
And—
“Shooting Glasses!” Jade yells, her hands cupped around her mouth.
Which is when she realizes that she doesn’t know his name.
That, to him, those are probably safety glasses. Maybe he’s never even fired a real gun, only knows nailguns. And more intimately than he ever hoped.
He doesn’t turn around to her plea, is just trying to push either Cinnamon or Ginger up onto the pier, but there’s no ladder on this side, Jade knows, and when that wood’s wet, it’s slicker than slick. But he finally does it, finally gets one of the girls up there enough that she can latch on, clamber up, and the other twin’s pushing too, and… shit, that’s not one of the twins turning around on the pier to help the other one up. It’s Galatea Pangborne. Meaning the other twin…? Jade sneaks a look across the lake, as if her mind’s eye can bore into the bowels of the yacht, pick one dead twin from that carnage. Or one hiding twin left behind by her and Letha.
Jade comes right back to the pier as if to apologize, ask for a do-over, she’ll just swim across right now, make everything right. But she’s never been in time for anything, has she? Is this the “Indian Time” her dad’s always using to explain his lateness? Growing up, she thought “Indian Time” meant “just one more beer,” as in, Tab Daniels was going to be however late it took to cash another can, but maybe it covers leaving a terrified little girl on the wrong side of the lake, too.
Not that this is necessarily the right side.
Jade pushes up as high as she can in the water to get Shooting Glasses’s attention, but he’s… he’s already got others’ attention, doesn’t he? Three, four flashlights are holding on him, helping him help these kids, who probably fell off their own floats. It should be a good thing, a happy thing, except—except he’s Jada Pinkett Smith at the front of the theater in Scream 2 now, isn’t he?