He returns to the cover page, and his eyes focus on the boldface word he’d avoided before: annulment.
Petition for Annulment of Marriage.
NINETEEN
DURING THE HEIGHT OF THE Perry Bueche era, the family went out to dinner every month or so. They’d head to Dick’s, and Lane always had a Deluxe and a chocolate shake in the back seat of his dad’s Galaxy. Perry wore his best gray Kangol flat cap to cover his bald spot for these special family occasions and got Dick’s little plastic cups of diced onions for a nickel to sprinkle on his burgers. Combined with a steady intake of Pall Malls, the onions made Perry’s breath intolerable.
While his parents bickered about whether it was worth the price of going out to dinner or not, Lane watched the stray seagulls dive-bomb for lost fries and bun fragments. Even young Lane knew these birds were stranded too far inland. But they were surviving. Thriving even. Using their wits to out-angle the crows. They’d evolved eating Dungeness crab and juvenile coho salmon but learned to suck down trash as well as any Lake City pigeon. They did what they had to do until they could make it back to where they belonged.
Before Lane’s dad’s grand finale in the Bill Pierre sales lot, Dick’s was the family standard for a night on the town. But on a few extraordinary occasions, when Perry had a good run selling used Fiestas and beater Ranger pickups, Lane’s mom would put on lipstick and they’d all go out for pork chops and buttered mashed potatoes at the Jolly Roger.
The pink stucco art deco building with a three-story turret that flew a skull-and-crossbones flag was the unofficial gateway to Lake City. In fact, before the area was absorbed into Seattle, the roadhouse sat a single, strategic block north of the city limits. Originally called the Chinese Castle, it had been a speakeasy, a casino and a brothel.
Lane has no idea if it is true or not (he thinks he might have made it up himself), but it is rumored that Jack Kerouac once drank at the Jolly Roger in 1956—the year before On the Road was published—when he was an alcoholic nobody who drifted through to see where his idol Gary Snyder, a.k.a. “The Poet of Lake City,” grew up.
By the time Lane’s family was going to the Jolly Roger, it was little more than a faded diner with roped-off rooms and septuagenarians hunched in cracked vinyl booths, gumming down soft chicken potpies, ham steaks and rib eyes. The city proclaimed the Jolly Roger a historical landmark, but it burned down in the late ’80s. The owner was seen wheeling out his file cabinets the day before. It became the Shell station, and since then its only claim to fame was that someone found a dead newborn in the bathroom wastebasket.
Neighborhood legend holds that the Jolly Roger’s turret was a lookout for the cops so that patrons were able to escape via an underground tunnel running under Lake City Way to the wooded ravine across the street.
This is the same ravine that Lane now descends into on a switchback dirt trail leading from the guardrail on the street down through the maples, nettles, blackberries, ferns and cattails. Deep in the thicket, he spots the remnants of an old wooden shack, not much wider than a phone booth.
He’s known about the University Trailer Park for years. Sure, it’s an affordable place to live in an ever-more-expensive city. But Lane considers it the unmentioned herpetic lesion on the nether regions of Lake City. He had seen a little bit of it from its car entrance when Robbie drove by to try to score acid from an hard-faced old hippie who used to live there, but he never knew about this trail until he and Nina saw Inez exit from it.
He sizes up the little shack and wonders if it’s the door to the tunnel, or what used to be the tunnel. He’d love to tell his Lake City boys, especially J.C. and Robbie, that he’d found the mythical passageway. If he weren’t avoiding J.C. and Robbie, that is.
Lane steps off the trail and wades through the thicket toward the structure. Using his bottle of Fred Meyer pinot noir to keep the thorns at bay, he makes it to within a few feet of the shack. He pushes the waterlogged Santa hat back off his eyes and observes a pile of empty Bud Lite cans, a pair of men’s tighty-whities—soiled?—and a splintered wooden pallet in the entrance. He unscrews the wine bottle’s cap, takes a few long drinks and bushwhacks close enough to the shack to peer inside. As his vision adjusts to the dark, Lane realizes he’s looking into the eyes of an older man squatting on the ground. Maybe he’s resting. Maybe he’s defecating into a earthen hole. Lane assumes the worst as his default position for everything in University Trailer Park.
“Who you supposta be? Santie Claus?” The old-timer sips something out of a sixteen-ounce disposable foam cup.
“You mean the hat?” Lane pushes it back up off his face and shrugs. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Well, you look like shit.” The old-timer laughs through missing front teeth.
“Not much of a costume, I know.”
“No, you.” The man traces a circular motion toward Lane’s face with the piece of newspaper. “You look like shit.”
“DARK PONYTAIL? I DUNNO, I think I seen her out back in the Annex.” The old-timer’s weathered facial skin looks tougher than the bottoms of Lane’s feet and remains motionless as he talks. Lane wonders how the hair in the man’s steel muttonchops is able to push its way through such rawhide. The two of them emerge from the woods and step into the main loop of the trailer park.
Dude waves his cigarette toward a one-lane dirt road that leads out the far end, disappearing further down into the ravine. “I don’t go back there. Too much drug dealin’ ’n’ wife beatin’. Not to mention them Guatemalans movin’ in now.”
Lane looks up the rear road, trying to discern the outlines of another row of trailers through the pines and light rain. He thinks about Inez’s call. He was crying on the couch in the TV room when his mom told him to pick up the phone. “There’s a little boy here who’s been sitting by the door for two hours—waiting to see Santa,” Inez said. The whole world can let Lane down over and over again. But he’s not the kind of guy who lets down a kid. I rise above. I fucking rise above, he repeats to himself.
Lane takes a bitter slug off his wine bottle. He’s desperate for a few hours without thinking about Mia, about the annulment, about that embarrassing flurry of collect calls he made to every number he could find for her dad.
“Can I get summa that, fella?” the old-timer asks, eyeing the wine.
“The wine? Yeah, OK.” Lane goes to pour some into the foam cup, but the guy grabs the bottle out of Lane’s hand and takes it straight to the head. He then wipes his mouth and whiskers with the back of his forearm.
The old-timer proceeds to enlighten Lane on the finer aspects of the North Seattle lawn-aeration business. It was good work until he got undercut by the Central Americans and outclassed by the big landscaping companies with their legions of Toros and Husqvarnas.
Lane remembers he’s late. He says goodbye to the old-timer and starts to walk up the road.
“But, your wine.” The guy waves the final third of the bottle at Lane.
“Keep it.”
“You sure?” He cleans the mouth of the bottle with his palm.
“Nah, man. Merry Christmas.”
ON THE OLD-TIMER’S SUGGESTION, LANE walks around the back of the loop so as to avoid the one little house in the middle of the trailer park, the cinderblock shed where the super, That Bastard Doug, monitors any dogs, foot traffic or cops coming into the park.
Most of the mobile homes don’t look like they’re mobile. They’re ensconced in cocoons of blue plastic tarpaulins, plywood and sheets of corrugated plastic that function as rain protection and perimeter walls to fortify the core living space. There are garbage bag windows. Tinfoil over glass windows. Paper over glass windows. And the popular particleboard windows.
Each trailer is a mini-fiefdom packed up against the next. There is a central dumpster overflowing with trash, but a lot of the garbage is piled high in front of the houses. Some looks like it’s been burned in shallow pits.
The Annex reminds Lane of camping. Not that he’s
ever been camping. But he did go to his mom’s old boyfriend’s place out at a lake to go fishing once or twice when he was a kid. Both places give Lane a feeling of being hidden away in the trees and muck. Except in the Annex you can hear cars disregarding the thirty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit on Lake City Way, and when you look up you can see the back rooms of Talents West, Frank Sr.’s stripper recruiting and bookkeeping headquarters, cantilevered off the embankment above. The single road through the Annex is full of mud puddles in the ruts of tire tracks. The number of cisterns hints at a lack of reliable water or perhaps the lack of reliable drainage. Lane sees a few carcasses of old propane tanks. Half-working strings of Christmas lights show that there is at least some electricity.
Lane has her address on the same bill he used for her phone number. But it seems that there are no numbers on the actual trailers. He searches for some sign of life among them. Most of the windows are papered over. He can hear the thumping of bass but isn’t sure where the music comes from.
Lane does see kids’ bikes leaned up against the steps to one trailer, a six-foot plastic basketball hoop in front of another. He knows he needs to reconsider his prejudices. Yes, Lane’s pretty sure that this is the shittiest of Lake Shitty. But just because these people are poor, because they’ve suffered historical grievances or didn’t win the lucky sperm lottery, they are not necessarily unfit to raise children.
Seattle is now home to the richest man in America—with a few others nipping at his heels. From 1986 to 1996, Microsoft stock soared a hundredfold, creating three billionaires and some twelve thousand millionaires in a sleepy city of less than half a million people. That’s like a millionaire per block.
Then Amazon and Starbucks also went public in the ’90s, continuing the metamorphosis. Even as the bubble burst, the city continues to price out its older, poorer and non-tech younger residents. Lake City is the leaky, yellowed fridge in a remodeled kitchen of granite countertops and fresh stainless steel appliances. And this trailer park is the unidentifiable left-overs in the back of the fridge’s crisper. But Lane knows that compared to elsewhere in the world, it’s still not terrible.
Lane imagines that there are conditions like this all over developing countries and those places are teeming with kids. Many of them very happy and healthy, or at least that’s what he’s been told. He’s read about and learned to respect the noble poverty of Bolivians and Nepalis while hating the shortcomings of his neighbors. Gary Snyder might not have had regular electricity when Lake City was all lumber camps, dairy farms, and a brick factory. And he became Kerouac’s idol and a Pulitzer-winning poet.
Standing in the middle of the dirt lane, Lane spins around a few times. He stares at a tree and starts to forget why he came here. Then he sees it: the blue trailer. Inez’s blue trailer. But then he sees another. Both have Seahawks posters in the window. There’s another one a little further down that’s also blueish, and it has Christmas lights and a Seahawks poster. As he goes to knock on the door, he sees another one with a dream catcher and a plastic Rudolph in the window. And a Big Wheel on the porch.
He steps around some big rain tanks under the front gutter, walks up the path past a sad attempt at a flower garden, a few empty pots and wet, hard dirt in a wooden pen. He raps on the aluminum storm door with his knuckles, and it reverberates a metallic rattle.
There are a few deep barks. The internal door opens, and the snout of a pit bull pushes the storm door open and growls right at Lane’s crotch. If he had a lower blood-alcohol level, he might have jumped, but he still floats backward down a few steps. The dog has a good set of teeth, a solid bark and a pigeon-like chest that it squares up to Lane. It pushes through the door, picks up speed and continues right past Lane and on down the road.
“Daisy. Stop, Daisy.” Inez grabs the screen door before it closes and sticks her head out. She turns to Lane. “Made it, huh?”
“Said I would, didn’t I?”
Jordan appears behind her. He has inflamed eyes and a T-shirt with its factory creases still in it that reads SANTA’S FAVORITE LITTLE HELPER.
“Merry Christmas. Santa’s here,” Lane announces to the kid, swaying unevenly.
“No Santa,” Jordan says with a note of recognition. “You mommy friend.”
“Yeah, I’m your mommy’s friend,” Lane responds, with a nod toward the door and Inez beyond. He had no idea the kid could even put two words together.
“No, mommy friend,” Jordan insists.
TWENTY
“DAISY. C’MON, DAISY, YOU BITCH.” Inez pushes past Lane onto the porch, calling the dog back in with a shrill, two-fingered whistle. Lane has always been envious of people who could pull that off. Whistling—even better with one hand—and knowing how to snap, change a tire, drive a stick or roll cigarettes. If he were honest with himself, he’d admit he is lacking in practical skills. But now is not the time to be honest. Especially with himself.
Daisy isn’t as impressed by the whistle, and Inez has to take off after her in bare feet.
“Mommy friend,” Jordan repeats.
Lane takes a step further into the trailer and stares at Jordan as if telling him, “Easy now. You’re confused, kid.” But it’s lost on the toddler. Lane’s expression starts to harden into “You know what happens to snitches?” until he is distracted by the prodigious disorder inside the aluminum and plywood rectangle that is Inez’s home.
Various styles of driftwood sculpture clutter every space capable of supporting them. The walls are draped in oil paintings of bears, eagles and wolves, often accompanied by the ghost outline of a pensive Native American shaman. There are Jesus votives. Saints figurines. A chain pharmacy version of a Bob Marley poster. Piles of rubber bands. Twist ties. Layers of plastic grocery bags pillow the floor under the coffee table. Belongings are packed into milk crates and cardboard boxes. A green glass globe wrapped in yellowed macramé is suspended from the ceiling. Lane watches as it refracts the dust-flecked slivers of daylight that sneak in around the edges of the foil on the windows. He hears the crackling of a frying pan on the hot plate and smells the butter cooking a thin breakfast-style steak.
To be fair, Inez has made a yeoman’s effort to add a Christmas-like veneer to it all. There is a small tree, or more like a branch harvested from a tree, draped with a single strand of blinking lights. There are also a few presents wrapped in newspaper under the branch, and there’s even a Spider-Man pushbike that Lane recognizes as a Fred Meyer Christmas special.
The blazing sound of a TV on full volume dominates the room but is nowhere in sight. Lane determines that it’s coming from the aft cabin as the wall doesn’t reach to the ceiling and the door is made of a colored plastic bead curtain.
Inez steps back in the house holding Daisy so tightly by the scruff of her neck that her front paws skim above the floor.
“I’m not a dog owner,” Lane suggests, “but a collar might—”
“You really gonna give me advice right now, dude? I’ve got enough—” There are a couple of quick popping noises and smoke starts to fill the trailer.
“Shit.” She runs across the room and rips the pan from the hot plate, burning her thumb in the process. She jams the pan into the sink full of fouled dishes and tries to open the tap, but the water sputters and the smoke turns black.
“Mommy friend,” Jordan announces.
Lane tries to help by opening the door and fanning out the smoke.
“Shit,” Inez says a second time—less frustrated than defeated—as Daisy bolts back out the door. Inez turns to Lane, battling back tears.
“Mommy friend,” Jordan cries.
“Santa’s everybody’s friend.” Inez tries to smile and then turns to Lane. “It’s so rare that he calls me Mommy.”
“What’s he call you then?” Lane asks, as Inez starts out the door and after the dog.
“He’s confused.” She slows down long enough to shrug, the smile no longer backed by any genuine emotion. “Watch him again for a minute, huh?”
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br /> THE SANTA HAT LISTS TO the side. Lane pulls the hat back down over his eyes and tries to recapture Jordan’s attention. “Do I look like Santa now?” Before the kid can answer, Lane turns to Inez. “I know . . . Not much of a costume. Best I could do on short notice.”
Jordan mumbles, bursts into tears and lies facedown on the couch. Inez runs over to pet his back with her unburned left hand until he stops.
“Kids.” Lane winks to Inez as if he knows something about children. “So what do you want me to do here exactly? You know, with him and all. I’m having a bit of a tough day. Plus, I gotta get home soon.”
She encourages him to be Santa. To watch some football games with them on TV. “Between his father and those—” She checks her thought. “Either way, he’s a boy. He needs some positive male role models.”
“Between his father and those whos?” Lane asks.
Inez ignores the question. “Anyway, all we got is me and his grandma here now.” She nods to behind the beaded curtain where Lane can hear what sounds like QVC at top volume. “There’s no man in his life. Not one worth nothing, anyway.”
Lane looks between the beads of the curtain to see Inez’s mom laying prone on the bed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Her arms spilling over the edge of the mattress. A white roll of her stomach webbed with blue veins crowds out the top of her pants. She appears to have spent more time in that bed than walking or doing anything else in the last few years. He nods to her. “Merry Christmas.”
No response.
Inez pulls the curtain to the side. “This is my mom. Wanda. Mom, this is Lane.”
“You got something to drink?” Wanda asks.
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