Lost Lake: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mark Slouka

  Simon Brand was pointing to a piece of butcher paper freighted with smoked salmon. “Have some more, kid,” he was saying to Billy. “Here.” Reaching over, he piled the soft meat on Billy’s bagel. “Anyway, DrayCom’s had quite a year. Did you catch the piece in the Journal last week? Never mind, doesn’t matter. The way I see it, and McCormick agrees, we’re a step away from being able to write our own ticket.”

  “So what’s all this got to do with me, Simon?” said John Finnsmith.

  “Well, that depends.” Simon Brand looked at Billy’s mother, then paused strategically. “How does vice president in charge of concept development at Brand Industries grab you? Say, thirty, thirty-five to start?” Quickly raising his hand like a traffic cop to forestall any questions, he continued: “You don’t have to know anything about the business, John. In fact, your ignorance will be an asset, a plus. I want someone—and please don’t take this the wrong way—who can see things from what we in the business call a need perspective; in other words, someone who might himself benefit from a few words of inspiration. In short, John, someone like you.”

  Sally Finnsmith looked at her husband, as sure of his answer as she’d ever been of anything. John Finnsmith was nudging a plastic lid along the table with his cup, first one way, then back. When he looked up, his eyes met his wife’s. He looked down again.

  “Don’t do it for yourself, John,” Simon went on, sensing an advantage. “Don’t do it for me. Do it for your kids. Or Sally.” He paused. “Look, I don’t want to get personal here, but how long do you two think you can keep camping out like this?” Simon Brand waved his arm, taking in the garter snakes in the goldfish bowl, the canvases against the wall. I mean, this is fine when you’re eighteen or twenty, but …”

  “Can I see your watch, Simon?” Billy said. We’d been staring at it. It was big. Gold.

  “What, this?” He hesitated.

  “You don’t need to see Simon’s watch,” Billy’s father said.

  “Please, Simon?”

  “Did you hear what I …”

  Simon laughed. “Sure, kid, go ahead.”

  It slipped over his wrist like something animate and folded, heavy and warm, in Billy’s palm. The dial gleamed. The hour and the minute hand, slim minarets of tiny glittering stones, were about to meet.

  “… a time you want to pad the edges a little bit,” Simon Brand was saying to Billy’s father. “Buy the kids some new toys. Or Sally a new dress.”

  “We’re fine, Simon,” said Billy’s mother. “Really.”

  Billy’s father, grim, his big forearms on the table, was sucking on the right corner of his lower lip.

  “Sure you are,” said Simon. “I just meant—”

  “When did you have to know by?” said Billy’s father. Mrs. Finnsmith turned, staring.

  Simon was wiping his big white hands in a wad of paper napkins. “Today, amigo.” He stood up—tall, trim, in control. “Look, why don’t you two talk it over a few minutes.” Not looking at me, he waved the watch back with his fingers. “You still using that outhouse out back?” he said, looking around.

  He walked out. Billy’s mother waited, poised, like a sprinter in the blocks. “Have you lost your mind?” she whispered, before the screen, sagging on its tired spring, had moved halfway through its arc.

  “Could be,” said her husband. “Who needs it?”

  “You’re actually going to go through with this? Inspirational publishing?”

  “What choice do I have?” With the thumb of his left hand, Mr. Finnsmith started picking at a callus underneath his right index finger, then looked at his wife. “Maybe he’s right, you know. Maybe it’s time we woke up. I figure in three, maybe four years, we can …”

  “Four years?”

  “Everybody has to pay a price for the things they want.”

  “I thought that was what we were doing.”

  “Look, at some point you stop wasting your time painting pictures nobody wants and you get a regular job.”

  “Jesus, listen to yourself.”

  “I’m tired of listening to myself.” Billy’s father shook his head, then looked at his wife. “I just don’t think I can say no this time, Sally. It’s too good.”

  We sat quietly over the wreckage of bagels and bags, of rudely scraped containers and napkins stiff with cream cheese. It was over. Done. The leg was in the snare; the trapper, club in hand, relieving himself in the bushes before finishing his work. Everything would be different now. Billy’s father would leave on the 7:12, return in the dark after dinner. He’d wear a tie. The margins of our days, like autumn light, would narrow, then fade.

  But it was not to be. Ever unsuspecting, Simon Brand strode confidently through the dappled light to the moonhouse. He opened the door. The wasps growled from under the eaves; the spider bobbed and twitched. He closed the door behind him, knocked it open with his forehead, closed it again. He placed his lean derriere on the plastic seat. And dropped his watch.

  I imagine he snatched at it as it descended all winking through the dim, moted light—and missed. Its slim, minaret hands flashed once, and the watch disappeared into the dark space between his legs. Just like that. The moonhouse gulped and splashed. The spider played a little pizzicato on the web overhead.

  We were still sitting around that table like stunned peasants in some latter-day Bruegel when Simon Brand appeared at the door. He had the confused, inward-looking stare of a somnambulist searching for his bed.

  “It’s not insured,” he said.

  Billy’s father looked up.

  “My watch,” said Simon Brand quietly. “I have to get my watch.”

  For a moment, no one said anything. Mr. Finnsmith was the first to understand. “You don’t want to do that, Simon,” he said, as kindly as I’d ever heard him speak to Simon Brand before.

  Simon Brand smiled a terrible smile. “What do you suggest, John?”

  “If you’ve dropped it where I think you’ve dropped it, I suggest you let it go.”

  “You do, John? You suggest I let it go?” Gliding forward, Simon Brand leaned on the table, sunglasses perched perilously on the rising wave of his hair. “Let me make something perfectly clear. My watch is at the bottom of your outhouse. I want it back. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care who you call. You understand? This isn’t some fucking game we’re playing here. That watch is worth four times the value of everything you own.”

  Billy’s mother looked at her husband.

  Mr. Finnsmith leaned back in his chair. “Was,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Was,” said Billy’s father again. “Was worth four times the value of everything I own.”

  Simon Brand stared, the veins in his neck bulging against his collar.

  Mr. Finnsmith took a sip of cold coffee. “Billy, if you dropped your favorite marble down the outhouse, would you go after it?”

  “Yuck,” said Billy.

  “Lilly?”

  “Gross,” said Lilly.

  John Finnsmith looked up at Simon Brand. “Let it sleep, Simon. There’s not a watch in this world worth a trip down the hopper.”

  But life, they say, is an ordering of priorities, and one way or the other, we pay for the order we choose. Billy’s father would never be a rich man; Simon Brand could never let it sleep. The sum of his life thus far demanded he do what he did next, and if—as he and Billy’s father walked to the shed, where he was to gather the tools for his quest—there was a certain air of disbelief about his features, it was because he recognized himself, in some dim way, as his own judge and jury. He himself would stand on the scaffold; his own hand would spring the trap.

  And that’s how it came to pass that Simon Brand, ashen-faced, found himself standing by the moonhouse with a crowbar, a butterfly net, and twenty feet of half-inch manila. I remember it all: how he pried the lid off the well and propped it against the outside wall, the seat like a lidless eye now staring toward the lake. How he probed the depths with the fra
gile butterfly net like some lepidopterist in hell, hopelessly sweeping that dark, inverted sky. How, finally, abandoning all hope, he … But no. Enough.

  Billy’s father, may it long be remembered, offered to hold the rope. But some things, apparently, a man must do alone. Simon Brand wanted only privacy, and the Finnsmiths magnanimously respected his wishes. But Billy and I, possessed of youth’s natural tolerance for the humiliation of others, observed all through a knothole in the outhouse wall.

  Simon Brand never found his watch. He passed from our lives. He vanished like a vision of the night.

  Billy’s father’s luck turned. Little Bean started sleeping. The sun of self-sufficiency—if not fortune, exactly—shone again. But Billy and I, like dreamers who wake to remember not so much the details as the import of their dreams, would remember Simon Brand for some time to come. We basked, we sang, we avoided all manner of work that might lead to lucre—and whenever the sleep-deprived sons of brave Odysseus appeared on our horizon, we chained ourselves to the rocks of our world to resist their siren song.

  equinox

  Balance. Symmetry. The bubble at plumb. The tide, poised between ebb and flow. All around us the world conspires against it: the level moves; the tide churns; happiness dies. Only rarely, in courts beyond our knowing (where pleas are heard and bargains struck), do the scales hover and slow, and momentarily come to rest.

  I. Ed Sipka

  Ed Sipka broke off a piece of rye bread and carefully wiped the chili out of his bowl. He liked the broad, white streaks, like brush strokes, that appeared as he cleaned the juice away. Though he never realized it, he always cleaned his bowl the same way, wiping toward himself in neat semicircles, first the right side, then the left, dropping down through the sedimentary strata of meat and beans and gravy. Tilting back in his chair, he patted his brown beard carefully, then tossed the napkin on the table.

  “Goddamn it, Miss Mary, you do make some serious chili,” he said to his wife, who had collected their bowls and was carrying them into the kitchen.

  “You tryin’ to flatter me, Mr. Ed?” she called back.

  “Could be.”

  “And what might you be hopin’ to get, sir, flatterin’ my chili that way?”

  Ed Sipka turned around in his chair. “Depends,” he said. “Whatcha got?”

  Mary Sipka returned to the room with two cups of coffee. “I think we got about half an hour to kill before the baby’s sleepin’. Think you can hold out that long?”

  Ed Sipka looked out past his own reflection into the September dark. A warm, gusty wind was picking up, tossing the trees by the road. Upstairs he could hear the big maple scratching like a claw against the shingles. “Is the door to the hallway closed?”

  His wife nodded. “It won’t wake him up.”

  Outside, a large gust shocked the trees and quickly subsided. Ed Sipka frowned. “I should have trimmed it back when I had the chance.”

  Half an hour later Ricky opened the door, cried, “Honey, I’m home,” and abruptly disappeared. The light in the kitchen and the lamp on the end table went out. Ricky’s broad-voweled Havana English, sucked into a point of blue light, lingered momentarily, then winked into darkness. For a moment, Ed and Mary sat next to each other on the worn, brown couch.

  “Well, shit,” said Ed Sipka, with feeling. “I guess I’ll get the—”

  At that moment two things happened. In the darkness, the phone rang. Then the electricity returned. The lights switched on, the room leaped into view. Mary Sipka turned down the volume on the television. Picking up the receiver, Ed Sipka glanced at the set. Ricky, out cold, was being carried to the sofa by Lucy and Ethel and Fred. Without the soundtrack, the scene seemed strangely desperate, Lucy’s face a tragic mask.

  “Yeah,” he said into the phone. “Sure. Okay. Twenty minutes.” He hung up. “Shit,” he said again, quietly this time.

  Mary Sipka watched her husband pull a pair of boots and a heavy yellow-and-gray rubberized coat out of the hallway closet.

  “What kind of trouble?” she asked, quietly.

  “Branch in the lines. Billy says it’s puttin’ on quite a show.” A strong gust pounded against the window, followed by a sound like the scattering of small pebbles against the panes. It was starting to rain. Upstairs, like a persistent animal locked out of its home, the claw scratched and scraped against the bedroom wall.

  “So why can’t the regular crew take care of it?” said Mary Sipka.

  Her husband finished lacing his boots and stood up. “They’re probably short this week. Ronnie’s at his brother’s wedding up in Albany, Miller’s sick …” He shrugged. “Just one of those things.”

  Slipping into his coat, he noticed the look on her face and took her in his arms, wrapping the coat around them both. She was a small woman, and the top of her head barely reached his collarbone. He breathed in the good, clean smell of her hair, the smell he knew from their thousand nights together, from the times he’d wake in the dark, the two of them tangled together, and just lie there, quietly breathing her in. “Wait up for me,” he said. “Maybe we can still have some time for ourselves before the baby wakes up.”

  “I will,” she said.

  Before he reached the door, after he’d gone upstairs and (holding back his coat to keep it from brushing forward) leaned over the crib and kissed the humid little cheek next to the pacifier, she said, “Be careful. Don’t get bit.”

  “I will,” he said, as always. “I won’t.”

  It was raining hard. In the small backyard, a circular mud bath marked the place where the little plastic pool they’d bought that summer had killed the grass. He sat for a moment in the dark cab of his pickup, listening to the hammering on the roof, then turned on the ignition and bumped down the driveway. He didn’t think to look back.

  Slick with leaves brought down before their season, the Old Croton Road looked like a beach after a storm tide, littered with debris. Ed Sipka drove carefully, veering into the opposite lane to go around the bigger branches, peering through the windshield that instantly turned opaque as bathroom glass after every hapless swipe of the blades. Around a curve a mile from town, in a densely wooded section across the road from a large Victorian with a wraparound porch, he found the trouble. In the glare of the spotlights, with the rain coming down in long, pale streaks and the wind gusting wildly, the scene appeared strangely cinematic, like a hand with a dagger suddenly illuminated by a bolt of lightning. The branch, he now saw, was actually the limb of an oak fully half again as long as a school bus. At its fractured base, where it had splintered into pale, jagged points, it was easily three feet in diameter. Thirty feet farther up and out, its branches were thrashing in the lines. A massive shower of sparks, as from a welder’s flame, rose and fell with every gust, raining down to the ground far below. Off to the side he could see McCourt, huddled small under the hood of his raincoat. Ed Sipka took a last sip of coffee from the cup he’d wedged between the hand brake and the seat. Then he stepped into the rain.

  It was not that he minded being the one to go up, though he’d always preferred going up the poles with the belt and the hooks to hacking around in a hydraulic-powered bucket. Nor did he particularly mind working with the big saw; he’d done it before, more than once, and, when all was said and done, better him at six-four than Ronnie or one of the others. Nor, finally, did the weather trouble him too much. Aside from having to watch his footing on the wet metal floor and keeping his eye on branches whipped around by the wind, there wasn’t much to worry about.

  No, what troubled him, he had to admit, was the sheer mass of that trunk, the angle of the break, even the sloping shoulder of the road along which the hydraulic rig was parked. That and the unavoidable fact that these were big lines: that 25,000 volts, humming like some huge, easily agitated hive, surged through them every moment of the day and night, and that this hive, having been disturbed at its labors an hour earlier, was angry now. He realized this kind of thinking didn’t make sense: he’d worked on
the lines before, dozens of times, and in conditions no better than this; what was more, this time, with only a little cutting back to do, he wouldn’t even have to get all that close to them. A fairly straightforward, up-and-down job. Still, as the bucket jolted and he began to rise, squinting up through the rain, he reminded himself, like an experienced drunk walking himself home, to take it slow. “Easy now, asshole,” he said, ducking the dripping branches like a prizefighter. One thing at a time.” And then, for no particular reason, feeling foolish: “Don’t get bit.” Leaning the saw against the rail, he kicked it up, pruned off some of the smaller branches in his way, and went to work.

  Four minutes later, according to weather reports issued the next day, the wind gusted to a high of fifty-three miles an hour, and the limb began to go. Hearing the crackling, like gunshots, beneath him, feeling the bucket under his feet start to tilt, slowly, inexorably, as though he were standing in the crow’s nest of a foundering ship, Ed Sipka only had time to heave the useless saw away from him before a sprung branch caught him hard across the face and the bucket pitched violently down, then forward into the humming dark. Instinctively reaching out, hoping to grab a branch before the rig went off the embankment, Ed Sipka’s hands closed not on wood but wire, and long before his big, charred body hit the ground, the furious hive had shot him through and thundered on, instantly stopping his heart.

  II. Nina Mazzola

  “Touch that I’ll kill you.”

  “You better not.”

  “Hey!” yelled Paul Mazzola from the kitchen. “Knock it off, you two. Anyway, I saw Dan Colby over at the store the other day, and he said—”

  “Well, I will.”

  “I’ll bite you. I’ll hit you with a—”

  “Hey!” yelled Paul Mazzola again. “I said knock it off. And go wash your hands, it’s almost time for dinner. Is he eating this stuff?” he said to his wife, scooping a cupful of suspiciously red-colored dogfood into a heavy, mustard-yellow bowl under the sink.