He peered at me over his wire glasses.
“Hello,” he said.
I nodded.
“Charles Henry,” he said, offering a hand. I didn’t have a chance to check it for blood before I took it. “Manager, Henry’s Grocery. I don’t believe I know you.”
I thought, why would he? But then, in a small town, I guess if you’re the local grocer you get to know all the local faces.
“No,” I said. “I’m just staying at my father’s place.”
Henry’s face was screwed up like he was detecting a bad smell, but since I couldn’t smell anything, I figured that was his normal expression. “That doesn’t mean you can’t sign the petition,” he said. “It’s open to anyone.”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
He shoved the clipboard at me. “To keep the parade family-friendly,” he said. “Just sign down there. We’re getting a lot of names, but we need more if we’re going to be able to get the mayor to back down.”
I smiled politely and waved my hands in front of me. “I don’t really know much about all that, but thanks, and good luck, okay?”
As I tried to wheel the cart around him he said, “Don’t you believe in decency?”
I honestly thought it was a bit overrated, but had a hunch this was the wrong time to say so. “Listen, really, good luck, but I’m really a bit pressed here,” I said, and got the cart around him, feeling his glare all the way down the aisle.
When I returned to the pickup with the groceries, I knew Dad wanted to look in the bags, see whether I got the order right, so I put them right behind my seat where he couldn’t reach them. I saw him glance back there a couple of times, the anxiety plainly visible on his face, but with his ankle so sore, he couldn’t shift around very far.
“Met Mr. Henry,” I said, turning the key and pulling the transmission down into drive.
“Oh,” said Dad, still pissed over our earlier argument.
“His face always look like that?”
Dad didn’t respond, and we didn’t talk the rest of the way back.
A small crowd gathered when we came down the hill and to a stop behind Dad’s cabin. At a glance, it looked like most everyone I’d seen earlier. The older couple, the well-dressed heavyset guy, and Bob Spooner.
They gathered around Dad’s side, opened the door for him, helped him out. Spooner saw the crutches behind the seats, grabbed them, assisted Dad in getting them under his arms. “Come on, Arlen, let’s get you inside.”
I got out the driver’s door, not rushing. Everyone else wanted to help. They seemed to have a genuine affection for Dad, particularly Bob and the older couple. This, I was learning, was not your typical fishing camp where the guests were strangers. This was some kind of family.
I brought in the groceries and my new clothes and the bear repellent, glancing over my shoulder into the woods as I approached the cabin. It was dusk, and the trees were losing their distinctness and blending together into a single shadow against the darkening sky. I stopped a moment and listened, hearing nothing but a light breeze blowing through the pines. Now, with daylight fading, it was hard to tell where, exactly, the body had been. It was long gone now, taken away shortly after May Wickens fell into her father’s arms, and the entire incident, in many ways, seemed part of the distant past. Almost as if it had never happened.
Dad was inviting everyone to come back in an hour. Bob Spooner said he did, indeed, have a stringerful of pickerel hanging off the dock that he could clean up before then, and the others were making offers of what they could bring. Before they could head back to their respective cabins and get ready, Dad wanted to introduce me formally to everyone, even if I’d already made their acquaintance.
“Bob I know,” I said, shaking his hand again. Then Dad introduced me to Hank and Betty Wrigley, the older couple, who came from Pennsylvania every fall to rent cabin 4 for three weeks, and finally, the plump guy decked out in Eddie Bauer, who pressed his sweaty palm into mine and shook it for at least three seconds longer than he should have. Everything about him screamed “sales.”
“I’m Leonard Colebert, and I’m in diapers!” He beamed.
The others either shook their heads or rolled their eyes, or both. I guessed that they’d heard this one before.
“No kidding?” I said.
“That’s right. I own Colebert Enterprises, makers of diapers for infants, toddlers, bedwetters, adults, you name it. If you can’t hold it, we will.” He laughed.
I found myself discreetly wiping the sweat from his hand on the backside of my jeans. I wondered if I was starting to develop a phobia about handshaking.
“Well,” I said. “You been coming here long?”
He shook his head. “Only a couple years. Not as long as Hank and Betty here, certainly not as long as Bob. Bob, how long you been coming up here?”
“Thirty, thirty-two years,” Bob said evenly. “Right back to when Denny himself had it. Didn’t have running water or toilets in the cabins back then, but then Denny sold the place around 1980, and Lyall Langdon bought it, did a bit of upgrading, and he was the one sold the place to your dad. But they’ve always hung on to the name Denny’s Cabins. Everyone knows it by that, and it’s a name with a certain recognition factor.”
“And you?” Leonard said to Hank and Betty Wrigley.
Betty, quietly, said, “Well, I guess nearly twenty years. We used to come up for a week every summer, but once Hank and I were both retired, we made it three weeks.”
“What sort of work did you retire from?” I asked, already weary of Leonard leading the conversation.
Betty said, “I was a nurse, and Hank here was in construction.”
Hank nodded. “I had my own crew. We built houses, mostly.”
“Me,” said Leonard, “I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I just love it too much. Love it love it love it. But I like to get away from it all, too, you know. I could afford to stay anywhere, but I like it here.”
Dad shot Leonard a look that said “Asshole.”
Bob Spooner said to Dad, “You want to give Orville, and, you know, a call, see if they want to come out.”
Dad waved a hand dismissively. “We’ll see.” He changed the subject. “Hey, we picked up some cans of anti-bear spray. Anybody wants to borrow a can, let me know.”
Bob smiled. “I keep my Smith and Wesson in my tackle box. Maybe I’m gonna have to start carrying it with me everywhere I go.”
Terrific, I thought. We could all get guns and wander around the place packing heat.
Everyone agreed to meet back at Dad’s place within the hour, and once Dad was settled inside, Bob motioned for me to join him.
“It’s a good thing you’re here, your dad really needs you right now,” he said. Bob was a tall guy, an inch or two over six feet, and even though he was twenty or more years older than I, I had to work to match his stride.
“Yeah, well, he’s not always the best at making one feel welcome,” I said.
“He does like things just so,” Bob conceded. “But he’s really improved this place since buying it from Langdon. Langdon, he fixed the place up when he first bought the camp, but in those last few years he had it, he let it run down. Broken boards in the docks, busted steps into the cabins. You had to be careful you didn’t trip and break your neck.”
“If it was a safety issue, I’m sure Dad was all over it,” I said. I don’t know whether I was comforted or distressed by the fact that I might have come by my own safety phobias honestly.
We were walking along the lake’s edge, listening to the water lap up against the shore. We passed a high, small wooden table with a hole cut in the center, and positioned directly under it, a short metal trash can with a lid on it.
I pointed. “What’s this?”
“That’s where we clean our catch,” Bob said. “Scrape what’s left into the hole, falls into the bucket. Has to be emptied every day. That right there would be incentive for a bear to wander down here. Need to mention that to Arl
en.”
My eyes darted about nervously. I reached under the table and gingerly lifted the lid for a peek inside. An eye, still tucked into a fish’s severed head, glared at me.
I put the lid back on.
“Anyway,” Bob continued, “your dad’s kept what was good about this place, and fixed what was bad, and I’m grateful to him for that. This lake, it means the world to me, coming up here year after year. The fish don’t bite quite the way they used to, there’s a few more people fishing out of this lake than used to, but it’s still beautiful up here. I’m up here three weeks of every year, and the other forty-nine I’m wishing I was. I’m thinking, now that my wife is gone—she passed four years ago from cancer, awful thing—that maybe I’ll spend my whole summer here. If I thought your father would go for it, I’d sell my home in the city, get cabin two winterized like the one your dad lives in, just live up here year-round.”
“You should talk to him,” I said. “I bet he’d go for it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But first, he’s going to have to figure out what to do about them.” He nodded his head back in the direction of the farmhouse. “They’re trouble.”
“Dad doesn’t want to talk about them.”
“That’s ’cause he don’t know what to do about them. And that embarrasses him.”
“Just what’s the problem?”
“They remind me of that bunch at Waco, remember them?”
I nodded.
“Cutting themself off from the world, thinking everybody’s out to get them, getting themselves ready to defend themself against attackers.”
“What attackers?”
“The government, most likely. But if not them, black folk, homosexuals, Communists, who knows? That woman, the young one whose boyfriend got eaten by the bear? She’s got a ten-year-old boy. He don’t go to school. They teach him right there, up at the house. Y’imagine the kind of poison that’s going into that boy’s head?”
A hopeless feeling washed over me.
Bob led me out onto one of the five docks. On one side, secured with braided white nylon rope, bobbed an aluminum boat, about fourteen feet long, loaded with fishing poles, tackle boxes, nets, and life preserver cushions. “That’s my rig,” Bob said. The other side of the dock was empty, and Bob reached for a metal chain slipped around one of the posts. I recognized it as a stringer, with oversized hooks that closed like a baby’s safety pin through a fish’s jaw and kept your day’s catch fresh, and underwater, until such time as you wanted to bring it in and clean it.
Before Bob pulled the stringerful of fish out of the lake, he said to me, “Whaddya say, tomorrow morning, I take you fishing? We’ll go out early, before you have to start helping your dad with camp chores.”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. It actually sounded like a fun thing to do. More fun than with my son Paul, griping about not having his Game Boy with him.
Bob gave me a thumbs-up. “Wait’ll you see what I got today. We got some good eatin’ here, that’s for darn—”
He pulled the stringer out, and there was nothing there but five pickerel heads that had been raggedly, savagely separated from the rest of their bodies.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bob said, shaking his head slowly. “Those fucking dogs. Again.” He looked back in the direction of the farmhouse. “They love their fucking fish.”
7
“SORRY,” BOB SPOONER SAID when he came into Dad’s cabin later. “No fish. They made a break for it.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Dad said, sitting at the kitchen table, breaking up romaine leaves into a bowl. “They got off your stringer?”
“It’s amazing,” said Bob. “I must notta snapped the clips shut. I’m an idiot.”
Bob had told me he wasn’t going to tell Dad about the pit bulls eating his fish. Dad had had a bad enough day, what with a dead guy being found on his property and wrecking his ankle. When I asked him how he could be sure it was the Wickenses’ dogs, Gristle and Bone, Bob explained that Timmy Wickens, or one of his grown sons, often brought the dogs down by the lake, letting them off the leash to splash around in the water.
“Couple times, I’ve seen those little bastards coming out of the water, fish in their mouths, chewing them up and swallowing them like dog biscuits. And then we go out, check our stringers, there’s nothing there but the heads.”
“You complain?”
Bob smiled at me, like I was a poor, simple soul. “You try talking to those people.”
Sooner or later, I felt, I was going to have to.
Before Bob came over with his fish story, I went back to Dad’s cabin and found him leaning up against the kitchen counter, slipping a key off one of four nails that had been driven into the wall. He tossed it to me, and, not being particularly sports-inclined, I panicked as it flew through the air toward me. You don’t want to miss a toss from your father. Somehow, I got it, and he said, “That’s for cabin three. You can use it long as you want.”
“Okay. But I don’t mind camping out here on the couch, in case you get a chance to rent it. Besides, you could probably use the help around here, like grabbing you the TV remote.”
“No, it’s okay. You take it. You should have some privacy. There’s some sheets and blankets in the closet in my bedroom you can use.”
Fine, I thought.
“Tomorrow, I’ll show you what needs to be done around here. Couple days, I should be back to normal.”
“I can take as much time as you need,” I said, although I knew I couldn’t stay away from work that long. With only a year in at The Metropolitan, I didn’t have much rank and hadn’t earned many favors. “I talked to Sarah, she said she’ll clear it for me with the other editors.”
“How’s she doing? You still making her life hell?”
“Like father like son,” I said.
The words were out of my mouth before I could get them back. They just slipped out. You could almost see them hanging in the room. I wished there were some way to reel them back in, stuff them back into my big, fat mouth.
Dad looked at me, and I was expecting him to give me a blast, but instead, he turned his back to me and washed his hands in the sink.
“Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, studying his hands as though getting them clean was the most important thing he’d ever had to do.
“Really, I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. That’s not how I feel.”
Dad grabbed a towel, wiped his hands off. “Sure it is,” he said. “You’ve always thought I was hard on your mother. I know that.”
“No, no, that’s not true. When I was little, yeah, you could be a bit tough on her, on all of us, but later on, when we got older, I don’t know.”
“I know you blame me for that time…”
I paused. “What? You mean when she went away? When I was twelve?”
Dad turned away, pivoting on one foot so as not to put weight on his bad ankle, and hung the towel back on the rack on the oven door. He said nothing.
I said, “She was gone for, what was it, six months?” Still no response from Dad. “I remember she phoned all the time, to talk to me and Cindy, but I never saw her once for, like, half a year. All you’d tell us was that Mom needed some time.”
“I don’t want to get into this now,” Dad said. He turned, and started to slip when he lost his balance trying to keep his weight off his injured ankle. I ran forward, but Dad caught himself before I got there. I handed him his crutches and he made his way over to the table.
“Pass me those buns,” he said. “I’ll butter them.”
Not long after that, Betty and Hank Wrigley showed up. He’d brought some booze, and she had a bowl of potato salad covered with Saran. Then Bob arrived, telling his lies about what happened to his fish, and soon after that, Leonard Colebert, the diaper magnate, came through the door that led to the porch, two pie boxes tied with string hanging from his index finger. He must have done a fast pastry run i
nto Braynor.
It was a party.
We cooked and ate and drank, and drank some more. At one point, I was sitting on the porch, Colebert in a chair to my left and Bob on my right. Colebert, it seemed, had one topic he liked to talk about more than any other.
“There’s millions in diapers,” Colebert said. “We’ve barely tapped the market.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You got all the old people thinking they need ’em now. I see all these commercials, these women, they don’t look a day over forty, running along the beach, getting their toes wet, prancing about, liberated from having to find a bathroom in a hurry. What else do you want?”
“Listen, this is just the beginning,” Leonard said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It’s all in the marketing. As you say, we’ve created this need among old people who might actually have been able to hold it, but now figure, what the fuck, who needs to, right? Let ’er rip. I mean, sure, there’s lots of people got a genuine need, but that’s a limited market. But what about everyone else, middle-aged and younger, who figure they don’t need a diaper? You for instance.”
“Me?” I said. “What about me?”
“Say you’re on a trip, you’re doing the interstate, you want to make good time, you don’t want to have to stop to take a whiz, so you wear a diaper, you can drive for hours. You’ve got your family with you, everyone whining about taking bathroom breaks, but you put them all in diapers, you get to where you’re going sooner, which means you can start having fun sooner.” He pointed his finger at me for emphasis. “We’re talking convenience. Like take when you’re watching TV, say, like, a Super Bowl, you don’t want to miss a touchdown while you’re standing over the can, shaking that last drop from your dick.”
Bob looked across at me, then gazed back at the reflection of a full moon in the rippleless lake.
“Gamblers, of course, have been wearing them for years,” Leonard informed us casually, like he figured everybody already knew this. “Say you’re playing a slot machine, you don’t want someone else taking your place when you go to the bathroom, that machine is yours, right? You know your win is just a crank away, you can’t afford to walk away. Or you’re at the blackjack table, you’re on a streak, you gonna walk away from a thousand-dollar payoff? When you’re in a diaper, you keep shoving in those nickels, you keep playing those hands.”
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