NATE: (Sleepily.) Embalming fluid?
(Pause.)
PETER: That was fucking rude, Nate.
—
On the sixth day, they set off even before Nate was fully awake. They crossed into Oregon some two hours later. After another four hours neglecting the federal speed limit they came into sight of the Cascades. In another forty-five minutes they’d crossed into Pennaquick County.
Time declined any relevance beyond that point.
The route became a hair-thin asphalt line amid black-wooded dunes, slithering uphill and westward with bewildering faith for longer than anyone would try. A wavy ocean of fir trees spread for miles and miles in every direction.
All three people in the car had begun to wonder whether they’d taken the right detour when they suddenly crossed the truss bridge over the Zoinx River—a cobalt-blue, rust-bleeding structure dangling over the busy rapids. All human eyes glimmered with acquiescence.
At the next turn left, a blue wooden sign welcomed them to BLYTON ILLS. Rot had eaten through the letter H.
It had begun to drizzle.
—
Without an introductory long shot, the town just happened on the sides of the road—a few wire fences first, then suddenly a building rising from the growth, and then the elementary school, and then a crossing and houses and stores. Andy had to check her watch to confirm it was a weekday. Most shops on East Street had their shutters down—had for a long time, by the look of it.
The first business of any kind they saw was an old man pushing a cartful of scrap metal in front of a vacant lot that Kerri was sure had once held a sporting goods store.
A few cars turtled by the Main and East junction, unwilling to reach their destinations, quarter-spirited like unpaid extras. In the southwest corner of that junction, the church’s parking lot lay deserted.
Two women and one man and a dog stared out their windows, the taste of copper oxide on their lips.
The sun had forsaken them after all.
—
Kerri turned left on Main, offering the first panorama of town, a composition of blue shingles and crestfallen puffs of smoke out of chimneys. Ben’s Corner Diner was open and serving. So were the pharmacy and Mr. Maxence’s grocery store. The flag on the city hall yard waved on top of the pole, though the image would have hardly inspired a decimated army back into battle.
A pickup truck drove past them and the driver tipped his cap at the girls. It was an irrelevant gesture, but for some reason Andy and Kerri and Nate clung to it.
Andy asked, “Is this the depression you mentioned?”
“Which depression?” Nate counterasked.
“I don’t know,” Kerri said. She pointed at the blue, red, and white frame of the barbershop’s front window. “My uncle used to take me there first day of summer to cut my split ends.”
The barber sat outside his shop, as he often did in the past, though this time there was no one to talk to. That didn’t seem to bother him, though; he was still talking.
The movie theater was closed, but that was to be expected. A video rental store had appeared a few doors farther down the street.
“Do you…I mean, does it look that different to you?” Kerri tried.
Two workmen loading a truck stopped for a breather at that exact second, and sulkily watched the Vega wheel by at 20 mph.
“Yes!” Andy complained. “Fuck, where are the kids?”
“We only used to come during holidays, remember?” Kerri said. “They must be in school.”
“What about young people?”
“Probably around the school,” Nate suggested. “Selling crack to the kids.”
—
The west side of town, a four-block residential area off the end of Main Street, didn’t look very different. Wooden FOR SALE signs sheltered under the trees from the gentle rain, but the houses they referred to stood old and solemn on desolate gardens.
The Chevy Vega crawled the few final meters to a stop before a low stone wall and a brittle wooden gate, pink paint peeling off. Kerri switched off the engine. Herewith ended a weeklong journey.
Andy got out of the car and, even before caressing the asphalt skin of the street, she looked up at the house.
It didn’t look back. It stood grave and stiff-upper-lipped like Mount Hood, window pots of wildflowers and weeds as shoulder patches indicating rank. It barely caught the striped station wagon with the corner of its left dorm window and mumbled, Punks.
The punks stood outside the fence, bags at their feet, glancing up at the gray-and-pink stone-and-wood cottage. Pink flakes snowed off the shutters, the front door, the swinging chair, the meek gate quivering on its hinges under a Japanese breeze. Andy mouthed the word “exfoliation.”
Kerri strode over the aimlessly low gate because she couldn’t waste time searching for the right key. Pacific rain forests had grown between the irregular slabs that made the narrow walkway.
Andy stopped halfway along that path and gazed back at the street. This was how every adventure had ever started. In Andy’s mental dictionary, the entry for “adventure” featured this exact picture: the walkway across the little garden, the pink gate, and the uncharted wilderness beyond.
Kerri located the front door key and rattled the lock awake.
Aunt Margo had told her that she still drove her VW Beetle up from Portland once or twice a year to check on the place. As soon as the door swung open, though, Kerri knew they were the first ones to step inside in at least two years, since she was given the keys—just like one can tell that their space has been violated in the five minutes they’ve been gone. The house was a cave, clean of campfires and energy bar wrappers. A Roman temple minus the guided tour posts. A catacomb for shrouded sofas.
Even Tim walked in slowly.
Kerri and Andy and Nate ventured in, holding on to their scant luggage, guessing the shapes of furniture under wraps and noting the silent airstrike of dust particles in the broken sunrays. Floorboards creaked exaggerated cries of pain under their suede boots and rubber shoes.
What annoyed Andy the most was the utter silence. Worse than reminiscent piano music, worse than a panicking violin. Nothing.
There was something more that bothered her, but she couldn’t grasp it. Everything was like she expected it to be: every framed photograph, every book on the shelves that she still felt too young to read, the wallpaper, the fireplace, the prehistoric TV set. Everything was okay; it just didn’t…sing.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said, trailblazing ahead.
The steps agonized like B-movie actors.
“You take your room as usual, Nate?” Kerri said upon reaching the landing.
“Yeah, I guess,” he replied, peering down that side of the hallway like he expected dart traps to shoot from the walls.
Kerri followed him from a safe distance as he walked up to the dark end and pushed open the door. A somehow cozy blue crypt welcomed him.
Then Nate took a leap of faith, crossed the darkness, and unbolted the shutters.
The rest of the colors splashed in, defibrillating the boys’ room back to life: two berths, a desk, a dartboard hanging on the door. Despite his frequent visits as a kid, Nate’s shier nature had never left a deep imprint in the room; the walls were poster-free and the books on the shelf weren’t his.
“It always felt like a really, really nice hotel,” he said.
Kerri nodded from the threshold, understanding. “I hope it beats the loony houses.”
Andy’s voice came from across the hallway like a fire alarm.
“Kerri! What the fuck happened to your room?”
Kerri sprinted back down the corridor, startling the porcelain dishes, and stormed through the door at the other end.
She saw the sloped ceiling and the sun cat-scratching the shutters. Her butterflies pinned inside their showcases. Her maps. Her books. Her Lego models. Her desk with her colored pencils in a clay vase.
“What? What happened?”
> Andy stood wide-eyed in the middle of the carpet: “It shrank!”
Kerri checked the distance between her head and the sloped roof. She had to duck to look through the dorm window now.
“No, it didn’t. This is what you said was going to happen when we saw the lake again, remember?”
Andy made a slow, Mars-speed orbit on her feet, inspecting around. She stopped on Kerri, her lips beginning to sketch a smile.
“It was always like this?”
She caressed the 1960s-flavored paisley quilt, glance-queried Kerri for permission, and sat down on it. The mattress sighed gently under her bum.
A full smile settled on her face and bit her lower lip, a silent wow in her eyes.
—
Nate wandered in, coatless, hands pocketed.
“So what now?”
Andy sprung to her feet, shaking off the tipsiness of bliss. “Okay, uh…We got a case to solve.”
The other two agreed voicelessly.
“So, um…We should have a club meeting. Uh, five minutes…At Ben’s Corner. You okay with that?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“No, I mean it, because…You know, it’s not like I want to take command or anything; I think we should be a team, make all the decisions together, you know. Reach consent.”
“You mean consensus.”
“Yeah, that. So, you agree on meeting at Ben’s in five?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then…I don’t know, unpack, go to the bathroom, whatever.”
“I’m fine,” Nate said. “I never unpack; I just take my clothes from the bag as I use them.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Okay. How long is it to Ben’s Corner on foot?”
“Five minutes.”
“Let’s go then.”
—
Ben’s Corner had changed little, in the way of other humble establishments that wager that if they don’t try to chase trends, trends will eventually run all the way round and embrace them back. Short of a nuclear attack throwing America twenty years back in technology, Ben’s Corner would not live to see the day it would become fashionable again.
The restaurant was busy enough with lunching workmen and beer-drinkers so that the staff didn’t notice the three hikers arriving, or the dog shaking the rain off on the blue-tiled floor. The jukebox had gone. The radio played “Groove Is in the Heart,” which is a radio’s way of saying it couldn’t care less about the mood of a scene.
They claimed a booth by the window, Andy and Tim sitting next to the tearful glass. Nate grabbed a menu, checked that it was just the same old Michael Jackson—new face-lift—and dropped it.
“Okay, so.” Andy laid her hands on the table. “The Sleepy Lake case.”
Kerri and Nate leaned forward, looking executively interested. Tim suddenly noticed some of his body parts did not look shiny enough and set about to correct that. Andy wished they had a file, or even a cardboard box full of evidence like cops do when they’re revisiting an old case, but all she had at hand to shuffle with was sugar and a bottle of Heinz ketchup.
“Well, we thought we solved it, but we didn’t. Because…”
“Because the least effed up of us is Tim, and he’s licking his testicles right now,” Nate assisted.
“Tim,” Kerri called. “Not at the table.”
“Yes, that’s it,” Andy replied to Nate’s statement. “So, what went wrong?”
No one spoke.
“I think we should try to retrace our steps,” Andy continued. “Let’s think about what we did in ’seventy-seven and figure out what we missed. Kerri?”
Kerri cleared her throat and spoke like a confident sixth grader. “Okay. So, summer nineteen seventy-seven. Uh, I’d been in town for a couple weeks already; Peter and Nate came next, I think; then you. And…we had heard about these sightings of a creature wandering around Sleepy Lake, and we told you about it when you arrived, and then Peter urged us to bike to the lake the following day and, you know, do some fishing and investigate a little. The fishing was kind of an excuse for Aunt Margo.”
“Good. So we packed our fishing gear and a tent and lunch and we went to the lake. Then what happened?”
“Well, it was morning when we got there, and it was a rainy day, like this, with very thick mist. So we set camp, and we probed around, but we found nothing. Then later in the day, we heard something in the woods. We went to check it out…and we encountered the creature.”
“Okay. Was it really the creature, though?”
“We found the slaughtered deer earlier,” Nate intervened.
“Isn’t that just an anecdote?” Kerri said.
“Tell that to the fucking deer.”
“Look, there’s a billion things that could’ve happened to that deer.”
“But all at once?”
“Okay, okay, I take note of the deer,” Andy umpired. “We’ll get back to that. But when we first saw the creature in the woods—”
“It was Mr. Wickley in a costume,” Kerri finished.
“Really? Are we sure it was him?”
The question levitated for a moment over the table.
Nate said, sounding surprisingly calm, “I think it was Mr. Wickley. Because…I don’t know, I mean, I was scared at the moment, but later…it felt worse when we saw the others. Right?”
The girls eyed each other, mutely, without seeing, lost in their own recollections. A solid, monolithic silence sat on the table.
“I mean,” he went on, “did the other ones even have eyes?”
A waiter sailed in, icebreaking through the gloom.
“Hi, welcome to Ben’s; our special today is beef and carrot stew.” He looked up from his notepad at the fourth customer at the table. “Uh, the dog shouldn’t be sitting there.”
Tim scoffed aristocratically at him and returned to the black-and-white Americana view outside the window. The kids tuned out of their flashbacks.
“I’ll have coffee, please. Black,” Nate ordered.
“Same,” Kerri said.
“I’ll have a milkshake. Peach.”
“Kerri?”
They looked up at the waiter.
“Kerri Hollis?” He checked the others. “Nate. And Andrea!” He took his hat off, long blond hair exposed like a very lame TV quiz prize. “Joey Krantz!”
“Hey,” Kerri said, smiling before her brain had even told the mouth to do anything. “Joey. Hi.”
“What are you guys doing here?” he asked, loud enough to turn some heads along the bar. “How’s your aunt Margo doing?”
“Fine, she’s fine. She’s in Portland. We just, uh…came for a long weekend. You know. Reminiscing the good old days.”
“Cool! I expect you’ll find a lot has changed, eh? Seen the water tower? It’s white now. Hey, you still solving mysteries, or are you keeping out of trouble?” His pen wiggled at Andy and Nate, who looked at the table and then at each other and then at pretty much everything in creation minus Joey.
“So what about you? What’re you doing?” Kerri deflected.
“Well, you know. I traveled around…Had a girlfriend in Belden—we just…we broke up recently. And since my old man hurt his back, you see, I’m helping out with the family business.”
“Cool. Cool.”
“I also volunteer for the sheriff’s office from time to time, so who knows? Maybe I’ll get to be a law enforcer like you guys. Anyway. Uh, two blacks and a milkshake, was it? Coming right up.”
He scribbled some dots and basic shapes onto his pad and moved along.
Kerri and Nate checked each other, facial muscles still tense.
“Okay. So,” Andy said, “we saw the lake creature, and then—”
“Peach, was it?” someone cried from the bar.
“Yes, please,” Andy shouted back. “Right. So we saw the lake creature, and then what did we do?”
Kerri and Nate were still fighting a smile each.
KERRI: We ran away.
NATE: Sor
ry, was that “ran” away then, or “run,” as in now? Are you telling or suggesting?
ANDY: Guys, c’mon.
KERRI: Yeah, sorry. I mean…(Chuckle.) You gotta admit that was…strange.
ANDY: Kind of, but—
KERRI: I mean, “How’s Aunt Margo doing?” Like, you know…
NATE: Like he’s channeling the town’s housewives suddenly.
ANDY: Okay, it was awkward.
NATE: It was funny. I mean, he’s a waiter.
KERRI: Yeah! Well, I was a waitress until last week, so that bit’s not funny, but still, something there was funny. I can’t quite put a pin on it, but…
NATE: Maybe the part where he didn’t treat you as a beaver-toothed nerd, or me as a piece of shit, or Andy as a wetback.
ANDY: Okay, I see it was funny. But really, I mean…fuck him.
NATE: Said the girlfriend in Belden.
KERRI: Yeah, shit, “I traveled around…” I think you can walk to Belden.
Nate chortled as Kerri endeavored to pick up the thread again.
“Okay, anyway, what did we do after the thing in the lake? We ran away.”
“Yes, we bravely retreated like Sir Robin.”
“Right,” Andy continued. “What next?”
“We went to see Captain Al.”
The name dropped flat on the chrome-rimmed table, with no one able to follow from there.
“Two black coffees,” the timely waiter said, landing the order off his tray. “And a peach milkshake.”
“Hey, Joey,” Kerri said. “Is Captain Al still around here?”
“Who?”
“Al. Captain Al.”
Joey frowned at the name.
“Oh, wait, you mean Crazy Al?”
“Uh…maybe.”
“Yeah, he’s still around. Have you seen the old man pushing around scrap metal on East Street?”
Andy, Nate, and Kerri stared at the waiter in horror.
“Oh, no, no, it’s not him,” Joey quickly mended. “Don’t worry. Not him. Anyway, you seen the guy? Just follow him. It’s Crazy Al who buys the metal.”
Some form of unremarkable weather, profoundly commonplace for meteorologists but somehow relevant to the overall color of the scene, was taking place. Let us say soft rain and sunshine; let us say lightningless, borborygmic thunder.
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