Chapter Nineteen #2
But Johnny couldn’t stop thinking about the single lock that bothered him: the one Imani had broken on Mazelle’s freezer.
He already knew Mazelle had liked her secrets.
Hollman had found hidden envelopes of thousands of dollars in cash in nooks that Uncle Ricky had overlooked before he vanished in the woods while Johnny was in college.
His uncle’s loss felt raw on a night when he had so many questions, especially when vanishing on a hunting trip near this lodge felt like a fate that could be contagious.
Why would Mazelle install a lock on her freezer?
Judging by the dates on those old packs of meat, no one had unlocked it since Mazelle died.
He wanted to believe her motives were petty and ordinary, like trying to keep her son away from her food—but what if they weren’t?
What if she’d wanted her stash of meat to be another secret the way she’d hidden her old film reels and one-sheets behind her powder room wall?
But why? Johnny’s thoughts boomeranged back to Imani’s intuitive suggestion that exquisitely fueled his recurring nightmare: Maybe she was feeding something.
Maybe he hadn’t imagined it, either then or now.
Whatever he’d seen then might have been as real as what he’d seen tonight.
That was an ominous, creaky door in his mind that made Johnny want to reexamine all his previous assumptions.
What if he hadn’t just dreamed that he’d seen Mazelle feeding a creature he couldn’t identify?
What if he had the dream because he’d actually seen it?
Johnny’s rounds brought him to the kitchen, where the lights were off to conserve power from the chugging generator outside. He glanced out the kitchen window, shining the flashlight beam outside. Snow was covering the erratic trail, but he could still see it. It was real.
His light caught the cabins, and Johnny remembered how he had fled out to the road the night his grandmother burned him, and Uncle Ricky had jumped in his Beetle to find him, letting him sleep in his cabin.
Like now, Johnny had sat watch at that cabin window all night in case his grandmother might try to drag him back.
Still in shock from his burn, he couldn’t fathom what kinds of monstrosities she might be capable of. So he had looked for her all night.
He had seen Mazelle open this same door late that night, wearing the robe his wife was now sleeping in. He had seen her sit on the back steps with an aluminum tray of food. He had seen something move toward her in the snow while she smiled. Hadn’t he?
Johnny breathed faster as his realization crystallized: He had seen something.
But somewhere along the way, he had stuffed the memory into the safer realm of his dreams, focused more on his fear and loathing of his grandmother than whatever animal she had been feeding with that white fur and long, snakelike torso and narrow snout with sharp teeth.
“But it was smaller,” Johnny whispered. The shadow in the kitchen had been too big.
That long-ago creature had been the size of a fox, or a possum.
He still didn’t know it hadn’t been a possum, as butt-ugly as those creatures were, like something from a nightmare.
But that hadn’t been a possum in the kitchen sliding in shadow across the floor.
His alternate scenario asserted itself as the most likely event: A bear had broken into the lodge. And it had still been outside when he turned on the generator. End of story.
This was how Johnny spent his night, pacing with his conflicted thoughts in a way that reminded him of his worst days on coke.
He used to call them demon thoughts, refusing to let him sleep, gnawing over every possibility.
By morning, the demon thoughts would cease.
They usually had. In the dark, however, Johnny was hostage to his unleashed imagination.
Uncle Ricky came to life more than he had in the forty years since his disappearance, a concrete image as if he were standing with Johnny in the kitchen.
He’d picked Johnny up from the airport in a black suede cowboy hat with a snakeskin band.
His thrift-store army jacket looked like a souvenir from war—until Uncle Ricky told him he’d never been drafted because of his “lucky knee,” which in fact was not lucky at all.
Mazelle’s blow to her son’s knee with a tire iron in high school might have kept Uncle Ricky out of Vietnam, but it had also sidelined him from the football scholarship he had dreamed of as a path to the pros.
Still, Uncle Ricky was one of the most cheerful people he knew, grinning so widely that Johnny could see a gold tooth shining in the back of his mouth.
The day after he cursed his grandmother on her deathbed, Johnny had tried to point out the zigzagging pattern in the snow from the mysterious creature to Uncle Ricky, the same day his uncle had taught him how to load the rifle, which he still remembered well enough to do in the dark.
Uncle Ricky wanted to teach him to hunt rabbits.
On their hunting trip, Johnny had confessed that he had wished Mazelle dead, inching close to revealing his certainty that his ruinous wish had conjured (or released?) some kind of evil spirit that had fled through Mazelle’s window.
The fox-thing, he’d called it. He remembered that now too.
Uncle Ricky had ignored every sign Johnny tried to show him in the snow of the creature’s passage until the horrific moment when Uncle Ricky shared the secret that he and Johnny’s mother had discussed whether they should put Mazelle out of her misery and overdose her on meds, except they couldn’t be sure if the act would be mercy or murder.
Would love or hate be driving their euthanasia?
(And who would say that to a child, anyway?
Had Uncle Ricky already been stoned so early in the morning?) He’d said it as if to mean, Your wish ain’t nothin’, little man.
Wait ’til you hear mine and your mama’s.
Uncle Ricky had said something like You shouldn’t try to go chasin’ after things you don’t understand, or some vague horseshit Johnny had assumed was a brush-off to a kid with an overactive, guilty imagination.
But somewhere between Uncle Ricky’s gaslighting and his inappropriate confession of how he and Mom fantasized about killing their mother in her sleep, Uncle Ricky had finally told him that Mazelle might have been feeding something in secret before she got sick.
Might have been treating it like a pet. He had told Johnny that after his mother was finally gone, he might go out in the woods and find it to put it out of its misery too.
For one brief instant, Uncle Ricky had spoken as if the creature in the snow were real.
Revelation? Or the ramblings of a chronic stoner?
Over time, Johnny was the one who had stopped believing.
Too much time in the world of the banal, combined with years of therapy, had stripped away his belief in snow beasts.
But here he was again, face-to-face with his demon thoughts.
What had happened to Uncle Ricky in the woods five years after Mazelle died?
How had an experienced hunter vanished without a trace in his favored hunting grounds?
That question had devastated Johnny’s mother to her own grave, since she never had closure.
The rest of her life, she’d expected her phone to ring and hear her brother’s apologetic story about how he had to go underground, or how he’d ended up in prison and been too ashamed to tell her.
But that call never came, of course, and the hole in their lives devastated Johnny anew.
For all his faults and inconsistencies, Uncle Ricky was the closest thing Johnny ever had to a father.
A sob tried to strangle Johnny, but he swallowed it away.
Fuck it, Johnny decided. He would never know what had happened to his uncle forty years ago.
Or why Mazelle had locked so much meat in her freezer.
And it didn’t matter if the creature was real or not.
He and his family were going home, and they were never coming back.
He might ask Hollman if he’d seen any strange animal activity one day, or he might not.
By Monday, he would call Money to try to write another polish and get his movie back on track.
For the first time, Johnny noticed that the sky had turned grayish pink through the kitchen window under his watch. Daylight, as always, helped him banish the demon thoughts. He’d found his cell phone and shoved it in his back pocket, so he checked the time: 6:20. He had made it through the night.
Johnny felt giddy and wide-awake instead of exhausted.
To test his newfound courage, he put on his jacket and gloves to go back outside.
Imani and Sharise had brought their damp jackets in from the garage so they could dry laid out in front of the fireplace.
Everyone was ready to go. Tasha stirred while he was in the living room, tensing with alertness, but he gave her an assuring smile when her eyes flew open.
“Get some more sleep,” he whispered. “I’m gonna take a look at the car. The road.”
Tasha mumbled and went back to sleep. If she thought he was crazy, she hid it well.
His gratitude for the way she had given him space to work through his panic attack almost brought him to tears.
He kissed her lightly on the lips, bathed in joy as he thought of the new child they would welcome into the world.
Maybe, just like his old fear of the “fox-thing,” his fear of having a new baby was just something he’d needed to face so he could move beyond it.