Gone Girl(103)
He leaves the windows down as we drive through the forested hills, the gravel dust coating my stubby hair. It feels like something from a country-music video: the girl in the sundress leaning out to catch the breeze of a red-state summer night. I can see stars. Jeff hums off and on.
He parks down the road from a restaurant that hangs out on stilts over the lake, a barbecue place known for its giant souvenir cups of boozy drinks with bad names: Gator Juice and Bassmouth Blitz. I know this from the discarded cups that float along all the shores of the lake, cracked and neon-colored with the restaurant’s logo: Catfish Carl’s. Catfish Carl’s has a deck that overhangs the water – diners can load up on handfuls of kitty kibble from the crank machines and drop them into the gaping mouths of hundreds of giant catfish that wait below.
‘What exactly are we going to do, Jeff?’
‘You net ’em, I kill ’em.’ He gets out of the car, and I follow him around to the hatchback, which is filled with coolers. ‘We put ’em in here, on ice, resell them.’
‘Resell them. Who buys stolen fish?’
Jeff smiles that lazy-cat smile. ‘I got a clientele of sorts.’
And then I realize: He isn’t a Grizzly Adams, guitar-playing, peace-loving granola guy at all. He is a redneck thief who wants to believe that he’s more complicated than that.
He pulls out a net, a box of Nine Lives, and a stained plastic bucket.
I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ‘I’ am game. I have become game again since I died. All the things I disliked or feared, all the limits I had, they’ve slid off me. ‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom.
We walk down the hill, under the deck of Catfish Carl’s, and onto the docks, which float slurpily on the wakes of a passing motorboat, Jimmy Buffett blaring.
Jeff hands me a net. ‘We need this to be quick – you just jump in the water, scoop the net in, nab the fish, then tilt the net up to me. It’ll be heavy, though, and squirmy, so be prepared. And don’t scream or nothing.’
‘I won’t scream. But I don’t want to go in the water. I can do it from the deck.’
‘You should take off your dress, at least, you’ll ruin it.’
‘I’m okay.’
He looks annoyed for a moment – he’s the boss, I’m the employee, and so far I’m not listening to him – but then he turns around modestly and tugs off his shirt and hands me the box of cat food without fully facing me, as if he’s shy. I hold the box with its narrow mouth over the water, and immediately, a hundred shiny arched backs roll toward me, a mob of serpents, the tails cutting across the surface furiously, and then the mouths are below me, the fish roiling over each other to swallow the pellets and then, like trained pets, aiming their faces up toward me for more.
I scoop the net into the middle of the pack and sit down hard on the dock to get leverage to pull the harvest up. When I yank, the net is full of half a dozen whiskery, slick catfish, all frantically trying to get back in the water, their gaping lips opening and shutting between the squares of nylon, their collective tugging making the net wobble up and down.
‘Lift it up, lift it up, girl!’
I push a knee below the net’s handle and let it dangle there, Jeff reaching in, grabbing a fish with two hands, each encased in terrycloth manicure gloves for a better grip. He moves his hands down around the tail, then swings the fish like a cudgel, smashing its head on the side of the dock. Blood explodes. A brief sharp pelt of it streaks across my legs, a hard chunk of meat hits my hair. Jeff throws the fish in the bucket and grabs another with assembly-line smoothness.
We work in grunts and wheezes for half an hour, four nets full, until my arms turn rubbery and the ice chests are full. Jeff takes the empty pail and fills it with water from the lake, pours it across the messy entrails and into the fish pens. The catfish gobble up the guts of their fallen brethren. The dock is left clean. He pours one last pail of water across our bloody feet.
‘Why do you have to smash them?’ I ask.
‘Can’t stand to watch something suffer,’ he says. ‘Quick dunk?’
‘I’m okay,’ I say.
‘Not in my car, you’re not – come on, quick dunk, you have more crap on you than you realize.’
We run off the dock toward the rocky beach nearby. While I wade ankle-deep in the water, Jeff runs with giant splashy footsteps and throws himself forward, arms wild. As soon as he’s far enough out, I unhook my money belt and fold my sundress around it, leave it at the water’s edge with my glasses on top. I lower myself until I feel the warm water hit my thighs, my belly, my neck, and then I hold my breath and go under.
I swim far and fast, stay underwater longer than I should to remind myself what it would feel like to drown – I know I could do it if I needed to – and when I come up with a single disciplined gasp, I see Jeff lapping rapidly toward shore, and I have to swim fast as a porpoise back to my money belt and scramble onto the rocks just ahead of him.
NICK DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
As soon as I hung up with Tommy, I phoned Hilary Handy. If my ‘murder’ of Amy was a lie, and Tommy O’Hara’s ‘rape’ of Amy was a lie, why not Hilary Handy’s ‘stalking’ of Amy? A sociopath must cut her teeth somewhere, like the austere marble halls of Wickshire Academy.