The Next Cool Place

by Dave Balcom

  The Next Cool Place

  By Dave Balcom

  Smashwords Edition

  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go on line and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright 2009 by David Balcom, All Rights Reserved

  DEDICATION

  This is a book of fiction. Real places are mixed with fictitious places. All characters and events described here are imaginary.

  This novel is dedicated to everyone who loves newspapers and understands the questions, not the answers, are the key to understanding.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not be in your hands if it hadn’t been for the continuous support from my live-in editor, Susie, our children and our friends who read drafts, critiqued those efforts and reminded me that the story’s the thing, the writing is the craft. Where this effort falls short is all on me, but it’s closer to the mark because of the efforts of others.

  1

  The call that plunged me back into a world I’d avoided for more than 30 years came out of the blue. I was living in Eastern Oregon – a secure place so far from my roots in Michigan it could have been a different country. I was certainly a different me. How Rick Edmonds found me was simple: He Googled my name after all those years.

  “Is this the James Michael Stanton from Lakeville I knew in Lake Lucy?”

  “It is. Who’s this?”

  “Rick Edmonds, do you remember me?”

  “Of course, but it’s been forever, Rick. How are you doin’?”

  “I’m fine, but I’m callin’ to let you know something that is difficult to talk about, but I knew you’d want to know… Mickey Buchanan is dead.”

  At the mere mention of his name, my mind was flooded with memories of Mickey Buchanan. It was like the cut on the thumb that took forever to heal, but finally was just a knot of scar tissue that only came to mind when you pinched something, and the knot reminded you. It was just like that. My memories left me silent, and that silence stretched to the point where Rick finally said, “Jim?”

  “I’m here, it’s just...” I contemplated this news and how I would, or should, react to it and the silence again stretched out until, finally, I shook myself, “Rick, thanks for calling me. I know this had to be tough for you after all this time, and you’re right, I really do need to know this. How did he die?”

  “You know Mickey was the poster child for bad choices, especially when it came to drugs and alcohol, so it appears he was high and drove his Porsche into a culvert.”

  “Really? After all those years of negotiating Lake Lucy’s roads with a load on, he… wait a minute… what kind of Porsche was he driving?”

  “Nine-eleven Carrera S.”

  “It would take a shoehorn to fit him into that.”

  “That’s the old Mickey. He had his stomach stapled years ago, and slimmed down to his high school size. And he wasn’t in Lake Lucy. He was up at Mineral Valley where he was building a big housing and recreational development. He had a meeting for dinner with some big time investors, had a row with his wife, and then stormed out; didn’t make a mile.”

  By now, my mind was working again. I knew I had to ask and I knew that this was the part of life I’ve never been very good at. “So, is there anything I can do?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I did want you to know that there’s going to be a celebration of his life in Lake Lucy on the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend, and you’d be real welcome. Lots of us talk about you still, following your career from afar and all, and I know it would mean a lot to Kathy if you could come.”

  At the mention of Mickey’s first wife, a pain of my own loss stirred. I thought I had put that behind me too, but the memory of Mickey and Kathy, both young and crazy, and how their infectious enthusiasm for life brought out the very best of my own love, flooded me speechless.

  “Jim, are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here; just had a moment. When did Mickey die?

  “March seventeenth.”

  “Why are you waiting so long to have the celebration?”

  “Oh, er … Well, we decided to wait until … some other old timers, like you, have moved off … and we figured it would give you guys a chance to make travel plans. Can you come?”

  Hating my indecision, after all Mickey and I had been very close once, but it had been years, and keeping track, staying in touch, all that grown up stuff had never been my long suit. It wasn’t that I don’t like people or care about old friends; it’s just that I’ve made a life out of living in the now and the future. The past has never held much interest for me.

  I couldn’t help but be non-committal. “I don’t know, Rick. I’ll have to think about it ... Can I call you.”

  “Sure, sure, I understand,” he said. I could hear the acceptance of rejection in his voice. It grated on my conscience. “I just had to call, you know, it was Mickey, after all, and well, I thought you’d…”

  “Listen, Rick. Let me line things up and I’ll let you know, okay?”

  We traded contact information, and said goodbye. I sat at the phone and stared out the window, considering how I had let Mickey, Rick and all that youth drain out of my life while chasing a dream.

  2

  The dream was mutual when I met Sandy during my rehab at the Naval Air Station in Rhode Island. She had been civilian staff in the otherwise all-Navy personnel department. It was a summer job. She processed all kinds of orders, including those that created histories for folks whose military careers were abnormal to say the least.

  She had seen through the cover stories, but never batted an eye. She saw all the scars, and never blinked. When she finally asked me to dinner, I found my soul mate, and never hesitated.

  Everyone learns what they need to learn in the service, especially when they go in harm’s way. I learned that while I may have had the skills and God-given athleticism to be a covert warrior, I was not mentally tough enough for the life. When it was time to choose between the Navy or civilian life, I knew I never wanted to go there again. I was committed to putting all that training and pain behind me, and to let my brain do the heavy lifting from that point on.

  Newspapers picked me more than I picked them, but once the choice was made, it became a great way to see the country. We worked in newspaper communities in five of the industry’s six geographic regions as defined by the trade publication Editor and Publisher; and with the moves came a variety of challenges and growth rings.

  If a couple’s life together was like a giant redwood tree, we put 30 fantastic rings around the core, raised two great kids to adulthood, and made a life. When we landed in Eastern Oregon, we figured we had found the end of our trail.

  But there are all kinds of ends in our lives, and I had never even contemplated that Sandy and I would hit different ends at different times, and certainly not that she would find hers before I found mine.

  Never athletic, the end for Sandy started with a shortness of breath that was excessive even for her. We were hunting spring mushrooms in the Blue Mountains then, but by summer the doctors told us there was little they could do. Our tree stopped making rings at 30, and I was left alone, going through the motions at work and at home. I was drifting along at age 52.

  We’d made some small investments during the later, tall-cotton years, and they had done well despite the dot-com bubble. After two miserable years I threw in the towel at work. Community news
papers are no place for people going through the motions.

  The first stories I wrote after leaving the newspaper were just storytelling that scratched an itch that had developed from years of daily writing. Memoirs were all they really were. There was a little thing about a duck hunting trip to Oklahoma, and Gray’s Sporting Journal published that.

  Then there was a memoir that grew into a novel about an Upstate New York co-ed who never made it past orientation. She stepped in front of a psycho at the orientation-day mixer. That story caught an agent’s eye and I was published.

  Two years of hard writing and two books later, I found myself sitting in the darkening gloom of my 1960s cottage-style home in the shadow of the Blue Mountains, wondering about the youth that evaded me, the life that had evaded Mickey, and feeling guilty as hell.

  Other than the occasional Christmas card, before Sandy died, I had heard from Mickey only twice in more than 25 years. He had sent a sympathy note after Sandy’s funeral, but my grief was such that I couldn’t bear to read all the notes that poured in from across the country, even the one from Mickey and his second wife, Ginny, so I never opened it. I just sent a thank you card, like the others I sent, to their return address.

  I had packed all those cards, opened and unopened alike; away with the things of Sandy’s that I never thought I’d use at again.

  Then, last fall, he had called me one night from Bend, Oregon, sounding a little drunk. Said he was there on business, things were getting difficult and he’d like to talk with me.

  He wanted to meet in Portland, at the airport, the next day. I explained that I couldn’t. At first light I was headed to Burns Junction with three other guys for a week of chukar hunting, and that was like 180 degrees from Portland.

  I hadn’t thought of him in years, and, frankly, that night on the phone I treated him like a stranger.

  “Well, okay. That’s all right. Next time, okay? I don’t want you to forget my number, okay? It’ll answer many questions if you ever look it up, okay?” He sounded like he was trying to tell me something, but I figured the liquor was in the way.

  “Let me give you my new contact information and how to reach me up in Mineral Valley. We’ll be up there a lot after the first of the year.” And so he did, and I brushed him off. “Till next time.” Sure.

  We had met Mickey, Kathy and their friends when we moved to Lake Lucy to live while I finished college on the G.I. Bill. Sandy taught second grade in the local elementary school. At that time, Lake Lucy was a minor resort town for the middle class of Lansing. Far enough away from home to be “away;” close enough to spend every weekend “at the cottage.”

  From Memorial Day to Labor Day, there were upwards of 10,000 people in the area; the rest of the year there were no more than 500. Most of them had lived there or nearby all of their lives.

  My working at the Lake View bar helped out our meager finances, and the owner, enchanted with the idea of having a drug-free, honest bartender, made a work schedule that fit my class schedule and outdoor pursuits.

  Working at the bar also meant working with Mickey who served as bouncer on Friday and Saturday nights when the house band rocked the place for young adults from far and wide. It was the time of 18-year-old drinking in Michigan, and having bouncers was a necessity as the weekend savages were prone to fighting as much as they were to dancing and drinking.

  The fighting had been so rampant when I started that after one weekend, I announced I wouldn’t be back. “Carl,” I told my boss, “I’m working real hard at college to beat some smarts into my brain, and I’m not going to come in here on weekends and have some yokel try to knock them out.”

  He talked me into one more weekend, and that’s when he brought Mickey and another local tough-guy, Rick Edmonds, into play. “These are our new security guys,” Carl explained to me the next Friday when I came to work. “You give them all the rum and Coke they ask for, and stay behind the bar if trouble breaks out, okay?” It sounded good to me, and after that first night, when Rick and Mickey made examples of the first two fighters, things became real smooth at the Lake View.

  Rick and Mickey also worked construction together, framing houses as a sub contractor for a big developer in nearby towns, and taking on little projects of their own. They also dabbled in drugs, growing marijuana in Mickey’s garden and selling it in twenty dollar bags to the young patrons out in the parking lot of the bar.

  College students always need money, and when Rick and Mickey found out that I had grown up working with concrete and a hammer, they started offering me day jobs on weekends and holidays – framing and pouring patios, sidewalks, driveways and stuff like that. They had no idea of what I’d done in the service, and they never asked. They just adopted me. They decided on their own that it was their role to protect me.

  Rick showed a real business sense and discipline in how he ran their business, but it was apparent that while Mickey shared Rick’s dreams for a successful life, he was clueless when it came to discipline or dedication. He seemed to think that his charm and obvious talents would see him through.

  Eventually, we became very close. Mickey had grown up hunting and fishing and had lost touch with that life with the boozing, drugs and womanizing of his early 20s. Hanging around with me, he remembered his roots with a vengeance. We were inseparable for the last two years it took me to finish school.

  After graduation, Sandy and I left Lake Lucy to pursue our fortune, and, after his divorce from Kathy, we lost track of Mickey and Lake Lucy and all those people. From time to time, we’d hear reports on how Rick had built a successful home construction business, but we only received sketchy reports about Mickey. He’d remarried, and he’d gotten involved in wireless telecommunications, cornered a market and made a killing. He’d molded his talents and fortune into a massive residential golf course development.

  And then he died. His death would plunge me back into a world of violence that I had vowed to never enter again.

  3

  Expedia figured out the travel plans for my trip back in time to Michigan, and while it would hurt to be so far from my precious Blues during the peak of morel mushroom season, I told myself paying respect to lost friends was just one of those things adults have to do.

  And Michigan was where my love affair with morels had all begun and Mother’s Day was perfect timing there, too. I scheduled myself into Michigan for a whole week. I would arrive on Friday before the ritual and then depart on a Sunday after a week of meandering through the morel woods of my youth. Touching one’s roots seemed like an adult kind of thing as well, and I congratulated myself.

  Shirlee, the neighbor lady down the road, would take care of my bird dog, Punch, and she would also look in on my place to take care of things in my absence. In addition to being full of pioneer friendliness, she’ll do most anything to keep the mushrooms, chukars, pheasants, quail, salmon and trout coming in season to her kitchen.

  Finally, May 4 came and it was time to travel.

  4

  A lone traveler has only two choices: Watching people or reading a book. My book was open in front of my eyes as I sat in airports and on planes, but the story rolling behind them were thoughts and memories of my life in Lake Lucy.

  The first time I saw the adult version of Mickey, was in a quiet bar in the middle of an afternoon just after I’d moved to town.

  Mickey was standing at the middle of the long bar next to the waitress station that guaranteed the floor workers access to the bartenders on busy nights. He had one foot up on the rail and was staring at a headless beer of his own. I didn’t recognize him.

  I had been scouting for the upcoming opening of deer season with another avid hunter, Greg Morrison, and we had worked up a bit of a thirst.

  Joey, the owner of the joint, brought us our drafts on Greg’s hand signal. I paid, we clinked glasses, and tipped them up with relief.

  “See that guy at the bar?” Greg asked. “He’s a piece of work, he is. Mickey Buchanan is his name.”<
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  I knew that name well, but the person didn’t match my memory. Mickey had been “Mr. Big” at his high school in Millerstown, a couple of classes behind me but nearly my age when I had been a senior in nearby Lakeville. He had been all-league in every sport he ever played, and every girl in every high school who had ever seen him was immediately in crush.

  I had played against him in football, and his reputation had been well earned. He was quick, tough and determined. He hit the hole at full speed with the ball; he closed it just as fast from his middle linebacker position.

  In basketball he had been a banger in the middle, without too much finesse, but he was all anybody in that small school league wanted to handle. In baseball, he was the catcher. While he had the same problems with the curveball that all the high school kids had, with his hitch and strength if you threw him a fastball below the waist he could lose it for you.

  Seeing him that day, in that shape, came as a shock. He stood six-foot three-inches and carried in excess of 300 pounds of what appeared to be, at first look, all flab. He had long blond, stringy, thin hair, and with his bright blue eyes, dimpled, ruddy cheeks, and pageboy haircut he resembled the Dutch Boy of paint can fame. His shoulders stretched his tee shirt up top as much as his belly did below.

  He wore faded jeans and construction boots. His hips, compared to his upper body, were seemingly thin, and his 36-inch inseam gave him an awkward, top-heavy look.

  “Where you at?” Greg asked. “You want another beer?”

  I snapped out of my reverie, thought about it for a second, and said, “No. I need home; it’s my night to cook.”

  “Let’s have another one. I don’t want to leave right now. I think there’s going to be some trouble, and Mickey is outnumbered,” he said as he caught Joey’s attention and ordered refills with a gesture.