Lake Charles

by Ed Lynskey

  Here it comes, I thought. We’d been quarreling all week.

  “I won’t be at your pot parties, Brendan. Ever.”

  “So you told me.”

  “Yet you still go. I can smell the pot on your clothes, hair, and kisses.”

  With a silent groan, I recrossed my ankles. She’s got to be on the rag, I thought but said, “I never promised you I’d quit.”

  “My point precisely, and this is as good a time as any to promise it. Say it. I’m waiting, Brendan.”

  What a bitchy nag. “Is it a big deal?” I shrugged. “I don’t miss any time from work. I’ve got no DUIs or arrests.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. If you respected my feelings, you’d make the promise.”

  “I tell you what. I’ll only come over when I’m straight,” I said, sure that my compromise was a generous and fair one. “How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds like bullshit. You have to decide. It’s the dope or it’s me. There’s no wiggle room left here.”

  Resentful anger heated my cheeks and ears over her issuing an ultimatum. “Why did you wait until tonight to whip this on me, Salem?”

  “It’s always bothered me. I like Brendan fine, but the pothead Brendan is a turn off.”

  The tube picture was jerky. The Rojos watched TV in the backyard to savor any refreshing breezes. Mrs. Rojos had a neurosis that air conditioners bred summer pneumonia. Right now, breezes or no breezes, I sat there stewing. Nobody had called me a “pothead” to my face, and I didn’t like the seedy appellation.

  “I’m waiting for your answer, Brendan.”

  “Maybe we should take a break from each other.”

  “There’s no maybe to it.” She bolted up from her lawn chair and moved to head indoors. She stopped but didn’t look back at me. “Good-bye, Brendan. If you ever grow up, give me a call. I’d love to hear when you’ve turned it around.”

  “Hey, I’ll do that sometime.”

  But I’d never updated Salem I was powering through kicking my drug habit, and I had a few major laps to go. That’s not to say I liked to live in my hermitage over the taxidermy shop. No nookie was a drag. But hell, I reasoned, I’d meet a galore of other Salems. With its 55,000 rowdy pipeline roughnecks, Valdez was rife with its juke joints, crapshoots, and cat houses all catering to the Good Time Charlies. Sure, I’d take off up north, hunt down Angus, and we’d go set the woods on fire. We Fishback men were babe magnets.

  In the final ticks before sleep sandbagged me, I pictured Yellow Snake’s gulag, and I prayed to stay free of it. If I could only get the goods on Ashleigh’s real killer and erase the bull’s-eye from off my back. Despite my best efforts at resisting it, once asleep, I was a failure at staving off the dreams. Yes, the eeriness was back, so I flowed with it rather than battled it.

  The pot’s smog choked the Jaguar’s interior since we hadn’t opened the windows. Ashleigh shrieked in orgiastic glee as we squealed around the hairpin curves along the ridges before we descended and docked at the Chewink Motel. After we nested in Room 7 (on this very spot!) she fessed up.

  “My dad isn’t actually the owner.” Her crafty smile was my first glimpse of her deceitfulness.

  I stuffed an inhalation and shrugged before expelling the smoke. “So, you fibbed to me. Why?” Her eyelids, I noticed, went liberal on the kohl. Had she always resembled a zombie? Or did the greasy smoke engulfing us distort my sight?

  “Brendan, my fair sex lies through our teeth all the time. We can’t help it. Tonight you learned a vital lesson on life.”

  “Meet the sophisticated man of the world,” I said, my laugh an ironic one.

  “What’s it like having a twin sister?”

  “Nerve-racking.”

  “No, I’m serious here. Do you finish each others sentences or can you read each others thoughts?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did she mature faster than you did?”

  “On that I don’t have a read at all.”

  “I wanted a sister. Being an only child has turned me into a self-centered hellion. My nannies told me that while I grew up in their care.”

  I said nothing because I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

  “I’ve led a melancholy life, Brendan.”

  Trying to lighten the mood, I laughed. “Who uses a word like ‘melancholy’?”

  “You’re right.”

  “We need more conversational foreplay. Do you like dirty talk?”

  “Skip over that part. Just follow my lead.”

  “M’m. Keep that up, and I’ll follow you to hell—”

  I bolted upright in the bed, the sheet falling away. My fingers clutched at my chest. A maniac drummer, my heart banged under my ribs. The air vacuumed in and out of my parched mouth. Even if I was staying straight, I seemed to be coming unraveled at the seams.

  “Tighten up,” I tried to coach myself, climbing out of the bed. “My detoxed mind is trapped in a whirlpool.” My sock feet pattered over the nappy carpet at the foot of the bed. “I did follow her to hell, and now I can’t return from there. That’s the main rub. Did I jinx myself? I need some air.”

  I went out the room door. My sock feet stepped from the nappy carpet to the hard concrete apron. The semi-dark courtyard sat tranquil under the streetlights. No traffic flitted by on the state road. Smelling the peat moss used to mulch the azalea beds, I saw the several cars from travelers on their stopover. My cab truck stood undisturbed.

  The soft drink and ice machines sat whirring next to the office and coin phone. In my sock feet, I braved wincing over the jagged gravel lot and slotted my coins into the soft drink machine. A bottle thumped down the chute, and I wet my mouth, the soda ice-cold, before I moseyed to the coin phone.

  The ratty directory listed the old Arbogast phone number. The phone had a signal. I chinked in my dimes and dialed the number, expecting to get a canned voice telling me I’d hit a disconnected line, but my call patched through. During the rings, I realized I’d used this same phone to call in Ashleigh’s fatal overdose. A girl’s papery lilt answered. She’d been asleep and I made my hasty self-introduction.

  “Sure, I remember Mr. Kuzawa came today. Why didn’t you come in, too?”

  “Our schedule was tight. Has Ralph Sizemore been there tonight?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him in several days like I told Mr. Kuzawa.”

  “That’s good. Listen, you better lock all your doors and windows.”

  She yawned on her end. “Uh-huh, but I do that anyway.”

  “Just make double certain tonight. Don’t let him into your house.”

  “Uh-huh. Brendan, it’s way past my bedtime. I’m just registering every other word. Let’s do this. Tomorrow you call me again. No, better yet, just stop by. Don’t make it too early, please. Say, around nine-ish.”

  “All right, be looking for us then.”

  “Thanks for calling. Good night.” Her hang up left the analog hum filling my ear.

  I racked the phone handset, walked back to the soft drink machine, and discarded my empty bottle in the trashcan.

  “Are you doing okay?”

  Recoiling as if I’d stepped on a hot 220-wire, I identified the speaker. “Jeez, don’t sneak up like that on me.” I grabbed a calming breath. “I just buzzed Alicia, and she’s battened down for the night.”

  “Heady thinking. I’ll also call her and leave my room’s phone number in case she needs help.” Mr. Kuzawa plinked in his coins and cuffed the tab for his favorite cola. “You know, I never sleep. Never. I just nap all night. It’s a carryover from Mr. Truman’s police action.” The frosted bottle thudded down the chute. Mr. Kuzawa uncapped the top, knocked back a swallow, and drew down to a cherry ember on his lit Marlboro. He exhaled, then, “But that’s just me. Why are you so on needles tonight, son?”

  Was he being serious? My look over at him was sharp. “For beginners, that store robbery we pre-empted turned into a bloodbath.”

  He inhaled and then let
the expelled smoke veil his live coals for eyes. His chuckle stirred like an angry hornets’ nest. “It did get a little gory, but it’s a distraction now.”

  “All I know is my showdown with Sizemore can’t end that messy.”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  “My murder trial is coming on a fast train.”

  Mr. Kuzawa’s eyes glittered at me. “After this, there might not be a trial. We’re all in to see this to the bitter end.”

  Other burning priorities ravaged my thoughts. Cobb had told me his father knew my Uncle Ozzie, and I decided it was time to let Mr. Kuzawa in on my vivid dream life. “I must be going mental,” is how I broached the topic.

  “You seem to be doing okay to me. What’s up?”

  “I’m dreaming in dribs and drabs of the night that Ashleigh Sizemore died.”

  “Ah, it’s coming back to you. Excellent.” He drew the Marlboro down to near the butt. Flicking it, he forged a smoke ring. “Bunking in the same barracks has tapped your memory, so let it roll.”

  I watched the smoke ring break apart. My airway constricted, and a raw voice I didn’t recognize as mine quavered. “Men crack up that way. Don’t GIs freaked by live combat go loopy and turn into vegetables?”

  Modulating to a husky pitch, he rested a bearish hand on my shoulder. “If a vet ever got what we in Korea called ‘shook,’ the VA hospitals treated him. Isn’t your mind trip more akin to déjà vu? It sounds perfectly normal and nothing to lose any sleep over.”

  “No sir, mine isn’t like that.” I wasn’t clear on how much to reveal, but how could I pull my punches now? “My dreams want to reconstruct the past. I knew Ashleigh the one night, but she talks to me in death as you and I are now. Sometimes she lies about stuff. Other times she taunts me. My Uncle Ozzie was nutty like that, and I’ve got some gene pool worries, see?”

  After a final glug, Mr. Kuzawa flipped the empty soda bottle over his shoulder, and the glass busted on the concrete apron. He belched. “You’re not even in the same ballpark.”

  “My gut level says different. Uncle Ozzie was right bad off. Mama Jo told me he went to visit the psychic Edgar Cayce.”

  “That he did. Since I chauffeured him in my car to Virginia Beach where Mr. Cayce lived, I can vouch for it. On the trip, Ozzie got all jittery on me. I offered him a snort of booze, but he said he wanted to stay sober and clear-headed.”

  “Did Mr. Cayce shed any useful light on Uncle Ozzie’s gift of dreams?”

  “It beats me. I left and met an old sailor pal at a bar. Later Ozzie said Mr. Cayce’s eyes had twitched like a shaman’s, and he used a squeaky lady’s voice. Ozzie sure returned home a quieter man. Look, I don’t laugh at the weird shit. My grandma, bless her soul, was a water witch, and my daddy, damn his soul, spoke in the Pentecostal tongues. Hell, on those long, cold winter nights in Korea, I battled my share of seeing hobgoblins.”

  I returned to this trip. “Today’s killing twists my nerves.”

  “This mission ran gory, but as I already told you, some dark shit can’t be avoided. That’s life, son.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  Nodding, he faced across the dark lot out to the state road and without turning said, “Brendan, you’ve gutted through a lot, but …”

  “But I can only move straight ahead,” I said to finish his thought.

  He turned to me. “You understand it. But you should also remember I’ve got your back.”

  “I can see that. Why are you sticking out your neck for me?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what friends do. I know Cobb and I left town when you ran into your first troubles, but I’m here now.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No thanks are needed.” He turned shrewd. “I’ll drop a dime, and I can hook up with some fast reinforcements. They fight like tigers, too.”

  As always, his radical ideas caused my gut muscles to clench. “Later, maybe. We can agree Cullen is our ace in the hole to play if we get in a stiff spot.”

  “Just give me the high sign when you’re set. Cullen takes shit off nobody. He’s fearless.” Mr. Kuzawa edged toward my cab truck. “Go on in and grab some shuteye. I’ll call Alicia and then guard our perimeter.”

  Locked behind Room 7, I dove into bed with a new spark of a thought. Mr. Kuzawa had commented at Lake Charles that an outside agitator—what was his name? Pierre Spartacus?—had run the pressmen’s strike. I made an interesting association. Hadn’t there been a Sizemore at the center of the strike? The old-timer pressmen at work used to curse his name. So it might be worthwhile to delve into the strike history.

  Sleep came with a few refreshingly dream-free hours. Ralph Sizemore on the attack didn’t interrupt our rest. In the predawn’s cool, I showered and shaved. My gamey clothes sailed into the wastebasket. The bullet wound I’d taken at Lake Charles grazing my ribs had scabbed over. The new clothes Mr. Kuzawa had bought us at the all-purpose store (was that only last night in Yellow Snake?) felt starchy but fresh and clean to wear. Cobb’s old .44 lodged in a side pocket. The sealed bottle of cologne I salvaged from the medicine cabinet patted on with a citrusy sting. I reminded myself we had to pitstop by Alicia’s house at nine o’clock.

  We shook out of our rooms. Before leaving the Chewink, I stopped by the lobby office, but Mrs. Cornwell was gone. Her Marlboro sat half-smoked in the tuna fish can next to the Tab diet soda bottle. My bell rings failed to summon her, so I tossed our room keys on the countertop, and we left.

  ***

  Mr. Kuzawa dropped a hint that I might update Mama Jo, so we shuttled into a gas station and the phone booths under an awning. Mr. Kuzawa ducked into the exterior restroom. While counting the rings, my other ear tuned in the lyrical genius of the late Jim Croce. His 1973 ballad blaring on a transistor radio inside the open service bay pleaded with a phone operator to put through his call.

  “Are you in any hot water?” asked Mama Jo after our greetings.

  “It’s all good.”

  “It is, huh? Why did you call then? Quit acting evasive like you do.” That famous temper hardened her command.

  “I called just to say hi. But the telephone lines have ears.”

  “So they do. Is Edna okay?”

  “The last time I saw her, she was fine.” I hadn’t lied to Mama Jo, and I spared my soul from hell’s eternal roast. “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m just peachy keen. Axel let out my goats. I see my osteopath today. The bats are colonizing my attic again. On the plus side, I’ve finished putting up the blackberry jam. Meantime you’re off tearing up the pea patch with Cobb and Edna.”

  “Actually a little under the weather, Cobb is taking it easy.” Again I hadn’t actually lied. “Mr. Kuzawa came up with Herzog.”

  “The fishing at Lake Charles must be unbeatable,” said Mama Jo, then, “Decent jobs are hard to come by. Since the strike, the companies don’t like it here.”

  “We stockpiled our vacation, so don’t worry.” The overdue rent to my flat arose, but I decided not to press my luck and ask her to cover it. I could always pitch a pup tent in the woods.

  “Do you have enough gas to do all this catting around?”

  “We’re not siphoning gas from other tanks.”

  “Well, I hope not. Another postcard came to the house.”

  “What’s the message?” I asked, my heartbeats on the uptick.

  “As always, there are no words. The ice-capped mountains are pictured on the front, and the postmark is still jerkwater Valdez.”

  “Valdez can’t be all bad.”

  “Uh-huh. Are those weird dreams making you act so reckless?”

  “I’m okay. Really I am.”

  “I want you to see the doctor in Gatlinburg. He can order that EEG test they do at the hospital.”

  “Why go to all that bother and expense? Nothing will show up. I feel just fine. Save the postcard. Look, I better go on now.”

  “Bye then.”

  After hanging up, I kept the phone receiver at my ear, a pretext t
o stand there and reflect. I needed to be with the web presses, the largest soaring two stories high, at Longerbeam Printery cranking away. The giant rolls of paper fed through the presses, and the newspapers for a half-dozen towns, including Yellow Snake’s blat, ejected out at the other end.

  My job as the lead pressman was to track the work times on the job tickets. I pulled a sample sheet at every 500 sheets and inspected the color specs. Any hiccups usually came from the second pressman, a boozer named Big Tiny more off than he was on the wagon, forgetting to fill the ink fountains. But I’d forget to jot down the ink fountain settings for later use when we ran the same job ticket, and my oversights also wasted company time and money.

  Keeping up the sheet tallies and the maintenance logs were my biggest headaches. Our red jumpsuits made us into orangutans climbing over the machinery to the mammoth web presses. The ink got on my clothes and skin pores. I was a true pressman working hard at my trade under the piercing eyes of our founder, Jeb Longerbeam. His streaky portrait loomed in its gold-frame over the wall above the time clock.

  Taking vacation didn’t thrill my boss. There was too much strife. My old temptation to chuck it all and hit the road shook me again. Go north, young man for Alaska or bust. I’d get with my dad Angus. That was the right stuff. We’d drink, laugh, and fish. We’d cheer on the Iditarod. We’d do many things.

  Then a new image crystallized of Cobb, young and happy, gunning his bass boat over Lake Charles. I liked seeing him that way and not immured inside of King Tut’s tomb we left on the mountaintop. More fear gripped me when Edna lost and dazed somewhere beyond Will Thomas Mountain staggered into my imaginings. Where had she gone? Had Sizemore captured her? Had she made it to dry land? Of course she did. No body of water ran deep enough to drown her. She was a tough cookie.

  It’d been good to touch home. The trip back to my cab truck was a slow walk. Clay-streaked and dented, it showed its true age in the brassy sun. A silver-armored Airstream clanked by traveling on the two-laner. The Florida snowbirds were getting an early jump on their winter exodus. I yearned to hitch on and leave with them, but all of my reveries never once set me in motion.