Garden Lakes

by Jaime Clarke

  Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon spoke briefly on the sidewalk. Hands and Figs tried to listen from Figs’s open window but couldn’t make out anything other than the sound of Mr. Hancock’s low mutters peppered with Mr. Malagon’s interjections. We’d know soon enough what they were discussing, though, as rumor spread that Jimbo and the Terminator were no-shows, and that the administration was unprepared for such a situation. There’d never been a fellow who hadn’t accepted eagerly—two was a historic precedent—and there was no such thing as alternates.

  We cursed Q his good fortune, living alone for the summer. Warren and Smurf gathered in Hands and Figs’s living room for a bull session after Mr. Hancock’s tour of the thermostats. Smurf guaranteed us that Mr. Hancock would force Q to live with him or with Mr. Malagon. Smurf said he’d go to Mr. Hancock first thing in the morning and volunteer to move in with Q, secretly relieved at the idea of getting out of the same house as Roger. We knew Mr. Hancock would not accept Smurf’s proposal. It may be that extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures, but Mr. Hancock wouldn’t allow any fundamental rule to be bent, breached, or broken, regardless of whether or not the violation solved the problem.

  The problem was to have an organic resolution. Lindy, who would die in his sleep in his early thirties, leaving behind a bereaved wife and two small children, knew it first, gazing out his window at the night sky. Lindy watched as Q slipped across the street, his duffel bag slung across his back. He cut across the dry lake bed, retreating to a set of headlights that awoke upon his approach. The headlights dimmed. The sound of tires squealing was drowned by the loud yips of an unseen pack of coyotes. The red flare of taillights was the last anyone would see of Q until school started again in the fall.

  Chapter Four

  Charlie listened to the outgoing message. The hum of the newsroom receded as he clung to the consonants uncoiling in the lilt of Charlotte’s voice. The message assured the caller she was sorry that she’d missed your call, and was eager to talk with you, which Charlie knew was probably true in every case but his. He’d spent the weekend listening to the message after vainly trying to meet up with the Sun Christmas revelers, who had disbanded before he could reach Mary Elizabeth’s, leaving him to a lonely drink at the bar while the barbacks waded into the vestiges of what looked to have been an epic bash. Nursing his drink, Charlie blamed Richter for Charlotte’s no-show at the coffee shop, though he knew his blame was misplaced. Charlotte was intrepid—Charlie was always joking that she’d make a hard-hitting investigative reporter—and Richter’s squirrelly countenance wouldn’t have deterred her from approaching.

  He set the phone back in its cradle as Brennan, his editor, approached in his trademark blustery fashion. Brennan was famous for appearing breathless, as if he’d just eluded capture. “What’s the status on the McCloud column?” he panted, leaning against Charlie’s desk.

  Charlie nodded. “I’ll make deadline.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Brennan said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you know.”

  Charlie did know what Brennan meant, that the McCloud family had called in protest when they learned about the column being written to mark McCloud’s recent passing. The McCloud family matriarch had argued with Brennan to let McCloud rest in peace, and Brennan had privately agreed. Charlie had convinced his editor that because McCloud was a public figure, and a controversial one, the Sun was well within its right to cover the passing of one of Phoenix’s more notable citizens.

  “I think you’ll be surprised,” Charlie said.

  “I never like being surprised,” Brennan said before being pulled away by his secretary, who could be seen at all hours of the day hunting Brennan in the reporters’ bull pen.

  Charlie began dialing Charlotte’s number again, undecided if he would leave a message or just listen to her voice, when Billy Gallagher, a lifestyle reporter with a recently coined degree from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State, breezed by his desk and beckoned him to follow. Such theatrics were usually employed to gossip about which reporters were sleeping together or defecting to another paper or being canned. Charlie watched Gallagher escape into the stairwell and sauntered after him.

  “I think Linda noticed,” Gallagher said. Linda Macomb, a fellow lifestyle reporter, had the uncanny ability to take a call, write her piece, and converse with someone at her desk all at once. Charlie was intimidated by Linda and gave her a wide berth.

  “I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “She was chasing after Brennan, something about a source that had recanted.”

  Gallagher leaned against the door to the stairwell.

  “What is it?” Charlie asked. Gallagher had married into a prominent Phoenix family that had let him know from the get-go that their daughter was marrying beneath her station, and Charlie had more than once calmed Gallagher’s anxieties by kidding that his wife’s family’s empire was founded on a beer distributorship. “They’re drunks, basically,” he’d say, which would momentarily cheer Gallagher up before he started worrying all over again.

  “I got this private detective on my ass,” Gallagher blurted out. “He’s asking me questions about the paper. At first I thought it was my prick father-in-law, but this guy, Richter, kept asking about the paper.”

  Charlie shuddered when he heard Richter’s name. “What type of questions?”

  “Crazy stuff about what goes on here and about this reporter and that reporter. He even asked about Duke,” Gallagher answered. “He asked about you, too. I told him to ask you, and he said he already talked to you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Charlie said, wrinkling his brow as if he were drawing a blank. He’d used this ploy before, especially when he was caught out giving contradictory information or realized that whoever he was talking to was about to grasp that he or she had been lied to.

  “He said you were uncooperative,” Gallagher said.

  Charlie smiled. “That sounds like me.”

  Gallagher smiled involuntarily, worry contorting his face. “Did you talk to him?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I have no idea who this guy is.” Later, when he reflected back on it, he couldn’t rationalize why he’d lied to Gallagher about talking to Richter. He wished he could say his impulse had been to assuage Gallagher’s jitters, but in truth his concern was that he was the target of Richter’s investigation, though on his life he couldn’t guess why.

  He spent the rest of the morning in the Sun archives, his eyes glancing through past columns for any clue as to why the county attorney would take an interest in him. Charlie hadn’t broken any laws, unlike many others whose conduct could only charitably be called lawful. Since the Heather Lambert episode, the law had become a yardstick against which Charlie measured his own behavior, an easier test to pass or fail than the abyss of what was ethical or moral, a test he’d begun to apply to all that had transpired at Garden Lakes. Memories of the high school retreat and Randolph Prep had been on Charlie’s mind since he received Father Matthews’s call inviting him to lunch at the rectory. Upon his return from New York, Charlie had treated his relocation the only way he knew how: as a move to a new city. He didn’t tell the Chandlers, his neighbors from long ago who had acted as his surrogate family and who had gotten him into Randolph, that he’d come back. It was easy enough to avoid his old haunts and familiar shadows so that Phoenix appeared new enough again.

  He hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from Randolph, though he’d periodically run into someone here and there, most recently Hands, whose wife was the cochair of a breast cancer benefit Charlie attended with Charlotte and her boss, who had sponsored a table. Charlie didn’t recognize Hands at first, but the secret they shared from all those years ago forced them into a shy silence, each unclear if the other could rightly recall the promises from the past.

  Father Matthews had been Charlie’s most fervent Randolph correspondent, writing him a note of appreciation if he approved of one of Charlie�
��s columns, or a gentle but chastising word if he disagreed. His invitation to lunch threatened to elevate their relationship to a new level, one that perplexed Charlie. He wasn’t a Catholic, nor was he an alum, having never graduated. And though he passed Randolph twice a day on his way to and from the Sun offices, he was never tempted to circle the parking lot or retrace his teenage footsteps.

  Gallagher took a half day, grimacing as he brushed past Charlie’s desk. He regretted not asking Gallagher what he’d told Richter, if anything. He could imagine Gallagher telling Richter everything he knew or whatever Richter wanted to hear. Charlie knew he couldn’t ask now without arousing Gallagher’s suspicions. In a long life there are always mistakes made, things to lament, and at thirty-seven Charlie was beginning to feel like he’d already lived forever.

  Chapter Five

  The Randolph campus was deserted, the students away on Christmas break, a time Charlie remembered as being filled with trips to Vail or California for others, but was just a fermata in the school year for him as he worked on extra-credit projects and wrote papers for independent study in a failed attempt to boost his GPA. As he climbed out of his car, he chuckled at how dire the GPA mess had seemed. He’d had an inkling that life would only be harder after high school, but harder wasn’t the right characterization. “Complex” was a better word. But how complex he didn’t know then, and on his worst days he pined for the order of rectifying a failing grade with its prescribed and delineated remedies.

  Charlie pulled into his former parking spot, the lot repaved and repainted with exacting yellow lines. He crossed the parking lot toward the rectory, circumventing a gold Chevy Impala resembling Brian Velasquez’s from back when they were classmates. Beav was a scholarship student from South Phoenix who rode the city bus until his junior year, when he appeared one morning behind the wheel of the gold Impala, which he’d lowered a couple of inches. The thudding bass from the custom stereo made the car pulse. At night, a violet neon light emanated from underneath the car, until the glass tubes were shattered when Randolph installed speed bumps. Beav took enormous static about being the only Hispanic at Randolph, everyone calling him chollo, sometimes in jest and sometimes not. Kids in the other classes referred to him as the beaner, though Beav never let it bother him. Charlie remembered Beav as his biology lab partner and wondered if his dreams of moving to Los Angeles had ever come to be. He was besieged with guilt as he reminisced about Beav, ashamed at all the anti-immigrant sentiment that his articles about Heather Lambert had engendered. An unexpected repercussion of Heather’s law had been to give teeth to every racist’s call for razor wire along the borders and all sorts of other craziness. Worse, lawmakers had tried to piggyback on Heather’s law, and not a single legislative session passed where someone didn’t try to introduce a bill in the guise of Heather’s law but that was really institutional racism looking for legal cover, such as immigrant teachers with thick accents being removed from their teaching posts for what the Arizona Department of Education termed “incorrect pronunciation” of English words. The previous week’s Sun had run a story about a group of Hispanic fifth graders who’d had green cards thrown at them while they walked to school.

  Father Matthews greeted Charlie as a prodigal son and ushered him from the well-lit carpeted foyer of the rectory and into a dark-paneled room with an oversized oval table made of oak. A tea set had been strategically placed on the table, and Charlie took a chair at Father Matthews’s bidding. As his eyes adjusted to the light streaming in from a high window that framed the cloudless winter afternoon, Charlie folded his hands in his lap and answered in the affirmative as Father Matthews asked a series of benevolent questions meant to put him at ease. He said yes to tea, too, which Father Matthews poured with delicate hands. Charlie watched with fascination as Father Matthews worked like a machine to steep and pour tea for two.

  “And do you find your work satisfying?” Father Matthews asked at last.

  “Yes, Father.” He sipped his tea.

  “That’s excellent,” Father Matthews said. He breathed a ripple across the top of his teacup.

  “I was surprised at your invitation,” Charlie said.

  “Were you?” Father Matthews seemed amused.

  “I haven’t been back to Randolph in years.”

  “Perhaps that’s why I invited you,” Father Matthews said. “Sons of Randolph should not stray so far as that.”

  “I never actually graduated,” Charlie reminded him.

  Father Matthews waved him off. His willingness to overlook such an important detail as Charlie’s dropping out before his senior year—before he could be called to account for what had happened the previous summer at Garden Lakes—was curious.

  “I’m normally skeptical of invitations like these,” Charlie said. The air in the room had become clotted with orange and cinnamon.

  “Skepticism is not a godly trait,” Father Matthews said.

  “Occupational hazard,” Charlie answered.

  “I’m sorry that you must deal with elements that try to mislead you for their own gain,” Father Matthews said. “Let me pay you the compliment of direct address.” The faint aroma of cigarette smoke stirred as Father Matthews situated himself. “I understand you’re working on a column on our dearly departed Brother McCloud.”

  “I am,” Charlie said. It seemed like a hundred years ago that he and the other fellows had sat with Mr. McCloud at dinner. The idea for the column had arisen from the memory of Mr. McCloud at Garden Lakes upon Charlie’s reading his obituary in the Sun.

  “His was a colorful life,” Father Matthews said. Charlie imagined Father Matthews likely had to label all kinds of misdeeds as “colorful,” including Mr. McCloud’s indictment and jail term, as well as the string of bankruptcies and allegations of hidden wealth in overseas bank accounts.

  Charlie sat silently sipping his tea, a tactic he’d use when a subject was having a hard time coming to the point. The tea had grown surprisingly cold surprisingly fast.

  “May I ask what the thesis of your column is to be?” Father Matthews asked.

  “It’s a reminiscence about Garden Lakes,” Charlie said, surprised at how easily he’d given away information he’d intended to keep secret.

  Father Matthews scowled. “But that was twenty years ago,” he said.

  “Yes,” Charlie said, another tactic he’d learned to use when someone was angling for answers he didn’t want to give. That the program had been quietly shuttered had been a steady drumbeat in Charlie’s heart, and he realized only now how imperative his need to expose what happened was.

  “I wonder if anyone will be interested in a column of that nature,” Father Matthews said.

  “Oh, I’ve written about all manner of things that people claim not to be interested in,” Charlie said, “judging by my mail.”

  A veil of frustration fell across Father Matthews’s face. “Do you think the timing for such a column is right?” he asked. “Some might think you’re exploiting Brother McCloud’s death.”

  “I’m sure some will,” Charlie said, and, worried that he was being too flip, added, “I can’t control what readers think about these things, Father. There’s always someone out there anxious to assume the worst about something or some situation, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Father Matthews nodded. “I do, my son,” he said. “My worry is that you might be creating a situation where a situation doesn’t readily exist.”

  Charlie swirled the residue of his tea and replaced the cup on the tray. Accepting the invitation had been a mistake, and he realized belatedly that he’d only wanted a legitimate reason to visit Randolph.

  “Would you like more tea?” Father Matthews asked, his congeniality returning.

  “No, thank you, Father,” Charlie said.

  Father Matthews drank the dregs of his cold tea. “May I inquire into your profession?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “When you’re writing something, a column or what have you”�
��Father Matthews gesticulated to indicate that he was out of his depth—“how do you know what information to include and what to exclude?”

  Charlie thought. “Instinct, I guess,” he answered. “When I was with the Tab, it was more straight reporting, so the facts were the facts. But with my column, there’s more room to ruminate.” He regretted inserting this newspaper columnists’ joke and covered with, “If you know what I mean.”

  Father Matthews nodded sagely. “Do you ever struggle with the morality of inclusion?” he asked.

  Charlie didn’t know what Father Matthews meant and said so.

  “I’m sorry. My question is: Do you now and then cross lines by including information that is . . . extraneous?”

  “Is there something you want to ask me, Father?” Charlie vowed not to let his perturbation show, though Father Matthews was testing his resolve.

  “I’m just inquiring,” he said. “I’m wondering at your methods.”

  Father Matthews wasn’t the only one questioning his methods. If Charlotte could borrow Father Matthews’s term “morality of inclusion,” she would, though it wouldn’t bring Charlie any closer to admitting that he’d lied about the illegitimate child he’d fathered at twenty-one. Charlotte had made the discovery by accident, finding a photo he kept tucked away in an envelope in the back of his sock drawer. He never looked at the photo, though he was sure throwing it away would be a sacrilege. But the truth was that he hadn’t known of the child’s existence until recently and that the girl’s mother, a bartender Charlie had briefly known, had kept the pregnancy, birth, and first sixteen years of the girl’s life a secret from him. The girl was a stranger to him, someone he could pass on the street without recognizing. Her mother had excluded him from the girl’s formative years, the time when the world exercises its influence over you and you become who you become, so in answer to Charlotte’s question about why he’d never mentioned the girl, he said, “Why would I?” He argued he was only trying not to complicate their relationship, that he was trying to protect her from the footnotes of his past. But Charlotte was beside herself with rage and grief, saying over and over, “I don’t know who you are right now, I don’t know you.” He pleaded that he was the same person she’d fallen in love with, but this gaffe—though he wasn’t willing to confess to anything other than chivalric omission, certainly not immoral exclusion—became insurmountable. An admission of wrongdoing was what Charlotte required, it seemed, but Charlie’s instinct was to continue to persuade her of his innocence, that as a fact, the sixteen-year-old girl living in Iowa was of no consequence to the here and now of them and their engagement, an argument that only enraged Charlotte further.