The Oshkosh Trilogy 01 - The Dark Lake

by Anthea Carson

  "What's that a picture of under the dope?"

  "Oh, it's a picture of a lady, an old-fashioned ad for Coca-Cola. Cool huh. I like to snort coke off of it, when I have it."

  "Do you often have it?" I asked.

  "When I can afford it." She lit the joint and passed it to me.

  "No thanks, really.” I waved my hand.

  She took a hit, blew it out slow, and then started moving again, on down High Street toward Menomonee Park, and the lake. It was snowing hard now.

  "Is it below freezing out there? Doesn't it seem like it's too early in the winter to be this cold?"

  "No. I don't think so. It's almost December." She shrugged.

  "Yeah, I guess it has been that long hasn't it,” I said.

  "That long? That long since when?"

  "Oh, I had a job interview and they said they might call. But it's been a month now,” I said.

  We drove through the park, lit white by the snow in the night. I thought of how beautiful the park looked in the summer, so green and hilly out there, with a few trees dotting here and there. Now the trees and hills presented amorphous shapes in the snowy night.

  "Holy shit, there's a cop behind me,” she said.

  I looked back.

  "He hasn't got his lights on. Just don't worry about it. Drive slow."

  "I got a bunch of drugs and beer and wine in the car, opened. And I'm majorly fucked up. Holy shit, he's just following right behind me."

  "Just go the speed limit."

  "Are we not supposed to be in this park after a certain time?"

  "No, I don't think there's a curfew."

  He followed us all through the drive that wound around toward the parking lot closest to the sandy beach, if you could call it a beach—more of a bank of sandy dirt. I played in there as a kid, and tried so hard to imagine that the waves were as high as the ocean and that I could surf.

  "God I hate it when those pigs follow you like that,” she screamed.

  "They just do it to intimidate you. Don't do anything wrong and you'll be fine,” I said. Meanwhile my heart was pounding inside my chest.

  "I'll pull over."

  "No, no don't do that."

  "Well, if he pulls me over I'm screwed. I don't have a driver's license."

  "Are you kidding?”

  "No. My license got taken away for a bunch of DUIs last year. Plus I'm wasted, plus we have drugs in the car."

  The red swirling lights went off, twirling around and around, reflecting in the mirror, and even on the glass. The siren started, whoop.

  "Okay, look, just be cool, maybe we can switch—"

  "That ain't gonna work,” she said.

  She took off full speed.

  "What are you doing?” I screamed.

  "I ain't getting pulled over. They can't chase you on the ice. It's against the law, or against police policy or something like that. They can't chase you there."

  "The ice isn't frozen yet!”

  "Sure it is, it's freezing out there, you said so yourself,” she screamed, turning down the radio to concentrate.

  We went over some very high bumps on the way out of the parking lot and onto the sheet of ice that was Lake Winnebago. It was indeed frozen over, but it was never frozen all the way through.

  "I'm getting out." I opened the door. She was driving super-fast, though, and I was afraid to jump. But if I didn't jump I would go through…

  You know if you go under the ice, what happens next is you lose where the opening of the ice is, so you can't get back out again, and you just swim around under there looking up into the thick, unrevealing, opaque glass, feeling with your hands.

  The police car did not follow out onto the ice, just like she said.

  "Wooo hooo," she howled, and began doing wheelies.

  "Let's get back to the shore, come on, maybe we can cross over there to that side and drive on."

  "Sie mochten nicht sterben?"

  I looked over and sure enough, Krishna was smiling at me, and she did something even more frightening than that before I woke up. She pulled the steering wheel off the dashboard and handed it to me.

  "Here, you drive,” and with that she shrieked with laughter.

  ***

  "Your problem, Jane, is you just take things too seriously," Krishna says, and then she leans over the coffee table and lights her cigarette on the red candle. It makes a crackling sound. She wears one of her low-cut-cleavage silks. She blows the smoke out in rings. "And my problem is I don't care about anything."

  "But you work hard in school, I mean, you do your work. And those are hard subjects, chemistry, and physics. And you get all As."

  She shrugs and says, "That's just because I don't care enough not to."

  She never talks about the future, or where her money will come from.

  "I think I know what happened,” I told Miriam.

  "What?"

  "I think … it had something to do with one of her pissed-off boyfriends."

  “Which one?”

  “Well, let’s see, there was Adam, he gave us the coke…”

  ***

  "Three hundred dollars’ worth,” Krishna had said, dazed.

  "It's just a cloud now,” Gay marveled.

  All of us—Adam, Krishna's former boyfriend included—just sat for a few moments with our mouths open.

  "No, it can't be. That's not all of it,” I said.

  All three of them stared at me with eyes that said, “You just don't get it yet.”

  "Maybe we can scoop it all up. It will fall back on the mirror."

  I held the mirror in the middle of the cloud, which still hovered there, at least in my mind's eye.

  They stared to see if maybe this would work after all.

  "Goddamn it, Jane," Krishna said, interrupted by Gay with, "What in the fuck did you do that for?"

  "What, all I did was sneeze! What? It's a bodily function."

  "Bodily functions can be controlled."

  "Unless you're stupid, you don't sneeze into the pile of coke on the mirror!” Adam yelled.

  "Well." I think it was me, but it might have been any one of us who said, "We've got to find more."

  "But how, I don't have any more money."

  "I know I don't," Krishna said.

  "I spent all the rest I had. Which wasn't much,” Gay said.

  "Well what are we gonna do?” We all three looked at Adam.

  "Don't look at me! I haven't got anymore, and I don't have any more money either."

  "But you know the dealer,” I said.

  "Yeah, and I know he wants cash up front. This shit ain't cheap. That's why you don't sneeze into it!"

  "Well, what are we gonna do?” I turned to the two of them. We would be on our own now, until we could come up with the cash, and then we'd go to Adam.

  "Why don't we try your dad,” they said at once.

  "Yeah, I guess that is a possibility."

  We drove to my house in my little blue Chevette. We pulled up into the driveway. It was around 3:00 in the afternoon and stormy. In we walked through the New Orleans kitchen, past my mom at the sink. Forget her, wouldn't dare ask her for the money. Up the stairs, and back down, I asked my mom, "Is Dad here?"

  "No," she replied.

  "You seen him?"

  "Not all day."

  "Oh." We walked outside.

  "Can I borrow some money?" I asked my mom, my head just inside the door.

  "Are you kidding me?" she said.

  "No, okay I guess that's a no,” and we went back out and sat in the car, and stared straight ahead at the netless basketball rim that was nailed to the old, white garage.

  We started the car and pulled out of the driveway to head who knows where.

  The car never had an empty tank, but I never filled it. It was filled with gas, we had all concluded one night, by mysterious elves.

  "Okay, so now what,” driving down Bowen.

  "I don't know, we maxed out your savings,” Krishna said.
/>
  We drove in sad silence for a while up toward High street.

  "Maybe Ziggy will have an idea,” Krishna said. "Let's go see him."

  All the houses on High Street had a certain neglected look. Ziggy's blue house was badly in need of a paint job, which Ziggy later performed for his parents on his summer off from Harvard at a fee of ten dollars per hour. We all had weed all that summer…

  "Cocaine? No way. I don't want any."

  "Why not."

  "It'll be too good."

  "Well then, can you just buy us some?" We all pleaded with Siegfried. "Or think of a way for us to get some?"

  He looked at us for a moment, arms folded, long, white sleeves never buttoned. Hair long, brown, curly, and never combed. His eyes always looked like they were squinting even when they weren't, but they were squinting now for sure, and he smiled as he squinted at us.

  "What's going on, you guys?"

  "We just want some more," I whined.

  "Jane sneezed three hundred dollars’ worth of coke into the air.” Krishna laughed, and her black eyes seemed to have mirrors in them as she glanced over at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire cat's.

  "Yep, but it was her money," Gay said. "So the only one who can really be pissed off at her is herself."

  "Oh I am, believe me."

  "We can pay you back," Krishna promised, with the smile still fresh from the laughter.

  "Oh for sure, believe me, we will," I promised, nodding.

  "Oh God!” He shook his head, rubbed his eyes and laughed. "That shit is good, isn't it? No, I'm not giving you the money. If you get more of it, it certainly won't be on my head."

  "Oh God, what are we gonna do?” Krishna whined.

  "Here," he said, grabbing his stash of weed, "roll yourselves a joint. I'm gonna go take a nap.”

  And with that he went into his room, which was literally covered from wall to wall with scattered and carelessly stacked books: books on philosophy—Kant, Hegel, Aristotle—books on biology, chemistry, math, books on music, old volumes of Rolling Stone magazine. I'd been in there. It was like wading through a pool up to your knees practically.

  He collapsed on his mattress with no sheet, which was thrown right on the floor, and we smoked a joint and talked some more about where to go and how to find more coke before we left.

  So it was a stoned plan, the one we came up with. We would steal the money.

  * * *

  "I think what happened was … I don't know why, but for some reason they all grew up. And I didn't…"

  "Uh huh…" Miriam nodded ferociously. "Good, Jane, keep going, keep going…” She rolled her hand in the 'give me more' motion.

  "I don't know why, but I guess it was the trauma…"

  "The trauma?” she asked, eyebrows up.

  "Of the car going in the lake," I said, "maybe because I …"

  "Shall we look at the…"

  "No! No! I have to…"

  "Do you want the nightmares to end?"

  "No! I mean yes! Isn't our time up?"

  "See you next week then, Jane.” She held the door open for me with a wary grin.

  18

  "Did they call from the Gazette?” I asked my mom.

  "Oh come on, they are not gonna call from that job,” she said from behind the newspaper.

  "How can you read in the dark?” I asked, annoyed. I knew the answer.

  "I do not like to waste money,” came the so-predictable response.

  "You will hurt your eyes reading in the dark."

  "I do not waste electricity."

  "It's not wasting it if you need it. Aren't your eyes worth preserving?"

  She only turned the page in response. It was dark in the whole house. I turned on the kitchen light, dining-room light, the basement light, and the light in the living room on my way to the stairway, where I lit the way up to my bedroom. Basically I left a path of turned-on lights behind me through the whole house in response to her stinginess. They stayed on less than two minutes. I turned three of them on again: the living room, the dining room, and the stairway. She turned them off immediately, and with a huff.

  "God damn it, I am not going to walk around here in the dark, you cheapskate," I screamed, and slammed the bedroom door behind me. Then I walked back out and turned on the hall light just in time to hear about how she was Scottish and thrifty with money.

  I laid down on my bed. It was neatly made, but I hadn't made it. I thought maybe I could call that newspaperwoman and ask her about the job. What was her name again, oh yeah, Leelah. Leelah the 1940s pin-up girl. Leelah with the dark-red lipstick and the curly, long, well-kept, black hair, and the violet-colored eyes with deep, black, heavily made-up lashes. Laughing at me. Wanting to see who it was that had a car in the lake. God damn her.

  It was a cold night, as all winter nights were. Some were only colder than others. I sort of didn't want to be in this dark house anymore; it was oppressive. The thought of watching cable cheered me up, but I thought maybe I could go for a drive.

  I went back down through the house. This time I didn't pass my mom. I got in the car and spent a few moments just waiting for it to heat back up again, breathing the visible air out like puffs of smoke from a cigarette. It made me want a cigarette, but I was trying to quit. I could barely afford them anymore. And I was so broke lately I was reduced to carrying a matchbook around in my pants pocket, instead of owning my own lighter.

  I drove down New York Avenue. I'd never been to the real New York. Krishna always talked about how great it was there, and Ziggy sent us cool things he'd bought downtown there, like that bootleg copy of ‘Cocksucker Blues.’ I drove toward the lake and, out of mindlessness and good music on the car radio, just found myself driving around the edge as far as I could go. If you went north you ended up driving past the carp ponds. If you went south, (or was it an east-west directional axis, I don't know) then it became residential. You had to go through the richest neighborhoods in town, the Kellermans, who owned Kellerman Napkin, the Miltons, who owned Milton Candle, and were supposedly the richest family in town, if not the county, Sara Seyemore’s house.

  ***

  "Get me back to class! If I don't go today they are not gonna let me play tonight!” Gay demands in a pissed-off voice.

  "You are so wasted, they're not gonna let you play anyway,” Krishna mentions.

  "I am not dropping you off. What is this bullshit?” I reply, but indeed I drive toward Oshkosh North High to let her out for her stupid, idiotic, jock-like, "What is it this time, basketball?"

  "Volleyball," Gay answers calmly from the back, arms folded.

  Where is the yelling, smart-ass, bong-toking, acid-taking, goldfish-rescuing, hands-free bike riding, Jackson Five listening 'girl' now? Where is that Gay? I want that one back.

  “Okay, I'll drop you off, but you have to be seen getting out of the druggy car.” I pull up right on to the grass and drive quite a ways on it.

  "Oh my God, what is she doing?” Gay yells.

  "She's dropping you off!" Krishna is in stitches.

  "Okay, get out." I smile. My car is literally in front of her class window, and I make sure to wave at everyone inside.

  Gay gets sheepishly, yet cooperatively, out of the car and walks to her class.

  ***

  If you kept hugging the lake you had to see all these houses, but you could take a shortcut. You couldn't actually see the lake when you drove past the million-dollar homes. You could only glimpse the lake through the space between the houses. The space between …

  But if you took the shortcut, you cut across directly to the Pioneer Inn, the fancy bridge, with the mall on the right, and you would have to take High Street and pass by Ziggy's and go past the library, and look at the stone lions… the stoned lions…

  Always reminded me of the Twilight Zone, where the library lions came to life in the black and white park and chased the businessman. Twilight Zone every night at 10:00, meet at my house everyone, an unspoken ritual ca
me up somehow. When did that start? But there we'd all be in the dark, stoned like the lions in front of the library, lying on the living-room floor, or in easy chairs turned backwards completely on their backs with the feet part up in the air, giggling.

  "When you're dead, you're dead. And then it doesn't matter anymore when you died or how long you lived," Krishna observes, one night after another excursion into the mundane philo-musings of Rod Serling that seem brilliant when you're stoned.

  "No, that's not true," Ziggy maintains. "You don't die when you die, you die when the last person who knew you forgets you."

  "No way," Krishna argues, "When you die, the whole universe dies because you're not there to perceive it."

  "Uhn huh," he says, "you are more than the sum of your parts—"

  "What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Gay interrupts.

  "You are not just the body you are in—"

  "So you believe in souls?” I ask.

  "No," he says, "you don't need to believe in souls for this to be true—"

  "It's either true or it's not true; it wouldn't matter what you would need to believe," Gay interjects.

  Each other's faces are lit intermittently whenever the scene on the screen is bright.

  "No, for logical consistency," Ziggy says.

  "Logical consistency with what?” Krishna says, becoming amused.

  "With the thing I said before—that you don't die when you die. You are more than that—"

  "A soul," I reiterate.

  "No, you don't need a soul for this to be true. Your existence includes the concept of you in the minds of the people who knew you. This was why Achilles chose immortality over a long life. He knew that to die completely was to be forgotten."

  And then Gay says, "Not because his soul would live, but because you die when the last person who knew you forgets you."

  "Or who knew of you," Ziggy clarifies. He lays on his back, arms folded, squinting at the ceiling, head tilted slightly to the side, like he is coming up with this stuff as he speaks, trying it out in his mind.

  "No," Krishna says after a long moment of silence, and halfway through another episode, and another clove cigarette. "You die when you die. And that's it."

  ***

  How far had I driven now? I'd passed the Pioneer Inn a while ago, and I'd passed the railroad tracks on the edge of town, and the turnoff to my first boyfriend's house, where I'd driven without my license once. I passed my mom in her car, and to this day I could still see that angry face.