Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  Lane gives a cursory—if not altogether fake—glance in the freezer. “Nope. Not here.”

  “I saw one back there. Bottom of the roller cart,” the clerk shouts from the front.

  Lane finds the loaf on the cart, but it’s room temperature. Doesn’t the kid know Havarti needs to be frozen in order to cut on a slicer? That’s Superstore Deli 101. When Lane picks it up, his thumb leaves an indentation in the side. The blade would chew up the ends and require at least a half-dozen passes before he could consider getting a slice of appropriate sandwich thickness. By then, the gauge plate would be so gummed up that nothing would get through. Even if he could cut a clean slice, he’d have to delay his break in order to get the slicer ready again for the coming lunch rush.

  “Can you come up on counter and I’ll look?” the kid tries again.

  Lane refuses to answer.

  “Biz?”

  Lane grabs the bleach rag and wipes the brown roast beef blood juice off his apron as he walks out from the back room. Best to handle this directly with the customer: tell him there’s none left, time to settle for some regular, standard, old-fashioned Havarti and—with some luck—the bus’ll get you back to your recliner in time for the second half of The Price Is Right. It took a lot of maneuvering for Lane to get his break from 10:45 to 11:00, right when he needs it. Whether or not there’s a culinary herb in some loser’s cheese is not going to screw that up.

  “Listen.” He approaches the counter. “We don’t—” Shit. He stares right at Robbie. Robbie who he’s known since the third grade. One of the more hilarious of the hilarious idiots. Blazed as usual, Robbie battles to add one more square onto the zigzagging, pixelated snake on his phone screen before looking up.

  Lane’s already thrown himself to the floor, rolling behind the lowboy as if he’d just seen a man in a trench coat stroll into the store and rack the pump action on a shotgun.

  “You OK?” the clerk calls out.

  Lane military-crawls into the back room.

  “Yo, you OK? . . . You slip?”

  Lane crouches against the wall, waiting for Robbie to shout his name, to clown the hell out of him for being back in Lake City, back in the deli. No further than when they were kids: but in today’s depressing version, Lane is supplying the cheese for Robbie’s sandwich. Aside from the odd insurance scam, intermittent landscaping gigs and overcharging friends for gas money, Robbie doesn’t even work. He used to brag to Lane that he didn’t read a single book or do a night of homework in high school.

  “Fucking why, Mia?” Lane asks the dropdown ceiling panels. “Why couldn’t we work through this together?” Lane braces for Robbie’s fusillade. But it doesn’t come.

  “I need two or three slices of shaved ham,” a lady’s voice calls from the counter.

  “Can I get some help up front then? I’ll come back and look for the cheese,” the clerk insists. “Biz?”

  “Wait a minute.” Lane knocks his voice down an octave, like he used to do when calling into high school as his (already departed) father to get a waiver from gym classes. He races to the wall phone and hits 3 for the customer service desk.

  Moments later, a voice crackles over the store paging system. “Hello, Fred Meyer customers. Would the owner of the red 1988 Chevrolet Z24 please come to the parking lot? Immediately. Your parking brake is off and the car is rolling. Again, that’s a red 1988 Chevy Z24.”

  Lane watches fifteen seconds tick off the clock and then peeks his head around the corner. Robbie is gone, his sandwich open and cheeseless on the bar. The wall clock reads 10:51.

  On his way out of the deli, Lane heaves the whole loaf of dill Havarti on the cutting board next to the sandwich.

  He bags and tosses a handful of ham to the woman. She watches him grab it from the presliced stack in the front case. “Is that shaved?” she asks, spinning around as he jogs from behind the counter to the aisle. “I like it rather thin.”

  “Yeah. Sure, lady. Of course.”

  “Hey, I need you here,” the deli clerk shouts after him.

  Lane heads toward the upstairs break room. “UFCW Local 367 mandate. Nothing I can do, man.”

  NINE

  LANE GIVES HIMSELF A FEW quick slaps on the cheeks, straightens into a power pose he learned from Sage, Mia’s Reiki and Pilates instructor cum nutrition and life coach, and stares at the door into the break room.

  He tries to visualize how he will approach Inez but ends up thinking of sitting on Central Park’s Great Lawn on the first day of September. His head rests in Mia’s lap. The worst of the humidity has passed, but it is still seventy-three degrees and he’s in short sleeves and flip-flops. She passes her hands through his hair. Runs a finger around his brow and ears. They smoke a joint of Sour Diesel from her delivery guy and debate whether they should go walk around the Museum of Natural History or take a cab out to Jackson Heights to hit up their favorite Tamil restaurant for a long lunch.

  They’re already discussing summer break and where they’ll travel. Mia prepaid his whole year’s tuition on the Amex card, which means a shit-ton of frequent-flier miles. Lisbon and Berlin have been discussed. Amsterdam is always up there. Maybe a service project in someplace like Bolivia or Mozambique. They speak about “flexibility” and “realistic impact” to be sure it’s understood that neither wants the service part to be too time-consuming or, God forbid, too depressing.

  He focuses on the optimism, the fulfillment he felt that day.

  Lane takes a final deep breath from his abdomen, like Sage showed him. He slouches out of his power pose and pushes through the break room door to find Inez sitting by herself at a far table by the microwave. Considering how many employees here have Washington State Food Handler Permits, Lane wonders how the microwave area could be so defiled with the encrusted remnants of Marie Callender’s chicken potpies and Lynn Wilson’s frozen burritos.

  Inez holds her head up with one hand and reads the comics in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Marmaduke. The Family Circus. All that. She picks through a box of turkey-and-cheddar Lunchables with the other hand.

  He walks up to her, an unopened pack of Parliaments conspicuous in his hand. He’d considered trying to pass off her own pack of smokes back on her but decided that the risk outweighed the cost of new ones, no matter how little cash he had. “Can I join you?”

  She surveys the room. Three other employees are eating in silence at their own tables. “Why?”

  “I think you got the wrong impression of me the other day.”

  She shakes her head: no recognition.

  “Remember? The TV pillow?”

  “Oh yeah, you’re boyfriends with Tommy the Motherfucker.” The other employees in the room shrink at her blasphemy.

  “Mommyfucker,” Lane manages to keep a straight face. “He’s very specific about that.”

  She stands up and tosses the Lunchables box into a garbage can.

  “Want to join me for a cigarette?” he asks. “You still got like six minutes.”

  She cocks her head to the side.

  “. . . I’m guessing. The break times, they’re pretty much standardized.”

  “Got my own,” she says as she walks out the door and into the hallway with the jackets.

  He unwraps the Parliaments, waits until he hears her start cursing, and then follows after her. “C’mon. I know the best outdoor spot to stay outta the rain.”

  THE FRED MEYER IS THE lone large commercial establishment Lane ever visited (or remembers visiting) until he was a teenager. Sure, it used to be located in a smaller building across the parking lot back in the day. And they didn’t sell much in the way of groceries or deli meats then. The store was on its trajectory from starting out as a horse-drawn coffee cart for Oregon lumber camps in 1909 to pioneering the concept of one-stop shopping in 1933 through becoming an independent Pacific Northwest regional superstore to the point it was bought out by Kroger while Lane was working there in 1998. These days, the Lake City store has the honor of having the hig
hest shoplifting rate of any company’s locations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. That and a nonpareil selection of Mad Dog 20/20. They even stock the elusive Lightning Creek flavor.

  Although Lane doesn’t smoke, he’s known about the secret spot for years. It’s little more than a few feet of extra roof hanging over the back edge of the second-floor, open-air parking lot. The fact that you have to squeeze behind rows of stacked shopping carts and a massive HVAC output to get there is what makes it worth visiting. There’s no chance a customer or a nonsmoking manager would wander back by accident.

  There’s a view north up the length of Lake City Way toward the city limit. Lane and Inez are shielded from the rain but not from a biting wind that drops down the same corridor from British Columbia and, he imagines, Alaska before it.

  The cement floor is spotted with black remnants of chewing gum, red cellophane pull strings and a few dozen butts in a Folgers can. An overturned milk crate serves as a coffee table for tattered back issues of People and Stuff. The best part is the wall, which always features new Sharpie murals including what looks to be a man getting head from a cat—Garfield?—with the title UPPER-CLASS LAKE CITY.

  Inez admires the artwork. “This place should be called Shit City. Or Used Car Dealership and Strip Club City.”

  Lane traces a finger along the horizon and riffs to her about how the land was carved out by the Vashon glacier some fifteen thousand years ago. How the primeval forest, once dominated by Douglas fir, bison and mastodon, is now the wet pavement that melds in the distance with the graphite sky. How the factory that shipped bricks the length of Lake Washington to rebuild much of downtown after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 was the first non-logging or farming business in the area. How railroad workers hung a sign that read LAKE at the train platform near the brickyard and the region earned its name.

  He looks at her from the side of his eye.

  Inez focuses on smoking. She does it with a certain rough grace, as if she knows he’s paying attention.

  Perhaps he’s made too cerebral a gambit. Yes, he should have known better. Inez is no Mia. He yanks his Nokia out of his pocket and spins it around in his hand a few times. He checks for incoming texts. To show her the kind of world to which he has access.

  His chest gets tight. It’s hard for Lane to tell if he is nervous or cold. He jams his phone and hands into his pockets and bounces on the balls of his feet.

  “You all right, dude?” she asks.

  “Me, yeah. Of course.”

  She pulls her hair back with one hand. He focuses on the faint whorl of dark peach fuzz on the side of her neck. He thinks of the indigenous influences in Mexico and the effects of racial miscegenation, how conversion-driven Spanish colonization differed from the British sense of order, bloodlines and racial purity. He read Open Veins of Latin America in a postcolonialism course earlier in the semester. He’s tempted to bring up the book but is certain she’s never heard of Galeano.

  “Ain’t you gonna smoke?” she asks.

  “Nah, I’m OK.” He’s never smoked a full cigarette in his life. This was to his advantage because Mia hated everything about cigarettes, including the fact that discount tobacco brands were the source of much of her family’s fortune. Not smoking was one of the primary articles in the Constitution of the United State of Mia and Lane.

  “Why’d you bring me here then?” Inez lets go of her hair and it sweeps back like a stage curtain, shielding her neck and ears. “You some kinda nerd rapist?”

  “Never raped a nerd, no.” He gets it out without a stutter.

  “Rapist nerd, then?”

  “First a shoplifter, now a rapist. OK.” He pulls a Parliament from the pack. “I was—I bought the pack, but my asthma, you know.” He doesn’t have to tell Mia about this cigarette. She doesn’t have to find out. It’ll be one of a few random things that happened while they were going through this hard time, things best never mentioned again. “And, you know, it’s not cool to make rape jokes.”

  Inez laughs as he hacks up a lung and mixes excuses about asthma and the cold weather between coughing bouts.

  They then stand in renewed silence as she finishes her smoke and he tries to get a handle on his head rush and churning bowels. They watch the rain falling on the boarded-up Mandarin Grille and used car lots down the street. Lane feigns another drag by pulling the smoke into his mouth. He coughs anyway.

  “So what’s your story?” he asks, looking at her through blurred eyes. “Where’re you from?”

  “What’s your story, man?”

  “I’m back for the holidays. From New York.” He dusts it off. “Needed a little time off from my PhD . . . after what happened in September and all.”

  “The fuck’re you doing here then?”

  His delivery was solid. He’s thrown by its apparent lack of impact. “Doing a little extra work to, you know, keep busy. Idle hands, right? Helping out my mom and all.”

  “I know all about that.” Inez checks her watch. “The family stuff, I mean. Never met nobody from New York.” She takes one more drag off her cigarette, chucks it on the ground right next to the Folgers can and walks off. “Thanks for the square.”

  “See you next break?” He waves with the pack of smokes in his hand.

  “Maybe.”

  The pager buzzes. He knows it’s not a heart attack this time, but it’s still enough to make him jump. The gray display screen reads: PROGRESS???

  TEN

  MIA ADMITTED TO LANE THAT she first became interested in moving to Seattle after watching Say Anything . . ., Singles and Sleepless in Seattle back in high school.

  She, along with much of Lane’s generation, bought into the idea of an earnest alt-utopia of overeducated, progressive do-gooders and amiable slacker artists. An organized metropolis with efficient public institutions, a low crime rate (beyond the few elusive serial killers) and quirky, if a bit depressed, type-A culture. Norway on Puget Sound. It’s a place where Tom Hanks’s heartbroken Sam Baldwin would move to start his life over in a tidy, multimillion-dollar houseboat with an elaborate tropical fish tank in his kid’s bedroom.

  The town that Lane grew up in was less Sam Baldwin and more the realm of James Caan’s John Baggs Jr., a sailor who shacks up with a hooker while on shore leave in Seattle in 1973’s Cinderella Liberty.

  Lane doesn’t deny the dominance of the Sam Baldwin narrative. Arthur Denny—the guy who’s credited as the founder of the city, at least in the mainstream history books—was such a teetotaler that he refused to sell liquor in the main store or let others drink in his presence. He was ambitious to the point of naming the settlement “New York Alki”—alki being Chinook Jargon for “eventually.”

  But he had an unwelcome neighbor in the form of David “Doc” Maynard, a divorced, hard-drinking and likely bipolar physician who’d been chased out of the regional political and cultural center of Tumwater (current population around twenty thousand) for fornicating with the Widow Broshears.

  Maynard and Denny came to despise each other. That much was inevitable. But they did agree to cede a strip of land between their territories to the city’s first industry, a new steam power mill, so it could roll its logs down a greased road to the waterfront. This original “Skid Row” became the official dividing line between Denny’s striver side of town and Maynard’s south side of brothels, taverns and live music.

  THE DENNYS AND THEIR ILK squeezed Maynard and the native Duwamish out of Seattle and tried to wipe them from the history. But the Maynard/Denny dichotomy, the Baldwins versus the Baggs Jrs., remains encoded in its cultural DNA the way Homo sapiens has stray Neanderthal genes. And the dark side still peeks through in a few mutant spots, primarily in Lake City.

  The Rimrock is one of those places.

  “You couldn’t pay my ass to go to New York these days,” says Lonnie. Lane thinks that one of his wonky eyes is on the TV behind the bar, but it’s hard to tell which way Lonnie’s looking. The cable news anchors scream about some guy
on a plane who tried to set his shoe on fire. A bomb, they report. Lonnie turns to Lane. “I swear, if I knew what Nina really wanted . . . and about your parole—”

  “I told you it’s not parole.” Lane finishes his pint of Rainier and slams the glass down on the bar with a little too much emphasis. A few people turn their heads his way, not that anyone at the Rimrock cares about one man’s personal problems. “It’s a suspended sentence.” In fact, it’s a conditional suspended sentence, but Lane doesn’t want to confuse Lonnie.

  Lane admires the padded red Naugahyde and the big western mural full of mesas and cattle on the wall of the Rimrock’s Stirrup Lounge. A bedraggled band seems to be over two decades into playing the same Van Halen and CCR covers. As the low stage isn’t large enough to accommodate the whole band, the singing drummer is set up off to the side. A trio of drunks sway and stagger on the pitted dance floor that’s divided by a load-bearing square post smack in front of the stage. One woman attempts some sort of pole dancing move on the post. Lane’s not sure what she’s hoping to accomplish, but it’s unlikely that she planned for her result.

  Lane picked this place because of the low probability of running into any old friends. Lonnie likes it because it’s one of the last places in town where anything still goes. It is comfortable, you might say. A man can smoke and drink doubles while eating a four-dollar steak-and-egg breakfast anytime from open to close. There is never a question that everything is cooked in butter and there’s full cream in the coffee. You can say whatever you want, as loud as you want. You can ash your cigarette on your plate. The owner, Connie, is always behind the bar, and it’s rumored that she’s never cut off a single paying customer. The Rimrock’s days are numbered.

  A scabby old guy in a wheelchair with a patch on his eye sips a well whiskey and rants about how subliminal messages hidden in CNN broadcasts of old Bin Laden speeches are giving commands to terrorist sleeper cells throughout suburban America. “We’re next. Mark my words, people. Seattle’s next,” he shouts over the music.