Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

Riv frowned. Like someone emerged from a traumatic accident, he’d developed extrasensory perception: the ability to tune into and exaggerate the volume of what’s obvious yet insignificant to others.

Riv asked why the Army didn’t sweep the area and catch the beast once and for all.

“They’ve got bigger fish,” Duven said. “But maybe we’ll see the Kid tonight.” He tapped a camera bag strapped to his waist like a holster. “Long as ya don’t scare him off.”

Silence had overtaken me. It felt like wet concrete drying in my chest after it had been poured down my throat. I had to force it from me before it set. I muttered something about how I liked thinking of a shy monster in the woods, ashamed of itself, wings demure, its ten-foot tail coiled between weird crane legs. “The poor fellow, I feel for him,” I said more clearly. “Last of an endangered species, a reluctant freak of nature.”

We walked deeper into the pines.

Duven was about 6′1″, but seemed taller when he stood next to the stocky-short Riv. About the same age as his clients, he seemed older, as though he had lived his life with his body in such a way that showed in his face. He had spent his time in the pines, whereas my friends had floated through a college town that had become progressively touristy and expensive. A change, too, that could be seen in their faces.

“Every time I seen the Kid I knew he was there before I turned,” Duven said. “Gotta turn quick to see him.”

Moss jerked to the left and pointed, a spastic gesture we all expected.

Kirsch had known Moss since before they knew how to speak. Now Kirsch stared Moss down.

“I swear I saw nothing special,” Moss said. He pointed again into the distance and smiled.

Duven said we’ll come to a fence twenty yards down the path. We’ll crawl through a hole and then there’ll be water. “I’ve got a boat waiting,” he said. The fence was five feet taller than anything we’d like to climb. As Kirsch shimmied beneath it, a twist of metal snagged his jacket. Corrine and Mack made it through just fine, helped to their feet with some show of civility by our guide. On the other side, we saw the boat.

Duven let us drift after every few paddles. Mist blurred the separation between water and sky. Moss primed his finger on the trigger of his digital camera. He once said he wished he’d somehow taken a photo of the coma that enveloped his mother.

“Reminds me of the River Styx,” Riv said. “Can’t wait until a three-headed dog greets us at the gates of Hell.”

Duven and Riv seemed amused by each other, though the words “fuzzy foreigner” and “redneck dirtbag” also seemed about to slip from their lips. But who would ever insult the bushy-eyebrowed, bearded Rivkin? “A very compact man” was how, after his divorce, Kirsch told me he would describe Riv to women he knew. “So much power in his calves,” he’d say. “Strongest calves in America.”

Francesca was half-Cuban, with halting eyes and almost-Asian hair dyed red. Soon after Riv introduced Francesca to his friends, she went to the beach with us on a perfect August Sunday. Moss watched her walk into the shorebreak in a bikini. “She’s got big plans,” he said, and Kirsch said, “How do you mean?” and Moss said, “I mean she plans on being big.” But she fought off those plans at the gym, where she met a trainer who worked her over, inside and out. Poor Rivkin, who would have thought it would all work out like this?

Black water coasted beneath us. Stars, the mist, the erratic silhouette of pines and cedars, hypnotized, dazed, coaxed into a pleasurable stupor. The whole state looked like this before they selected the extraordinary out of existence. I could emerge sans dress, walk across the water, and they’d wave.

“Hear that,” Duven said. It was a command, not a question.

Our eyes followed every sound. Water against the boat. Riv’s breath. Spearmint gum snapping in Moss’s mouth. Kirsch ironically knocking his knees together. An oddly rhythmic distant whistle.

“A whippoorwill,” Duven said. “No worries.”

We drifted and listened. Mack held her breath. Duven turned an ear across the water ahead.

“See,” Duven said, “folks hear a blue jay get real scared. But I tell you what, you hear the Kid, you’ll feel it first. You’ll feel it. Hear it once, your bones’ll know. Trust me.”

Riv opened his eyes wide as though to better absorb the atmosphere. “So great if the Jersey Devil were a lonely lady,” he said. “I’d one up Francesca.”

Riv had been made to feel so small when the trainer at the gym who his wife had left him for demanded the picnic basket Riv and Francesca had bought to celebrate their fifth anniversary: a picnic out at Battlefield Park under a gnarled old tree from the Revolution. That basket had meant zilch to Riv. An overpriced wicker box with latches and leather handles, bought on sale at Williams Sonoma. But once the trainer wanted it, that sentimental nothing became Priceless Symbol of What Had Been, something Riv would have fought to protect if the trainer hadn’t been twice his size and ripped. Oh but once he and his mythological sweetie shot across the skies and alighted on the roof of the trainer’s condo. Or maybe Riv’s eyes opened wide when Duven conjured these screams because he too wanted to wail but never permitted himself such an expression of grief.

Some boating, hiking, communion with the woods, we even heard a whippoorwill.

Moss said he had thought we would only see pines and sand, pines and sand.

We floated on. Duven smoked cigarettes and doused them in a puddle at his feet. Peaceful now. Legs numb. Not ready when Duven yanked the oars for a decent pace. The boat seemed lighter the more momentum it built. The trees were larger on this side of the water: oaks more than pitch pines, or what Duven called “Jersey Bulls.” He pulled the oars into the boat and let the hull slide ashore. He jumped from the boat and tied a rope around the nearest pine. We all managed to get out too without anyone falling on their faces.

“Welcome to Kalikak Beach, my friends. Named after Boney Kalikak, a recluse who stayed out here for years, eating fish and squirrels and turtles and whatnot… Speaking of turtles, who’s hungry?”

He pulled from his backpack a plastic Cool Whip container. In it were sandwiches on small dark squares of spongy wheat.

Corrine whispered to me that Duven seemed more like a Wonder Bread guy.

“Snappers pull ducks to the bottom of the river and eat them,” Duven said, “then I catch the turtles. Makes for real good, greasy meat. Try some.”

Riv didn’t hesitate. He must have been starving. Moss muttered and took one.

Corrine asked Mack how long ago she thought Duven had caught the turtle, how long it had been unrefrigerated, how much bacteria was on it, not to mention radioactive gunk from illegal dumping and run-off from Fort Dix.

“Those ducks, too,” I said.

Riv made an exaggerated mmm. Moss feigned nausea. Kirsch said he’d think of it as a communion of sorts. “Cheers,” he said.

I tried some. Fresh, flaky, moist. Duven had even put some sea salt on it.

“Sorry for the hesitation there,” Corrine said through chews. “I’m never sure where turtle fits into my diet.”

“Can’t find it up where you guys live, huh?”

Duven told us there were more oaks here because this side of the lake hadn’t burned in eighty years. Oaks give up after a few burns, he said, but not the bulls. They got this built-in mechanism that shoots new limbs out after a fire dies down, before things cool. Everything’s still smoking when the pines start coming back.

He led us down a narrow trail through a patch of deciduous forest. These white cedars, he said, descended from the trees used to build the desk where Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence.