by Steve Amick
Earlier that evening, though the room had been packed, no one sat on the bear couch; they stood around it, commenting on it and studying it from all angles, as if it were sculpture. He wished now he’d never bought it. He wondered what he’d paid for it exactly and why. Was Tony with him at the time? Maybe Tony had talked him into it, or at least agreed it was a nice couch. He wondered what kind of couches the people tonight had in their homes—the kind you get at the Salvation Army for fifty dollars or from some dead aunt and there’s a small dog bite or stain, but you cover it with a well-placed afghan and it never gets thrown away, just demoted, down to the rec room, out to the garage, off to the frat house. The kind of couch you can collapse on when things are bad and doze off and forget all your problems for a time. He’d give a lot to have one of those fifty-dollar dog-bitten couches—and the kind of frank, honest, nonsycophantic conversations people used to have with him on such couches—and he had a strong feeling he soon would.
He left Tony and his marketing genius alone now to do, on his ridiculously impractical couch, whatever it was they were starting up or covering up—if they could get it on on that thing, more power to them—and he took the spiral stairs up to the tower and looked out at the last little lights down in the village, the bars still open and buzzing as if it were a tiny Fisher-Price town, a toy town. And he decided he should start going to those bars. Not for any great financial scheme, not to schmooze and get backing for sumac lemonade, just to hang out with the locals. If he was going to be a pauper, go bankrupt, he might as well do it in a cheerier setting, surrounded by people, normal folk like the one he was about to become. One of the regulars. Tomorrow night he’d start. He probably couldn’t blend in or meet anyone—
probably no one would even talk to him—but he’d at least give it an honest try.
68
THIS TIME, SEVERAL WITNESSES CAME FORWARD. They’d seen lights in the sky and heard a whirring sound. This was right over the Meenigeesis. People came out of their cottages. Dogs were barking. Treetops shimmied. They saw the water ripple, it came down so low. And a beam of light shafted down, near the old Willoughby place, right at the end of the dock and—here was the part they insisted was true—it lifted up the jet-ski there. Up into the sky. And then the big white light was gone, as if it had been switched off, leaving just the tiny blinking lights, and the sound faded away along with those little lights—like running lights of some kind—and it banked to the north and disappeared.
The sheriff insisted it was a helicopter. What he wanted to know, from each witness, was if they saw the craft itself, or did they just see lights. Unfortunately, everyone agreed that it was too hard to see much of anything with that blinding beam of light shafting down like a ray gun. The one witness who remembered getting a glimpse of the dark shape behind the lights was pretty certain it wasn’t a helicopter: “Helicopters are squat and round and bubbly, right? This seemed long and cigar-shaped, what I saw.”
The younger witnesses seemed to really want it to be a UFO. Hatchert just fixed these kids with a severe look. “You think some superior life-form wants to study our jet-skis now? That it? They’ve moved on from Florida fishermen and Montana cattle?”
All this was being reported to Roger by Janey, back in uniform and leaning against her cruiser in front of his house, shaded from the noon-hour sun by Grandma Oshka’s beech tree. She wasn’t asking him any questions, he noticed, just smirking a little, telling him of the progress her boss was making—or not making—with his neighbors. Roger had been watching him all morning, working his way around the lake, and even from a distance, through his field glasses, the guy’s ever-reddening face made it clear his investigation was getting nowhere. He had nothing on him.
“Maybe it was a UFO,” Roger said. “Maybe they’re going to give it an anal probe. I know I would. Seems like the best thing you could do to a jet-ski.”
The other cruiser pulled in, separating them with a cloud of dust that rose between them. It was the sheriff, leaning out his window with his mirrored shades. “You. Chief Water Moccasin. You’re going to need to come in for a talk.”
“Oh? About my lawsuit for that racial slur you just made? You have some official complaint forms I need to fill out or something?”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Water Moccasin. Coach.” Saying it like the only wrong part was chief.
Roger glanced at Janey over the top of the cruiser. “Could he really honestly think that’s my name? Is he actually that dumb?”
Janey shrugged, like Anything’s possible—that big wide smile—and he thought, God, I like seeing that, and he knew he was smiling, too, like a dope, thinking about kissing her last night.
Hatchert jerked his head toward the backseat. “Go ahead. Get in. Let’s do this official. Have a nice long sit-down, by the book.”
Janey bent down and told him through the window, “Forget it, Jon. Not our guy. I can vouch for the Coach’s whereabouts at the time.”
“Oh really?” Hatchert said, snidely. “Interesting. All night?”
“From around seven P.M. to around midnight . . .” she said, then added, with no apparent rancor, “. . . you jackass.”
Roger said, “The neighbors all tell me this happened at ten-thirty. Twenty-two-thirty. Right on the money. That true?”
Hatchert turned his head from one to the other, then back again, sizing them both up, acting like he had their numbers. “Cute,” he said. “Real cute.” He put it in gear and pulled out of there, rooster-tailing road dust.
Janey sidled over to her cruiser and eased in. She leaned out her open window and waved him over. Roger obeyed, crossing the short distance to join her. “Next time you use me for an alibi,” she said, cool as Clint behind her mirrored shades, “I expect to get further than first base.”
He leaned in the window, not sure, till he did it, if it was against regulations for her to kiss while on duty.
69
THE POLAROID Von taped to Marita’s bedside lamp at the hospital was one he had Miki take, with him and Santi, arms linked awkwardly, standing in the garden right behind the sign. It was the best shot of the bunch, he decided, with both of them smiling and the pepper plants just showing down at the bottom and the sign clearly legible:
¡PELIGRO! DANGER!
EL JARDÍN DE MARITA
MARITA’S GARDEN
NO MOLESTE.
He knew it wasn’t going to bring her out of her coma, but it did make his son stand up and embrace him and even smile a little, which was a start. “I’ll check back in on you two in a little bit,” Von said, feeling awkward with all this sudden touching. “I need to go talk to your mom now.”
He had the older photo album with him, the one he’d been studying, as well as the family Bible with the family tree written in the front. He brought these things along in case he needed visual aids.
He found his wife out at the picnic tables in a little patch of green in back of the waiting room. He wondered again if she was sneaking cigarettes out there but he had more important things to discuss. He opened the album to the picture of his grandparents, the same one Aunt Sadie had shown him the day of the accident, and he opened the Bible to the family tree and then he told her the crazy Al Capone malarkey Sadie was now claiming. After he’d told it all, he said, “The woman’s nutty as a pecan log, of course, but I thought you should know what she said.”
Carol seemed to be taking this in for a moment, squinting out at the shimmering stand of birch and the black pool of parking lot beyond. “You could get a DNA test. See if you match.”
“Please,” Von said. “I’m not digging anybody up for some stupid test.” He thought of that new sheriff and the holy hairy bitch it had been just putting someone in the ground.
A tired smile flickered across his wife’s gorgeous mouth. “What I meant, of course, was a sample from you and a sample from Sadie. Or you and one of your dad’s sisters. See if it matches. If you really think all that’s necessary.” It sounded like she didn’t think it
was. She studied him for a moment, as if trying to figure something out. “I seriously doubt this would affect us getting the Centennial Farm status,” she said finally.
“I know,” he said, though he wasn’t positive.
“If that’s what you’re concerned about.”
“It isn’t.”
She sat looking at him, waiting, alert. Sometimes, like this, it felt as though they spoke two different languages and she would look at him like this as if he were Lassie, trying to explain that the barn was on fire.
“It doesn’t bother you that I may not—may, okay?—may not—be a vonBushberger?”
She snorted. “I’m not even going to waste my time answering that.” As if changing the subject, she flipped ahead in the album, to the photos of Von as a little boy. There was one of him riding the sprayer like a pony with that migrant, Paulo, grinning alongside, keeping him steady, and it made Carol grin, too, looking at it, and he watched her touch the nail of her thumb to her lips. And then there were photos of Von as a teenager, standing proudly on the tractor seat and then in his baseball uniform, posed on one knee, for the Weneshkeen High Whos, and the two of them, Von and Carol, preposterous in Easter egg colors and mounds of hair, standing stiffly on the front porch, right before the prom. Just looking at that picture, he could feel the pumping of his heart that night, that feeling of What the hell is going to happen next? and that was the last photo in the album. It was all continued in the next one.
They lingered over this last page. Carol touched the plastic over the prom photo, smiling, then closed the album and slid it back to him. “Okay,” she said. “Anything else, or is this family meeting adjourned?”
It sounded familiar, a phrase he’d heard recently, and he felt he sounded a little like Aunt Sadie being sassy when he blurted out, unplanned, “Yeah. If you’re smoking again, knock it off. I don’t like being a permanent fixture at this place.”
“So noted,” she said, and they got up from the table and went back inside and she wrapped herself around him, leaning into the crook of his arm as they walked down the hall. “You always did like Italian,” she murmured, meaning the food. “Hey, maybe this means I secretly had a mysterious Italian lover all these years. Mama mia . . .”
“Quit,” he said, though it did make him smile.
He thought there was something different about the light or the air, something palpable, as they neared Marita’s room. There were voices, for one thing, but there were always voices, hushed churchly voices. A large nurse he didn’t recognize strode out as they entered and he saw now there were more staff in there than usual, several nurses surrounding the bed. He pushed his way in, demanding, “What’s going on? Did anybody call the—?”
He saw Jack’s face first, smiling, then Marita’s, eyes drowsy but open. The two of them, with their heads tipped together on the pillow, looked oddly like a couple who had just had a healthy baby, the wife exhausted, the husband beaming. The thought of this, the little joke played on him by his own brain in that moment, made Von’s cheek twitch. But still, she was awake. And Jack looked alive.
Marita saw them now and tried lamely to reach for the Polaroid taped to the lamp. “I like . . . my garden . . .” she said, faintly, like it was laryngitis she was recovering from or she had just been pulled from a mine shaft where the air was thin.
“There’s another surprise for you, too,” Von told her, “but you have to come home to see it.” He’d cautioned them all not to say a word about the new paint job.
The large woman he didn’t recognize was back at their side. “I’m sorry,” she said, starting to herd them to the door. “The doctor’s going to need to run some tests before she can have visitors, but he’s on his way and—”
“Hey.” Von moved out of her grasp. “Relax. It’s okay. Really. We’re family. Immediate family.” He shifted with Carol out of the way, but like hell if he was leaving the room.
70
TWO DAYS AFTER the big jet-ski abduction on Lake Meenigeesis, Roger Drinkwater got a call from Colonel Glenn Landry, up at Camp Grayling: “You heard I got a new toy?”
Roger said, “I heard there’s a new toy up on Neptune or someplace, is the way I heard it.”
Landry chortled. “Neptune, nothing! I’m having too much fun with this puppy to let any aliens get hold of it.”
“Just don’t play with it down in my county, all right? That’s the deal.”
“I know, I know . . .” Even though he was now going to ride a jet-ski, Landry wasn’t a bad guy, really. Compared to the regular type of loser drawing pay as brass in the Reserves. Normally, it was a bunch of fuck-ups who couldn’t quite cut it, but Landry was better than that. He probably would’ve done fine staying in as a career man in the regular service if only he didn’t have a such a fondness for bluegill. But the fact that Camp Grayling was only few minutes from the Au Sable—one of the finest fly-fishing and canoeing rivers in the country—was far too tempting. “I’m going to have to time-share the thing with this sergeant. But don’t worry, he’s cool.”
“He the one did the rappel?”
“No rappel, man. We grappled the fucker.”
“You are kidding me.” Roger would’ve liked to have seen that. He’d just assumed they dropped a man into the water on a harness line. Someone to tie the cargo line to the jet-ski before they yanked it up.
“Yeah, no one even got wet. We just hooked it. Can you believe that? Not the whole ride back, of course. Jeez, can you imagine: the grappling hook slips, we drop it through some Fudgie’s two-million-dollar A-frame?”
“Bad times,” Roger agreed.
“Yeah, so we set it down in a field once we got over the rise a couple clicks and secured it better. But initially? That was fly-fishing, my friend. Like working the claw game at the Chuck E. Cheese.”
“So it wasn’t exactly by-the-book, huh?”
Landry snorted. “You think there’s a book covers what we did?”
They chuckled together some more for a moment and he knew it was merely the preliminary niceties, the lead-up to getting down to business, but that was okay. He’d agreed to the deal and now he had to pay up. And already he was feeling a little like his old self anyway, his younger self, with all this hoo-rah commando talk. He could do this.
Landry told him then that the demo class he wanted Roger to teach wouldn’t start till late September sometime, but he wanted to make the “shack,” meaning the ordnance depot, available to him beforehand, so that Roger could reacquaint himself with anything he might need. “I know you’ve got some . . . issues . . . with the blasts and all, so I thought I’d give you a free hand to practice a little, so it’s not so . . . whatever . . . for you.”
“So I don’t wince and cringe in front of the men?”
“Exactly,” the colonel said, giving it right back, “so you don’t piss in your pants and cry like a girl.”
And with that, he was right back in it. Back in the ranks, it felt like. Time to suck it up. Drop your cocks and grab your socks, as they used to say. And surprisingly, he felt okay with it. No panic. This was something he’d agreed to do and he would do it, no problem.
71
COURTNEY’S ARMS were folded across her chest and she was staring out toward Sumac Point like if you made a list of things she found interesting around her, Mark would be maybe number thirty-seven. If he was lucky. She didn’t even look at him when she said, “Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. If you’re going to be this huge pain and all.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I won’t be a pain.” Was she breaking up with him? They’d said on Loveline she probably wasn’t really his girlfriend, but this sure sounded like she was breaking up with him and it was maybe the most horrible sound he’d ever heard. “Really,” he said. “Don’t— Please.”
Now she turned and pouted at him for a while, considering. “We’re only in town for like . . . not that much longer, really, so I want to spend my time wisely. My stepbrother’s here, and then there�
��s the Sumac Days Court . . . I just don’t want to waste my time doing stuff that isn’t really, really fun.”
He told her he understood. He told her he could be really, really fun. No problem. Don’t worry.
THERE WASN’T A PLACE MORE OFF-LIMITS than inside the Sumac Point lighthouse. If it were any other girl, he never would even think of going near it. But this was Courtney Banes. And he had to come up with something.
It would be all boarded up. But he remembered the crowbar in the toolbox Walt kept in the main pilothouse. After the difficulties at the bootlegger’s place, he knew to go prepared this time.
COURTNEY WAS ON TOP OF HIM, riding him like he was a horse, and though it had started out as seeming sort of wild—he’d seen movies, of course, knew grown-ups did it that way a lot—it was starting to feel a little weird. Not just the damp stone floor against his back or the wind blowing through the smashed-out windows and up the metal spiral staircase from below or the clicking sounds that might be bats. Weird in a way that had nothing to do with them being up in a lighthouse. He’d never done it quite like this—not that he was about to admit this to Courtney and risk looking like a kid, someone she wouldn’t want to bother with. It was real obvious she had done it this way plenty. And what was kind of not so hot about it, after a couple minutes of this, was the way he started to feel like he wasn’t even there. She was moving like she was hooked up to something, some gizmo she thought she’d try out on her junk because she was bored. He imagined, the way she got going back and forth so fast—Jeez, no way could he move his pelvis that fast, not on a bet!—that she’d practiced this move many, many times before. Maybe not with a guy, but on something—the edge of a couch maybe, the armrest of a big easy chair. He’d heard of girls doing that, beating off that way, straddling something. They talked about it on the radio, on Loveline. That’s really what that show was: kids called up and explained their favorite way to beat off and the doctor told them what they ought to do instead. It was a good show for that sort of information, but they hadn’t scored high points with him with that sucky advice about Courtney; about walking away. That was easier said than done, that kind of advice.
