Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  After his mom and Toby have been reprimanded, Lane grabs his shoes and storms out of the house, slamming the front door behind him. “Don’t expect your ten bucks back either, Toby.” He marches down the walkway.

  He makes it to the pay phone by the liquor store, and before he knows it, he’s placing another collect call to Mia. He knows better than to use his name at this point, so he tells the operator he is Tad, Mia’s autistic cousin who lives in a group home in Connecticut. He’s been saving this one for a special occasion.

  She answers the call. “Tad? Everything OK, sweetie? Where are you?”

  Lane is silent. He hasn’t thought about the next step. How to manage the pivot.

  “Taddy? Are you there?”

  He imagines her in their apartment, shouldering a nice Nokia to her ear and scanning the floor-to-ceiling cherrywood bookcases in the living room. Shelves he was busy filling out with novels he’d been buying from the Strand that he hadn’t had the chance to read yet.

  “Lane? Is that you?”

  He doesn’t answer. He’s trying not to cry or, worse, stutter.

  “I’m—I can’t talk to you.” She tries to maintain control of her voice. “My dad, he knows about all the collect calls. He wants me to meet with a lawyer.”

  Lane feels a trembling sensation in his ribs. Shit. Here comes the coronary. He’s always known it would get him. It was a matter of when. He’s almost in visual range of the used car lot where his pops met the same fate. His chest pulses and rattles. Then the feeling stops. All feeling stops. His vision starts to dim.

  He falls forward against the pay phone.

  Am I dead? he wonders, grasping at his own torso, searching for something tangible, some proof of life. His hand finds its way to the hard edges of Nina’s pager in the left chest pocket of his faux fur–collared Armani Exchange jacket.

  Of course, he knew it was the pager all along. It’s the hangover making him jittery, that’s all.

  “You there, Lane? I told my dad I’m not ready for that,” Mia continues. “But I promised I wouldn’t answer any more calls. To calm my nerves, you know? Before any decisions . . . I’m sorry,” she says. He is sure he hears just enough intentional sensitivity to let him know that she still has feelings for him.

  “Buy me a ticket. I’ll pay you back. I’ll come to the apartment and we can talk about this. I know this’d be different if you talk to me in person. Don’t talk to a lawyer until we can speak face-to-face. Please. Please, Mia.”

  There’s no answer.

  “Mia?”

  The line clicks over to a dial tone. She disconnected the call after saying she was sorry.

  He punches the pay phone as hard as he can. He imagines the number pad on the phone as Mia’s dad’s stupid, angular WASPy face, and he hits it again and again until blood streams down the back of his fist.

  Lane goes through the coins at the bottom of his pocket. He scrounges a dime and three nickels, and calls the number on the pager.

  FIVE

  A PASTEL-COLORED WOLF LEAPS ATOP a brick house and enters the chimney.

  Lane gets back to murdering the pronunciation of the children’s book in Spanish: “Des-cen—Des-cen-dee-o por el . . . No, damn, it’s la—la chi—chi-mee-nuh.”

  He glances at Jordan, Nina’s two-year-old, in the back seat of the parked Mercedes. The kid doesn’t seem to be listening. He’s hypnotized by the passing traffic on Lake City Way, his eyelids at half-mast. Lane’s not even sure if the little guy talks.

  “Don’t you have anything in English?” Lane asks Nina as she returns to the car with fingernail clippers and a sugar-free Red Bull she procured from the Shell station.

  “My wife, she won’t let me. It’s about Jordan’s cultural whatever.” She sets about clipping any visible white parts off her nails.

  “Chimenea,” Jordan says without a hint of an accent.

  “Good job, honey. Mommy and Momma are so proud of you.” Nina grins and then turns to Lane. “My wife read me this thing about how bilingual children are high achievers.”

  The wolf drops down the chimney into a cauldron of boiling water. The Three Little Pigs slam closed the lid and climb atop, as the wolf struggles to escape.

  On the next page, a bit of limp, furry tail sticks out from under the lid. The pigs celebrate.

  “Jesus.” Lane slams shut the book, shielding Jordan from the grizzly denouement. “I remember the English version as a bit more, I dunno, kid-friendly.”

  “Babar’s got a murder and an incestuous marriage. All in the first chapter. But I bet they’ve sanitized that now too ’cause everything’s so vanilla these days that—” Nina sits up straight. “Wait. There she is.” She grabs a small pair of binoculars from under the seat and puts them to her eyes. “Yep, that’s her. For sure.” She hands the binoculars to Lane.

  He watches through the windshield of the Mercedes as a woman, a few years younger than him, emerges from a dirt trail and climbs—careful not to rip her pants or lose the cigarette between her lips—over the guardrail onto the far side of Lake City Way. Lane can’t make out where the path leads down through the maple trees and thicket, but he knows the encampment of busted mobile homes, blue tarpaulin roofs and makeshift plywood walls known as the University Trailer Park infests much of the ravine below.

  “That’s the chick?”

  “Inez,” she whispers. “The little crack baby herself.”

  From what he can see, the woman’s skin is darker, like Jordan’s, and her hair is jet-black, stretched so tight into a ponytail that it seems to peel back her eyelids. And it is all secured in place with a shellacking of hairspray. Her clothes look to be black polyester and fake patent leather trimmed with white stitching: a desperate attempt at work casual by someone who gets her sense of sophistication through primetime network dramas. She doesn’t strike Lane as the vicious street junkie Nina made her out to be. In another world, another dimension, he might even say that she’s attractive. Or, at least, his type, if no one else knew about it.

  He imagines the pungency of her discount-aisle perfume. The opacity of her overapplied foundation makeup. As she starts to walk down the sidewalk, Lane watches how her ass curves into her upper thigh. She is slender through the torso, a bit thicker though the legs. Impressive for someone he assumes to be surviving off of boiled hot dogs, Newports and Safeway Select. Maybe it’s due to her youth. Maybe it’s the meth. But seeing where she lives, he knows all he really needs to know.

  Nina fires up the engine and noses the car out of the Shell station parking lot. As Inez chucks her cigarette on the sidewalk and breaks into a sprint, Nina whips the Mercedes across four lanes of Lake City Way traffic. Lane drops the binoculars to the floor and braces both palms on the dash.

  Inez is wearing low heels, and her patent-leather handbag swings with each stride, hitting her in the back. She doesn’t run like someone who has ever run for fitness or because she wants to run. She runs out of pure, panicked necessity.

  The 72 Metro rounds the bend, decelerating for the stop ahead. Nina falls into place behind the bus. Inez catches the 72 as it starts to pull away again.

  “Keep your eyes on her.” Nina finishes a smoke, flicking it out the open window. “Use the binoculars. That’s what they’re made for. Come on, man.”

  Lane digs around on the floor, searching for the binoculars. They must have slid back under the seat once the car accelerated. “I can see her fine. No worries. Really.”

  “And to think: we were this close to signing the paperwork.” Nina grinds together her thumb and index finger. “This close to being done with her trashy Mexican ass.”

  Nina tails the bus, winding north along Lake City Way. They drive past the Seven Seas, the Shanty Tavern, the Italian Spaghetti House, Bill Pierre Ford, the Frigate, the Rimrock, Bakers candy store, the Value Village: the places that mark the borders of the only world Lane knew for so long. The one he now wants to forget.

  “I mean, look at this.” Nina motions at Jordan�
��s elaborate car seat, one that would be at home in a NASA cockpit. “You think she can even afford bus fare for him? How about health insurance? Or college?”

  “Here we go,” Lane warns as Inez pulls the stop cord and gets up from her seat. Nina veers to the side of the road with half a block to spare.

  “I think it’s better if you talk to her yourself,” he offers. “I can still help. You know, keep an eye on your kid and all. Like you said: babysitter no-showed; wife’s at a meditation retreat.”

  “No direct interaction. That’d blow our whole case.”

  Inez jumps off the bus and resumes running, her bag still whacking her in the back.

  “Talk to her. Get to know her a bit. Become part of her life.” Nina double-checks that Jordan is asleep and continues, “All she wants is money. Money from us. Money from welfare. Money either way. And I’m gonna give her what she wants. But you have to make sure it’s her idea. It’s gotta be her asking, not me offering. You follow me?”

  “I’ve got some legal complications that—”

  “Do it for my little Jordan. Make sure he isn’t a pawn in some scheme by the druggie loser who never did anything more for him than get barebacked in a mobile home.”

  “Listen, I’ve already dedicated my career to helping those who—”

  “So, do it for Jordan. And three thousand. Cash.”

  A terse, exaggerated laugh bursts from somewhere inside of him, forcing out white flecks of spittle that hit the dashboard before he can tamp it down and redirect his attention to his split knuckles. He turns his hand over and over, following the contours of the ragged flesh. “Dollars?”

  Nina and Lane watch as Inez affixes a name badge to her shirt while jogging through the front doors of the Fred Meyer superstore.

  “C’mon. I’ll throw in the iPod. That’s my last offer before I go with Lonnie’s other friend. The one with the forehead acne,” she says.

  Lane looks at the red Fred Meyer billboard and drops his head into his hands.

  Nina lights a smoke and opens her Red Bull in a single motion. “Let me tell you something: when people’re trying to fuck you over, sometimes you’ve gotta be like those piggies. You gotta make wolf soup.”

  She exhales smoke into the car. “Honestly, Lane . . . today is not the day to be a pussy.”

  SIX

  “YOU LOOKING FOR SOMETHING?” INEZ says as he passes the end of the aisle.

  Lane opens his eyes wide, scavenging for some sense of surprise. He taps his chest with two fingers and mouths, “Me?” But he doesn’t stop walking.

  “Yeah, you. C’mere.” She fluffs a purple poly-cotton and rayon-blend pillow, the kind with attached bolster arms, and shoves it back on the middle shelf in the Home Essentials section. The air is sticky with clearance-priced Green Apple, Warm Breeze and Chocolate Fusion scented house candles fatter than soup cans.

  The moment he starts sweating, Lane can smell his own body odor. He’s sure that Toby’s Old Spice is the culprit. It must be infected with some sort of noxious white trash bacterium. Lane makes a mental note to tell Toby to get a new deodorant as soon as he gets home. That said, he’s not sure he likes the fact that Toby feels comfortable enough to keep toiletries at his mom’s house.

  He takes as few steps as possible toward Inez and nods to the purple pillow and its orange-corduroy brethren. “Yeah, I was wondering, uh, what do you call those things?”

  “These? I dunno. A TV-watching pillow?” She smooths back the sides of her hair into the ponytail.

  “That’s funny. I always thought they were called reading pillows.”

  Due to her lack of reaction, Lane deduces that she must not have heard him.

  “My mom, she used to call them a lazy husband,” he tries while surveying her chewed nails, torn cuticles and a couple of hot-Bic smiley scars between her index finger and thumb. “But I bet the real name is like a bed rest pillow.”

  Lane realizes he’s still wearing his wedding ring and slides his hands into his back pockets.

  “Wow. Really?” She leans toward him. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah?” he inches closer, arms still behind his back.

  “The fuck are you up to, dude?”

  LANE NEVER TOLD MIA THAT he worked at the Fred Meyer deli, even though he was still there full-time when they met. “I dedicate my time to working with disadvantaged youth” is what he explained to her. And it was true, except the disadvantaged youth were he and his coworkers.

  Mia never set foot in Lake City. During daylight, anyway. Lane made sure of that. It was one thing to tell her stories about where he was from. To describe his youth as “Algeresque” or “hardscrabble” and swaddle his bootstrapping tales in a layer of authenticity and grit. It was quite another thing for her to witness him in his indigenous habitat, especially as he’d always felt himself a non-native species marooned there from more cosmopolitan climes.

  Lane knows what she would have thought. Lake City looks like nothing more than a strip of downtrodden and often sleazy businesses adrift in a sea of cracked parking lots and brambles. And although he didn’t want the responsibility of explaining it to her—of defending a place he’d hoped never to see again—he knew Lake City was Lake City for a reason.

  He knew that the day the Volstead Act was passed in 1919, there was but a single commercial business, a family-owned general store, on the whole length of the road. By 1922, it had been rechristened as “Victory Way.” And this first cement highway in the United States was teeming with roadhouses named the Plantation, the Jungle Temple, the French Inn and Joe’s Hot Lunches, where they offered no lunch, only booze, cards and female companionship. Tusco’s was housed in a barn and owned by a doctor who served up both drinks and abortions.

  Seattle absorbed Lake City in the mid ’50s. Like protomammals feasting on fallen dinosaurs, smaller taverns overtook the roadhouses. The last of the old guard, the Jolly Roger, was torched Lane’s freshman year of high school and became a Shell station. Frank Colacurcio Sr., or Frank Sr. as they called him, built a strip club empire up and down Lake City Way from Rick’s to the group houses where his strippers lived to Talents West where their books were kept. But not much else changed.

  Lane does remember the construction of a large blue castle across the street from Fred Meyer when he was about eight years old. As they tacked on the prefab crenellations, he dreamt that it would be the Lake City outpost of Enchanted Village or maybe an indoor waterslide park like they had up on Aurora. In the end, it became a windowless self-storage block. One of dozens to follow. That was progress for Lake City: as a receptacle for the crap that Seattle didn’t want but couldn’t quite bring itself to throw away. That’s the last time Lane would ever get his hopes up about the neighborhood.

  By the end of the dot-com boom, the rest of Seattle had cut its hair and gotten a job. But Lake City was the mistress that grown-up Seattle kept around from its younger, untamed years. The one with electric-blue eyeliner and a missing incisor. The one Seattle would never introduce to its friends, but also the one who is always there when it needs to drink a forty and get a hand job in a parked car and not have to discuss what it all means.

  “WHAT AM I UP TO?” Lane fires back at Inez. “I’m shopping for Home Essentials. Jesus, lady.”

  Inez crosses herself in what Lane figures is the direction of the Virgen de Guadalupe votives. “I seen you pass by here three times. Looking all weird ’n’ shit. You got something in your jacket?”

  “In my jacket?”

  “Yeah, you gaffle something?”

  “You accusing me of shoplifting?”

  She shrugs, “Go over to the 99 Cent Store or Value Village. But here, it’s gonna be my ass and I’m already—”

  “I’m a—Do I look like a shoplifter to you?”

  “Kinda. Yeah.”

  “Listen, what’s your name?” He makes a point of searching for her name tag. “Listen, Inez, I can’t believe you’d—”

  The clap of a hand a
cross Lane’s shoulders forces him to pause and regain his breath before turning around.

  “What up, Lame-o?”

  Once Lane turns, his tongue clutches in his throat.

  “It’s me. Tom. Tommy Tucker the Mommyfucker.” The man fingers his name tag and takes a long swill from a can of orange Crush. “C’mon, brainiac. You don’t recognize me outside the deli?”

  Tom was, in fact, unmistakable with his faithful preservation of an ’80s hustler motif: a feathered butt-cut parted down the middle, caressing the tops of his ears. Throw in a bulletproof black mustache and a copious chest pelt surmounting his open collar and he added up to a kind of a third-tier gentile Harry Reems. Or, more precisely, the former home run king of the grocery union softball league. A total “plab,” as they used to call the look in high school.

  “Tom. Hey.” Lane struggles to get the words out. “I was planning to come over to the deli.”

  “So, how’s it hangin’, guy?”

  “Not really sure. How’s it, uh, hanging with you?”

  “Long and loose and fulla juice.” Tom laughs as if he didn’t say this whenever given the opportunity. “Man, how long were you gone? A week? Who woulda thought? I can’t wait to tell everybody you’re back.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m—”

  “You know this dude?” Inez asks Tom.

  “The new chick sweating you, Lame-o?” Tom tracks Inez from her chest down, craning his neck to try to evaluate her rear.

  Lane catches himself checking out her body too and then redirects his eyes. “We’re cool. We’re just talking.”

  “Just talking . . .” Inez trails off.

  “Carefula this guy, Maria,” Tom says. “He don’t look like much, but he gets chicks’ heads spinning with all his big words.”

  “My name’s not Maria,” she says as she retreats to the pillows.