Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home

by Matthew Batt

  Across the river, a band of people marches in some kind of procession. The road flows through the park at that point in a sharp bend around a hill, and the parade wends upward. There aren’t many marchers, and they don’t look overly organized or politically motivated. It’s more of a They’re Flip-Flops, Not Thongs! walk than a radical demonstration, I decide. Then again, I can’t hear a peep over the rushing river. For all I know, they could have Wagner raging over loudspeakers in preparation for a march on Idaho.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a Latino man deeper in the woods, downstream from us. He wears mirrored sunglasses and a long braid and leans against Highland High’s fence. He reminds me of a cross between Carlos Santana and Jesus. He doesn’t pay any attention to me, but I know he knows I am here. He just gazes through the trees at the people across the river.

  I watch the parade for a few more seconds to see if I can figure out what it is that holds this guy’s attention. I hope it won’t involve a sniper rifle, say, or petroleum jelly.

  I decide it’s best to give the dude a wide berth, so instead of following the high path that leads by the school fence, we can skirt around through the brush by the river. But Skillet is protesting, doing his best to turn himself into a concrete goose, and as I drag him down the tangled path, I look up just in time to see Maggie test the river with her paw.

  I wasn’t thinking. This is, after all, the part of the river where, in the summer, I would let her swim. No wonder she wouldn’t go in the upper part; the water was almost always too fast there. But by this point it has usually calmed down. Certainly by July. But today it’s fast and bad as a flash flood in a slot canyon, where ranchers sometimes lose entire herds of cattle.

  I scream at Maggie as loudly and forcefully as I can, but I’m not sure she can hear me over the roar of the river. She turns around, but in doing so steps in the water, and all at once she is afloat and begins bobbing and spinning away in the current. I run toward her but the eddy in which she swirls immediately whorls into the rest of the fast water, and just as I reach the river’s edge the water sucks her downstream faster than I could swim after her.

  “Skillet!” I shout, though he has never heeded a word I say. I yell one more time and yank him down the path, but he dives for a bush and jerks himself out of the harness and I’m left holding an empty leash. Both of my babies are in the wind.

  There is no time to think or feel or worry or plan. I just know that in a heartbeat I went from being a proud daddy of two sweet critters to a man faced with the decision of letting one go for the sake of keeping the other safe, or risking the lives of both in an attempt to retrieve the first.

  I think of that little girl who was swept downstream two days ago and the scout who himself could have easily drowned and the culvert she was sucked under and all that water and all those rocks, and decide it is simply time to act. I look at the Latino guy but see only my panicked reflection in his glasses.

  I plow through the brush downstream to where I know there is, at least in the latter part of summer, a decent crossing. I dive through the branches and bushes and manage to get to the clearing just ahead of Maggie. The river is still high and fast, and I know if I don’t go in ahead of her there is no way I can get her out.

  I think of Jenae and how, without her knowledge, all her loved ones are going to be thrown in a river with no real promise of escape. I think of my mom and how unlikely it is that she could survive the piling on of another death so close to the anniversary of her own mom’s passing. I pause only for the hint of a prayer, because as unsafe as I know that water is, there’s no way I can slink back home with empty, dry arms.

  I imagine Skillet might have tried to follow me through the brush or might have done what he has been doing all day: following Maggie. I’ll have precious little chance of catching him, I know, but if I don’t hurry, Maggie is going to sweep past me and away for good, so in I jump, and the shock and rush of all that cold, fast water hits my body all at once, as if the river is a frigid, liquid form of electricity.

  Maggie rushes into view, struggling to keep her head above water, paddling fiercely but with little hope of getting to shore on her own. I didn’t even think about how deep the river would be for me—I never imagined it’d be up to my head—and a surge of water blows my sunglasses off my face and fills my messenger bag like a lead parachute. The water plumes up my body and face, eddying turbulently behind me. I lean into the stream as if I am trying to dam the river itself. I tilt just an inch too far, though, and for a second I can’t touch bottom. I rudder myself back to something approaching vertical just in time, and there is Maggie coming at me like a fast and furry tugboat. I open my arms and she hits me square in the chest.

  I hold on tight, and water rushes into my mouth and lungs, and it is so, so cold. I can’t believe that only moments ago I was almost hot and contemplating sunbathing, and here we are, fighting for our lives in the middle of a freezing river: a boy and his dog and maybe his damned cat to boot.

  But there is no time to wait for Skillet. If he is in that water, he’s as good as gone. With Maggie in my arms, I can’t even get back to the bank we came from. It’s only five feet away, but the river is too strong and cold and I am coughing up froth and struggling to keep Maggie against my chest—I don’t know what will happen if I take another lungful of water. It’s not that I think I will drown, but one good knock on the noggin or neck and what else would it take to make things catastrophic? I try to let the river guide me into the bank, and sweet Melanie’s messenger bag acts something like a keel, keeping me more or less square so that I can hold Maggie tight and not head too fast, spaniel-first, for some tree trunk or rock. We pass a snag of roots and brush and I grab onto whatever I can, afraid it is the only chance we are getting, and I roughly shove Maggie ashore.

  I worry that she might have been hurt, maybe badly, but she gets herself upright immediately and shakes her coat off as though preparing for another swim. I am so relieved I almost fail to realize that I haven’t yet managed to get myself out of the river. I pull hard on the roots and paw myself to shore.

  “Come on, bunny,” I yell to Maggie. There is no time to check for injuries—we have to get back to the other side. I am freezing and hacking up water, but we run as fast as our numb little limbs can carry us. I feel the stares of some paraders and a few kids playing basketball up ahead by the bridge. We must look quite a sight. Here it is, sunny and in the fifties, and along comes a profoundly soggy dog and her dad, water sloshing out of his bag.

  I am so happy that Maggie sailed right into my arms, that she seems blithely childlike and ready to go on her next big adventure, not having any idea how close a call she—we—really had. But there is no time to relax. My lungs are bursting with icy water and my throat aches from screaming and water squishes out of my shoes and the pockets of my jeans. I can barely see through the brush at the base of the river and can’t spot Skillet anywhere. I can’t say that I ever felt anything like affection for the little putz, but I know in some strange way he makes Jenae happy, and there is neither rhetoric nor apology enough to explain how I have managed to save my dog but not her cat.

  The bridge is broad and solid, with a cement walkway and steel railings painted purple, and it is the only way to get to the other side of the river within a mile. Once across, I stop and look up to find Jesus still gazing across the river with his mirrored sunglasses.

  “Where’s Skillet?” I ask Jesus. I gesture around the woods, surprised to find I am still holding the retractable leash with his empty fat-boy harness dangling there.

  I know I’m not making any sense, asking this guy for a frying pan, for all he knows, but I can’t do any better. I am frantic and bewildered and don’t know which way to turn.

  But Jesus knows. Without a word, he raises his right arm and points downstream.

  I scan the riverbank, calling out “Kitty kitty kitty,” because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you lose a cat, despite the fact that my
cat has only ever heard me call him Skillet, Drillbit, Harelip, McGarret (from Hawaii Five-0, which he and Jenae love), Snakebit, Rarebit, or Fat Boy. His wide orange-and-white hide should be easy to see—unless he’s in the water.

  And then, hunkering just about where he was when I yanked him out of his harness, trying to hide from the great wide world under a shrub, there he is. Little thug.

  I scoop him up and hold him tight against my chest. He immediately claws at me, because I am soaked to the bone and still dripping cold water and it is probably the second-biggest shock of his day, but I won’t let him go for anything. Maggie and Skillet and I wave to Jesus and slosh back the strange way we have come.

  We plop down in a clearing beneath some pine trees and try to catch our breath. I strip off as much as I decently can and spread out my clothes and the contents of my bag to dry on the grass. I haven’t lost anything, but the book I brought is bloated to three times its original size and all I can get my cell phone to do is gurgle. I wait as long as I can, and after dragging the wet, recalcitrant pets across the vast steppe of Sugarhouse Park to the car, and driving home, I find, thankfully, no one. I want to call the Plumb brothers, but I only had their number stored in my cell phone. Before I hop in the shower, I give both the animals as much cat food as they can eat (yes, Maggie too) and call Jenae.

  “So everybody’s fine,” I say.

  “Oh, my God, what happened?” she says. She knows it isn’t going to be about flowers this time. “Maggie? Skillet?”

  “Remember that bit on the news?” I say. I pace around the kitchen floor, leaving soggy footprints on the slate. “The part about the water being high in Sugarhouse Park?”

  “Oh, my God. You did not.”

  “Well,” I say, “we did, and it was, but everybody’s all right.”

  “Oh,” she says again. “My God. I would have killed you if you drowned.”

  As I warm up in the shower, I begin to feel achy and emotional. The hot water washing over me in my house is such a merciful respite, it’s hard to believe it comes from the same source as all that snowmelt that coursed over my body an hour ago. But there isn’t time to relax. There might be another showing any minute, and though I don’t really care that much about it given the events of my morning, I don’t want to have to explain it to a nice young preapproved couple and their realtor.

  Just as I am drying off, the phone rings.

  “Bob says no more water.” It’s Jenae. I think she means the shower and begin to remind her that it is a low-flow showerhead and it was a traumatic morning—then I get it. “He said that people die in that river—he grew up here in Sugarhouse, remember?—and don’t be a dumbass, stay out of it. That, and there are no more showings today.”

  I am relieved. I am disappointed. I am absolutely wiped out.

  That evening, I spread our scratchy blue-plaid blanket on the grass and we all hang out in the backyard, trying to relish the remaining days in our little Sugarhouse home. Nicole and Erik, their new baby girl Zoë, and Cleo their monster dog come over. We grill brats and corn on the cob, drink wine, tickle the baby, and watch Skillet abuse a dog ten times his size. It’s hard to imagine we are ever going to leave this place.

  The next morning, Sunday, Rick Plumb calls at eight and says that somebody who has already seen the house wants to come by again.

  “I know it’s a pain in the ass,” he says. I imagine him with his cast-covered leg propped on an open drawer, eating grapes by the pound. “And I know it’s Sunday, but he said you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to. I kinda hinted that it might be inconvenient, but Bob said not to hate on ’em. You only need one buyer.”

  Point made.

  In an hour the guy in the Avalanche jersey shows up, this time with his girlfriend and his own agent. His name is Brian and he’s a systems guy—whatever that means—for a mining company, and he says he just had to see the place again.

  “Stay, stay,” Brian urges us as we begin to pack up the critters. “Really. I just want to show my girlfriend.”

  We don’t quite know where to be or how much to act like what is obviously true: we own the place and hope to make a lot of money from it.

  Brian takes his tank-topped, flip-flopped girlfriend around while their agent hangs back and strokes his mustache like a Bond villain petting his lap dog.

  “Seems like a nice place,” he says. “Nice neighborhood. I like nice neighborhoods.”

  “Yep,” I say. “Me too.” I wish Bob Plumb were here for this. He has warned us about direct contact with buyers and other agents.

  “Price is a little much,” Brian says, staring critically at the soffits. “A little much, don’t you think?”

  I look at him. Twenty-four hours ago I was in danger of drowning. “It’s what we’re asking,” I say.

  “Hey, okay, kemosabe,” he says, holding his hands up. “Your house, your price.”

  Brian and his girlfriend join us outside. If she is enamored with the place, she doesn’t show it. Brian, on the other hand, glows as though he has gotten into Jenae’s buffing cream.

  “I just love it,” he says, rushing us to shake our hands. “It’s such a great house.”

  His agent rolls his eyes.

  “He can’t stop talking about all the stainless stuff in the kitchen,” his girlfriend says.

  “And the slate,” Brian says. “That is slate, right? And the countertop. What is that? Concrete? I can’t believe it. I love it.”

  We thank him and watch his agent glower.

  “Are you guys going to be around later,” Brian says, “like this afternoon?”

  “You bet,” I say. “We might go for a little swim, but beyond that, we’ll be here.”

  Jenae pokes me hard in the ribs and leaves her finger there to let me know I am not funny, not even a little.

  Homecoming

  THE PLAN WAS to try to relax and live as if Texas were home. Our house payments were lower than the cheapest rent I’d ever paid; they called deep-fried tortillas smothered in nacho cheese “salad”; and Bruce was only a couple of hours away and visited every few weeks to make sure the shoe-size cockroaches hadn’t carried us or any of our unopened beer off into the piney woods for good. Yet it was a long way from the place I called home, and I wound up getting a shot at a job up north.

  We went to Nebraska for Christmas, and to Wisconsin for New Year’s, right before my job interview in Minnesota. My mom was still negotiating life with her two Bobs. Ever since her husband fairly appraised Grandpa’s grilled tilapia as “a little overdone”—the single dish he prepared every time he cooked, which he did by setting it on fire and letting it burn itself out—Grandpa refused to share any space with Bob. So our plan was to have dinners with Bob and lunches with Grandpa.

  On New Year’s Day, we struggled to decide on a restaurant Grandpa didn’t associate with Tonya, who had in the meantime remarried Tim, so we picked a place equally objectionable to all of us: the Champps sports bar in Brookfield. The place was packed with Badger fans wearing red-and-white pelts and oversize wedges of plastic cheddar on their heads.

  “I’m not sure I’m up for this,” Jenae said. It had hardly been a rockin’ New Year’s Eve the night before. We had all gone to bed before the ball dropped. “I feel a little . . . thick,” she said.

  A grim hostess with glasses in the shape of the year showed us to our table. Grandpa was slower than ever today, glum about Tonya’s remarriage, so when we finally got installed in our booth I ordered a round of bloody marys—in Wisconsin they come with a beer chaser, a stick of beef jerky, and every other medicinal garnish they’ve got at the bar—and I thought everybody would be on the mend inside a couple of minutes.

  Instead, Jenae struggled to keep her burger from talking back, while Grandpa sat resentfully quiet because he couldn’t hear over the din of the football game, which was being broadcast on every flat surface in the bar, and my mom dealt with her predeparture depression, knowing that she wasn’t going to see us for a
while—unless things went really right at the interview. Everybody was just kind of out of it.

  When we got back to Grandpa’s apartment building, we left the girls in the car while I shuffled with him to his unit. “You know, Matt,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about what you do, with your writing and all?”

  “Yeah?” I said. He knew I wrote short stories and essays that weren’t very appealing to him compared to the subtle ghost/spy/romance/thrillers he’d lately been checking out of the library by the bushel.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And I’ve got an idea for you. For a book.”

  “Is that right?” I said as we arrived at his door.

  “It is,” he said. He glanced at me, still a wink of trouble left in him. “And it would be pretty racy stuff, let me tell you what. But I don’t expect you’re interested in writing something like that. Something that would involve, say, a gentleman, a hot young lady, and some trouble.”

  “We’ll see,” I told him, giving him one last hug. “I just might.”

  By the time we got back to my mom’s condo, we were all ready for a cocktail—except Jenae. She just wanted to head upstairs to crash, she said. She was so tired she couldn’t think of eating or drinking anything else today.

  “Not even cottage cheese?” I said, tucking her in.

  “I hate you,” Jenae said. “Don’t make me hurt your face parts.”

  I kissed her on the forehead and went downstairs.

  My mom and Bob were sitting in their easy chairs, and I told them about Jenae, hoping they wouldn’t be too sore about her absence.

  “What,” Bob said, hoisting his half brandy, half crème de menthe, “is she prejke?”

  I didn’t know if the word was Czech or Polish or what, but I knew what he meant, and in my gut I knew he was right.