Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  “I brought you a bottle of wine.”

  She continues to look at him, unblinking, waiting.

  “Some dude up at the front part of the trailer park . . . he took it.”

  “Who?” she raises her voice over the TV.

  “Some old-timer. He got talking to me about lawn aeration—you know, like when they pull all those little dirt plugs out of the grass?”

  “That look like goose shit?”

  “I guess so, yeah. Anyway, the whole conversation got kinda like technical and complicated, and I spaced about your wine.” Lane looks down the length of Inez’s mom, and his eyes keep on going once her legs stop. There are no feet. No shins. The sweatpants are filled to the top of the knee or so, and the rest looks like a used condom or a deflated balloon.

  “I’ll take one a them Icehouses from the Shell station then. The big ones,” she orders.

  “Doctor said no more drinking,” Inez jumps in. “And, anyway, Mom, he’s here for Jordan. For Christmas. Not to get you drunk.”

  “No respect,” Inez’s mom says.

  “You’re an expert in respect,” Inez says. “A black belt.”

  “Let me get some of that steak then.”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  “Fuckin’ abracadabra. Listen, I’m a goddamn diabetic, and all I eated today was like six Cheetos.”

  “Ate, Mom.” Inez cringes. “Ate.”

  “No, I said six. You never listen.”

  “DO YOU WANT TO SING some Christmas songs?” Inez asks Jordan, who is facedown on the couch. She motions to Lane.

  “Uh, yeah, that, uh, sounds like a great idea.” He takes the cue and tries to conjure some enthusiasm.

  Jordan looks up long enough to jut out his lower lip and puff his cheeks.

  “How about Rudolph?” Inez announces. “OK, Santa. Let’s do it.” She fishes the plastic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer out of the front window and holds it within inches of Jordan. “Look. Look, Jordan. Look, Jordan. Look. It’s Rudolph. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Don’t you want to sing the song. C’mon, Jordie. Jordan?”

  Lane is in a fine state to ignore what’s going on between Inez and her mom but providing entertainment to an upset child is quite another matter.

  She gives him another hard stare. Pushing.

  “Rudolph . . .” He works through the dehydration and cottonmouth. He tries to swallow and then starts again off-key, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer . . .”

  “. . . Had a very shiny nose,” Inez continues.

  “. . . And if you ever saw it,” they sing together. Inez returns to the kitchen and tries to resuscitate the cold, charred steak in black, congealed butter. She pries the plastic spatula under it, pulling up a layer of flaking Teflon. “. . . You would even say it glows . . .”

  The house phone mounted on the wall rings. Daisy is alerted and paces, her tail between her legs.

  Inez lifts the receiver, its plastic surface swirled with brown smoke stains. “Is that you?”

  It’s quiet for a minute. She holds her hand over the phone. Lane retreats over to Jordan and places his hand without moving it in the middle of his back.

  “Uh-huh, Merry Christmas to you too then. Yeah, I hear you. But you know what the answer is.”

  She turns to Lane, puts her palm out toward him in a cross between a surrender and stay-on-that-side-of-the-room, and mouths, “Sorry.”

  “Yeah. No. That’s not up for discussion.” She busies herself with trying to clear something out of the rug with the toe of her shoe. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re not even supposed to call. You’ve got us in enough trouble as is.”

  “Is that Kevin?” her mom calls from the other room. “Tell him to come over.”

  Inez put her hand over the receiver. “Quiet, Mom.”

  “Quiet, you,” her mom says. “You don’t know how to treat a man. With respect.”

  A thunderhead builds behind Inez’s temples, pushing out the veins on her neck, forcing her eyes forward in their sockets. It reminds Lane of watching the TV reports of the rock dome swelling on the side of Mount St. Helens. On that morning that it blew in the spring of 1980, Lane’s dad took him to Maple Leaf Park, one of the highest points in North Seattle, where they could see the mushroom cloud on the horizon.

  Wanda continues, “I got a present for Kevin.”

  “How about a present for me? Or your grandson?” Inez shouts at her mom.

  Almost there, Lane thinks. But, instead, Inez surveys all of the Christmas decorations in the room, her son, her visitor, and then as fast as her rage comes on, it blows itself out.

  “You are not welcome here.” She metes out her words into the phone, hangs it up and returns to the kitchen area to work on the steak.

  “Mom? Can I use your microwave?”

  “You know I don’t approve.”

  “Of me using the microwave?”

  “Of how you treat Kevin.”

  “Remember what I always tell you about him, Mom?”

  “That he’s got a huge cock, ’specially for a white guy.”

  “Uh, no,” Inez’s face flushes red. “That he brings more problems than he—Look, it doesn’t matter. It’s my decision, and he’s not coming.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “HO, HO, HO, LITTLE MAN.” Lane nudges Jordan and sees if he can get him to roll over. “You having a good Christmas?” Lane certainly isn’t. At least Jordan is getting attention and presents from Inez. An old drunk wiped his bacteria-infested palm on Lane’s sole present. And he’s been cut loose by his wife, who’s denying that they were ever married. He’s been redacted. Everything that happened between them—meeting at the party, living on the houseboat, their plans, their drive across the country, coffee in Gramercy Park, their favorite South Indian restaurant—it was all the impulsive episode of a troubled young woman off her meds.

  He was her mistake. Or she made a mistake and he was the outcome of it. He was less significant than the outcome. He was a detail in a series of her missteps, and her father taking the reins of her life was the outcome. He’s like the D that she got in French back when she was full-time pulling bong hits, cracking nitrous and dropping acid second semester of freshman year at Dartmouth. The D grade that inspired her dad to call up a dean and play the alum card and the donor card. He got the class retroactively dropped. He turned two other classes into pass/fail courses so those Cs became passes and she finished the semester with a B average: a B, two passes and a dropped credit that she could make up with a summer class at some point. A respectable enough 3.0.

  Maybe he was destined to be low-class all along. The universe was somehow determined to make sure that nothing good happened to him. That he never got any breaks. He could work hard, but he’d never improve his lot. Except for a few outliers, the American Dream is for immigrants with ambitious parents who are unwavering in their support of their child’s academics but are also consummately practical and force them to become dentists, engineers and lawyers. The American Dream is also for upper-middle-class people who later reminisce about roughing it in low-paying summer jobs but who were already born within striking distance of success and with the safety net to take risks.

  At least Lane believed in himself. He had that going for him. Or he used to. Most of his peers never even had that. It’s not like Lane or his friends grew up knowing a single person who was successful. He’d seen Frank Sr. at the Italian Spaghetti House. And Frank Jr. walking out of Talents West a couple of times. But he didn’t have any tangible role models. There was nobody in Lake City to give him advice or show him a career path. Or any path, for that matter.

  To make things worse, he knew that if he didn’t re-up at Columbia this January, his pre-felony undergraduate school loans would come out of dormancy and he’d be buried under an avalanche of debt. He could struggle all he wanted. It was a fool’s errand. He was already an indebted sharecropper. Running in place. If only he’d ignored all of those academic voices in school who told h
im he was smart, to think of other people and learning and the state of knowledge, epistemes, and what the fuck, the greater good. He should have majored in accounting. Or at least something like marketing. He realizes now that his problem is that he is too intelligent for a country of money-hungry philistines. Too intelligent and too nice. Too humble. Or at least too thoughtful about his fellow man. If he were a little less academic and more ruthless, he might have found his way into communications or business or something with a real-world application and a financial future rather than all of this bullshit. At least after six figures of debt he’d be able to get an entry-level job somewhere.

  He found it unfair that no matter how hard Mia tried to mess her life up in her quixotic pursuit of authenticity, she had never fallen that far. It was as if she stepped outside of the evolutionary struggle and existed as a free-floating life form unencumbered by the rules that governed the rest of the universe. Had she been born into Lane’s family, she wouldn’t have made it to adulthood.

  The microwave beeps in the bedroom, and Inez returns with a hard shingle of burned steak and a lump of semifrozen peas, and starts divvying them up onto disposable paper plates. Inez hands a plate to Lane, puts a plate in front of Jordan and stands up with the third plate. He sets about sawing at the steak with a plastic knife.

  “A million bucks says Jordie ain’t gonna eat that,” her mom shouts from the other room. “You shoulda made my casserole: the one with them tater tots, cut-up hot dogs and Velveeta. Nice ’n’ soft. You loved that as a kid.”

  Inez feigns gagging herself on her index finger.

  Her mom goes on. “And what about me? You want your own mother to starve on Christmas?”

  “I’m coming, Mom. You know I got you.” She takes a plate into Wanda’s room without so much as a thank-you in return.

  Lane tries to keep Jordan occupied in the meantime. He picks up a plastic Santa Claus on a motorcycle and revs the engine. It lights up and plays “Jingle Bell Rock.” Lane thumbs the MADE IN CHINA label of a kid’s scarf knitted with HAVE A TOTALLY AWESOME CHRISTMAS.

  “The hell?” Inez yells at her mom. “Where’d you get that?”

  She comes out of the room with an empty plastic pint bottle of gin and throws in in the trash. She shakes her head. “Fifteen minutes. Tops. Watch . . .”

  Jordan refuses to eat a bite of the dinner. He screams and cries as if Inez were trying to feed him spoonfuls of fiberglass.

  LIKE CLOCKWORK, WANDA IS DOWN for the count. Inez pushes her way back out through the beaded curtain, carrying her mom’s television set with both arms. Lane knows he should help her, but he lacks the motivation to get up right now. She walks at a hunched angle until she’s able to set it down on the floor. After plugging in the set, she adjusts the antennae and pushes the buttons one after the next.

  “You know what channel the game’s on?” she asks Lane.

  “What game?”

  She laughs as if he were joking. Lane doesn’t like to let on that he doesn’t understand the rules of football. That he’s not sure what a down is. Or a rush. Or a safety. It’s something he feels compelled to lie about. This cultural illiteracy is not masculine. Not American. Lane knows he’s different, but in Lake City he’s always needed to be careful to not come across as too different, too bookish. He was teased into giving up all of his Dungeons & Dragons stuff in middle school. He grew up during the binary years of the Cold War, after all, and ran the risk of being pegged as a Commie or other dangerous nonconformist. He feels the same pressure to pretend that he likes bullshit like pancakes, a tasteless vehicle for syrup; driving, more stressful than useful, and Peanuts, the aggressively humorless comic strip, not the legume.

  Inez revisits one of the earlier channels and places a piece of rolled tinfoil between the two antennae. The game comes not into focus but into enough of a semblance of an image that they can make out the lower-third score graphic and the shapes of players through the snow and distortion.

  “Who you think’s gonna win?”

  “Those guys.” He motions to the team with the ball. “Yeah, they’re solid this year.”

  “You hear that, Jordan? Those guys. Who are they, Lane?”

  He tries to make out the Seahawks logo but is at a loss. “Uh, New York?”

  “Yeah, New York is gonna win. Uncle Lane says so.” She turns back to Lane. “You think you could explain the rules to him?”

  “He’s too young, I think. It’s a complex sport. Lotsa strategy, execution.” Lane stretches out and feels his joints start to melt into the floor. Once he’s down, he’s down. The announcer goes on about Indianapolis taking the snap.

  “Who’re the Indiana team?”

  Lane’s eyelids are hot and thick. He rolls on his side and make sure she can’t distinguish the words of his mumbled answer.

  He thinks back to that first winter right after Perry died, when they kept the heat off and took to burning cardboard and scrap wood in the fireplace for warmth. For Christmas, his mom pawned her television so that she could get Lane the Ewok Village. She did whatever she could to make him happy and became so close with the lady who ran the toy department at Fred Meyer that she’d get a call when the new Kenner shipment arrived. He wonders if he could find an elusive vinyl-cloaked Jawa or a blue Snaggletooth in his old toys. Maybe he could turn a buck on eBay.

  “C’mon, dude. Pull it together.” Inez shakes him back awake. “I’m gonna put on some music. Whatdya like?”

  “It’s your place,” he punts. “What kind of music’re you into?”

  “A little bit of everything.”

  “Lamest answer ever.”

  “OK, then. I used to listen to local, you know, grunge, like everyone else. But now I’m more into underground stuff. Stuff you never heard of.” She flips through a Case Logic of burned CDs labeled with a Sharpie all in the same handwriting.

  He’s been to new places opening up in old mayonnaise factories in Williamsburg. Even a warehouse party in Red Hook. “Underground, huh?”

  “I admit, I dabbled in trance, when I didn’t know any better. And even some embarrassing happy hardcore shit,” she says, then realizes she swore in front of the kid and covers her hand with her mouth. “My ex is a DJ. Or he used to be. Got me into the Jungle scene around town.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lane’s not sure what she’s talking about. He surveys clothes in a couple of small cardboard boxes and tries to change the conversation. “Where’s your room?”

  “You’re pretty much looking at it,” she says. A cat walks right under Daisy’s nose—the dog doesn’t move from her rest. There is a milk crate full of thin, glossed booklets.

  “Jordan’s too young to read, right?” Lane isn’t sure when kids learn to read, let alone walk or talk. “You been reading comics to him?”

  “Those are graphic novels. A bit too much sex and violence for a two-year-old.”

  Lane tries to sit up, fighting against increased gravity like the spinning cage ride at the Puyallup Fair that speeds up until you’re plastered against its interior wall. “Like anime stuff, right?”

  “Anime means animation. TV or whatever. Manga is books. You ever heard of shojo?”

  Lane doesn’t want to admit to not knowing this many things in a row. He pretends he didn’t hear the question.

  “I think shojo means girls, but it’s like also a kind of manga aimed at girls.” She searches under the comics and finds a couple of books by an author named Yuu Watase.

  “And you’re into this stuff?”

  “They’re all fantasies about characters with special powers. I’ve got some other shojo stuff here too.” She starts to rummage for other books under the plastic bags and worn clothes on the floor. “Like X/1999 by Clamp—Clamp’s two people, I think—and some more out-there stuff you never heard of like Mai, the Psychic Girl and Battle Angel Alita.”

  “I thought you didn’t like the Orientals?”

  The relevance of the question is lost on her.

  The phone ri
ngs again. She starts toward it but then opts not to answer. Wanda shouts from the other room, “Pick it up, huh? I’m tryin’ to sleep.”

  Jordan starts to cry. When Inez cradles him in her arms, he intensifies to hysteria. She can’t figure out how to sooth him. She tries everything. Petting his back. Smoothing his hair. She gets Lane to make funny voices. They rev the moto-Santa in his face. They try to dance for him. They turn on the TV. They search for cartoons. They turn up the volume. Lane is no help. Childcare is outside of his areas of expertise.

  “Check the kid’s goddamn diaper,” Wanda yells from bed. “Jesus Christ.”

  Inez holds Jordan down and rips open his diaper. She sees the viscous contents suspended in midair for a split second as she regrets that she didn’t first check the interior. Rookie mistake. It splatters all over her hands, the front of her pants and the floor.

  “Who am I fooling?” Inez holds the screaming child on his back and tries to stabilize his legs while pulling down his pants. Jordan responds as if he were battling off a prison rape.

  “Get me a roll of toilet paper,” she commands Lane. “Right now.”

  He enters the bathroom, which reminds him of something he’d see on a Greyhound bus but with more shag carpeting, Christian iconography and a padded toilet seat. He snatches the roll of the back of the tank.

  “Holy f—” Lane says returning from the bathroom.

  “Hey. Watch the language,” she responds.

  He needs a moment to gain his composure. He had no idea a toddler could produce anything of that grandiosity.

  Inez was caught off guard too as the toilet paper smears the soft feces, leaving tracks down the child’s thighs and up his back. Jordan kicks it into the pants around his knees and onto the carpeting.

  Daisy starts to bark as loud as she can, and Inez bursts into tears.

  “Shush, Daisy,” Inez shouts, and wipes her face with the back of her hand. “Lane, can you wet this paper down for me.”

  The dog continues and runs laps around the trailer.

  Lane moves as fast as he can to the kitchen sink, almost tripping over the fleeing cat. The sink spits rusty drops that disintegrate the rough one-ply.