Megan grins. ‘Hey, do you guys have a boat? I know how to water-ski.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
*
There are many reasons Ray cannot sleep the night before departure, and of course Megan is the chief among them. But she has also become a sort of psychological Calamine lotion, pretty and pink, soothing every burning irritation and itchy concern about the family reunion trip. So what if he hasn’t seen his siblings in eight years and the last go round ended with Colt in howling tears, Leonard in jail? Why fret over discovering just how much his parents have deteriorated; they lost interest in him before he graduated high school. Megan will be there.
But it all seems too convenient. There must be an angle he can’t see…
Stop. Accept a little good fortune. You’re due.
Around five he drifts into an approximation of sleep, fluttering between states. His dreams are illuminated by white sun, carpeted with blonde sand soft as flour, and jeweled with deep blue lapping wavelets stretching beyond any realistic horizon, a body of water that is impossible in Nebraska. The sand is scorching the bottoms of his feet, he has been walking the beach, burrs catching between his toes. He has been walking for hours and hours, possibly for days, and there is far too much sand. He walks miles of it, staring at the sand, and when he next looks up, the lake is gone.
There is only sand. A barren wasteland of blinding hot sand in all directions.
He is lost, alone, left for dead.
The beach begins to fracture, the sand swirls around and around…
Calypso music, digitized and abrasively loud, filters into his half-asleep dream and he opens his eyes, feeling as though he has not rested for weeks.
He turns off his cell phone alarm. The screen clock tells him it’s 6:30 a.m. He is to pick up Megan in thirty minutes.
After a quick cold shower and another brushing of the teeth, Ray collects his weekender bag from the den. He takes a final inventory, making sure he has everything to see him through the five-day camping trip:
5 T-shirts. 2 shorts. 1 jeans. 3 pair socks. 5 underwear. Swim trunks. A pullover sweatshirt. His battered Paul Smith sneakers, a pair of leather flip-flops. Toiletry kit. Ibuprofen. Five thousand in cash. A baseball cap. The rest – food, first aid, tent, sleeping bags, every tool imaginable, beverages, GPS, enough gear to occupy a Middle Eastern capital – his father will supply, regardless of his health.
Ready?
No. He doubles back to the den and sets the duffle on his desk. Crouches before the bottom right drawer, unlocks it with a small key. Removes the steel safe box, sets the three dials to the proper code, pops it open. He unwraps the oil-softened, faded-orange Dark Horse Tavern T-shirt in which it is kept, inserts one of the two single-stack magazines, flicks the safety on, off, on again, and then rewraps the Colt M1911 .45 single-action his father gave him when he turned twelve, the sidearm Warren carried through Vietnam and Laos, and digs the bundle into the bottom of his duffle.
Now he is ready to pick up Megan and ferry the two of them five hundred and eighty-three miles north-east, thirty years back in time, to sands Ray has not walked since he was a boy and they were a real family. Together, harboring no secrets.
Safe.
Cover Story
It is a time machine of sorts – their means of transport – as well as another gift from his father. Warren gave Ray the two-tone maroon-over-creme 1978 Ford Bronco for graduating high school, but it had already been imprinted with so many memories throughout Ray’s childhood, his thirty-eight-year-old son still cannot bring himself to think of it as his own.
Prior to handing the keys over to Ray, Warren had the original-matched paint job reapplied, had the 6.6-litre motor rebuilt, installed thirty-three-inch off-road tires, sealed the floor in new rubber, upholstered the interior in new saddle leather, wired in a CB radio, added a second fuel tank, giving them nearly seventy gallons capacity, and outfitted the rig with the full-size spare, a first-aid kit, flares, a toolbox, roof rack, jerry cans for more fuel and water. The glove box still holds Warren’s old nylon tape case containing Glen Campbell, Cat Stevens, Supertramp, Bread, The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and a dozen or so other artists from the old man’s heyday.
Ray debated leaving the Bronco in the garage in favor of taking his newer and much more sensible Honda Pilot, not least because the Bronco – and Ray’s careful preservation of it – felt a bit too much like a desperate appeal for his father’s approval. But in the end, he could not deny the old man this acknowledgement to tradition. He had been embarrassed when he arrived to find Megan standing on the curb at the address she had given him, one bag and a small cooler filled with beer on the sidewalk, shorts and a fleece shirt, flip-flops, her hair pulled through the back of a purple Rockies cap. She seemed reluctant to open the passenger door, as if he’d rolled up in a van with a disco ball inside.
‘Everything okay?’ he’d asked, once she recovered and hopped in.
‘Thought I left the stove on inside my apartment,’ she said. ‘But I’m good. Cool truck, by the way. How come I’ve never seen it down at the restaurant?’
‘Gas,’ Ray said, shifting into drive. ‘The mileage is obscene.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That makes sense.’
‘So, what’s our cover story?’ Megan asks as they pass through Sterling, about an hour from the Nebraska state line. The towns seem to be shrinking, the grain elevators rising. The terrain is prairie weeds, pink rocks, scraggly green brush, and long intervals of cottonwoods clustered near the lazy brown rivers. Occasionally the quartz and mica in the gray sun-starched highway twinkle in the heat.
‘Cover story?’ Ray turns down the radio. Even the high-powered classic rock stations out of Denver have become garbled with static. Soon they will be left to choose between sermons, demagoguery and crop reports.
‘Our history,’ she says, sitting up in the Bronco’s passenger seat. ‘How we met, our best dates, favorite restaurants, where you proposed, our song. You know, our story of us.’
Proposed! ‘Oh. I guess I kind of forgot we were really going to play it that way.’
‘I have tons of ideas,’ she says, a child eager to begin Twenty Questions. ‘I’ve been mulling it over for the past three days.’
Ray cuts his eyes at her, frowning.
Megan reaches over the big plastic console and slaps his arm. ‘Don’t be so serious, or I might step out of character.’
‘No, no, we wouldn’t want that.’ It had not really occurred to him to take the whole girlfriend or fiancée thing so literally. ‘You’re doing me a big favor. I don’t care if they know the truth.’
‘You don’t want me to be your girlfriend?’
Ray twitches, opens his mouth in protest.
‘I’m kidding,’ she says. ‘We’re just friends, right? I work for you, too, but —’
‘Yeah, about that.’
‘I know, I know. I am here of my own free will.’
He looks at her. ‘I hope you really feel – I hope you know that.’
‘I do.’
‘Good.’ Ray fidgets with the ventilation gates.
‘Okay, how about this,’ she says. ‘Let’s make up a story, because what else are we doing for the next – how far did you say this lake is?’
‘Another three hundred miles. At least.’
‘Right, five more hours of corn,’ Megan says. ‘It will pass the time. When we get there, you can play it however you want. Tell them you picked me up hitchhiking or we eloped, whatever, and I’ll follow your lead.’
This relaxes him. And he is curious to hear her vision of it, this make-believe romance. It’s one way to learn more about her, and isn’t that what he wanted?
‘All right,’ he says, opening a bottle of water. ‘We met at a concert at Red Rocks. Wilco, two years ago.’
‘Wilco? Blech. Depressing.’
Ray sighs. ‘Okay, you pick the band.’
‘My Morning Jacket?’ She leans back and rests her heels on the d
ash.
‘Nicely done.’
She claps. ‘You saw me in the parking lot and decided to chat me up?’
Ray grins. ‘No, you were two rows ahead of me. I was watching you do that swaying dance for half the show, wondering what your name was. Then those drunk girls from Aurora edged into your space and when you pushed back, a fight broke out. You were about to get tossed, but I smooth-talked the security guards.’
Megan spreads her palms across the windshield, opening the imaginary stage curtains. ‘By the time they busted out Mahgeetah during the encore, I decided to pull your arms around my waist.’
‘Your hair smelled like rain.’
‘Aw.’
‘And cheap beer.’
‘Hey!’ Megan slaps his arm again.
‘I didn’t mind.’
‘You offered to walk me to my car, but we decided to wait for the parking lot to empty out. We were the last two people sitting in the amphitheater.’
‘I asked for your name and phone number,’ Ray says. ‘But you said no, let’s agree to meet here again next year and see if it was meant to be.’
‘And I said no way. I’m hungry, let’s go get late-night diner food.’
‘For which I was secretly relieved. The only thing open at that hour was a Denny’s.’
‘I had Moons Over My-Hammy,’ she says. ‘That actually sounds good. I want that now. Do they have a Denny’s out here?’
‘I can’t remember,’ Ray says. ‘But I do remember that I had at least two kinds of breakfast meat, three eggs, and four cups of coffee.’
‘Ugh, so full. What are we gonna do about my car? We left it at Red Rocks.’ She is speaking as if they are back there now, in the booth.
‘You shouldn’t drive this late. I’ll take you back in the morning.’
‘That’s sweet, but I don’t crash at strangers’ houses.’
‘I’m not a stranger. You can trust me. I’ll sleep on the couch.’
‘What if you can’t trust me?’ she says.
‘Then that will be too bad.’
Megan laughs but does not look at him, just as he is not able to look at her. To look now would break the spell.
She opens her own bottle of water. ‘We were inseparable for eight days and eight nights, though we had done nothing more than kiss and hold hands.’
‘We did everything. Went to the movies. Ate long brunches. Ducked into record stores. On the seventh night I cooked Indian food for you.’
‘I lost the bet,’ she says. ‘I didn’t believe you could cook like that, but it was delicious.’
‘I had the advantage. Working in my father’s restaurants. Wait, what did I win in the bet?’
‘Winner got a back rub.’
‘No guy wants a back rub,’ he says. ‘But all right.’
‘On the seventh night, we drank too much wine and confessed things to one another.’
‘Oooh,’ Ray says. ‘This is getting intense.’
‘We knew what was happening. We’d both been through enough bad relationships. This time we were going to be honest from the beginning, no matter how scary the truth turned out to be.’
‘I told you I had never been in love. I felt like such a freak, I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with me.’
‘You’re the first guy I opened myself to in almost four years.’ Megan looks out the passenger window, and he can’t tell if she realizes she slipped into the present. Or maybe it wasn’t a slip. Either way, something has hit close to home. He’s got to find a way to lighten it up.
‘I never told anyone about my business plan, my dream,’ he says.
‘But you never could keep a secret from me?’
‘Sad but true.’
She watches him expectantly. ‘I knew it was going to be brilliant and…’
Ray is more nervous now than the last time he pitched an angel investor.
‘When I was a kid, there was this old barbershop in town, Stan & Ollie’s. A real old-school hole in the wall. My dad used to take me and we’d get our haircuts together. A whole cross-section of Boulder’s natives gathered there – real estate people, bartenders, mechanics, cops, the mayor. They had an old radio playing hits from the fifties, there was a beer cooler, and a huge jar of caramel lollipops for the kids. Sometimes my dad would sit with the owner, this old guy Fred, and they’d play checkers at the little table in the corner. Guys kept their own shaving mugs on the rack in back. It was like a club, with open membership. All men of goodwill were welcome at Stan & Ollie’s.
‘And that got me thinking, a few years ago,’ Ray continues. ‘What’s a haircut now? For men it’s an errand, a chore. Women have salons, day trips to the spa, a pedicure, massage. Guys lack the imagination, so it’s basically a strip mall chain where they mangle your hair, or a sports bar to watch a ballgame. But the wives don’t like that, the husband running off to go drinking with the boys, leering at waitresses, and you can’t take your kid to a bar.’
‘Some people do,’ Megan says.
‘And when you talk to couples now, with two working parents, what do you hear? There’s never enough time. Mom and Dad are going a hundred miles per hour, always tired. The kids are shuffled from school to sports to lessons to homework to bed. It never stops. And it’s all broken out, separate.
‘But what if there was a place where fathers could take their sons… sure, there would be barber chairs, hot towels, straight-edge shaves, all old school but with modern stylists. But so much more. Hi-Def TVs showing sports from around the world. No bar, but a soda fountain, a billiard table, checkers, chess, a fireplace, air hockey —’
‘Free wi-fi?’
‘No wi-fi. No internet. No video games, but maybe skee-ball or a mini basketball court with Nerf hoops and a real parquet floor. The idea here is human time, not tech time. Being present, holding a conversation, making new friends. And the best part is, while this is aimed at fathers and sons, moms are happy too.’
‘Because she gets a break from the kids,’ Megan says. ‘And from her husband. While the boys are out pretending to be men, she has time to do her yoga, go shopping, get the massage, take a nap.’
Ray nods along. ‘And she can’t be mad, because what’s her husband doing? Spending quality time with his son, not throwing back beers at Hooters, but really being there with the kid. Everybody wins.’
‘I love it,’ Megan says. ‘It’s genuine. There’s nothing like that out there now. You can market this to special events, private parties. Oh! And you have to have a section for the moms and the sisters, little takeaways to say thanks for letting the boys be boys. A bucket of single roses, three bucks each. Scented candles, toy bracelets and candy necklaces, anything that says we were thinking of you.’
Ray is beaming. She understands it, believes it. He always feared it was a little too male, too exclusive. It needed a woman’s touch, and now here’s precisely that.
‘I quit waiting tables,’ Megan says, ‘to help you finish the decor, the marketing campaign, balance your books. But only if you agreed to make me a manager.’
‘You contributed so much, I had to make you a partner,’ he says.
‘We stayed up all night painting murals on the walls. I finally got to use my art degree.’
‘The walls, yes. Ernie and Bert, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Superman. The heroes.’
Beneath the Lake Page 4