by Jess Walter
Thank you. I’d appreciate that. Bit clears his throat. But before you put it away, could you show it to him? Tell him his old man brought it for his birthday?
Sure, Mrs. Molson says, and then she gets hard again. But Mr. Bittinger, you can’t come by here.
I know that, he says.
Next time I’ll call the police.
He begins backing away. Won’t be a next time.
You said that last spring.
Backing away: I know. I’m sorry.
Call Mr. Gandor, and I’m sure he’ll set up a visitation.
I will. Thank you, Mrs. Molson.
She turns and goes inside. Bit stands where he’s backed, middle of the street, feels like he’s about to burst open, a water balloon or a sack of fluid, gush out onto the pavement and trickle down to the curb. When are we gonna get our shit together?
Quickly, Bit begins walking toward downtown. He imagines the curtains parting in the houses around him. Think you’re so smart. Let’s talk about you. Jesus he wants something. He stowed his ANYTHING HELPS sign back behind Frankie Doodle’s; instead of going to the Jesus Beds and pleading with Cater, maybe he’ll go get his sign. Hit that corner again. Tear it up one more night, like him and Julie used to. Maybe the guy in the gold convertible will come back and give him another twenty. He tries to think of something good. Imagines the guy in the gold Mercedes pulling up and Bit spinning his sign and it reading Funny Fucker and the guy laughing and Bit jumping in the car and them going to get totally fucked up in Reno or someplace.
Anything helps funny fucker! Funny fucker helps anything! You want to talk about Julie? Fuck funny anything helps! How long you been saving for that book, Bit? Anything funny helps fucker!
Dad! Bit turns and there’s Nate, stand-pedaling a little BMX bike up the street, its frame swinging beneath his size. Jeez, he’s big, and he’s got a bike? Of course he does. What thirteen-year-old doesn’t have a bike? He remembers Julie waking up once, saying, We gotta get Nate a bike. Even fucked up, Bit knew that not having a bike was the least of the kid’s problems.
He tries to focus. The kid’s hair is so short, like a military cut. Julie would hate that. There’s something else—his teeth. He’s got braces on. When he pulls up Bit sees he’s got the book in its brown bag under his arm.
I can’t take this, Dad.
No, it’s okay, Bit says. I talked to Mrs. Molson and she said—
I read it at camp. This kid in my cabin had it. It was good. But you should take it back.
Bit closes his eyes against a wave of dizziness. No, Nate, I want you to have it.
Really, he says, I can’t. I’m sorry. And he holds it out, making direct eye contact, like a cop. Jesus, Bit thinks, the kid’s different in every way—taller and so . . . awake.
Take it, Nate says. Please.
Bit takes it.
I shouldn’t have wrote that in my postcard, Nate says. I was mad they wouldn’t let me read the book, but I understand it now. I was being stupid.
No, Bit says, I was glad you sent that card. You have a good birthday?
It seems to take a minute for Nate to recall his birthday. Oh. Yeah. It was cool. We went to the water slides.
And school starts . . .
Three weeks ago.
Oh. Sure, he says, but he can’t believe it. It’s not like time passes anymore; it leaks, it seeps. Bit wants to say something about the grade, just so Nate knows he knows. He counts years in his head: one after they took Nate, one after Julie, and one he’s been trying to get better in the Jesus Beds—a little more than three years the Molsons have had him. Jesus.
So . . . you nervous about eighth grade?
Nah. I was more nervous last year.
Yeah. Bit can barely take this steady eye contact. It reminds him of Cater.
Consequences, Cater’s always saying.
I was more nervous last year, Nate’s always saying.
I don’t feel good, Julie’s always saying.
Yeah, Bit says, no need to be nervous. He’s still in danger of bursting, bleeding over the street.
You okay, Dad?
Sure. Just glad I got to see you. That ad litem business . . . I’m not good at planning ahead.
It’s okay. Nate smiles. Looks back over his shoulder. Well . . . I should—
Yeah. Bit moves to hug the boy or shake his hand or something, but it’s like the kid’s a mile away. Hey, good luck with school, and everything.
Thanks. Then Nate pedals away. He looks back once, and is gone.
Bit breathes. He stands on the street. Imagines the curtains on the street fluttering. What if Julie didn’t die? What if she got herself one of these houses and she’s watching him now? You ever gonna get your shit together, Bit? You gonna get Nate back? Or you goin’ back to cardboard?
Bit looks down at the book in his hands.
At the Jesus Beds last weekend, after Bit explained to Cater how he was only a couple dollars short of buying this book for his kid, Cater stared at him in the most pathetic way.
What? Bit asked.
Cater said, How long you been saving for that book, Bit?
What do you mean?
I mean, ask yourself, how long you been a couple dollars short?
He supposes that’s why he went crazy, Cater always looking at him like he’s kidding himself. Like he’s always thinking, How long has it been since you saw your kid, anyway?
BIT STANDS outside the bookstore holding a twenty-eight-dollar book. Holding twenty-eight dollars. Holding three fifths of vodka. Holding nine forty-ounce beers. Holding five bottles of fortified wine. Holding his boy. Civilians go into the store and come out carrying books in little brown bags just like the one he’s got in his hands.
Here’s why at the Jesus Beds they can only talk about all the stupid shit they’ve done—because that’s all they are now, all they’re ever gonna be, a twitching bunch of memories and mistakes, regrets. Jesus, he thinks. I should’ve had the decency to go when Julie did.
BIT EASES against the light pole. You think you’re through with some things. But you aren’t.
It’s about to rain; the cars coming off the freeway have their windows up. It’s fine, though. Bit likes the cool wet air. The very first car pauses at the bottom of the hill and its driver, a woman, glances over. Bit looks away, opens the thick book and begins reading.
The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. For a second they stood quite still, wands pointing at each other’s chests . . .
The light changes but the woman doesn’t go. Raindrops have started to dapple the page, so Bit pulls his jacket over his head, to shield the book. And when he goes back to reading, this time it’s with the accent and everything.
We Live in Water
1958
OREN DESSENS leaned forward as he drove, perched on the wheel, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, open can of beer between his knees. He’d come apart before, of course, a couple three times, maybe more, depending on how you counted. The way Katie figured—every fistfight and whore, every poker game and long drunk—he was always coming apart, but Oren didn’t think it was fair to count like his ex-wife did. Up to him, he’d only count those times he was in real danger of not coming back. Like that morning on the carrier.
“Dad?”
He’d technically been at war the whole four months he was out, but he’d only been in danger that one time, a month before the end, a beautiful dawn in open water, up deck with his slop crew, alone as a man could feel, the planes huddled at one end of the gray deck like birds, wings-up. The rest of the world, in every direction, seemed like bands of varying blue, except for a thin gray line where the sea and sky met, and then the horn sounded and a single, smoking plane fell out of nowhere—no Japanese carrier or base anywhere nearby—just a lost Zeke falling out of that deep blue like a single raindrop, twisting for the deck, coming so close Oren could see the red suns on the wings before the thing dropped harmlessly off the
stern—an osprey going for a fish.
“Dad?”
But no matter how you figured trouble, there was no doubt this time. He was in some shit. And not like that morning on deck. This time he was the lost plane, spiraling and smoking. Oren downshifted. The Merc’s cockeyed headlight beams met and crossed ahead. On either side, the dark trees leaned over the narrow road and the headlights made it seem like a pine tunnel. Wasn’t much farther, Oren thought. Flett would be there already, fixing things. He hoped.
“Dad?”
Oren glanced at the kid, whose feet dangled over the edge of the bench seat and the scratchy Indian blanket he’d put there to keep the springs from popping through the torn upholstery. Michael was six, middle of three, only boy, and the only kid Oren got in the divorce. It had been his lawyer’s advice: if he didn’t want to pay so much, he needed to take a kid. So he got the boy. “Yeah?”
The kid’s head was tilted to the side. “Do we live in water?”
Oren dragged his cigarette. “What?”
“Do we live in water?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do we live in water?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean do we live in water?”
“You mean like in the rain or something? In the ocean?”
The boy stared at him.
“I don’t . . .” Oren took a pull on the beer. “Do you mean can we live in water?”
“No. Do we live in water?”
The clearing had snuck up on Oren and he slowed, came into the cross of narrow country roads, nothing but dark walls of trees in four directions, and Flett’s roadhouse in the center of this clearing, the big one story, low-slung building with no windows and a stumpy sign that read: TWO BRIDGES. A single lightbulb pointed back at the sign, night bugs frantic in the dim light. Oren pulled the Merc into the parking lot, the cackle of rubber on gravel.
He took a breath. “Listen. I gotta run in this place for a minute.”
There were five other cars parked outside, including Flett’s Chevy and that bitch of a red Cadillac that Ralph Bannen drove. Okay. Flett must be in there trying to smooth things with Bannen, working out some kind of arrangement. Earlier that day, Oren and the kid had driven out to Flett’s new house overlooking the lake, and while the kid hung out in Flett’s basement, Oren had explained how bad he’d messed up, how he’d been nailing this guy’s whore of a wife, and how once on a drunk she happened to mention that her husband had a safe in the house. Oren guessed right off the wife’s birth date as the combination. He’d only taken a little money, but the guy apparently counted every night and hit it out of the wife that Oren had been over. The whole time Oren told this story, Flett just stared, until he finally said, What guy, Oren? And when Oren told him Ralph Bannen, Flett just shook his head. Bannen ran book and women at half the clubs in the panhandle, including Two Bridges. After yelling at him, Flett had suggested going alone to the roadhouse, talking to Bannen, and then having Oren come down after he fixed things up. So Oren sat at Flett’s house for an hour while the boy played in the basement. And now, here they were.
Oren dragged his smoke and stared at the kid again—blond like his mother, round-faced, big floppy eyelashes. He looked so much like her Oren wondered how he could like the kid so much.
“Sit tight,” Oren said. “I gotta see this man. Don’t get out of the car. You hear?”
The boy stared at him expectantly, as if waiting for the answer to a question, and that’s when Oren remembered the boy had asked one. “Look, I don’t know what you were talking about before, Michael,” he said. “Do you mean can we breathe in water?”
“No,” the boy said, as plainly as if he were asking for a sandwich. “Do. We. Live. In water?”
Oren pulled smoke again. And then he surprised himself by laughing.
1992
THE NUMBERS clicked to a stop, the tank full, and Michael replaced the nozzle and screwed the gas cap back on the rental. He craved a cigarette. It was all he could do to not go into the convenience store and buy a pack. Two years and still . . . maybe he’d just feel this need forever. He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, shocks hunching up on the blacktop. It was more developed out here than he’d imagined, businesses all along this stretch, the grubby outskirts of a resort community: tavern, little grocery, machine shop, Western boot store, sawmill, wrecking yard, and a couple of nicer mobile home parks. From the news story, he’d imagined it more remote than this, forested and dark, not a civilized string of small businesses.
Locals called the area Two Bridges, this unincorporated strip of businesses connecting the northern and eastern shores of the lake—overgrown with restaurants and tourist stores, and on the busiest corners, the place Michael had come to see, the oldest thing in the area: Two Bridges Restaurant and Resort.
The resort was comprised of three newer buildings: a Western-themed restaurant and lounge in front, with faux wagon-wheel windows; a General Store that sold driftwood and Indian art; and the hotel out back, a big eight-story Vegas-style tri-sided structure with a sign promising, “Lake views!”
Michael got out of the car, grabbed his briefcase, and walked past the restaurant down a sidewalk, between landscaped strips of grass, toward the front door of the motel. The desk clerk showed him into an office overlooking the hotel lobby, on a mezzanine directly above the front desk. A few minutes later a woman came into the room, mid-thirties, short and plump with dark hair and a round bosom and introduced herself as Ellie Flett. It was the woman he’d talked to on the phone. “You’re the lawyer from San Francisco who wanted to talk about his father?”
“Yes.” He offered his hand. “Michael Pierce.” And it occurred to him that he hadn’t really thought about where to start, or for that matter, where to go once he’d started. He reached in his briefcase and pulled out a news story that a clip service had found for him in the Spokane newspaper, just over the border from the lake, a story published four years earlier: “Historic Two Bridges Resort to Expand.” The story had been about the construction project, but it had referred to the resort’s history as a roadhouse and home for gambling and prostitution before this side of the lake was developed. As he handed the story over, Michael saw that his hand was shaking.
Ellie Flett didn’t seem to notice. She took the story and pointed over his shoulder to the same story, laminated and framed on the wall behind him with a handful of other clippings. Michael hadn’t expected this to be so hard.
“My mother died two years ago,” Michael said. “She raised my sisters and me. We never knew our father. It was something we never talked about. There were no pictures, nothing. She remarried when I was ten. A good man, my stepfather. Shane Pierce,” he added, explaining his last name. And as true as all of this was, it seemed like something other than the point of this visit and he rubbed his brow, confused by the disconnect he felt from this seemingly intimate information. “After my mother died, my sister found this note in her things.” Michael handed her a faded slip of yellow paper covered in small printed letters, as if a shy child had written the note.
Katie, Sorry I couldn’t take the boy after all. I got in some trouble. Just like you said. He’s a good boy. Tell him I said so. You tell him it’s okay he can do anything he wants.
Oren.
I’ll come back when I can.
Ellie didn’t look up from the note. “This was your father?”
“Oren Dessens,” Michael said. She showed no reaction to the name.
Ellie turned the page over. Stamped in light blue ink on the other side of the narrow strip of paper were the words TWO BRIDGES and, running down the left-hand column, the numbers one to fifteen.
“This is a betting slip,” Ellie said. One corner of her mouth went up. “I used to see these around the house when I was a kid.”
She stared at the slip like an old family picture. And then she laughed. “Back in the old days, before all the money flooded into the valley, t
hey used to take sports betting out here. Games were written on a chalkboard and these numbers corresponded to each game on the board.” Ellie smiled at the memory and then looked down at the betting slip. “‘I’ll come back,’” she read.
“‘When I can,’” Michael finished the line.
“I guess he didn’t.”
“No,” Michael said. There was some other part to all of this, something about his own divorce, but Michael didn’t know how to tell that part. “I was surprised about my father saying he couldn’t take me after all,” he said instead. “My mom never mentioned me living with him. Shane, my stepfather, said the only thing my mother ever said about Oren was that he was a gambler and a drunk who took off for good when I was six. She heard he put out on a ship and figured he died of syphilis somewhere.”
Ellie was staring at him in a way that made Michael feel exposed.
“But,” Michael said, “naturally, when I found the story about this place . . .” He didn’t finish, and wondered, naturally . . . what? Did he expect to find his father here?
Ellie looked back at the betting slip. “Look. I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss. A convention we’re trying to get. But . . . do you want to talk to my dad?”
“Your dad?”
“Tim Flett. He bought the place in the fifties from the original owner, probably about the time you’re talking about. He’s not in the best of health, but his mind is still sharp. Maybe he remembers your father.”
They made an appointment to meet again in an hour. Michael left her office, took an elevator to the eighth floor of the hotel, and stood in the hallway looking out. From the top floor, he could see the lake in the distance and the two highways parting ways at a 90-degree angle from one another, skirting the shores of the lake and disappearing in a blur of commercial development.
Again, it wasn’t the way he’d pictured it, and it seemed odd to him that he’d pictured anything at all. Maybe it was the news story, which made reference to the dark history of the place: the Western toughs, the gamblers and hookers. And Oren’s note: I got into some trouble. Was this enough to fuel his imagination? And what about the other things he saw, the cowboy boots and Indian blankets, the bright shimmering wall?
