Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  Lane finds everything he needs but a pair of clean pants. He will have to go look in the TV room and brave the savage youth.

  He knocks on the door. No one answers, but he can hear gunshots and explosions emanating from the TV. He opens the door an inch at a time. The kids look up and then go back to playing and watching the screen, its light flickering off their faces, casting inverse shadows of their chins up and across their faces.

  “Just grabbing something.” He steps over the youngest and busies himself digging through his mom’s newspapers, the kids’ dirty hoodies and pieces of Maxim magazines to find his rumpled pants on the floor.

  On his way out the door, he turns back to the kids. “Why don’t you guys go out sometime or do something?”

  “Like what?” asks the older one.

  “Go meet some girls. Or at least—I dunno—read a book. Watch a decent movie. You’re rotting your minds.”

  All three of the kids laugh.

  “Funny, huh? Video games aren’t gonna get you anywhere.”

  “So what? We can be like you?”

  Lane starts to respond but fights back a stutter.

  “Books are creepy old-guy shit.”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “Old. Like twenty—maybe—twenty-three?”

  “I’ve gotta go,” Lane says as he backs as fast as he can out the door. “Important meeting.”

  NINA COMES DOWN THE ALLEY in the Mercedes and honks her horn. It’s raining and her fog lights are on as then sun sets in the late afternoon. Lane jogs out through the garage door, his chin on his chest, brow furrowed and cheeks hardened to shield his eyes from the rain.

  He pauses so that the kids can see him getting into the car. Only one is facing the window. And he’s not sure if they can see that it’s a Mercedes through the blackberries. But it’s better than nothing.

  Nina steps on the accelerator and flies out of the alley without slowing down to look for oncoming vehicles. “The judge. The caseworker. Inez. They’re all in it together. In the same cult: Space Mountain or Strawberry Hill or some shit.”

  “Mars Hill.”

  “That’s it. Like Jesus and the God of War had a lot in common, right? They think homosexuals should all be stricken with AIDS by God and men rule women.”

  “Yeah, they’re some sort of New Calvinists who say dude, train kids in digital marketing and proselytize online,” says Lane. “They’re like our own homegrown megachurch.”

  “Sound like nice people.” She pulls into the Shell parking lot and looks in the rainy evening at the darkness of the trailer park. “We have to stop them.”

  “Wait. I didn’t agree to ‘we’ anything exactly. I didn’t say ‘I’m back in.’”

  She ignores him. “They’re all a bunch of hypocrites. You think a regular person dedicates their life to preaching this kind of intolerance? They join these cults because they can’t stop looking at kiddie porn or when they get out of gambling rehab or need to stop beating their spouse. And then, out of the blue, because they’ve made right with Jesus Claus, they have some sort of moral authority. What kind of moral authority does she have over me?”

  He imagines he could use Spinoza or maybe Nietzsche here but can’t back the name-dropping with an explanation of either of their philosophies. “I dunno. What does anybody really have over anybody?” He looks out the window.

  “We’re gonna take a more proactive approach. Aim for her weak point.”

  “Which?”

  “Drugs. Obviously.”

  “She doesn’t even drink.”

  “Doesn’t drink . . . For how long? A month? Two months? She’s a convicted drug dealer. An addict. It’s a matter of time. And then what? Wait until Jordan is back with her before it all comes apart at the seams? Once my wife has already been destroyed by this. Once Jordan is triple-fucked and has to start this process all over again with a different foster family. Why doesn’t anybody else see this?”

  “Can’t people get better?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No?”

  “One in a hundred. No, one in a thousand. And those come from good families or already have some sort of structure or bright spot in their past that serves as an anchor. Fucked is fucked.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “Fair? What’s fair? I don’t believe fair exists . . . I don’t even respect fair. People get what they get. It’s a combination of hard work and luck. None of us deserve anything.”

  Lane shifts in his seat, exaggerating his movement enough to let her know that he doesn’t agree without having to say it and provoke additional conflict.

  “I know you’re a liberal arts guy and one of these Seattle idealists who think everyone has the potential to be good and rational and get along if they become better educated and more enlightened,” she says. “That if people open their minds and read enough books they’ll find some sort of consensus based around progressive values and the world is gonna be OK. But it ain’t like that. That’s not how it works. We’re not all destined for some sort of just and better future.”

  “You got it all figured out, Nina.”

  “Yeah, I kind of do, actually.”

  Lane gives up on his Pacific Northwest restraint. “You think you’re the first Californian to move here with a bit of cash and think you know better than all of the locals? Truth is, you—and everybody like you—are just another type of utopian. You think there’s no history here. That it’s all a blank slate and you can show up and bully your way into creating a life on your own terms without accepting any realities of anyone else out here in this lost little corner of the country.”

  “Locals? Really? ’Cause some white trash, fishermen and hippie burnouts found cheap land here for a generation or two? You all took it from the Indians in the first place. And none of you’ll be able to afford to live here in ten years anyways. Maybe in Lake City. Maybe . . . The rest of you will be renting up in Lynnwood. And nobody’s gonna remember anything about the past of this place. Such is progress, my friend.” Nina lights another smoke. “Speaking of locals, you know what’s your greatest cultural contribution?”

  “Me personally? Well, as a student of—”

  “No, Seattleites, dumbass.”

  “I dunno . . .” Lane stutters for a moment but deflects. “Tom Skerritt? No, wait, I don’t think he was born here. Adam West? Kenny G?”

  “How about bikini baristas? Or, even better, drive-thru bikini-barista shacks? Seattle coffee culture in a head-on collision with Lake City sleaze. Our girl Inez used to work in one up along north Lake City Way. Optimal mom material.”

  Nina tells Lane everything she knows about Inez from before she was pregnant, when she was standing around all day in nylon lingerie smudged with coffee grounds, getting harassed for subminimum wage plus tips by construction workers commuting into the city in their F-150s. Her boyfriend, Kevin, had long been a dealer, hustler and smackhead. He washed up from the peninsula or the islands or someplace unimpressive.

  Inez got pregnant, and they dealt with it the way they knew how to cope with stress and the challenges of life: cutting corners, breaking laws, escape through addiction, playing the victim. “Poor life choices. Over and over again.” Nina shakes her head for emphasis. Kevin and Inez started selling drugs out of her disabled mom’s trailer, and the rest is history.

  Nina cracks her knuckles and clears her throat. “Look, she’s having a tough time. She needs to cut loose. Needs to relax. To have some fun. You should go over there and be a comforting friend.” She hands Lane an amber plastic bottle with a few round white pills in it and the prescription sticker picked off. “Make absolute sure she feels better. And then you can get on with your life, as I deal with the next steps.”

  He holds the bottle between his thumb and index finger, giving it a little shake to see the shape and size of the pills. “Prozac?”

  “Try OxyContin.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  She
pulls out a photo of her, Tracey and Jordan in some sort of a government-looking building of cheap brown office chairs and Formica. The kid is small, bloated and curled in on himself. “This is when we adopted him. Not adopted, but started to foster, you know . . .”

  She pulls out another. “This is now.” The photo shows Nina and Tracey reading a book to Jordan in a home office with a glass desktop. They’re sitting together as a happy family. Nina is wearing a gray Kangol flat cap and laughing. The same Stanford pennant and rows of bookshelves fill the wall behind her. Jordan has grown, slimmed and his smile overtakes his cheeks. “You have an opportunity here, Lane. An opportunity for you. And for Jordan. To do the right thing. To change a life.”

  Lane looks over the photo again and again. “The right thing. Yeah. OK. But—”

  “Think about who in this equation has a future. Including yourself. I know you’re gonna make the right decision.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  LANE IS NO STATISTICIAN AND despises academia’s drift toward an overreliance on data and quantifiable research. He was never a numbers guy. But he’s skilled at the participant-observation technique he cultivated by watching the scroll of would-be stepdads parade through his childhood home and later refined in his anthropology and area-studies coursework. He knows he has no hard proof, but after years of witnessing cold cut consumer behavior, Lane is certain that sliced turkey is the most popular lunch meat in America.

  People consider it to be the ideal deli meat. It doesn’t challenge kids’ taste buds. It’s good for busy adults with a vague sense of nutrition. Goes great with mayo and soft bread for seniors. It was the first fast food that sold itself as being good for you. None of the visible gristle of a sausage and without the ethnic pungencies of traditional deli offerings. No shame about fat or calories. Just a blemishless, inoffensive source of all-American white protein.

  But Lane was always confused as to where such a piece of meat came from. That’s the point, right? Like a boneless, skinless chicken breast under cellophane, it is many steps removed from the unmovable fact of being a dead flightless bird.

  Many people, like Tom, are happy to believe it is simply sliced from the roasted breast of a large, healthy turkey, and they refuse to believe any different. Lane had seen few real turkeys in his life but still had trouble imagining one large enough to yield that sized piece of intact meat.

  When one of the purveyor’s sales reps stopped through the store to see their product in the wild, Lane asked him to explain. “It’s all made outta milky meat jism,” the guys said. On the next visit, he loaned Lane his copy of the company training VHS tape.

  Lane watched as different bits and pieces from any number of different turkeys were mechanically separated, bleached and thrown together in a vacuum tumbler, which he thought looked like the rotating drum in a cement mixer. Steel paddles inside the tumbler, plus a sizeable injection of salt and phosphates, pummel protein and cellular debris out of the blood cells in the turkey parts. This soup of milky meat jism is called exudate.

  The pieces, now swimming in liquid poultry, are heated and pressure-molded into metal casts. The exudate fills out any holes and joins the meat scraps together into an amalgamated loaf of random bits of turkey muscle.

  This consistent white Jell-O is yanked from the molds, plastic-wrapped, shipped and then thin-sliced into chewable units by sandwich artists and slicer jockeys like Lane. Sure, it’s another sausage-making process. But it doesn’t render a sausage. The end product is the perfect guilt-free choice for your diet regimen or to stick in your children’s mouths.

  But be careful. Get it down fast, don’t think about it too much and move on. If it stays in your fridge for a few days too long, the meat jizz will start to leach back out of the turkey and remind you what it’s really made out of.

  LANE STANDS IN THE OPEN door of the loading dock, breaking down cardboard containers with a box cutter and his foot. He razors the packing tape end-to-end, kicks in the middle of the box with his heel and heaves the flattened remnants onto a pile outside the door. Depending on the quality of the cardboard and the width of the tape, he sometimes skips the blade and goes right to putting his foot through the back of the box. It’s rather cathartic.

  He’s done it enough times that he can intuit the optimal approach based on the box dimensions, which signify the former contents. The jojos and jalapeño poppers boxes are easier than ones that held tubs of macaroni or ambrosia salad.

  Lane hears a female voice above his head. “So what’s up? You don’t talk to me no more?”

  He finishes slicing the back of a box and looks up to see Inez standing over him in her work attire, her hands on her hips.

  “It’s not like that,” he says, drawing the blade back into the box cutter.

  “Not like what? I toldja you think you’re the shit. That you’re too good for me.”

  “I was gonna come talk to you.”

  “To what? Apologize?”

  He shrugs. “I dunno, I was thinking I’d—”

  “Do you even know how to apologize?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “OK, I’m waiting.”

  He stands as if to face her and then busies himself with a box of fried chicken drumettes. “I know you’re feeling embarrassed because—”

  Her cell phone rings. She looks at the number, answers, “I told you not to call me here,” and hangs up.

  “New cell, huh?” Lane asks before she can return the Kyocera pay-as-you-go burner to her pocket.

  “Bought some minutes, is all. Got a raise, you know.”

  “Raise?” Lane starts to pace. “How?”

  She ignores his question. “What were you saying to me before?”

  Lane shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. How’d you get a raise?”

  “Whatever, dude. You dipped on us on Christmas. Ditched me doing your job at work. I thought we had—thought we were moving toward something.” She turns and walks off.

  “Toward what?” He follows after her.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP here? You don’t even smoke. Not for real,” she says as he trails her into the secret smoking section and sits atop the milk crate. There’s a condom wrapper in the coffee can, mixed in with the cigarette butts. Lane is relieved that the spent prophylactic is nowhere to be seen. “Why’d you invite me up here that first time, anyway?” she asks, and she lights her cigarette.

  “You seemed nice.”

  “That it?”

  “Yeah. Something wrong with that?”

  “You know what I think? I think you wanted to fuck me but you’re not man enough to handle that I have a kid. Or that I’m not as fancy as you think you are.”

  “No. You’re right. That’s it. You got me pegged, sister.”

  “You ain’t better than me.”

  “I never said I’m better than you.”

  “Well, you judge me.”

  “No. It’s your boyfriend or your ex or whatever he is. It seems like you still have loose ends.”

  “Kevin? You think I want him showing up at my place like that?” she says. “You’re scared of him? Aren’t you?”

  Lane laughs.

  “He was gone in five minutes. I sent his ass home. But you ran away first.”

  “That’s your opinion. It didn’t happen like—I don’t see it that way. At all.”

  “You’re the hero in your own little world, Lane. But you only know how to look out for you.”

  “How can you say that? I gotta look out for myself right now, yeah. How else can I avoid getting sucked down into this morass? But, I told you, I’m dedicating my career to the greater good.”

  “The greater good of Lane fucking Bueche. You know what? I can’t believe I started to let myself . . .” She trails off.

  “Let yourself what?”

  “Never mind.” She flicks her cigarette off his chest. The ember burns a gray spot on his black polyester tie. “But I was right . . . you’re a pussy.”

  “Hey. Wha—What the fu-f
u-?” He wipes the ash from his chest. “I could get you in deep shit for that.”

  “My point.” She marches off and shouts again. “Pussy.”

  LANE PUTS HIS HEAD BETWEEN his hands and his elbows on his knees. He’s simply misunderstood. Like he has been throughout his life. New York was the one place he ever felt like he was approaching his true self, his potential. At Columbia. With Mia. He breaths the cold, wet air and thinks of her. None of this was necessary. They could’ve been figuring out which New Year’s party to go to. Or planning to get out of town for a few days and stay at a bed-and-breakfast in the Hudson Valley. In between all of that, Lane should be gearing up for his second semester. Scanning the syllabi and buying books. Filling out the bookshelves in the Gramercy apartment.

  “Where’s Inez?” Tom jogs into the smoking section. “Some jerkoff with a moped is downstairs looking for her.”

  “She ain’t here.” Lane doesn’t take his face out from between his knees. He finds the tone of the moped comment to be a bit rich considering that Tom doesn’t have a driver’s license.

  “Somebody said you two headed up here together.”

  “Somebody who?”

  “Blake.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who looks like you. The one in the deli.”

  “I can’t believe you hired that guy.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty much retarded. She, on the other hand, she’s not half bad, huh? Trouble though . . .” He nudges Lane with his knee. “You banging her?”

  “No. C’mon, man. Don’t be vulgar.”

  “Right . . .” Tom stares at Lane, keeping him on the hook, watching for a tell. “I think you should steer clear of her.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ‘why’ me, assistant. You get my sloppy seconds, not vice versa. And, anyway, this was your last chance, guy. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, and it was my ass on the line. You can’t walk away from your job to come up here to hit on chicks.”

  “What does ‘was your last chance’ mean? You firing me?”

  “Wish I could. Need an airtight reason these days with all of these bullshit PC rules to protect losers and Al Qaeda foreigners who don’t deserve to be here in the first place.” Tom takes out a hard box of Camel Wides and starts packing them on the butt of his left palm. “Go on, man. Get back down there.”