The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  There was twine there. He could get far enough away so at least he wouldn’t get hurt. Yeah, this would be fine. This would work. He wished like hell he had real fusing, and he had the granulated sugar and other ingredients to make some, but that would take even more time and the night was slipping away. Besides, he was starting to shiver.

  Well, he thought, this’ll be okay. He didn’t need a timing fuse so much for getting away, for an alibi—he thought he could talk his way out of it even if it blew while he was still in Meenigeesis, but of course he’d prefer to not be around for the noise. After all, hadn’t he driven all the way to Canada to avoid just such noise?

  Then he remembered Jimmy Connelly.

  Jimmy Connelly swam the individual medley a few years back. Strong butterfly, passable crawl, but a terrible pain in the ass. There were kids like Jimmy who forced him more into the role of gym teacher than of coach and he hated that, having to police the kids. But he heard some of the rest of the team talking in the showers, saying Jimmy had “a bomb.” Roger didn’t think this was true. The kid wasn’t bright enough to build an actual bomb. He was more like Terry Thomas or Teri Garr than Terry Nichols. More Ted Knight than Ted Kaczynski. But he checked the kid’s locker anyway. What he found was waterproof fuse—big deal. You could buy it in any hobby store that sold rocket engines, but he confiscated it anyway. He’d heard Jimmy Connelly was studying prelaw now, down in Ann Arbor. It figured.

  If he remembered right, all that student contraband junk was in the bottom of his gym bag, back inside the house in the front hall, and sure enough, he found it there among the roach clips and laser pointers. Uncoiling it, gauging about five seconds per centimeter, he figured he could easily get free and clear.

  He locked the back door and slipped out the same window, pulling it down behind him, then eased back into the lake.

  HE WAS ALREADY OUT IN LAKE MICHIGAN, past the lighthouse, about a half-click south of town, just past that idiotic ark house, floating along on his makeshift windbreaker bladder, when he thought he heard it. Possibly. A whump, quick and dull.

  That could be anything, though. A wave lifting a raft, letting it down solid in the water. Something blown over in the wind, a beach umbrella. He listened for sirens. Nothing.

  He resumed kicking. Maybe it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe it wasn’t going to happen. He’d made duds before, even back when he was practicing on a regular basis. He tried to remember the last time he’d built any kind of explosive. It gave him something to do as he floated and kicked.

  He decided it wasn’t all that long ago. Maybe six or seven years ago. For benign purposes, too. Reenie Huff, the most bullheaded woman he knew in town, had an elm stump in her flower garden that she was tired of dressing up and camouflaging. Some kids had snatched the wrought iron sundial that formerly covered the stump and she was just sick of looking at it.

  “You sick of the whole garden?” he’d asked her. “Because I don’t know how to make anything quite that tactical. Something that won’t muss your black-eyed Susans.”

  Reenie said she was ready to start over. She was a woman of extreme measures. She’d been head librarian with only another year to go to qualify for retirement but she quit out of protest when the village refused to finance a free reproductive clinic that would be accessible to teenagers. It had nothing to do with the job they were paying Reenie to do, really, but she was feisty and wanted to make a stand, and so she’d applied for a Planned Parenthood charter and was running, at a time she should be retired, the smallest chapter in the nation, out of her garage. It was basically a card table, a plastic jack-o’-lantern full of condoms, and a peach basket full of pamphlets on abortion and adoption and herpes and genital warts, and once a month a doctor came and did a few exams behind a Japanese screen that purportedly featured whooping cranes with fish in their beaks. More than once, Fudgies, seeing the people gathered in front of her open garage door and the card table, wandered up, thinking it was a garage sale, hoping to find a nice lamp, get a good deal on one of those quaint copper Jell-O molds.

  That time, for Reenie, he didn’t stoop to fertilizer but took the trouble to cook up plastic explosives with bleach and potassium chlorate. It was tricky business—like preparing baked Alaska, only trickier, since, unlike even the fanciest dessert, it could kill you—but he thought the job required a little more precision than a fertilizer bomb.

  He hadn’t set that one off, either. He left it in her hands, with instructions, and asked her to wait till he was out of town—he was headed up to Camp Grayling for one of those two-day classes he taught. SCUBA, it must have been. The first he learned that one had worked successfully was Reenie showing up at the lake a few days later with a thank-you plate of ranger cookies and a brochure, for some reason, on the transmission of hepatitis C. And with no missing limbs, as far as he could see.

  Now he kept listening, floating farther away. He supposed it could have blown much earlier. Though he hadn’t heard anything during his whole long creep back out the river, nor at his arrival at the lighthouse, on the point, taking a breather on the rocks and grabbing a bite of jerky. He’d tried counting the seconds, but it was really a judgment call. Who knew how long that fuse was? It was dark at the time and it wasn’t like he’d measured the thing. And maybe the putty hadn’t held. Maybe the fuse was so long, the adhesiveness gave out and the blobs of putty fell off the side of the jet-skis and plopped into the water. If that happened, it might ignite underwater—maybe—but before it did, it would also probably sink all the way down to the bottom of the lake, which had to be at least ten or twelve feet deep there, at the end of that dock, and so the underwater concussion would only make for a little raised water, a big splashy burp. Or, more than likely, if it dropped off the jet-skis and hit the water, it would lie there so long waiting for the spark to travel that long fuse, the putty would have time to get saturated with water and be about as explosive as a wet sock.

  He’d stuck it on hard, one handful of the concoction for each jet-ski, scooped out of the can and molded and pressed, like a tiny volcano, smack on the hull, right above the waterline, right near the gas tank. Then he’d connected them with the green fuse and unwound it down the dock, making it as straight and as long as he could. He reached up onto the dock and hooked the fuse around a mooring cleat to keep it from dipping in the water, lit it with the long fireplace lighter, and, with the whole Ziploc bag of paraphernalia jammed, pirate-style, in his teeth, swam hard for the mouth of the river.

  And now he was out in the second deepest Great Lake, probably about to drown himself, and probably for nothing—probably there had been no explosion and would be no explosion. Yes, they’d find his body way down in Michigan City or somewhere and much would be made of the irony of his being a swimming instructor. And as he was an Indian, they would assume he’d been drinking—how else to explain this poor slob with a stash of beef jerky duct-taped to his chest, horsing around on nothing but a puffed-up windbreaker?

  He remembered how he used to be the kind of guy who didn’t worry all the time. Lately, he’d sure taken to fretting. Something was really going to have to change soon or it was going to seriously cut into the calm, cool Indian vibe he’d always had going on.

  BY THE TIME HE SPOTTED HIS DIVING BUOY, floating southward and still tethered to the hunk of driftwood tree trunk—the squirrelly make-out kids long gone—and caught it and stopped his drift and reeled it in and got back to his car, the replacement stick-on clock on the dash was blinking 2:05. He stripped down, threw his wet clothes in the trunk, where he snatched a towel and some clothes out of his luggage, wrapped himself around the waist and slid behind the wheel, cranking the heater up to high.

  He drove north on 31 at a steady clip, stopping only once, along a desolate stretch of pine, to hop out and pull on the dry clothes. Back in the car, he rolled down his window, flipped the switch from heat to straight fan, and aimed the blowers at his head. No sense taking chances, he thought. Yet still, imagine the absolute razzin
g old Coots and Miller would give him if they knew he was now running the sort of “spesh op” that could be improved upon by the use of a travel-sized blow-dryer.

  Coming in just south of town, it was about ten to three in the A.M., so he slowed his approach, wanting to time it just right. He pulled in at the all-night Mobil and filled up and stretched conspicuously and asked the kid working there if he had the time, knowing it was now probably three on the button.

  “I’ve got . . . three A.M., on the money, Mr. Drinkwater.” Roger was glad to see the kid was one who recognized him from the high school. This was good. He wanted the kid to remember what time he’d pulled back into town, in case he was ever questioned.

  For 0300, it sure was lively. Cars were whizzing by, heading for the lake. “Three in the morning,” he said, repeating it, “what the hell’s going on at three in the morning?”

  “Big to-do over to the lake,” the kid said, jerking his head in the direction of Meenigeesis. “Somebody’s dock blew up.”

  Roger made sure to pay him in Canadian bills.

  When the kid had said dock, Roger’s first thought was that he’d goofed; he’d done all that for nothing, just to blow up the dock. But then, as he pulled onto the county road and found it lined with half-dressed gawkers and all kinds of service vehicles—the sheriff’s department and volunteer fire and even state troopers—he got the word from Deputy Struska. She waved him through with her Maglite, letting him pull into his driveway, then followed him up to the porch.

  “Something going on?” he asked.

  “You’re kidding. Where you been?”

  “Canada.”

  She seemed to be looking him over for a second. He wondered if there was some part of him that still wasn’t dry. “Oh, right. Fourth of July. Well, you’re especially lucky you left town this year.”

  “Really noisy, you’re saying?”

  She told him what had happened. The part of it she knew. It felt kind of strange, how she knew her half and he knew his.

  It wasn’t that he’d missed his target, it was just that the dock had been destroyed, too, and from the perspective of everyone else, that seemed the significant fact: a dock had been destroyed—which included everything tied to it, which was, according to a preliminary inventory, two jet-skis, an awning, two big beach towels hung out to dry, a wakeboard and tow tube (whatever that was), flower pots, a combination bench seat and ice chest, and a rowboat.

  He felt a little bad about the rowboat. Rowboats were okay. But as for the rest of it, the dock and that Fudgie crap, hey, what did they expect—surgical precision? He was working with fertilizer, after all, and he hadn’t had any practice in years. It wasn’t like he pulled the recipe out of Martha Stewart Living. How exact could he be?

  “I know you were away and all, but Hatchert’s going to want to talk to you.” As if on cue, the radio clipped to Struska’s broad chest crackled and she took the call, turning away and rogering some fuzzy directive. The sound was broken by a long fizzle and a burst of light overhead, amber sparks and a report that banged in echo across the lake. Some kid with leftover fireworks, egging on the cops.

  “Bottle rocket?” she asked.

  “Little bigger. Maybe a skyrocket or Texas Pop.”

  They stood, staring up in the break through the trees, expecting more. He could feel her glancing over at him, probably wondering how he was doing, trying to gauge how unnerved the fireworks made him, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, looking up, not wanting to give her any information. He’d developed a habit, when looking up at the night sky, of first covering his throat with one hand, and he was doing this now. The idea was to protect the jugular, to not leave yourself vulnerable to someone who might slit your throat in the dark while you’re star-gazing like a dope. Years ago, he’d performed this very move, without thinking, in front of a woman he had just started living with named Crystal, while they were on a camping trip out in the Manistee National Forest. When she realized what he was doing, she began weeping uncontrollably and said it was so unbearably sad (this was the seventies and her name wasn’t really Crystal: she’d named herself after an actual crystal that she’d found in the ladies’ room at an MC5 concert) and she felt terribly sorry for him but she couldn’t possibly live with a man who had become so hardened to the world, so untrusting and “crusted,” was how she put it. So there was no point in camping. All during the dark drive back home to Weneshkeen, she kept reaching across the front seat and petting his cheek like he wasn’t even there, like he’d been laid out for viewing, and wept about the way “that goddamned war” had robbed him of his humanity.

  The truth was he’d learned the neck move years before Vietnam, when he was little, hunting with his Uncle Jimmy Two-Hands, who’d picked it up from their Grandma Oshka. So it was actually probably an old Polish custom, or maybe just the quirky impulse of a person thrust, irrecoverably, into an ill-suited land. But he didn’t bother telling Crystal any of that. She was nuts, he decided, and he just wanted his house key back.

  “Hatchert’s coming over,” Struska said now and it sounded a little like an apology.

  “I’ll be unpacking,” he said. He decided he’d look less like a suspect, the whole thing less like an episode of Cops, if he didn’t wait there out on the porch. Plus, he needed to give the place a quick once-over, make sure he hadn’t left any evidence out in plain view. Last time, with the nozzles, they hadn’t come in, but this time, they might have a warrant.

  They didn’t, but the coast was clear, so he opened the door to them anyway as soon as Hatchert arrived. Struska took a casual position leaning against the kitchenette counter. She seemed to be looking around, but maybe not with the eyes of a cop. More, it seemed, with the eyes of regular company—glancing at the postcards and pictures on his fridge, perhaps appraising the curtains, assessing the sanitary level of the sponges in his sink. Meanwhile, Hatchert stalked, nosy-eyed. He was pretty direct with his accusations this time, saying he knew Roger was behind this, it was just a matter of evidence.

  “Here’s your evidence.” Roger flashed the stack of receipts from his trip, with the one from the Mobil station on top and the Ambassador Bridge on the bottom, hoping they wouldn’t notice how much time had passed between the Canadian border and stopping to refuel on the way back into town. “How do you account for the fact that I didn’t get into town till three A.M.? Talk to the kid at the Mobil. How could I have blown anything up while I was out of town?”

  “Timing fuse.”

  “Uh-huh. A three-day timing fuse. You know how long that would be? Stretch partway round the earth. Timing fuse . . . !” He turned to Janey. “Can you believe this guy, Deputy?”

  “Well,” she said wryly, “timing is everything.”

  “Especially in comedy . . . Well, you know that.” He spoke directly to the sheriff, implying the guy was a comedian. Struska looked down suddenly, averting her eyes. “Look, if you really thought I was blowing up private property—or anyone else—you’d have called in the FBI. You’d have to, right?”

  “We haven’t ruled anything out.”

  Struska nodded. “Like for example, errant fireworks. My money’s on fireworks.”

  “Errant ones,” Roger said, feeling punchy.

  Now she looked like she might start snickering. “Right.”

  “They’re almost always errant,” Roger said. “Ever notice that?”

  “Which is why you exit every year,” she offered.

  The sheriff turned to Struska now like Roger wasn’t even there, brusquely, like he wasn’t worthy of direct address. “Isn’t he supposed to be a SEAL or something?”

  She frowned. “Not now he’s not supposed to be . . .”

  “You must be thinking of my Indian name,” Roger said. “It’s similar to that.”

  “Yeah? Your Indian name is something with ‘seal’ in it? What is it?”

  “You an Indian?” Roger asked.

  “No.” This guy was really getting pissed now.

&nb
sp; “Then I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

  The sheriff jabbed a finger his way, poking the air between them. “This is horseshit.”

  Roger shrugged. “Look, maybe if you saved my life, pulled me away from some settlers who were trying to lynch me and ravish my sister and then you and I cut our palms with a big Bowie knife and rubbed them together and became blood brothers and smoked the peace pipe, I could tell you my Indian name, but I don’t see all that other stuff happening, do you?” He didn’t know what it was—he was probably just punchy from the marathon swim—but something was suddenly turning him into Groucho Marx here, or at the least, instilling him with attitude, sassiness, and he had a strong feeling it had to do with Janey Struska’s presence. Or maybe this new guy was just too much fun not to put on. “Yeah, that thing with the blood? Forget it. Very icky.”

  “I can look this all up, you know. There are records.” The guy was trying to sound like this was a big threat.

  “Sealed records, probably,” Struska said, egging him on, too.

  “Seal records?” Roger said. “Records of seals? I used to listen to those. Very big in the seventies. Not as popular as whale music or dolphins, but nice. Had them on eight-track.”

  “Big with the ladies,” Struska agreed.

  Hatchert was already leaving. He stopped on the steps and turned back, holding the screen door open, a final point to make. “And for the record, Mr. Hilarity, I know a thing or two about this Indian stuff, okay? If it’s not in your environment, in the area where you live, it’s not in your vocabulary. Eskimos don’t have a word for cactus. So your Indian name can’t be ‘seal’ or anything of the kind, because there are no seals anywhere around here.” He let the screen door slam, even though it was close to 0400 hours already.

  Struska remained leaning against the counter. They both gave out heavy sighs, almost simultaneously, as if relieved to be enjoying the sudden peace. It was very quiet, except for the creak of her leather, the holster and the belt. It was a nice crinkly sound, he thought, the sound a cowgirl might make when she wasn’t busy yippeekiyaying. “He forgot about Easter seals,” she said. “We get those around here every year.”