Don't Fear the Reaper (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #2)

by Stephen Graham Jones

It was like the West was calling him back. Like the land needed a cleansing agent to rove across the landscape, blood swelling up from each of his boot prints, his shadow so long and so deep that last cries whispered up from it.

First, though, this convoy lost in the whiteout, this Reunion Tour slouching toward a Bethlehem already swimming in blood.

Allusion

If you watch their faces, their eyes, then it’s business as usual, they’ve already put that night behind them, are just thinking about the future, or the moment, not that night in the water. But don’t fall for those poker faces. Instead, watch them sitting at the outdoor tables at Dot’s. Watch them leaning against that chipped blue pole at Lonnie’s while their cars gulp gas in. Watch them sitting on Melanie’s bench for the last little bit of the sunset. They’ll make it three minutes, five minutes, their book distracting them, this phone call taking all their attention, this bite of omelette so perfect. But then, when their mental discipline slips—you can see it happen: a shoulder will twitch, a hand will clench into a sudden fist. A chest will fill with air as if the lake is washing over them all over again.

So as not to be a complete insensitive, Hardy guides his cigarette from his lips back into the pack, sure to turn it around upside down so it won’t lose its place in line. It’s stupid being superstitious like that, he knows, but if you don’t have private little rituals, the days can lose their meaning real fast.

Skirls of snow are swirling across the ice of Indian Lake, meaning things are about to pick up again.

“ ‘Without memory, there can be no retribution,’ ” Letha recites then, her affect flat like she’s possessed. “Mr. Holmes?” Jennifer asks, something timid to her voice. “Popcorn,” Letha tells her, apologetically. Then, quieter, but she has to: “1991.”

John W. Gardner says that History never looks like history when you’re living through it, yes. What does it look like when you can’t stop living through it, though? When it’s not even history to you yet?

But, as Aldous Huxley warns, That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

As Karl Marx says, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, which is to say: all these episodes of violence eventually become cartoons. Time mollifies, multiple tellings codify, and then history repackages.

I think of that passage you photocopied for us from Günter Grass’s Tin Drum, where post–World War II Germans pioneer “onion bars,” so they can gather as a people to cut onions and cry. Proofrock needs some of those onions.

The Golem, which is another graft from Judaism. This is the hulking protector or “revenger” that gets pitted against those who would harm or oppress the Jewish people. Made of clay, supernaturally strong, and animated by magic, the Golem is a fearsome presence, to be sure, but also something of a mindless automaton, in that it’s controlled by the wronged and desperate person who raised it—and nearly always, of course, loses control of it, leaving it to, as Dark Mill South does, rampage until forcibly stopped. Grendel, the monster of the Old English poem Beowulf. Grendel is less a rampager, more a ravager—specifically, of Heorot, a mead hall and occasional dormitory for warriors. Like the Golem, Grendel can only be stopped with force, by someone pure of heart and intention. Dark Mill South being identified with Grendel, then, is of course an indictment of law enforcement, in that, were any of them pure of heart and intention, then Dark Mill South would have been stopped years ago, rather than ducking into state after state, and killing at will.

She promised to see it for him, and tell him all about it, but when she moved that way, it was… different. Over the years she would figure this out more, but this was the first time: when she stayed in one place for too long, the silt and debris suspended in the water would slow around her, congeal into gossamer tendrils like the finest, most delicate hair, but mushy like moss, like the lake was trying to gift her a body, a form, a shape, but all it had was what was within reach of where she was right then, however long that “then” lasted. She could still, with effort, extract herself from those cocoon shapes, though, those moss dummies. Extract herself and then watch these body memories loosen, relax, eventually drifting

up to the surface to decay, becoming blots of darkness that soaked the sunlight up.

What did Abraham Lincoln say? Something like—yeah, yeah: “The chords of memory will swell when touched again by the better angels of our nature.”

And, talking Jade: Mr. Holmes. Which is to say: teachers I’ve had. The first one to thank is from what should have been my senior year. I was seventeen, day one at another new school. Government class. This teacher walks in, cases the place, sets her books down on the desk, sighs, then zeroes in on me way in the back, in a way that I kind of feel my throat swell a bit, because she’s going to recognize me in some way, or’s going to introduce me all around, plug me into this new place, I don’t know, anything can happen, right? What she says once the room’s quieted down, though, is for me to get my greasy head off her clean chalkboard. I lean forward like she wants, everyone sneaking looks back to me, logging me as that kid, and, after class, I walk out this teacher’s door, down the hall, and out of high school forever. Which was wonderful research for writing Jade. So, thank you, government teacher. And, yes, I am that student who showed back up at the end of that semester to ace the final, just to prove to you I could, even if I was way past credit, or graduation. The next teacher is Dr. Jill Patterson. I’m a senior again, but this time at college, which I never even meant to go to—I’m meant to be driving tractor, chopping cotton. But, here I am in fiction workshop somehow, and I’m pretty much levitating in my seat, am reading everything I can get my hands on, and writing every minute of the day. I can’t get enough of books, of writers, of reading. This is a world I didn’t ...

chuckles, I pronounce his name Yeets, not “Yates.” Jill—you probably don’t remember this—instead of telling me to get my greasy head off your clean chalkboard, you just grinned to get your words right and said you’re pretty sure it’s pronounced the other way, Stephen, but, yes, it does look like “Yeets,” and so, instead of walking out again, back to where I belong, I stick with this whole reading and writing thing until I’ve got my PhD like you, and am here, doing this, even using Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—the poem I was halfway citing in workshop that day, via The Police—in this novel about a girl with a heart bigger than her body. Thank you, Jill. And thank you to my next writing teacher, William J. Cobb, for telling me about this new novel he’d just reviewed, Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers, which stuck with me enough that I named a background character “Galatea” in Chainsaw, and then, when I needed someone to write essays for Reaper—here she was, raising her hand politely but insistently, telling me, like that guy at the end of Hoosiers, that she’s got this, Coach.