Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  Leanne stared at him for a second, as if that were precisely what he was to her—a stranger. Then she made her beautiful face over into a mask of amiability. “I’m sorry, Jon. Karen and I have been talking over old times, and I guess it’s got me a little rattled.”

  Jon Silverstein went behind Leanne’s desk and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Leanne sank beneath it, as if he held the weight of the world in his palm. Silverstein sighed and took his hand away.

  “Hello, Karen,” he said, glancing red-faced at us. “Remember me? Jon the Chauvinist?”

  Karen smiled at him affectionately. “Of course I remember you, Jon.”

  “You look great, Karen,” Silverstein said. He stared at me blankly.

  “Stoner,” I said, reaching across the desk to shake with him. “Harry Stoner.”

  Silverstein shook with me. The encounter with his wife had unsettled him, because his palm was sweaty and his hand was trembling. “You two are...?”

  “Friends,” Karen said.

  Silverstein nodded. “So where’s Lonnie?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Karen said.

  Silverstein looked confused. “He’s not with you?”

  “We’re separated, Jon.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Silverstein said, looking down at Leanne, “although that does seem to be the way it is with our generation. Nobody stayed together very long. In fact, none of our friends from the sixties is still married. Except for us.”

  “And we’re getting a little rocky,” Leanne said pointedly.

  There was a momentary lull, in which everyone in the room looked off in a different direction. It was clear that the Silversteins’ marriage was more than a little rocky. I felt bad for the man, mainly because he looked as if he was still in love, where Leanne looked as if she’d stopped caring.

  “I guess it didn’t work out the way anyone expected,” Jon Silverstein said, filling the silence.

  “Why don’t you and Mr. Stoner go out in the hall, Jon,” Leanne said suddenly. “Karen and I have some girl talk to finish.”

  “Sure,” Silverstein said. All of the boyish energy in his face and voice had vanished in the course of the conversation. He literally dragged himself across the room and stepped into the hall.

  I followed him, closing the door behind me.

  Silverstein leaned against a wall and sighed. “Women,” he said, trying to make light of the scene in Leanne’s office. “I guess she’s had a bad day.”

  I smiled at him. “I guess we didn’t help.”

  “You two were...you’re looking for Lonnie?”

  I nodded. “He’s gotten himself into some trouble.”

  Silverstein laughed coarsely. “That’s all he’s ever been—trouble.” He said it bitterly. But then, I’d seen the look on his wife’s face when she heard that Lonnie was missing; I’d heard the history of her relationship with Lonnie. I guessed Jon Silverstein had had to live with that history for too long, even if Lonnie had once been a friend of his. Frankly, I could feel for him.

  “You haven’t seen him this week, have you?” I said.

  Silverstein shook his head. “I haven’t seen Lonnie or Karen in almost nineteen years.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled a cigarette out of a gold case. I hadn’t noticed in the office, but the man was wearing a good deal of gold jewelry—rings, a Rolex. He’d obviously made some money and liked to show it off. Maybe that was what his wife held against him.

  Silverstein lit his cigarette with a gold lighter. Inhaling deeply, he blew a huge cloud of smoke out of his mouth. “What kind of trouble is Lonnie in?”

  “Drugs,” I said.

  He nodded. “It figures. And I guess you told Leanne about it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That explains it. Lonnie’s always been a god to her. A fucking god.” He dropped the cigarette onto the carpet and crushed it angrily with his shoe. Bending down, he plucked the butt off the floor and stuck it in his jacket pocket, then toed at the carpeting until the ash mark had been rubbed away.

  The office door opened and Karen and Leanne stepped out.

  “I’ll be in touch if I hear anything,” Leanne said to her.

  Karen said, “Fine.” She turned to Jon. “The last time I saw you, you were delivering mail on Calhoun Street and hawking concert tickets on the side.”

  Jon Silverstein ducked his head. “That was ages ago.”

  Karen smiled and touched Jon gently on the arm. “It’s good to see you.”

  Silverstein looked up at her and smiled back. “It’s really good to see you again too.” A bit of enthusiasm returned to his face. “Maybe we could all go to lunch. I’ve got the four fifty outside. We’ll hop in and drive over to the Maisonette. Talk over old times. I’ll treat. Or we could go out to the farm. Have Grandma make us some grub.”

  Leanne Silverstein turned abruptly on her heel and walked back into her office.

  Silverstein’s face fell again. “Maybe not,” he said with a long sigh. “Good luck to you, Karen. I hope you find Lonnie.”

  He followed his wife into the office and closed the door behind him.

  25

  IT BEGAN to snow again as we walked up Fourth Street. At first there were just a few flakes, then it started coming down like a hard rain. For several minutes the snow fell so thickly that it was impossible to see. I pulled Karen into an alcove in front of a shop window, and we stood there for a while, watching the snow sweep in wind-driven sheets up the deserted street.

  “Did Leanne tell you anything else?” I asked.

  Karen shook her head. “She just wanted a moment to collect herself and to cry on my shoulder a little about Jon.”

  “Not a happy marriage,” I said.

  “No,” Karen said sadly. “It’s weird, but I kind of feel for her. Even though I don’t like her, I feel sorry for her.” She laughed mordantly. “Christ, she’s wearing pearls and I’m feeling bad! I don’t know why it is that Leanne can always manage to make me feel guilty.”

  I laughed. “I felt sorry for him.”

  “Don’t,” Karen said. “In spite of the way it looked in there, Jon’s nobody’s victim. He could always take care of himself. Even when he worked as a postman, he had a knack for turning a dollar. And it looks like he’s still doing a pretty good job of it. But Leanne...it seems like she’s been hanging by the same thread since the day I met her. It’s no surprise that it’s finally wearing through.” Karen sighed. “Oh, for God’s sake, what do I care? So she’s rich and unhappy. So what? She’s got her life. And I’ve got mine. Jon was right—none of it worked out the way anyone planned. The important thing is to keep moving forward, like the Marine Corps manual says.”

  I smiled at her. “How do you know about the Marine Corps manual?”

  “My brother, Tom, was a Marine,” she said with a touch of pride. “Tough Tom. Tough guy.”

  Karen stared out at the snow. There was snow all over her jacket, in her hair, on her face. I brushed some of it off with my hand.

  “Give me a kiss, huh?” she said, turning toward me. “I could use one.”

  I kissed her.

  When the storm let up for a moment, we walked quickly up to the parking lot where we’d left the Pinto. Once we got inside the car, I took the bottles of muscle relaxant and painkiller out of my pocket and swallowed a couple of pills—dry.

  “You hurt?” Karen said, eyeing me with concern.

  “I’m all right,” I told her.

  She started up the car and pulled out of the lot onto Fourth.

  “Do we have a plan?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Go see Norvelle, I guess.”

  “He isn’t likely to tell us anything we want to know, is he?” Karen said. “I mean, if he’s dealing drugs...”

  “I’ll persuade him,” I said dryly. “The important thing is to find Lonnie and to find out what happened to the crack.”

  I didn’t say it to Karen, but it was also i
mportant to find out who Norvelle’s connection was, assuming that Thomas was the one who put Lonnie in touch with the man. I was hoping that Leanne Silverstein could help us with that. If I got a name from her, I might be able to do a little business of my own with Lonnie’s supplier. Once I got Bo and his friends off my back, I could deal with Jordan. And I planned to deal with him, in my own time.

  ******

  Because of the blizzard, it took us almost thirty minutes to drive up Gilbert to McMillan. By the time we turned onto the little East Walnut Hills side street called Cross Lane, the streets and sidewalks were covered with several inches of snow.

  The house that Leanne Silverstein had directed us to was a ramshackle two-story frame Victorian, with a screened-in front porch and a turret window on the second story. It sat at the end of the block, on the verge of an empty lot. The porch screen was full of holes and several of the upper-story windows had been pasted over with cardboard. There was a single lamp on in the turret window, glowing a warm yellow in the blowing snow.

  Karen parked in front of the house. Before she could get out of the car, I said, “Maybe you better stay here.”

  She turned on the seat and gave me a questioning look. “But you don’t know him.”

  “He’s a tall black junkie,” I said. “I’ll find him.”

  “I mean, you won’t know him to talk to,” Karen said.

  “I don’t think old times are going to get us anywhere with Norvelle. You said it yourself, Karen. He isn’t going to want to talk about a drug deal, especially one that’s gone as bad as this one has.”

  She looked down at the steering wheel. “You’re not going to hurt him, are you, Harry?”

  “I’m not planning to.”

  “Remember that he’s a junkie. All he cares about is getting well and getting off. The most important person in his life is his connection, and he won’t give the man’s name up easily.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “That I come in there with you.”

  I shook my head.

  “I can talk to him, Harry. I know where he’s at. I’ve been there myself.”

  I stared at her for a second and sighed. “All right, Karen. But for chrissake, if anything goes wrong in that house, just come back to the car and drive away.”

  “Without you?”

  “Without me,” I said.

  “You’re scaring me,” she said with a shaken look.

  I said, “Good. Because this is likely to be a scary place.”

  We got out of the car and walked through the blowing snow to the porch. As we stepped up to the front door, I caught the sound of heavy metal coming through the iced-over front window—Kiss, I thought. Inside that front room a girl laughed shrilly and shouted something obscene at someone else. I patted my coat pocket—the one with the pistol in it—and knocked on the paneled wooden door.

  When no one answered, I pounded on the door with my fist. Someone turned the volume down on the stereo, and a few seconds later a short towheaded girl, with a pale freckled face and greasy pigtails, opened the door a crack and peeked out. She was wearing a blue gingham dress with a man’s red cardigan sweater draped over her shoulders. An unlit cigarette drooped from her mouth.

  The girl eyed me hostilely and shivered against the cold. She would have been pretty if she hadn’t looked so strung out. Her arms were like sticks, and her face was careworn and darkly ringed around the eyes. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen; but in most of the ways that counted, she’d never get any older than she already was.

  “What do you want?” she said belligerently. Her voice had an Appalachian twang to it.

  “I want to talk to Norvelle Thomas.”

  “Are you his social worker?” she said.

  It looked like that might be good enough to get us through the door. I said, “Yes.”

  Karen glanced at me, then smiled at the girl. “We’re friends of Norvelle’s.”

  The girl stepped back from the door and pulled the sweater tightly around her chest. “Well, come in, then,” she said. “I ain’t gonna stand here catching pneumonia.”

  We walked into a tiny hall. The girl slammed the door behind us. I could see a living room through an archway to the left and an uncarpeted staircase to the right that led up to the second-story turret. Another short hall ran past the staircase toward a kitchen. An old blacklight poster for Jr. Walker and the All Stars had been taped to the wall by the front door. The concert was at the Black Dome. July 22, 1968. I smiled when I saw the poster. I’d been to the concert.

  “You like Jr. Walker?” I said to the girl.

  “Fuck no,” she said.

  Karen laughed.

  Upstairs a phone began to ring. It rang twice, then someone picked it up.

  I glanced up the staircase. “Is Norvelle up there?”

  The girl shook her head, no. “Cal,” she said.

  “Where is Norvelle?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said sullenly. “You better talk to Cal.” She nodded toward the living room. “Y’all wait in there till I come back.” She started up the stairs, then looked back over her shoulder. “And don’t touch nothing.”

  Karen and I walked into the living room.

  Another teenage girl was sitting on the floor inside, leaning against a cushion covered with a paisley throw. The three pieces of furniture in the room—two chairs and a sofa—had also been covered with paisley throws. There were brick-and-board bookshelves along each wall, filled with science fiction paperbacks and record albums. Drug paraphernalia was scattered on top of the shelves—pipes, roach clips, glass hookahs. A forty-watt light bulb with a paper globe around it hung from the ceiling; a threadbare oriental covered the floor. Piles of dirty clothes sat in two of the corners. The room smelled like dirty clothes. It also smelled faintly of marijuana and sex.

  “Who are you?” the girl on the floor said.

  She pulled herself upright and stared at us curiously. She was about the same age as her friend, but she still had her baby fat. She was wearing jeans and a torn T-shirt. The T-shirt was draped at an angle across her chest, leaving one of her shoulders bare except for the strap of a black leotard that she was wearing as an undershirt. She’d cut her hair in a kind of spiky Mohawk and sprayed one side of it with blue glitter. She’d also made up her eyes with mascara and rouged her cheeks like a clown’s. But in spite of the punk look, she was still obviously a little girl, dressing up like the big kids.

  “We’re looking for Norvelle,” I said to the kid.

  “What do you want with that nasty old nigger?” she said with a sneer.

  “He lives here, doesn’t he?” I said.

  She gave me a bored look. “So? It’s Cal’s house. Cal’s the man.” She got a dreamy look in her eyes and let her head loll back against the cushion. “Cal’s so cool.”

  “Are you his girlfriend?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Me and Renee. He says we do him better than anyone.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “You live here too?”

  “Renee does,” she said a little sullenly. “But I’m going to move in soon. Living at home is a drag.”

  “Is Norvelle here now?” Karen asked the girl

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know. I ain’t seen him.”

  I didn’t feel much like sitting down on any of the furniture. There was something so visibly corrupt about the place that it affected me physically, as if I were staring at an accident.

  I glanced at a huge beaten-tin ashtray, sitting on the floor by the couch. There were no butts in it—just torn-off cigarette filters and a couple of balls of cotton. Karen noticed it, too, and nodded, as if it meant something to her.

  We stood there for a while, waiting for Cal. The girl turned up the stereo and went back to Kiss. I thought about going upstairs and searching the second floor. Then Renee came into the room. The cigarette was still hanging in her mouth, unlit.

  “Thelma,” she said to the other kid. “Ge
t your ass out of here.”

  Thelma made a sour face, but she got up and walked slowly out of the room.

  Renee stared at us for a moment. “Cal’s coming down,” she said in a forbidding tone of voice, as if we’d awakened a monster. She turned on her heel and followed Thelma out of the room.

  “You ain’t no social workers,” she said over her shoulder. “You’re fucking narcs.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked her.

  Renee walked down the hall without answering me.

  I turned to Karen and asked her the same question, “Who told the kid we were narcs?”

  Karen shrugged. “When you do junk, every stranger’s a narc.” She pointed to the tin ashtray. “You know what that shit is?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’ve got to filter junk, Harry,” Karen said authoritatively. “After you cook it up, you’ve got to filter it before you shoot—to get rid of the impurities. Most of the time you use cotton balls as filters. You draw the junk up from the cooking spoon through the cotton into the syringe. If you don’t have enough cotton, though, a cigarette filter will do the job nicely.”

  I stared at the ashtray and felt a wave of disgust pass over me like a flash of heat. “Those kids are junkies?”

  She nodded. “The one with the sweater—Renee—has got railroad tracks on her right arm. She was trying to cover them up, but I caught a glimpse when she went upstairs.”

  I shook my head in despair. “This Cal must be a real charmer.”

  “He’s probably just another user, Harry,” Karen said coolly. “He pushes enough on the street to keep himself high and to pass out a few bags to his girlfriends—in return for favors rendered. It was no different in our day. You just didn’t see it.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “I’m glad I didn’t see it,” I said angrily. “I’m fucking proud of it.”

  Karen wasn’t impressed by my indignation. “Grow up,” she said. She glanced around the corrupt little room. “This is the real world. It always was.”

  26

  AS KAREN and I stood there staring at each other, a tall, skinny, black-haired man walked into the room. We both turned toward him. He looked like a mean Harry Dean Stanton—long, thin redneck face, deeply grooved on either side of his tiny mouth, heavy-lidded blue eyes, sharply hooked nose, uncombed coal-black hair that fell in thick locks across his forehead. He was wearing jeans and an unbuttoned checked shirt that gave anyone who was interested a good view of his sallow, hairless chest and pudgy little belly. I put his age at about forty—the same as mine.