My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(27)

What I asked her here as I’m sure you can guess was “OLD pier?” As in, there was another before the one that’s there NOW? How do we not all know this? What ELSE do we not know, sir? This is why history class is a requirement. If I wasn’t for sure graduating, I could take it again and again, until I knew about ALL the old piers.

But, Christine Gillette. Or, Cross Bull Joe, really. His winch strained and pulled and I imagine that, like Quint in Jaws, he had to pour water on that winding-up cable. What he finally pulled up made all the women scream, all the children fall to their knees, and all the men take a long step back like whoah.

It was an Indian girl, sir.

Which, I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Holmes. You’re thinking that it’s sad but people drown in lakes every day, probably more back then before life jackets and safety signs, and that Indian Lake is cold enough that they don’t even decompose, just bob around in Ezekiel’s Cold Box, waiting for the day somebody with a tow truck hooks them, pulls them up into the light. I know this is what you’re thinking because it’s also what I was thinking.

But we’re both wrong, sir.

The way Christine Gillette told it to me, the way they knew this wasn’t some random Shoshone or Bannock in a stolen and rotting water logged dress was what happened 10 seconds later. But let’s time these explosions if we can. The first for me sitting there in room 522 of Pleasant Valley Assisted Living was what you’re probably asking now, which is “Stacey Graves was INDIAN?”

If you’re rocked and shocked, it’s because this is not exactly common knowledge and it’s also not part of the accepted lore about our Lake Witch. But evidently Stacey Graves had been half Indian, meaning that since her dad was all white, her mom must have been full blooded. Which everybody used to know and I guess we still would if we talked to the right old people. Christine Gillette told me that the boogeyman of Indian Lake used to not even be Stacey Graves in the first place, OR Ezekiel with his big hands. It used to be Stacey Graves’s MOM, always walking around the shore line looking for her lost daughter, and taking any kids after dark back to her cave where she would hold them to her, in Christine Gillette’s picture painty words, “leathery dugs” and make them drink her milk, which pretty much did the opposite of real mother’s milk, so the lesson there was to not go out after dark, kids, get it?

Anyway, with THAT explosion of Stacey Graves having been Indian hanging in the air above me and Christine Gillette, she activated her inner demolition man and detonated the next charge, even sort of acted it out so I’d be sure to get it. What she did in her wheelchair was reach her right arm up for the big iron hook coming in under Stacey Graves’ chin, gouging up into her head like she was a fish wriggling on a trotline. And then her left hand joined her right, and using the strength of both she pulled herself up off that black hook, which Christine Gillette said was a good 2

dollar one, which is probably a fact we could check to verify the truthfulness of her story.

Because of the barb at the point of that hook that caught in this little girl’s chin right at the very end, when she was already trying to fall away and do what Stacey Graves DOES, which you of course already know from having lived here for so long and heard the stories, the final releasing of her hands made her hang sideways by only her jaw and everybody thought it was going to crack off and tear away. But then only SOME skin tore instead and runny black blood spurted out and then she was off the hook and to the races, and everybody was shrieking and pulling their hair and going to church first thing and promising not to go across the lake for elk anymore, which is kind of the secret real birth of the national forest if you ask me.

And Christine Gillette saw all of this 1st hand, Mr. Holmes. She was 14 that year. And the way I know she’s not making it up is that the story went on after that, and not because she was just trying to keep me there since nobody ever visits her according to the sheet I had to sign.

After what happened HAPPENED, nobody would go out onto the old pier anymore. Not even Cross Bull Joe to get his truck. So then one morning they heard a cracking and crashing sound, and by the time anybody looked out there, the old pier had mostly collapsed under the weight of that tow truck, probably when one bird too many landed on that black hook and that tall V of pipe holding the cable. If a pier can be a camel’s back, then a bird can be a straw, right?

Christine Gillette’s dad told her he would give her 1 whole dime if she would swim out there and untie that 2 dollar hook for him, but Christine Gillette says that her life was worth more than ten cents, which back then was a lot more than today of course.

So that hook’s still out there, I guess. And maybe that truck too, all rotted and flaked away, the window glass all turned to crumbles.

And also Stacey Graves, Mr. Holmes.

You had to know that’s where I was going.

So in conclusion and wrap up for the WHOLE SEMESTER including my course grade which maybe shouldn’t be history, what we thought was just fiction has in fact a basis in eyewitness testimony. And the way you can know I didn’t make this up is that if I were the one coming up with that then at the end of the story Christine Gillette would huff air out through her nose and two plugs of mud would splat onto the ground between us, and then I’d look up the moment after a shape just left from looking in the window, and there would probably be scary piano and violin playing too.

But none of that, sir.