The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  (AUDIO DROP: PUNCH SFX.)

  ADAM: Let me ask Mark something. Mark. This chick: she’s hot, right?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: I think so.

  ADAM: I’m not talking “I think so” kind of hot, I’m looking for super-lava-hot. She’s gotta be one real piece of ass, right?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: Pretty much.

  ADAM: Pretty much. Thanks for backing me up on that, squirrelly. Jesus Christ. Such enthusiasm.

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: No, no. I’m sorry. She is. She is very attractive.

  ADAM: Like the kind of attractive where all your buddies see her as the local equivalent of Adrienne Barbeau—

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: Who?

  DR. DREW: Britney Spears.

  ADAM: Go ahead and insert your own famous hot chick du jour there. What I’m driving at is everyone says “Oh we can’t believe Mark is going out with this chick,” right?

  DR. DREW: Or more accurately, that she’s going out with Mark.

  ADAM: Exactly. She’s so hot, you feel like she’s doing you some kind of incredible favor. She gives you a handy, you send her a thank-you note. What I mean is, it feels, to you, like this chick got sentenced to community service and, luck of the draw, just happened to get assigned to your squirrelly ass. Right?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: You could say she’s pretty much the hottest girl in town, yes. Like . . . okay, she was Miss Sumac Days? Like, two years in a row.

  DR. DREW: What’s that?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: The winner of the pageant? For Sumac Days?

  ADAM: Aha! I knew it! Hold on a second, Mark.

  (The caller is put on hold.)

  ADAM: Drew.

  DR. DREW: Yes, Adam?

  ADAM: “Sumac Days”: anything?

  DR. DREW: Not a clue.

  ADAM: Really? You mean you’ve never heard of Sumac Days? Shocking!

  (They laugh.)

  DR. DREW: Isn’t that like a poisonous shrub or something?

  ADAM: Drew. Do you get the idea that our callers are under the impression we ride around in a backpack slung over their shoulders all day long?

  DR. DREW: All life long, more like.

  ADAM: We’re just back there the whole time, looking around, taking in the sights, peeking over the top of the backpack, jotting down notes . . .

  DR. DREW: Like a papoose.

  (More laughter.)

  ADAM: Je-sus Christ. What goes on!? . . . (Weary sigh.) . . . Mark?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: Yeah?

  ADAM: You listening to me, screwball?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: Uh-huh.

  ADAM: Good. Now, look. You’ve got two choices with this crazy chaotic bitch: A, confront her . . . And by the way, the type of relationship you two have, confronting her would basically be like walking up to a stranger at a bar, some three-hundred-pound mongoloid, and saying, “Excuse me, sir, but can we discuss your drinking problem?”

  DR. DREW: There might be some of that in her family background, actually.

  ADAM: Mongoloidism?

  DR. DREW: Alcoholism.

  ADAM: Oh, right, right . . . Then there’s B, which is run away screaming. No big explanation, just get out. Just say, “NO more! Do you hear me, woman?! No more will you be giving me BJs in the Bijou, bitch! Enough!” And then DO NOT see her anymore.

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: This is a small town.

  ADAM: You like that, Drew—BJs in the Bijou?

  DR. DREW: Very nice alliteration. What’s that, Mark?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: It’s a small town, where we are. It’d be a little hard to pull off, avoiding her totally. We’re both only here for the summer, so in the fall, no problem, but the town’s so small—

  ADAM: Hold the phone! Really? The town that Sumac Days put on the map, you’re telling me that’s a small town? Drew, you jotting this down?

  DR. DREW: I’m stunned.

  ADAM: Drew, didn’t you assume it would take a booming metropolis, some sort of massive, teeming center of industry, to support a world-reknowned event on the scope and magnitude of Sumac Days?

  DR. DREW: Well, you couldn’t hold it here in L.A.! Town’s not big enough!

  ADAM: Jesus Christ . . . Anyway, then there’s plan C—and I think honestly, Drew, this is probably the choice for young Mark here, C being ride this ride till the carny pulls the brake handle. The carny with the grotesquely misshapen nose, the botched jailhouse tattoo and outstanding warrants in Florida and Georgia. By this I mean just go with the flow. Enjoy. Ignore the fact that she’s probably screwed in the head and just enjoy until it ends. Abbondanza! But don’t extend it, don’t compromise yourself, don’t beg for her to change or get in any way further wrapped up in her little web of manipulation and hot, hot danger sex!!! Now, Drew, I know you don’t like this kind of advice, but in Mark’s case, come on—he’s not going to change this girl. He’s sixteen, the summer’s almost over . . .

  DR. DREW: No, no. I agree. For Mark, right now, that’s fine. Just don’t get hurt, Mark.

  ADAM: Keep your hand firmly on that car door button! I mean that metaphorically. They don’t make those knobby type of car door buttons anymore.

  DR. DREW: The door locks, you’re talking about?

  ADAM: Yeah. On the top.

  DR. DREW: Not the handle, on the side.

  ADAM: No, on top of the door. Drew, have you been in a car? Jesus. I know you don’t even know how to change your oil, but you’ve been in one, right? Door locks! They’re all recessed now. Flush with the door panel. So if you ever go over a bridge, you basically just drown scratching at the door.

  (AUDIO DROP: “Whooooooooooo . . . cares!”)

  DR. DREW: Okay. Mark, those are your options. Got it?

  ADAM: Right. Probably C is your best bet.

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: Yeah, but . . . I really care about her.

  ADAM: Really?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: Yeah . . . It’s like . . . painful.

  DR. DREW: Oh, Mark . . .

  (A pause.)

  ADAM: Hold on a sec . . .

  DR. DREW: Oh, boy.

  ADAM: I put Mark on hold.

  DR. DREW: He’s in this. You can tell.

  ADAM: Yeah. He shouldn’t be, but he is. Jesus . . . What’re the chances, you think, he’s going to be able to follow the game plan and just take it easy?

  DR. DREW: “Ride the ride till the carny pulls the brake handle”?

  ADAM: Yeah. Plan C.

  DR. DREW: Honestly? Probably close to zero.

  (Caller is punched back in.)

  ADAM: Hey, Mark?

  MARK IN MICHIGAN: I’m still here.

  ADAM: Listen, buddy . . . maybe you oughta consider plans A or B . . .

  52

  FOR THE “FIRST DEBUT” of his sumac lemonade, Noah Yoder had a lot of big investors in for the weekend, at great expense, all of which would be itemized under the heading of business entertainment. Deery had found some lean-faced folkie down in Ann Arbor whom she hired to come up and play a song he’d written about the sumac being “on fire,” which must have meant in bloom and was pretty and wistful and haunting and all but Noah couldn’t help thinking the guy might have been convinced, thrown a few extra bucks, to add a line or two about how tasty the stuff was, at least. It was discouraging, sometimes, how he felt he had to do all the thinking. Didn’t his people understand how much things were on the line now? He was taking a real chance here and they had to make it work.

  Deery Lime made the presentation, speaking grandly from a new, more complicated piling of her applesauce hair. Noah said a few words and smiled and nodded his head in a sort of aw-shucks bow, accepting the smattering of noncommittal applause. They sampled the sumac lemonade.

  Among them, there was an aging publisher who’d obviously made the trip to show off the four new breasts of his two companions. He begged off trying the drink because of his diabetes and his twin girlfriends sipped theirs with the expression of those used to commands, who spent their days ticking off a series of small chores that were not always parti
cularly pleasant. There was a pizza baron who insisted on mixing his sample with gin and then complained that it was okay, but not “ginny” enough. Some teen beauty queen type Noah didn’t recognize camped out on the chair in the shape of a hand with her boyfriend, who seemed to have the same last name. (Deery said they’d probably crashed with her dad’s invitation. They didn’t mix but whispered and giggled and then they were gone. No one saw them leave and later, no one could locate the hand chair.) Then the millionaire white rapper, the one of the bunch closest to his own age, who Noah really thought might get behind it, spent most of the gathering up on the roof, checking out the antiaircraft gun and doing who-knew-what with his posse. If an IRS agent had walked in, Noah would have been hard-pressed to convince him that this was a legitimate business expense and not just a gala bash for the decadent rich.

  A few accepted a prototype case to take home. But he knew, down to the person, there wasn’t one in the room who would invest. He knew this because of the way they made small talk. They asked him about living in this “funny little town” and about the house and what the architect Mishuki was really like—was it true he once designed a house made of cheese? They asked about the names of the lakes and the river and what types of fish they caught in these parts and what the weather was like and if he got to swim much and if he felt isolated up here and how the locals acted around him—did he require much security here? And was the dish really enough to survive without cable? And how did he get good bagels and coffee and essentials like that? They laughed about the gossipy things they’d heard on the charter connections up from Detroit or Chicago—local pilots with their puddle-jumpers: people were seeing lights in the sky? How absolutely darling! And there was some sort of civil unrest involving jet-skis?

  Very little was said about the sumac lemonade. If the pitch had hooked anyone, they would have drawn him aside and said, “I’m in.” That’s the way these people operated. Big and from the gut. But as he watched the last of them leave, laughing and weaving toward the helipad, he caught a glimpse of the deputy sheriff out in the drive, on duty as security. She was leaning against her squad car, giving a wide smile and friendly goodbye to each departing group as if she herself were the hostess—and she was, in a way, in terms of the town. She was saying goodbye and being polite on the part of the town. And he remembered now that it was this very person who first told him about sumac lemonade and he was struck by the thought that the answer might be local. Start with local investors and a local customer base and branch out from there. Sure, they wouldn’t have nearly the deep pockets as these blowhards, but if he could just round up enough people with medium-deep pockets . . . And who better to appreciate the potential of sumac lemonade than the people who had a whole festival around the plant?

  He went back inside and found Deery and Tony sitting very close together on a couch and told them he wanted to try it again. “Whole new group,” he said. “No outsiders this time.”

  53

  VON KNEW FULL WELL that his son and new daughter-in-law had been driving out to visit Jack’s great-great-aunt, Sadie vonBushberger, pretty regularly, because each time they returned, Marita made a point of informing him that Aunt Sadie had asked about him again, that she wanted to see him. Then, soon after Brenda announced she was engaged, she went to visit and took Miki along to meet her and when they came back, Brenda told him, “She’s expecting you Wednesday at three o’clock.”

  Von noticed that none of the kids seemed to return with any signs of food on them. He wondered what made them so all-fired special. Perhaps Sadie wasn’t well.

  They had her set up at what was formerly—and what Von still thought of as—the Old Folks Asylum but Sadie insisted was a “senior community” and if you called it anything else, watch out. Completely overhauled, the place was now the Silver Maples, rechristianed by some idiot developer in a distant city, no doubt, who thought it elegant and distinguished and didn’t know a silver maple was a frail, stinky weed tree better off slashed and burned. Sadie had one of the better setups there, the “independent living” option, which meant one of the tiny cottages that ringed the pond side of the property, outfitted with all the necessaries—emergency buttons and handrails anywhere you’d care to grab and monitors and attendants from the main building who checked in on the residents and did the housework and oversaw the cooking in their little kitchenettes. Von thought of it as “the stubborn wing,” the place where they put the ones who just wouldn’t give it up. People like Sadie—if there really was anyone else like Sadie vonBushberger, which he seriously doubted.

  Sadie was his grandfather’s younger sister, his great-aunt. And at ninety-one, just as opinionated and nutty as ever. The only thing keeping her out of the dementia wing was the fact that she’d always been that way, apparently as far back as a small girl, and anyone in the county would attest to that. “Mentally, Sadie—in the context of Sadie—” her doctor had recently explained, “is still in top shape.”

  She’d been a schoolteacher for years and never married, and those facts, in her day, her coming as she did from a farm family (an environment in which sons-in-law and future offspring were viewed as the primary labor force), might have caused pity or suspicion in the case of any other spinster—whispered wonderings about her sexuality. But with Sadie, that had never been the case. No one wondered anything about Sadie. She’d had boyfriends all her life, as recently as ten years ago, when she was a much spryer eighty—before she hurt her hip in an accident that could only be explained sexually (despite Von’s many attempts to sell himself on any other plausible scenario). He wasn’t entirely convinced she still didn’t engage in some manner of courtship with the old goats at the “senior community”—the younger fellas in their seventies who could keep up with her or at least had substantial enough hearing left to know when she was so far out of line they should give her a crack in the mouth. The fact of her so-called maidenhood obviously never had anything to do with some secret orientation nor with a bad toss of the dice in terms of meeting Mr. Right; put simply, she was virtually impossible to get along with. The fact that she had worked, for several decades, in a position of absolute power over impressionable, helpless young people floored him every time he thought about it.

  This kind of visit wasn’t something Von had a lot of time for, so he took the shortcut from the parking lot to the rear of Sadie’s unit. The back door was ajar, but he knocked as he entered through the little kitchenette, calling her name. He heard her grunt in acknowledgment over the blast of the AC as he stepped into the tiny front room. He knew to duck and did so, avoiding getting hit with what turned out to be, this time, a very old blueberry bagel, hard as a hockey puck. He picked it up and set it on the TV, which was vibrating from the AC. “Hello to you, too,” he said. “Reason?”

  “I said three,” she explained. “It’s three-ten.”

  The throwing things was pretty standard. She had a reputation, during her long career as a teacher at the old Weneshkeen Public, for throwing chalk erasers around the room to keep the children attentive. These days her ammo was usually food she saved till it was good and hard.

  He gave her the regular kiss on the cheek, which she waved off, and then took a seat on the only option, the low hassock, and slid it a little farther away from the AC.

  “Is it too cool for you?” she asked. “I enjoy the air-conditioning.”

  “I know you do, Aunt Sadie.”

  She frowned, sympathetically. “It’s too cool for you, isn’t it, dear?”

  He knew better than to take her bait. She wasn’t about to turn the AC down. “Well, you could say I’m overly aware of my nipples right now . . .”

  She beamed. “What a delightful thing to be! Land, I remember a time I was constantly aware of my own nipples. For years! You could say I was entirely preoccupied with them. More entertaining, I tell you, than any dumb paddleball or yo-yo I ever got from Santy . . .”

  It was his fault for being a smartass and starting it, but there was no w
ay he wanted to sit here and listen to this excruciating nipple talk. Not if he was planning on eating again in the next month or so. Besides, he had to get back. “We’re in the middle of the sweets, Sadie. Right in the middle of the run.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Busy Bee. The Farmer’s got to get back to the Dell, I imagine. The bigaroons are in!”

  It felt odd hearing that term for bigarreaus, those white-pink cherries that always seemed so fragile to him, so fleshlike. The term was hardly used these days, but he remembered it now from his grandfather, the sound of the word taking him back to the original barn, watching the sorting from the loft. Every once and again, one of the migrants—a big brown man with one eye that didn’t quite open, Paulo (he never knew his last name)—would lob a cherry up to Von in the loft, the only warning it was coming a quick low “Aquí!” or “Más?” It was their secret.

  “Did you know,” Aunt Sadie said, sliding right into her old teacher voice, “the name of the river over in town—the Ninny John—the real name, is something that means ‘busy’?”

  Of course he knew that, but he was trying to be patient with her. “I think I might have heard something about that, yes.”

  “Maybe you could change the name of the orchard to that—the word that means ‘busy.’”

  “Change the name of the orchard. Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, since you’re in such a hurry all the time. Since it’s become such a big production for you.”

  What the hell was she talking about? It had always been a big production, even before he was born. “You want me to change it from ‘vonBushberger’s.’ Change all the signs, all the trucks.”

  “It’d give it a little more mystique. Folks are very het up about places and products with authentic Indian names these days. Some kind of reverse snobbery, I’d imagine.”

  “Just get rid of our family name.” He was straining to be polite, but he knew now he was going to have to speak with her doctor again.