The Lake, the River & the Other Lake Page 30

  There was a stirring and the rubbing began through his trousers, noncommittally. I’ll stop this right now, he told himself, and then scrolled down to find there was an entire additional, unopened block of thumbnails, more arousing than the first batch. He liked the grins in particular, appreciated the fact that they didn’t look walleyed or drugged or under duress. The eye contact, he decided, was acutely enticing, the way they seemed to be holding his gaze, as if looking up at him, not the camera or the man who remained unseen but for his most primary part.

  Gene unzipped and began stroking in earnest.

  Then there was one that made him sit forward in his desk chair: a girl—dark hair, the set smile, her teeth and lips white with semen as she blew a bubble.

  It looked like the girl. It looked like Kimberly.

  He let go of his member. But he couldn’t stop studying the photo. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly like her—this girl had two studs in her ear and he was pretty certain Kimberly’s only piercing was in her navel. But still, there was a rather striking similarity. Close enough that one could look at this and easily pretend it was her. The more he looked at it, the more it seemed to become her. And she had the eye contact, that straight-on gaze, almost taunting the camera. And her lip curled into a smile, as if about to burst into laughter, amused at the bubble she’d made with the man’s juices. It was an image that made his breath catch, made him cough and the whole plane of the room shift and shimmy, like a visit to that childhood haunt the Mystery Spot, down in the tourist trap Irish Hills, hitting him with a slight but sudden dose of vertigo. It was a powerful image and he realized, with dismay, that he was harder than before.

  No, he told himself, I will not pleasure myself to this image, and he moved on, opening the rest of the day’s thumbnails. They were okay; acceptable; perfectly arousing; adequately obscene—the sort of thing that would have caused him, as a teenager, to walk into traffic in a daze if he were to so much as get a momentary glimpse. But now they didn’t seem to be doing the trick. He flip-flopped from one to the other and back, but he just couldn’t finish. Finally, when he felt his urethra starting to burn and heard the Westminster chimes from the living room clock, announcing it was already four in the afternoon, he relented and opened the off-limits one, the one that looked like the girl, the bubble perched on her playful smirking lips, and Lord forgive him, it offered something more; it was enough to complete the task.

  The hard part was after. Moments after. It hurt, for one thing, his member sore from the lengthy rubbing. He mopped up the mess with a few sheets of used paper from the wastebasket but knew the carpet would be hard and crusty right in that spot and if he ever stepped on it with his bare feet, he’d feel the difference in the texture there and remember the shameful thing he’d done. And the worst thing was, since he needed to get up and wash his hands, he couldn’t close out of the site yet and so the picture remained frozen on the screen, staring accusingly back at him, the dirty old man.

  Later, he took a shower and cried and then prayed about it and went for a walk down along the Oh-John. There was a wind coming in from Lake Michigan, cutting the day’s heat nicely, and the gulls arced overhead, squawking about something trivial, and he felt a little better, breathing in the clear breeze and watching the boats work their way through the narrow river, but even so, he knew this wasn’t over. It was only going to get worse.

  A few members of his former flock stopped to exchange a few words or called out hello or, if they were walking on the other side of the river, waved. One, Reenie Huff, down below in her fancy one-man rowing contraption, even called up, “How are you, Reverend?” with that emphasis given the grieving, as if she truly wanted an answer and was not merely being rhetorical. People had been saying it that way since the fall, when it was clear Mary was dying, and then continued through the funeral and extended it, like renewing a library book, after he announced his retirement. He wondered if he would live to see a time when they would drop that emphasis and go back to the less-inquisitive “How are ya?” that served only as a greeting.

  He had an urge to confess, I’m becoming a dirty old man, that’s how I am, but he just told them, “Fine, fine! Starting all kinds of new hobbies . . . !” and smiled like a goon, squinting up at the gulls, grateful that they were there to drown him out.

  55

  “YOU HAVE ALL BEEN A GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT,” Roger Drinkwater muttered to himself as he scrubbed the base of the statue of Chief Joseph One-Song. Nimaanaadendam Gaa Zhi Binaadkamgiziik—they should inscribe that right on there, he thought. Get the tribal council to kick in some of that casino money toward altering it, like they did the sign for the river.

  It fell to him every year at this time to go down to Scudder Park and “spruce up the Chief,” as the Sumac Days committee liked to call it. Remove the lichen, birdshit and teen Fudgie cigarette butts, was what it came down to. And though Roger had little use for the ridiculous event, he had enough respect for his childhood hero Bezhik-Nagamoon to make the effort.

  Somewhere along the way, Sumac Days had appropriated—idiotically, Roger felt—this great chief who told off Congress.

  There was no birthdate on the marker, just the year of his death, 1837—the exact date being the same as both that of the speech and the state’s admission to the union—but the legend Roger Drinkwater had heard all his life was that Chief Joseph One-Song had been a small boy when that first outsider stumbled in, that Greek deserter; that he might have been old enough to form words, to join in the puzzled grilling of “Wenesh kiin? Wenesh kiin?”—“Who are you? Who are you?”

  But Roger knew that part was a load of crap: just look at the dates, do the math. Even a healthy man, pre-pollution, pre-smallpox—even a blessed man, in the grace of the Great Manitou, privy to all the herbs and nutrition of all the surrounding bounty of what once was at least his idea of at least relative paradise—could not live to be almost two hundred years old, to span the time between the first outsider and his death in D.C. So surely that part was a myth. He wasn’t a naked papoose, staring wide-eyed at Argus (or Anastasius) Mulopulos. Didn’t happen.

  Maybe it was because the Chief’s statue stood in a good shaded area where all parades congregated beforehand that people just started associating him with all heritage events and sumac and with Mulopulos as well. Maybe it made him more palatable to them. Adorable. Safe.

  Besides that part of the legend, the statue itself was a lie, too. If you looked up an oil painting of Chief Joseph in a book and held it up to the statue, anyone could see they didn’t match. In the statue, he was dressed in a full suit and high collar, the complicated necktie of the time, with a beaverskin hat in one hand and the Holy Bible in the other. He looked like a priest or Mafia don, his hair pomaded, slicked back, his nose noble, Roman, even. In the painting, he was more of a blob, like an apple granny doll, with features flattened, squished. Roger had heard the man in the statue was actually the sculptor’s assistant or lover, a marble worker from Tuscany who came to North America to learn bronze work. Maybe so. All he knew was the greatest and only similarity between the statue’s subject and its life model was that probably neither one could speak much English.

  It was possible, however, that the Chief heard firsthand the tale of that first outsider—the “bloodless man” whom earlier generations tricked into drinking that crappy sumac concoction. Joseph One-Song’s own father or grandfather or uncle could have been one of those wide-eyed kids and maybe he himself was present when the next outsider visited—the official “discovery” by Marquette and the crucifix-wielding Jesuits, the “Black Robes” or Wemitigoji (“Wavers of Wooden Sticks”). That would work, mathematically. Chief Joseph certainly witnessed subsequent similar encounters—the trappers, the redcoats, the wicked marauders of all those distant bands and countries during the French and Indian Wars who made the woods a terror for many lifetimes and left it, when the redcoats finally won, and then the Americans after them—everyone winning and losing, one side and then the ot
her, in the manner of a canoe being paddled—with all the screams that traveled along the water gone, but not the fear. The fear, along with a sadness, remained after they departed, like the smell of bad meat. And to each of these outsiders Joseph One-Song and his people continued to ask, growing only more befuddled with each visit, “Who are you?”

  Roger wondered, as he refilled his bucket, who would do this if he wasn’t here.

  56

  IT HAD BEEN DAYS and Jack was still a zombie. Von knew his son would benefit from some air, a walk down the halls at least, maybe get him into the snack room and get some food into him. But when he put his hand on Jack’s arms and tried to pull him to his feet, his son resisted, twisting out of his grasp. So Von backed off and watched as the boy lolled his head, like deadweight, against the foot of Marita’s hospital bed. His eyes were closed, as if in pain, and then they opened slightly and it seemed for a moment that he was aware of Von’s presence. “Leave me alone,” he said and the eyes closed again.

  Von kept standing there, watching, keeping his distance as if these two young kids carried some sort of dangerous electrical current. Eyes closed, slack-jawed—they appeared merely asleep, like two toddlers, exhausted from a day of shrieking play, who’d passed out in the back-seat and now must be carried into the house and upstairs to bed. Carol had photos like this, taken when Jack and Brenda were young and innocent and sleeping like lambs in the Bible.

  But neither Jack nor Marita were sleeping. It just looked that way. After a long while, without opening his eyes, Jack said, “Why are you even here?”

  Von stepped closer and laid his hand, just for a instant, on his son’s back where the sweat clung to his shirt, but he didn’t answer the question. It was a good question, he decided. Then he turned quietly from the room and followed the signs downstairs, to the basement, to the little hospital’s morgue—smaller than the laundry room he first passed—and asked the attendant in charge, a kid who looked younger and less worldly than even his son, whom he would talk to about releasing the baby’s body.

  “VonBushberger, right?” The kid got this just from glancing up at him, which struck Von as a little weird, on account of he’d never seen this morgue kid in his life and he wondered where he’d come from, whose family he belonged to.

  “Jack, not Von, though. It’s my son’s, the husband of the girl in—”

  “You understand it was stillborn, right?” The kid had papers and forms on clipboards but didn’t bother checking them, and Von understood now. This wasn’t exactly Gary, Indiana. The kid didn’t see a lot of action down here in the basement. It was probably the only one currently on ice. “It was never actually breathing. And in this case, the degree of premature and all, we are set up to handle disposal ourselves.”

  While the kid explained there would be no additional charge for this, Von spotted the large metal bins behind him, tagged with little international sign stickers: BIOHAZARD and MEDICAL WASTE. Von waited for the guy to use the term medical waste, curious to see how he himself would react to such a phrase in connection to this baby. Would he pop the guy in the nose or would he really care? Hard to tell. But the guy didn’t say “medical waste”—which meant he might have had more training or at least more common sense than he initially appeared to.

  “The mother’s Catholic,” Von said, “so we’ll need to bury it proper. And stop saying ‘it.’”

  “Excuse me?” the kid said. Apparently, he hadn’t heard himself.

  “You keep calling my grandson ‘it.’”

  The kid studied him for a long moment. “Right. My apologies.” He started to turn his clipboard Von’s way, perhaps to have something signed, but quickly withdrew it, frowning. “You understand that we do not provide a container.”

  At first the word container made Von recoil. But then the word choice prodded him in the direction of a rather obvious solution. He went out to the parking lot and rummaged through the fruit baskets he had with him in the bed of the truck. Most were old, banged-up bushels, but there was one cute little red-and-green peck basket he thought would do.

  Back inside, passing a linen cart, he snatched up a few items that he discovered, in the elevator, were pillowcases. Riding down to the morgue, he pressed the linen to his face. It was cool and smooth and smelled, in a good way, like his grandmother. The memory reminded him of his visit to Aunt Sadie the day of the accident, that cock-and-bull story about his grandmother stepping out; about his not really being a vonBushberger. What a load that was. It was weird now how it seemed like forever ago since he was sitting in her small chilly room, being pelted with compost and lied to.

  The morgue guy frowned when he saw the red half-peck basket. “Relax,” Von said, arranging a pillowcase down inside it. “I’ll line it with this, and then put another one on top.”

  The attendant sighed and went to get the body. Von signed the forms on the clipboard, and the attendant, still sighing his disapproval, placed the tiny body into the fruit basket. Von took a moment to study the tiny purple face. No, he did not look anything like a gangster. He laid the second pillowcase on top and used both hands to carefully carry the basket back upstairs to take it home.

  HE HAD A CRATE IN MIND that he’d been saving for a few years, thinking it would make a special cradle or something if the right kid came along. It was one of the really old shipping crates with the first vonBushberger label, from back in the 1910s. He had only a few of them left. He wouldn’t just use the crate as it was, of course, but it would be the base.

  He went into the main house and located the crate, up in the top of his closet, where he’d stashed it, and dug around in Carol’s sewing stuff for some nice bright red sateen kind of material—Cheery, he thought—and went out to the tractor barn to use the workshop. While he worked on the crate, he had Brenda call the monument place they’d used just last year, for his dad. He knew they’d have to erect it after the fact, but he knew by now how this worked, how they’d have to order the stone so it all matched, and he wanted to get the arrangements under way. Brenda came back in and asked about the name, that they needed something for the estimate, just for a tentative character count, and he told her, “Santiago vonBushberger.” He’d been thinking about it and that seemed acceptable.

  “With a hyphen or is that a first name or . . .”

  “Either way.” Jack could decide what he wanted when he was less of a zombie, but for right now, that sounded about right.

  STRICTLY SPEAKING, he knew they weren’t supposed to be using the old family plot in the beech grove anymore. There were county ordinances. No new graves on private property. They’d broken the rule last year, when they buried his dad up there, but Don Sloff was still the sheriff and he arranged for a “special dispensation,” which probably meant Don had actually passed along to the county coroner the warning Fred vonBushberger had made the last time they all went fishing, before he got too sick: that he’d come back and haunt any pencil pusher or county toady who kept him from getting buried with his family.

  While Von dug the hole, he considered calling Reverend Gene and seeing if he could come by and say a few words. But the guy’s wife had just passed and maybe he wasn’t up for it. Maybe it would be a little insensitive to drag him out to another gravesite just a few months after. Besides, he was retired now and maybe they weren’t supposed to bother him with such things. Then, too, there was the whole Catholic issue. If they got somebody official, Presbyterian was probably not the best thing. Marita probably would want it to be Catholic or nothing.

  In a way, the whole thing felt pretty Catholic—this baby would probably be the first stillborn in the beech grove to rate a headstone and any sort of ceremony. He knew there had to be others out there behind the low rusty fence—the unnamed vonBushbergers who didn’t make it. But things were different in those days and he knew those kinds of personal losses weren’t discussed as much. They were different people back then, with different views, and strong opinions on how things should be done.

 
; When everything was ready, he walked back down to the house and told Brenda to put on a dress or something and then he drove back to the county hospital to retrieve his wife and son. And round up Santi, whether he was with his crew or, understandably, at the hospital.

  THE NEW INTERIM SHERIFF did show up. They could see the patrol car approaching, from the high ground of the family plot, as he pulled off 31 down by the main house and then bobbed along the gravelly tractor ruts and kept coming, the big Crown Vic gunning as he climbed the rise and put it in park in the high weeds just a foot from the old rusted gate. And then he got out, the radio squawking behind him, and sighed deeply, like he was very disappointed. He did take off his hat. Von had to give him that. But then he got all official, telling them he was sorry, but they’d have to cease and desist. They couldn’t bury on private property.

  Von wondered if it was the morgue kid at the hospital or someone at the monument place who finked. Or maybe this Hatchert guy was just particularly snoopy. Von stepped forward so he stood between the new hole and the new sheriff. “He’s a vonBushberger, Sheriff. This is where he belongs.”

  “Maybe a hundred years ago, fine, but not anymore. There’s zoning.”

  “Zoning?” Jack said. “Screw that.” It was the most lively thing out of his mouth since the accident.

  “Look,” Von said, “my fruit stand isn’t zoned as a public highway, either, but that didn’t stop that dumbass kid driving through it.”