Free North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud

seem like you could use a family,” she said.
    He looked at her. Time snagged around her words, where it fluttered, waiting to be set free again.
    “I been telling them about you. They want to meet you.”
    It came loose and drifted free, a red silk banner twisting into a blue sky.

    “And now he’s all, he’s blubbering like a little baby, he’s got snot coming out of his nose. ‘Oh please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, I’ll suck your dick, please don’t kill me!’” Derrick’s voice goes high in a falsetto imitation. “And dude, what did you do, Matt? What did you fuckin do?”
    Matt shrugged. “I took my dick out.”
    “He did! Matt here whips it out and says well go on then! Get to it!” Derrick paused while the others laughed. He was telling this story to all four guys sitting on stools at the bar in this little dive tavern on the Westbank, across the bridge from downtown New Orleans. The four guys Nick was with were all heavily muscled, with shaved heads and elaborate tattoos. Derrick was the biggest of them; he wore a thin wifebeater, and Nick couldn’t help but stare enviously at all his muscles, at his arms and back covered with swastikas, bloody-fanged skulls, and, over his heart, crossed hammers against the backdrop of a Confederate flag. He looked to Nick like the apotheosis of man, some rarefied ideal of physical and mental presence. It was a little past seven and the bar was not crowded. Nick felt the atmosphere change when they walked in, felt the gravity of their presence draw every eyeball in the building. When they settled in and ordered beers, the fat man behind the bar who brought the drinks to them wouldn’t even look them in the eye. Nick, clearly underage, didn’t warrant a glance.
    Matt, a little fireplug of a kid, was on the other side of Derrick. “Tell him the rest of the story before he starts thinking I’m some kinda fag.”
    “So this little queer crawls over to Matt and starts to reach out for his dick, still bawling, and Matt fucking balls up his fist and fucking drills him in the head! Crack! Motherfucker drops like he’s dead.”
    “I thought he was,” Matt said, taking a sip from his bottle. “I was like, goddamn, he really is a pussy.”
    “He wasn’t dead, though. He was still crawling around, making this weird little sound. We kicked him around a little bit, and then I fucking curb-stomped him to make my point.”
    “Shit,” Matt said. “You did that boy a favor. He probably sucks good dick now.” While the others laughed and shook their heads, Derrick said, “You believe that story, Nick?”
    “Sure. I guess.”
    “Oh, he guesses. My man here guesses.”
    The bar had gathered all the residual heat of the afternoon and hoarded it with a miser’s resolve. A ceiling fan whickered pointlessly, stirring the thick air like a spoon in a honeypot. Trixie was back at Derrick’s apartment with the other girls, hanging out doing whatever until the boys were done talking business. They would give them time to talk and then they’d show up later. Women were rarely welcomed into meetings such as this. The point of the meeting, Trixie had told him, would be to judge his worth as a recruit to the Confederate Hammers, the regional chapter of the white nationalist movement called the Hammerskin Nation.
    “Do you even get that point of that story, Nick? That dude was a junkie. He was sucking cock for drugs. Now you know, whatever, the world’s full of human cockroaches, I can’t worry about all of that shit or I’ll go crazy, right? But it was in my neighborhood. He’s walking up and down the goddamn street, cracked out of his mind, talking all this shit a mile a minute so it made you crazy just to hear it. In this goddamn neighborhood . We got kids that live here, you know what I mean? Got so I just couldn’t stand for it anymore.”
    He touched his fingers to a swastika on his chest. “You see this here? That’s what it means. That’s why we wear