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Star Beast Fall 2

Part I: Little Champ

August 1972

My parents rented a cottage on Black Point Road, way up on the northeast side of Lake George.

Every summer my dad and his war buddy Vince Nolano would split the cost for a monthly rental. I was fourteen at the time. My brother Marc was a year older and my sister Carla was almost seventeen. Vince and Marie's son Phil was a little older than Carla. All of us bundles of hormones, but this story is only concerned (slightly) with Carla's. She was as hot as the summer sun for Phil Nolano, who was already a college student and seemed so much cooler than any other guy she knew, and certainly way cooler than her younger brothers.
     
Phil’s dark Sicilian face was well-mustachioed,
making Marc and me envious, as our facial hair was still rather fuzzy. We resented his presence on principle, although we hoped he would turn us on to weed, which we had never tried. He was one of those early-70s hippies with very long black hair and slitty red eyes; we could always tell when he was stoned although all the adults were clueless.

Phil considered himself too old for family vacations; he was only at the cottage to get into my sister's pants, we were sure of that. Dad watched her like a hawk, of course, and Mom made sure her bedroom was just past theirs and on the other end of the duplex from Phil's.

From an early age, thanks to the influence of his grandfather, Phil was interested in magic. Even as a kid he would put on shows for everyone. Carla, of course, would get all giggly and worshipful like a groupie, sitting shamelessly on the floor during his show in the living room--right in front of him in a miniskirt and saying stupid stuff like “Oh wow, Phil, how did you do that?” She had thick and wild black hair she usually stuffed inside a New York Yankee cap, with ponytail sticking out. Now it flowed gorgeously hippie-like down her shoulders. Her bright blue eyes were widely gaping at Phil as he fanned  a deck of cards and held it out for her to pick one, taking the opportunity, I noticed, to look up her skirt.

None of my business, I thought. I'm her "little" brother, as she liked to remind me. And anyway I needed to stay on his good side if I wanted to get some weed.   




My brother Marc was the luckiest fisherman I ever knew, even as a little kid he always got the most bites and strikes, and always caught the most fish. But he couldn’t swim and was afraid of boats, so he could only fish from shore. My father and Vince were planning a fishing excursion on the lake, and the night before, sitting out on the front porch, I rubbed it in that Marc couldn’t come along because of his phobia.

"Dad suspects you're gay, you know."

"What the hell does that have to do with having a phobia?"

"Well, he thinks you're a sissy, a wuss. Sticking around here with Carla--and Mom, and Mrs. N. 'Let Marc be one of the girls.' That's what he said."

"He obviously hasn't learned much from the new gay lib movement."

"So you admit it?"

"Fuck off, Paul. Phil isn't going either, you know. Is he gay too? You've seen the way he's been ogling our sister."

I got back to the issue at hand. “You can’t get the big ones from shore, Marc. C’mon, it’s a big boat, wear a life-jacket." 

"In other words, be a man? How's this?" He punched my arm hard enough to hurt. He was much bigger than I. "Keep it up and see where the next one lands. I'll put off confronting my phobia for now, thanks. But I will bet you any amount I can catch a bigger fish in my cove than you and Dad can on the lake.” He was referring to a great fishing spot not far from our cottage off Black Point Road, a cove nestled in the woods and accessible only by a short but winding trail from the backyard of the empty cottage up the hill. The property belonged to someone who was seriously ill with cancer of some sort, and hadn't been there for two summers in a row, so the fishing spot had already become Marc’s cove. “Well, is it a bet?” he asked.

“You bet it’s a bet. The big trout stay in the deep water this time of year.”

“I’m not talking about trout,” he said.  “I’m talking size, man. How much can you bet?”

“Let’s do it this way: the loser has to be the one to ask Phil for a joint.”

He laughed. “Sure. Beats flipping a coin.” 
  
“What you expecting to catch that’s bigger than a lake trout?”

"Muskie, or pike, or maybe a lunker largemouth like that monster I caught last year. You remember that one, don’t ya?”



“How could I forget it? You never shut up about the sucker.”

“It wasn’t a sucker, it was a bass.”

“I know, I know—as big as your ass.” He did have a prominent one.

Before he could pound me, Carla appeared, out of the bushes. “Hey you guys,” she said, all excited, “Come see what Phil’s doing.”

“Not another one of his stupid tricks,” I said.    

“No—he’s all by himself in the dark out on the deck."

"I don't want to see him jerking off," I said.

"He’s mumbling, or chanting or something.”

We all took a look, hiding in the bushes just beyond the deck in the backyard. It was difficult to see exactly what he was doing, but we were sure he was dealing out a tableau of cards, like for solitaire, on the picnic table. It wasn't solitaire, though, because he examined every card, holding it up in the dim yellow bug-light behind him, and these cards looked longer and narrower than regular playing cards.

Luckily, the night was very calm—one of those clear, crisp August nights. He was definitely talking to himself, and judging from the cicada-like cadence of the mumbling that reached us, we concluded that he was saying the same thing over and over as he picked up the cards, studied them, and carefully dealt them out again. Then he looked up at the stars for what seemed a whole minute.

“Jeez,” said Marc. “He must be stoned. But is that the best he can do when the parents aren’t home? Some mumbo-jumbo?”
 
"This is the guy you're so hot for?" I asked our sister.
 
"Shut up, Paul!" she actually spat my name.

“Let’s get out of here before he notices us,” I said. Trying not to rustle the bushes too much, we went back to the front porch.
 


  
    
The next morning just after dawn, out in the middle of the huge lake, my father was in his glory. Vince pretty much deferred to him since the boat was Dad's. Here he was captain, and had no compunction against barking orders to his favorite son and his best friend. Vince made sarcastic "Sir, yessirs" before carrying them out, while I obeyed without question, not because I feared the ex-marine but because I knew, in nautical and angling matters, he was always right.

As the sun rose higher, we were trolling and casting and not a nibble. Eventually Dad barked his lower-the-anchor order, which I carried out. We ate some bologna sandwiches, Vince and Dad smoked cigarettes and looked ready to lean back for awhile, leaving floaters in the water around the boat. Just as I lay back on a patio chaise longue, this bright white fireball, maybe half the size of the sun, suddenly shoots across the sky, falling in a wide arc over the mounds of Adirondack pines.
 


I saw something splash into the lake far off to the south.

“Holy shit! Did you guys see that?”
 
“What? Fish jump?” Dad came out of a doze.
 
“No, a fireball! God it was huge.” Then I remembered an article I’d read in the Sunday paper. “It must have been one of the Perseids! They’re supposed to be peaking tonight."

   
"What's a Perseid?" asked Dad.

"You know, Joe," said Vince, "the meteor shower, happens every August."

"Weird to see a meteorite in the daytime!" said Dad. "Maybe it was a UFO."
 
"Wouldn't that be weirder?" asked Vince.
    



Later, on the boat-ride back, our stringer empty, totally skunked except for some pumpkin fish and bluegills we caught with worms after giving up hunting the Big Ones, I dreaded having to confront Marc and his inevitable stringer full of lunkers. His gloating round face, his smug grin—these I could do without. So when we got back to the cottage just after sunset, I was momentarily relieved that only my mother was home, until I noticed her worried expression.

"Where's Marie?" asked Vince.

"She and Phil went to look for Marc and Carla. They went fishing in the cove and promised to be back no later than 5:30." It was well past eight o’clock and they still weren’t back. "I stayed here in case they showed up."

"I'm sure they'll be here any minute," said Dad. "With a ton of fish."

We spent the whole evening anxiously waiting for them. Marc’s cove was only half a mile away, something was obviously wrong. There were no cell phones back then, so all we could do was look for the high beams of their station wagon coming up the country road. Vince and I played gin rummy while Dad drank successive Rob Roys and Mom sipped a single Tom Collins she kept replenishing with ice. At around 10:30 I asked if I could go outside and look for Perseids.
    
“No. You’re not to leave this house,” my mother said.

“Oh come on, Mom, I’ll just be up at the clearing on top of the hill.”

“You heard your mother,” said Dad.

“But there’s nothing to do.”

“We got a crisis here, Paul,” he said. “I’m not putting up with any backtalk.”

“Let’s play another game of gin,” said Vince, who had already lost twice.

“What do you think happened to them?” I asked.

“Nothing," Dad said firmly. "Maybe they got lost."

"Maybe they got abducted by aliens!" This was my way of diverting my mom from her dreads. Something totally ridiculous. I said to Vince, "maybe you were right and the fireball I saw was a UFO. Maybe a ship crashed into the lake and—”
    
“Come on, Paul, let’s play gin.”

"No thanks, Mr. Nolano, I think I'll go to bed."

"Good idea," said my mother.

"Maybe I'll see some Perseids from the bedroom window.  Another fireball maybe."

I lay there in the dark waiting for the reflection of Marie Nolano's "country lights" (as she called high beams) on the walls and ceiling. I was dozing soon, and then I was dreaming of monsters, natural monsters, I was fighting off creatures that looked like lizards--big monitors, or maybe komodo dragons. Creatures pawing and clawing me all over, I thrashed out at them wildly until I found myself on the floor....

I remember waking up there, several of my knuckles bruised and abraded, Mom's head peering at me from the dimly lit doorway. “Not again, Paul.” I was still lying there when a flash of light hit the ceiling and we knew they were home. I followed my mother to the living room where my father was snoring in the rocking chair. Mom opened the front door. . . .

Text copyright © 2014 by Joseph Andriano

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