by Steve Amick
“You could get that man who taught the kids to swim at the new high school there to help you make sure it was spelled out exactly right. He’s an Indian.” She said it like she was being so damn helpful. Then again, you never knew with her when she was up to something.
“This was your big thing you needed to discuss? Wipe out a century of local name recognition?”
“Oh no,” she said, “not this. This just popped into my head. But doesn’t it make you stop and think—that the word busy got mixed up somehow with the word ninny?”
He looked at his watch, not bothering to hide it from her.
“Well,” she said, “I know you’re busy, but this may take a minute or two. I’m afraid I may be about to ‘rock your world,’ as they say.”
“To what?”
She beamed. “Isn’t that precious? I heard that on my shows the other day. Some crazy mixed-up family on the Jessie Jones. One girl says to the other girl she’s about to ‘rock her world’—I forget what unpleasantry the young lady eventually disclosed . . .”
“Right . . . And . . . ?” He could see now this was going to be something big and really had zero interest in trying to explain that the woman’s name was Jenny Jones.
“Rock your world . . .” Her wrinkled brow knit with thought.
“. . . Rock your world . . . Isn’t that interesting? As if you and I live in separate worlds, not in the very same.”
Jesus god. He closed his eyes, waiting for it. “Okay, Sadie. What is it?”
“I think words are so interesting sometimes, the way folks use them, twist them around, connect things with them. Like busy and ninny.” There was a canvas bag on her lap, he noticed now. Certainly it could contain knitting, but the chances were good it contained more ammo. So he said nothing. She said, “I’m going to tell you something that you’ll probably find hard to believe.”
“Is it about the lights?” He was kidding—he hoped she wasn’t one of those people who were supposedly seeing lights around the area.
“It’s about you. It’s about your family.” She pulled from the bag a cracked brown photo he recognized in an ornate frame. It was Karl vonBushberger and his then fiancée, Dor Sorensen—his grandparents—standing on the running board of the old Model TT truck, and she had a ring of blossoms in her hair. This would have been sometime in the twenties.
Sadie confirmed this, saying this was the summer she wanted to tell him about—1926. His grandfather, she said, was getting “flippy-floppy” after the initial bliss of the courting and after all the engagement fuss wore off. “It was unusually warm that spring and he was feeling his oats. Maybe you don’t want to hear that. Sorry, but he was. And this was after them two’d spent the winter bundling. You know what that was? Bundling?”
He had some vague idea what she was talking about, that Old World courtship ritual, still in practice in rural America in the early part of the twentieth century. As a gesture of faith accorded a suitor who showed a proper degree of serious commitment and respect in his pursuit of a young lady, he was sometimes actually allowed to sleep over. In the same bed. The idea, even to Von today, seemed asinine. The only precaution against premarital monkey business was the “bundling”—the future in-laws themselves wrapped the boy very tightly in sheets and blankets—essentially, making the bed with him already in it. A whole-body condom or chastity suit, is what it was, the idea being that he wouldn’t be able to move much without a significant ruckus. Except it was nonsense: who couldn’t get out of a bed? And with the girl lying free right there beside him, on top of the sheets, couldn’t she lend a hand? If he hadn’t seen the thing in practice once, in a movie Carol rented one night about the Revolutionary War (last winter, it had to be, the only time of year he allowed himself to stay up late and watch TV), he wouldn’t have believed it. Granted, there was some small degree of practical reasoning behind it—traveling to court a girl across great distances, one farm to the next, especially on a sleigh or wagon, it was just impractical not to allow the kid to spend the night. And the boy would not only be bound physically but also, back then, ethically—he was bound to her by getting her pregnant (which was probably the unspoken plan all along). Or even bound by just the simple act of compromising her good name. Back then, that would be enough. It was a wink-wink situation, with no legitimate expectation that they would remain virtuous. Had to be. And really, who was the one being taken advantage of—literally tied up?
“There used to be a phrase,” Aunt Sadie said. “‘Leading her down the primrose path’—are you familiar with that concept? I was young, sixteen, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew what my brother was up to. Karl was seeing some Indian girl down around Government Lake. And his best friend at the time, Warner Stroebel—who later married my best friend, Binnie—he told her years later they both went to the whores up around Camp Grayling that summer. And hell, Karl was seen by half the town carting around one or two evenings with Flanna McConkey, who was a whore through-and-through, only difference was she never charged!”
Von remembered a Flanna McConkey but had a hard time thinking of her as anything remotely like a whore. The Miss McConkey he remembered used to run the mitten-and-sock tree for charity every Christmas. She wore those black net-veiled pillboxes in church, right along with the widows. An old maid with long, stretched-out earlobes and bad costume jewelry strung around a wrinkly neck. He decided this had to be someone else. Either that, or Aunt Sadie was making it up, which was entirely possible.
“So your grandmother, Dor, who really was always very sweet to me, was, as the kids say today, really getting dicked around.”
Von was horrified. “What kids today? Who says that? Around you they say that?” Jesus god.
She hurled something at him that turned out to be an Oreo, but otherwise ignored his interruption. “So she really had no business not saying yes when she was asked out by this very well-mannered summer person named Mr. Al Brown. From Chicago.” She waited, then added, “Staying out at the bootlegger’s place?” That twinkle came into her eye like she was either palming a hardboiled egg in the bag or about to lead into something real juicy. He waited, but she wasn’t forthcoming. “Al Brown?” she repeated, like he was the nitwit. If they were back in her classroom, she would’ve called on another student by now. But really, how could she expect that plain a name to ring bells when he was still kind of iffy on truly memorable names like Flanna McConkey?
“I’m supposed to know who that is?” he asked finally. “Some guy my grandmother dated before she got married a million years ago?”
He looked away in disgust, out at the pond, for just a second, and something very heavy hit him square in the chest and landed in his lap. It was a black banana, frozen hard. “You froze this? Just to throw it?”
“What—you’d have me making a mess, slinging a rotten banana around?” She threw up her hands like he was hopeless and said, “Al Capone, dimwit! Of course, she didn’t realize it was him, not until your daddy was about five and she saw his face on a newsreel. Al Capone’s face, I mean, not your daddy’s. Though in a way . . .”
The banana fell from his lap with a thud and he didn’t really care. “What are you talking about?” He was sure now she was on some new meds. Or needed to be.
“And there’s a reason why he was here. It all sort of clicked, made more sense to me years later, when I read a book that explained it. It seems some of his bunch accidentally killed an assistant district attorney in Chicago earlier that year and so were laying low in Michigan the whole summer. I guess he visited these parts normally, lots of times, even when he wasn’t evading the law. Had a grand farm down south a ways, more toward Benton Harbor and that. And two cottages up north of here somewhere. But that year, ’26, this was for the whole summer he stayed up here. And no one was to know who he was. So he used this alias he used all the time. Same name as your grandmother’s summer beau—Al Brown.”
Von started to get up. “I can’t believe you dragged me out here for this lame move.”<
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“Fine and dandy,” she said, employing that tone he remembered from the one year he actually had the misfortune of being her student. “We’ll go through it then, step by step. For the slower children . . . What was your father’s name?”
“Fred.”
“Incorrect. Alfred. Born 1927. Alfred Karl vonBushberger. Remember?”
Of course he remembered. Hadn’t he had to deal with the man’s headstone just a year previous? This was idiotic, but he continued to play along. “Capone’s name,” he said, “was Alphonse. Not Alfred. So please.”
Aunt Sadie made a very wet raspberry. “So she’s going to call the baby ‘Al Capone vonBushberger’? What are you—simple? Don’t be such a dunderhead!”
This is why he drove out here—the insults, the browbeating? “So,” he said, sighing, “my dad was actually the son of the world’s most notorious gangster. And nobody objected. Got it. Anything else?”
She eyed him levelly. “Of course no one knew. No one caught on. Everyone said of your daddy that he was the most vonBushberger of the bunch. They’d say, ‘Boy, he sure is a vonBushberger, that Fred.’ The point is, what matters is who you are and what you do. It’s not whose juices you come out of.”
The word juices made him wince.
“Look, Karl was my brother, sure, but Dor and I got real close. We were friends. I know what I’m talking about. The fact is, me and you, we’re not even really related. Not by blood. You want to talk about the last living members of the bloodline, who’s a true vonBushberger, there’s me and there’s your two aunts, Fred’s younger sisters. Those girls were legitimately Karl’s, that was obvious. Hell, I think I even witnessed the conception of them—heard it, I mean. It was hot that summer and we had all the windows thrown open and you could hear noises down in the little house from the main house. You’re probably familiar with that phenomenon yourself, everyone so huddled up close together out there like circling the wagon train. You got to stopper up your ears sometimes.”
He took a deep breath before speaking. He wanted so much to sound calm—as impossible as that now seemed. “If this is to make me ease up on the kids, Aunt Sadie, and be all accepting, you’re wasting your breath. I already decided not to make a big huge stink about everything. So thanks. Now I have to walk around with this lead balloon over my head. Just on account of you like to tell wild stories.”
“Well,” she said, “tough titty, as they say. Maybe I should’ve kept my trap shut, I don’t know. But too bad, honey. The truth is the truth, it is what it is, and things are the way they are.”
“Anything else?”
“Just that I love you. And I accept you. Always have, no question.”
He took this as his chance to exit, heaved a sigh and rose to kiss her on the cheek.
“Just—could you be a dear,” she said, “and go out through the front there and around? I can’t watch you if you leave through the kitchen and you might pocket my silver.”
He just gaped at her: pocket her silver?
She winked. “You do have some criminal in you, you know.”
He wasn’t going to dignify this. He turned toward the kitchenette, ignoring her foolishness about the silverware and felt something hard and wet hit him in the back of the ear.
“Ow! Damn it, Aunt Sadie!” He looked to see what it was at his feet: she’d walloped him with a section of gnawed cantaloupe rind.
She always did have a good arm.
BRENDA WAS STANDING OUT in the turnaround to meet him as he pulled in. She had her arms folded across her chest and a frown creasing her brow dark as a charcoal smudge. Behind her, Miki stood, almost as if at attention, at the bottom step of the front porch. She kept coming, walking straight up to the truck in this peculiar folded arm way. “It’s Marita,” she said, before he could even get out. “They’re all at the hospital.”
He didn’t understand. “She’s having the baby?” Even a contrary little squirt like Marita wouldn’t be contrary enough to have the thing this prematurely. It wasn’t due till September or October or something.
Brenda shook her head sorrowfully. “I don’t think so, Dad. There was an accident. I think you should go to the hospital. Calmly.”
It was only as he was turning the truck around to head back out that he caught sight of the smaller of the two roadside stands—what was left of it. It was stove in on one side, the roof tipped, like something heavy had landed on it and flattened it. The sides were all wrong, too—no longer lined up square with 31 but shoved aside, catawampus from the road. And there were tire marks, deep in the dirt, right in line with the new angle of the demolished stand.
He was starting to see it now. It wasn’t something he wanted to see but he could see it now, all the elements coming together like a picture.
MARITA’S COMA was the biggest thing going on at the county hospital that evening, so the head nurse assured Von and his family they weren’t going to make a stink about visiting hours. They could all stay as long as they wanted. Come and go. But after several hours of standing around and not knowing what to say to his son, who’d been rendered a zombie, sitting there like some piece of unexplained medical equipment that came with the room, or to Carol, whose response to the situation seemed to consist of walking around rubbing everybody’s arms—stroking them like pets, like they had something on their sleeve or had poor blood circulation—Von couldn’t take it anymore. He had to get out of the hospital.
At first, he didn’t know where he was heading. He just wanted to get out in the air where he could breathe and not feel so closed in and surrounded by family and dependents and employees and the medical staff and everybody coming at him with panic and fear and anger. Back out on 31, as he approached the orchard, he saw the darkened shape of the smashed-up fruit stand and felt like he could see it happening all over again. The deputy at the hospital, Janey Struska, had said it was a Fudgie talking on his cell phone and in a hurry somewhere, worried he was lost. Von kept going, passing his own driveway, and he realized now he was heading into town, to the Oh-John and the marina.
He took Don Vanderhoof’s fishing boat, The Wet Debt. Don had always said he could use it anytime, though Von had never before taken him up on the offer, never having had time to relax. He rumbled it back out of the slip and wound his way out the river, trying to keep it slow, no wake, but itching to go, and then he was cutting into the big lake, out past the lighthouse and opening it up, full bore, in the general direction of Chicago. And in the spray and roar, the crying began. He would run the fucker till he ran out of gas and then he would raid the fridge, splay-legged on the lolling deck, under the cold starlight, and drink every single one of the Bell’s Ambers and Bell’s Pale Ales and whatever else skunky beer Don had stowed away in there. He felt it was the best plan he’d had in a very long time: go and go till the big beast sputtered and died, then drift, powerless, and get drunk and cry and cry until there was nothing left to do but fire up the radio and call for help.
54
OF ALL THE AWFUL sites he kept returning to, the thing that Gene found so infuriating about this Ultrateen.com in particular was the fact that it was updated daily. Each day it grew closer to feeling something akin to a physical addiction, and he railed against it, but curiosity kept driving him back with a desire to just peek in and see what was new. And it loaded so fast, the tiny pictures—thumbnails, they were called—popping up in rows and columns like a tempting box of candy, each little square demanding his perusal.
The degree of volition was what was so blurred for him. Because how much interaction or effort was required here? To simply lay that little white pointer over the picture and hit the button marked Enter—was that anything at all comparable to sneaking into a peep show, wearing a raincoat and dark glasses, driving to another city to see an actual movie—to pay your money and get a ticket and find a seat? Was it anything comparable to renting a video, pushing through those swinging doors in back of the Video Vault that seemed so oddly Old West, like entering a salo
on? It was nothing like being a Peeping Tom, sniffing panties on a laundry line. (He remembered years ago, there being a problem with a sad, mixed-up man named Lem who did just that—the former sheriff, Sloff, did something unofficial with him, put him on a bus or something.) This was certainly nothing like grabbing a young lady, “copping a feel,” as his friends had called it when they were young. It was nothing like lurking around a playground, being a molester or a rapist. It was nothing like visiting a lady of the evening. There was more volition and intent, he decided, in calling one of those phone sex numbers. There was the intent of dialing and the consequence of cost and the humanity of the live woman on the other end. This was more like thumbing through the magazines at the barbershop. This was idle perusal.
He could hear the voice of his old adviser from seminary, Dr. Getner, rumbling the word semantics.
And it wasn’t really kiddie porn—he was fairly confident of that. It seemed to him he’d heard enough about the FBI in the news to understand that those busts they made were big events. Truly illegal pornography was now therefore a pretty rare duck. In this context, the “teen” moniker was merely a marketing device to connote youth and beauty and a devil-may-care sense of sexual adventure. They weren’t actually minors. Which was fine. He didn’t want to see that sort of thing.
Actually, he didn’t truly want to look at this sort of thing either, but he was starting to feel as though he couldn’t help himself. There really was something about the idea of oral contact, the lively passion of it, the pure illicitness, that triggered his libido in a way that he had not felt in years. He could look at those pictures and imagine the heat of their breath.
Today’s selection was mostly outdoor shots, girls on the edge of chaise lounges, their summer reading set aside, splayed on the binding beside them, as if they’d been engrossed in a good book and looked up and said, “Oh! A penis!” as if they’d spotted a robin. Some were poolside or in the water, some kneeling in hiking boots along desert mountain nature trails. California sunshine washed across their skin with the candlepower of a prison searchlight. Some wore sunglasses, and these pictures, to his amazement, were paired with follow-ups with the sunglasses soiled, the white seed glopped onto the plastic lens and in the hair. It was too much, really, but he looked on, opening the next and the next.