Ahead of us, a house trailer towed by a Dodge drifted from side to side as they, too, rumbled on toward two weeks away from it all. The old man muttered:
“Lousy Chicago drivers”—a litany he repeated over and over to himself, endlessly, while driving. It must have had the same sort of soothing effect on him that prayer wheels and mystic slogans had on others. He firmly believed that almost all accidents, directly or indirectly, were caused by Chicago drivers, and that if they could all be barred at birth from getting behind a wheel, cars could be made without bumpers and the insurance companies could turn their efforts into more constructive channels.
“Look at that nut!” The old man muttered to himself as the house trailer cut across the oncoming lane and rumbled out of sight up a gravel road, trailing a thick cloud of yellow dust.
My mother was now passing out Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum. “This’ll keep you from getting thirsty,” she counseled sagely.
We were doing well, all things considered, having stopped for Randy at only 75 gas stations so far. After licking off the sweet, dry coating of powdered sugar, I chewed the gum for a while and leafed restlessly through a Donald Duck Big Little Book that I’d brought along to pass the time; but I was too excited and kind of sick to worry about old Donald and Dewey and Huey and Louie.
Suddenly the front seat was in a great uproar. I sat up. My mother screamed and shrank away toward the door. The old man shouted above her shrieks:
“Fer Chrissake, it’s only a bee. It’s not gonna kill you!”
A big fat bumblebee zoomed over the pots and pans and groceries, banging from window to window as my mother, flailing her tattered copy of True Romance, cowered screaming on the floor boards next to the gearshift. The bee zoomed low over her, banked sharply upward and began walking calmly up the inside of the windshield, like he knew just what he was doing. Every year, a bee got in the car—the same bee. My mother had an insane fear of being stung. She had read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! that a bee sting had killed a man named Howard J. Detweiler in Canton, Ohio, and she never forgot it. The subject came up often around our house, especially in the summer, and my mother invariably quoted Ripley, who was universally recognized as an ultimate authority on everything. She screamed again.
“Goddamn it! Shut up! Do you want me to have an accident?” my father bellowed. He pulled off to the side of the road, flung his door open and began the chase.
“Gimme the rag outta the side pocket!” he yelled.
My mother, shielding her head with her magazine, interrupted her whimpering long enough to shriek: “Where is he? I can hear him!”
The bee strolled casually up the windshield a few inches farther, humming cheerfully to himself. The old man tore around to the other side of the car to get the rag himself. Sensing that he had made his point, the bee revved his motors with a loud buzz and was out the window. He disappeared back down the road into the lowering skies of early evening, obviously getting set for the next Indiana car to show up over the hill.
“He got away, the bastard!” My father slid back into his seat, threw the Olds into gear and pulled back out onto the asphalt.
“OK, he’s gone. You can get up now.” His voice dripped with scorn.
My mother crawled back up into her seat, flushed and shaking slightly, and said in a weak voice: “You never can tell about bees. I read once where….”
My father snorted in derision: “Howard J. Detweiler! I’d like to know where that goddamn bee stung him that it killed him. I’ll bet I know where it got him!” he roared.
“Shhhh. The kids are listening.”
“Hey, look! There’s Crystal Lake.” My father pointed off to the left.
I sat bolt upright. Way off past a big gray farmhouse and a bank of black trees under the darkening sky was a tiny flash of water.
A gravel road slanted off into the trees, bracketed by a thicket of signs: BOATS FOR RENT BATHING FISHING OVERNIGHT CABINS BEER EATS. We were in vacationland.
Oh, boy! In the back seat, I had broken out into a frenzied sweat. In just a few minutes, we would be there at that one-and-only place where everything happened: Clear Lake! For months, when the snow piled high around the garage and the arctic wind whistled past the blast furnaces, into the open hearth and around the back porch, under the eaves and through the cracks in the window sills, I had lain tossing on my solitary pallet and dreaming of Clear Lake, imagining myself flexing my magnificent split-bamboo casting rod, drifting toward the lily pads, where a huge bronzeback—an evil, legendary small-mouthed bass named Old Jake—waited to meet his doom at my hands.
I would see myself showing my dad how to tie a royal-coachman fly, which I had read about in Sports Afield. He would gasp in astonishment. I also astounded my mother in these dreams by demonstrating an encyclopedic grasp of camp cookery. I had practically memorized an article entitled “How to Prepare the Larger Game Fish.” The text began: “A skillful angler knows how to broil landlocked salmon and lake trout in the 25-to-40-pound weight range.…” I had never seen, let alone cooked, a salmon or a trout or a pike or anything else—except for little sunfish, perch, bullheads and the wily crappie—but I was ready for them.
We rounded a familiar curve and rolled past a green cemetery dotted with drooping American flags. Steaming, the Olds slowed to a crawl as we inched past the general store, with a cluster of yellow cane poles leaning against its wooden front amid a pile of zinc washtubs. We had arrived.
“Now, look, you kids stay in the car. HEY, OLLIE!” the old man shouted out of the side window toward the feed store. “HEY, OLLIE, WE’RE HERE!”
Through the rain-spattered windshield, we could see that a few lights were on here and there in the ramshackle white-clapboard buildings overhung with willows and sweeping elm trees that lined the street. A tall figure in overalls strolled across the sidewalk and plunked his size-14 clodhopper on the running board, battered farmers straw hat pushed to the back of his head.
“By God, ya made it.” His Adam’s apple, the size of a baseball, bobbed up and down his skinny neck like a yo-yo,
“Yep. We’re here, Ollie.”
“How was the trip?”
“Pretty good. Got a bee in the car, though.”
“Back just before ya hit Crystal Lake?”
“That’s right.”
“Just before ya come to Henshaw’s barn?”
“Yep.”
“Gol durn. That son of a gun’s been doin’ that all summer. Got me twice.”
Ollie owned six cabins on the shore of Clear Lake, which was rimmed solidly with a thick incrustation of summer shacks—except at the north end, where the lake was swampy and the mosquitoes swarmed.
“I saved the green one for you. She’s all set. I emptied out the boat this morning.”
A jolting shot of excitement ripped through me. The boat! Our boat, which I would row and anchor and bail out, and hang onto and cast my split-bamboo rod—My split-bamboo rod! I had forgotten for hours that I had left it all back in the garage.
“How’s the fishing this year?” asked the old man.
“Well, now, it’s a funny thing you asked. They sure were hittin’ up to about a week or ten day ago. Guy from Mishawaka stayin’ in cabin three got his limit a’ walleye every day. But they slacked off ‘bout a week ago. Ain’t hittin’ now.”
“I guess I shoulda been here last week.” It was always “last week” at Clear Lake.
“They might hit crickets. I got some for sale.”
“I’ll be over in the morning to pick some up, Ollie. I got a feeling we’re gonna hit em big this year.” The old man never gave up.
We turned off the main highway and drove along the beloved, twisting dirt road—now a river of mud—that led through cornfields and meadows, down toward the magical lake.
“Ollie looks skinnier,” my mother said.
“He’s just got new overalls,” my father answered, sluing the Olds around a sharp bend. Night was coming on fast as it does in
the Michigan lake country, black and chill. The rain had picked up. In the back seat, I was practically unconscious with excitement as the first cottages hove into view. Between them and the trees that ringed them was the dark, slate void of the lake.
“She looks high,” my father said. He always pretended to be an expert on everything, including lakes. Already my mother was plucking at pickle jars, Brillo pads, clothespins, rolls of toilet paper and other drifting odds and ends of stuff that she had banked around her in the front seat.
Next to every cottage but one was a parked car pulled up under the trees. Down in the lake, I could make out the pier and the black swinging wedges of Ollie’s leaky rowboats. A few yellow lights gleamed from the dark cottages onto the green, wet leaves of the trees.
“Well, there she is.”
Our lights swept over the rear of a starboard-leaning, green-shingled, screen-enclosed cabin. Above the back door, painted on a weathered two-by-four, was the evocative appellation HAVEN OF BLISS. All of Ollie’s other cottages had names, too: BIDE-A-WEE, REST-A-SPELL, DEW DROP INN, NEVA-KARE, SUN-N-FUN.
We inched under the trees. My father switched off the Olds. With a great, gasping shudder, she sank into a deep stupor, her yearly trial by fire half over. The rain was coming down hard now, pounding on the roof of the car and dripping off the trees all around us. I tumbled out of the back door—plunging into mud up to my ankles—and began sloshing my way down through the wet bushes and undergrowth to the lake. Behind me, I could hear my kid brother already whining that the mosquitoes were biting him. There at my feet, lapping quietly at the rocks, the black water faintly aglow, was Clear Lake.
In the darkness a few feet offshore, I could dimly make out our wooden boat, the waves slapping against its side.
K-thunk … K-thunk … K-splat … Plop … Plop…
One of the most exciting sounds known to man.
“Hey, come on! We gotta unload. Everything’s getting wet!” my father shouted down through the trees.
I slogged back up the path, splopping and slipping and skidding and cracking my shins against tree stumps. My father and mother were tugging at the tarpaulin that covered the luggage rack on the roof. The rain poured down unrelentingly.
“Where the hell’s the flashlight? Don’t tell me we forgot the FLASHLIGHT!”
“I thought you brought it,” my mother answered from the dark deluge.
“OH, JESUS CHRIST! WHAT THE HELL DID WE BRING?”
“Well, you made up the list.”
“How the hell can your forget the FLASHLIGHT?”
“Well, if you had gotten up when you said you would, you—
“SHUT UP! I don’t have no time to argue. This stuff’s getting soaked!”
My mother disappeared into the cabin. “The lights aren’t working,” she called out into the rain a moment later.
My father didn’t even bother to answer that one. If she had said the roof was gone and there was a moose in the bedroom, it wouldn’t have surprised him. He staggered past me, reeling under an enormous cardboard box full of pots, pans, baking powder, rubber ducks and ping-pong paddles.
“Don’t just stand around. Do something!” he bellowed to everyone within hearing. “DAMN IT, DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING?’
I grabbed a beach ball from the back seat, waded through the clay and groped my way up the rickety back steps. Inside, the cabin smelled of rotting wood, wet shingles, petrified fish scales and dead squirrels. My father had struck a match, which dimly lit up the worn linoleum and bare boards of the kitchen.
“Why the hell didn’t Ollie turn on the juice? That’s what I want to know!” he raged, flicking his match around in the dimness.
“Hey, here’s a kerosene lantern!” my mother said excitedly. Above the tin sink, on a shelf, stood a dusty glass lamp half full of cloudy yellow oil.
“OUCH! DAMN IT!” The match had burned down to the old man’s thumb. Sound of fumbling and scratching and cursing in the darkness. Finally, another match flared.
“Gimme that lousy lamp.”
He lifted off the black, smoky chimney and applied the match to the wick, turning up the knob on the side as he did so. It sputtered and hissed.
“DON’T BREATHE ON THE MATCH!” he yelled.
At last the wick caught hold and a steady blue-yellow flame lit up the primitive kitchen. We rushed out into the dark and for the next hour lugged wet sacks, bags, blankets, fielders’ mitts, all of it, into the kitchen, until at long last the Olds, a ton and a half lighter, shook itself in relief and settled down for a two-week rest
My mother had been sorting it all out as we dragged it in, carrying blankets and bedding into the little wooden cubicles that flanked the kitchen. When it was all indoors, the old man stripped off his soaked shirt and sprawled out on a lumpy blue kitchen chair.
“Well, here we are.” He grinned, water dripping down over his ears. “Boy, am I hungry!”
My mother had already opened a can of Spam. We sat amid the boxes, downing two-inch-thick sandwiches.
“We gotta set the alarm, because we wanna get out real early to fish,” announced the old man between bites.
My kid brother was already asleep in the next room.
“If ya wanna get the big ones, ya gotta get up early!” His eyes gleamed brightly in the glow of the kerosene lamp. “They always bite good after a rain. Yessir!”
But it was all back in the garage—my rod, my reel, my father’s tackle box, his bobbers, his Secret Gypsy Fish Bait Oil that he had bought from the mail-order catalog.
“But, Dad, don’t you remember I told you.…” I began miserably.
“So how come I found it on top of the car? I wonder who put all that fishing stuff on top of the car? Hmmmm …
I guess somebody must have snuck up and put it on top of the car when you weren’t looking.”
Ten minutes later, I lay in the dark, ecstatic with relief and expectation, huddled under damp blankets and a musty comforter. The rain roared steadily on the roof-as it would for the next two weeks—and drummed metronomically onto the bare wooden floor beside my bed
K-thunk… K-thunk…Plop…Plop…Plop….
The boat called to me from the dark lake. From somewhere out in the woods, something squeaked twice and then was silent My kid brother tossed and whimpered softly from beneath his pillow; and across the room, my father’s low, muttering snores thrummed quietly in the night. We were on vacation.
Lustiki! read the marquee in letters three feet high. Must be Lithuanian for lust, I mused, jogging from foot to foot to keep warm in the long line of Manhattan art-film fanciers in front of the East Side’s smart new Cinema 69, their ascetic faces flushed in anticipation of another evening of artful montages, elegant pans, gracefully executed dissolves. I glanced at the posters that rimmed the box office. One of them read:
LESBIA, AN IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEASANT GIRL, TRAVELS TO THE BIG CITY IN SEARCH OF TRUTH. STARRING LUDVICKA BELLICOSNICK AND DIRECTED BY MILOS PEDER-ASTINCKI, THE 13 -YEAR-OLD SENSATION. “A SEARING EXPERIENCE” … NY TIMES “SMASHING” … REX REED
Lesbia herself, bosoms ripe as Indiana cantaloupes, her peasant eyes widely spaced in her magnificent Slavi face, appeared to be enjoying a transcendental sexual climax with a Viet Cong irregular.
The throng around me looked like a Fellini crowd scene: squat females in leather jackets carrying bull-whips, coveys of razor-thin, trilling creatures of indeterminate sex in velvet jerkins and elf shoes, a few scowling, bearded revolutionaries in full Zapata attire, their denim jackets abristle with OFF THE PIGS buttons. The light from the marquee glinted from the polished lenses of hundreds of pairs of rose and blue sunglasses, some as large as dinner plates. A sizable contingent of Shoshone Indians in beaded headbands and fringed deerskin jackets exchanged mystic signs, their voices oddly Bronx-tinged as onlyCCNY braves’ can be.
Others were clad in castoff costumes from Joan Crawford pictures: padded shoulders, frumpy skirts, sequined wedgies, ringlet curls and feather boas.
Here and there a Grand Concourse version of Humphrey Bogart sneered condescendingly at the mob, cigarette drooping sardonically from a lower lip. A few Belmondos and several Warhols added vivid accents to the mosaic. A Salvation Army Santa Claus at the curb, his Kriss Kringle costume hopelessly démodé, rang his bell listlessly above the clamor. I tugged at the bill of my Jackie Coogan tweed cap, setting it more firmly on my head as I shivered slightly under my Clint Eastwood paisano serape, my Fred Astaire two-tone patent-leather pumps pitifully inadequate to the December slush.
After the show—which turned out to be a flawed but compelling black-comedic existential skin flick in the drolly amusing Sacher-Masoch genre—I eased into a booth at Le Bagel Vérité, a favorite haunt of cinemagoers in the neighborhood. Sipping a mug of mocha absinthe, described on the menu as the favorite of John Barrymore, I found myself studying a striking poster on the wall amid the likenesses of Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Peter Fonda, Ché Guevara and Charley Brown. It was my old friend Ludvicka, “Don’t I know you from someplace?” I reflected, the absinthe flowing like tepid laval through my veins.
Of course! It hit me. Every male I ever knew believed that foreign girls, even if they’re just from the next town, were infinitely sexier than the ordinary homegrown product. I laughed ironically in my Sidney Greenstreet manner, as I often do when my mind takes a philosophical turn. Then, painfully, it all began to come back—my own almost forgotten adventure in alien sensuality, foreign passion, forbidden fruit.
It began innocently enough a couple of weeks before Christmas in the northern-Indiana steel-mill town where I festered as a youth. It was just before Christmas vacation, already deep into a bitterly cold winter, and I was shuffling idly through clots of drifted, soot-covered snow, my mind drifting aimlessly like a semi-deflated blimp. I was between romances. A brief, disastrous fling with Elizabeth Mae Longnecker had petered out in late November, when I discovered she wore earmuffs and galoshes with snaps. Somehow she had seemed different on the tennis courts.
Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories Page 11