White Birch Graffiti (White Birch Village Book 2)

by Jeff Van Valer

  After he was already dead, Lloyd spoke his last word to Ted.

  Pssst! was the sound he made, the result of something liquid—either blood or melted fat—dripping onto the coals.

  Ted preferred the Joni dream. He strolled to the kitchen in his boxers. Shift starts in two hours. He got a pot of coffee going and opened the fridge, grabbed a bottled water and headed to the bread and peanut butter station.

  He munched on his utilitarian nourishment and stared absently out the back window. The dark capillary waves on the unfrozen portion of Brookmount Lake—this time, at least—were all it took to bring up an image of the camp’s Loon Lake. Ted finished his sandwich and drained half of his water.

  Nineteen seventy.

  One-Nine-Seven-Zero. The date and its memories popped up regularly. They sometimes lurked like a soft shadow behind frosted glass. Other times, they roared like a hungry tiger in his face. Other times, they rolled in like a storm, taking over the entire horizon.

  Only three good things came from that summer. His lifelong friendships with cabin mates Zeke and Neil were two of them. His G-rated love affair with Karen—hours of conversation, a couple hand-holds, and one quick kiss—was the third and the greatest.

  Tired of the other memories, he flipped on the television. There, on one of the classic movie channels, Harrison Ford looked cocky driving an old hot rod at night. In an eyeblink, Ted recognized the scene from American Graffiti.

  Graffiti.

  A sense of nostalgia enveloped him. His next thought came as a non-sequitur. Ted and Zeke spent part of one fateful afternoon in the forbidden loft of Cabin 7, a magic marker in their possession. They weren’t supposed to be in the loft, and they weren’t supposed to vandalize the cabin with graffiti. But tell a couple twelve-year-olds they’re not allowed to do something, and see what happens.

  From the shadows that day, Ted and Zeke secretly witnessed what would become the most profound change in their lives’ directions. They didn’t know it at the time, of course. It was a simple thing, the toggling of a track switch that sent the train another way. Because of it, nine boys’ childhoods and one man’s life would end that summer. Ted and Zeke had no way of knowing it at the time, so they simply got to work with their magic marker.

  Ted watched American Graffiti for a few minutes and found it was no distraction at all. Summer camp in 1970 had tattooed its own forbidden graffiti on Ted’s mind. The images of crispy critters on stainless steel, gasoline, pork barbecue, Lloyd, and the cabin loft would never go away.

  He turned off the television and wandered past the kitchen. His triathlon bike in the breezeway made him long for fairer weather. He thought about swimming laps. Races in the coming summer. Young-punk-Joni, leaving him in the dust of a triathlon. Joni—who that very day, as though possessed with super powers, uttered the names Loon Lake Sloth and Karen Dinwiddie.

  White Birch Camp. Lloyd. Karen.

  It’s not gonna stop, Ted. Not today. Wait till your shift. That’ll distract you.

  He hoped.

  He couldn’t fight off age twelve any more than he could stop breathing. Karen appeared in his mind. She was fourteen that summer. Her draw on him was still so strong these thirty years later that she would take him, bare feet and all, through the mudroom and into the garage. This time, he wouldn’t resist.

  A letter Karen wrote Ted after the 1970 camp season sat in an ancient cigar box, which he kept hidden in the gun safe. He hadn’t seen the letter in years. Each time he did resulted from a compulsion he didn’t want. The bitter sweetness it brought was usually too painful to bear. The grown man in him wondered if he could ever read that letter without tears. But the confused, broken-hearted kid, the one who knew the end of summer was coming way back when, always let them flow. The man wanted the pain to go away and the kid wanted to keep it forever.

  Ted loved Karen before he could even know what his feelings meant. He was twelve. When he met her, he would have sworn she was in college. The day after a terrible storm (Tornado Night is the name Hoss gave it), Ted held hands with Karen while the two of them dreamed of crossing Loon Lake together by canoe. In a religious sense, 1970 was a summer of miracles, both good and bad. The lifelong friendships with Zeke and Neil were one kind of miracle. Karen was another all her own. But Hoss, Lloyd, and the fire, in their own horrible ways, were miracles, too.

  Ted shared Cabin 7 with some of the most disturbing acquaintances a boy could ever make. Hoss was a brilliant and insidious leader who used Buck, a charismatic and good-looking kid, as a mouthpiece. Buck ended up being pretty shallow. Hoss was as deep and mysterious—and dangerous—as Loon Lake itself. He was the agitator. The action-seeker. He was the one who toggled the track switch when Ted and Zeke held their magic marker in the loft.

  Ted’s near-unstoppable free-form thought conjured an image of another kid they called Bud, a slight-framed, pale-faced little shrimp with Nebraska, corn-tassel hair more white than blond. Bud had a temper as volatile as ether. Somebody in the cabin once sent him into a blind rage by saying something about lab rats and asking, Hey, Bud, how come your eyes aren’t pink?

  Ted stepped onto the garage’s concrete floor. It was cold, like an autopsy suite. He ignored the image as a young hand dialed in the safe’s code and twisted the ship’s-helm handle.

  Shuck! went the hefty lock inside the door. With a whoosh, the safe sucked air as the anodized metal door peeled off the rubber gasket. Down at the safe’s bottom, next to the stocks of a dozen rifles and shotguns, buried beneath a mountain of exquisitely ordered ammunition boxes, it hid.

  Ted jittered inside with a kind of excitement only a kid can feel. He doubted he’d even touched the cigar box for ten years and hadn’t unfolded the Sloth Story in twenty. A letter inside was something only Karen and he knew about. It was a letter she sent to him, and only him.

  Keeping the secrets from Kathryn seemed both like gestures of courtesy and a form of adultery. But grown-up concerns, for the moment, were distant. The man and the boy in Ted both loved and loathed that box. No good would come of it, but he could never let it go.

  Digging through the ammunition, Ted completed the excavation in about a minute. He picked up the box. In the lid’s decorative picture, a nineteenth-century woman holding a parasol sat in a canoe, watching a male companion tear birch bark off a tree. Careful to keep the heavy thing at the bottom of the box from shifting, Ted opened the lid. The letter was still there, he thought, as though it could possibly have found somewhere else to go. As though by instinct, he lifted its pages to his nose and breathed in deeply. They smelled like his grade-school library’s card catalog. After thirty years, the scent he’d forever called the Karen fragrance was gone.

  The spike of disappointment was sharp enough to surprise him. The Dear Ted at the top of the first page squeezed at his insides just before the garage door opener jerked into life. He jumped.

  Kathryn was home.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ted crammed the ancient pages into the box, flipped the lid closed, and tossed the box into the safe. He shuddered as the sheathed knife thumped inside it. The elevating door revealed Kathryn’s smart legs and sensible heels next to someone else’s car. The garage door was waist-high on her by the time he shoved the safe’s door into latching position behind him.

  Whose car is that? Why isn’t she driving?

  Inside the other car sat a waving Donna, Kathryn’s secretary.

  Kathryn, looking cute with her coat’s hood up, waved at Donna and blew her a kiss.

  “Hey!” Ted said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Details, details,” she said, walking into the garage. Ted waved hello and goodbye to Donna, then hit the button to close the garage door. Kathryn pushed her hood back and turned her head from side to side, revealing a radically different hairstyle. “What do you think? It’s not too short, is it?”

  Her hair was indeed short and a lighter
color in some patches he thought might be called highlights. It revealed her slender neck, was cut above her ears and had a tousled look he liked. She still looked like his wife. And because of it, the weight of the awful day cracked, crumbled, and fell off his shoulders.

  She sauntered up and planted a kiss on his mouth, wrapping her arms around his neck, briefcase and all. She stood back and had a look at him. “What are you doing out here in bare feet?”

  “Nothing.”

  She was the only thing, that day, from Blue River to White Birch, and from 1970 on, that made the first bit of sense. “Where’s your car?”

  “Wouldn’t start. I had Pete Stevens tow it down to the shop. Donna brought me home. Are you out here stroking your guns again?” she asked.

  “Just admiring them from afar this time.”

  “Redneck country doctor.”

  “Wife of a redneck country doctor. Your mom and dad should be so proud.”

  “Hush. They love you.”

  Ted doubled over in mock disbelief and pretended he couldn’t breathe. When he got over the fake coughing fit, he said, “Yeah, they love me. I remember those tears your mom shed at our wedding. She lost a daughter and gained a—”

  “Ted.”

  “And your dad!” John Radiford was a bulldog attorney who loved the courtroom and his bourbon.

  “Stop it,” Kathryn said, swiping a hand at him, trying and failing to hide a smile.

  “Guy still looks at me like I’m your first date in high school.”

  “He does not!” Kathryn broke into a toothy laugh, hugging him again. He hugged back, drawing from a mental library of material on which to denigrate her parents, but he recognized Kathryn’s hug. It was a signal. It was a surrender, a call for mercy. I’m sorry for my parents, it said. Please stop while this is still funny, it also said. Ted thought about all the painful Thanksgivings he and Kathryn spent with her parents in Broadbent, Ohio. Sally Radiford doesn’t like football, Ted observed more than once. And she hosts Thanksgiving. Who hosts Thanksgiving and doesn’t like football?

  Ted let his fingers walk across Kathryn’s ribs, tightening his grip. He breathed in deeply through his nose. “Mmm…” he murmured.

  “What,” she said. The timbre of her voice let him know she was still smiling.

  “Your hair smells nice,” he said.

  “You like?”

  “Sure do.”

  She loosened her grip and kissed him again. “I’m glad. I was a little worried what you’d think. Sure it’s not too short?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all. But my feet are cold. You wanna go in?”

  “Girls’ night out tonight, you know,” she said, walking into the kitchen and putting down her briefcase. “Gonna need your truck. Drop you off at work?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  She appraised him from head to toe. “All right, Dr. Gables, better go get your shower. You look like…” She paused and looked concerned.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Uh. I think.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. What’s the deal? You look all… sympathetic.”

  “That’s because you’re a sympathy magnet. You know that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She leaned into him and sighed. “You just… I don’t know… you wear your pain on your sleeve, Ted.”

  “What… pain?”

  “Don’t know, hon. Been trying to figure it out for years.”

  Sympathy magnet?

  She winked and slapped him on the butt. “Go get your shower.” She took off her coat and draped it over a chair.

  Ted shrugged it off and went into the bathroom, turned on the water, and dropped his clothes. As he stepped into the spray, Kathryn appeared.

  “And, uh, Ted?” she said.

  “Uh-huh?” He wet his hair.

  “Is it time to have a talk with Joni?”

  “Joni? What about?”

  “Rumor has it she went into your little doctor’s hiding place this morning.”

  “Son of a bitch. Are you kidding me?”

  “Is it true?”

  “Sure it’s true.” Ted soaped his face and said, “I just didn’t think it’d get all the way to you so fast.” That sealed it. The gossip lines in Blue River were made of insulated copper wire. Ted soaped his armpits.

  “You know Donna’s husband is one of your x-ray techs.”

  “Oh. Yeah. How ’bout that?” Ted had blanked that little factoid like his car keys and stethoscope. Through the pitted glass of the shower, he could see Kathryn leaning against the sink, facing him. He imagined she was enjoying herself. Either that, or she was worried about Joni getting hurt.

  “Look, Ted. I think that poor girl might be in love with you.”

  “No…”

  “She told me herself at the gala last year how much she looks up to you. She is single. Is she dating?”

  “Not that she’s said.”

  “And the work schedules?”

  Good God. “They, uh… do seem to overlap quite a bit.”

  Ted let the water pour over him, wondering about the custodian in the garage that morning. The one who saw Joni hug him. There was no reason to suspect that guy’s gossip wires weren’t made of copper, like all the rest of them.

  Ted said, “Joni does seem to be getting kind of…”

  “Kind of what?” Without question, Kathryn’s voice had the smile-timbre.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Sympathetic?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Kathryn laughed.

  “She’s a little close at work,” Ted said. “But nothing inappropriate. I swear it’s almost like she thinks people don’t notice.”

  “You sure? She’s pretty sharp, Ted.”

  “I know it.”

  “Okay. Then she must not think clearly when she’s around you.”

  Ted turned off the water. He opened the door to grab his towel as the showerhead dripped onto the tiles. The drain gurgled. Kathryn squinted at him.

  “I’m still convinced you’re not boinking that hot little slice,” she said. “Tell me I’m right.”

  “Kath,” he said, toweling off.

  “Hell, Ted. I’ve seen her in her tight little swim-bike-run suit. I’d practically do her myself.”

  Ted cinched the towel around his waist. “You two decide to do something like that? Save me a seat in front.”

  “Eww,” she said, mugging.

  “And make some popcorn.”

  “Boys are gross.” She hesitated and then looked serious. “But look. You need to figure out a way to get that poor girl outta this mess. With dignity.”

  The phone rang.

  “How do I do that?” Ted asked.

  “That’s your problem,” she said, leaving the room.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was about quarter after six. In a couple minutes, Ted emerged, dressed in scrubs. He threw on a pair of socks and stepped into some old running shoes. In one stroke with each hand, his hair was done in his laissez-faire, windblown look. He saw in the mirror his hair wasn’t too far from Kathryn’s new ’do. He’d heard somewhere married couples, after a few years, often started to look like one another.

  Ted went to the kitchen. Kathryn gently placed the phone back onto its hook. Her face was gray but turned red when she saw him.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, reaching to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Neil.”

  “What.”

  “He’s…” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “He’s what?”

  “He… died.” Kathryn’s voice was high and squeaky.

  Ted let out his breath and didn’t try to breathe in again. He just stared at her. “Was that Mary on the phone?”

  “Mary’s sister,” she said, wiping her nose.

  Ted couldn’t speak.

  “It was last night,” Kathryn whispered, shaking her h
ead.

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody stabbed him.” Her eyes overflowed.

  Ted croaked as he tried to say something.

  “It was Danielle’s birthday,” Kathryn said.

  She wrapped her arms around him and heaved out three or four quiet sobs. She’d spent enough time with Zeke and Neil and their families to love them in her own right. Ted held her until she drew in a mighty sniff. She stepped back and straightened her lapels abruptly, clearing her throat.

  “I’m so sorry, Ted.”

  It was his turn to be upset, but he remained quiet. They stood for an entire minute, saying nothing. A bulb of hot anger blazed in him and dimmed to warm incredulity.

  “Can you work tonight?” she asked.

  He thought for a second and said he could or maybe that he should. Somewhere inside he knew, after the day he had he couldn’t afford not to go to work. His mental health demanded it. Kathryn trudged off to change.

  He numbly grabbed his backpack, crawled into the truck and slumped into the passenger seat. An image of Neil and Zeke appeared. In it, the two boys sat on a special bench at White Birch between Cabins 5 and 6. They faced the lake and looked through The Guide to Sloths, Past and Present. It was a book Zeke’s parents had sent him. Ted had read Karen’s first sloth story to the cabin on the campout that later became Tornado Night. The fictional sloth had scared Zeke and Neil so horribly they were bent toward the academic, to learn their way out of what frightened them.

  Other than Ted’s father, those two boys on the bench turned out to be the greatest men Ted ever knew.

  Neil had been put on this earth to do a lot of things. Some of those things involved being there with Ted and Zeke as they stumbled through their middle years and reached old age. They were supposed to make pacts about what two of them would do together when the first one died some distant day.

  “Not supposed to be today,” Ted whispered to himself.

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the image of Kathryn hurrying into the garage, fresh highlights bouncing with her springy steps, replaced a memory of Zeke and Neil on the bench. Dressed for her night out, sad as it may be, Kathryn hopped into the driver seat.