The Lake, the River & the Other Lake Read online

  “Nimaanaadendam gaa zhi binaadkamgiziik . . .” he chanted, in deep, deadman tones.

  There was a whiny roar and the kid was gone. Roger swam around to the other side of the dock rather than wading through that area where the kid had just been. He was pretty sure he would be swimming through urine.

  HE OWNED A DEPTH MAP OF THE LAKE, issued by the DNR in 1978, showing each indentation and point in the shoreline, and, in concentric organic sworls, the varying bottom of Meenigeesis. It had been created mostly for fishermen, but Meenigeesis was so cold and so deep, you hardly ever saw fish except at the far edges of the summer, early in May, late in September. Roger used the map for diving and exploring, and kept it pinned to a corkboard wall squeezed in between the door and the fireplace. Over the years, he had less need to refer to it and it had become more decoration than reference material.

  But now it seemed like a good way to keep track of things. He moved some of the firewood aside so he could stand closer to the map and really see what was what. He got a work light from the shed and clamped it on the mantel so that it shone back at the wall, illuminating what he was now considering his war map.

  With the colored Sharpies he used for swim meets, he drew in the cottages. He drew in the docks and rafts, occasionally stepping out through his front door to squint out at the lake, to check one or two against his memory.

  With a fine-point pen, he further identified the homes—some he knew by name (“The Petersons,” “Old Willoughby place”) and some by inclination (“Big Fat Guy Who Screams At His Kids,” “Bad Music,” “Water-skiers,” “New Yorker readers”) and some he just assigned nicknames (“His & Hers,” “The Freckled Family,” “The Fussbudgets”).

  Then he fished out a box of colored pushpins he kept in a kitchen drawer and began placing them around the map. These would be the jet-skis. The targets.

  He stood back and surveyed his battle plan. A lot of work lay ahead.

  14

  SUMAC DAYS was originally held closer to when the sumac is “on fire,” as they say, or in bloom, which is closer to the autumn. But after Labor Day, with the disappearance of the Fudgies, the village council soon discovered the event wouldn’t break even unless they moved it earlier in the year. Gradually, Sumac Days had crept back and back until now it was scheduled for the last week of August. Nobody actually enjoyed Sumac Days, but it was a tradition.

  There would be the booths selling sumac lemonade and a small midway and the crowning of Miss Sumac Days, a competition that had engendered so many hurt feelings among the small handful of passably good-looking local girls—it almost always went to an outsider, some summer girl who didn’t even live there—that now the court had expanded to include not only runners-up but also various divisions and subcategories—Miss Teen Sumac Days, Miss Preteen Sumac Days, Little Miss Sumac Days—so that essentially everyone who entered would at least place.

  The whole court would ride in the parade, led by someone playing Chief Joseph One-Song. The few members of the Ojaanimiziibii band of Ojibwe who were still around generally ignored this event, so the role of Chief Joseph usually went to the next best thing, one of the Hispanic migrant pickers. The village council would slip him five bucks and a case of beer and he generally had a good time, whooping like a TV brave in buckskins and grinning back at his friends who lined up to hoot. Usually, the guy couldn’t even speak English, let alone Ojibwe.

  For an event billed as “a celebration of the unique history and identity of Weneshkeen,” the thing had become an extravaganza of inaccuracies, lies and concessions.

  For one thing, there was the whole issue of the sumac lemonade. Staghorn sumac, the variety whose tannic acids are marginally consumable, doesn’t grow in vast quantities anywhere, and the amount available around Weneshkeen, even in season, in the fall, was diminishing. Inland, construction was crowding out the plant, and even out on Sumac Point, it now barely grew. Some said that maybe the experimental paint the Corps of Engineers slapped on the lighthouse back in the late forties had irradiated the plants. Some said it never should have been able to grow there anyway, so close to the water. Some said they didn’t give a rat’s ass. Because, fortunately, sumac had become a fairly minor component to the festival. After all, it wasn’t as if they were trying to promote the stuff. It wasn’t a crop or a livelihood. It was just a thing they did and few remembered why.

  Those who cared to keep track of local lore would tell you that this titular beverage was originally meant to reference the story of Weneshkeen’s “first visitor,” Mulopulos: the small degree of succor the natives seemed willing to give the lost Greek was gourd cups of a strange reddish drink, and he reported that they kept repeating what sounded to him like “zu mach.” (He considered this a crude approximation of Low German—“to make”—and theorized it was a diuretic. It certainly was bitter enough.)

  But the idea wasn’t really that Weneshkeen was so all-fired in love with sumac. And unlike with the Cherry Festival up in Traverse City, which often falls just before the crop comes in (causing imported sweet cherries to be rushed in from Washington State and South America), there is no commercial sumac industry and so, when there was no sumac in bloom at the time of Sumac Days—which was becoming more and more the case each year—the ladies substituted regular lemonade with red food coloring and a few mashed raspberries, to get the pips floating around. It was actually a huge improvement on the real thing and no one complained much about the switch. When anyone first tried true sumac “lemonade”—the same steeped concoction that was served to Mulopulos—inevitably they stalled. They hesitated before sipping and double-checked: “Sumac? That’s poisonous, right?” They would need reassuring, and then, after trying it, really need reassuring. Many contended that it didn’t actually taste good, it just seemed tasty compared to, say, poison.

  15

  AT THE END OF THE RIVERWALK, on a driftwood log down on the beach, on the other side of the beginning of Sumac Point, they watched the breakers roll in on Lake Michigan. Mark still couldn’t believe he was there with Courtney Banes. On a date—or sort of. He’d screwed up his nerve and called the local listing for Banes and when she finally said, after what felt like endless rambling and stumbling on his part, “Oh, right. Sure. Got it . . . ,” recognizing him, she’d taken charge and done all the work and told him to meet her on the riverwalk the next night and so there he was now, actually sitting on a log with her. Courtney Banes was actually talking to him—alone, giving him a rundown of the summer she had ahead of her—and though it sounded like it was all an ordeal to her, to Mark it sounded like the life of someone he watched on TV, not someone right there that he could reach out and touch.

  She talked about being in the Sumac Days Court again this year and sighed heavily at the prospect. He’d never been involved with it in any way, nor had he cared to, but he never would have guessed being a beauty queen was such a burden. Maybe it was the part where she had to deal with so many other people—he could see that being a pain in the ass.

  On top of that, during the school year, she did what she called “catalogue work” back home in Chicago. He wasn’t sure what that was but she said it was boring and paid “crap.” But the “bra stuff,” she had to admit, was kind of fun—the idea that it was regional and kids at her school might see it in the Sunday supplement and look twice, wondering if it was really her there, smiling back at them with her top off.

  She told him her uncle was Matt Banes, and said it like he was supposed to know who that was. He didn’t. She explained that he was this artist guy, that his paintings were “super-hot” right now. “He has the same agent as LeRoy Neiman. You know LeRoy Neiman, right?”

  “Sure,” Mark said. “I mean, I know the name.” Though he thought that was a clothing designer or something.

  “Uncle Matt’s totally different, though,” she said. And when she described his process, it didn’t really sound like a true painting. What her uncle did was shoot photographs of all-nude models, then painted the b
ackdrops and skimpy clothes on them. “Maybe a cowboy hat or a captain’s cap, a towel, stuff like that. They’re like old-style calendar pinups,” she said. “Only in reverse—he makes more out of less, is how he puts it: ‘pindowns,’ Uncle Matt calls them. And they’re huge—this large-format camera. He wants me to pose for some, only he thinks we should wait another year.”

  “Because you’re too young?”

  She frowned at this. “Hardly. I’m seventeen. That’s not so young. How old are you?” She didn’t ask it casually. She asked it like it mattered.

  He told her he was almost seventeen, though the truth was he’d turned sixteen only two months before. It was as much of a lie as he thought he could get away with, considering how jumpy she made him. Which was weird—normally he couldn’t care less.

  She got up to walk again and he followed, trying not to stare at her legs, already brown though the season was just starting, or her tight white tennis skirt, the way it flipped and shifted, or the way her posture, her slight swayback, made the small globes of her ass appear like some sort of special fruit you only got for a very short season.

  “Not ’cause of my age,” she said, “’cause of my boobs.” She spun around and kept walking backward for a moment, facing him, tugging on the white shawl she wore draped over her shoulders, and the motion, as if on cue, caused her already proud posture to improve still further and display the topic at hand. “Uncle Matt thinks they might be a little bigger in a year. He says they’re perky and nice but they’re probably going to be just right in another year.”

  Mark thought, And then he’ll paint something over them. I don’t understand. He said only, “I see. That makes sense.” He tried to imagine this sort of conversation going on in his own family and just couldn’t—maybe an aunt sizing up his junk in a bathing suit, saying, Yeah, give it another year and you’ll be really packing some meat down there . . .

  And now he had a thought he couldn’t get out of his head: she might take her clothes off and let her uncle take pictures and then there would be a record of it, maybe hanging in galleries in Chicago or Europe somewhere or all over the Internet. Maybe they’d appear in one of those big hernia-giving coffee-table books his mom liked to clutter up the house with. And he wondered if he’d ever have a chance to see the final product. Even if this evening turned out to be a bust and not really a date and she never spoke to him again, there was still a chance he might be able to see her someday without any clothes on. Or at least, without any real clothes on. Just painted clothes.

  He had to be careful now, stepping along the water’s edge. He felt like a real spaz all of a sudden, like he might trip and fall any second.

  And as much as he wanted this to be an actual date they were having, to be totally honest, it was really feeling more like a job interview. True, the only real job interview he’d ever had had been meeting with Keith and Walt before they approved his apprenticeship on the river this summer. But that was just a formality and he hadn’t exactly been trying to win them over, not being all that psyched for the job to begin with. But even with only that limited experience he could recognize that that’s what this felt like. He was just one of many candidates eager to be awarded the position. And if he didn’t do some of the talking soon, he’d be out of the running. She’d think he was either retarded or gay or boring and move on to the next applicant.

  So he sat back down on the log and started in about his new job with the pilot-boys and she sat down with him but didn’t let him go on for long. “Please,” she said. “I don’t need to hear about all that.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The Brits have a great expression I picked up in London last fall. They say, ‘Less of that.’” She paused as if waiting for him to get it. He didn’t. She sighed and continued. “I know all about channels and boats, okay? I’ve been through the Panama Canal, for God’s sake. The whole thing bores me to tears. Literally. Just a big yawn.”

  She reached over and her hand was on his cheek. Not long, not lingering. More like she was wiping something away, some flaky imperfection, some scrap from dinner. She smiled and said, “You just don’t have to do that. You don’t have to talk about anything.”

  He didn’t know what to make of this. If he wasn’t supposed to talk about anything, what was he supposed to do? Hop on her? Pull her down onto the ground and roll around? This was Courtney Banes, for crying out loud. Miss Teen Sumac Days two years in a row. She’d been to the Panama Canal. He couldn’t just hop on someone like that.

  “Look,” she said, rising from the log, standing over him. “You can fuck me. That’s not a problem. You just have to know how.”

  He couldn’t believe it.

  But of course he knew how. He’d had sex before—a few times, even. And of course he’d seen his share of porn. All you had to do was dial up the Internet and it was like training films for fucking. And then there were all those sex ed classes over the years. They hit them with the simple polywog stuff in the fifth grade, then got a little more specific in the eighth; finally gave you the thumbs-up on beating off, that it was normal, not something you had personally invented and would fry in hell for; and then in sophomore year, Human Biology, last year, the real nitty-gritty—contraception and AIDS and STDs and safe sex and anal and oral and that whole gay/lesbian thing; the stuff he’d heard about on Loveline since he was maybe twelve. So of course he knew how. But he was too stunned, at the moment, to reel off some kind of résumé, if that’s what she was looking for.

  She went on. “What I’m saying is, sex is really no big deal. Really. You just have to know how to make it a big deal. Understand?”

  There were a thousand things he could say in response but what came out was, “No.”

  She didn’t seem to understand this. “No?” She repeated it as if he’d meant he didn’t want to have sex.

  “I mean, not really. I don’t really understand. Sorry. No offense. Could you explain? I mean if it’s not too much trouble.” God, he hoped he didn’t sound all beggy.

  She sighed, heavily; looked up at the stars, out at the waves. Mark waited, sitting there like he was in her classroom. The shawl slipped up over her head, babushka-style, and she laughed then, like she had some inside joke going. Suddenly she leaned forward, her hands on his knees, and whispered close, “Entertain me.”

  He stared as she pushed away and began walking off, barefoot, down the beach, humming to herself, but loud enough for him to hear. He got up off the log and started after her, but she turned and said, “Good night,” and he knew he wasn’t supposed to follow, he was just supposed to think about all this.

  He watched her go, certain there was an old movie star he’d seen on TCM whom she looked just like, with her white tennis skirt flipping along in the moonlight, whom probably she was imitating. Part of him knew that she was being ridiculously dramatic and lah-dee-dah. But the other part, the louder part, thought it would be a good idea to try to have sex with her. And soon.

  16

  BRENDA VONBUSHBERGER KNEW her family respected her training. She knew it would become more and more essential, in the coming years, to the continuing survival of vonBushberger’s. Nonetheless, sometimes the sacrifices she’d made for that training felt unappreciated. After all, it was her love for this place, if truth be told, more than a love for her studies, that had caused her to devote so many years to her degrees. She knew it had come at a personal price, turned her into a sort of unapproachable geek, full of “modern ideas” about the orchard. She was an unmarried woman of thirty-two, living at home, with no colleagues other than those with whom she corresponded via e-mail. Which was one reason it was going to be great to have someone around now with whom she could discuss, in a meaningful way, the more advanced elements of the horticultural sciences. The thing Brenda had not counted on was that the researcher would be so handsome.

  It had never crossed her mind. The importance of his project and the degrees he’d held, the work he’d done in genetic mapping, all paint
ed a very different picture of the man who showed up and would be camping out in their orchard this summer. And it wasn’t just his appearance that surprised. If she hadn’t reviewed his credentials herself, she might think this guy was sort of a flake. For one thing, there was the giddiness—about everything, it seemed. He acted like he’d arrived on some distant planet, and boy, what a great planet it was, according to him. Then there were a lot of goofy little things, like the polished Petoskey stone she spotted when he gave her the tour of his mobile lab and living quarters. He’d left the stone under the microscope he would be using for preparing slides—he’d apparently been examining the unique hexagonal shapes of the state’s official fossil, which certainly had nothing to do with botany or the genetic mapping of cherry blossoms.

  He caught her frowning at it and removed it—a little sheepishly, she thought—from under his microscope, explaining that he bought it at a shop in town. He asked if she knew this was the only place in the world to find a fossil like that.

  She did, of course. “Any lake in the area, you find them. You shouldn’t shell out money for a Petoskey stone.” She considered explaining about Fudgies and the touristy crap they could actually be sold, but decided he wasn’t ready to hear this. She thought, too, that the polite thing might be to offer to take him to one of the lakes sometime and help him find a few—it was sort of sad thinking about him being so lost here that he couldn’t find his own Petoskeys. All it would take would be an unhurried stroll along the edge of the water with the sun high and bright, a little wading, maybe, and they’d find bucketfuls, no problem. But she held back on the offer, thinking it was a little unprofessional and that he might be offended. He wasn’t here to socialize, after all, or to see the sights. The Japanese government was spending too much money on him for that.