Permafrost
Page 10
And gasoline, I frugally reasoned, was gasoline.
The tank was still a quarter full.
Unlike the other place I had passed after leaving Harmony, this one came with some kind of convenience store attached.
“Try Our Freshly Made Sandwiches. Choose From A Variety of Fillings,” the sign on the window said.
I pulled in.
Self-serve was the only option offered, and I pumped twenty dollars worth of gas.
Inside the place stood two people clearly related. My first thought was that they were father and daughter. At a stretch they might even have been husband and wife. Both were meaty, overweight. Both were sullen. Both were silent as I entered.
At the nearest of two cash registers, I handed the man a twenty dollar bill. He pulled a thick bundle of notes from the top pocket of his stained overalls and placed the crisp twenty somewhere in the middle of the soggy wad. I couldn’t help noticing that his roll contained notes of all denominations, and probably added up to more than a thousand dollars. A lot of money. I wondered why he bothered with the register.
He said nothing during the transaction.
Then I turned and walked from one world to another, from engine dirt and man-sweat to a pristine cleanliness. The food counter positively shone, the glass in front and over the assembled sandwiches sparkled. I glanced down at the floor, which had metamorphosed from lubricated filth to well-scrubbed squeaky industriousness in a matter of a foot.
I had stepped from one person’s domain into another’s.
The same family. Wildly opposing work ethics.
Behind the food counter the woman became a girl as I got closer. I smiled at her and her face did something similar in return.
“What do you recommend?” I asked her.
As I spoke, she looked at me with an odd, unreadable expression.
She took a long while to answer me.
“They all pretty good,” she finally, grudgingly, allowed.
“Do you have any roast beef?”
“Surely do.” I had offered a mild insult.
“What does that come with?”
She took a deep breath. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want?” She was throwing down the challenge.
“Well. Let’s see . . . lettuce, tomato . . . Swiss cheese if you have it . . . potato chips. Not too many. No mayo on that if you please.”
“Drink?”
“Coke . . . Pepsi . . . whatever you have. It doesn’t matter.”
“Some people got a preference.”
“I can’t tell the difference.”
“Coke’s got a syrupy taste to it.”
“What do you have?”
“We got RC.”
I very nearly laughed. “That’ll be just fine.”
“Diet?”
“Why not?”
I pulled out Keith’s picture and placed it on the counter in front of her.
She nodded at it slowly. “Yup. That’s him. That’s who I was just this instant thinking of,” she said mysteriously.
I was confused. “That’s him? What do you mean?”
“He spoke just like you. When you spoke just now. I thought of him. Then you showed me his picture. Pretty weird, huh?” she said.
“He was here?”
“Sure was.”
“Long ago?”
“Mmm . . . two months . . . maybe longer . . . no . . . it was two months. Sliced turkey was on sale. He had the turkey. On a Kaiser roll. Chips and a soda. Three dollar plus tax. He wanted water. I told him it came with soda. He wanted water. I told him the price was just the same. Three dollar. Soda or no soda.” She shrugged. “But he wanted water. I gave him water.”
“For the three dollars?” Why was I getting into this?
“Nah . . .” she smiled ruefully. “Gave it him for two fifty.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
Her eyes widened to take in the whole place. “Many customers do you think we get? Strangers? Lookin’ just like tramps? Ridin’ a bike. Talkin’ with a strange voice?” She paused. “No offense,” she quickly mumbled.
“That’s okay. Not many, I’d imagine.”
“Right. It was him. He was here.” She hesitated. “Your friend?” It was becoming a very common guess.
“Yes.”
“Lookin’ for him?”
“Yes.”
She nodded sagely. “He was headin’ up north. Paddle Lake’s a few miles further up the road. Maybe headin’ there. Pretty enough place.” Her tone said she didn’t care much for it, pretty or otherwise.
“Yes . . . maybe he is.” I said absently.
She nodded and walked away.
I stood in a daze and waited.
I had myself a lead.
Keith had been here.
She returned with a brown paper bag, three large napkins, and a paper cup with a straw sticking up from the clear plastic top.
“Didn’t say which size you wanted for your soda,” she said, “I guessed you for a medium.”
“You’d have been dead right,” I said.
She looked pleased with herself. “Good. Three sixty-nine. Comes to. With tax.”
I gave her a five and told her to keep the change.
“This ain’t no restaurant.”
“I know.”
“So keep your money. I done nothin’ fancy for it.”
“You helped me out.”
“Just told the truth. Nothin’ special. Keep your money.”
“I’ve offended you.”
“No.” She held up her hand. “You meant it okay. But it ain’t right. You go on an’ keep it.”
I took my change back. I opened the bag. I sniffed at it.
“It smells very good,” I said.
“Darn right,” she said, casting a superior look toward the dirt-soaked figure on the other side of the room.
“Did he say anything else?” I asked.
“What about?”
“Where he was going? Anything?”
“Just asked for his food. Paid. Left. Got on his bicycle. Headed north, like I said. If he’d have said more I would have told you. I don’t lie. I don’t keep things back from folks.” Once again the oily figure on the other side of the room received a sour, cryptic look.
I decided to leave before a familial squall blew in.
EIGHT
By the close of the afternoon the humidity had transformed air into liquid. The Mercedes crested a gently rolling hill, and descended into the Handle, the collection of single-story ranch houses situated at the southernmost point of Paddle Lake, ten miles from the town of the same name.
The two-lane road curved around the lake in a loose, looping semicircle. On the right, the beach sloped softly down to the water, which as Tom Younger had attested, was as clear as cut glass and inviting in the moist heat.
The houses were uniform, all windowed to face out over the water, with dense scrub behind for privacy, and severely manicured lawns spread out like dropcloths over the sandy soil and low fern cover in the front. Lawn met road. Road met beach. Beach met water. And water stretched three miles across, to a mirror image of trees and houses.
Past the last of the houses the beach came to an abrupt end. There a rugged and pristine dock extended out into shallow water, where a dozen boats, mostly the flat pontoon type, were moored. Past the dock there was an empty asphalt parking lot, and a single tennis court, partly hidden behind a green practice board. A basketball hoop hung over the far corner of the lot, and a small children’s playlot stood nearby, the pieces of pale wood bolted firmly together and left standing in a stretch of cut grassland that also housed a communal barbecue area, four long wood tables, with a well-used gas grill sitting squat in a circle of worn mud in the middle of the grass.
It was an oasis of order.
An old Richard Thompson song was being sonically assaulted by Bob Mould on the CD changer. I sat in the car with the engine turned off, eating my sandwich and potato chips, sipping my medium Diet RC Cola.
The first house I had passed belonged to the Tait family. This wasn’t exactly a difficult fact to ascertain, as a sign fashioned out of smooth, thickly lacquered wood at the end of a newly sealed driveway proudly bore their name. There were smaller wood pieces underneath, all linked together by tiny chains. George and Sylvie, Chip and Greg, and Tammi.
I reasoned that when one child left for college their name would doubtless come down. When they returned in the summer months they would naturally be reinstated. It was meant to be cute. I idly wondered whether Sylvie was George Tait’s first wife, whether her nameplate had replaced someone else’s.
The Tait family garage was almost as big as the house and it stood boastfully open. Inside were three mountain bikes, a relic of a red Toro snow blower and matching lawnmower, a set of golf clubs, a white Corvette and a mid-sixties Ford Mustang in a lurid yellow, and an empty space, where another car obviously stood. My guess was Sylvie’s, possibly a more practical vehicle, a nondescript late model Buick or Oldsmobile perhaps.
The other houses on the road displayed a similarly cavalier disregard for security. Names were always prominent. Garage doors all stood wide open. Even house doors were unlocked, their screen doors the only flimsy defense against the outside world.
As Tom Younger had promised, eleven houses followed the curve of the beach road, and four orange Harmony Realty signs were visible.
A diagrammatic listing of the berths on the dock hung on the tree by the picnic tables and five minutes of study yielded the names of every inhabitant of the Handle, another minute and the names could be matched to the boats. A stroll along the road would enable the easy identification and cross-referencing of family, house, boat, car, golf clubs, tennis rackets, power mower, and child.
Did they possess no secrets in the Handle? Were they that safe or indifferent to outside danger? Or just that supremely overconfident?
With a whittled stick I pulled a child’s gym shoe from the water underneath the dock. I kicked at a smooth pale stone, and it rolled into the water without making a sound. At the furthest point on the dock I looked out across the smoothness of the water to a small tightly wooded island that lay low in the water, as if playing dead.
My first glance from the road hadn’t made out the island, which was difficult to spot against the uniform tree cover on the other side of the lake. But now I saw that the island had a beacon; one solitary tree had turned to a fall color already, rushing the next season, its leaves all aflame, an angry, cheated red, as autumn slyly, surreptitiously stalked the last days of summer.
When I turned and walked back, an old muddy Jeep Wrangler was parked in the lot and a tall older man in well-worn khaki shorts with deeply tanned, bony legs was gazing thoughtfully at the Mercedes. We met halfway across the sand.
His shirt was plaid, faded from what had once been a vivid red to shades of dirty muted pink. His hair was gray and thinning. He was late fifties, perhaps older, but whipcord fit, more from daily rigor than enforced exercise. It wasn’t by any means a friendly face, eagle-eyed, a chin like an arrowhead pointing downward, his hands knotted around a piece of rope.
“Never have owned an import,” he spoke quietly.
I was clearly in a land governed by Detroit rules, and I couldn’t come up with a good way to answer him.
“Dumbass boat always needs something.” He gestured toward the dock with the rope.
I nodded my sympathetic understanding.
“Name’s Bill Kraft.”
I told him my name, and we shook hands. His grip was softer than I had expected. I had stupidly guessed him for a blusterer. He quite clearly wasn’t.
“Interested in buying a boat?” he asked me immediately.
I told him I was looking for a house.
He nodded. “They got four nice ones ‘round here up for grabs.”
I said I knew.
He remarked that it was a swell spot for kids.
I couldn’t argue with that.
“They play on the beach all the day long in the summer months,” he told me. “When the schools let out. They row out into the lake in the old rowboat that’s pulled up on the sand, and they love it. Mine are way too old for that now. Both got kids of their own. Living miles away. They bring them here sometimes. Not as often as they should. I miss them.” His voice grew soft. “Do you know I hear the kids’ voices from the house? And for a moment I sometimes think they’re mine?” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Gotta be about the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, right? Like I was some vegged-out relic? Dumb, right?”
I tried to smile.
“I gotta fix that dumb buoy. Wife’s been after me to do it.”
I smiled again. There wasn’t any space in the conversation for me.
“I’m pretty sure all the houses up for sale come with boats as part of the deal.” I must have looked mystified. He explained. “Folks tend to sell ‘em with. Often as not. All four got pontoons. Good boats, these pontoons are. Maybe not much to look at. Nothin’ pretty or sleek but you put a big enough engine on, maybe 350 or so, and they’ll drag a couple of fat-assed skiers behind ‘em a ways.” I must have looked skeptical. “That’s no lie,” he added.
I told him I was sure it wasn’t.
“Well. Like I say. Gotta fix that dumb buoy. Hangs too high. Boat hits the dock. Used to be I could take her in and hardly need the buoys at all. Gettin’ sloppy with old age.” He held up the piece of rope. “Nearly a foot longer than the old one. Gotta make all the difference, I figure.”
He walked away from me looking thoughtfully at his rope.
On an impulse, I pulled my shoes off and walked across the rest of the sand toward my car. The sand was bleached white and warm beneath my pale feet. There were beach chairs stacked tidily behind a giant oak tree. A rope was attached to another tree, and towels and swimsuits hung in the sun to dry. There were toys piled up in colored crates: plastic shovels, buckets, floatation devices of bright colors and various shapes.
I didn’t notice an old rowboat anywhere.
* * *
Back at the car, I opened the folder and looked at Tom Younger’s extensive property listings. According to Tom, the Claytons, the Blacks, the Sanders, and the Alexanders were all anxious to sell.
I quickly scanned the listings. There was little biographical detail on either the Alexander or Sanders families, but amazingly Younger had appended the other two listings with a sizeable portion of gossip, which was a remarkably unprofessional act.
While each of the four houses looked very similar in layout, the inside of each property showed a notable disparity.
First there were the inhabitants. Will Sanders was a semi-retired lawyer in his late forties, whose name was reasonably well known to people like me who followed the legal machinations of the big four automakers. Mr. Sanders had represented one of these companies in headline cases, where two burning deaths had been blamed on gas tank placement, a manufacturing defect of which the company had been all too well aware. Each case had been a victory for Sanders and the car company. No one had ever accused the lawyer of illegality or deceit, but he had willingly placed himself in the unpopular position of defending big business against grieving families who nevertheless had been able to put a price on their suffering, and a high price at that.
Younger noted that he had a wife named Chloe and a nine-year-old daughter named
Beth. His house was priced to sell, the tenacious Younger noted in the margins of the listing.
Connie Alexander lived alone in a house that, if the photograph was accurate, was the most charmingly featured, and boasted the prettiest interior by far. She was a petite woman, with elfin features and dark hair, in her mid-fifties perhaps, sitting primly in an ornate high-backed chair, surrounded by massed antiques. There was no mention of other family, dead, elsewhere, or just absent. She essayed the slightest of smiles in the photo. Younger clearly thought including her in the photograph provided a nice touch. He also reckoned she’d drive a harder bargain but, like the Sanders, would take a decent offer, if she got one.
It wasn’t mentioned anywhere in Younger’s notes that Connie Alexander was an artist, a painter of rural watercolors that were rather good, that tended to sell for fair if unspectacular prices, and which ArtWorks had, on occasion, been called upon to frame.
It was a small world.
I actually liked her art very much. But as always, those who make a profession out of what many consider a vocation seldom manage a truly aesthetic appreciation of the subject. We are simply too close. Or else too fixated on profits and bottom lines.
I live in an art world, yet I can as much judge art as I can compose a symphony, or fire a handgun with any degree of accuracy.
Cindy Clayton had three small children to raise on a considerably more meager divorce settlement than she thought she would receive from her regularly unfaithful golf pro husband, Mike. The inside of her house was aggressively strewn with Barneys and Lamb Chops and Power Rangers and every other overpriced kid fad she had purchased to keep her three infants happy, as a very ugly divorce proceeding unfolded.
This house was an absolute steal. Younger made heavy use of his highlighting pencil here. Priced way below market price. Needed minimal cosmetic work. Should sell very fast. Cindy was desperate.
Younger’s scrawl on the front of the folder mentioned that all three of these properties had come onto the market very recently, almost simultaneously. He drew no conclusion from this fact. At the bottom of the page he expressed the hope that this background info on the selling families was helpful. He asked me to keep it to myself as he prided himself on his professional discretion.