Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  The teller with the blond helmet of hair, shoulder pads and a ruffled, striped blouse informs Lane that she has located a record of his account but it has been closed due to lack of funds. For more than a year. That he needs an active account in order to cash a check of that size.

  When he protests, she responds, “This is a bank. Money-tree is down the street.”

  Who is this lady to peg him as someone who would go to Moneytree? She appears to have copied her style from thumbing issues of Golf magazine and watching movies about Wall Street while, in reality, working as a teller at the two-bit stale-carpeted Lake City branch of Bank of Whatever that still has sand-filled ashtrays in the waiting area.

  Doesn’t she see the white headphone coming out of his pockets? Does she recognize his leather shoes? The only thing this bank has going for it is that it was the last spot robbed by Scott “Hollywood” Scurlock, arguably the most successful bank robber in US history. He only knows this because Scurlock was killed in a shootout with dozens of cops (or killed himself; it’s also debatable) a few blocks up Lake City Way as Lane was sitting down to a frozen and canned Thanksgiving dinner with his mom in 1996.

  Lane asks the teller to open a new account for him. He’s in a rush, so please be quick with the paperwork. Time is of the essence. He called Inez multiple times last night and this morning, and no one answered the phone. He’s gotta get there in person. He can’t stop checking the wall clock as the lady taps the keys on the 1980s PC with a spinach-colored screen and yellowed plastic casing. When she calls his name, it’s to tell him that the account is active but he’ll still have to wait up to six business days for the full check to clear.

  He pulls the pen so hard that the chain rips out of the plastic base affixed to the counter. After some use of “an elevated voice,” as the woman described it, he reconsiders going to the checks-cashed place. It’s within walking distance, so she won’t even have to see him get into the beat-down Chevy Celebrity. But, after some reconsideration of his reconsideration, he can’t bring himself to participate in that sort of usury and gives himself thirty minutes to pull off Plan C.

  LANE HOLDS THE BANK’S GLASS doors for Dottie, who marches in wearing her reading glasses with their bedazzled strap and her anorak over her terry cloth bathrobe. She holds the signed check in her left hand, the paper flapping like a windsock as the heated bank air rushes out the open door.

  For a fleeting moment, Lane wonders if it should pain or embarrass him to have his mother do the transaction for him. Not to mention in front of this same bank cashier. But there’s too much at stake. Too little time.

  The teller brings the cash to Lane’s mom and counts it out across the counter. As the hundreds and fifties flop down into stacks, he thinks about that earlier flight from New York back to Seattle. The one he said he’d repay his mom for. He could do it right now, but he needs the money more than she does. They’re going to nowhere Nevada. He needs it for New York. Manhattan. At a critical point in his life. Critical in the development of his career. He’ll pay her back down the line when the time is right.

  His mom slides the stacks of bills down the counter to Lane. It’s more money than he’s ever seen in cash before. He can smell the cotton fiber, sweat and sharp ink. He hunches over the bills and tries to fit it all into his pockets. He folds the stacks in half when possible. The paper pushes into his skin. His pants bulge. He knows everyone is looking at him.

  Out at the car, Lane goes to the trunk and pulls out a plastic Fred Meyer bag. The thick kind they use to keep the rotisserie chickens warm. He empties his pockets. Stuffing the cash into the bag like Hollywood Scurlock with sirens bearing down on him. Bills fall out of the bag, and he rams them back in with a fist. Right in front of his mom. He decides to keep about five hundred in his pockets, although he does not go out of his way to be precise with his counting.

  “What time is it, Ma?” Sweat streaks down his sides, even in the cold weather.

  She doesn’t have a watch. “’Bout ten, I think. Give or take.”

  He tries to hide the bag in the trunk’s tire well, but it is rusted shut. Lane slams the trunk closed and bundles his mom into the car in one extended motion.

  The engine chokes and dies. “It’s predictably unpredictable under a quarter tank,” she says.

  “It says full.”

  “Gauge ain’t worked since Ronnie. Remember Ronnie?”

  “Ronnie who ran the vinyl-siding pyramid scheme out of our living room? Or the one who ripped the tank off the toilet?”

  “The toilet tank was Don. Donny. He was climbing—trying to change a light bulb.”

  “At 4 a.m.?”

  The teller watches them through the glass doors as Lane pushes the Celebrity across the lot with his mom behind the wheel. With enough momentum, the station wagon turns over, and Lane sprints around to the passenger side as the vehicle rolls out into light Lake City Way traffic.

  “Cool if I drop you at the bus stop?” he asks his mom. “I don’t have enough time to take you all the way home.”

  INEZ ISN’T HOME AT UNIVERSITY Trailer Park and neither is Wanda. Or at least they’re not answering the door. Daisy is barking her ass off and appears to be the only one on the grounds.

  Lane curses himself. That he’s too late. That they’ve already taken Inez and Jordan away. He walks around the trailer and climbs atop the plastic cistern to peer in through the sliver between the foil and the edge of the window. It looks empty inside. He feels an acid pit of shame in his abdomen. Jordan will have the chance to flourish with Nina and Tracey, but he feels the vast space inside of the trailer. A hole he has helped rip open.

  Daisy’s teeth hit the window, ripping foil away from the glass and streaking it with saliva just inches from Lane’s face. He jumps backward, falls from the cistern and lands on his ass.

  As he sits on the ground, rubbing his sore thighs and lower back to the ongoing soundtrack of pit bull barking, he wonders if she’s been arrested. Or, if not, how far she could go with no money. He surveys the downtrodden trailers. Garbage piled on the lawns.

  He is confused by his impulse to cry, thinking that he might never see her again. He is a charlatan, and he knows it. A real piece of shit.

  No, she can’t be far.

  ON HIS WAY BACK OUT of the trailer park, he sees the old-timer sitting in a lawn chair and drinking a tallboy.

  “Hey there, Santie Claus,” the old-timer says. “I thought that was you.”

  Lane asks if the man has seen any police or any cars, in general, coming and going from the Annex this morning.

  The man doesn’t move but wants to know what it’s worth to him.

  Lane grumbles and then digs in his pocket, gets out of the car and walks over to the man in the chair. He passes him the smallest bill he has. A fifty.

  “No,” say the old-timer.

  “No? No, what?”

  “No, I didn’t see nothing.”

  “I gave you fifty bucks, dude. You gotta tell me something more.”

  “You want me to make something up?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there you have it then.”

  LANE DRIVES THE LENGTH OF Lake City Way looking for Inez and Jordan at bus stops. He keeps the driver’s-side window rolled down. The January cold helps him stay awake. Alert. And it hurts a bit. Like he knows he deserves.

  What would he do if he were her? Where would he go? But he’s not even sure how much she knows at this point. When he gets to Fred Meyer, he decides to look for her inside. It’s a reasonable guess that she is picking up her last check.

  He’s uneasy about turning the car off, so he leaves it running next to the double doors in the upstairs parking lot. He plans to do a sweep through the store in five minutes or less. But he risks losing a lot more than the beater car. He takes the key out of the ignition and heads in, still with the plan to keep it as fast as possible. That way he should be able to avoid Tom too.

  She’s not at Customer Service. Not getting h
er check. Not in the break room or the smoking section. He heads back up the escalator and can see his car through the glass doors when he runs into Tom, leaning up against a counter, telling stories to a new female cashier with braces and a high-strung laugh.

  “Hey, Lame-o, you meet Charity?” Tom good-ol’-boys him. “Started today. Yesterday?”

  “Hi.” He nods to her. “Can I speak to you for a second, Tom?”

  “Guy’s a bit queer.” Tom smiles at Charity. “Watch that he don’t try to, you know . . .”

  They take a few steps toward the door. “Before you say anything,” Tom says in a monotone, “know that I can—”

  Lane shoves Tom in his shoulder with his right palm. “Why’d you have to do that to her, man?”

  “Easy now, kid, don’t make me slap the shit outta you.” Tom straightens his tie and looks over his shoulder to be sure Charity or another employee didn’t see. “Inez got the employee handbook in training. Same as everybody else. No double piercings. No shoulder-length hair on men. No drugs. And, of course: no fucking people at work.”

  “I didn’t—She’s my friend, dude.”

  “Friend?” Tom laughs.

  “Yeah, my friend. Nothing like that happened.”

  “Shit. I fucked her. Didn’t you?”

  Lane shoves Tom again. Hard. With both hands. Square in the shoulders. He falls against a spinner rack of garden seeds. Charity gets a full view of it and lets out a scream that is as much surprise as alarm. Tom’s face burns red, and he swings back with a lopsided haymaker, missing widely. Before Tom can punch again, Lane is out the door and running. He doesn’t want to risk a dead car in front of his crazed and mortified assistant store manager, so he continues up and out of the lot and hides in the hedge across the street until he’s sure Tom is gone.

  When, in fact, the car won’t start, Lane sneaks down to the loading dock and knocks as hard as he can until Cheese and Rice answers. The clerk says he can’t leave the deli unattended. That would be breaking the rules. Lane promises to go to Mars Hill with him. To heed his advice about college. He’ll find God. Whatever to make the kid feel magnanimous so he’ll come upstairs and help Lane push his car across the lot. “C’mon, Biz,” Lane coaxes.

  As Cheese and Rice pushes the back bumper, Lane sees Tom come out through the double doors. The engine coughs and then turns over. Lane bids farewell to the deli clerk before adding, “We still have nothing in common, dude.”

  Tom runs as fast as he can, which isn’t particularly fast, and pants, “Don’t come back. Ever. You goddamn prick.” Lane floors it out of the parking lot, past the row of hedges and onto the back street. He looks into the rearview mirror to see Tom chewing out Cheese and Rice as they stand in the middle of the lot.

  THIRTY-SIX

  OUT OF IDEAS. OUT OF options. Lane pulls into his mom’s gravel driveway.

  He can envision the sideshow. It is coming. As soon as the social workers and Nina realize that Inez has taken a runner.

  He’ll deal with his money and buy his ticket. Then he’ll return to her place again, check the bus stops. Where else could she be?

  As he gets out of the car and heads around toward the trunk to get his money, Lane spots her smoking a cigarette over by the garbage cans. Casual. Like she’s taking one of her fifteens at work. Except she has a tattered blue suitcase and her young son at her feet. Jordan is shivering. Underdressed.

  Lane hugs her out of instinct but is still surprised that she receives it and returns the embrace with an unexpected level of affection, if not need.

  “How’d you know?” she asks as she releases her grasp.

  “I, uh, saw Tom.” Lane pets Jordan atop his head. His hair feels unwashed. The kid smiles, reaches up and holds on to Lane’s index and middle fingers.

  Inez looks off toward the Douglas firs in the distance.

  Lane continues, “Tom told me that you and he, that you two—”

  She doesn’t give him a chance to finish the question. “You jealous?”

  Lane shakes his head.

  She studies his face and returns to looking at the trees, “You are. You’re jealous.”

  “No. No way. Not at all. But, Tom?”

  “Did you know he was the home run king of the union softball league? In ’97. And again in ’99.” She puts her hands over Jordan’s ears. “I don’t know what it was. It was like something savage took over in me. Something animal. I had no choice.”

  Lane is crestfallen. His shoulders roll forward. He no longer cares if it’s obvious. He going to make a point to act dejected.

  “See? I knew you liked me.” She puts out her cigarette. “And give me some credit, dude. I wouldn’t touch Tom with your pussy.”

  “I don’t have a—I don’t even know what that means.” He then mounts a vigorous defense to prove that he knew she was messing with him the whole time. He was playing along. She wants to know why he was jealous then, why he cares. He denies it, but now it is his turn to avert his eyes and study the gravel and weeds in the driveway.

  “I still think you like me,” she teases.

  Lane hits back. “The fact that you came here now tells me that you’re the one who likes me . . .” He watches as she pulls her hair back and smiles.

  “Yeah, ’cause at least you got a car now.”

  A SIREN IN THE DISTANCE catches his attention. Lane hurries them out of the exposed driveway, and they get Jordan into the back seat of the station wagon. The suitcase weighs a lot more than it looks when Lane heaves it into the trunk. He tries to think of ways to get the bag of cash to a safe place in the trailer without her noticing. He holds it in his hand and starts to stuff it into his pants, but she comes around the back of the car.

  “What’s that?” She points to the bag, as he rushes to tuck it back under a blanket and slam the trunk shut.

  He waves her off with his outstretched palm. “Nothing,” he says, and spirits her back into the vehicle.

  “The look on your face . . .” She laughs.

  “I told you: that bag’s got nothing.” He fumbles to start the station wagon and notices his mother watching them through the kitchen window.

  “No, the look . . . about Tom.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah. Right.” The engine turns over. Lane nods to his mom and wipes at his brow with an exaggerated pass of his hand to signal relief.

  “Well, you wouldn’t be so jealous if you were with me and Jordie last night, man.” She details for Lane the fiasco of the overnight. Jordan didn’t sleep well in the bed she made for them on the couch. He was up on and off for most of the night. He cried for two hours straight at one point, and Inez lost her cool, grabbed him by the shoulders and screamed at him to stop. Not out of real anger but out of frustration coupled with the limited impulse control brought on by sleep deprivation. “I never felt so tired in my life. This mom thing is fucking crazy.” She turns to Jordan in the back seat. “Sorry. Don’t repeat that word.”

  “WHY CAN’T WE STAY AT your place for a day or two?” she asks at they reach the top of the hill past Lane’s mom’s house and pull out onto Lake City Way. “After things settle down, I’ll talk to the judge. This is all a big misunderstanding, you know.”

  He insists that it’s not a misunderstanding. That it’s very real and she either needs to accept this or hit the road. She says that she can’t and won’t go back to how it was before. Back to jail. Having Jordan in limbo.

  “Then you gotta get out of town. Outta state. Like right now,” Lane says. They stop at a red light, and Lane looks over both of his shoulders and scans the oncoming lanes for police cars. “What about the reservation? Can you apply to keep him under tribal law?”

  “I was like twelve last time I was there. I don’t even know if I’m Indian enough. I gotta talk to my mom.”

  “Call her from Yakima. C’mon, let’s go. Over the mountains. I’m taking you to the bus station.”

  “I dunno about Greyhound right now. About taking Jordie on that long of a bus ride.
The whole thing sounds sketchy.”

  He thinks for a minute. “I’ll drive you there. To Yakima. Then you can figure all this out.”

  She searches for a response. Her hand locates his, resting on the front bench seat. She slides her palm atop the back of his hand.

  “Where’s his car seat?” He flees from the moment. Takes it back to the practical. Logistics.

  “I came on the goddamn Metro. You ever try to carry a car seat, a kid and a suitcase on a city bus?”

  He looks at Jordan in the rearview mirror. His poreless skin, black hair and handful of crooked teeth. The kid peers out the window and shouts something indecipherable at a passing garbage truck. Lane feels a sense of quasi-fatherhood, that he is responsible for the child’s well-being. “If we get pulled over without a car seat, you see, I’ve got a suspended sentence—”

  “Well, they’re going to call this a kidnapping or close to it. So I don’t think the car seat is your biggest worry, Lane.”

  “Kid? Nap?” Jordan repeats.

  “Don’t sweat it, little man.” Lane turns and tries to soothe Jordan. He swivels back to Inez and whispers, “You’re his mother, right? The court hasn’t contacted you yet, right? And I don’t really know the first thing about the situation, right? So, let’s say you’re taking an unapproved in-state trip for Jordan to meet his extended family. His grandma. Not totally kosher. But not the end of the world. And you can see what they try to throw at you from there. Make your decision on better footing when you have some more leverage over your situation.”

  She leans across the bench seat and kisses him on the cheek. She holds up a hand to block Jordan’s view and stretches farther to kiss him on the mouth as he drives.

  “Will you stay with us then?” she asks. “For a day or two. For a little bit.”

  “I dunno. But I’ll make sure you’re OK.”

  They kiss again as he gets lucky and hits a green light at the main intersection of Lake City Way and 125th.