While I tried my best to enjoy the free booze and the company of my old gang, almost immediately they were all were mingling in separate groups, jabbering away like it was their last night on earth. It didn’t take long to spot Peyton Chambeau all gelled up and spiky, haranguing a group of former teammates on Iowa State’s most lucrative majors. It was mostly similar conversations all around—comparisons on the wildest fraternities, hippest underground bands, coolest campus radio stations, etc. At one point I ended up a chance spectator in a mature debate on “problem” refugees from Sudan, where I learned that upon deeper academic inspection our natural redneck assumptions about blacks, Mexicans, and Jews ruining everything were proved to be well founded. It was a relief to receive a few minutes of weight room advice from Marcus Panozzo, who’d traded his baby fat for a square jaw and shirt-stretching muscle, as well as a visit from purple-toothed Heidi Sneed, our former class slut, who told me: “Everyone says you sell pot.” I ended up nursing my beer, suspecting at any moment the lights would dim and the DJ would call my name, igniting the crowd before urging me to take the microphone and share my version of what happened out at Saylorville Lake.
Before I knew it everyone was blurry-faced and shouting, none more than Tino who started blowing kisses to everyone before each drink. “Who shrunk Jodie’s titties?” he yelled, referring to her breast surgery that was now common knowledge. “We’ll lynch the biological bastard!” I ended up slumping at a quiet table near the entrance, mostly watching Nat’s older brother make his moves on Emily. When she finally caught sight of me she marched directly across the tent, enflaming my covert pride as she reminded everyone that she was the hottest girl in the room and she was coming and going with me. We hadn’t discussed the matter of how we’d compose ourselves in public, but she stepped up close and lorded over me, putting one hand on her hip and wincing in a way that let me know I was in the good kind of trouble. I felt more than a few pairs of eyes on us as I gripped her by the waist as though measuring whether we’d make a proper match.
“Have you see Tino in a while?” she asked. “Ashley said she caught him removing the ham and roast beef from all the little sandwiches.”
“That’s what they get for buying the expensive stuff. Bread sandwich leftovers.”
“I think you’d better give me a kiss and put an end to all this curiosity.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until midnight?”
“In terms of building the drama, I would normally say yes. I might even suggest we wait until after midnight. But your hands are already on my waist and your eyes are on my breasts and I’m just standing here letting it happen.”
“Practically dangling yourself in front of me.”
“Practically,” she said, directing me to my feet with an upward nod.
We kissed. We heard a few whistles and catcalls but didn’t bother looking up. The kiss ended at the sound of firework explosions from the backyard. Nat raced helter-skelter for the exit, drawing half the tent springing behind him. Emily and I took the chance to refill our beers, stepping outside just as one of the older guests lit a string of about five hundred jumping jacks that bounced willy-nilly across the snow, whirling balls of red, orange, and blue.
A minute later Peyton swaggered over from the other side of the lawn. First thing he gave Emily a little shoulder massage, as nonchalant as ever, like we were all adults now and wouldn’t it be silly to consider that he was still sore about her dumping him in high school way back when. He even slapped my back and shoved a cigar in my mouth like some kind of backroom Depression-era cardsharp.
“Good to be back in the old DMZ,” he said, nodding in general approval of the whole scene laid out before us, as though Ames were hundreds of miles away. “Not too shabby spending New Year’s with the cream of the crop.”
I lit my cigar, hoping that Emily would deal with the situation, perhaps by way of a comical inquiry into Peyton’s status as big man on campus. But she only turned her back, peering toward the edge of the tent where Lauren was teaching Hads a snowy Irish jig.
“You should see some of the girls up in Ames,” Peyton went on, swearing a few times and slapping my back again. “It’s just fucking ridiculous. And they’re dedicated fans, let me tell you.” He kept nodding and smiling, like he really knew what he was talking about. “So what’s up with all these girls with boyfriends in South Dakota and Canada? Shouldn’t they be able to have a little fun at midnight? I mean, it only comes once a year, right?”
I nodded along, trying to appear joyously distracted. After a brief exchange about the exact start time for the breakfast buffet, I thanked him for the cigar before turning my attention to back to Emily. She was flicking a lighter, smoking, and doing her best to look completely bored. But Peyton wasn’t finished yet and stepped around me to continue the conversation.
“How’s Chi-town,” he said, smiling all gangly and glassy-eyed. “Getting any acting gigs? I mean, it’s a pretty good city for all that, right?”
“Nothing to report just yet,” she said.
Peyton kept nodding, like that was nothing to be discouraged about. “It’ll come. Those folks out in L.A. struggle for years. Then one day . . . WHAM! They’re on Letterman telling the whole world about their sex lives!” He threw his arm over my shoulder, laughing like it was his best wisecrack in years.
“Sorry, what was that?” Emily said, shaking her head as though reviving her lost concentration.
“You heard me,” he said. “And when it happens, don’t forget who tried to help you out when you were still small potatoes.”
For the first time he won Emily’s attention. She turned to him with such a sharpened gaze and smirk of coded distain that I wondered if she and Peyton hadn’t mixed words earlier in the evening.
“You have some connections in the theater business?” I asked.
“Nothing like that,” Peyton said, waving his comment off as hardly worth explaining. “Over the summer my dad wanted to put Emily in one of his commercials, but she wouldn’t have it. He was gonna pay her two hundred bucks, but she blew him off, told him TV wasn’t her thing.”
Emily covered her face, shaking her head like she regretted her decision now more than ever. “Some opportunities only come around once,” she said, laughing now as she took the cigar from my mouth and tossed it in the snow. “Care to dance, George?”
“I only know the tango and cha-cha and mambo,” I said, giving Peyton a good-night nod as we headed back inside. Whatever mood of analysis I might have attached to the conversation was washed away with a fast shot of wine and a kiss. I directed Emily toward Smitty and his barefooted dance partner, Mandy Anderson (whose wild braids and braless chest had pushed us all at least once to thoughts of nude grassland barbarism). Near midnight small portions of champagne were poured and passed around. By this time several tables of former classmates and even some of the elder Frys’ more professional associates were flipping quarters into mixtures of red and white wine, forcing one another to slam them down in one gulp. A few caterers grew fed up and rude, employing liberal elbows as they pushed through the crowd. I caught Smitty and Mandy making out behind the tent well before the countdown. Despite judging them as overanxious cheaters, I was making gestures to follow their lead when I received an authorial two-finger tap on my right shoulder. By the look of blank confusion suddenly crossing Emily’s face I might have guessed to duck—I’d already thought it possible that Peyton was left unsatisfied by our exchange and might attempt to prove the macho superiority of basketball players to wrestlers, a challenge he was smart enough to realize I would have welcomed—but I didn’t and simply rotated around as anyone would at a New Year’s Eve party in a lavish tent filled with reunited classmates. I only hazily recognized the piggish figure winding up to punch me, and was even less sure about the meaning of his swinging spitfire insult.
“HOWDY, ORLANDO!” he shouted, a split second before his fat fist audibly flattened my nose, driving me backward into the breakfast buffet. I coll
apsed against a metal tray of scrambled eggs and its reciprocal hot water pan that banged to the floor, inspiring a series of sobering shrieks from the drunken splashed. But even more startling than my mystery opponent’s punch was the speed with which the breathalyzing security guard hulked onto the scene, plucking my assailant from his feet with all the ease and skill of a Kodiak dragging a goggle-eyed doe by the pelt of its upper back so that its limp hooves swept the path of its own fatal departure. From the mere profile of this guard, in particular his hardworking neck and hands, I immediately recognized him as the man I’d spoken to in the bathroom at the Cohen funeral parlor.
It was only a few minutes after midnight when Mrs. Fry bustled her way onto the deejay stand, putting a fast stop to the music before taking the microphone to cite juvenile roughhousing, illegal fireworks, and the mounting damage afflicted upon the tent and other rental equipment as reasons enough to pull the plug on the festivities. Without a moment’s hesitation the caterers removed all remaining sources of alcohol, returned the buffet trays to the catering truck, then dismantled the event chair by chair and table by table. My nose was smashed and my shirt was splattered with blood. Emily took me by the arm and led me away, uttering curses at Marcus Panozzo, who was doing all he could to identify our enemies and exploit the unruly mood for an all-out brawl.
By the time we arrived around front my security guard had already locked his suspect in the backseat. I wanted to thank him, but he was now facing a line of about thirty designated drivers, half of whom were certain not to pass his test. I wanted to ask what else he remembered from that day at Casey’s General Store.
Smitty handed me a stack of cocktail napkins. By now everyone knew that my attacker was a guest of Nat’s brother and had moved on to the question of his motive, part of which involved interpreting his cryptic insult in the seconds before his assault. I pressed the napkins to my nose, denying any clue of who he was or what he’d meant. With an air of Christmastime generosity I suggested the matter be dropped, that I’d simply fallen victim to a case of misidentification. “Besides,” I told them, pretending to be drunk, “a man isn’t really a man who hasn’t had his nose broken at least once.” But of course I knew with one hundred percent certainty that the young man now slumped in the back of the squad car was the person I’ve previously described as the most pacifistic member of the collegiate foursome with whom I’d altercated on the Urbandale golf course. I also recognized his “Howdy, Orlando!” battle cry as a reference to the Saturday-morning documentary program Fishing with Orlando, which he’d clearly intended as a below-the-belt crack at my conscience.
After Smitty dropped me off that night I went directly to the front hall bathroom to clean the congealed blood from my cheeks and attempt to reset my nose in the fashion of beat-up boxers hoping to convince judges and opponents they’re less damaged than they really are. I straightened it as best as I could, but no amount of adjusting was able to fix the pronounced mid-bridge hump.
After showering the swelling worsened. I lay in bed with my eyes open for at least an hour in expectation of one of Emily’s late radio calls, which over the previous week had become part of the regular routine. But the call didn’t come until four or five a.m., when I was caught in a deep REM cycle. (Over the years I’ve come to question if I ever truly awoke from this sleep, despite my perfect memory of the conversation; the slurring voice on the other end was eerily reminiscent of my grandfather’s after his second stroke, in the weeks before he died.) My initial reaction to this call was to assume that Emily’s radio had been picked up by a drunk at whichever bar the girls hit on the way home, or that I’d fallen victim to the demented mumblings of a radio pirate who’d invaded my signal. In the following days I was able to eliminate the former option as a possibility.
“Habby,” the voice said. “Habby New Year. How about a drinkie-tinkie! Over!”
“Happy New Year,” I said. “Is this your radio? Over.”
“Sonva gun!” the man said. I guessed his finger kept slipping off the TALK button because his voice kept flashing in and out. “—and I think I’M having the party, but HE’S having the REAL party! Oh yeaaaaah!” The man laughed hysterically. “Right here in River City! Right under MY NOSE! Over!”
“Who is this?” I asked, speaking as calmly and clearly as possible, hoping to inspire similar such articulation on the other end. But apparently the caller hadn’t finished his previous point.
“—twenty-four hours a day since nineteen eighty-one! You believe me what I tell you BOIY!”
“I believe you,” I said. “Can I meet you tomorrow to pick up my radio? Over.”
“Ever doggone day . . . I tell you it NEVER goes AWAY!”
Part
Three
Forty-two
A week into the New Year, Frank Moretti called to let me know he’d just won a big contract for a piece of the action in the state fairgrounds restoration project. “If you feel like making some real money,” he said, “you’d better get to work out in the cold like my father used to back when only the old-timers took winters off and being a construction man actually meant something.” I accepted the offer, if not for the much-needed income than for the distraction from the lies I’d been passing to my increasingly anxious mom in connection with my crooked nose and the inkwells beneath my eyes that grew more colorful and unsightly day by healing day. After hanging up with Frank—in the spirit of planning for a dynamic and nourishing New Year—I called Grand View to sign up for night classes in Oriental Philosophy and Literature of the Civil War, then radioed Emily to invite her to an afternoon of movie hopping at the new Mega Screen theater in West Des Moines. It turned out she couldn’t meet me until later that evening. I headed downstairs and flipped on the TV, just in time for a newscast on the four Waukee students who’d torched the most famous and beloved of the Madison County bridges.
The report focused mostly on an interview with a Madison County fire chief who detailed the evidence linking the culprits to the crime, thus prompting the same investigative aspect of my personality that led me to Thomas Staniszewski to again rear itself and set to work. During the ensuing Bears-Vikings game, while watching our replacement quarterback spend the first half running scared, scrambling backward and zigzagging in circles, I began to consider the event of Katie’s death: such peculiarities as the well-timed disappearance of the Eagle Scout from the rental hut, his false testimony about the numerous life jackets he spotted by the shore, the lone canoe turned over in the muck, the collaboration of the police and the Des Moines Register in the official mistelling of the account (they even bumbled such details as the day’s wind conditions and the class of algal infestation that had caused the frogmen so much hassle in discovering her body), Katie’s closed casket, the revelation of her experimental brain and spine surgery, her claims of having planted a time capsule, not to mention the broader environmental factors such as her parents’ serially mute relationship and the still unknown whereabouts of the strangler Nicholas Parsons.
But as the reader well knows, this is a realistic story told in a realistic fashion, which means it would be inappropriate to detail the various conspiracies or other metaphysical trickeries I might have been tempted to attribute to the incongruity of Katie drowning while wearing a life jacket. Katie slipped out of her life jacket and died, either because she unbuckled it without my noticing, or because the life jacket was defective. These are the only conclusions I have faith enough to pass along. That said, by the time the clock ran out on the Vikings (after a harebrained quarterback tuck-and-run that ended in a touchdown after his miraculous emergence from an opaque mob of purple and gold), I’d already decided to drive out to Saylorville Lake in order to preserve a piece of evidence that I knew over time would dissolve and allow an even greater shroud of mystery to befall the incident in question.
That afternoon I trudged the same path from the parking lot to the lake that I’d marched on the morning of Katie’s death. Starting from the canoe racks, I m
ade a hard half circle around the lake through heavy, frosted weeds to the hunched willow that once ensnared my favorite lure. Of course it was unlikely that anyone would have noticed the lure or taken the time to retrieve it, but on finding it perched in such a remarkably observant and lifelike pose I burst into astonished laughter, ignoring the fact of its inherent artificiality in order to marvel at the sight of a frog that had not only adapted to the winter freeze, but also taught itself to climb trees. Despite my bulky boots and gloves, I mounted the willow’s icy spine just as I had the first time, undis tracted now as I worked my way from one bare branch to the next, noticing the places where eight months before I’d snapped off a sprig or two in order to more easily reach my target. This time I did reach it, and carefully plucked the barbs loose with both hands in order to prevent myself from dropping it onto the frozen lake below. I didn’t leave right away, but instead lay like a snoozing cat across the trunk, admiring my lure—its leopard spots, cool white belly, and phosphorescent eyes—every once in a while looking up to peer dreamily over the snow-covered lake. I didn’t climb back down until I’d come to a clear decision about what I had to do.
Forty-three
A week later I found myself bundled up in as many flexible layers as possible, already waiting at the curb at five a.m. when Frank picked me up to head to the fairgrounds in East Des Moines. He was pumped about the big contract, already singing along to Ste vie Wonder and grinning ear to ear, popping open the glove compartment to retrieve a photo book of the restoration models on display at the Historical Society downtown. On the whole, he and a dozen other contractors were embarking on a $30 million initiative aimed at restoring the original fairgrounds of 1842. This mission involved the complicated task of reviving the original ecosystem, including all the underground water channels that once served the Grand Basin, the original symbol of the fair. Frank’s enthusiasm had a way of spreading and soon I was grinning alongside him while paging through original photos of ancient Ferris wheels, young girls in bonnets smiling out of covered wagons, a group of roughnecks posing next to a snarling cougar in an iron cage. Even our small contribution to the project was massive: we were to dig up seventy acres of frozen ground, much of which had been employed as a landfill from the fifties to the seventies. I didn’t see how it was possible to complete the restoration before the fair kicked off in August, but I never mentioned my doubts, knowing Frank wouldn’t have heard them anyway.
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Page 25
