The Lake, the River & the Other Lake Read online

  “You’re kidding. You’ve heard your dad . . . doing it?”

  “All the time. And that’s just with my boring old mom. When he’s got something hot happening, like tonight, I bet he’s even louder. We could probably be doing it ourselves at the same time and he’d be so loud, he wouldn’t even . . .” She turned around in his lap and considered him again. “Hey. Yeah. It’s going to be kind of like a live sex show. Maybe we—”

  Just then there were voices on the gangplank and footsteps on the deck. Mark felt a slight shift of the boat. Courtney pressed her fingers against his mouth. Then they were coming down the little stairs, into the cabin, the woman saying something about her not really being a big boat person, that she was too used to being surrounded by trees. Light came through the slats—dim and orange; the small table lamp in the corner. There was the sound of ice cubes: more drinks. The sound of the couch unfolding into a bed. Courtney’s hand left his mouth, slid underneath her, between them, squeezing his crotch.

  He was convinced her dad would know instantly that they were on the boat. Sure, they’d left no evidence out, their bikes were stashed up at the condo, but it was such a confined space, even if it was maybe the biggest boat in the marina . . . He imagined the man discovering them in there, the red rage on his face as he flung Mark overboard. Having a bigshot like Dick Banes mad at him—he might get arrested or lose his job on the river or who knows? At the very least, his parents would go mental. And Courtney had the condo to herself tonight—why the hell weren’t they up there right now where they could be alone?

  The stereo came on, loud—some seventies-sounding crap he was pretty sure was that guy who used to be in the Beatles. Not the one guy, but the other guy.

  Courtney tipped her head to the side and forward, beckoning him to take a peek. He craned his neck, peering around her hair to see through the slats. They were doing it all right. Her dad was on top, the soles of his feet and his hairy legs and ass silvery in the dim light. All he could see of the woman was her hands on his hips, casual, like she was resting them there, and her khaki clothes folded neatly on the side of the bed like they were waiting, too.

  Courtney grinned against his cheek, biting him. He could just see her eyes, looking back at him wide and naughty, like this was the Greatest Show on Earth. Personally, if they had to watch, Mark kind of wished there was more to see than her dad’s hairy ass, but something about it—the idea of it, maybe—was certainly getting to Courtney. She took his hand, directing it so he was reaching around in front of her, sliding it down into her bikini bottoms. It was damp there, and he touched her where she showed him before, that spot much higher than he always thought, higher than he’d done with those few girls back home, though they hadn’t complained or anything or said he was off. Maybe Courtney was just built differently, with everything way up above her vagina. She was a pretty exceptional specimen of human being, after all.

  They were making some noise out in the room now—or at least Mr. Banes was—and Mark was pretty sure now that Courtney was right: he wouldn’t hear them in there. At least not at the moment, in the middle of the act. But Courtney didn’t seem to want to sit there quietly and enjoy the show. She was twisting around on him, easing to one side and trying to get at his junk. She undid his fly and started rubbing on him. He really didn’t think this was a great idea, but she was already starting to work her bikini bottoms down. It didn’t look like she’d have enough room to get them all the way off, but she was tugging at them, making her intentions clear, and he could feel the heat of her on his leg and with her other hand, twisted around, she was rooting around in his pockets, locating a condom. She pulled it out and bit off the corner and got it out with one hand, and tried to work it down on him, but he just wasn’t ready.

  She twisted around and he could tell, even in the dark, that she was glaring at him, silently pissed. But this whole thing was pretty scary—was it really that weird that he wasn’t hard?

  She started yanking on him, stroking aggressively, but that didn’t work. Then she eased off him slightly, trying to lower her head to his lap, but she couldn’t bend over that far. There wasn’t enough room. So she returned to the stroking. It was no good. He wasn’t going to get hard enough to do it. And he wasn’t sure he really wanted to. This was just too crazy. Wasn’t it?

  Apparently giving up on him, she started doing it herself, touching that spot on herself and grinding back against his package—what there was of it at that point. She was breathing hard and he was sure her dad would hear or she’d lean too far forward, press too hard against the door, and they’d spill out onto the floor. He covered her mouth as she came and then bit his hand, not as part of her coming, but after, like giving him a shot in the ribs. It sounded, out in the cabin, like her dad was finishing, too.

  The stereo was turned down and he could hear them talking now. Mr. Banes was saying wow, that was great, but man, he was suddenly really bushed, like he wanted to go to sleep. Courtney giggled into his neck, silently. Then the woman’s voice, reminding him of a promise that she could spend the whole night.

  “Oh yeah . . .” Mr. Banes didn’t sound so thrilled. “Sure. No problem.”

  “Not to get heavy, really. Just— I’ll get out at dawn.”

  Dawn? Mark thought. Jesus Christ. His coming home real late in the summer maybe wasn’t a problem, but dawn? No way would that fly.

  The stereo was turned off now and they were quiet for a long moment. And the light was still on. Mark reached around in front of Courtney so he could press the light button on his watch. It was now almost one A.M. He waited. No one was getting up. Were they going to leave that light on all night?

  As if to answer his unspoken question, Mr. Banes mumbled something like, “Hon? You gonna—?” and the woman said she needed to leave it on while she slept.

  Courtney was a very slim girl. She weighed next to nothing. He kept telling himself that. Because after another half-hour of this, the weight on his legs was significant. They were tingling. A little longer, and they were definitely numb. Courtney shifted around a little, grinding that bony butt wherever she felt more comfortable, and even seemed to be dozing a little. She was fine. Probably bored even. But when he checked his watch again, panicked at the late hour, he wasn’t sure he could even feel his legs or make them work properly. Could he even walk out of there, given an opportunity to do so? He wasn’t sure. He started poking at his thighs, trying to get the circulation going, imagining the grisly amputation process, his legs two sutured stumps, the doctors shaking their heads mournfully after the gangrene set in. He rocked back and forth, hoping that might help. Yeah, he’d have to wheel himself around on a little furniture dolly. Visit other area high schools and give frightening talks to the kids about the dangers of letting your legs fall asleep . . .

  Occasionally, he’d lean forward and peek through the slats and see their bodies in the glow of the bedside lamp. They didn’t seem to be budging.

  Maybe, he thought, maybe I can just go . . .

  Courtney was drowsy enough, a rag doll on his lap. He slid her a little to one side and squeezed out from underneath her, still hunched in a semi-seated position and leaving her heaped on the Rubbermaid bin. He eased open the louvered door a crack. Courtney grasped his arm, but he resisted and she let go, pressing herself up against the side of the closet as best she could as he rose, painfully, to a standing position, feeling like one of those primitives midway along the chart of evolutionary man, and leaned out, moving through the door.

  His legs buckled under him, useless, as he lurched toward the bed, out of control. He felt like Frankenstein, like he had two casts on his legs, and caught himself from falling with one arm on the mattress. He was leaning over it, the floor still wobbly beneath him, mushy, when the woman sat up, watching him. She was mere inches away, still clinging to Courtney’s dad but wearing no real expression. She just sat straight up, staring at him, wide awake. Alarmed maybe, but not screaming, not surprised. Just unblinking, alert
, like she wasn’t going to take her eyes off him for a second. She looked like she’d expected him to appear. He spun and stiff-legged it up the stairs in a sort of side-to-side sashay, like a male mermaid. He managed somehow to clear the deck, but his legs weren’t up to the challenge of the gangway and he lost his balance and fell, overboard. The water was colder than it should have been that far into the summer, but then he remembered how late it was and how warm, in comparison, he had been, down in the small closet with Courtney’s body pressed against him. I’ll drown, he thought for a second, thinking he was virtually paralyzed, but he didn’t. He worked his arms and felt the slimy dock pilings and something metal—the Pilates equipment?—and grabbed at the line tied to it and pulled himself slowly back up. Standing dripping and bent on the dock, he listened for voices, alarm and chaos down in the cabin, but there wasn’t any. No one had noticed or maybe no one cared and so he squished and wobbled his numb way home.

  “THAT WAS PRETTY LAME,” she told him the next night, after he got off work. “You just leaving like that.”

  Mark said again that he had to. His parents would have killed him.

  “Still,” she said, “I would have loved to have seen his face close up when you walked past the bed like that.”

  “I don’t think he saw me. He looked like he was asleep.” Of course, Mr. Banes very easily could have heard him falling overboard, but Mark decided not to mention that part. “Your— The woman, she saw me. Looked right at me.”

  “Yeah, she was kind of creepy, huh? She did the same thing when I walked out. Stared right at me, like she wasn’t sleeping a wink. But my dad saw me, too.”

  “Shit. You’re kidding.”

  She shrugged. “I made a little noise. I decided, fuck it, maybe he should see me, you know? What’s he going to do about it—tell my mom? He didn’t say a fucking word. To her or me. Just sat there, totally busted, his dick still hanging out.”

  He tried to picture it: Courtney walking out and clanging around, banging into something on purpose, maybe, glaring at her dad sitting upright, naked next to some strange woman, father and daughter face-to-face. The whole thing was just so creepy. “Listen,” he said, trying to take her hand, get her attention. “Courtney. I like you. A lot.” She shook his hand off but he continued anyway. “I—I like hanging out with you. And I know you got a certain way you like things and that’s cool, but sometimes, in terms of just a nice evening, a nice date, you know, like a date date—?”

  “Nice?” She said it like she might say mice.

  “Like last night—that’s not exactly my idea of a perfect date. I mean, you yourself—you’re perfect and all—but the activities—it’s not exactly how I wanted the evening to go. Sorry, but—”

  “No shit.” She frowned, practically sneered, pulled back in a sort of disdainful recoil. “That’s not exactly how I wanted it to go. It’s not exactly a big fantasy of mine to have a guy get all noodle-dicked on me in such a totally excellent situation. Pretty lame, really. Now maybe if you were older, if you were my age . . .”

  She let it hang there and walked off ahead of him, toward the boats.

  44

  IT MADE HER SMILE, when she’d open her e-mail and see something there from reecher81757. Even if he had the simplest, almost babyish questions, he was so polite about it and sorry to bother her and always asked how her reading was coming and when he’d see her next or mention some new—well, new to her, ancient, really—jazz person he wanted to play for her next time.

  She’d gotten online at her dad’s clunky old Mac in his so-called “office,” the messy mudroom between the garage and the kitchen, that he used to print out receipts and stuff for his septic business. She never liked to use it much, going to the library or getting on at Reverend Gene’s instead, not because her dad was really a dick about her using it or anything, or because of the porn sites she occasionally found listed in his Web history, but because the computer itself was sort of grimy. There were black smears from his hands all over the keyboard and the side of the monitor, and though she knew it was probably just gunk and grease from the gears and motors and the tools he maintained in the garage, not actual sewage, it still made her think of that, which was pretty gross.

  She finished up answering Reverend Gene’s question about the Escape key and then shut it down, and did it the way her dad told her to, flicking the switch on the surge protector under the desk because there was something messed up about his old piece-of-crap Mac, and that’s when she spotted that blue fish again—the same blue fish with the red beret and thick-rimmed glasses from the Starkeys’ driveway sign. It was printed in full color on an envelope in the wastebasket. Weird, she thought. Maybe Mr. Starkey has it on his letterhead now . . . ? She slid the basket out and found the crumpled letter that went with it, also with that same big blue fish printed up near the top. It wasn’t from Mr. Starkey but from some tuna company:

  Mr. Kurt Lasco

  Edgewater Road

  Weneshkeen, MI 49660

  Dear Mr. Lasco:

  Thank you for your letter expressing concern about the possible trademark infringement created by your neighbor’s sign featuring a close approximation of Charlie the Tuna.™

  You are correct in assuming that a large corporation like The StarKist® Seafood Co. must remain vigilant in protecting our many trademarks. Failure to protect these can, as you suggested, cause this precious intellectual property to fall into public domain.

  Our legal department has thoroughly discussed your letter and the attached photos of your neighbor’s sign and upon consideration, we feel this is one of the times it is preferable not to act. The sign is not being used for a commercial enterprise, and your road (a dirt-topped “lake access road,” according to our information) receives insubstantial daily traffic. In balance, therefore, the “bad press” fallout of any legal action we might take would far outweigh the advantages of pursuing this matter.

  We will keep the photos of the sign on file and we thank you for calling this to our attention. Please accept the enclosed coupons toward free StarKist® product with our gratitude.

  Sincerely,

  Rose Anders, Esq.

  The StarKist® Seafood Co.

  PO Box 57

  Pittsburgh, PA 15230

  She put the letter back in the trash and tried to arrange it as close as possible to the way she’d found it, tucked under the envelope, which she reballed, and then slid the wastebasket back where she’d found it and went upstairs and tried to forget about the whole business.

  That didn’t work. Twenty minutes later, she marched back downstairs, dug the letter out of the trash, smoothed it out and wrote REAL NICE!! in big black marker across the bottom and left it out on his keyboard where he would have to see it.

  RATHER THAN DEAL with the Starkeys in person, she decided to leave the fudge in their mailbox. It was a two-pounder she got at a discount from work—a fancy mixed sampler, in the older cloth-covered boxes that still said Hersha’s Chocolates in vintage script rather than T.G.I.Fudge.

  But Mark Starkey surprised her, coming up behind her on his bike and then leaning against the mailbox, asking her what she was doing. He looked tan and sweaty, probably just home from work.

  She felt defensive. “It’s fudge. For your parents.”

  He frowned and snorted, shaking his head. “My mom can’t eat that stuff.”

  “Well,” she said, “I just wanted to be . . . neighborly.” She had an urge to say It’s the thought that counts, but didn’t this jerk know that? Jeez, she was just trying to be nice. Not that anyone seemed to understand that around here anymore. Except maybe Reverend Gene and a few others.

  “Whatever,” he said and pedaled up his driveway to the house. She put it in the mailbox anyway.

  When she got back up to the house, she found her dad blocking the patio door. He’d seen the whole thing and looked angry. “What’re you talking to him for? Are you that bored you have to go over there and carry on like a traitor?”
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  “Right,” she said. “I’m a big traitor. Benedict Arnold. Jeez.”

  She tried to brush him off and started down the hall to the stairs, hoping to make it up to her room without further bullshit, but he called after her, “If you want to meet boys, I can introduce you to plenty. Things aren’t really that dull, are they . . . ?”

  She took a second, then turned and walked back into the room. “Do you ever think about why I bother here? I mean, why do I come up here every summer? Is it just to go swimming and work at the fudge shop and see people I really only knew when I was in diapers?”

  What she was referring to was obvious, she thought: the fact that she continued to come up here for part of the year so that he could do his part of the raising, have his input and set an example; be an adult role model for her, along with the one provided by her mom.

  But he just was not getting it. “Okay, okay! You’re saying it’s boring now. You’re getting too old and fancy for our little town. Right? Well, I’m sorry if we don’t have amusement park and rave parties . . .”

  “Did I say bored?”

  “It’s because we don’t have the cable, right? That’s why you hate it here and you have to stir up—”

  “Did I say I—? Look. Forget it. Let’s just drop it, okay?” Again, she started down the hall, then decided to give it one more chance and turned and asked, “But can you just think about this one thing: What is the purpose of us spending the whole summer together? What is the purpose?”

  “I’m sorry if you don’t feel there’s a purpose. Maybe—”

  “Not what I said, okay? It’s a question, Dad. It’s not rhetorical. It’s an actual question. With an actual answer that you will provide after you think about it. Got it?”

  “If you’re that bored up here, why don’t you make a list of some things you’d like to do and—”