Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  “Are you Harry Stoner?” she called out.

  “I’m Harry,” I said, walking up to her. “Sorry I’m late. The weather slowed me down.”

  She smiled at me. “I figured.”

  I smiled back at her. She had the kind of good looks that would have made me smile at her, even if she’d been a stranger. Her hair was light brown, almost blond, cut in bangs in front and piled in a bun on top. A few loose hairs curled at her cheeks, giving her a casual, earthy look. She had a full, square face, sunburned and lined attractively around the eyes and mouth. Her eyes were wide and a pale, cornflower blue. Her top lip flared up, with the suggestion of a pout, although there was nothing snotty about her smile. She was wearing jeans and a pale yellow fur jacket that had gone tatty at the cuffs and the collar.

  I must have been staring at her a little too openly, because she started to look embarrassed.

  “I guess I sounded like a monster on the phone,” she said, as if she thought that was why I’d been ogling her. “Was that what you were expecting?”

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” I said, sitting down across the aisle from her.

  “You look like I expected,” she said with genuine warmth. “You know, Lonnie used to talk about you a lot. His famous roommate who became a private eye.” She said the private eye part with a touch of irony. But it was good-natured irony. After the way she’d sounded on the phone, the lightness of her manner came as a surprise. “He kept saying he’d put us in touch some day. But...”

  She looked down at the floor, as if talking about Lonnie embarrassed her.

  “How is he?” she said, without looking at me.

  “We’re going to have to talk about that,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “He has a problem about seeing you right now.”

  Karen Jackowski smiled knowingly. “It isn’t something I haven’t already seen.”

  “He’s tried this sort of thing before?”

  “All his life,” she said, and for a moment her voice filled with the same bitterness with which she’d spoken over the phone. Then she made a face, as if she’d heard that bitterness herself and didn’t like what it did to her. “He’s never intentionally taken an overdose of pills before, but God knows he’s overdosed enough.”

  “On what?”

  “Ludes, soapers, smack. You name it.”

  “Lonnie is a junkie, then?” I said, without much surprise.

  Karen nodded. “He’s been in a federal drug rehabilitation program for the last two years, Harry.”

  “When did he get out?”

  “As far as I know,” she said, “the week before last.”

  ******

  We walked back up the long hall to the check-in counters. Karen was taller than I’d expected—taller than Lonnie. And she moved quickly, with long deliberate strides—the way runners walk. As we approached the X-ray machines, Karen glanced at one of the TV monitors flashing flight information and began to laugh.

  “The last time I was at this airport in ‘72,” she said, “Lonnie and I got stoned on acid before we boarded the plane back to St. Louis. I remember standing in front of one of those monitors and staring at it as if it were a soap opera. A flight attendant came over and asked me if he could help. He was coming on to me, but I was so stoned, I didn’t realize it. I thought he really wanted to give me a hand, so I asked him if he could change the channel on the TV.” She laughed again. “You should have seen the look on his face. Lonnie got hysterical and said he couldn’t take me anywhere. We were goofing so openly, it was a miracle we didn’t get busted.”

  “I did acid once,” I said.

  “Once?”

  I nodded.

  “Under a doctor’s supervision?”

  I grunted and she laughed.

  “You’re kind of square, aren’t you, Harry?” Karen Jackowski said, in her husky, amused voice.

  “My whole life,” I admitted.

  “Well, I did acid more than once. And everything else that Lonnie did.” She gave me a frank smile and said, “I was a junkie too.”

  Whether she’d intended to or not, she’d surprised the hell out of me. I tried to cover my shock by acting as casually about it as she had. “When did you quit using?” I asked.

  “When Lonnie got busted in ‘76,” Karen said, as if she’d answered the question many times before. “Lonnie was so sick in those days that he needed that first one or two bags just to get well. One morning, he shot himself up in both arms and OD’d on the bathroom floor. I had to call the life squad to our apartment, and they brought the cops with them. The paramedics brought Lonnie back to life and the cops busted him on the spot. Do you know what he said when he regained consciousness?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said it was the best high he’d ever had,” she said. “He wanted to do it all over again.”

  “And that’s when you quit?” I said.

  She nodded. “That was it for me.”

  “What happened to Lonnie?”

  “They sent him to a halfway house for six months. Then put him back in a methadone clinic. We were both going to stay clean, after that.” She laughed bitterly. “Yep, that was the plan, all right. Get married. Have kids. Go back to school. A new life.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  She eyed me balefully. “No, it didn’t work. He stayed in the clinic for a while—six months, maybe. And then he started getting stoned again. He’d lip the methadone pills and sell them on the street for junk. He lied about it, at first. But towards the end he didn’t even bother to lie. We were living apart when he got busted the last time. I filed the divorce papers the day he went off to Lexington.”

  We’d come to the end of the hallway. I stopped for a moment and stared at Karen. She’d spoken so freely about her sensational past that she’d almost taken my breath away. And then it was always sobering to hear about the lives other people have led. It gave you a healthy sense of your own inconsequence, like having your picture taken in front of the Grand Canyon.

  As we started down the escalators to the ground floor, I asked her, “Why did you come after him today?”

  She thought about it for a second, then said, “I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  “You still love him?”

  She shook her head decisively. “No. But I still want to, if you can understand that. I still have the need. Lonnie’s a lot like junk—you never really kick him. All it takes is a taste and you’re hooked again.” She turned to me with a resolute look. “I don’t want to get hooked, Harry. I can’t afford to anymore. I’ve made my own life now, and I don’t want to go backward.”

  “How do you expect to help him?” I said.

  “I can’t help him. I don’t have the strength or the desire. All I can do is fly him back to St. Louis and take him to someone who can get him straight. After that, it’s up to him.”

  We stepped off the escalator into the dim, deserted ground-floor waiting room. There was a phone booth beside the escalator. I thought about calling Lonnie—to check up on him. Then decided against it. I also decided to take Karen back with me to the apartment, whether Lonnie approved of her or not. It was clear, now, that I was way out of my depth when it came to dealing with him.

  I guided Karen to the exit. She took one look out the plate-glass doors—at the blowing snow and rain—and shivered.

  “Welcome to Cincinnati,” she said lugubriously.

  8

  AS WE were walking through the lot to the car, Karen slipped on the icy tarmac. I caught her before she fell and lifted her to her feet. In lifting her up, I inadvertently cupped my hand around one of her breasts. I pulled my hand away immediately and gave her a quick, embarrassed look. She looked amused.

  “That was a cheap way to cop a feel,” she said.

  “Hey!” I protested. “It was an accident.”

  “There are no accidents, Harry,” she said with a laugh. “But we should know each other a little better, I think, bef
ore you go any further. Especially in an airport parking lot.”

  As she got into the car, I thought that I’d very much like to know her better.

  “You have somebody back in St. Louis?” I said curiously as I got into the car beside her. “Somebody you...know a little better?”

  “I’ve known a lot of men better,” she said in her husky, ironic voice. “Better and worse.”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Have you hooked up with someone else, after Lonnie?”

  “Seriously?” she said in a vaguely mocking voice. “Seriously, no. At least, no one for very long. I guess Lonnie spoiled me for other men.”

  “He’s that good?” I said, feeling a twinge of ancient jealousy in spite of myself.

  “Oh, he’s very good in bed,” Karen said indifferently. “But that’s not what I meant. What I meant, I think, is that I haven’t wanted to get involved with another man since I separated from Lonnie. There were a few one-night stands, especially right after we broke up. But nothing lately. I’ve got my kids and my job at U-City Elementary. I don’t need anything else.” She laughed dryly. “I sound pretty arrogant, don’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do to myself. You’d just have to have lived with Lonnie for close to fifteen years to understand it.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “About the woes of my marriage, you mean?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Why not?” She turned toward me on the car seat. “Lonnie and I met at a concert at Washington University in 1969. His band was the opening act for Quicksilver Messenger Service. And I was a sophomore coed, majoring in protest. From that first night until he went off to prison two years ago, I didn’t have a life outside of his life. I didn’t have a thing of my own. It was like I’d caught a fast train back there in St. Louis, and I couldn’t get off. We just kept rolling—all over the country. From one gig to the next. Up and down. Two years in Hollywood, when Lonnie was hot. Two years in the Big Apple, when he cooled down. Then four years in an East St. Louis tenement, when nobody would touch him. And all the time, there was the dope and the games. Kinkiness, ugliness. Servicing Lonnie’s supplier for a dime bag. Copping fifteen bags with the rent money. Pushing seven on the street to keep the other eight. Every day worrying about how to get well—how to get the bread to cop. It was, as they used to say, a trip.”

  She tapped her leg nervously with her fingertips. “So you’ll just have to forgive me, Harry, if I don’t meet your expectations when it comes to men,” Karen said in a voice that was meant to be lighthearted but that was cracking under the strain of the past. “When it comes to men, I’ve had it. All I want now is my own life. No more train rides, thank you. No more commitments.”

  I glanced at her. She’d turned her head away, toward the side window.

  I cleared my throat and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” she said abruptly, without turning around. “Strolling down Memory Lane always has this effect on me. Put on the radio, will you? I don’t want to be the main attraction anymore.”

  I flipped on the radio and concentrated on the road.

  ******

  As we rounded the final cut bank above the river, the city came into view, white and shimmering in the snow, like a city of marble.

  “He always liked this place,” Karen said. “He made a lot of friends here.”

  “Do you think that’s why he came back, yesterday?” I said. It was a question that had been bothering me since Claude Jenkins had phoned the previous night.

  Karen didn’t answer me—just stared at the beautiful skyline.

  “What I said before,” she said after a time. “It wasn’t always like that.”

  “We don’t have to talk about him anymore,” I told her.

  “No,” she said stoutly, “let me say it.”

  “All right.”

  “He was never really a bad man,” Karen said. “He was just too naive about things. The sixties did that to him—to all of us. Primed us for disappointment. Raised our hopes too high. The old J-curve. When expectations outrun your ability to meet them.” She laughed. “I sound like a graduate student, but who could have guessed what the last fifteen years were going to be like? Who could have guessed what a falling-off there was going to be? God, what an awful decade this is. So selfish and inhospitable. So cocksure of itself. So unimaginative. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “It’s different,” I said.

  “The last ten years practically killed Lonnie,” she said bitterly. “He just couldn’t stop living the sixties dream. Me neither, I guess. The accommodations I’ve made...I’ve had to make. But inside...” She touched her breast, over her heart. “I’m still for peace and love. I still make the marches, when they’re marching. I still want to believe in all that stuff. Like I still want to love Lonnie, I guess. The two of them are hard to separate out in my head—Lonnie and the past.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He never really meant to hurt anybody. Christ, he really believed in peace, love, sharing. He just didn’t want to be hurt himself. And he’d been hurt so many times. His parents, his brother, the band, agents. Me. You. Did you know that you hurt him, Harry?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I think I do know that.”

  “All he ever really wanted was to be loved uncritically—the way he thought he loved other people. It’s what we all wanted, wasn’t it? He’d open himself up to strangers, time and time again. Really show them his heart and soul. And every time they’d disappoint him or use him or hurt him. It got so that he expected it. And then it got so that he couldn’t handle it without a fix. He just didn’t have it inside. It was like he was born without the right stuff. He used to joke about it, feebly. He said he was missing a bone—the heart.”

  “We all have to live with disappointments, Karen,” I said.

  She stiffened up on the car seat. “I’m not excusing him,” she said coolly. “I’m the last person on earth who would excuse Lonnie Jackowski. I’m just saying that he did what he did out of weakness and despair—not out of any deliberate desire to hurt.”

  I crossed the river on the Brent Spence and took I-71 north to the Reading Road exit. We didn’t say another word, until I pulled into the Delores’s parking lot on Burnett.

  “We’re here,” I said, flipping off the engine.

  Karen looked up at the red-brick apartment and shivered.

  “If you don’t feel like this,” I said gently, “we could get you a hotel room.”

  She shook her head. “I came to help him.”

  “There could be a scene,” I said in a warning voice.

  “I can handle Lonnie,” Karen said, with just a touch of contempt in her voice. “Let’s go.”

  I guided her around to the front, up the stairs leading to the narrow court. The slush in the courtyard was dimpled with footprints, filling up with new snow. The limbs of the dogwoods were encased in ice, dripping down in sharp, conical icicles. Karen brushed against one of the dogwoods and the icicles tinkled like wind chimes.

  As we stepped into the lobby, Karen stared ominously up the stairs.

  “All set?” I said.

  She took a deep breath and nodded.

  We walked up two flights to my floor. When we got to the top floor, I put my hand across her chest, brushing her breasts again.

  She laughed and said, “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  When I didn’t laugh, she stared at me curiously and asked, “What’s wrong, Harry?”

  I pulled her back to the landing. “My apartment’s at the end of the hall on the left.”

  “And?” she said.

  “The door is open.”

  “Maybe he opened the door,” she said, “to air the place out?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, we don’t have to make a melodrama out of it,” she said, peeking around the corner of the landing, “let’s just go see.”

  “I’ll go,�
�� I said.

  She gave me a disappointed look. “You’re not going to be like that, are you, Harry? A male chauvinist prick? Lonnie would have told me to go ahead. In fact, he would have pushed me in front of him.”

  “I’m not Lonnie,” I said.

  I put my hand on her shoulders, backed her gently against the landing wall, and stared into her eyes. “Humor me and stay here, Karen. Okay?”

  “For chrissake,” she said with disgust. “All right. Go already.”

  I stepped back into the corridor and walked slowly down the hall. As I got closer to the door, I could see that the apartment had been ransacked. I unbuttoned my topcoat and pulled the Gold Cup out of the shoulder holster. It was cocked and locked. I flipped off the safety and stepped into my living room.

  All the drawers of my desk had been emptied on the floor. The cushions on the couch were slashed; and the stuffing had been pulled out and scattered around the room. A big wad of it was hanging from a lamp by the door. I swiped it off with the gun barrel.

  “Lonnie?” I called out.

  Nobody answered.

  I walked into the bedroom and flipped on the light. The bureau drawers had been emptied and the mattress had been ripped open.

  I walked back into the living room. Karen Jackowski was standing in the doorway, surveying the damage with an aghast look on her face.

  “Did Lonnie do this?” she said with horror.

  “I don’t know. He’s not here now.”

  “He must be completely out of his mind,” she said, giving me a helpless look. “God, what are we going to do?”

  I put the safety on and stuck the gun back in my holster. “Find him,” I said.