by Steve Amick
CREEPY was how it felt now, lying out in her dad’s yard. She tried to ignore everything that was going on, neighbor-wise, and just do it, keep her face in her book, not gaze out too long toward the water, through that disputed section where her dad had cut down the trees, but it was just so unnatural and awkward and hard to concentrate. She felt like she was under a microscope now or onstage and who could concentrate on reading, really, if they were onstage?
She’d been over the same paragraph about following the landlord across the moors three times now and had no idea what she was reading. She kept thinking Mr. Starkey was up in his bedroom, watching. (Not in a lechy way, but still.) Frowning, being all feudy, like they were the Hatfields and the McCoys. Never mind that it had affected what she wore outside now. The days were getting warmer already and yet she had on sweatpants and a sweatshirt, since she was sure they were scrutinizing her now, judging everything she wore, and if she wore what she wanted today, maybe not a bathing suit but at least some shorts and a belly shirt, maybe a sports bra, they’d be up in that house thinking, See? The guy’s a tree killer and his daughter’s a dirty ho. And the son, Mark—he was her age so he’d be even harsher, saying all who-knows-what about her. Thinking it, at least.
Back home—at her mom’s house, that is (both places were “home”; they’d hammered that idea into her years ago)—she and her mom got along just fine with their neighbors. They exchanged gifts, even, at Christmastime. The Hemmiters were cool: they had her call them by their first names, even though they were way old, like fifty or so. Yes, she would have no problem lying out in her yard at her mom’s. Theoretically. Except, of course, that she wouldn’t lie out in her yard—not really—because it would be the school year and too cold to do such a thing. And besides, without water nearby, it didn’t feel natural. It felt sort of vain and full of yourself, like it’s so obvious you’re working on your tan. It’s not like you’re just enjoying the water and the view and the sun. Not if your view is of a bottled water plant, a convenience store and a dirty-looking park where guys went to yell at their girlfriends, like it was at her mom’s house.
This, she decided, was getting a little like her mom’s house. In that there was no way she was going to feel normal about lying out in the backyard. And it was really starting to suck.
She closed the book and heaved up out of the lounge chair with a sigh. No more suntanning out in the battlefield zone.
SHE WASN’T SURE WHEN the sign first appeared, but the first time she noticed it was coming home from work on a day when her dad picked her up at the fudge store. They were just about to pull into the driveway when her dad hit the brakes. She followed his stare, right at the split between the two driveways, where the Starkeys’ paved wraparound bookended the mailboxes with her dad’s dirt-and-gravel drive. It was a large painted wooden sign, hanging by chains from its own post and crossbeam, not unlike something you’d see in front of a restaurant. A seafood restaurant, specifically, because the whole thing was cut in the shape of some sort of blue grinning fish, wearing a red beret and horn-rimmed glasses, standing on its tailfins, beaming and pointing with one flipper to a white oval with their name in it in red letters: The STARKEYS.
“Look at that.” Her dad sounded horrified. “That’s gotta be a huge copyright infringement, don’t you think? Wouldn’t the tuna people like to know about this?”
“What tuna people?” she said. What was he talking about? Wasn’t tuna an ocean fish? Obviously, it was supposed to be a perch or a lake trout, though it didn’t look much like either one. But she didn’t bring up all this because she wanted him to keep going, to put the truck in gear and get out of there before Mark Starkey wandered out to get the mail or something and saw them sitting there, gawking at their sign. So all she said was, “I don’t get it,” and gave it a shrug and left it at that.
Her dad seemed pissed at her now. “Charlie the Tuna? ‘Sorry, Charlie’? Come on, Kimmy. Don’t you watch TV?”
As usual, he didn’t know what he was talking about. “This isn’t from TV, Dad. Trust me. It’s just a dumb fish or something. Relax.”
Grumbling, her dad sprayed gravel pulling into their drive.
It made her feel so weird, his being like this and her not knowing who the jerk was; if he was crazy or if the neighbors were really out of line and dissing him. She wished she could just ask someone, tell one of her friends back home what was going on. She thought about calling her mom but she tried to never do that—talk smack about one to the other, get them all up in each other’s faces. The summer had barely started and she could tell it was going to be a long one if things kept up like this. Because come on—it was just a stupid sign with their name on it and a big blue fish. How was that any big whoop?
She was dying to get out of the truck. The whole thing was so weird.
11
THE LAST MAN-MADE THING you would pass, heading out of the mouth of the Oh-John-Ninny into the open blue of Lake Michigan, would be not the outer pilothouse, where you dropped off the pilot-boy, but the lighthouse out at the end of the long rocky spit known as Sumac Point.
If you weren’t from Weneshkeen and were wondering if the light still functioned, there would be no quick answer. Operation of the light itself was discontinued in the late forties when the Army Corps of Engineers chose Sumac Point as the subject of a study in “alternative and experimental Marine Hazard Warning Systems”—all of which meant they made the sucker glow. The entire tower was painted with a radium paint, the same used, in the war, for wristwatch hands, and sure enough, the lighthouse could be seen for miles, no power source required. The lighthouse keeper was given early retirement and a small housing subsidy, since he’d devoted himself to a real-estate-free life, and moved to the desert outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he had no knowledge of any of the terrain or wildlife and, it’s said, less than a year after moving there, got bit by something and died. Soon after his demise, the lighthouse followed suit. It seemed to be cracking and crumbling—significantly enough that it was soon deemed unsafe to go up inside it. Which was fine—it glowed anyway, so there was no need, really, to climb the circular stairs inside the tower and change the bulbs or anything. It was roped off and entry was restricted, but it was not officially condemned, because essentially, while it was still mostly standing, it more or less did the job. It wouldn’t stand forever, that was clear—big winds would knock pebble-sized pieces loose and, on moonless nights, you could make out a faint glow around the base, which was powder-fine dust falling and collecting on the rocks below.
The Army Corps of Engineers said, well, it was old to begin with and it was just coincidental that it started falling apart right after they painted it. But everyone felt it was rather telling that the Corps of Engineers had not gone on to paint any more lighthouses with the stuff. Obviously, the radium in the paint was causing hairline stress to the infrastructure, the rebars in the masonry as well as the masonry itself. And if that was the case, what was it doing—a lot of local people still wanted to know—to the lake and the town and to them? The government said, officially, it was harmless, and because it was way out there on the point and since Weneshkeen hadn’t become some sort of Love Canal with outrageous medical statistics, there was probably no need, they figured, to go enlisting the aid of some Erin Brockovich type to get to the bottom of it. Besides, most people in Weneshkeen felt a certain sense of civic pride in the dilapidated lighthouse, because, hey—this was the only glow-in-the-dark lighthouse in the world.
It was also the first thing a few people pointed to as a possible explanation for the strange lights seen, by even fewer people, in the skies the summer of 2001. Though most folks dismissed this as “crazy talk, through and through,” they were never explicit about which part was the crazy talk.
12
ABOUT A WEEK into his new job, Mark was working under Keith, the greasy, wiry younger one, when they came aboard a rather large pleasure yacht, moving down the river out of the dry docks to the marina. It wa
s The Courtney, owned and captained by Mr. Dick Banes of Chicago. He was some big important wheeler-dealer, Mark knew—either in the stock market or maybe it was advertising—and he was so good at it, he was able to spend most of the summer up in Weneshkeen. Kind of like his own dad, Mark supposed, but on a much bigger scale. And he thought how weird that was, to be able to make yourself so indispensable that people would find a way to work around the fact that you weren’t always there. It seemed like a contradiction, or at the least, a really bad way to do business, and sometimes he wondered what it would be like up here in the summer if the only people who came to Weneshkeen were underachievers and losers and people who’d declared bankruptcy.
Mr. Banes had the wife and daughter with him, and they looked like something out of a catalogue for the kind of sweaters Mark would never wear: blond and brown, all in white. Mark recognized them on sight, of course, though he’d never stood this close before and had certainly never spoken to them. It was pretty nerve-racking. Everyone knew of the Banes family.
They were summer people, like his family, and yet not at all like his family. Not by several decimal points. If it was true what Keith claimed, that rich kids stunk when they got wet, then these people would reek halfway back to Chicago. Theirs was the biggest boat in the marina, where they also stored a fleet of bicycles, a golf cart and an SUV, and they owned a condo overlooking the slip for whenever living on the boat felt too much like roughing it. The dad commuted back and forth to Chicago or stayed on the boat a lot or took it out for cruises into Lake Michigan and so wasn’t as visible in town, but the daughter and mom made themselves regular summer fixtures. The girl, Courtney, had been the best-looking girl in the Sumac Days Court just about every single year she was in it, including when she was probably only four or five and crowned the Little Darling Junior Miss Sumac Days, the age class where they have to run an elastic chin strap under the tiara to keep it on and the kids usually start bawling and have to be pulled from the float before the end of the parade.
Keith was unusually polite and attentive, standing by as Mr. Banes remained at the helm. But he had Mark hopping around like a monkey—at one point, where a new snag had appeared since the last big storm, actually lying on the foredeck, hanging half over the side and reaching out to keep the upper branches from scratching the side of the boat. They hadn’t bothered doing that for anyone else. Then again, no one else’s boat was quite that tight a squeeze.
The wife was waving to people she seemed to know along the riverwalk, but otherwise uninvolved, and the daughter looked bored and surly and Mr. Banes kept pulling her over to him and hooking his arm around her tight as he steered the boat, as if this might keep her entertained, being mashed up against him. It seemed to Mark the kind of thing a dad would do when his kid was young—a thing they used to like but had grown out of and the dad either hadn’t wised up or didn’t know what else to do, so just kept doing it.
When they drew up to the pilothouse to disembark, Mr. Banes shook both their hands with a hardy grip, and Mark felt the money in his palm and then Courtney, still looking off somewhere disinterestedly, squeezed past him, heading aft, mumbling something (“Nice job,” maybe?) and he felt something soft—the peach fuzz of her forearm?—brush against his upraised arm as he tried to minimize his presence so she could squeeze past. She wasn’t even looking him in the eye, but he knew she had just handed him something. He turned to the ladder, afraid to examine what was in his palm, but it felt a lot like the feeling in the other hand, the one clutching the paper money her dad had just tipped him. Could she have tipped him, too?
After shoving the contents of both hands into his shorts pockets, he climbed, following Keith up, and as soon as Mr. Banes pulled away, rumbling, with an elephantine blast of the horn and the whole river snaking in its wake, Mark slipped into the pilothouse while Keith lingered out on the platform, grabbing a smoke, and snuck a peek, cupping the little scrap of paper close to his side and peering down to read it just in case Walt looked up from his newspaper or Keith barged in and caught him at it. The note said:
NICE ASS!
He read it several times, as if it weren’t in English, before putting it away. Maybe it was a crack about the shorts. They’d said to wear shorts, but he didn’t own any new ones this summer—he’d told his mom he needed new shorts, that the old ones were too small, but she never got around to taking him shopping before they left Birmingham. This was her fault: she’d ignored his warnings that he’d grown out of them and now the hottest girl in town was making fun of his gay-ass too-tight shorts.
Keith reentered, coiling a mooring line, grinning through the blue haze that still trailed in his wake. “Miss Sumac Days gave you her phone number, didn’t she?”
“No,” he said, knowing now he must have seen her do it. “Cut it out.”
“You forget you’re talking to a guy keeps his eyes peeled for a living.”
“Okay, she gave me a note, but it doesn’t say anything.”
“You mean it’s blank?” He stopped coiling the line, looking genuinely confused, then frowned, as if let down. “Maybe it’s just litter and she didn’t want to be a litterbug. She was handing you her trash. That it?”
“She wasn’t handing me her trash.”
“Everyone’s a servant to those people.”
“Okay,” Mark said. “I’ll show you, but . . .” He pulled out the note and held it out between both hands, keeping a tight grip on it. Keith squinted, reaching for it. Mark backed away, but there wasn’t much room to go anywhere. “Just read it,” Mark pleaded. “Don’t take it.”
Keith stepped a little closer. He seemed to be taking his time for such a short message. “Jeezo,” he said and he was strangely quiet, for him. “This is her phone number and then some . . .”
“Really? But she didn’t give me any information or—”
“What kind of information? You don’t need her phone number. You know who she is, where she stays.”
A growl came from Walt. “What do you need, kid—a bloodhound? A map of the county?” Now he was piling on, too. “Shit, that boat of theirs can be seen from space.”
Keith cackled, pointing at the pocket where Mark had stuffed the amazing note. “I’m telling you, the girl’s already asked you out. At the least, she’s asked you out on a date. At the very least. I tell you, kid, no girl ever wrote ‘Nice ass’ to me or to anyone when I was your age and I’ve only got like ten years on you. Jeezo . . .” He and Walt just kept chuckling, shaking their heads, and it struck Mark as odd seeing them react to anything as if it were exceptional.
Finally, Keith said, “Listen, I want to point out—I get some credit here for getting you to put on some shorts, right?”
13
THERE WAS ANOTHER WAY, Roger Drinkwater knew, to make himself more visible to the enemy during his early morning swim on Meenigeesis—an option that would spare him the indignity of the bathing cap.
Besides, the bathing cap had also proven ineffectual even for purposes of sabotage, having managed to disable the jet-ski for only a day—though he sure did enjoy the entertainment for the better part of an afternoon, watching from his porch through field glasses, his feet up on the rail and working his way through a whole pie from vonBushberger’s. It was preseason, made from frozen cherries, but still damn good—a treat (which is what he felt the occasion called for as a pack of summer people stood around, knee-deep in the lake, trying to puzzle out why the thing wouldn’t go, debating and theorizing, as if they were actually the kind of men who knew anything about anything other than which button to push to start the rider mower). But then the new sheriff stopped by and then, finally, a truck from the marina in town. Probably they were the ones who found the bathing cap.
In terms of being seen, he now had a better idea: warpaint. Much better than a stupid bathing cap.
Natural paints were easy enough to make—sumac for red, goldenrod for yellow, pokeweed berries for a midnight blue. But he decided that for the lake, in the hours
he went out, white would be best. Crushed limestone, the standard white, was something he didn’t have, until he borrowed a handful from the pristine driveway at the new showplace a few houses down and crushed it himself, between two cast-iron stove lids and the wheel of his truck, and then added water for a milky paste. The next step called for adding deer grease, which he had but decided, Come on—if it was going on his face, why not just substitute Vaseline? It would work about the same and tradition was no reason he had to smell like entrails. When he smeared it all on, it felt like the black camo grease they had worn on operations in Nam.
It was overcast the first morning he tried the warpaint, the sky a wintery gray, with actual wisps of fog rolling low across the flat water. Perfect for spooking kids, but not so perfect for kids being out on the lake. But sure enough, midpoint in his return lap, he heard a jet-ski start up—he judged this one as coming from over toward the big rental that was supposedly advertised in The New Yorker. Roger continued on underwater, nearing his own dock, and calculated that the kid was about fifty meters off and closing, about to loop across his path. It was shallow now, so he stood, in one solid motion, turning to glare, zombie-eyed, at the kid. Sure, he thought. Now you can see me, goddamn it. Startled, the kid made a sudden jagged correction and pitched back off the jet-ski. Roger watched as the boy floundered and yelped, the water clearly too chilly for this Fudgie. Finally, he climbed back on the bench seat of the jet-ski and sat there staring, his motor idling. Roger raised both hands, slowly, and closed his eyes, as if reciting some incantation. Peeking through slit lids, he saw the kid was shivering, mouth open, his eyes round as skipping stones, as if he was about to be flayed and dressed out like a buck. Roger gritted his teeth, clamped his jaw, kept his eyes squinted shut, trying to give the impression that he was concentrating on his hex, his voodoo spell, when actually he was just trying to keep from laughing.
