Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

“Sure,” I said. Six, ten, and even, Claude got a cut of the action. It was a hell of a good reason not to want the police nosing around. “Let’s see the bottle you said you found in Lonnie’s hand.”

  “It’s in the desk,” Claude said.

  I let him go, and he walked behind the counter. I watched him closely as he opened the desk drawer.

  “If you come up with anything but a pill bottle in your hand, Claude,” I said, “I’ll break your fucking wrist off. I swear to God, I will.”

  “Take it easy, mister,” Jenkins said, looking frightened. He plucked a pill bottle from the drawer and brought it over to me. “Here.”

  It was a druggist’s pill bottle—the kind they dole out prescriptions from. The printed label was heavily stained with mud, but I could still read some of it. Valium, 10 mg. 100 Tablets. I tilted the bottle up and looked inside. It was empty.

  I stuck the bottle in my pocket and walked over to where Lonnie was slumped in the chair. “C’mon, buddy,” I said to him, “we’re going to get you some help.”

  I worked my right arm around his middle and lifted Lonnie to his feet. He opened both eyes for an instant and stared at me. “Harry,” he said, with a silly smile. His eyes rolled back and his head slumped down again.

  “C’mon, Lonnie,” I said, giving him a shake. “You gotta help.”

  He moved his legs as if he were treading water. Slowly, I worked him over to the front door.

  “You ain’t going to the police, are you?” Jenkins called out.

  I glanced back at him. “If I don’t, it’s because of him. Not because of you. And if I find out you were fucking with him, I’ll be back.”

  Lonnie laughed stupidly. “That’s tellin’ him,” he said.

  I turned to Lonnie. “You asshole, you haven’t changed much, have you?”

  He laughed again, then teetered as if he was going to fall.

  I caught him and put him back on his feet. “Save your strength, buddy,” I said, steering him through the door. “You’ve got a long night ahead.”

  3

  SOMEWHERE AROUND Tusculum, Lonnie got sick again. I pulled the car off the parkway into a gas station lot and sat there as he retched out the open window.

  “You want to go to a hospital, Lonnie?” I said to him when he’d stopped gagging.

  At first, I wasn’t sure that he’d understood me. But after a moment, he shook his head decisively and fell back against the car seat. “No hospital. No cops,” he said heavily, as if the one meant the other. He groaned like a sick animal. “No luck. No luck at all.”

  He began to sob. I sat there, helplessly, watching him cry. After a time his head lolled to the left, and he was out cold again. I started up the car and eased back onto the parkway.

  The rain kept falling, harder now, then turning to wind-whipped flurries of snow, then back to icy rain. He’d picked a good day for it, I thought. But then he’d had a flair for the dramatic. At least, he’d had when I’d known him in college—an age ago.

  Eighteen years. I could feel it like another passenger, like a teenage kid sitting between us. His kid, my kid. A separate lifetime. I didn’t know a thing about the man. Hadn’t seen him since we’d stopped talking to each other, one fall day in 1968. And like that he’d dropped out of sight. I’d heard he’d gone to L.A. Then to New York. And then I’d stopped hearing.

  And now, on a miserable December morning, he was back—beaten, burned out. A suicide.

  I glanced at him from time to time in the rearview mirror. He’d changed terribly. Face grown coarse, heavy-jowled. His eyes scorched to the sockets. His flesh yellowed. His mouth, fat and red from the beating he’d taken. He looked fifteen years older than he really was and ready for death.

  When I’d first met him, he’d been a handsome, twenty-year-old kid. Sad-eyed, thin-lipped. Like a short, black-haired Peter Fonda. In fact, when Wild Angels came out in ‘67, Lonnie’d taken to wearing a motorcycle jacket and posturing in front of Harleys. He’d never gotten a cycle of his own—he was scared to death of getting killed on one. But he’d liked the way he looked standing in front of them. So had the coeds at the University of Cincinnati. Lonnie’s ladies. He’d had a gift with them.

  After we’d stopped rooming together and he’d gone off to L.A. to make his fortune as a guitarist, I’d asked one of his women—a pretty sociology major named Joyce—what it was that Lonnie’d had, why it was that so many coeds had been so taken by him. She’d smiled and said, “Remember the scene in Wild Angels, when the girl says to Peter Fonda, ‘You’re so cool, Blue’? That’s what he has. Lonnie’s cool.” I didn’t remember what I’d said to her, although I did remember being ticked off by the Peter Fonda comparison, since Lonnie had cultivated it so carefully. But if cool had been the currency in 1967 and 1968, Lonnie’d had it all.

  We’d become good friends during the summer of ‘67, right after I’d come home from the war. After a couple of weeks of living with my family, I’d enrolled at UC and, in my off-hours, started hanging out on Calhoun Street where the hippies lived. At that time, I felt more comfortable with the street people, with their foxhole mentality, than I b did with my folks or with other college kids. Plus, the hippies liked to talk, to rap, as they said back then. And I had this insatiable urge to talk—to justify what I’d done in ‘Nam, to explain it out loud, as if it were the plot of a movie I’d seen.

  For several months, I was ruled by that need—to work off the bad karma, the war karma. And I scared a lot of people away. My folks, my friends, my professors, my classmates. I didn’t scare Lonnie. He’d lost an older brother to the war, and he was eager to hear what it had been like. Eager to serve as a sounding board for my rambling, nervous, nonstop monologues. He sat with me for hours, in Love’s, where I first met him, or at the Black Dome, where he sometimes played guitar with a local band—listening to that movie scenario I was recounting. And then one day in September, I realized that I wanted to talk about other things. With Lonnie’s help, I got over that first hurdle. And started getting over the war. In a way, he never did.

  His older brother, Steve, haunted him. They had been close as kids, and Lonnie had been badly hurt by his death. So had his parents. They were lower-middle-class, patriotic folks who thought that their son had died for the best of all causes. They also thought that Lonnie was a sluggard and a coward for not following his big brother into the grave.

  In his blackest mood, Lonnie agreed with them. He saw himself as a coward too—an underground man who’d climb back into the society he’d rejected as soon as the war was over and it was safe to come up again for air. The things he believed in—the love and peace all his songs celebrated—were excuses to ball, to smoke, to have fun, to turn a dollar. If he didn’t have love and peace, he’d have found other reasons to drop out. Unlike his brother, unlike me, he wasn’t taking real chances. And until he was willing to risk it all, like I had done, like Steve had done, he wasn’t a man.

  There was nothing to say to him when he was in that mood, except that he was wrong. And, to be honest, I wasn’t really sure that he was wrong. Although I lied to him about it, I think he knew that my heart wasn’t in my words. Even then, I had the feeling he just wanted to hear another voice—a strong voice, a sympathetic voice, a brother’s voice. Later on, I wondered if a part of him hadn’t wanted to hear the lie in the voice too.

  We’d rap for hours—about ‘Nam, about Steve, about his folks, about risk-taking and manhood and all the other crap that twenty-year-old men talk about. Then Lonnie’d hole up in his room. Smoke weed, listen to his own tapes. And in a day or two, he’d resurface—himself again. Bright, funny, with a new girl or two on his arm. His black mood forgotten. That was the pattern for the first year that we roomed together. It started to change in the summer of 1968.

  When I thought about it later, I realized that I’d seen it coming for a long time. From the first time I’d heard him talk about his brother, really, and then watched him go into his room, put on the stereo, take out h
is lid of grass and shut the door. It didn’t stay grass for very long. Acid hit the street in late 1967. Then came Blue Meanies. Soapers. PCP. STP. MDA.

  We talked about it a lot, Lonnie and I—the drugs. I thought they were bad. He thought they were good. That was what it came down to. And since I was a minority of one and since experimenting with drugs was in the air, like the music and the sex, both of which I did enjoy, I felt too much like my own father harping on it for very long. I just let it be, like one of those family disputes that sits on the table every night along with the silverware.

  I thought later that I had been wrong not to look after him more carefully. But in those days, I didn’t believe men were supposed to look after one another, except on the battlefield. I think I thought that’s what it meant to be a man—to look after yourself and not to ask jack shit from anyone else. I was forgetting, of course, the charity Lonnie had shown me, when I first met him. And just not seeing or not accepting the communal spirit that was alive all around me. But when you’re trying to get stronger, your vision narrows. You overlook certain things. Maybe you have to overlook them to get stronger.

  In the early fall of 1968, expense money started to dry up. Money we kept in a kitty, for meals and beer and grass. Lonnie’s rent money. I fronted him some, and after a time it got to be a pretty large tab. I don’t know what I told myself—that he was buying equipment for his band, maybe. I had some explanation that I half believed in or wanted to believe in.

  Then one night in August, Lonnie brought some friends home with him, and I couldn’t tell myself those lies anymore. They were from Miami, his friends. And they weren’t kids, although they were dressed like kids. They were grown men. On their way to Cleveland, looking for a place to crash. They never stopped talking, these men. When the second one interrupted the first one, the first one’s jaws kept working, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. They crashed with Lonnie that night. And that night, for the first time since I’d come back from ‘Nam, I unwrapped the government-issue Colt I kept in my closet, loaded it, and slept with it in my hand.

  They left at first light—Lonnie driving them to the bus station in his old Ford van. When they were gone, I turned over Lonnie’s room and found works and crystal meth under the mattress. I thought about leaving them out in the open, where he could see that I’d seen them. But after a while, I put them back and put the room right. When he came home again that night, I told him that I knew what he was doing and that if our friendship meant anything to him, he’d stop, because I wasn’t going to sit around and watch him turn into a speed freak.

  I thought of that moment again as I drove through the December sleet toward home. It was one of those scenes that you know at the time is a turning point. I looked at him in the rearview mirror, slumped unconscious on the backseat, and thought of how he’d looked then—when I’d told him I was going to move out if he didn’t quit shooting up. He’d cried. Not in front of me, but in his room, with the door shut. Then he’d shouted, cursed. Then he’d shot himself up and gone out, leaving the works where I could see them on his bed.

  We kept rooming together until the end of September, because that’s when the lease was up. We didn’t talk much, except for polite talk about how I was doing with my summer courses and how his gigs were going. I think we both wanted to reconcile, to forget the whole thing. But we’d said too much, gone too far in our posturing—me as the big brother he was mourning, Lonnie as the true child of the sixties I could never become. Neither one of us had enough sense to back down and start over.

  The last time I saw him was on the last day of September, 1968. He’d played at the Black Dome that night. I’d gone to hear him, for old times’ sake. He brought a woman back to the apartment with him. I had a girl of my own by then—a beautiful black-haired English major named Linda. The four of us shared a bottle of wine in my room, listened to some Jimi Hendrix, and talked about old times. There were no hard feelings that night—I think that was the point we were both trying to make. We shook hands warmly, told each other we’d stay in touch, and went to bed.

  We saw each other on the street a few times after that, and I went to hear him play at the Dome again. Then the fall term started for me, and I lost touch with him. I heard he went to L.A. and New York. Several years after that, someone told me they’d heard him play at the Winterland in San Francisco.

  And now, eighteen years later, he was back. Still trying to kill himself. I stared in the rearview mirror and wondered what I was going to do with him—this time. Wondered if I could help—this time. Or if anyone could.

  4

  IT WAS almost five A.M. when I got Lonnie to the Delores. I half carried him to the apartment—through the parking lot and up the back stairs. Once I got him inside, I stripped off his filthy clothes and threw him into the tub. I left him soaking in a couple of inches of tepid water while I called Ron Fegley—a doctor friend.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ron said when I told him how many pills Lonnie had apparently swallowed, “he must have a hell of a tolerance for drugs.”

  “I think he’s had his share,” I said.

  “He probably vomited up most of them earlier tonight. And it has been better than eight hours since he swallowed them. But if I were you, I’d take him to the emergency room—pronto. That’s my advice.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” I said. “Attempted suicide means psychiatric confinement and, possibly, a police report. I don’t know what kind of criminal record Lonnie might have, but I don’t want to put him in jail or in Longview. Besides, he said he didn’t want to go to the hospital.”

  “He’s in great condition to decide for himself,” Ron said acidly. “Did it occur to you that he might be better off in jail or in some detox center.”

  “I’m not going to make that choice for him. At least, not while he’s in this kind of shape.”

  “Then keep him warm and keep an eye on him. If he starts looking shocky or goes into convulsions—call an ambulance. And I mean quick. You know you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do if he dies on you.”

  I thought it over and said, “I’ll just have to take that chance.”

  “It’s your life,” Ron said. “And his.”

  After hanging up on Ron, I pulled Lonnie out of the tub and dried him off. With the dirt and blood washed off him, he looked a lot better than he had in the Encantada Motel—like a haggard, graying version of the kid I remembered. His face was bruised; but the split lip wasn’t serious, and although the black eye was mousing up, it wasn’t a bad injury either. I took a look at his arms, expecting to find needle tracks. To my surprise he didn’t show any. What he did have was an oval twelve-inch scar on his right side that pinched the flesh between his hip and his rib cage, exactly as if some animal had taken a bite out of him. It looked like a gunshot wound, although it was awfully large for that. I noticed that his fingertips were heavily callused, which meant he hadn’t lost touch with his music—whatever else he might have lost.

  Hoisting him up over my shoulder, I carried Lonnie into the bedroom and lowered him onto the bed. He groaned as I covered him with blankets.

  “Where am I?” he said groggily.

  “You’re at my place.”

  He nodded and smiled, as if that were good news. Then he fell back to sleep.

  After putting Lonnie to bed, I took some fresh bedclothes out of the hall closet and made the living room sofa up for myself. It wasn’t until I actually sat down on the couch that I realized how cold, wet, and tired I was. I stripped off my clothes, curled up on the cushions, and listened to the December storm tapping its nails against the living room window. In the bedroom I could hear Lonnie snoring evenly. I closed my eyes, telling myself that I’d just doze off for a few moments, and immediately fell asleep.

  *****

  I woke up around one o’clock that Friday afternoon, and the first things I heard were the measured sound of Lonnie’s snoring and the patter of the icy rain on the living room window. I walked down th
e hall and took a look at him in the gray afternoon light. The color had returned to his face and he seemed to be sleeping soundly. I thought about trying to wake him, then thought better of it. The fact that he hadn’t died on me in the night was a relief. But I knew that Lonnie wouldn’t see it that way. Junkies have a saying: “Dying is easy.” I let him sleep.

  After fixing some coffee in the kitchenette, I gathered Lonnie’s clothes together and went through them, looking for some clues to his recent past. I found a slip of paper in his shirt pocket with a local phone number penciled on it. When I dialed it, it turned out to be the office of the Encantada Motel. Claude Jenkins answered in a cranky voice. I hung up before he’d finished saying hello.

  In Lonnie’s pants pockets I found a dog-eared social security card, an expired Missouri driver’s license, and a snapshot of a brown-haired woman and two smiling children, posing in front of a Christmas tree. The photograph had a date printed on its back—December 25, 1984. The woman was very beautiful; so were the children. It didn’t seem possible that it was a picture of Lonnie’s own family. And yet I couldn’t think of a better reason for him to have kept the photo on him. There was an address on the expired license—Klotter Road, University City, Missouri.

  In his parka, I found a crumpled pack of Camels, a ticket stub from the Bijou—a theater here in town—and a round-trip Greyhound bus ticket, to Cincinnati from St. Louis and back. I also found a page that had been ripped out of a Cincinnati phone book and folded into a square. I unfolded it, knowing already that it was the page with my name and number on it. I was right. My name had been circled in pen and a little note was scribbled beside the listing. Sorry, Harry.

  I stared at the note for a second and wondered if he’d written it before or after he’d taken the pills. Either way, it was the closest thing to a suicide note he’d left. Sorry, Harry.

  I folded the note back up and stuck it in my desk drawer. I piled the rest of his belongings on the coffee table. The parka could be cleaned; the rest of the stuff was hopeless. Bundling up his clothes, I threw them in a plastic trash bag. I figured he could wear some of my things until he could buy some new ones. Or until I could buy new ones for him.