David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

Hey, I could relate.

In fact, a couple of years ago I would have been one of those kids. We’d been stopping at Natch’s every summer since Lenore was a little kid and I was a baby. Dad used to joke that Oliver Natch’s old highway rest stop had grown up with me. When I was little, Natch’s was just a burger joint on the northbound side of the highway, nestled in a semi-circle of low rocky hills, and surrounded by a dark forest of big pine and cedar trees. I was too young to remember it like that, but one of our family pictures is of the four of us standing in front of the little restaurant — Dad with a big suntanned arm over Mom’s shoulder, Lenore holding me and giggling like an idiot while I grabbed her ear. I don’t know who took the picture — maybe Mr. Natch himself did it, because he probably spent more time there in those days.

These days, my Dad figured that Mr. Natch was too busy counting his money to spend much time at the Grill and Fun-Park. Over the years, he’d put in about fifty picnic tables, slapped up two separate dining buildings with their own washrooms, set up a lame amusement park with a little carousel and the CARLINGSBURG RAIL MUSEUM in an old train car. Sometime in the last ten years, he’d built a completely enclosed footbridge across four lanes of highway to a parking lot on the west side — so people coming south back to the city could stop at Natch’s too. Dad thought he must have bribed someone high up in the government to get permission to build the bridge across the highway like that. I didn’t know if he did or not but he certainly could afford to. The place was packed. It was so packed there were actually security guards, wearing blue shirts and carrying walkie-talkies and strange black wands, making sure nothing bad happened to Mr. Natch’s considerable investment.

“Okay,” said Nick. “I see what you mean.” He was looking at a table two over, where a four-year-old girl with pigtails had overturned her milkshake onto her brother’s french fries. Her dad, a big-bellied bald man in a Carlingsburg Panthers T-shirt, sipped at his own milkshake without seeming to notice. “If that were my kid, maybe I would want to strangle her.”

Lenore took a bite out of her pretzel. “ Our kid,” she said, “would never do that.”

Lenore didn’t notice how Nick winced, but I sure did. Nick had been wincing a lot over the past two weeks he’d been at our cottage. He winced when she talked about how after graduation next year, the two of them would apply to the same college. He winced when she talked about how before college, the two of them could audition for spots on the Up With People tour and spend the whole summer criss-crossing the United States spreading cheerful songs and right-thinking values to those “less fortunate” than Lenore. And he particularly winced when she would go on and on and on about all the things they’d do together after college. I wasn’t surprised one bit when Nick offered to drive me back to the city along with Lenore, to give my parents some “alone time.” “Alone time” was something he and Lenore had altogether too much of over the past two weeks.

“Hey!” The boy across from us got up, one soggy vanilla-flavoured french fry in his hands. His sister stuck her tongue out at him. “You little rat!” he shouted.

“Don’t call your little sister names,” said their father as he sipped at his milkshake and looked off into the distance, and the little girl smiled. “ Don’t call your little sister names ,” she said in a sing-song voice that was designed to be irritating. Then she crossed her eyes and turned over to look at us.

“Fezkul,” she said.

I leaned forward, trying to figure out what she was trying to tell me. But she wasn’t trying to tell me anything. Someone answered from behind me:

“Good girl, Blair. You are a rocking kid.”

The voice sounded like a little boy — a little boy leaning right over my shoulder. I turned around, and for an instant, I saw him: a kid wearing low-slung jeans and a baseball cap, an oversized T-shirt and a big smile.

It was a smile with rows of saw-teeth. It made him look like a shark.

“Holy crap,” I said. But then I blinked, and he was gone. Or I’d dreamed it. Or he was just gone. I shook my head.

The little girl giggled and clapped: “Fezkul!” she said. Her dad set his cup down on the table and looked at his watch.

“We should get back on the road,” he said. “Your mother’ll have my neck.”

The girl stopped giggling and her face fell. “No!” she said. “Wanna go see Fezkul!”

She pointed across the picnic ground to the woods.

Her father made to protest, but she hollered back that “new daddy” would let her and just like that, he gave in.

“Weird kid,” said Nick.

My sister shook her head. “She’s not weird. She’s manipulative. Her poor dad’s probably just got them for the weekend, and she’s probably been holding that ‘new daddy’ line over his head the whole time.” She looked up into the clear blue sky overhead, as if asking God to back her up. “Divorce is so terrible. Let’s never get divorced, Nicky.”

“Um,” said Nick.

“What’s with Fezkul?” I said.

They both turned to look at me. “Who?” said Lenore, and Nick said, with a certain amount of relief in his voice: “ Fezkul . That’s what she said. I couldn’t make it out. You got a good ear, bro.”

“Fezkul,” said Lenore. “It’s probably some character off the Cartoon Network. Or out of one of your Dungeons and Dragons books.” Lenore was forever dissing my Dungeons and Dragons books. “ Kids .”

“Sure.” I nodded like I agreed with her, but I didn’t buy it for a second. I couldn’t get the picture of that weird kid with the creepy smile out of my mind. That kid was no cartoon character.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“All right,” said Lenore. “But don’t take too long. Tomorrow’s a school day.”

“Do what you got to do, bro,” said Nick as I got up and hurried off to the main building.

I didn’t have to do anything, at least not in the bathroom. But I did have to go. There was something about that kid Fezkul; something about his voice, those teeth. I figured it must have been an optical illusion, those rows of shark teeth, but still…

I was having what my dad called a curiosity attack. Ever since I was two, these attacks would come on with varying intensity and they would cause me to do all sorts of things which, looking back, seemed pretty stupid: climbing telephone poles; sticking my head through metal grating; one time, eating a bug. Dad told me that this curiosity disease would — how did he put it? — “Doom you to a life of journalism” (which is what he did before he quit the newspaper and went into web design) “if it doesn’t get you killed first.”

What can I say? It’s a sickness.

I started my search for Fezkul at the museum, and checked out the kids standing in line. There were only five of them, and twice as many parents. None of them looked like a Fezkul.

So I headed for one of the dining buildings. It was nice out, so there weren’t very many people inside, just a couple of clusters of senior citizens who looked at me nervously while they munched on Natchie Burgers. A teenager in a bright orange Natch uniform was busy mopping up an immense puddle of something in the middle of the floor. There were some old video games — which struck me as the kinds of things that might attract a kid like Fezkul — but no. I nodded at one old woman, who nodded back and looked away, and stepped around the puddle, and so it was that I left the dining hall. Rather than try the other one, I figured I’d head for the heart of Natch’s Highway Grill and Fun-Park — the place where it had all started: The grill house.