Lake Overturn

by Vestal McIntyre

  The previous spring, Gene had become interested in the mechanics behind all of those spinning brushes in the car wash. Every day the boys had peered into the building on their way by, eventually lingering and hiding when cars entered. They got home with their shirtfronts damp and smelling of ammonia. Enrique had already got bored of watching the car wash when, one afternoon, one of the men who worked there decided to come around back of the building and run them off. “I’m going to design car washes when I grow up!” Gene had shouted in defense once they were safely through the fence. Enrique had shushed him. He could be so embarrassing.

  After this, Gene went through a period of stopping to examine the morning glories that grew on the fence. He began by opening the flowers—which, by the afternoon, had twisted themselves closed like hand-rolled cigarettes—then turning the flowers inside-out. Sometimes Gene picked them and took them home to perform experiments on them. He put them in his closet to see if he could make them open and close by shining a bright light on them.

  Once when Enrique was over watching TV with Gene, Connie had come upon a pile of withered flowers under the kitchen sink. Her body stiffened. Then she bent and grabbed the bunch of brown sticks and crumbling petals. Enrique had feared that she would yell—that’s what his mother would have done—but instead Connie came into the living room and turned off the TV, causing Gene, who hadn’t yet seen what she had found, to grunt angrily.

  “Gene,” said Connie, holding out the sad bouquet, “give me your eyes. Give me your eyes, Gene. Give me your eyes.” Finally he looked up enough to satisfy her. “Clean up after yourself, and stop destroying flowers. Do you hear me?”

  Connie rarely disciplined Gene; this was one of the few times Enrique had witnessed it. (How many times had Gene seen Lina yell at Enrique about something trivial? Her outbursts were always followed by a brief period of angry cleaning, then a hug.) It occurred to Enrique, as he watched, that Gene had trained her. She was addressing him exactly in the way he wished to be addressed—quietly, clearly, from across the room.

  “I’m going to be a botanist,” Gene said, as if this would close the subject.

  (“I’m going to build a submarine.” “I’m going to work at the water tower.” It seemed that each new interest not only replaced the last, but consumed Gene wholly, future and all.)

  “That’s fine, Gene. In the meantime, clean up after yourself. Stop destroying flowers,” Connie had said.

  Now, as they walked down Meadowlark Lane, Enrique put aside his anger to give it another try: “Halley’s Comet?”

  Gene sniffed, as if the comet had personally offended him. In March the two had spent a few nights in sleeping bags in the dewy grass between their homes, and the most they had seen of the much-anticipated comet was a tiny yellow shape like a fingernail clipping among the stars.

  “We could show those photos from Japan—it was brighter there—and make a diagram of its orbit.”

  “Come inside,” Gene said.

  “Why?” Enrique said.

  “I want to show you something.”

  “Is it for the science fair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something we can do as a project?”

  Gene didn’t answer, but climbed the stairs to his trailer. Before following, Enrique called across the empty lot, “Mom?”

  “Yeah?” Lina called from inside.

  “I’m going to Gene’s.” Ever since his mother had told Enrique she had been kissed, it had been important for him to know when she got home. He paid more attention to which homes she cleaned on which days. He couldn’t help it.

  “Great,” Lina responded after a curious pause.

  The boys went into the trailer, angled their bodies to pass Connie’s bed, and entered Gene’s bedroom. Gene opened a drawer in his desk—it only opened halfway before it hit the bed—and pulled out a pile of newspaper clippings. He handed the first to Enrique. It was from the front page of the Free Press, the local newspaper. “Hundreds Poisoned in Cameroon,” said the headline.

  “This was last month,” Enrique said. “It was a rebel attack.”

  “It wasn’t a rebel attack,” Gene said.

  “What was it?”

  “No one knows.”

  WINSTON BLASTED Def Leppard on the way back to Eula, and Gary was jubilant. Winston couldn’t stop going over the details, retelling the glorious story. “Shit, Wanda, you deserve a fucking Academy Award! You cried for the judge. Gary, you got off scot-free! What a cheat! I had to pay a fine! The meek shall inherit the earth. Wanda, you are a master bullshitter. I fucking love you.”

  Gary didn’t join in, but bounced gleefully in his seat.

  Wanda smiled, nodded, even managed a chuckle, but she was in misery. Pain smoldered in both her thumb and chest, and occasional bolts shot up and down her arm between, just as the earth and the clouds volley bursts of electricity in a thunderstorm. It was intense, in part, because it would so soon be soothed. Without the prospect of relief her suffering would be less, she realized, but that’s how life worked. And although she had gotten swept up in the lie’s momentum—it had eased the pressure inside to let the story gush from her mouth—she now felt guilty. It must have taken a lot for that Mexican to become a judge, and he obviously regarded himself as hard-boiled and unflappable. How embarrassed he would feel if he knew how gullible he really was! And Mrs. Wojciechowski! The idea of this nice lady ever finding out she had been imitated, made fun of . . . Wanda couldn’t bear it. She felt as if she had torn down everything right in the world.

  “God!” Winston said. “The soup kitchen! How did you come up with that one?”

  “Dunno,” Wanda said. Never, ever could she admit that she ate at the Mennonite soup kitchen when she was broke.

  She sat and watched the back of Winston’s head as he babbled on. She lifted her uninjured hand and waved a little bye-bye to him, low enough that neither boy could see. He loved her now because she had lied. She hadn’t even known, really, how much she wanted him until she won him—and lost him—by playing his game. By damaging property. Now she realized that she firmly believed every word she had said as Theresa Wojciechowski. She needed a pill.

  “Uh, Winston,” she said, “would you mind stopping by my friend’s house on Garrity on the way back? I need to pick something up.”

  This broke Winston’s mood. “Shit, Wanda, I’ve gotta get home or my mom’s going to start calling around. I barely have time to drop you off at your place.”

  “Well then, just leave me at my friend’s. It’s on the way. You don’t have to wait.”

  “How will you get home?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Wanda wasn’t worried. She’d walk if she had to. Nothing after that point was problematic. As Gideon, the pot dealer down the street, liked to say, Drugs will provide, referring to the lovely way things seemed to come together when you were high. It was a motto of his.

  Winston drove to the house on Garrity and turned to Wanda. “Well, thanks, Wanda. That was a totally brilliant performance. Sorry we can’t wait around.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Gary was stiff in his seat, fiddling with something in his lap. Then he swiveled quickly and held out some bills rolled tightly into the shape of a cigarette. Wanda understood that paying her embarrassed him.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She pulled on her overcoat, got out of the car, and walked up to the house, carrying her purse in one hand and the hat, into which she had stuffed her church dress, in the other.

  Tammy made her living by caring for elderly and mentally retarded people in her home. The state paid her so much per person (more for the retarded, she had once mentioned), and so there were usually four or five people living under her care. Before Wanda knew her, Tammy had been a hospice nurse—she had lived in people’s homes and eased them into death. Tammy had observed the very depths of human misery, and her heart seemed neither darkened nor enlightened by
the experience. She was a regular, cheerful gal, and this alternately comforted and frightened Wanda. The pain pills (along with innumerable other medications) had been prescribed to two of Tammy’s “folks,” as she called them, who had died. Their deaths had been reported to the state—everything was aboveboard; old people die—but the state had never gotten around to cutting off their Medicaid, so Tammy was able to fake prescriptions and resell the pills. “The extra money improves the quality of life for my other folks,” she had once said, and Wanda bought this excuse. Tammy wasn’t living large. She drove an old maroon El Camino with one green door.

  Wanda rang the doorbell. A dog barked next door. Wanda heard Tammy holler, “Vincent, don’t answer that door!”

  Vincent answered the door anyway. He stood, one eye squinted, his mouth hanging wide, his tongue slowly rising to touch the roof of his mouth, then lying back into the bed of his jaw. His tongue did these calisthenics, up and down, endlessly. Vincent always answered the door, although he wasn’t allowed to, and never recognized Wanda, although he had seen her many times.

  “Well, howdy do, Wanda,” said Tammy, crowding her huge frame into the doorway, pushing Vincent aside with one prodigious hip. “Come on in.”

  Wanda followed Tammy into her living room, where the seats were arranged around the TV set. Here sat two white-haired old women dozing, and one very aware-looking young woman, whose eyes darted between Wanda and the TV screen as she rocked back and forth. The room smelled of urine and cinnamon potpourri.

  “Everything all right, hon?” Tammy asked. Her arms were short, like flippers that rested on her sides.

  “Well,” said Wanda, “I banged my thumb. It’s killing me.” She took away the tissues and showed Tammy. The smudge had spread into a blackish bruise that ringed the midsection of her thumb, and there was a crust of blood.

  “Sweetie!” cried Tammy. “Let’s gitcha cleaned up!”

  She led Wanda to the kitchen, walking with effort—not the effort of carrying a heavy load (she actually seemed strangely light for her size, balloonish) but an effort of balance similar to that of a person on stilts. She climbed a stepladder and, from the top of the cabinet, retrieved a first-aid kit. Then she sat Wanda down and cleaned her thumb with hydrogen peroxide.

  “The cut isn’t so bad,” Wanda said with a wince, “it’s just sore.”

  “I’ll just bet it is! How’d ya do it?”

  “Car door.”

  Tammy gasped and shook her head. She got a Ziploc bag from a drawer and filled it with ice. “Now, you just keep this ice on it, and you’ll be good as new.”

  How many cuts and scrapes did Tammy have to mend day by day? She had once had a woman here who pulled out her own eyebrows, then, when they were gone, continued to pluck at the skin until she had horrible eyebrows made of brown scabs. That one ended up back in Blackfoot, the town in southeastern Idaho where the psychiatric hospital was.

  “Thanks so much, Tammy. What I really need is some pills.”

  “Of course you do!”

  “You know, the pain.”

  “Hush,” said Tammy, with a squeeze on Wanda’s knee. She rose from the stool (such a slight difference in her form, between sitting and standing!) and went to the back porch. Wanda had never seen where Tammy kept the pills; Tammy had never let her. She returned with a little yellow prescription bottle. “How many ya need, hon?”

  “Ten. Thanks so much, Tammy.”

  Tammy got the wax paper from a drawer, ripped off a square, and shook ten pills out of the bottle onto it. Wanda took from her purse the bills that had loosened a little in their roll. Despite the craving, which had reached a relentless, screaming intensity, Wanda smiled at the memory of Gary, that polite and embarrassed boy. She flattened the bills and counted them, then nearly burst into tears. He had given her $120. He had tipped her! Now she had $20 to buy groceries tomorrow.

  She gave five of the bills to Tammy, who pocketed them without counting and handed over the folded square of wax paper. “You need a glass of water?” Tammy asked.

  “You know,” said Wanda, blushing with shame, “the pain is so intense I might need to . . .”

  “Of course,” said Tammy, squeezing Wanda’s knee again. “Come with me.”

  She led Wanda to the bathroom and, from under the sink, took a handheld mirror and a razor blade. She set these on the counter and gave Wanda a tight-lipped smile accompanied by a squeezing shut of her eyes. This was the clumsy smile of sympathy old women at church used to give Wanda. Wanda hated it but endured it, reminding herself that to Tammy she wasn’t the poor little orphan girl, but a friend in pain.

  Tammy left the way nurses leave exam rooms to let you undress, closing the door respectfully behind her.

  Wanda settled onto the fluffy green shag that covered a foam-padded toilet seat cover. With trembling fingers, she unfolded the wax paper and dropped four pills into her coin purse. Then she folded the fifth back into the wax paper and looked around for a tool. She picked up a decorative glass bottle and with its rounded base she crushed and re-crushed the pill. Then she unfolded the paper, dumped the powder onto the mirror, and, with the razor blade, arranged it into a line. She had never done this at Tammy’s house before, and she was ashamed of herself, but she couldn’t wait those long minutes after the pill would go down her throat and before it would take effect.

  Wanda had crossed this border about four months ago. Back when she swallowed the pills—even after the doctor refused to renew the prescription, and she began to buy them from Tammy—Wanda still felt that they were medicine. Once she crushed and snorted them, however, they became drugs. She hated that Tammy knew now.

  Wanda rolled the twenty-dollar bill—that wonderful bill—back into its cigarette shape. Then she paused and counted. For five seconds she observed in herself a complex sensation: agony and anticipation folded together and flowered into a horrible, gorgeous moment. It was like being on the verge of coming. Then she snorted the line.

  She roused herself. How much time had she spent sitting happily on the soft toilet seat? She looked down at the hand mirror and noticed a few grains of white. She licked them up, right off the glass. They tasted wonderfully bitter.

  She put away the mirror and razor blade, threw away the wax paper, and stood up. In the big mirror over the sink she saw herself, a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. She smiled down at the blue dress. I hate you, she said—aloud?—and felt not hatred but, rather, forgiveness, contentment, and, strangely, music. Dancing a little, she took the dress off. Should she stuff it in the trash or give it to Tammy? That green plastic hamper in the corner would make a perfect new home for this dress. Drugs will provide. She took her own dress out of the bowl of the hat and put it on, lifting her arms and letting it fall around her body. Then she opened the hamper, which now resembled a yawning frog, and placed into its belly both the blue dress and the hat. A message in a bottle. Where would it end up? Clothing one of Tammy’s folks. With a beneficent smile, Wanda pulled on her coat, imagining that darting-eyed woman from the other room donning her new outfit and proudly, jerkily, walking downtown. All was well now between Wanda and that dress.

  As she moved through the house, Wanda thanked the walls for setting everything right. Tammy wasn’t in the living room. Maybe she was giving Wanda room to leave uninterrupted. Wanda came upon Vincent pacing the empty foyer. He retreated a bit into the darkness upon seeing her.

  “Bye-bye,” Wanda said.

  Vincent ducked his head to the side.

  “Vincent,” Wanda said, “why do you always answer the door? Are you waiting for someone?”

  He said nothing. His tongue was busy with its exercises, and there was a suspicious slant to his brow.

  “It’s just your job, isn’t it? It’s what you do.”

  Vincent hugged himself and turned farther to the side. Wanda didn’t want to frighten him. “Bye-bye, Vincent,” she said.

  Walking down the street toward her part of town, Wanda wonder
ed whether there was a job out there that she should be doing, and whether she would be happy if she found it. Then she realized: she had. She was doing her job. It was nothing so simple as answering the door, but she had a job and she was doing it every moment of the day. Her overcoat felt comfortable and warm as a blanket, a magic blanket that supported her and helped move her forward. She imagined that she could stop using her feet and this coat would carry her home.

  Wanda floated through rooms of sunlight that narrowed and widened at the direction of the elm trees lining the street. This was a pretty neighborhood of clean, humble houses whose flower beds had withered over a few recent frosty nights. In the lawns, yellow leaves had been raked into piles. Some of them were neat as igloos; others had been smeared across the grass by children’s play. In an upcoming shaft of light Wanda saw a sphere of busily flying gnats, and she ducked so as not to disturb them.

  Wanda imagined that another force besides her coat was helping her forward: behind her, over her left shoulder, a huge, benevolent cat prowled along. A tiger or panther, but bigger, as big as a car, protected her as she walked. Then she realized the cat was real, and it was a car. She turned toward it, and it stopped. Gary was the driver. Wanda got in.