Lake Overturn

by Vestal McIntyre

  “Sure,” Enrique said. He stood up and rubbed his knees.

  Miriam stopped pacing, removed the pen from her mouth, and held it in the air like a conductor poised to begin a symphony. “The trees have to go,” she said.

  “What?”

  “And the houses.”

  “That’s the best part!”

  “I know,” she said, shaking her head with a pity that seemed more for the trees than for Enrique.

  “Why?”

  “Enrique, it’s Africa. This is going to be a model of a lake in Africa. That village is cute, but it looks like—I don’t know—Hansel and Gretel.”

  “What are we going to replace it with?”

  “Palm trees. Huts.”

  “And where do we get those?”

  “Where’d you get this stuff?”

  “Abby Hall gave it to me. It was her dad’s.”

  Miriam nodded gravely. “We’ll have to construct them ourselves, then. Do you have scissors?”

  They went to the kitchen table and Miriam tore a few sheets from the notebook in her backpack. She folded one into a square, then into a smaller square, then into a triangle. Enrique wondered if she was making an airplane. Then she took the scissors and wrestled a lightning bolt–shaped cut into the folded paper. A snowflake? “What’re you doing?” Enrique asked. Miriam ignored him. This is how she got when she was scrutinizing a blouse at the mall that she wanted to copy. She unfolded the paper and revealed an eight-sided star with tiny tufts of pulp showing at the jags in its spokes. She rolled another sheet into a tight cylinder, then balanced the hub of the star on top. “Palm tree,” she said before the star teetered and fell.

  Enrique’s shoulders collapsed and an ugly look of resignation took over his face.

  “I mean, this looks crappy. We’ll use construction paper and cardboard, even fabric if you want. It’ll be fun. The judges will like it better because we made it. Oh my gosh!” she said, looking at the kitchen clock. “I have to go. My mom’s picking me up at the Circle-K!” She quickly gathered her things. “You’re not worried, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Trust me, Enrique, it’ll be even better than before.”

  Miriam left, and Enrique stayed at the table, leaning crookedly on his elbows, like an old barn on the verge of collapse. The only sound was the rustling of the blinds when the wind sucked at the window. Enrique felt a draft and assumed it was entering the house through the seam down its middle where the men had stuck it together last summer. A month ago Lina had set the thermostat’s dial at sixty-five, then covered it with an X of masking tape to keep Enrique and Jay from turning it up. So Enrique wore his hooded sweatshirt inside. He rolled the sheet of paper back into a cylinder, removed some of the chewed tabs of paper that hung from the snowflake-star, and balanced it on top again. A palm tree twice as tall as the church’s steeple? But, he supposed, they could make them a quarter this size. And for huts, they could cut toilet-paper rolls in half, coat them with glue, and obscure the cardboard behind rows of toothpicks, then make roofs out of dried grass.

  The refrigerator ticked, then hummed. Enrique was about to get up and turn on the radio, when he heard his mother pull up.

  It had been awfully quiet like this all weekend. Saturday night they went to the house at the edge of town—the spooky house with a crumbling chimney and dormers that looked like eyes—where every year they bought their Christmas tree. The floodlit forest had lost its magic for Enrique, and he had encouraged Lina to buy a modest, inexpensive tree. She had nodded sadly. In previous years, he had always pushed for the biggest one she could afford.

  Jay had hurt them both, but it was the moment after he left that haunted them as they hung tinsel on the tree’s sparse branches. I should take better care of her, Enrique thought. He remembered Abby saying, of her father, “He needs happiness more than other people.”

  Despite the Christmas music, the house seemed quiet. The crackling possibility of Jay’s arrival had been removed, and Enrique didn’t miss it, really, but he missed its power. It was Jay’s crashing about the house and the noise of his voice that had jarred Enrique into changing from a boy who played cat’s cradle at the mall to one who observed the workings of junior high from a comfortable distance, like a crow in the rafters. Jay’s long legs lying crossed on the coffee table, the stupid sports he watched on TV, his stinky shorts hanging in the shower—Enrique would no longer have these around to hate.

  Little brother, Jay had called him once.

  Now Enrique waited for his mother to come in the front door and break the silence. When she didn’t, he went to the window and lifted the blind. It was not Lina who had pulled up to the house, but Jay. He was unfastening a strap on the trunk of his Maverick and lifting something out. Enrique went out onto the porch.

  “It’s my old bike,” Jay said, keeping his eyes on the handlebars as he guided the dirt bike up the walkway to the foot of the stairs. “It was at the Van Bekes’. You can have it if you want.”

  Jay had spent the weekend doing chores—he had insisted on it. The Van Bekes’ children and grandchildren were about to descend for Christmas, so there was plenty to do. He had spent Saturday gathering all the sticks that had fallen from the globe willows onto the frosty lawn. Those bothersome trees seemed to grow by splitting in half, then recovering, and they shed more branches than they kept. The gardening gloves Jay wore had stiffened with cold, and his ears came to ache as if they had been boxed. “Jay! Put these on!” Janet had called from the front door, tossing him a hat and earmuffs. Sunday Jay had gone to church for the first time since moving to Lina’s. The members of Eula Lutheran had ruffled his hair and asked about basketball.

  Underneath, Jay felt an ache of remorse. He tried to remember how hard he had squeezed Lina’s arm and pushed Enrique. He hoped he hadn’t really hurt them. It wasn’t their fault, really. They were poor, downtrodden; Liz would judge him harshly for being so cruel. Even now, it was only for Liz that he wanted to do good. What message could Jay send to Lina and Enrique to say he was sorry? Should he call? If he ended up staying here at the Van Bekes’ permanently, it would be nice to show there were no hard feelings.

  Sunday afternoon Jay added a line of colored lights to the Van Bekes’ front fence, thinking it would be a nice sight for their kids to see when they turned onto the lane after the long drive from the Boise Airport. Then he cracked the sticks he had gathered the day before into kindling and put them in the garage to dry. There, under a tarp, he found his old bike.

  Enrique swallowed an expression of excitement that would have sounded girlish and descended the stairs. His pocketed hands formed balls with knobbed ridges at the knuckle like little spines. Jay put down the kickstand and stepped back. Enrique ran his fingers over the handlebars. He squeezed the grip and saw that this caused two rubber pads to clamp onto the wheel. Brakes. On the bikes Enrique had ridden, you worked the pedals backward to brake. He indicated a pair of levers and asked, “Are those the gears?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do they work?”

  Jay shrugged. “Figure it out. It’s not hard.”

  Enrique was grateful, and aware that he should thank Jay. But what would happen if Enrique said nothing, if he stood impassive and froze inside?

  “Merry Christmas,” Jay said, with an unfamiliar, inquisitive look. Then he walked back to his car and said, “Tell Lina I’m sorry.”

  Lina—was that what Jay called her? Enrique had never heard Jay call her anything.

  “THERE’S A MAN here to see you,” one of the other aides said near the end of the day.

  “At the desk?”

  The aide smiled.

  Connie finished dressing the bed. She tucked in the blanket with trembling hands, then walked down the hall past old folks dozing in wheelchairs, to the reception desk. Bill stood when he saw her. His brows were drawn low over his eyes, almost obscuring them.

  “You weren’t in church yesterday,” he said.

  “I wa
sn’t feeling well.”

  “Sorry to hear that. I leave tomorrow. Just thought I’d come by and thank you. Here, I brought you something.” From a pocket inside his jacket he took a small wooden cross attached to a key ring. People in a village near his mission carved these. Connie had seen him give the same gift to pastors in the churches they visited.

  “Thank you.”

  “Well . . .” said Bill, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Bill, in your presentation, why don’t you mention that one of your fellow missionaries is also your fiancée?”

  Bill swallowed. “Because I don’t see how our romantic life is relevant to our work.”

  “Why don’t you include pictures of her in the slide show? There’s pictures of all the other missionaries.”

  “I . . . She is in the pictures.”

  “Yes, one, the group photo, in the back row.”

  “Connie—”

  “Because when I was thinking about it the other day, when I was told you were engaged, I figured, either you didn’t mention it because you’ve lied to her, and you’re not going to marry her”—Connie paused to allow Bill to weakly shake his head—“or because you thought the women in the groups we visited would be more likely to give money to a handsome single man.”

  Bill took a deep breath. “In my prep meetings with the missions board, before I came to Idaho, they suggested that might be the case.”

  “I find it difficult to believe that the missions board would have you lie—”

  “I don’t like that word, Connie.”

  “I don’t like it either,” she hissed, aware that if she spoke as loudly as she wanted to, the other aides would hear. “A Christian shouldn’t like it. A Christian shouldn’t do it. I find it difficult to believe that the missions board would have you lie to women’s groups in order to make a few extra dollars.”

  Bill lifted his chin. “A few dollars, in my line of work, can save a life.”

  Connie raised the back of her left hand to face Bill, and pressed her wedding ring with her thumb. “I still wear it, Bill, twelve years later. When I take it off to do dishes, my fingers don’t fit together anymore. Why? Because I follow the Bible to the letter. God says to follow it to the letter, or not at all. You know the verses. You teach them!”

  “Everything I do,” Bill said with an angry tremor, “is for my mission. Everything. It is the whole of my life. I live for those disadvantaged, uneducated people, Connie.”

  “And for Janey Tanner. Don’t forget her.” Connie couldn’t help it—tears were rising. “Well, I’ll pray for you, Bill. And for those disadvantaged, uneducated people, and for Janey Tanner.” Connie walked around the counter, sat down at the desk, and sheltered her eyes. When she looked up again, Bill was gone. She took his gift and dropped it into the wastebasket.

  THAT NIGHT, ENRIQUE plucked the trees from the model one by one, quietly and without much fuss, so his mother, who was in the kitchen talking on the phone, wouldn’t ask what he was doing. Bits of green-painted newspaper came away with the trees like clumps of grass; these he tore off and rolled into balls. Then he peeled the glue from the trees’ flat bases. He did the same for all the houses, the school, and the church. The rubbery blobs of glue came off clean, sometimes showing reversed impressions of the tiny words that were printed on the bottom of the pieces—the name of the manufacturer and an identifying number. Then Enrique took all the trees and buildings to his bedroom and lined them up on top of his bookshelf. After Christmas vacation he would return them to their boxes, which he had kept in the closet, and give them back to Mr. Hall. At last he would see what this man looked like—how his eyebrows would lift upon finding his mistress’s son here, not to challenge him but to return his gift. A chagrined shadow would pass over the man’s handsome, weathered face before he threw back his shoulders and straightened his tie and said, “Thank you, young man,” accepting the handles of the shopping bag. Then Enrique would jump on his bike and jet off before Mr. Hall could say another word. Mr. Hall would turn, walk down the echoing hall, and open a large, ornately carved door to reveal his special room: a wonderland of cities and forests, clock towers, Ferris wheels, all ticking and whirring mechanically as trains dashed in and out of mountains riddled with tunnels like Swiss cheese.

  Returning the gift would be an experiment, just as this submission to Miriam’s new vision of the model was an experiment. With a little scientific distance, things that would otherwise hurt became, simply, interesting.

  Chapter 17

  Oh my God,” said Penny, Miriam’s cousin who was visiting from Stockton, California, for Christmas, and who apparently didn’t mind taking the Lord’s name in vain. “You’ll never guess what I found over there.” She had just returned from the dark, cobwebby recesses of the cellar to the lighted corner where Enrique and Miriam had set up a pile of bean bags and old, mildew-smelling sofa cushions.

  “What?” Miriam asked.

  Enrique barely looked up from the little papier-mâché palm tree he was painting.

  “Babies’ brains!” From behind her back, Penny presented a Mason jar in which peaches, halved and brownish, swam in syrup.

  Miriam practically screamed with laughter. “Gross!”

  Penny threatened Miriam with the jar and spoke in a wicked-witch voice: “Mmm! Babies’ brains.”

  “Get those away from me!”

  “They’re nutritious.”

  “Gross!”

  “You guys are so immature,” Enrique said. “They’re peaches.”

  Penny’s smile dropped and her head cocked. “No shit, Enrique,” she said.

  Miriam and Enrique both looked down shyly. Bad words still stung them a little.

  Penny wore a miniature bowler hat on the back of her head, but you would never know looking at her face-on. Her bangs, which were bleached white, had been teased into a rat’s nest that sprang up several inches before plunging over one eye. From under the chaos of her hair dangled an earring that resembled a checkerboard from a dollhouse. She turned and disappeared again into the dark part of the cellar.

  “She’s not helping,” Enrique said. The whole reason they had gotten Miriam’s brother to bring the model over here in the bed of his truck was because she had promised a comfortable place to work, and a helpful cousin.

  “She’s entertaining us,” Miriam replied.

  “She’s entertaining you.”

  Miriam just shrugged. She tied a knot around a small bundle of straw. She cut the string, then chewed with the scissors into the straw about three inches under the knot. Then she dug a knuckle into the bunch, forming it into a cone: the roof of a grass hut. “Looks good, huh?” she said, holding it up for Enrique.

  “Oh my God!” Penny cried. She came around the corner and blew the dust off another Mason jar, this one containing stewed tomatoes. “Monkey hearts!”

  “Ew!” Miriam cried.

  “The tape’s over,” Enrique said.

  Penny put down the jar and squatted before the pink portable cassette player she had brought down.

  “Put on Cyndi Lauper,” Miriam said.

  “That poser?”

  In the short time Enrique had spent with Penny, she had used this word countless times. It seemed an odd favorite for the girl who posed more than anyone he had ever met. Only yesterday, in the record store in the mall, she had made a game of picking up albums by the bands she liked, and mimicking the dramatic expressions of the weirdos on the covers—a look of shock, all teeth bared: the Human League; a Satanic scowl, chin tucked, eyes menacing: Siouxsie & the Banshees. Miriam had eaten this up, of course.

  “I thought she was your favorite,” Miriam said.

  “She was never my favorite. She dressed Wave but she didn’t sing Wave.” Apparently New Wave was so entrenched in Penny’s psyche that it was no longer “New.” What a poser!

  Penny’s rebuke silenced Miriam, who returned to her grass hut. Enrique, too, returned to his work, until, suddenly, the lig
hts went out. Miriam emitted a little shriek. Then the music started, and a flashlight illuminated Penny’s face from underneath. “Let me take your hand, I’m shaking like milk . . .” she lip-synched as she lurked across the cellar’s empty space and tossed her head, “turning, turning blue all over the windows and the floors.” She draped herself across the furnace, snarled, rolled her eyes in their sockets. Her eyelids, which caught the light from her flashlight-microphone, fluttered like moth wings. The effect was more that of a silent-movie Dracula than a rock singer. Miriam cheered. Penny picked up her jar of monkey hearts, cupped it like a lover’s head, and sang to it. “The two of us together again. It’s just the same, a stupid game.” Then, during an interlude of synthesizers and bass, Penny lit the jar from below and swirled the water, creating a homemade lava lamp that cast blobby shadows across the puffy insulation that bulged between the ceiling beams like pink tissue between bones.

  When the song ended, Enrique himself rose and turned on the light, worried that Penny would continue to lip-synch the entire record.

  “That was totally awesome!” Miriam cried. “Who was that?”

  “The Cure.”

  “Rad!”

  “Did you like that song, Enrique?” Penny asked, overly solicitous.

  Enrique shrugged, as if the Cure were old hat to him. If Miriam could be ridiculous enough to use one of Penny’s words, he could use Jay’s: “Pretty cool.”

  When they had finished their afternoon’s work, one of the farm hands, who was heading into town anyway, gave Enrique a ride to the Circle-K. As he walked through the trailer park and up Robin Lane, Enrique didn’t notice the dusty old Plymouth, so the first indication that something was amiss was the warmth and the cigarette smell that met him when he opened the door. He stepped in and glanced at the thermostat. The X of tape was gone. His first thought was, Jay turned it up. But, of course, Jay was gone. Lina was in the kitchen, seesawing a large knife back and forth on its blade using the heel of her hand, which was covered in a plastic bag. This was how she diced chilies, and she usually only diced chilies on the weekend.