The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  But it was true that the Yoman!® thing had merely been a small part of a bigger picture, the wide and varied empire he’d intended to build for himself. Besides, this might just be the thing to bring everything back on track for him financially; the thing that would save this monstrosity of a summerhouse and all his subsidiaries and his position in the yearly rankings of Fortune and Forbes and Wired and Spin. Because even during a nose-diving economy, people still got thirsty, didn’t they?

  Every time he heard the phrase now—sumac lemonade—it chimed like a mantra. Whimsical, soothing. There was something there if he just pursued it. He knew it. It was a much better plan than drumming up interest in his house with false Letterman rumors. That had been desperate hooey, he saw now. He’d been operating from a position of defeat. This, on the other hand, was productive! Fresh! Something! This was a full-blown, balls-to-the-walls project!

  First, he brought in a marketing research planner from Chicago named Deery Lime on the recommendation of Tony, his money guy, legal counsel and roommate from his only year at college. The vibe he got when she arrived with her team, reading between the lines, was that she and Tony had been intimate at one time. He could see the draw: she had an overly attentive quality, the way she listened—“power-listened,” was the way he thought of it—with her wide unblinking eyes. It was probably just an element of her professional training, gauging people’s reactions, listening to their comments, but he could see it being a turn-on in a more casual setting. Theoretically, it could all translate into some fairly nonpassive monkeyshines in bed, he imagined. He didn’t say anything to Tony, call him on it, but if they were in fact doing it, or had been in the past, he hoped this didn’t mean she wasn’t also highly qualified.

  Then there was her slightly stewardess-y hairdo, the color of applesauce. Not Noah’s thing—he liked them darker—but he could see the appeal for others and the way it gave her confidence. God, he hoped she was as good at this as she seemed to think she was.

  Deery called him sir. (It always felt a little weird when people working for him who were obviously a little older called him sir, but he decided not to contradict it. Better to enjoy it. The days of sir could easily end real soon.) She said she had some tentative designs for labels and packaging but first wanted to explain her preliminary findings from a few focus groups and market surveys she’d already thrown together back in Chicago. “Bottom line,” she said, “we’ve already determined that actual sumac lemonade—this so-called ‘lemonade’ as extracted from an actual sumac plant, following the steeping procedures you outlined for us—that’s not going to fly. Not without a few tweaks.”

  Already, he didn’t like the sound of this. Tweaks meant throwing more money at it. “Like what?”

  “Like the name, for example. People will think ‘poison sumac.’ Eighty-two percent made some connection with the phrase ‘poison sumac.’ Besides, sumac, just as a word, doesn’t sound very appealing. It’s too guttural, with the soft U and soft A. It sounds like gut-sac.”

  Noah didn’t think it sounded anything like gut-sac.

  “Well, anyway, we do. We’re suggesting ‘wild berry lemonade.’”

  He pointed out that they weren’t berries.

  “Close enough,” Deery said. “We’d also be interested in ‘Indian Berry Lemonade.’ We’re going to test both, see how they scan in the twenty-two-to-thirty-five target.”

  “What’s an ‘Indian berry’? Is there even such a thing?”

  “We’ve decided that’s what sumac is. An Indian berry.”

  “You’ve decided. But there is no such term in common usage, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re saying now it won’t have sumac in it?”

  “No, sir. No actual sumac. Various ‘natural flavorings.’”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Berry juices probably. Apple juice base.”

  “So your idea is no sumac in the name, no sumac in the bottle?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “Could we have a picture of sumac on the label then?”

  “Why would we do that, sir?”

  “Because that’s where we started out. With the sumac idea.”

  “Have you looked at sumac close up, sir? Not a lot of appetite appeal there.”

  Her assistant piped in. “It looks sort of hairy and half-dead. Even when it’s in full bloom. Respondents said things like ‘dust-mop,’ ‘ragweed’ . . . They said ‘ewww.’”

  “They said ‘oooh’?”

  The assistant corrected him. “‘Ewww,’ actually. Seventy-three percent said ‘ewww.’”

  Deery checked her notes. “Two people said ‘Is it a bug or something?’ Two entirely different focus groups, exact same response, down to the word.”

  Noah sat back in his chair, limp, energy draining out of him. This was not how he’d expected this to go. I mean, he thought, Is it a bug or something? . . . ?! This was not good.

  She had the mock labels on black presentation board, and she was whispering with the assistant now, reshuffling the ones he hadn’t seen yet. “Let’s show him the wild card idea,” he heard her say and they showed him something called “Staghorn.” The label was a painting of a big buck elk or something. Some massive antlered macho animal, manlier than even the Hartford deer, standing on a rocky outcropping with jagged pines in the far distance. He looked like he was deciding what he was going to mount next. “This would be if we went for the energy drink market. We add ginseng, vitamin E, taurine . . .”

  Taurine was the stuff he’d heard was made from bull testicles, though that couldn’t be, could it? He didn’t want to appear stupid on this point.

  The name was not something he liked at all, even after thinking about it, trying to give it a chance, writing it down several times on his notepad. He also wondered now if he should really rely on nomenclatural advice from someone who thought it was okay to be named Deery Lime, for Christ’s sake.

  “No, no.” He scratched out where he’d written Staghorn. “No. Let’s keep this thing on track. You’re taking something unique and homogenizing it . . . Let’s just . . .” But he wasn’t sure what they should do.

  “There’s unique and quirky,” Deery said, very politely, “and then there’s moneymaking, there’s appealing to the masses. It’s a tall order to do both, usually, sir. Unique is, by definition, fairly singular. You don’t say, ‘Wow, look how quirky that stadium full of people is!’”

  She had a point, but still. At the heart of every great success story in this country, wasn’t there always an iconoclast? He thought of the Cinderella stories they used to write about Yoman!® If he could do it once, he could do it again.

  She was still watching him, waiting patiently. Then she cleared her throat and told him he needed to decide if he wanted them to pack it in or if they should go to the next step, developing the prototype and creating a presentation for media and investors. She said she understood that he probably didn’t actually need the capital from other investors, but in terms of PR, since he obviously had so many friends and associates with celebrity, the more star power he could attach to this venture, the better. If he wanted to continue, that is.

  Noah didn’t feel it was any of her business that if he did decide to do it, the investors’ capital would be just as much a help as any possible PR buzz they would bring to the table. But who would he approach? The first name that came to mind was Wesley Snipes—they’d met once at a celebrity volleyball tournament for charity. And when the guy accidentally barked Noah on the shin jumping for the ball, he was very nice and apologetic. But maybe that wasn’t enough to ask the guy . . .

  Deery Lime said, “Say you’ve got a friend who can invest who’s got the nation’s ear, got some sort of nightly forum . . . then we’d really have something. You could call it Crap Lemonade, you get the right personality behind it.”

  Nightly forum? Who the hell . . . Was she talking about Letterman? She couldn’t be talking about Letterman.
/>   Why was it that everything lately seemed to be rocketing out of his control like a runaway train? Was life always like this and he’d just been lucky and shielded from it for the past few years?

  I’m a smart guy, he thought. I’m the kid genius here. I ought to know what to do . . . But he didn’t. More and more, he just didn’t.

  47

  AFTER FINISHING with Brenda vonBushberger, who’d just popped in at the parsonage for some advice—she’d just rushed into an engagement with a Japanese man and was worried her father might have some difficulties with the situation—Gene walked out back to join the girl. It wasn’t a Thursday, so there wouldn’t be any official computer tutorial. She might do some cleaning, but she was mostly there to sun and relax.

  She was reading a big hardcover book with a picture of a dove on the cover and, for some reason, Oprah’s name, though she probably wasn’t reading very closely, because she wore one of those personal hi-fis and had a stack of CDs beside her on the lounge. When she saw him standing over her, she splayed the book in her lap and tugged back the headphones and he could hear a rhythmic buzz like distant engine repair.

  “I saw you had someone in there with you,” she said. “So I didn’t want to interrupt, telling you I was here.”

  She wore baggy shorts and a little top that seemed several sizes too small—a belly shirt, he thought it was called, though her belly was covered now with the big book.

  He told her it wasn’t a problem—just a parishioner who needed someone to listen. “They’ve been with me so long,” he said, “it’s perfectly natural for them to continue coming to me.”

  She gave him a grin. “Thought maybe it was a girlfriend.”

  The idea was horrifying. Brenda had to be in her mid-thirties at the most. He remembered when she was in the Junior Youth Group and he’d have to pull her out of wrestling matches with the boys. She was probably all of twelve at the time.

  He frowned sternly. “She’s rather young for a potential girlfriend, don’t you think?”

  “Seems old to me,” she said. “She’s got gray hair and stuff.”

  Brenda vonBushberger probably had, at the most, seven gray hairs. He knew he would be hard-pressed to find seven hairs on his own head that weren’t gray. To change the subject, he picked up a CD case, found it empty, and asked if this was what she was listening to. Some sloppy buffoon posed in pants you could get lost in and there was a warning label on the front of it—something about adult content.

  “It’s nothing you’d want to hear. Definitely not recorded live at the Blue Note.” He was impressed that she remembered the name of the famed club. She hit a button and the buzzing stopped and she reached for the case. “Not that I don’t like your music. I do. It’s just—you wouldn’t go for this.”

  He was still trying to figure out what could be so scandalous about lyrics that were almost unintelligible. “Isn’t it strange,” he said, “that Adult Content almost guarantees only young people will enjoy it? Minors, people who aren’t adults?”

  He let her take the case. She was squinting at him like she was studying him. “Do you ever feel like you’re the only adult—even with the other adults? What I mean is, when I was little, I thought all grown-ups were like, grown up, right? They didn’t do anything childish or stupid or mean. But that’s totally not true, right?”

  “I don’t follow,” he said, though he thought maybe he did.

  “You have to be this adult all the time for these other not-so-adult adults to turn to. That must be really lonely for you, being the only grown-up. It sucks, huh?”

  He studied her for a moment. She looked bitter, personally involved, not just making an offhand observation. “What I’m hearing, Kimberly, is disappointment. How are these people disappointing you? Talk to me.”

  She shook her head, as if it was no big deal, then seemed to reconsider. “Okay, you know what it’s like? It’s like on Loveline. You ever listen to that call-in radio show? It comes on at like one in the morning?”

  “Too late for me.” The truth was, he probably could listen to it most nights, what with the insomnia and the Internet, but staying up that late was always something he regretted doing, not something he planned.

  “It’s mostly kids calling in. Teenagers. But grown-ups call in, too, and they’re all misbehaving in these just idiotic ways? Like they’re children, too? They’re so stupid.” She sounded genuinely disgusted. “A ten-year-old would know better than these alleged grown-ups. Seriously.”

  “Are we perhaps talking about your dad?”

  She bit her lip, looked off toward the river. There was a ridiculously tall pleasure craft heading out with a gangly teenaged pilot-boy he didn’t recognize up on the bridge and a woman the color of caramel fudge reclined on the aft deck. It bobbled along like a house being moved. “Maybe,” she said. “For example.”

  He thought so. Wasn’t her dad the cause of her desire to hang out in the parsonage yard, rather than at home? He was pretty sure she’d let something like that slip in the beginning, when she first asked permission. And then there was that stuff she’d confided about his feud with the neighbors. “You want to talk about it? What’s he doing now?”

  “Just . . . stuff. Acting like a kid. It’s embarrassing.”

  It wasn’t much of an answer. He wondered if Kurt Lasco was possibly one of the people now running around claiming they were seeing lights in the sky. That could certainly be enough to embarrass a sixteen-year-old. Especially if she was already sort of an outsider. He told her he’d like to hear about it.

  “No, you wouldn’t. Not two people in one hour dumping their lame problems on you. You’re retired.”

  “I’m your friend.”

  She looked at him and seemed to be thinking about this. “It’s no biggie. I’ll spare you today. Maybe some other time.”

  She started to lift her book and that’s when he saw it. It took him a second to understand what he was looking at, but she had a pierced navel. She caught him staring and covered it up with her book, saying, “What?”

  “I’m sorry! I don’t mean to stare. It’s just I saw this little metal ball and I guess at first I thought it was one of those little silver decorations on a cupcake? That it had fallen onto your . . . middle there . . . and then I realized, you’re not eating a cupcake.”

  She wrinkled up her nose at him. “You hate it, right?”

  He’d seen this, he realized, on the Web sites. Not very often, though, because the stuff he kept looking at was generally more focused a little higher on the body than that, from the neck or chest up. Sometimes, in a long shot, with the girl kneeling, he saw the navel. Occasionally, they appeared, like an unpleasant sore, on the girl’s tongue, an image he found horrifying. If they all had pierced tongues, he probably wouldn’t have a problem because he’d never look at them again.

  “It’s totally normal.” She seemed to want to convince him. “Really.”

  He wasn’t sure about that. “Does your father know you have a pierced navel?”

  This made her squirm a little. “No. I don’t know! Maybe. I haven’t gone ta-dahh! at him or anything. Okay? But still, it’s still totally normal.” He smiled because he didn’t know what else to say. Even counseling both the Young Adult Group and the Junior Youth Group for all those years, he’d never run into this subject. He told her he was going to go make her some iced coffee and turned in retreat.

  She called after him, defensive. “Hey! It’s just like when you were young, probably, and the goldfish swallowing! It’s the same thing. Just rebellion. Only everyone rebels exactly the same way, so it’s normal. You know? No biggie!”

  He didn’t see much point in explaining that that whole goldfish thing had been roughly about the same time his dad was a brash young man. That wasn’t what she was after here—a historic timeline of American teen crazes. “Relax!” he called back. “I’m not telling your dad!” He said it over his shoulder, too uncomfortable to look back.

  48

 
IT WAS BAD ENOUGH, being stuck on the river, in the smelly pilothouses or crowded onto people’s boats like some unwanted guest, like one of those hippo birds that tag along for the bugs, and being stuck hanging around with that Keith, who was like the greasy older brother Mark was glad he never had, or old dull-ass Walt, who wasn’t as rude, maybe, but wasn’t exactly Mr. Entertainment either—that was bad enough, that he was stuck doing all that rather than being able to run off and see Courtney all day. It was bad enough waiting around, watching the fat lazy flies spin on the pilothouse windowsill, and bang themselves against the glass, perplexed by the heat. But what really topped it off, heaping-pile-of-shit-wise, was the fact that these two lame-os weren’t even really letting him in, opening up, welcoming him to the team and all. Sure, they explained what to do, pretty much, but they never bothered really explaining who people were or who they were talking about when they were just hanging around in between boats. It was super-dumb, too, because Day One, they go, Hey, the trick is knowing people. You can’t be a stranger to these people—you help them guide maybe their most precious possession down the river, you need to get to know them, then they turn around and talk in front of him, all the time, about every last person in this stupid little town and do they explain who and what and where? No, they do not.

  Mark was thinking about just this—how they conducted entire private conversations right in front of him that he couldn’t follow one little bit—when they went ahead and did it again. It was a slow day—it had been raining all morning, so folks were staying off their boats. It was clear skies now, but that’s how it worked. Usually kids would demand some alternate activity when it rained, so they’d either go to the one movie in town or take a long family trip somewhere for the day, drive up to Traverse or some other tourist hole. So it was both of them, Keith and Walt, in the main pilothouse and the two of them had even started drinking a little, pulling faded-looking cans of beer from a cooler Keith used as a footstool.