Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction)

by Natasha Troop

  * * *

  Rick Gonzalez hated his brand new Winnebago Vectra. He couldn’t think of anything in the world he possibly hated more.

  “Look,” his wife Marisol said as she excitedly pointed where he could not possibly look, which was behind this great stupid beast of a machine. “A moose.”

  It was about time, he thought, having seen a hundred road signs, which warned merely “Moose” without displaying one. The only moose he had actually seen in this state were the small stuffed variety that inevitably crowded around the bottles of maple syrup and jars of apple jelly or apple cider donuts that seemed to live next to every last cash register. He hated them too. He hated the moose and their marquee signs. But most of all, he hated the Vectra.

  First, he hated the name Vectra. What is a Vectra? He spoke three languages and not one of them included the word vectra. He knew what a vector was and he knew a guy named Victor and he read a play about a Greek girl called Electra but he had never heard of a vectra. So he had to assume that much like Adam in the Garden of Eden, some guy at the Winnebago Corporation, or maybe some group of guys or a group of guys with one woman sat down in a room at Winnebago headquarters and had a meeting about what to call this monstrous sucker of gasoline. The talked it over and threw around names like “Starmobile” and “Galaxy Trekker” and everyone of them had a good laugh over their café mochas or latte frizzies or whatever the local coffee chain was charging four bucks a cup for these days. Rick liked coffee. He liked good coffee, but just coffee. He knew every last well-fed imbecile on that naming committee just loved their mochachinos and he hated them. They probably came up with Vectra because one of them, probably the man who had a degree in engineering but had been a crappy engineer but a good worker who had moved up the chain of command and ended up in the corporate naming room came up with the notion that anyone consigned to such a gargantuan monstrosity as the Vectra would be traveling with a destination in mind on a given day and might set a vector for a given destination and so maybe they should call it “Vector.” But the woman with the frappalatte thought that Vector wasn’t sexy enough. As if a Winnebago could ever be sexy without a bunch of sexy people inside and the only reason they would be inside is because they thought it would be a fun thing to rent when they traveled to some vacation spot where the girls could go wild or something. Then some guy who liked whipped cream on everything, including his iced guava tea, wondered if they could make the vector electric and came up with the word “Vectelectric.” That’s how these meetings go with people just making up words that kind of sound like other words until they finally end up with meaningless words like Vectra. After one too many coffeejambas, however, they start to break down and settle on the least stupid sounding made up word. Rick hated the word Vectra and all the coffee zombies who invented it.

  It wasn’t just the name he despised. It was the amenities. All the ridiculous things that some mobile home designer thought might just make the Vectra just a little more attractive than the next cumbersome dinosaur. Like the powered sunvisors. Now this vehicle was designed for people who didn’t want to do much, but to actually think that someone with the sun in their eyes might not have the physical ability to lower a visor to correct a glare issue was a bit too much for Rick. Rick had worked for twenty years as a branch manager for a bank in North Miami Beach. He knew a little something about senior citizens and what they might or might not want. Seniors would spend hours telling you why it was important to have clean change. They didn’t like dollar bills that were slightly crumpled. They felt it an affront to the sacrament of American currency. They complained that the toaster the bank was giving away didn’t brown properly. Needless to say, Rick hated senior citizens. Even more so now that he was considered one of their ilk. He didn’t feel that old, but he knew the problems with modern society when he saw them and he knew what seniors might possibly complain about and pulling down a visor when the sun got too bright was not something anyone in their right minds might take issue with. But some bright penny at Winnebago felt that it would be better to engineer a button which would spin a servo to lower a sun visor than to possibly fix the biggest problem with the machine which was it got five to seven diesel miles to the gallon. Downhill. With wind. Autovisors were particularly despised by Rick.

  There were many other little touches that bothered him. Some decorating genius thought that it might make the Vectra feel more like home if they installed ceramic tile in the bath and kitchen areas. Now first, he wasn’t supposed to call it a kitchen. His wife kept reminding him not to call it a kitchen. It was a galley. Like on a boat. Now he often agreed that the machine had boat-like qualities. It made him want to vomit. Much like a boat. It stank inside the bathroom. Much like a boat. If they wanted to call the kitchen a galley, by the way, why didn’t they call the bathroom a head? Keep the nautical theme consistent. Rick hated inconsistency. Almost as much as he hated calling his kitchen-like space a galley. Even galleys on real boats, not land boats like this scow, didn’t have ceramic tiling to delineate the area. You knew you were in the kitchen because that was where the refrigerator and oven were. It’s where you cook. It’s where you sneak a few scoops of ice cream in the middle of the night. It’s where your wife makes the great dishes that she used to make much better in the house you lived in for thirty years and raised four kids in but had to sell because she wanted to spice life up by shaking off her roots. He had shaken off his roots with his family fifty years ago after Fidel ruined Cuba for the middle class. He liked Fidel for that. He liked Miami a lot more than Havana. He liked Miami a hell of a lot more than the Vectra. And he certainly liked the ceramic tile in his old kitchen that now belonged to Kerrick and Devon, a gay couple who just got back from their wedding in Toronto and wanted to settle down in a quieter area of Miami because South Beach had become too trendy. There was only one thing the ceramic tile in the Vectra did. It made Marisol think that this wretched carrier was in some way a proper replacement for their home.

  Their home did not have a CB radio. Of everything he found abominable about the Vectra, it was the CB radio that topped the list. He talked on the radio. A lot. To whom he had no idea. There were people out there with handles. They called them handles. Handles are something that you hold on to or open things with. Names are what you are called. Aliases are what you are called when you don’t want to be called what you are supposed to be called because someone who you might not want to know that you are you might be listening in to your important conversation about the traffic jam on the interstate or the approximate position of a police office, cleverly called Smokey or Five-Oh as if they didn’t know that’s what they were cleverly called. Instead of names, they call them handles. That’s CB talk. Rick would always just call himself Rick because he never felt a need for a clever nickname like Hondo or Touthless Lou or Trogdor. Some guy would always call him Ricky or some other would come back that he needed a proper handle and because he still retained a slight accent, would inevitably call him Babaloo as if he had never heard that one before. The rest of the CB world would seem to chuckle about this in their own strange language which he despised. But sometimes he had to talk to the world because Marisol would spend hours working on her novel with her headphones on while he was driving and he needed to talk to someone sometimes. But he hated the CB because people wouldn’t just talk without giving some kind of information. He had no information to give. He didn’t have to get anywhere quickly so never bothered to speed so never cared about Smokey’s location or if there was a traffic jam somewhere. These things didn’t matter to him. Life mattered. The universe mattered. Marisol mattered. He wanted to talk about all of these things that he used to talk about at the bank or the bar or with his buddies at poker. They would always listen and talk about their own lives while he listened and that was what he needed. Hondo only wanted to tell him to shut up about Lucy always wanting to be in the show. He had many words with H
ondo and had been threatened on many occasions. He had heard it wasn’t a good idea to mess with truckers but was not terribly afraid of someone messing with the Vectra. With its Caterpillar seven point two liter turbo-charged diesel three hundred and thirty horsepower engine pulling its weight along, he figured he could outrun a semi if needed. He was more worried that no one with any kind of intelligence ever operated a CB radio and that merely by pressing the button on his receiver, he became associated with the refuse of the airwaves. He thought it a step down from internet chat rooms filled with international morons typing greetings for hours on end without ever really imparting anything useful. He tried for hours on end to send out his messages to whomever might be listening and he got Hondo’s threats and Aquaman’s instructions on how best to avoid Smokey outside Laverne’s Tavern on Route 13 outside of Idaville somewhere in Ohio or Wisconsin. He hated the CB because it promised communication but never delivered.

  As much as he hated the Vectra, he could never hate it completely because Marisol loved it. She loved the GPS computer that always had the right directions to the next place she had always wanted to see but had never heard of before. She loved the two televisions with the satellite on the roof that moved with the Vectra so that she could still watch all her shows no matter where they were. She loved the Portsmouth Oak cabinets and the Green Slate interiors because she loved green and she loved wood and more importantly she loved the two together. She loved that her galley had an icemaker and a dishwasher and she loved that she could still go online to the internet chat rooms and say hello to people all over the world. What she loved most about the Vectra was that they were both in it together and that where ever they slept at night, they had never slept there before and everything was always new. Even all of the old things they saw were new to them and she never failed to point that out. She loved the Vectra because she knew that Rick would never have left North Miami without it.

  So Rick loved the Vectra too because he loved his wife more than anything in the world and anything she loved wasn’t so bad after all. But he still hated the damned CB.

  “Look,” said Marisol, sensing her husband needed some fresh air. “They sell souvenir bridges at that store up ahead.”