The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  I pulled into the entrance to the parking lot, and there were just a few other cars there, including Edwin’s Subaru, parked about fifty yards away, right near the school buildings. Edwin was leaning on the hood, talking to his sorta-sister Pleasance.

  Ike was parked a lot closer to me, and he was just getting out of his little Volvo. He waved at me, grinning like an idiot, and gestured to the empty space next to his. Anything for a moment’s proximity to me. It would have been sweet if I could have thought of a way for him to be remotely useful to me. He stepped into my path and started making big exaggerated air traffic controller gestures, as if guiding Marmon in for a landing. For the school’s “funny kid,” Ike wasn’t all that funny, but it was park where he wanted or run him over, so I hit the brakes to slow down.

  But the brakes didn’t respond. I pushed harder, and the pedal sank mushily into the floor. Oh, fuck, I thought. Vehicular manslaughter, here we come.

  Adrenaline does things to your subjective time sense, and kicks your attentiveness up a few notches. I didn’t panic: I pumped the brakes, but that didn’t achieve anything, so I stomped down on the emergency brake. Not much help there, either. Marmon was rolling downhill, and locking the back wheels with the emergency brake didn’t really stop my momentum—it just made my back end start to drift a little to the left. I tried downshifting, but Marmon’s got touchy gears, and I mostly just made horrible grinding noises. “Move!” I shouted, but Ike just looked at me, his stupid grin gradually melting into a quizzical expression. It occurred to me that I could swerve Marmon into one of the other cars and stop that way, but apart from the fact that such action would be terminally embarrassing, it probably wouldn’t save Ike’s life: If my front end struck something, it would probably just slew my back end around, and I’d end up killing Ike via sideswipe rather than head-on collision. There just wasn’t time to do much of anything except mow the stupid kid down, and that would lead to all sorts of unpleasantness. I’m not overly concerned with the sanctity of human life, but something so public, against someone who’d never wronged me, was hardly my idea of a good time.

  Ike realized I was going to hit him, and started to dive out of the way, but Marmon’s a big truck, and if he was lucky, he’d end up with just his legs crushed instead of his whole body—it wasn’t going to get much better than that.

  Suddenly, I saw Edwin’s face at my window, even though moments ago he’d been at the far end of the parking lot. He streaked in from the side and body-checked Marmon like a football player making a tackle. The truck swung hard to the right, much more sharply than I could have turned it. I bounced in my seat hard enough that the top of my head hit Marmon’s ceiling. Son of a bitch. Marmon, pushed hard off course, crunched into the rear of Ike’s Volvo. Ike, meanwhile, was standing up unharmed and dusting himself off, gaping.

  Edwin eased open my door and clutched my hand: those icy fingers again. “Bonnie, are you all right? Did you hit your head?”

  “Um, a little.” I rubbed the top of my head and stared at him. “Edwin, how did you do that?”

  He frowned. “Do what?”

  “Push Marmon—my truck. He weighs three thousand pounds, and you moved him like a tackling dummy.”

  Edwin frowned. “You must have hit your head pretty hard—I just ran over a second ago to check on you, I didn’t push your truck.”

  Okay. Play it that way, then. Edwin was even more extraordinary than I’d realized. Was it just some temporary Hulk-out moment, like those women who lift burning cars to save their kittens or kids or whatever? But, no, it couldn’t be that, he’d been at the end of the parking lot, and he’d flown over here in a second, faster than anything living could move. Was he… what? A kid superhero? I’m what you’d call a realist, and a skeptic, but I also absolutely trust my own senses and my mind, and they were telling me: Edwin moved as fast as lightning and shoved a ton-and-a-half truck aside like I’d push a chair out of my way. “Better check on Ike,” I said, easing myself out of the truck, and he looked momentarily annoyed.

  “Ike, are you all right?” he said brusquely.

  “I, uh, yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, making a great show of clutching my not-really-all-that-wounded head. “I don’t know what happened, the brakes just didn’t work.”

  “Good driving, though,” Ike said, rubbing his elbow, which I guess he’d scraped diving for the gravel. “I mean, it’s gotta be hard to control a truck that big, and I’d rather you dent my fender than crush my head.”

  I glanced at Edwin, who was looking conspicuously at nothing, and realized Ike hadn’t seen his intervention—too busy leaping for his life, I guess. I looked over at the Scullens and Scales, who were clustered around Edwin’s car, and they were mostly glaring at me, except Pleasance, who looked almost concerned. Pretty soon people were pouring out of the school, and more students were arriving, and before I knew it, there was an ambulance and EMTs, and Edwin told them I’d hit my head and probably had a concussion. Not very nice at all. I insisted I was fine, but who listens to a girl with a head injury? No one. They loaded me onto a stretcher, which struck me as funny, because I wasn’t the one who’d been nearly run down, and all Ike got was a band-aid for his scraped elbow and an EMT shining a light in his eyes.

  Then Harry showed up, and seeing me on the stretcher freaked him out, and I had to shush him and say I was fine, Marmon’s brakes had failed but I was okay—

  His eyes went wide. “Oh, Bonnie, I’m so sorry, honey, I checked that car out myself, I don’t know what happened, I even replaced the brake pads and all the fluids were good, maybe it’s got a leak somewhere I didn’t know about. I’d better call Willy Noir over to check it out, he knows that truck backwards and forwards, or that son of his Joachim, he knows everything there is to know about anything that runs or rolls, why, I hear he played with carburetors the way some little kids play with Lincoln Logs—”

  Several of the onlookers and one of the EMTs joined him in discussing the various ways brakes can fail, and that led to a general discussion of horrendous car accidents narrowly avoided, and while it was nice not to be the center of unwanted attention, it was also annoying. I looked at Marmon, and there was a new dent in the driver’s side door, just the right size and shape for Edwin’s shoulder. He’d bent the metal when he shouldered the truck aside—and it was good solid steel, not the crappy stuff cars are made out of nowadays—and hadn’t even gotten bruised in the process.

  Eventually they got me in the ambulance and drove out to the county hospital, some miles away, with Harry leading the way in his police car, lights and siren blaring. They wheeled me into the emergency room, and promptly took me upstairs for an X-ray, which at least got me away from Harry’s terrified doting. I told them I was fine, that I’d barely bumped my head, and they couldn’t find anything wrong at all when they scanned me. Eventually they returned me to my personal curtained alcove in the ER, explaining that I couldn’t leave until a doctor signed off, which might be a little while. I was surprised to find Edwin lounging by my bed, which I refused to lay down in anyway, taking the visitor chair for myself.

  “So what’s the damage?” he said.

  “No damage at all. No concussion. I doubt I’ll even have a bump on my head.” I looked at him, hard. “I’m sound of body and mind.”

  “I’m very glad to hear that,” he said, ignoring my implication.

  “Why do you get to hang around back here?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Position has its privileges. When your dad’s a doctor…”

  Just then, a hand swept back the curtain, revealing a young, tall, blond, pale, thin man in a white coat who looked nothing at all like Edwin, but shared that same impossible-to-explain magnetic quality. It was like they were luminous beings in a dark land. Substance when the rest of us were shadows. Dolce & Gabbana in a Wal-Mart world.

  “Dr. Scullen, I presume.”

  He glanced at me, then at the clipboard in his hands. “Ms. Grayduck. My son has told
me so much about you.”

  Edwin winced, and I suppressed a smile.

  “How’s your head? My son says you bashed it pretty thoroughly.”

  “I’m not sure how he’d know that,” I said, “when he was all the way across the parking lot when it happened.”

  “Mostly because you were babbling a bunch of nonsense when I opened your door,” Edwin said dryly. “Sounded like head injury talk to me. Call it inductive reasoning.”

  “Mmm,” Argyle Scullen said. “Well, it all looks fine to me. I can keep you here under observation if you prefer—”

  I shook my head. “No, I’d rather get back to school.”

  “I daresay a day off is warranted,” Dr. Scullen said.

  I sighed. Harry would probably insist on keeping me home anyway. “All right, fine.” The doctor told me to take some painkillers if I needed them, and to call if I had any blurred vision or vomiting. Once he wandered off, Edwin gave me a smirk and started to stroll away too. I grabbed his arm. “Hey,” I said, in a low voice, and pulled the curtain around us shut. “I want to talk to you.”

  His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed, and even that was hot. God, I was in trouble with this one. “What about?”

  “Well, I think I owe you,” I said. “Since you kept me from running Ike down in the parking lot.”

  “I told you, I didn’t touch your truck, I just—”

  “I saw the dent, Edwin.” I took a step closer to him, and he couldn’t retreat without crashing through the curtain, and I had a feeling he wouldn’t want to look as ridiculous as that would make him look. “In my truck’s door.”

  “That truck has more dents than it doesn’t,” he said.

  “And I know them all. That one’s new. And it’s just the right size for your shoulder.”

  “What do you think happened, Bonnie? I moved a truck that weighs more than some houses with my own body? How would that work?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.” I searched his face, and his eyes were darker again, a blue so deep it was very nearly black. “But I’d like to find out.”

  “If I did save you from something,” he said stiffly, “seems like you might owe me the kindness of not pressing me on this.”

  Ah ha. “Good. Moving past simple denials. That’s a step in the right direction.”

  “No one will believe your story,” he said.

  I nodded. “I know.” I know a lot about which kinds of stories are plausible, and which kind aren’t. “And I don’t intend to go telling tales anyway. But… I’d like to know, for my own peace of mind… how did you do it? What are you, Edwin? Is Edwin your secret identity? Alien? Government experiment? Souped-up clone? I’m an open-minded girl.”

  He laughed. “You watch too much bad TV, Bonnie. I’m just a seventeen-year-old who was worried about you when your brakes failed. You really must have hit—”

  “Stop,” I said, and something in my tone—the utter lack of artifice, maybe, the fact that it was a word originating from the mouth of the real me, and not one of the thousand masks I wear for the rest of the world’s benefit—made him stop. “We don’t need to do this. We’re past this. I know something, and I’ll find out more. It will be easier for both of us if you just talk to me.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, but he looked away.

  I relaxed. If these were the parameters of the situation, that was fine. I could work with these. “Edwin,” I said softly. “Really. You can talk to me.”

  He turned, swept the curtain aside, and practically ran out of the room.

  After that, he didn’t say a word to me for weeks.

  DANCING AROUND

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  Forget the cold shoulder; Edwin gave me the cold everything, except a cold look, because that would require actually looking at me. He couldn’t avoid me in biology class, what with being my lab partner, though he did the best he could: there might as well have been a force field between us, a transparent barrier that allowed us to see but not touch, or talk, or even acknowledge one another. The first day back after Ike’s near-death experience, I tried to pick up where we’d left off before I’d seen him perform acts of superhuman impossibility, saying, “Hi, Edwin,” in class. That was the last time he looked at me: a stare of infinite distance, and his eyes were, again, so dark they might as well have been black.

  “Ah,” I said softly. “So it’s like that.”

  He turned away, and didn’t lay eyes on me again, and on the rare instances when his gaze necessarily swept through a portion of space occupied by me, he seemed to stare right through me.

  A lesser woman might have thought: do I have cooties? Body odor? Do I need to reconsider my skin-care regime? Perhaps a change of make-up, or a lower-cut shirt, or a squirt of new perfume is in order? But I’m too aware of my faults (such as they are) and my finer qualities (innumerable), and it’s hard to suffer from low self-esteem or high self-doubt when almost everyone around you is, self-evidently, little better than a bunch of grubby insects. Edwin was a higher being, obviously, but he wasn’t any higher than me: whatever superhuman physical qualities he had were impressive, but they just made him an even more suitable mate for me than I’d thought he was before. For whatever reason, he was resisting. Afraid his secret—whatever it was—would come out, probably. But I could be discreet. Very discreet. He’d figure that out, in time. Meanwhile, I could be patient, and I could play it just as cold as he did.

  “You saved my life,” Ike said, for the fifth time, and for the fifth time, I shook my head.

  “I endangered your life.”

  “No, you couldn’t help it that your brakes failed. Most people in a truck that big, the brakes go out, they would’ve panicked, and I would’ve been a pancake, but you thought fast, and I just got a dented bumper instead of a crushed head.”

  I made a noncommittal noise and took a bite of my meatloaf. At lunchtime now I sat with my back to the Scullen table, which meant I had a view of nothing more interesting than my “friends” Kelly, J, Ike, and assorted hangers-on. Once Ike got a whiff of the distance between Edwin and myself, he did his best to insert himself into the gap (and that wasn’t the only thing he hoped to insert somewhere, obviously). His enthusiasm barely registered as amusing, but at least it made J furious, which was something: while Ike fawned over me, J stared at me with murderous slit-eyes. For whatever inexplicable reason, she was still enamored with the pudgy little nothing, and his obvious infatuation made her seethe. The fact that I was utterly uninterested in Ike did nothing to diminish her ire, but she was firmly of the “keep your enemies closer” camp, and did her best to be my best friend/principle foe. In a way, it was cute, seeing her attempt to compete with me on a cutthroat queen bee level—like seeing a monkey dressed in a tuxedo or a chicken attempting to play the piano. She was so far out of her league that she was incapable of even recognizing that she was out of her league. I could mess with her, and at least amuse myself, while I tried to decide what to do with Edwin. Maybe start returning Ike’s affection, and see if that sparked some jealousy in Edwin? Could be playing with fire, though. (I have nothing against playing with fire: when I was a little girl, I loved setting fires. But as I learned when I accidentally burned down the garden shed at age seven, fire needs to be respected and treated with care, unless you don’t mind wholesale out-of-control destruction.)

  Or I could play matchmaker. That was a thought. I’m not what you’d call a romantic, but it might be amusing to bring people together instead of driving them apart. Certainly a new challenge. And messing with people is messing with people.

  “So Ike,” I said. “What’s the plan for this trip to the lake?”

  His eyes lit up, and J’s eyes darkened, so I knew I’d hit on something there. “We’re going this weekend!” he said. “A whole bunch of us are going over to the north side of the lake, where there’s a little beach and some nice woods. It’s technically on the Pres du Lac reservation, where the Woebegotten Band of the O
jibwe live, but they don’t mind outsiders visiting as long as we take our beer bottles and crap back out with us when we leave.”

  “Sounds fun,” I said. “What I’ve seen of the lake looks more like a swamp.”

  “It’s marshy on this side,” Ike said. “But it’s real pretty over there. Did you, ah… want to come?”

  I looked at J. “Will you be there?”

  She seemed taken aback at my direct address, but then, she was more passive-aggressive, rather than aggressive-aggressive. “Yeah, of course, all my friends will be there.”

  I turned back to Ike and gave him one of my better smiles. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Great,” Ike said, all sparkles and happiness and effervescent enthusiasm. He was so uncool. “I’ll bring some beers—my uncle Dolph, he owns the grocery store, and he’s lousy at keeping track of inventory, I’ll just lift a couple cases of cheap stuff from the storeroom next time I’m working there. And Kelly…” He lowered his voice. “She’ll bring the weed.”

  I looked sidelong at Kelly. “Why, I’ve fallen in with a bunch of reprobates and delinquents. How wonderful.”

  Kelly shrugged. “I’m sure it’s not as good as the stuff you get in California, but my cousin is in college in St. Paul, and he brings me little treats when he visits.”

  “Sounds like quite the party,” I said. I wasn’t much of a drinker or a smoker, really—I like feeling the edge, the rush, of transgression, occasionally the buzz of a little coke or meth, but only rarely the spacey euphoria of weed. (Booze is dangerous, and I partake only in small quantities. I really shouldn’t lose what few inhibitions I actually possess; they keep me out of trouble.) But I could do enough that no one would think of me as the weird abstainer-kid—drinking and puffing as protective coloration.

  And if I worked things right, Ike and J would be screwing in the back of someone’s pickup truck by the end of the night, and ideally become so besotted with one another that they’d stop annoying me.