Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Gary had said he was living across from the parents of Sissy Farrell, so Michael had no trouble finding him. ‘A pink place kitty-corner from the Malcolms’ or ‘you know, the white house on the lake side of the old school’ – these were the designators he had grown up with and remembered. With no home delivery of mail, there was not any identifying value to a numerical street address: if Gary had said 325 Cedar Street, Michael couldn’t have placed him with confidence within three blocks.

  Opening the front screen door of the bungalow, Michael stepped into a low-ceilinged living room full of magazines and newspapers and dirty glasses. Hearing a television set from the back of the house, he walked through a wood-panelled galley-style kitchen that was surprisingly tidy. ‘Anybody home?’ he called. In the back he went down a step into a screened porch, which looked out over ratty yellow grass and a low wire fence towards a virtually identical bungalow.

  Three young men were watching television, one sprawled on a sun lounger, the other two leaning back on a sofa with their feet up on a bamboo coffee table. After an initial glance his way, they kept their eyes glued to the television.

  ‘Football this early?’ he asked, looking at the screen.

  ‘Exhibition game,’ said the guy lying on the lounge chair. Michael looked at him. He was long and skinny, wore jeans and a white T-shirt with cowboy boots, and had a mouth, thought Michael, like a small asshole. On his forearm there was a purple tattoo of a mermaid entwined in an anchor.

  He turned to the two on the sofa. One had a boy’s face with the improbable adornment of a bushy, ginger moustache. Next to him sat a fat, sandy-haired man with slick-backed hair, who was draining a can of beer. Both of them paid no attention to Michael, so he tried again with the guy on the lounger. ‘Is Gary here?’

  The tattooed cowboy stared at the screen. ‘Who wants to know?’

  Enough was enough. ‘I do,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Hear that?’ said the guy on the lounge, craning his neck to look at his two friends. ‘Bubba,’ he said with a smile, looking past Michael.

  Michael turned round and faced a newcomer who walked in from the kitchen. Bubba? he thought. Who are these guys?

  ‘Say what?’ said Bubba, in a voice so deep it could have been bought from the classified ads section in a bikers’ magazine. He was a little over six feet tall and must have run close to three hundred pounds. He had the long, greasy, black hair of biker mythology and wore a blue jean jacket, tan workpants, and clunky work boots.

  ‘This guy says he’s looking for Gary,’ the cowboy announced. ‘Says he’s called Eye-Do.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Michael, changing tack, since he could see no percentage in playing tough guy, ‘I’m Gary’s brother. Anybody know where he is?’

  Bubba seemed to find this funny, for he guffawed like a cartoon bear. He walked through the room, still chuckling, opened a door in the far corner, then went through and closed it behind him. Coming out again a minute later he signalled with his head. ‘Find him in there.’

  Gary was lying on the bed on his back, with his clothes on but his shoes off. ‘You all right?’ Michael asked as his brother slowly opened his eyes and took him in.

  ‘All the better for seeing you,’ said Gary, using their father’s favourite greeting. Then he closed his eyes again. There was a glass of something brown and watery next to the bed, with a long cigarette stub in it, half-floating, half-submerged.

  ‘Who are those guys next door?’

  ‘Friends,’ said Gary. There was a leaden note to his voice.

  ‘Not real friendly friends.’

  ‘I didn’t say they were your friends,’ he said, growing slightly more animated. ‘They thought you were a cop.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of your clothes.’

  Michael was wearing pressed chinos, a blue cotton golf shirt, soft loafers – the same clothes he’d worn, along with a sports jacket, for his farewell dinner with Jock and his wife. He looked down at his brother, who was keeping his eyes closed, and said, ‘Speaking of cops, Maguire wants to see me. You know what that’s about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I had a feeling it had something to do with you.’ He thought of the ‘friends’ next door. ‘Maybe it’s the attractive company you’re keeping.’

  Gary snorted. ‘I thought a man was still allowed his own choice of friends.’

  Leave it alone, he decided. ‘You missed the parade.’

  Gary now opened one eye. ‘I had my own celebration last night.’

  ‘So I see.’ Even by their usual standards, Michael thought, the two were conducting a pretty desultory dialogue. ‘Why don’t we get together when you’re feeling better? Come round to the house. I’d give you supper but I’ve got to shop first. You cleaned me out.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Can’t you afford your own groceries?’

  Gary put a hand over his forehead.

  ‘I thought you were a partner now. That’s what you said.’

  ‘We never signed the papers.’

  ‘And you had a falling out with Harold?’

  Gary’s hand moved down over his mouth. His words came out from between his fingers. ‘Something like that.’

  Oh, Christ. ‘When’d you last get paid?’

  ‘June.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been calling you for weeks now.’ He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. He tried to control his irritation as his brother now put both hands over his eyes. ‘Come over when you get up. I’ll buy you supper at the Poplar.’

  ‘Pop said they’d fucked it all up. He wouldn’t go there any more.’

  ‘They still serve whitefish?’

  ‘’Spose so. Why?’

  ‘It’s pretty hard to fuck that up. Anyway, come by the house. I’ll lend you some money. Then I’ll talk to Atkinson. We’ll sort something out.’

  As he left the trio were still watching football. In the kitchen the big guy named Bubba was making peanut butter sandwiches. As Michael passed by him Bubba said, ‘Y’all come again, ya hear?’ like a racist comedian doing black folks, then gave another guffaw.

  Thugs, he thought as he left the bungalow, then thought again. He had not supervised construction crews throughout the world without some acquaintance with the kind of hard guys who were always happiest with violence as a solution (or resolution) to anyone crossing some internal line of cussedness that was their (the hard guys’) raison d’etre.

  But these guys had seemed more punk than thug. There was something strange about the set-up, odd as well as unpleasant, that he couldn’t really put a finger on. And then he got it. These men were young but grown-ups: not teenagers. Yet there was an overwhelming sense of ‘boys’ night out’ about them all; there was not the smallest suggestion of women in their lives, even deep in the background. What had Gary said about his girlfriend? I threw her sorry ass out. Creepy, definitely creepy. What was this all about?

  And then he suddenly wondered, would his father have changed his will if he’d discovered Gary was gay?

  He waited until eight for Gary to show, then went and ate dinner by himself at the Poplar Inn, the town’s first hotel, built around 1900 on the top of a dune next to the State Park. It had new owners, well-heeled ones from the looks of things. On his table, a brochure for the hotel boasted about the recent renovation of the bedrooms: a double room cost $135 and brought back turn of the century charm with today’s comforts; the honeymoon suite (price on request) was decorated with authentic antique Shaker furniture. On the walls hung photographs of the nineteenth-century Stillriver, sepia stills culled from somebody’s ancient scrapbook or a volume of local history. One showed the original sawmill on the shore of Stillriver Lake; another the ferry crossing at the lake’s shortest ends, close to where the channel was later dredged and lined. Then a shot of two moustachioed men cutting ice with a long two-handed saw, while a cart horse, hitched to a wagon full of sawdust, stood waiting for its load.

/>   No wonder Pop didn’t like this place any more, thought Michael, for it seemed to embody the ersatz historicism his father had loathed. Considering his almost obsessive interest in local history, it was funny, thought Michael, how much his father had resisted recent efforts to promote it. Was it because it seemed so artificial, and so out of place? So un Midwestern? Yes, that was it – these new owners seemed intent on recreating the ambience of a New England inn, as if in some superior way they believed that there was a historical grandeur to the town which, until the owners came on the scene, had gone completely unappreciated by the ignorant locals.

  And that would have infuriated a man who, having killed off his own past, had been passionate about that of the town where he’d come to live. Henry Wolf had held a timeless, romantic vision of the Midwest, based on an ideal that presumably had first drawn him to Stillriver. His father had created his own mythology, thought Michael as he examined the vast menu, full of food previously unknown to the state of Michigan (Belgian frogs’ legs), and this mythology rested on the purely American building block of the melting pot. Be what you want to be, not what you were born as. Be American, which came full circle back to be what you want to be. But ultimately the mythology was about the Midwest – where plain men rode tall, or walked that way at least, and women were gentle and kind, and the region drew its strength from a quiet, unaffected pride in its inhabitants, who were, well, quiet and unaffected.

  And where nobody banged on about their ancestors, unless one of them had done something funny or outrageous, or spectacularly brave, and nobody gave a shit about what ship their family had sailed on to come to America or whether they prayed in a simple nonconformist church with an elegant white bell tower or rolled about in more opulent pews, sniffing incense and lighting candles. Where first names were the stuff of ’50s sitcoms – Darren, Bruce, Debby, Kim – and last names potentially anything – Walwicki, Meisenheimer, Buryk, Jabot – without being in the least regarded as socially indicative. In other words, the Midwest of lore. That’s what Michael’s father had believed in.

  And the problem was, as Michael was coming to recognize, however much he didn’t want to as he finished his Lake Michigan whitefish and good green beans (he held out against the importuning owner, who was functioning as sommelier, and stuck to beer), then walked home in the muggy air, just beating the thunderstorm; the problem was, as he opened the locked back door then relocked it behind him, and the wind outside picked up and the rain came down, first like a gentle sprinkler then, picking up volume, more like bucketfuls dumped from the heavens, and he turned off the brass standing lamp in the living room and went upstairs; the problem was, as he got into his bed with just a single cotton sheet over him and yet another Edinburgh paperback mystery to read as two Bogle boys squabbled across the street and a car door slammed and someone raced by on a bicycle, the wheels hissing on the now-slick surface of the street and the wind whistling through the turning spokes; the problem was, as he thought of his father’s almost wilful negative distortion of the life to be had anywhere else, his sentimentality about Stillriver, his provincial romanticizing and fundamental unshaken belief in the virtue of a Midwestern life; the problem was, as Michael thought of his own nomadic recent past, the far-off places he’d worked in, the rootlessness that no flat in Ealing was going to cure; the problem was, thought Michael, I’m beginning to believe in it, too.

  He woke up and wondered if he had dreamt the sound of thunder, close by, virtually simultaneous with a lightning strike, a mixture of boom like a cannon fired at close quarters and then crack, sharp as a whip. The rain had stopped, and the wind came through the window in a cool flow of small, rippling waves over the sheet. The bedside clock said half past three.

  Or had whatever wakened him come from inside the house? The thought unnerved him, and he lay still, breathing as quietly as he could, listening carefully. A small creak – was that the stairs, someone moving slowly up them? The faintest of thuds – the boiler, perhaps, but what was it doing in the middle of the night?

  There was nothing for it but to get out of bed. He turned on the light, went out into the hall, opened the closet and found his father’s sixteen-gauge Winchester shotgun. Feeling faintly ridiculous but also nervous, he turned on lights as he went and toured the entire house. In the basement he found the fishing rods of his childhood; his father had hung them and his own waders from nails pounded into the side of one of the enormous overhanging floor beams. Behind them he found a window open. It was a very small window, just above ground level, and faced towards the street in front; it was hard to see how anyone larger than a small boy could get through it. But he closed it just the same.

  Emerging upstairs he repeated his tour in reverse, this time more warily. There was nothing. Returning to the kitchen, he poured himself a hefty belt from a bottle of Maker’s Mark he’d bought at Duty Free and took the glass and the shotgun upstairs. Standing outside his bedroom, he put down his drink on a bookcase, broke open the breech of the shotgun, and discovered it wasn’t loaded. That would have done a lot of good, he thought.

  He rummaged through the closet and found an open box of shells. He took two of them, loaded and closed the gun, then carefully put it standing up in the closet of his bedroom, half-hidden behind one of his jackets. He felt uneasy about keeping a loaded gun in the house – what if kids came in? Whose kids? he asked himself, trying not to think about Cassie and her children. But he took the shells out and put them back in their box, then placed the empty shotgun on its side, high up on the shelf above the hangers, just as the first birds began their early call for dawn.

  3

  LATER THAT MORNING he drove to Meijers in Burlington and spent $245 equipping the house and buying food. There was a certain adult satisfaction in buying cleaning stuff – Windex, paper towels, sponge-headed tubes with washing liquid inside, a new mop head, washing powder – but it was a childish delight he took in buying the food.

  For he had forgotten the sheer abundance of the American supermarket. There were fewer differences between America and Britain than he had expected, chiefly because Britain (or London at least) seemed to him so surprisingly wealthy. He had gone there expecting to find it infinitely poorer than America, misled by his colleague Streatley’s memories of an England many years before – little heating and less hot water, fridges the size of a laptop computer, dinky-sized cars and waxed toilet paper.

  Still, there was the constant sense there that space, physical space, was at a premium, not to be wasted. He remembered how driving through Sheffield he had been amazed to find sheep grazing on a green hillside just above a steel mill, and how British greenbelt policy kept a rural ring around each town, giving a sense of space in a country smaller than Minnesota. In America, paradoxically, you could drive for miles through the asphalt peripheries of even small-sized cities before finding open countryside. The availability of so much space meant it was exploited to wastefulness.

  As in the cavernous arena he entered now, with a ceiling so high that once inside he didn’t notice it any more, and floor space the size of several football fields. There was a pizza parlour at the front – Eat Here or Take Away / Makes no difference to what you pay – a drugstore (one more nail in the coffins of the small town likes of Alvin Simpson), an optician, an ice-cream shop, a hardware store, and, just inside the food store itself, a bakery. Having made the expensive mistake of coming shopping while hungry (he’d had just coffee for breakfast) Michael now cut loose.

  He began with healthy priorities in the fruit and vegetable section. He remembered shopping with his mother, her fixation with large salads – healthy food for my healthy boys. He and Gary had called it rabbit food – behind her back so as not to hurt her feelings. Now, captivated by a sprinkler system dripping pearls of ice water on the lush-leaved heads, he bought three different kinds of lettuce, then a cellophane bag of peppers the size of softballs, fire engine red and the yellow of hotdog mustard, beets scrubbed down to vermilion, baby carrots the s
ize of his little finger, a long, fat cucumber with shiny skin, and a bunch of radishes with diameters the size of golf balls.

  Always mad about fruit, he started to buy blueberries and peaches, then realized he could get them fresher at Sheringham’s, as well as new-picked corn, so he contented himself with a quarter-watermelon, dazzled by the crescent-shaped rim the colour of Key Lime pie and the flipside flesh, which looked like a trough of pink, studded with raisin-black seeds.

  Lamb stew, beef stew, pork stew, even ghastly chicken stew – the relentless succession of watery broth, mushy carrots and deconstructed onions of his father’s cooking had given Michael a perpetual appetite for unadorned cuts of meat. At the counter he stared at the mitts and flaps and mounds, pink and crimson for the beef, the dull beige marble of pork, and he succumbed like a child unable to stop eating chocolate. He bought a sirloin steak the size of a first baseman’s glove, two pounds of lean hamburger, and a flange of skirt steak; he remembered how, years before, Cassie had grilled it, on one of the few occasions she had cooked for him when her father was away. Delicious, he’d declared, and she’d beamed with pleasure before admitting it was the only thing she knew how to cook. Now he also picked up a pack of four griddle-marked cube steaks, two long racks of spare ribs, veal escalopes, a cut-up frying chicken, three packs of local hotdogs, a small plastic tray of pork chops, and finally, in case he hadn’t done enough for his cholesterol count, a bag of frozen jumbo shrimp from the Gulf.