The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  He tried to imagine what his dad would say if they got busted. Already, just out on the lawn, they were trespassing. Sure, the estate was for sale and there were signs speared into the grass, pointing out various gardens and gazebos and features on the grounds, encouraging you to explore, take the tour. But certainly they weren’t meant for two teenagers in the middle of the night looking for a thrill and hopefully—he had his fingers crossed—a place to do it.

  He kept his doubts to himself, though. He could tell already, in terms of Courtney, he was doing the right thing: she squeezed his hand as he led her toward the shadowy hulk. She was into this.

  The main door was padlocked, but under that main entrance they found a sort of alcove you stepped down to, and that seemed a little more promising. It reminded him of the kind of speakeasy doors under the stairs he’d seen on Turner Classic Movies. Probably a delivery entrance, originally. He tried this first, figuring it would be safer than standing up above on the big stone porch where anyone could see them if they pulled in. This way, if the sheriff happened by or swept the spotlight around, on patrol, they could duck and probably not be seen.

  He kept sliding his Blockbuster card in the doorjamb but all he was getting was a very dented card. Behind him, Courtney sighed. “That’s not going to work, is it?”

  “It’s a little tricky,” he said. “Just give me a sec.” The day before, he’d biked over and rode once around the turnaround for a quick look. During the day, this seemed like the most likely spot. Old latches like this, he figured it should be a snap to card.

  “I’m waiting,” she said, only she didn’t sound like she was.

  He tried harder. The card slipped and was gone. He stared at the dark door. The thing had swallowed his Blockbuster card. With his name and Birmingham address encoded on it. Great. Now they were going to have to get in there, one way or the other. He stood to remove his wallet and fish out another card. Courtney saw what he was doing, made a disgusted click with her tongue and headed back up the little stairs. He grabbed her arm.

  “Just forget it,” she said. “I’m not in the mood anymore. This is turning into a big yawn for me.”

  “Hang on, hang on.” He spun around, looking for anything not nailed down, knelt and wrenched up the rusty metal storm drain piece at his feet—a perforated disk of iron, six inches in diameter—and bashed it into the door. There was a tinkle of glass. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure she was still there. She stood waiting, watching. He reached through to turn the handle but it was still too high, so he broke another panel and this time felt the door handle inside.

  “See?” he said, swinging the door open for her, kicking aside the broken glass like a gentleman. “No problem.”

  25

  ROGER DRINKWATER WAS SITTING AT THE BAR at the Potlicker. It was late afternoon on a Friday and he’d just taught a three-day dive camp out on Lake Michigan. Three days on a 164-foot schooner with male and female teenagers—not unlike sharing a pup tent with monkeys. He figured he deserved a couple beers. He was just finishing his first when he felt someone moving up behind him, someone with some size and confidence. Glancing up at the bar mirror, he saw it was the deputy sheriff, Janey Struska.

  She pulled up a stool next to him and they nodded hello. She wheeled around on her stool like a kid, scanning the room, seeing who was there, waving and smiling at a few regulars, and he waited for her to do all that, check the schmoozing off the list. He knew she’d planted herself next to him for a reason. “So, Coach,” she said, leaning in a little closer to him, elbows on the bar. “My new boss, the new guy? He wants me to poke around and see if there’s anything to what he’s hearing out on Meenigeesis.”

  “What’s he hearing?”

  “You’re harassing people. Jet-skiers. Maybe some minor vandalism, monkeying with them a little. I can tell him that’s not happening, right?”

  He studied her for a while in the mirror. “You off-duty?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re not off the record, Coach. I’m not Lois Lane here. I don’t have the authority to grant that kind of thing.”

  Roger snorted. “Jesus, Struska. I just want to know if I can buy you a beer.”

  She shrugged. He signaled to Dale McConkey, who brought over two fresh Bell’s. He wasn’t exactly buying Janey a beer: in junior high, Dale nearly drowned in one of Roger’s drownproofing classes, because the clothes he wore were heavy-wale corduroy, and Roger had saved him, reaching into the pool and pulling him up by the collar and giving him mouth-to-mouth. So when Dale tended bar, Roger tended to drink free.

  They clinked bottles in a silent toast and took a pull in tandem. “You wanna know the most I do?” he said finally. “I do kind of a proactive thing, the last couple years. With the team.”

  He knew she knew what team he was talking about. She’d been on his swim team, years ago. What was it—maybe fifteen years ago? He could picture her wide back, her bobbed hair, black like an Indian’s, being tucked up into her school-issued cap. He recalled having some sense of the good humor she had about it all at a time when most girls her age, minus the maybe two percent who thought themselves flawless, would be hard-pressed to dream up a location more distressing than the school pool.

  “What I do, during the school year, I educate them. Tell them about spirits I’ve seen on the lake. ‘Manitous.’ Indian spirits. Pissed-off Indian spirits, in this case.”

  “And they believe you?”

  He shrugged. “Most of them pretend not to, but they sort of have to. They figure I must know something, I’m an Indian. And they don’t see me clowning around any other time, so I must be dead serious when I’m telling them this, right? I know somebody believes it because I’m starting to hear it around.”

  “I think maybe I’ve even heard it, too,” Janey said. “A few kids have asked me about it. They’re usually young, though. Kids on bikes and skateboards and razor scooters I’ve chased out of the Spartan parking lot. That sort of thing.”

  “Yeah? Good. Don’t deny it’s true, okay? Do me a favor.” He took a pull on his beer. “I explain it to them like this: You get too crazy with the watercraft, especially after dusk when it’s supposed to be peaceful, you stir them up. All the gamii-manidook—the lake ‘manitous,’ the ancestral spirits . . . They present themselves to you and they are marked for war, man. Painted.” No need to tell her, he decided, that this summer he’d started donning the warpaint himself. “I figure maybe most of my swimmers don’t actually own the jet-skis themselves—they don’t have that kind of money, generally—but they’ll tell two kids and they’ll tell two kids . . . It’s like that old shampoo ad: ‘And so on and so on . . .’ The hope is, it eventually reaches the summer kids, the real jerkoffs with enough money to own the things, and they think twice about it now.”

  She was shaking her head, grinning. “You stole all that from Scooby-Doo.”

  Holding her gaze, he said, “I guess I don’t follow.”

  He followed fine—he knew Scooby-Doo from his time at the VA. And he knew what she was looking for here from him: some slip that would confirm her accusation that it was all a put-on, that the lake was nothing but an inert body of water, spiritless—and in turn, implicate himself in criminal mischief. But like hell if he was going to open up about matters like personal belief systems and protecting one’s home and the land and such all to Janey Struska. Especially not at the Potlicker with a bunch of jamokes gathered around. She could think whatever she wanted to think.

  But she kept coming with it. “You figure these kids aren’t much brighter than Shaggy, right? Especially the summer kids.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She smirked, setting down her beer like it was a chore just lifting it. “Yeah, Coach, I noticed. But you don’t do anything beyond that, right? Intimidation-wise?”

  He made a show of shrugging. “I’m menacing, I don’t smile . . . but hey, guess what? I’m an Indian. Smiling’s not required. Not a thing we’re real big on, smi
ling.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s what I’m hearing about, Coach: you not smiling at the neighbor kids. I’m sure that’s all it is.” She was being sarcastic, but she clinked bottles with him good-naturedly and gave him her own half-smile, showing little lines around her mouth that he decided were relatively new, the way it dimpled like that now. She’s getting older, he thought, but it wasn’t bad.

  HE’D ALWAYS THOUGHT HIGHLY of Janey Struska. She’d stood out even back then, on the women’s junior varsity team. Not for talent or even looks, but the girl had heart. And a smart mouth, he found out one day—which he liked a lot.

  He’d been trying to whip them into shape for a meet with Newaygo or someplace. They were dismal, especially on the butterfly, and so about ten minutes into practice, he called them all out of the pool and lined them up on the bench and gave them what was, for him, a pretty stern lecture. He didn’t yell or stamp around or throw a bench in the pool—that wasn’t his style—but he was feeling a lot of frustration and was sure it was showing that day, much more than he normally would let such things show. He didn’t remember planning to get that melodramatic, but, after weighing his options, realizing they weren’t going to get any better that day and that some of the girls weren’t even listening—whispering out of the sides of their mouths, louder than they realized, probably, due to water in the ear—he pulled the old coach trick of telling them to hit the showers. “That’s it,” he said, disgusted. “Pack it in. Go home and think about what we’re trying to do here.”

  Most seemed indifferent, hopping up and shrugging. The rest were snippy, as if he’d wasted their precious time by getting them to suit up and shower in the first place and now they had to fix their hair all over again. The only one who responded entirely differently was Janey, adopting a sort of wistful stoicism as she followed him over to the corner where he kept his satchel, and asked him if he knew “The Swimmer,” by John Cheever.

  He turned around and took her in. She was still dripping wet, smiling, not malevolently—cheery almost, like she was just making small talk. He told her he’d seen the movie and didn’t care for it much—the way the guy smiled all the time, all that hearty laughter.

  “That was just Burt Lancaster,” she said. “There isn’t so much smiling and laughing in the original story.” He listened as she gave him her rundown. “This suburban guy decides one day he’s going to swim across the county, pool by pool. Along the way, he runs into all these neighbors and friends who don’t seem so keen on him and you get the idea that something’s really wrong. Then at the end, when he finally gets home, the place is abandoned and boarded up—it’s like the bootlegger’s place, you know?—unraked leaves everywhere, and you realize he’s mentally blocked the fact that he no longer has this family and marriage. And in wanting things to be the way they were, he’s become delusional.” It seemed to jibe roughly with what Roger remembered of the movie version, but he still didn’t get what she was driving at.

  “Seems to me,” she explained, “the lesson there is: too much swimming makes you unbalanced. You come unhinged.”

  He remembered that years later, when she turned up as a deputy under Don Sloff. How she’d been basically telling him to have some perspective, only doing it with some humor, keeping it light. She was really a lot like the retired sheriff in that way and it seemed to Roger a pretty rotten thing that the idiots in charge had passed her over for that spot.

  26

  IN PREPARATION FOR HIS NEXT LESSON, Gene Reecher made a special trip to the Spartan and loaded up on snacks and pop. He was shocked at the options in the pop section, far more than he remembered. He wasn’t sure what the girl would like to drink, so he bought a variety. Now he had Coke, Squirt, Vernors and Faygo Red Pop. “Or there’s water,” he offered. “Or I could make some coffee, tea . . .”

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m sort of used to iced coffee, from back home, but nobody sells it up here. It’s kind of a chain store kind of drink, I guess, but my way works, too. Would you mind if I . . . ?”

  He told her by all means, to go ahead, opening the cupboard drawers, displaying pitchers, bowls, the mixer—whatever she needed. But she was still hesitating. “You end up with a little dishwashing after,” she warned. “So only if I can clean up after, okay? I don’t want to add to the . . .”

  “The mess?”

  She grinned. “Yeah. The shambles. The pigsty. I’m kidding! I don’t mind a little mess, personally. But really—you have to let me clean up after if we make the iced coffee.”

  He assured her it really wasn’t a problem. She could make all the mess she wanted—it couldn’t get any worse. The truth was, though, he’d spent a good part of an hour cleaning around the sink. Unlike on her last visit, it no longer contained one dirty dish.

  He stood back and watched as she prepared her drink. He felt like a bad host, but he’d never seen this done before. He tried to pay close attention so maybe he could make it next time and have it all ready for her. While she was chipping the ice, between grinds of the mixer, he asked her what her e-mail name meant. As soon as he asked, he regretted it, a little concerned it was something off-color that he should have left alone. Because kids today made all kinds of sexual references that they never had in his day. Heck, kids didn’t drink coffee in his day.

  “Fudgie,” she said. “You know—’cause I’m not really from around here anymore. I come up for the summer like a Fudgie.” She shrugged and he could see her bra straps: burgundy. “Plus, I work at T.G.I.Fudge.”

  “And you’re sixteen years old.”

  “Right,” she said. “So . . . FuG16.”

  What she ended up with looked like a mocha milkshake, and she poured it into two tall glasses. It wasn’t bad.

  He announced that he could probably make these himself and she said, “No doubt. You’re learning all kinds of new stuff!” She clinked her glass to his, downed the last of her drink and poured herself a refill.

  When they moved into the den and got the thing fired up again and they were sitting side by side, he smelled the hazelnut coffee on her breath and it made it feel like she was even closer. It was better, somehow, that he could smell her coffee breath. It filled the house more, in the way he imagined noisy kids running around the living room would. It was nice. Less lonely.

  She left it up to him what they should work on that day; asked if he was ready to work on the word processing software or if he had any questions about what they’d covered last time.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m e-ing out okay and people are e-ing in okay—”

  “You’re getting e-mail.”

  “Yes, but I can’t seem to get to the picture part.” He was reluctant to admit this, because she’d already shown him, but he just couldn’t remember. It was all too much, too fast.

  The girl claimed there was some sort of difference between e-mail and the Web. This began to explain some of the problems he’d been having. He’d sent and received several e-mails and yet he still hadn’t figured out how to look up information. (And he certainly hadn’t seen anything remotely racy.)

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can’t take it all in at once. We can keep going over it and it’ll start making sense, little by little. You’ll get it, don’t worry.”

  He loved her attitude, her confidence in him, though he was pretty sure it was misplaced. Sixty-nine might just be too old to grasp the complexities of something like a “world-wide web.”

  She told him, “Let’s try the small-town thing. Think of e-mail like checking your box at the post office. Think of the Internet like going over to the library. Like going into the reference section at the library, only tons easier. Anything you want to look up, you just do a search.”

  He still didn’t get it. How could you do a search if you didn’t know the filing system? Of course, he’d never learned the Dewey decimal system either. He knew religion was in the 200s and jazz was 781, but that was about it. “But what are the subjects? Are there categories you loo
k under, or—?”

  “It’s whatever,” she said. “What do you like?”

  “What do I like?” Again, he wasn’t sure he knew the choices.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s not like a menu at a restaurant. They don’t give you a list you pick from. You decide. You tell them.” She looked at him, waiting, and he suddenly felt, more than ever, that this was just too difficult for him to manage. “What do you like to spend a lot of time reading about or looking at or learning more about?”

  He was staring at the photo of Mary over the desk, thinking maybe he had it now.

  The girl said, “Like, the Bible, maybe?”

  He had to laugh at this suggestion. “The Bible? No, I can read the Bible if I want to know about the Bible. And believe me—” He stopped himself: there was no reason he should be telling this young girl how absolutely retired he felt. From all of it. No, this was for something else, this new toy. “Jazz,” he said.

  He could feel her studying his face. “Really. Okay. Good. You mean like Kenny G, Louis Armstrong . . . ?” She pronounced it Louie.

  “Not particularly,” he said. “But there are many different forms.”

  “That’s something I’ve never really gotten—jazz.”

  He told her that was fine—she was a kid, she was supposed to hate it.

  But she shook her head at this. “That’s a dumb excuse, me being a kid. I don’t want to approach things that way, based on what I’m supposed to like and not like. I just haven’t found a way to connect to it, I guess. I’m sure it’s not jazz’s fault.”