The Lake, the River & the Other Lake

by Steve Amick

  Roy was holding up the little paper slips of color samples. “Jeezo . . . On-the-nose match it or just hand grenade close?”

  “Hand grenade. It just needs to be cheery.”

  Roy looked up when he said the word cheery, made a little frowny face, almost a pout. It was weird seeing such pity on a person like Roy Kunk and it made Von even more uncomfortable. “Sorry to hear about all the bad luck you’ve been having out there, Von,” Roy said. “Things any better?”

  “Getting there,” Von said and tugged down his feed store cap. Goddamn it, he was going to make things better if he had to.

  NEXT HE COLLARED MIKI and took him around back of the main house to the family garden. “You like to use a lot of vegetables in your cooking,” Von said. “If there was one item in here that you could choose that I could rip out right now and you could make something out of it, so it wouldn’t go to waste, what would it be?”

  Miki jutted out his lip and frowned, studying the situation like he’d been asked to perform some elaborate algebraic equation. Finally, he said, “With the cabbages, perhaps I could make something.”

  “That we can use all at once?” Von imagined vats of uneaten coleslaw, a horrifying thought. “I don’t want to waste anything.”

  “There would be no waste. What I’m proposing is a pickled cabbage dish, very spicy. You will be able to store it safely for a long, long time. One year or more.”

  Von didn’t like the sound of this. “You talking about kimchee?”

  “Kim-chee. Yes.”

  Von asked him but wasn’t that Korean—kimchee? Miki said sure, but just because he was Japanese didn’t mean he didn’t know how to make it. Von wasn’t about to argue the point. The two of them set to yanking up the cabbages, loading them on the wheelbarrow. Pretty soon, they’d cleared away about twenty square feet of crop.

  “It certainly is a large area of space that is left denuded now,” Miki said. “I have an idea. I would have to take a soil sample, of course, to determine if it is properly . . . uh, do you say aroused?”

  “No, you don’t say that. Not at farms around here, not if you don’t want to get slugged. Or worse, get them thinking you’re sneaking out at night, sticking your pecker in the earth. Aroused? Jesus god. Try fertile maybe?”

  “Fertile. Pardon. But here is my idea: it is perhaps too late in the growing season to do so, but perhaps this space could be used, if it is fertile, to grow some tomorokoshi, horenso, azuki . . . maybe mitsubu, Japanese parsley?”

  Von told him, “Relax, son. We’ll make room for your vegetables next summer. This here’s for Marita, for when she comes back home. Now go on ahead. Go start pickling that crap there, get the house all stunk up and farty . . .”

  Miki started off with his overburdened wheelbarrow. Von thought better of his gruffness and called to him to hold up. Miki stopped pushing the wheelbarrow, looking up as if awaiting his next command. Von had to admit the guy was an agreeable son of a bitch. Not a lot of backtalk and contrariness, he had to give him that.

  Gesturing along the strip of lawn where Miki stood on the other side of the fence, Von said, “We’ll rototill all that out the west side there, bring it out another twenty, thirty feet. Next year. I just don’t see the point doing it now, do you? You figure you can squeeze what you like in that space next year?”

  Miki grinned. “Yes, sir, Vonison! More than enough space! Thank you! Very nice!”

  “Very good then,” Von said. “We’ll make room, don’t worry.”

  “I will be looking forward to it, Vonison!”

  He’d been planning to ask him to knock that off, next time he did it—it sounded way too much like deer meat. But now that he’d done it again, he decided to let it pass. The guy just looked too pleased to spoil it for him.

  AT THIS TIME, SANTI’S CREW would normally head north to help pick the last of the tarts up at Bridgman’s near Petoskey (where the difference in latitude always put them a week behind Von), then return in a week for the start of peaches. Santi was clearly torn. He said he really needed to go with them, but the thought of leaving his daughter, Von could see on the man’s hard face, was breaking his heart.

  “We’ll keep in touch with you up there,” Von assured him. “I know Hans Bridgman. He’ll put you on a phone if we need to get ahold of you. I know it’s a couple hours away, but I swear, if there’re any problems or anything, hell, one of us’ll drive up and get you, if need be. And you’ll be back down here in just a week, right? To start on the red havens?”

  Santi looked like he was in pain. They were standing on the porch, looking out at the sunset playing across the faded sides of the little house, turning it almost pink.

  “I promise her mother, que en paz descanse, I look after her,” he said. “Is why she’s always by my side.”

  Von touched the man on the shoulder. His shirt was soaked with sweat. “I know how you feel,” he said. “But you need to keep going.”

  “Why?” Santi said, and the truth was, Von really didn’t have an answer.

  “Let’s see if maybe we can come up with a plan,” he said. With that, he stepped off the porch, walking off, away from the buzz and clatter of his home.

  “HERE’S THE DEAL.” He was addressing Santi’s crew the next morning, standing on the front porch of the empty little house, right in front of Marita’s half-red door. “You stay on the next week, full wages, and until we start with the red havens, you help me get this house painted.” He squinted out at the gathering and this one glance told him they understood and liked the idea. “If you’re a crappy painter, you scrape, clean brushes, tape windows, fix lunch, whatever—we’ll find something for you to do.” He explained about the scaffolding, the tarps, the regrouting. “Take your time, do not fall off the scaffolding, do not get hurt. You all know how picky Marita is, so do a good job.”

  They all laughed and moved in to select a job for themselves. One of them—the almost Indian-looking older man who’d carved the peach pit, clamped his hand on Von’s shoulder and said, “Gracias, Don Von. Too many Fudgies up there in Petoskey, anyway. They look at us funny, the Fudgies. This is much better.”

  He wondered if this was how Capone felt when he set up the soup kitchens.

  Later that day, Don Vanderhoof showed up, unannounced, with a flatbed of three-foot-high pepper plants, and Miki hopped up to help unload. It was Miki, too, who was prepared for the plants, who stopped them both from touching the buds. He ran back into his camper and returned with a box of disposable rubber gloves.

  “The spicy hotness,” he explained. “You can get it in your skin, in your eyes . . .”

  “How about that,” Don marveled. “Handy guy to have around, this guy.”

  Von said, “What—you don’t have your own resident botanist? Must be rough.”

  Don hung around long enough to kibitz over the initial planning. He still shook his head at the whole idea, marveling at this fool move on Von’s part but chuckling about it now. He also said he liked the new look of the half-painted house. “You realize,” he observed, “now you’ve got yourself a house that’s the exact color of your sweet cherries? Talk about your subliminal advertising. That can’t be an accident.”

  Von denied it was an accident, though he’d honestly never really made the connection and he wondered if the girl had.

  “Smart,” Don concluded. “Folks’ll be salivating, thinking about cherries a mile away. Won’t even know why.”

  Later, before they closed up the cans of red paint for the day, Von took an old shingle and a garden stake and painted a nice little sign.

  62

  THE HOSPITAL’S BIMONTHLY SEPTIC TANK CLEANOUT wasn’t scheduled for another week, but Kurt Lasco ran it early. His contract with the hospital allowed him some leeway so he could juggle other jobs, emergencies being a major component to his line of work, but that wasn’t the reason he was doing it early. This business with Starkey’s wife had been bugging him and he kind of wanted to get the straight scoop on her c
ondition. It wasn’t like he wanted to visit her at the hospital, but if he happened to be out there, he might ask around a little, make sure she was okay.

  And what the hell—since he was passing vonBushberger’s orchard on the way out there, why not pull in at the stand and buy one of those fresh wildflower bouquets they sold? They were cheap enough and he wouldn’t be paying for some unnecessary add-on like delivery. And he wouldn’t have to give them to her in person—he could just drop them off anonymously. No doubt if Starkey knew he’d brought flowers, he’d take it as some sort of apology, like he was wrong about the trees, which was not how he meant it at all. After all, he might have screwed up with the sausage gag, but that didn’t make him wrong in general, did it?

  He took care of the tanks first, then cleaned himself up in the janitor’s room and stopped in at the nurse’s station. He’d hidden the flowers in a length of PVC drainage pipe—a clean sample scrap he kept in the back of the rig—and was waiting for a moment Jilly, the nurse on duty, stepped away so he could leave it anonymously for Marcie Starkey, when he noticed the visitors book and was curious to see how many folks had stopped by. He slid it over and glanced through it, casually, like he was bored or waiting for someone to show up to authorize his job invoice.

  The thing listed the time of the visit, beginning and end, the name of the visitor and the name of the patient. She’d only been there a short time, but still, there were more entries than he would have thought. For a summer person, she must be more of a joiner. There were at least a half a dozen names there. One name leapt out at him: DeWalt. His ex-wife Lisa’s maiden name. And not Walt DeWalt, her distant cousin of some sort who supervised the river boys. K. DeWalt.

  It floored him. Not only was Kimmy visiting the enemy, she was going by DeWalt now? Since when, he wondered? Lasco was still her legal name.

  Why does she hate me? She must hate me, he thought, and he thought about little else the whole rest of the afternoon.

  KIMBERLY WAS IN HER DAD’S OFFICE, checking her e-mail. There was one from the nurse at the hospital, Jilly, warning her that her dad had been by that afternoon. Kimberly was pretty sure she was in deep shit. But she tried to remember what Reverend Gene had said about having to do what she knew was right and not worry so much about her dad being right. So maybe he’d be pissed—what would he do about it? Send her home early? Maybe. More likely, he’d just rethink having her up next year.

  Well, whatever . . . Still: make my own relationships with the world . . . She closed her e-mail, moving ahead, logging on to Amazon to do a few searches for a possible birthday present for Reverend Gene. She had the cookbooks out, too, thinking maybe that was a way to go, because really, did she really know enough about him to figure out what he would really like? Probably not. The guy’s record collection was huge and besides, baking something would be easier.

  It struck her, with a small pang of guilt, that she wasn’t sure she knew her own dad’s birthday—March something, maybe? But then again, it wasn’t part of his e-mail address like it was for Gene. Reverend Gene.

  She had her Walkman on and was listening to one of his things she’d found at the library on CD, Mary Lou Williams playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” Dusk had started to settle. She hadn’t noticed till she got up to pee, heading for the little half-bath jammed in between the office and the kitchen. No lights were on yet. Just then, her dad stepped into the kitchen and picked up the cordless. He had a scrap of paper in his hand and referred to it as he punched in the numbers. He didn’t seem to notice her as he moved into the living room.

  It was the first she knew he was home. The time had gotten away from her and she hadn’t heard him pull in thanks to her Walkman. She turned it off now and stood motionless in the shadows, listening.

  Leaning flat against the wall, she watched as he settled down into the creaky leather easy chair, his back to her. He let out a deep, uneasy sigh and waited while it rang. Kimberly waited, too, wondering if maybe he was calling her mom. But no—certainly he knew their number by heart. It had to be something else.

  And then her dad spoke. “Scott? Did I wake you? . . . It’s Kurt Lasco. Listen, I know you’ve got a lot bigger stuff going on over there now, but this business with the trees— Look, you don’t need to drag me into court. It’s not necessary. I’ll get some new ones in, no problem . . . No, really. Could you give me maybe a week—is that gonna be soon enough . . . ?”

  She crept closer, sliding her socks along the linoleum till she was standing in the dark kitchen, just a few feet away.

  “Now, also? The wood? That’s really yours, if you want it. It really ought to dry for another year before you try to burn it, but . . . Well, think about it. Like I say, it needs to sit and dry anyway . . . Yeah . . . Okay . . . Yeah, that would be good. We should do that. Kimmy’s gonna be here a little while longer—let’s plan on that . . . Listen, how’s your wife doing anyway? . . . Oh, that’s great, that’s really good. We were wondering about that . . .”

  After he said goodbye and hung up, he sat there with his hand still on the phone, exhaling a big puff of air. He looked a little scared. Even from that angle, just the back of his head and a little of the side, she thought she could tell. She’d never seen him like this. It had been a whole summer of seeing him in ways she never had before, but at least for this moment, she felt proud of him.

  I could tiptoe away, she thought. We can just keep everything the way it is. He doesn’t have to know I’m here.

  But I am here, she thought, and she decided to show herself, stepping out into the doorway, into the light. He looked up, distracted, and it was clear he was surprised to see her. He just sat there, childlike in the oversized chair, staring back at her silently. He looked like he’d been shot or something, like he was paralyzed. She stepped over to the edge of his chair and leaned in to half-hug him, sliding her arm along his shoulder in an awkward little pat. “How much is all this going to cost?”

  “It’ll cost what it’ll cost,” he said, not annoyed, just matter-of-fact. Then he caught her eye and put on a smile that looked only a little manufactured and pulled her closer, nuzzling into her shoulder, kissing her on the material of her shirt, the gray lightweight plaid one she’d lifted from Reverend Gene. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just means I’ll need to clean out that many more tanks. And that’s one good thing about this business. It’s like being an undertaker, a CPA, anything like that. There is no end to the amount of shit in life.”

  She leaned against him more, till she was half-sitting on his leg. She put her head in the crook of his neck and smelled that old dad smell that was always there. They stayed like that for a long while, staring out into the blank descent of night, the featureless view through the row of open windows, and she didn’t want to let go.

  63

  IT WAS GENE’S TURN to stand in that Sunday. When Mrs. Hiram Henderhoch called him to ask for the title of his sermon, so she could put it in the program and on the message sign out front of the church, he told her “The Devil in the Box.”

  There was a pause. “Sounds a little Baptist.” He could hear her frowning. “The Devil and all . . .”

  “Not really,” he said. “It’s a message for everybody.” He didn’t tell her it was about censorship, pornography and the like. He didn’t tell her, Just put down “Internet Porn.”

  That Sunday, when he took to the pulpit, he eased into it, first spending about ten minutes laying out what constituted “the box”—the various modern-day media—and then danced, lightly, around the implications of what deviltries could be uncovered there, and cited lawsuits and news stories where the evil influence of these media were declared the cause of trouble, the thing to blame.

  From there, he knew what they were expecting. Some sort of Pandora’s box paradigm, chagrined bemoaning, a what hath man wrought? plea for the simpler things of a simpler time. But that was not where he was heading.

  “The fact is,” he admitted, “there is no ‘Devil in the box.’
It only contains those things that we put there ourselves. If we can find it on the Internet, on TV, in movies, on the cable, in music, it’s because we put it there. Look to yourself, not to the Devil.”

  Maybe that much would have been acceptable—wrapping it up, going to the prayer, stopping it there. Only he didn’t stop there. Concrete examples were always the stock of his sermons—Dr. Getner had taught him that, decades ago. Examples were what kept an audience. Examples made the snoozers stay focused; pay attention; stop thinking about the television ballgame later that afternoon; stop studying the curls at the nape of the neck of their neighbor’s wife, seated in front of them; stop wondering if they were having ham for dinner. And the more memorable the example, the better. And so he asked the congregation to take up their Bibles and look at Ezekiel, chapter twenty-three, verses seventeen through twenty-one.

  Perhaps it was ill-conceived. After all, he wasn’t really at the top of his game anymore. He needed practice. He missed his wife. He’d possibly lost a part of his mind when he lost her. He wasn’t supposed to be counted on for this sort of thing anymore. He was supposed to be free.

  “‘For she lusted for her paramours,’” he read, “‘whose flesh is like the flesh of donkeys, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus you called to remembrance the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians pressed your bosom because of your youthful bosom.’” He closed his Bible, smiled out at his flock. The ones who seemed to be paying attention looked a little perplexed now, as if he’d derailed, jumped from one sermon to another; as if he were showing signs of dementia. The rest looked blank-faced, still probably thinking about those issues of televised sports and ham and not understanding that he’d made an apparent hard left turn.