My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(41)

You know Dorothy? Dot’s? You too young for coffee yet? Give it a year. But we were all just stupid [bleeping] kids back then too — no insult. Now, after Jefferson, it was… let’s see. Howarth, yeah. Crane Howarth. He had the prettiest goddamn jump shot I’ve ever seen in real life. He just would have sold insurance or drove a truck after high school, I know. But watching him play, it was — I guess that’s what people mean when they talk about grace. He could rise up and have that ball launched and perfect before you’d even realized he’d stopped.”

DOES THAT COUNT AS “LOCAL COLOR,” SIR? SPORTSBALL STUFF?

IF NOT, THEN HOW ABOUT SOME ARCHERY.

“No, no, not arrows. It say that in that article? No, Crane turned up at the bottom of the bluff, must have been trying to climb it. It was a… maybe don’t print this next part? Used to you’d climb the bluff, and one of your friends would point out to everybody else that the moon’s just cresting, look how big it is, and when everybody looked up you’d already have your pants pulled down to show them the REAL moon — I never did that, though. And, after Crane, the bluff was strictly off limits. Still should be, you ask me. The whole place, I mean. Somebody’s gonna get hurt over there.”

OR, YOU KNOW, CONCEIVED OVER THERE, MR. HOLMES. BUT THE

INTERVIEWER’S PERSONAL DETAILS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO MATTER. I DON’T KNOW WHICH CABIN IT WAS ANYWAY, SO CAN’T SAY THAT

DETAIL. BUT I DID KNOW THE NEXT NAME TO ASK THE SHERIFF

ABOUT.

“No, it’s Brockmeir, like ‘brock’ plus ‘mayor,’ just you don’t say the y-part as hard. But she was… as far as we knew back then she was just Remar Lundy’s weird little niece. But I guess, living back in the trees at their place, one of her older cousins had maybe told her about the Lake Witch, I don’t know. And she took it to heart, maybe. She wasn’t right in the head, I’m saying. It probably didn’t help that all us junior detectives around the campfire — to us it was even money that it was Stacey Graves who’d got Jefferson and Crane. This was right after the big fire of 65, Bear teach you about that? Good, good. Know your history, don’t [bleeping]

play with matches. What I’m saying though is that we were all kind of spooky already. And it was kind of a thrill too, you know how it is at camp. But yeah, before you ask, it was me who ID’d her for Don Chambers when it was all said and done. But that was after. I mean, that was 2 tragedies later, that’s how I should say it. The 1st of those would be Anthea, Anthea Walker. She was the 16 year old. But she was short, that’s the thing. Guess she had to be to fall into the big cook pot.

Except she didn’t fall, we all knew that. How do you fall into something you hardly even fit in? We heard it was a dare — that won’t be in your article there either. The story Midge and Gun Saddleback — they were the ones trying to make a go of Winnemucca that summer — the story they were trying to get us to all buy into was that Anthea pulled the short straw in cabin 2, so had to be the 1 to make the run down to the canteen, investigate just what mystery meat was for lunch the next day.

But, Anthea — we all called her Thea, kind of like your old man’s Tab — she was friendly with the Brockmeir girl, see? That’s probably how Amy Brockmeir was able to get behind her so close, push her in.”

BECAUSE WE HAVE TO PROVIDE CONTEXT FOR NON-LOCALS, WHEN THE SHERIFF ABOVE SAYS THEY WERE ALL SCARED OF THE

“LAKE WITCH,” THE STORY HE’S REFERRING TO THAT YOU AND ME

KNOW BUT NOBODY NOT IN PROOFROCK KNOWS IS THAT A 100

YEARS AGO SOME BOYS AND STACEY GRAVES THE 8 YEAR OLD WERE

PLAYING “WITCH” IN THE SHALLOWS OF THE RISING LAKE AND THEY

SWUNG HER AND THEN THREW HER OUT AS FAR AS SHE COULD TO

PROVE SHE WASN’T A WITCH, BECAUSE WITCHES FLOAT, EVERYBODY

KNOWS THAT, BUT SURPRISE, THE WATER WOULDN’T LET HER IN, SO

SHE FLOPPED OVER ON IT, HUNCHED UP LIKE A CAT, HISSED AT THE

BOYS THROUGH HER CRAZY HAIR AND RAN AWAY ON ALL FOURS TO

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE TO FIND HER MOM THAT HER DAD

HAD PROBABLY KILLED AND HIDDEN OVER THERE ALREADY, AND

THIS IS HOW LEGENDS ARE BORN, SIR.

“Well, yeah, that was Friday night. Saturday night was — [4 letter bleep] — that was when I saw what I saw, yeah. Which I don’t know I should be repeating, even for history. But… well [same bleep]. I mean, Bear, your teacher, that’s his real name, he knows all this already. He was in cabin 4, the 6th graders. So I guess it’s okay. He won’t put this paper on the wall, I’m pretty sure.”

AND HERE’S WHERE I WENT FULL GERALDO.

“You gonna believe an article by a reporter who wasn’t there or you going to buy the story of the guy who WAS there? Nobody saw what I saw. It was Amy Brockmeir, none of that mistaken identity bull [bleep]. That’s easy to say from the armchair, I mean. But I was there, little miss, feet on the ground, lump in my throat the size of a cantaloupe. This was Saturday night, our last night there. I don’t know why we hadn’t all gone home already, with kids dying left and right. I’d got up to pee, but the privvies, they were all the [bleeping] way to the other side of camp. On the way over, I rounded this 1 corner — at first I thought it was a badger, I guess. I can still see it, I mean. You know how a badger, when it’s eating, it kind of bunches up in the middle, like it’s humping whatever it’s eating? Strike that, don’t write that down, shouldn’t have said it. But I think they eat that way because of something to do with how their throats are. Rolling at the spine, it forces the food back faster than just an esophagus can.”