The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  THE MIGRANTS STARTED ARRIVING on an early June Sunday, in time to help finish up with the small berry crops and then begin the real work, picking sweet cherries from the end of June till the end of July and starting the tarts mid-July or thereabouts, the apricots the last week of July, then the peaches and nectarines about mid-August.

  They mostly arrived in crews, under a workboss, and the biggest batch was Santi’s bunch, the Guatemalans. Von was in front of the tractor barn, oiling and sharpening the pruning rig, when a dusty pickup—it was always a different dusty truck every year—pulled in, making a wide arc of grumbling gravel and dust, the shocks squeaking. Santi waved his straw hat, grinning, and it was clear he’d had some dental work done over the winter. (The taking-out kind, not the putting-in kind.) Von judged he had at least a dozen workers with him—the driver and his daughter, Marita, up front with him in the cab and the rest standing and squatting in the bed. Though most of them looked somewhat familiar, some were definitely new this year, squinting around at the property, getting their bearings.

  The dust was still clouding up around them as Santi got out, swaying toward Von with his big brown hand outstretched to shake. Behind him, the workers looked dazed and wobbly as they dropped to the ground, getting their land-legs back. Von and Santi shook hands and then Santi was back at the pickup, helping his daughter out.

  That’s when Von caught sight of the belly. This was not a matter of too many greasy tortillas or a pork-rich diet. The girl was pregnant.

  “Oh, no,” Von said, shaking his hand in the air to help with the translation: this was no good. “No, Santi, please. I can’t have this.”

  “No, no!” Santi said. “Is not a problem!”

  Already it was starting, the headaches of summer. And it wasn’t even warm enough to put away the down duvet yet. He covered his face with his hands. It made it easier to think, to say the tough things he needed to say to this man. “I know she’s your daughter, I know, I know, but we can’t do this, Santi. All the workers need to work.”

  “She works! No problem!”

  “NO. No. It is a problem. I’m not having a pregnant lady out in the field, catching sunstroke. We don’t do that here. Jesus, Santi. You’re aware this is America, right?”

  “Of course this is America. This is Weneshkeen, Michigan, United States of America! Is wonderful place here.”

  “Mr. vonBushberger?” The daughter stepped forward, with a little sway like she was carrying firewood. He liked that she said Mister, not Señor. He remembered her now. Pretty girl. The big, beseeching eyes. She had always been bright and lively—a good worker. But then, she’d always been someone nonpregnant before. “I understand if you do not want me in the trees, but I can maybe help around the house or at the fruit stand? Is whatever you want. I help as long as I can.”

  Von put his face back in his hands. He couldn’t take it. All the workers were watching now. He wondered how much of the discussion the other pickers could understand. But what did they really have to understand? Migrant picker girl, big as a house, upset white landowner: it was pretty much a silent movie, he expected.

  There was housework, of course, and the two roadside stands—the larger of the two had a pie oven in back and they baked and sold fresh pies. But there was Carol for that and his eldest, Brenda, and several local ladies who would get very territorial and huffy. They were German, for the most part. He knew that it would make him look like a tyrant, coldhearted because he couldn’t give her some sort of meaningless make-work. But on a farm, there was really no such thing. Not if you didn’t want the bank to take it all away. The only way to even make the smallest margin of profit was not to allow any waste, any deadwood or free rides or duplication. “I’m sorry, Marita,” he said. “I can’t do that. I don’t have a job for you.”

  He risked looking her in the eye now, expecting she would start tearing up and there would be a lot of weeping and dramatic Latin nuttiness all around. He’d be the bad guy, the evil gringo, and have to go hide in the house. Probably his wife, Carol, would continue to scowl at him for a few days after, refer to it as “the summer you drove that poor girl off,” even though even Carol would realize he didn’t have any choice.

  But there weren’t any tears from the girl, just a flare of her nostrils. She was bold, this one. Tough. He wished she wasn’t pregnant. He needed more nonflimsy people around him. She just raised her chin, slightly, like she was about to say something he wasn’t going to like.

  The screen door slammed behind him and he heard dirt scuffling. Startled, thinking some emergency was at hand, Von whirled to see it was just his son, Jack, laughing hard and pumping away, running straight for them. Was he actually whooping?

  Jesus god, the boy was sure glad to see the pickers . . .

  Jack brushed past him and practically skidded in the dust, like a runner about to slide home, cutting on the brakes in front of Marita, and then, slowly, gently, grinning, wrapped his arms around her. She threw that head of big black hair back and they were both either laughing or crying or both. Von stared as his son squeezed her very carefully, her feet lifting a few inches off the ground. It was as amazing as a magic trick. Behind them, Santi was grinning now, too, displaying his brown gums, and he stepped forward and patted Jack’s arm in a small area that Marita wasn’t busy squeezing and kissing. It sounded like the boy was saying baby over and over—as if that wasn’t readily apparent to anyone with eyes and even the loosest grip on the basic concept of human reproduction.

  Von, who rarely swore in front of the help, and certainly never in front of his own children, said, “What the fuck . . . ?”

  THAT EVENING, while his wife continued to hustle back and forth to the little house across the yard, with dishes and armfuls of old linens, getting them “settled in,” making it “nice” for “the kids,” Von still was trying to wrap his head around this whole thing. First of all, he had been pretty sure, as recently as breakfast—hell, even five minutes into the migrant workers’ arrival—that his only son was gay. The boy had gone on maybe three or four dates back in high school—usually unavoidable affairs, like prom and Sumac Days Cotillion—but he’d never had a girlfriend, at least any that Von had ever met. Certainly not a girlfriend girlfriend, the kind that hooked her fingers into his belt loops and tugged him around a shopping mall. Maybe he had down in Lansing, but who knows what goes on at college? The facts as Von knew them were the kid was twenty-two and he never talked about girls, he didn’t hang any girlie posters in his room growing up, and it just seemed, whenever his great-aunt Sadie referred to the boy, fondly, as “the sensitive soul of the family,” that she had pretty much nailed it on the head.

  Carol, on the other hand, seemed to adjust to this news in a flash. She’d been breezing around the place humming and gathering up pillows and blankets like it was nothing more than an unexpected sleepover; Jack and a pal camping out in the treehouse.

  Meanwhile, the head of the family, the goddamn patriarch, didn’t have a clue. Because apparently this had all happened back in January. It was Jack’s last year at Michigan State and even Von thought it might be reasonable to let the kid go have some fun during his winter break. He figured he’d earned it. Brenda, their oldest, had never done anything like that during her many years in college—road trips or Fort Lauderdale—but school came easier to her. Jack wasn’t as much of a student, so it stood to reason that he might need to let off more steam or have more to celebrate.

  He’d told them he was flying to Monterrey, Mexico, with a couple of friends and that they might rent a car and drive over to Cancún on the coast. At the time, Von tried not to sweat the details, because he thought, on some level, these might be gay friends and he didn’t want to know about what they were up to down there with the cabana boys and the “eating the worm” and all that crap.

  Christ, he remembered now, they had received a goddamn postcard, saying “Mexico is great!” and how much he was enjoying “just doing nothing.” The thing was still up on their r
efrigerator.

  It was all just a big fat lie.

  It was so crazy, he had to keep repeating it to himself, just to get the order of events straight, the whole outline of it. Okay: They fell in love last summer, secretly. He snuck down there in January and decided, impulsively, to get married, because she was Catholic and her family was so goddamned important to her and if she was going to do it, she had to have every last relative there, down to the last wizened, immobile great-grandmothers and the family dogs. And then she got pregnant that week sometime and he returned and she wrote him and told him and now she was here. For good. Not just for the season. And now Jack would not be sleeping in his room downstairs but had moved across the yard with his wife—his wife, of all things! The two of them were out there right now in the little house, slipping into a bed together—the same bed he’d slept in with Carol back when they were first married.

  Jesus god.

  And then there was Carol and her part in this. It was only now, after a whole day of this, when it was time to go to bed and he was sitting there watching her reorganize the linen closet, that he finally put it together. She was folding their duvet and putting it away. Von thought she was being hasty, that it wasn’t warm enough yet, but he didn’t care about that anymore. The fact that she hadn’t troubled him to stand up and help her fold the duvet—an obvious request, since he was just sitting there on the bed, doing nothing but watching—suddenly seemed like the light-stepping act of someone who felt guilty or self-conscious. The only reason she hadn’t set up the little house for them ahead of time was she hadn’t wanted to spill the beans. “You knew all about this,” he said.

  “Not all about it.” She turned from the linen closet to frown at him. “I knew when he got back from Guatemala. He showed me the pictures.”

  “You mean Mexico.”

  “He was only in Mexico the time it takes to change planes to Guatemala. And yeah, I knew they were involved, to some degree, last summer. We didn’t talk about any of it till after the wedding though. I’m just the mom. When it comes to love, I’m a neutral party. I don’t promote, I don’t prohibit. I just listen. And by the way, it’s not my job to make you two communicate. That’s something you two need to work on. This was his news to tell you, not mine.”

  Von couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His own wife had kept this from him. “So you knew she was pregnant?”

  She frowned. “She wasn’t pregnant when they got married, Von. If that’s what’s bugging you.”

  “Right!” He knew he sounded snide, but he was beyond caring. “That’s what’s bugging me! My only son just eloped with some migrant picker, some wetback, and what I’m concerned about is the sanctity of the marriage bed. How’d you guess?”

  She walked straight over to where he sat on the edge of the bed and stood over him. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you use that word—”

  He looked away.

  “—and that’s the last time you’re going to use it.” She hooked him under the chin, raising it with one sharp finger, getting his full-on attention, like a scolding mom about to dole out the time-out. “Clear?”

  “Clear,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I’m just not happy about this.”

  “You can be unhappy,” she said. “Just don’t be an asshole.”

  “That’s a word I’ve never heard you use.”

  “Hey,” she said. “New things happen all the time, Von. It’s called life.”

  4

  THIS WAS ALL ON TOP of the business of that Japanese fella, Miki. Von had known he was coming, they’d discussed it months before, but it had sort of slipped his mind, with all the preseason prep that spring, and it never really seemed a reality till one chilly day in early May, with the trees still stick-bare, when the guy pulled into the property, giddy about getting started.

  The Japanese guy being underfoot was his daughter, Brenda’s, doing. It was an arrangement she’d set up based on a posting in one of the agricultural alumni newsletters she received. At dinner one night last fall she had first proposed the family participate. It was some research program for a volunteer orchard to have this fancy Japanese botanist come and stay with them for the summer to study fruit blossoms and observe operations. Something to do with genetic coding and cloning or something—Von wasn’t real clear. All he knew was the notion was laughable: Brenda said the guy would need to be able to make observations of and participate in the entire cherry season and all its processes, start to finish. Von had kidded his daughter pretty good as she continued to present her case on into dessert. She even got her mother on board, but Von wasn’t buying it. Finally, Brenda spoke up about the ten-thousand-dollar subsidy—a card she probably should have led with. The Japanese government would actually pay them just to allow this scientist guy to loiter and ask dumb questions and collect a few blossom samples. Ten grand . . . Still, he wasn’t real keen on the idea. There would probably be a lot of monkey business and headaches and nonsense. He could see it all. He imagined some Oriental following him around all day, getting in the way, bowing and scraping and saying Very honorable–this and Very honorable–that, and what would they feed the guy? His wife would make some attempt at sushi, knowing her, the way she tried to accommodate everyone. No, it probably wasn’t worth the ten grand.

  “They bring their own accommodations,” Brenda explained. “It’s this little mini lab. They sleep in it and cook in it and everything.”

  Von decided, after several days’ rumination, that it would probably be okay, having the guy camp out.

  But it was hardly camping out. He arrived on a cold day in May, grinning, in a James Bond–mobile that looked like a page out of one of those silly-ass Hammacher Schlemmer catalogues that peddle crazy crap only rich gay men with no family or responsibilities could afford. Or the Japanese government. He supposed it was a camper, of sorts, though he’d never seen anything exactly like it. Dark blue, and bulbous like a plump accessorized minivan, with gleaming built-ins to allow it to double as a lab. When Von stuck his head in and got a load of all the pop-out work surfaces and compact gadgetry that bloomed from the thing like that old movie the kids used to watch—Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—he thought, Oh Christ. Half the Jap grant money’s going to be blown on my electric bill . . .

  Except the guy didn’t need to plug in. The thing had solar panels on the roof that ran the whole shebang.

  The Jap himself was also a surprise. Von had been expecting a little fellow, especially since he was a scientist, but the guy—Miki Taki-something (it sounded like Teriyaki)—was tall and stocky. Not sumo fat, just big, American big—about the size of a running back. When he introduced himself, he just shook hands. No bowing.

  Brenda addressed him as Doctor Taki-whatever-it-was, but he said, “Miki. Please.” Not Mickey, like Mickey Mouse, but more like a rhyme for squeaky.

  “Jesus god,” Von said. “You’re a lot bigger than—”

  “Da-add.” Brenda cut him off with a look like he’d said something terrible, like he’d called him slant-eyes or something.

  “I mean, for such a little place to live in for three, four months, is all.”

  “My mother was a research scientist in the field of nutrient,” Miki said, with no hint of a smile, as if this explained everything.

  The only one smiling, really, was Brenda. Von wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her looking quite like that and he had no idea what it meant.

  5

  IT WAS STILL A LITTLE COLD to be lying out—really more like yardwork weather—but Kimberly Lasco was too psyched about getting her summer started to let a few goosebumps stop her. And since it was her first weekend back in Weneshkeen, with her summer job starting in two days, it wasn’t like she was dying to go hunt up some yardwork. Her dad even told her not to; to just relax today. So fine, she was relaxing. If there was ever any one place in the world she associated with relaxing, this little blue-edged patch of green was it.

  Occasionally, she would glance up from her book in the dire
ction she was used to glimpsing the blue of Lake Michigan and have to reorient her view, panning from the smirking porcelain sun hanging on the side of the huge new addition that had appeared on the neighbor’s house to the narrow new sliver of view her dad had made for them where those skinny, silvery trees used to be in the way. He’d said he’d “thinned it out a little” about a month before, that he wanted the place looking nice for her. It was different, but things were always different. You live with two different parents, she figured, you can’t expect the place to stay like a museum.

  She barely remembered what it was like way before, when she lived there year-round. The divorce had come when she was only four, but she thought she remembered back when the yard rolled uninterrupted down to the lake. Back before the people from down in ritzy Birmingham, the Starkeys, bought the lakeside lot and built their giganto mini-mansion that made her dad’s old house, she had to admit, look a little hillbilly-ish. Maybe she just thought she remembered running all the way down to the lake, in and out of those silvery trees, being chased by her dad and giggling and being scooped up by her mom, in her fur-trimmed leopard print New Wave coat and her Madonna hairdo and red fishnets. She’d seen it on an old videotape her grandparents had, but maybe she remembered it for real. Hard to say. It seemed like a totally different life, back when the three of them lived here year-round, when she wasn’t this dumb summer girl from Ferndale, trying to fit in again every summer. There were a few people who remembered her and were kind enough, just being polite, probably, and she usually had no problem finding something to do, jobwise. This year, it was the fudge store again, working for Mrs. Hersha. But meanwhile, back home in Ferndale, the few good friends she had down there were all doing stuff without her, going on dates, hooking up with guys, working together at some of the same jobs . . . Having all their own inside jokes all summer that would make Kimberly feel totally left out when she saw them again in the fall. So all in all the arrangement wasn’t so hot. Her parents didn’t really bicker anymore, but for Kimberly, it sucked sometimes the way she now didn’t really fit in either place. Sometimes it felt like she’d been put away in the basement crawlspace in the plastic bin with all the sweaters and winter clothes all summer, while everyone continued along with their lives, growing up, and she remained in deep-freeze, stuck as a little kid, reading books and selling fudge. By the first week of school last fall, three of her best friends had given guys “third” over the summer, and she’d barely done second (once—kind of—the guy’s fingertips sort of grazing her chest, plus she was wearing a couple layers and a thick bra and just as it happened, she kind of breathed in too deep, feeling nervous or shocked, so it was kind of like yanking her boob away from his grasp, so did that even really count as second?). Still, she wasn’t so into all that, not like her friends were, and the junk her mom was always preaching about—about being young for a while and not rushing things too soon with boys and regretting it later, how she wished she’d slowed things down herself and hadn’t ended up divorced at twenty-two—made a lot of sense to Kimberly, despite its being annoying. Fine, she didn’t have to act “boy-crazy,” like her mom said her friends were, but she did want to have a life; be normal with people—girls or guys or whoever . . . Just feel like she could walk down a street somewhere and people would know her and say hello. And maybe even like her.