Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

Looking at Riv, at Moss, at Kirsch, at all the other men at this tavern in shorts, sneakers, T-shirts, jeans, baseball caps, beards, it seemed like a step or two down the evolutionary ladder before they once again were cavemen, hooting, pillaging, their most affectionate moments coming when they picked beetles from the hair of their mates. Could it be so hard to profit off them? Imagine all the good we could do with the money. What if the Jersey Devil Adventure Pinelands Experience were intended as a preservationist non-profit or an organization that directed its profits to rebuilding areas of cities devastated by chronic neglect. I’ve lived in holes in the sand, caves, orchards, and now a studio apartment above a garage. What did I need a house for, a car I can’t drive? All profits from the biopic and documentary and even my life story I’d donate so others lived a better life.

What did this Jersey Devil hunt mean to us? Clearly, as we’d toasted a few weeks ago, this was something we needed, something I needed, too. At first for obvious reasons I’d found the trip to the Pine Barrens and the hunt for the legendary beast not much more than amusing, at most a rare experience with friends, at worst an ambush as they unleashed their knowledge about everything I am, taking me into the woods, netting me, subduing me with an injection, disrobing me, flaying me, displaying my skin for all to see, using tonight as a launch pad for the rest of their lifework, profiting from their association with the infernal monster of the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

A man burst into the tavern. He was tall and thin and perpetually tanned as though for breakfast every morning he ate egg whites and motor oil. Moss stood to meet him. It was Christian Duven, our guide for the night. He pumped our hands and pulled a chair from an empty table, sat on it backward, crossed his dully tattooed arms along the top of the backrest, his soiled trucker’s hat turned catcher’s style to better bask in our light. He was Pastor Dade and Branley Jukes reincarnated in the 21st century as a carnie tour guide, almost militaristic—paramilitaristic, that is—but also there was something sweet there, like he had a secret soft spot for the films of Nora Ephron, which revealed to him the presence of so-called heartstrings in a lean and narrow chest. He wore a black wife beater and cut-off denim jeans, a pair of heavy black boots and white athletic socks pulled over nonexistent calves. He was unshaven and the mustache area seemed to have a head start on the rest of his face. His eyes seemed black, without a hint of iris. He paid special attention to the ladies of the group. The way he leered at Mack incited in me a protective instinct. Kirsch, I felt, suspected my attraction but registered no real threat, perhaps thinking I was asexual, too ashamed of what I had said was my burned skin to ever open up to another person that way. (A problem I had in summertime was that I always needed to wear long sleeves and pants, and the solution of course was to concoct a story about being terribly burned as a child. Suggestion of fire damage preempted further questions.)

“Ladies and gentleman, my friends, oh boy are we in for a night tonight, okay. The summer solstice, best night for it. I start taking groups in January. Now that’s rough. It’s night by six, but now we got hours till we need headlamps or night-vision goggles.”

Mention of night-vision goggles activated a gender-specific reaction. The women seemed deaf to the prospect, but night-vision goggles accessed every nascent commando reverie in the men. What would it matter what we saw, the world would be transformed and the concealed would be revealed.

Duven noticed and smiled. He had a movie star smile, and his smile also seemed to have a gender-specific response. Corrine especially mirrored it, responding to something clever relayed beyond speech.

“My friends,” Duven said, “this entire area, everything you’re standing on, dry as it is, it’s like a camel or a cactus. That’s right, filled with water. Beneath these trees and sand, there’s more than enough, turn any city into Atlantis. You think you’re walking on dry land but beneath your feet, not that far down, it’s water. Some say that’s where the Jersey Devil lives, a dinosaur throwback that’s survived because he’s been underground feeding off whatever’s down there. But he spends a lot of time up here, too. There’s more room to spread his wings and I figure the food choices might be a little more various up here.”

“Does he eat humans?” Kirsch asked.

I imagined eating Kirsch’s beer-battered flesh. His arms roasted in garlic.

“That’s a good question, my friend. He’s no vegetarian, but historically I’d say you’re in much more trouble if you’re a rabbit or small game like that. Us big game, there really hasn’t been evidence to say he did it or not when parts of a body are found in a peat bog. He comes in handy, sometimes, sure, when we need to blame something, okay, but I don’t want to tell you we’re not endangering ourselves tonight. We are most definitely endangering ourselves more than, y’know, safe at home. People disappear in these pines, a few a year. They find an entrance into that underground aquifer maybe and are still exploring it now, or maybe the Jersey Devil finds ’em and swallows ’em whole or captures ’em. Lots of people say he’s more vampire than anything else, happy to live off the blood of livestock until he comes across a fine human example.” Duven leered now in the direction of Mack and Corinne, and it seemed clear to me—maybe to all of us then—that the only devil we had to fear that night was our guide.

A vampire? How commonplace, though I suppose we both suffer from immortality-related sadness. Or perhaps I should say I once had sympathized with the vampire, for something had changed in the atmosphere—or at the very least, something had changed in me. I could soon find myself transformed into an elderly man, though it seemed that all was proceeding at a slow pace. Still, each day was marked by an urgency otherwise absent from my first few centuries.

Moss was blissfully oblivious to this, of course. He set his face to serious mode: we paid for this, we’re gonna get our money’s worth, we’ll catch the thing, definitely. Be the first to bring back more than sketchy evidence. Moss alone would domesticate the monster with a stern word and finger snap. Thereafter, his pet would vanquish whatever devils persisted from the days of Marshall, or since his mother’s death.

Through my native territory at dusk, our guide drove in circles, loop-de-loops, until we left the world we knew. We fishtailed through pools of hourglass-grade sand as Kirsch and Riv exaggerated the jostling, rammed shoulders in the backseat like boys on a school bus. Duven took us to an area not far from where the ferryman had long ago helped travelers cross the river, where December and her brother ran when we first met. So much still looked the same.

Each summer, fires reduced thousands of acres to charred spikes. You could smell the burn beneath the scent of evergreen and ocean. It will all be underwater once the ice caps melt, but for now the sea seemed distant. Supernatural territory. Older pines armored in thick gray scales. Some evergreens looked like cheerleaders radically deformed by environmental tragedy: stunted limbs, crooked spines, spiky pompoms.

Moss wanted to try the night-vision goggles. “Rejects from Fort Dix? Can’t wait.”

Duven took us deeper into the pines. “I got a special deal worked out with a cousin works up there. Outdated technology, okay, but they come in handy.”

“Reuse, recycle, et cetera,” said Corinne.

“That’s the motto, my dear,” Duven said. They laughed though no one else did.