by Ted Staunton
“Well, it gets weirder,” I say. “Last night she told us we’re going to Jackfish, right? Look at this. It’s from my grandpa, about what I was supposed to do if your grandma wasn’t around.” I give her assignment number two. She reads it and looks at me, even more confused. “So, what’s up with Jackfish?” I say. “What’s it got to do with her?”
AmberLea shrugs. “Who knows? She’s from Kansas. Why did she hide that locket behind a moose head—”
“Deer head.”
“Whatever, in a cabin—”
“Cottage.”
“Whatever—cottage—no one ever knew she had?”
“Well, see, that’s what I mean. Maybe it’s all a setup. Maybe the cottage was rented. Maybe she got somebody to put a locket behind the deer head. Your grandma is rich, right? She could hire somebody to— well, it could be done.”
AmberLea’s chin has been tucking in ever since I started talking. Now she’s shaking her head. “No. No. First, she isn’t rich. My mom says she doesn’t have a dime. Her last husband went bankrupt and wiped her out, and the gangster one before that had everything taken by the government. Nobody knew about the cottage. Second, she told me this morning that the money from selling that cabin or cottage or whatever is going to be mine in her will, if I…”
“If you what?”
“Never mind; it’s not important.” She bends and scratches at her ankle. She seems to do that a lot, I’ve noticed. Mister Bones comes over to investigate. “The point is, it must be hers. She wouldn’t promise me something fake. She’s a pain in the butt, but she’s always straight up. So that means the picture must be real too.”
I’m not convinced. “Okay, then either somebody does know about the cottage, or there’s another mystery, because guess what I saw this morning? That black SUV again. It was hemmed in behind all the volunteer fire guys’ cars back there in Torrance. How did they know where we were going?”
She looks up at me, dead serious. “Maybe there’s another transmitter.” She scoops up Mister Bones and starts feeling around his collar. Mister Bones wriggles and then licks her face. Considering what else he’s been licking in the last few minutes I don’t envy her. “There’s nothing there.” AmberLea puts the dog back down. He trots over to a lamppost. “So, either they knew about the cottage…”
See? I want to yell.
“…or somebody told them where we were going.”
“Who?”
“Not me,” says AmberLea. “Not Gramma; she doesn’t have a phone. Not Al; he couldn’t get a signal last night, remember? That leaves you.”
“Well, I didn’t tell them! I got a signal down on the dock, but I didn’t call them.”
“Did you tell anybody?”
“Only my brother. He was my only call last night. He doesn’t know any mob guys in Buffalo. He’s not even going to tell our parents.” I doubt his Fifteenth Street skateboarders or video posse or whatever will be interested either, so I leave them out of it. Bunny can be hard to explain sometimes.
AmberLea shrugs. “I don’t know then. But the cottage is real. And the picture is real. I caught her looking at it this morning and I thought she was going to cry. Believe me, Gloria Lorraine never cries. She said she had to show me something that nobody else knew. Right now, I guess I have to believe her.”
“But,” I said, “it’s—I don’t know—like a movie or something.”
She shrugs again. “Gramma always says it’s only a movie if you believe. If you don’t, it’s just the pictures. And you know what? Even if it’s all a crock and they hang me by my toes when I get back, it’s still been better than staying home.” She looks away and tugs at Mister Bones’s leash. “Anyway, we should get back.” She pulls down her shades. Then she pulls them up again and looks straight at me. “But promise me something? Promise you’ll swear she forced me to come.”
“Uh, sure. You got it.”
“Thanks, Spencer.”
We turn back for the motel.
TWENTY-TWO
The next day we drive. And drive. And drive. And drive. We head north from the Sault. Al drives, AmberLea drives, I drive. GL rides shotgun. We pass tiny places—some I can’t even pronounce—and they’re getting farther apart. We stop a couple of times for food and gas and to let Mister Bones and us do our thing. Except for trucks, there’s not much traffic. I start to see what GL meant about life being a movie without jump cuts—especially a road movie.
GL watches the landscape for a while as it gets rockier and scrubbier. She nibbles some of her crackers. She doesn’t say much. Then I see her reach in her pocket and turn off her hearing aid; after that she makes like Mister Bones and pretty much dozes.
AmberLea listens to her iPod. Al tries to get a signal on his phone every so often, then swears in a halfhearted way and wrestles with a map. I can’t get a signal on my phone either, so I take out my camera and try a few shots when it’s not my turn to drive. I get a good one of AmberLea at the wheel, with her hair whipping out behind her, and one of tiny old GL asleep, all hat and scarf, in the front seat. Al says, “Don’t even think about it,” when I turn the camera toward him, so instead I get a cool rolling-down-the-highway shot through the windshield. Then I turn around and get on my knees for a shot over the back of the car, of the road unwinding behind us. If this were a movie, I think to myself as I try to hold the camera steady, what I’d see right now is a black dot on the road back there, getting bigger until it morphs into the black SUV, gaining on us, with the motorcycles, and the helicopter would swoosh overhead. Or there’d be a jump cut to wherever we’re going so we could skip all this.
But there isn’t. No black SUVS or killer bikers either. All we get buzzed by are blackflies (one whacks into my head as I’m kneeling there) and rain, after the Sault. We stop to put the top up and everything seems dark and dreary and even more boring.
At White River, we stop for an early dinner. We stagger into a restaurant you can tell smells permanently of French fries. A lot of rigs are parked outside. I’m guessing the rest of the customers are truckers. The map and GPS both tell us we’ve got about an hour to go to Marathon, where GL says we’re going to stop. She’s had enough for today.
“Thank god,” says Al as we sink into a booth. I nod. I never thought sitting could make me so tired.
AmberLea brings GL back from the restroom and folds her in beside me. You can practically hear GL’s hinges creak. She was so stiff when we got out of the car that I wondered if we’d have to unbend her ourselves. She looks worn-out, even after her naps. Some of her face powder has come off and her lipstick is blurry and staining her teeth. When the waitress shows up with coffee, she has a cup right off.
“Gramma,” AmberLea warns, “you never drink coffee.”
“It’s a special occasion.” She hunches over the cup. “I need this like hell needs a fire hose. I used to live on this stuff.”
By the time the waitress takes our orders, GL’s perked up some. “Between the caffeine and the bathroom I’ll be up all night,” she says, panting a little, “but right now it’s worth it. Now,” she goes on, leaning across the table, both hands around her cup, as if she’s some moose trapper who’s lived up here forever, “Jackfish is on toward Terrace Bay. We’ll stop in Marathon tonight, rest up and be there in the morning. Just the way I promised.” She looks at us, as if we’ve been whining all day.
“And what are we going to do in beautiful Jackfish, Gramma?” Two days on the road haven’t left AmberLea any too perky either.
“Unfinished business. Believe the living and bury the dead.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Al says.
GL nods. “My big line in Shadow Street. Just because it’s from a movie doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” She looks back to AmberLea. “You’ll see tomorrow. A little secret between you and me.” She turns to me. “And we can’t forget Spike’s kiss for his Grandpa David, can we? Then”—she waves a hand like it weighs forty pounds—“Al can hightail it to Grand Portage or F
ort Frances and duck into Minnesota if he wants.”
“What I want”—Al waves his phone—“is to find out if things have cooled off in Buffalo. I got a business to run.”
“And I’m sure it needs all those baking supplies in the trunk,” says GL. “Maybe you’d like to drive us back then. You can thank us for saving you when you say goodbye.”
“Yeah, how do we get back?” I say. “You told me to say we’d be home tomorrow.”
“I may have been a little hasty on that,” says GL. She nods to the rest of the room. “On the other hand, I’ll bet not many of these fine young men would turn down a little old lady and her lovely granddaughter if they were hitchhiking. I’ve done it before.”
“Really?” says AmberLea. “Gramma! When?”
“When I was your age. If it wasn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, it was close to it.” GL pats me on the arm. “I’m sure they’d make room for our personal photographer on the bumper or the trailer hitch. Don’t worry, Skeezix; just kidding. If Al doesn’t want to go back, we can easily get a bus ticket. Or we could just get a cab.”
Before I can even begin to wonder if she’s kidding, the waitress arrives with the food and GL digs out all her pills as the food is put down. When the waitress leaves, GL says, “Screen me.” She empties her water glass into the pot of plastic plants behind the booth; then out comes the gin bottle from her straw bag, under the table. She glugs some gin into the glass and whisks the bottle back into the bag as the waitress comes by with ketchup. “If you have to take pills,” says GL, “it might as well be fun.” She gets down to it.
She’s a little wobbly on the way out to the car. Once she’s in, she settles herself as if she’s dozing again. But I’m driving, and from the side I can see behind her sunglasses. She’s watching every inch of the way.
TWENTY-THREE
Not long before we get to Marathon, GL stirs herself. She roots around in her bag and gets busy fixing her makeup. Then she insists we pull over and put the top down on the car. “I want to make an entrance,” she says.
“To Marathon?” AmberLea says.
“Indulge me. I’m an old lady.”
There’s no real reason why not; it’s still a bright, sunny evening, even if it’s cooling off. Down goes the top. GL settles her hat and gets a cigarette pose going. We roll into town in style: a ninety-year-old bombshell, a blond ankle-scratcher with a vanishing chin, Buffalo’s King of Cannoli, a Chihuahua and a movie-geek chauffeur with bent glasses and a big need for a shower, all in a dented white Cadillac with stolen plates, a bullet hole, five big bags of something that might be icing sugar, and its own helium supply. It’s not four gunslingers riding into town, but it might be the closest I’ll get.
“Damn,” says GL, as we roll past two kids bending over a skateboard and a guy checking his tire pressure. “We should have had the car washed.”
“It rained while you were asleep,” Al reminds her. “We’re good.”
“Oh. All right then.” She gives a queenly smile to a golden retriever in the back of a pickup truck. Mister Bones yaps.
We pick the Superior Motel because it’s the first one we see and it looks okay. “You can always tell about motels,” Al advises. “You wanna lie low, pick one’s gotta car with a flat parked at a unit.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Car with a flat says cash, cheap and close.”
“Close?”
“To your basics. You know, like a liquor store.”
“How do you know that?”
“If you hadda drive, you’d fix the flat.”
Al and I go into the motel office. There’s a big, fleshy-faced old guy in saggy jeans and a black golf shirt behind the desk. The only thing even close to being as big as his gut is his huge upsweep of silver hair. It curves out over his forehead, then rolls and swoops straight to the back of his head, kind of like young Elvis, except old.
Over in the corner an even older guy is parked on a couch, dozing in front of a TV blaring CNN. He’s all wrinkles and stray whiskers under his ball cap, and he’s got the belt-and-suspenders combo happening over green work pants and a plaid shirt.
Al pulls out a credit card and books two rooms while I look around. I’m tired and this place isn’t making me feel any livelier. There are fake flowers here too, and potted palm trees, a rack of postcards and some tour brochures.
On the wall behind the desk, on a wooden plaque, is a big stuffed fish with its mouth wide open and some framed photos—pictures of kids’ soccer teams wearing Superior Motel jerseys, grad shots, a wedding, old people with a cake and party hats. That kind of stuff. Underneath hang plaques and certificates from the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. Jer once had to give a speech about “Front Porch Farmer” to a Rotary Club. I look closer at the inscription. The name on the plaque reads Mike Karpuski. Why does that sound familiar?
To one side are three black-and-white pictures. One is of a bunch of guys on a dock, in old-fashioned clothes, squinting into the sun and holding up a big fish; another is a line of people standing in front of a plain wooden building with a sign above their heads: Superior Hotel. Then I jolt out of my tiredness, because the third picture is different. First of all, it’s been torn into pieces and carefully taped back together. Second, I’ve seen it before. It’s a soft focus, head-and-shoulders glamour shot of a platinum blond, one dark eyebrow arched knowingly at the camera. At the bottom, on the right, perfect handwriting flows: Best wishes always, Gloria Lorraine.
“Hey,” I say.
Al doesn’t notice. He’s busy stuffing whatever hot credit card he used back into a wallet. The guy behind the desk is handing over two keys on plastic tags. “One-twelve and one-fourteen there, Mr. Scrimger,” he rumbles over the din from the TV. “Halfway down the west side. You can park right in front. Enjoy your stay.”
Al scoops up the keys. “Sure we will. C’mon, Ed. Let’s get Gramma settled.”
I follow him out. “Did you see that?” I ask him. “It was so weird.”
“See what? Was somethin’ on the news?”
“No, on the wall!” We’re at the car. “Guess what?” I say to GL as we get in. “You have fans here with the same name as your alias.”
“Not now, Spicer.” She’s tilted onto the door’s armrest. It looks as if her grand entrance has used up whatever energy she had left. Her left hand moves to turn off her hearing aid. I stop her. “No, listen, you’ll like this. Remember how you had the cottage sign marked Karpuski for privacy? That must be the name of the people who run this place, because there’s this award on the wall for a Mike Karpuski. And they have one of your old pictures up there too! How weird is that?”
Gloria Lorraine straightens up. Her eyes flare and water for a second as she stares through the damaged windshield. She takes a deep breath, reaches up, snaps down the sun visor and checks herself out in the mirror. Then she opens the car door. “Help me in,” she says.
TWENTY-FOUR
We all go. I hold the door while AmberLea helps GL totter inside. Al cradles Mister Bones. The TV is still blaring. When she gets through the door, GL shakes AmberLea off her arm and straightens up as best she can. Then, with just her cane, she almost sashays over to the desk.
“Can I help you?” The big guy with the big hair puts down some papers and takes off a pair of half-glasses.
GL doesn’t answer for a long moment; she’s checking out the wall display behind him. She stares at her taped-together photo, then steadies herself against the desk. She arches one eyebrow and does her best Gloria Lorraine: “I’m told there’s a Mike… Karpuski here.”
“You’re talking to him,” says the guy.
GL shakes her head. “You’re too young.”
If he’s young, I’m Santa Claus, I think, but the guy just chuckles and says, “Oh, you want Big Mike. That’s my dad. I’m Little Mike. That’s Big Mike over there.” He nods at the snoozer by the TV.
GL turns stiffly and looks at Big Mike. His jaw and his ball
cap have both come adrift as he slumps on the couch. I notice his fly has wandered a little too, and under the TV noise he’s snoring a little. GL’s chin starts to tremble. Then she bunches her lips together in a thin red line and starts across the room, leaning on her cane. AmberLea trails her hesitantly. “Turn that…” GL waves at the TV, never taking her eyes off the old guy. AmberLea finds the button.
In the sudden silence, the guy at the desk says, “He had a stroke last year, ma’am. It can be hard talking to him. There’s a lot he’s not clear about.”
I can’t tell if GL hears him or not. AmberLea helps her sit down beside Big Mike. Slowly, GL reaches out and touches the old man’s arm. “Mikey,” she whispers. “Mikey.” Then she’s talking in a foreign language; I don’t know what it is. “Mikey,” she says again, gently shaking his arm, then more foreign language, then, “It’s Wandi.”
The old man jerks a little and his eyes open. “Gone,” he says, or maybe it’s “gun.” It’s hard to tell. He looks blearily at GL.
She says, “I was gone, Mikey. Now I’m back.”
“Wandi?” croaks the old man. “You look bad. You been sick?”
She clutches his hand. “I’m old, Mikey. We’re both old.”
He nods. “It’s late, isn’t it? You stay here. I’ll get you something. Papa will be mad if he finds out, but he never finds out, does he? He was very mad, Wandi. But Mama will be happy. She cried and cried. She’ll help in the morning and be happy.”
GL nods. “It’s okay, Mikey. I can get it myself. You go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning and we’ll talk then.”
“Okay. I’m glad you’re back, Wandi.”
“Me too.” She leans forward and gives him a kind of hug. His knobbly hand comes off his lap far enough to pat her back. Then she struggles to her feet, leaning hard on her cane and the sofa back. “Night night, Mikey,” she says. “Sleep tight.” She lifts a hand off the sofa back and pats his shoulder; then she lifts his cap and plants a kiss on his forehead. “See you in the morning.”
