The Bog Monster Of Booker Creek

The Bog Monster of Booker Creek

A Novel

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Dear Brett,Just to be clear

–

the bog monster was always me, never anything or anyone else. I wish I could have explained this to you in a way that made

sense to you. I‟m starting a record of what happened, but I won‟t share itwith you until you‟re older, maybe when you‟re twenty

-five, old enough tochuckle at your off-kilter old man but young enough to remember how wesurvived the frenzy together. You were tough, tougher than I could have

imagined, but I wish I could have done more to protect you. Maybe you‟ll

understand when you read this.I am going to lay everything out from the beginning, in February 2005.You were an eighth grader at Phillips Middle School, a tall, lanky, skinny-armed boy, with pale skin and an assortment of blackheads and zits, asometimes goofy smile that I saw you cultivate in front of the mirror

–

which fit perfectly with the oversized cat-in-the-hat headwear you woresometimes to parties

–

and yet there was a penchant for the pained look of the only child. Your mother and I were worried about you because youseemed to have bottled up, withdrawn from the kids you had played with just a few years before. Nothing seemed to interest you much; you watchedtoo much TV, played too many video games, and lay around the house likean unacknowledged secret. Then the assignment came.It was the worst kind of schoolwork

–

one requiring your parents‟

attention and time, too. Your mother helped as much as she could, invitedyour schoolmates to come over and snack and work, but in the end she came

to me and said, “John, you need to get involved.” I was happy about being

needed, but not about the position it put me

in. “What is it?” I asked. Shedidn‟t answer, which wasn‟t a good sign.

The Bog Monster - 2Your science teacher, Mr. McGrath, had mastered the fine art of overblown homework: exquisitely defined projects whose purpose wasknown only to himself and his God; repetitive components adding up to anungodly sum of points so that the whole seemed like a giant scramble; and ascope that knows no bounds, apparently on the assumption that thereby Mr.McGrath is not stifling the creative ones. This meant that the best projectswere mostly done by the parents, and students shrugged their way to a grade

they didn‟t deserve. I wasn‟t going to fall into line. You were going to do the

project, whatever it was.

“Brett,” I asked from your doorway. “What is this project your mother

asked me to l

ook at?”

“Huh?” you said, looking up from a hand

-drawn comic you wereworking on.

“The project?”

“Oh that,” you said, looking back down at the sheet. “I

-don-

noh.” The

pencil started moving again.

“Let me see the project description,” I said, and you point

ed at your notebook without stopping. That particular habit of yours always irritatedthe heck out of me, but I decided to let it pass. I opened the notebook, butyou had to point me to the page, which did finally distract your attention, infact so much that you decided to reread the instructions yourself, until Iyanked them from you.

Environment. Biology. Something about statistics. McGrath‟sexplanation didn‟t enlighten me, but the examples set the light bulb off. Myfavorite was “Scat

-

ology”: “Map out

a wooden area and comb it for wild

animal scat. You‟ll need a good animal

-tracking book. What does your research tell us about wild animal populations? Use an appropriate graphing

technique.” No surprise that Doreen deferred this one to me. I asked you

what your team had decided on, and with hems and haws you laid it out: youwere going to search old police blotters

–

from the days when the policewere animal control

–

for reports of marauding animals, in order to developa scatter plot of animals who lived in proximity to people but who found itdifficult to co-exist. You speculated about wolves, bears and badgers. Ithought more likely: rabid raccoons and stubborn skunks.

Jared‟s father was a police officer, and Jared said that he could get the

information

without problem. You didn‟t know whether he had asked his

father about this or not. I smelled a distinct whiff of wishful thinking, but at

3 - W. Miller

the same time a hint of success. You were surprised by my reply: “Thiscould be mapped.” This was the perfect match,

since I was in charge of

Orange County‟s Geographic Information System (GIS), and I‟d alreadyoffered to show you how it worked. “Cool,” you said before becoming

absorbed again.The topic waited for another week, until we reached a point where thedeadlin

e was impossible to ignore any more. I called up Jared‟s father to seeif he‟d been brought into the loop. “Oh, we‟d talked about it a couple weeks back,” he said with obvious irritation, “but I thought he was going to find

another project. At the station,

we don‟t have blotters, or even criminal

records, from far enough back in time to be of use to the kids. I suggested

they try the county museum or the Chapel Hill Reporter, but I don‟t think there‟s anything out there.” At that second, I was trying to ima

gine how wecould bring this into the present and get at existing data

–

Animal Controland road kill statistics? Nothing pleasant came to mind.

I confronted you the next morning at breakfast. “No worries, dad,” yousaid and kept eating your cereal. “What do you mean, no worries?” Youwaved me off and said, “Jared‟s got it handled. He called the countymuseum and they have police blotters going back 100 years. We‟re goingthere this weekend.” Oh, I thought, you might have told me. But I was

equally surprised and pleased that it

was

handled.Or seemed to be. I ended up driving you all to Hillsborough on Saturday.

The team was you, Jared, Frank and Billy. The curator wasn‟t at the museum

when we got there, so we wandered down the main drag in Hillsborough, past the historic courthouse and down to the river park. Eventually, we came back up and only then read that the museum was open every other Saturday.We had already packed into the car when we saw the curator walk with peculiar purpose to the door, open and

close it carefully behind him. “Jared,”I asked for the first time, “did you tell him we were coming today?”

“Sure,” he said immediately and with gusto, then: “I mean, I told him. Idon‟t remember if he said anything.” I just looked at him. After I thought

I

made my point, I sighed and said, “Well, let‟s go see what he‟ll say now.” I

thought that was pretty equanimous of me.You all piled out of the car and chatted and gravitated to the door withoutseeming to pay one bit of attention. A slight rain was threatening to turn intoa downpour. The front door was locked, so I knocked. After some time, thecurator came with a pained look to the door, but I doubted the curmudgeonlyshow.