ONE
STOPOVER IN A QUIET TOWN
1 Later, Jack had time to wonder about how it all began. He understood how it ended. It ended in betrayal, destruction, death. But how did it begin? Could he follow the thread of his story back to a single moment in time where he might have saved everyone and everything? He could. He could. And he was surprised to find that this moment was rather mundane.
The day classes let out for summer, Jack returned to his apartment with a cardboard box of History Channel DVDs and found a blinking red light on his answering machine. His suite was on the sixth floor of a six-story tenement on Lakeshore and the elevator was on the fritz. Again. Out of breath, he set the box on the dining room table, aware, suddenly, of the emptiness here. This was not a home.
There was nothing on the walls. No photographs or paintings. It even smelled empty—that generic foodstuff aroma, ghosts of a thousand Stouffer’s frozen dinners. The blinking red light demanded his attention. He pushed the button. It was his sister, Jean.
BEEP. “Jack. The Captain thinks I’m her again. He’s back in Vietnam. He’s getting closer. Thought you should know.” BEEP.
Fuck.
“The Captain.” That was their father, a retired Continental Airlines pilot. During the war he had flown cargo in and out of South Vietnam and had apparently taken up with a Saigon prostitute named Qi while living there. When he got really bad, the Captain called his daughter “Key,” as in “Qi.” He would yell at her: “No more Uncle Sams, Qi! Not for you.” Once, he had backhanded Jean so hard he’d given her a black eye. Dementia. Alzheimer’s maybe.
Jack didn’t want to go back to Franklin Mills.
But he did.
Mostly, though, he didn’t.
Jean wasn’t calling to ask him to come home. She wanted to keep him in the loop was all. The Captain was coming in on final approach and it was likely to get bumpy before the end.
He didn’t want to go back. Franklin Mills was full of traps. Jack traps. Because Samantha was there, too. Sam. But the only warmth in the entire apartment was a purple loofah a woman named Danielle had left behind three years ago.
Jack tossed some clothes into a bag. Ten minutes later he was in his rusting Saturn, driving south on 77, out of Cleveland, toward a town on the edge of a deep lake, a town with a single traffic light. A town full of secrets.
2 By the time he got there his father was sleeping again. The old man dozed in the hospital bed Jean had set up in the living room, where they used to watch monster movie marathons. Labored breaths ruffled the Captain’s bushy white mustache back and forth like dune grass.
“He rearranged the fridge today,” Jean whispered. “Said he wanted to help clean. What he did was he condensed all the half-empty jars to make room. He put the jelly in with the pickles and the ketchup in the pepper jar.” She laughed quietly. “He’s getting worse.”
Jack led his sister onto the back porch, stepping lightly through the sliding glass door and quietly closing it behind them. Through the budding boughs of the oaks behind the house they could see the glassy black surface of Claytor Lake, a private swimming hole that had shuttered in 1984. All that remained was a rickety lifeguard stand that would surely tip over in the next summer storm. The breeze had a cool bite, like it was early April instead of the last day of May, but Jack didn’t mind.
Jean lit a Winston Light, their mother’s brand. She looked a lot like their mother: that straight hair the color of wet sand, those thin eyebrows and little mouth.
Virginia Felter should be here, taking care of the Captain. She had been capable enough, a rawboned lady who drove a bus for John F. Kennedy Consolidated. When she was still alive, Virginia was often found in the bus garage behind the high school smoking Winstons and talking shit with the mechanics. But four years ago, just before the Captain started in with his “transient ischemic attacks,” Virginia suffered a massive coronary while hosing bugs out of number 8’s grille. Dr. Palmstrum reckoned she was dead before she hit the ground.
And so the Captain was his children’s burden. Mostly Jean’s. Jack sent money. The Captain’s pension helped some. And there was Continental stock. Still, watching over the Captain was a full-time job. Somehow Jean also managed to look after her six-year-old daughter, Paige.
“Mind if I stay on a bit?” he asked. “I could help you with the Captain.”
“Of course,” said Jean, exhaling ribbons of smoke that twisted over their heads like thin spirits. “Your room’s all made up.”
“I could watch Paige if you want to get out to a movie or something. You seeing anyone?”
Jean laughed and looked at her brother sideways.
“Hells no,” she said. “Not with the Captain the way he is. It’s slim pickin’s around here. Might like to get together with Anna and catch a movie in Kent.” Anna was her sponsor. She flicked the cigarette into the yard. Then she said, “What do you think of Nostalgia?”
Jack’s breath caught in his chest. He’d seen the storefront of the new antiques place on his way through town. He smiled meekly and shook his head.
“Sam’s there every day,” said Jean. Her voice suggested a dare.
“Last thing she said to me was that she never wanted to see me again.”
“That was before Tony disappeared,” said Jean.
“Well, if she saw me, we’d have to talk about him.”
“Get it out and over with.”
“Nah,” he said. He looked back toward Claytor Lake and shook his head.
“Anyway,” said Jean, shrugging her shoulders and shivering a little.
“The Captain,” prompted Jack. “If he gets worse, will he get violent?”
“He’s on new meds for that.”
“If he does, though, we’ll have to take him up to St. Mary’s.”
“Not yet.”
“What else do the doctors say?”
“That it ain’t Alzheimer’s. Something like it, though. They’re still calling it dementia. Anything they don’t understand is ‘dementia.’ Got him on antibiotics. He has low-grade pneumonia from aspirating food. We have to mash everything.”
“How long?”
“Shit, Jack. A year? Maybe more.”
“Make him right or make it quick,” he whispered.
“Amen.”
“Qi!” The Captain’s voice, powerful and demanding, carried through the thick glass of the sliding door. “Qi! Dung noi gi voi nguoi linh do, goddamn it!”
“I don’t know what the hell he’s saying when he’s like this,” said Jean. “Why’d he have to go and learn Vietnamese?”
3 The Captain was sitting up, a knitted blanket covering his legs, shouting at them in that clipped Asian mountainspeak. He huffed angrily when he saw Jack. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “Qi. Who the hell is this? Khong phai vay, Qi! Khong phai vay.”
Jean stroked his father’s arm. “Shh. Dad?” she tried. “Dad?” But his gaze remained fixed on Jack. “Captain Felter?” He looked up at his daughter. “Captain Felter, this is your son, Jack. You remember Jack.”
The Captain squinted. Recognition washed over his face in a visible wave. “Johnny!” he said. “Hey, ya, buddy! Hey! Yeah. How you been?” His voice was dry, like an eight-track that had been played too much.
“Good,” he lied. Jean nodded and then set off for the basement to fold clothes and give them a moment. Jack sat in the recliner, a ratty, worn tartan thing, frayed armrest showing the wood beneath. It had been his father’s throne during forty-eight-hour turnarounds. It’s where the Captain had sat when they played chess.
“Defense, Johnny. Don’t worry about getting to my king yet. Anticipate my next move. Try to think what I’m thinking. Play your opponent.”
“How are you, Pop?” he asked.
“Right as rain, my man.”
“I’m going to stick around a while. Crash in my old room for a bit if you don’t mind.”
His father nodded, smiled. For a few seconds, the Captain continued to admire his son, but then his eyes began to dart about the room. The bookshelves were full of compendiums of America’s wars: picture books of bloody battles, hunting magazines and National Geographics. Facing them was a tube TV and converter hooked to a dish. Fox News was on, muted (Thank God for small favors, thought Jack). On the wall behind the television were framed photographs: the Captain, his arms around two men in gray fatigues under wet jungle canopy; Jack, age four, high in a fir tree; Jean at twenty-one; Virginia, thinner than Jack had ever seen her, feeding the Captain a piece of cake from her hands inside a VFW hall.
“Isn’t it amazing?” the Captain whispered.
“What?”
“It looks just like our old house. How did they find all the same stuff? It all looks the same! Right down to that Winnie-the-Pooh cookie jar your mother bought at Busch Gardens in 1982.”
Jack braced himself.
“Where do you think you are, Dad?”
“I don’t know, man. But, listen, I walked outside earlier today and this isn’t Park Avenue.”
The Captain was born on Park Avenue in nearby Rootstown and had lived there until age nine. “You think you live on Park Avenue?” asked Jack.
The Captain laughed. “Well, uh, yes, Johnny, I do. That’s where home is. This isn’t home. They just want us to think it is.” A pause. “Also, there’s a woman here looks just like your sister.”
“Dad, that is Jean.”
“No, Jean was here yesterday. That’s a different woman.”
Jack flinched when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Jean squeezed, gently. “Just go with it,” she whispered. “Don’t argue. He’ll just get confused and stop talking if you do. If he wants to live in the past, let him.”
“So why are you home so early?” the Captain asked him. “Don’t you have baseball practice? Coach Young is starting you at shortstop Tuesday.”
“Canceled.”
“Oh, okay.” He licked his lips and stared at his daughter, embarrassed that he didn’t know the strange woman’s name.
“Some ginger ale?” asked Jean.
“Please.”
After Jean walked away, he caught Jack’s attention and pointed to the cabinet below the nearest bookcase. “Get it out,” he demanded.
“I don’t know, Pop.”
“Don’t be such a vagina. Let’s play chess.”
For the next hour and a half, they did. Jack played four games against his father. By the end, he wasn’t holding back. He used conservative openings and strong defenses, but the Captain won every game. Whatever was eating away at his memories, it had not yet consumed the files where he kept chess strategy.
“You still only see your pieces,” the Captain sighed as he dropped the rooks back in the Parker Brothers box. “Chess is about anticipating your opponent’s agenda. You have to play both sides.”
4 She wore a furry yellow-and-black costume and shook with excitement, the fat girl with the colorless hair. “Uzzzzzzzz,” said Paige, her eyes closed as she conjured her best bumblebee impression. She reminded Jack of that girl from the Blind Melon video.
Paige balanced on a red plastic stool so that Jean could make alterations to her costume—her first-grade class was staging an end-of-school “Backyard Zoo” pageant. Jean bent over, pins sticking out of her mouth as she tried to secure the stinger. “Hold still, sweetie,” she kept saying.
“I could sting you, Uncle Jack, but then I’d have to die,” Paige said, suddenly serious.
“Why would you die?” he asked.
“See this stinger,” she said, wiggling her backside, pulling it out of her mother’s hands. “It’s full of barbs. If I sting you, it sticks and then rips off my butt and my belly goes spilling out the hole.”
“Paige! Jesus,” said Jean.
“It’s a fact,” she said. “Also, I’m a queen bee. I’d be a worker bee but they musta fed me royal jelly.”
In the dining room Jack was helping the Captain with a bowl of chicken dumpling soup that had passed through the blender. It was a hot mess of meat and dough and broth. The Captain watched a nine-inch portable TV propped up on the table. Above the Fox News scrawl, helicopter footage showed a charred black crater burning silently a mile from downtown Ferguson. A drone strike had killed a dozen domestic terrorists. Free Will Baptists. They’d packed a U-Haul with explosives and were planning on taking down the St. Louis arch.
“I’m glad you’re here, Butch,” the Captain said, patting Jack’s hand. “Glad you’re home.”
Butch was his father’s brother. But Butch had never come home. He had died inside Tan Son Nhut Air Base during the Tet Offensive.
“You’re welcome,” said Jack.
“Uzzzzzz,” said Paige. He concentrated on her voice and fed the Captain another spoonful of soup.
5 There was only one bar in Franklin Mills, down by the traffic light at the center of town. The Driftwood was a dimly lit workaday pub with a paint-chipped juke and one pool table, a ten-minute drive from the house. Along the way Jack scanned the shadowed country roads, drawing down memories like a different sort of draft.
There was the redbrick cheese store where a bully named Chris once lived. One night when they were fourteen, he and Tony rode their Huffy Pro Thunder two-speeds out here at three in the morning and lit a nest of firecrackers under Chris’s bedroom window. A large, hairy-chested man in white briefs had come crashing out of the front door, swinging an antique scythe. I git you motherfuckers! he screamed.
There was the spot where he’d hit a patch of black ice on his way to pick up Sam one morning, sending his Subaru into a spin that had deposited him in the wrong lane moments behind a semi bound for Youngstown.
And there, slipping out of the darkness: a giant stone church attached to a squat brick building—St. Joe’s. Jack went to school there until seventh grade. It was where the local Boy Scout troop met on Tuesday nights. It was where he met Tony.
He fell in love with Tony before he fell in love with Sam. And it happened the same way it did with women: all at once.
* * *
In 1992, Troop 558 met inside the pole barn behind the church. It was a den of boys and a museum dedicated to their wayward adventures. On the back wall hung framed photographs of Boy Scouts in khaki uniforms at Camp Manatoc (in the winter) and Camp Algonkin (in the summertime). In the center was a panoramic: a contingent of older scouts grouped on a plateau at Philmont. On another wall hung wooden shingles in tidy rows, arranged by patrol unit. On each shingle was the name of a boy. An American flag was tied to a wobbly pole in the corner by the space heater. Wide shelves displayed awesome relics, like an Indian chief’s peacock-feather headdress and a pair of wooden Bigfoot feet that could be tied around your shoes. There was also a stuffed and mounted bird that looked sort of like a dodo, provenance unknown. In winter, the two space heaters made it so hot inside that it felt like you were wrapped in a woolen blanket. It was winter when Jack noticed Tony sitting below the dodo, reading a textbook.
Tony was an eighth-grader at John F. Kennedy public. He was a skinny kid with poky knees and a sharp jawline. He wore wire glasses and his hair was spiky, a strange yellow-orange from cheap spray lightener. Jack unfolded a wooden chair and dragged it over to him.
“Christ,” said Jack. “Is that for one of your classes?”
Tony adjusted his specs and bit at a nail. “It’s my mom’s. She’s taking a class at Kent. Nights. It’s psychology.”
“You wanna be a shrink?”
“No. I’m going to own a bunch of batting cages. Make some real money. I’m going to drive a bimmer. That’s a BMW. My first car’s going to be a BMW. Bet me.”
“I believe you.”
Tony looked up then. “I’ve seen you before. We were at Claytor Lake one summer before it closed. Your mother knows my mother.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, you were playing with the Rizzi twins on the barrels.”
Jack nodded. “So what’s in the book?”
Tony closed the text. On the cover was a bright green aspen leaf sectioned into a jigsaw puzzle. “There’s some freaky shit in here. Like scary, freaky stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Stuff about memory. Like you can’t trust anything you remember. For instance, there’s this experiment they did with a bunch of college students? On video, they showed this crime take place. Guy steals some stuff out of a woman’s bedroom. Then they hand everyone a test, ask questions about the crime. What they remembered. Except the way they worded the questions made them remember it different. One question was, ‘How many earrings did the burglar take?’ All the students had different answers. But here’s the scary part.”
“What?”
“The burglar never took any earrings. He took necklaces and panties and stuff. But no earrings. The questions made them remember it different. Even after they showed the students the video again, some of them still believed they had seen the burglar take the earrings. They were convinced the teacher had switched tapes.”
“Weird.”
“I know. It makes you wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“Well, if anything we remember is real. We. Us. Our parents. Their parents. I mean, if memory can be screwed up just by asking questions a certain way, how can we be sure anything we remember is true?”
“You lost me.”
Tony looked off, over Jack’s shoulder. “Sometimes I get the feeling none of this is right.”
“None of what is right?”
He leaned in closer to Jack and whispered, “Haven’t you ever noticed how old Berlin Reservoir seems to be?”
“What?”
“Berlin Reservoir. All those stone walls. It looks ancient. But it was supposedly built in the fifties. Doesn’t everything seem so much older than it’s supposed to be?”
“I don’t know.”
Tony shrugged. “It’s always creeped me out, that reservoir. Whatever. The thing is, memory is about trust. We have to trust that what we remember is fact. And we have to trust what other people remember for things we never saw. Like when Berlin Reservoir was built. It’s creepy when you think about it.”
It was creepy when you thought about it, Jack realized. That night he thought about it a lot. It was a disturbing and thrilling realization, that our grasp of the truth is dependent on the honesty of older generations, on the companies who write history books. To Jack, it felt like the first Big Idea, the first adult thought he’d ever had. He felt a gratitude for Tony. For sharing such a grown-up thought and thinking he was worthy of such sharing.
From that night on they spoke of Big Ideas before every scout meeting. They exchanged numbers—back then all of Franklin Mills had the same prefix, so you had to remember only four—and talked about their Big Ideas on the phone. It was a different friendship. This wasn’t kid stuff. This wasn’t about getting together and playing baseball. This was important. And Tony had found him worthy. And for that, yes, he loved him right away.
6 The juke was playing “Gimme Three Steps” when Jack walked into the Driftwood, Skynyrd thrumming from tinny speakers that made the band sound older than they were. The cagey air smelled of stale popcorn and yeast, the beginnings of a party that promised to go nowhere. At the back, a lanky guy in a frayed Indians cap leaned over the pool table. A younger man stood by him, arm propped on a cue. Next to the bar was a row of lacquered booths nudged out of alignment. A middle-aged couple sat on the same side of a table, nursing bottles of Red Stripe. A gargantuan fellow in bib overalls perched on a stool at the bar, watching a flatscreen. Jack took a seat at the other end and set his wallet on the counter. A young woman slid out of the kitchen and ambled over. She had dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Under her left eye was a wide scar and she did nothing to hide it.
“Hiya,” she said.
“Dortmunder?” he asked.
“Tall?”
He nodded and handed her his credit card. He felt a little shiver in his chest, his body anticipating the hoppy beer. It had been a long drought. Hard to drink when you have 180 students to keep tabs on. Had been for him, anyway. Some teachers all they could do was drink to get through a day.
The young woman returned with his beer. Jack sipped it and watched the television across from him, which showed images of the smoking crater outside St. Louis.
“Where the fuck are you, Leroy? I’m at the rookery, numbnuts. I’m not going to fight these whelps alone!”
The loud voice startled Jack. For a second he thought the large man at the bar was speaking to him. But the man was staring at the other TV. It showed a computer-generated hillside and a character in Viking armor waiting outside tall wooden doors set into a mountainside. The man playing the video game looked strikingly similar to his on-screen avatar, down to the curly red beard that reached to his chest. He wore a Bluetooth and held a gray controller in his hand.
When another character (this one a spindly wizard) appeared on-screen, the man sighed with relief. “I see you. I don’t care what you had in the microwave. You gotta tell me when you walk away.” Suddenly the Viking character rushed inside the cave, where he and Leroy were quickly consumed by a swarm of flying baby dragons. “Fuckers!” the man shouted at the screen. He pulled out his Bluetooth and tossed it onto the bar. “Maiden!” he called. “More mead!”
The lady with the scar returned and poured the man a Miller Lite. “Nils. Don’t shout. Okay?”
“Sorry.”
“And I’m not your fuckin’ maid.”
“Maiden.”
“Whatever.”
Now that he got a good look, Jack recognized this man. “It’s Nils like thrills,” he used to say when they were kids. “Hey, Nils,” he said.
The Viking looked over. “Jack Felter! What in the actual fuck?” Nils—full name Nils May—smiled. Nils’s old man owned an excavating business that operated out of a tin garage off the highway. Drinking wells, mostly. The large man slid off his seat and skipped down to Jack, wrapping him in a bear hug. He smelled of brisket. “I haven’t seen you since the reunion, man! Northfield Park. We bet on some ponies. You got the trifecta, son of a bitch. How the fuck are you?”
“Good,” he said, climbing out of the squeeze. “Back for a bit. Helping with my dad.”
“I heard. Alzheimer’s?”
“Something like that.”
“My mother had MS. That’s some tough shit, man.” Nils sat next to Jack. “I come down here on Wednesday nights to play Warcraft. Tell my wife I’m playing poker. She hates, hates WOW. Calls it Warcrack. Shelly lets me hook it up here if I order a few drinks. Gotta spend at least ten dollars, though. Yeah. Working down at Georgio’s. The pizza place? Delivering. Good money.” Nils nodded and sipped his beer, waiting for Jack to say something.
“I always, I don’t know why, but I always wanted to open a pizza shop,” Jack said. He thought he could get real good at making pizza, make it so each pie came out same as all the others—same sauce, same texture, same meat-to-cheese ratio. No surprises.
“Maybe that’s why you’re here,” said Nils.
Jack laughed. It was the first time he’d smiled since coming home. Nils was a good guy.
“Hey,” Nils started, “you heard about Tony Sanders, right?”
And the smile was gone. “Yeah,” he said.
“What happened there do you think?”
Jack didn’t say anything. He looked to the moose head on the wall between the TVs, antlers dressed in purple Mardi Gras beads. There were no moose around here. Not anymore.
“Just…” Nils waved his hands in the air like a magician. “Poof! Ta-da! Gone. Vanished without a trace.”
“They were about to arrest him for kiting checks out at that hospital,” said Jack. “He didn’t want to go to prison. Probably in a cabin in Kentucky somewhere waiting for the end of the world.”
“I don’t know, man. I heard he had some problems right before it happened. Shelly said he come in here once wearing a helmet made out of a spaghetti colander.”
This was new information to Jack, who had followed the story about the missing doctor on the Akron Beacon Journal’s website with a detached curiosity. “Hadn’t heard that.”
“He was acting weird,” said Nils.
“I knew him better than just about anybody. He was weird. But never suicidal.” That was a lie. But Nils didn’t need to know otherwise.
They sat in silence, finishing their beers and pretending to watch the news. Then Nils put a dollar under his empty glass, stood, and began to gather his gadgets, which he put in a manpurse slung low over one shoulder.
“Whatever happened, it’s shitty. I guess I shouldn’t be blabbing about it. It’s just so … bizarre. I know you two were close back in the day. Used to watch you two pal around at camp. Didn’t mean nothing.”
“No worries, Nils. Long time ago.”
The redheaded giant slapped him on the shoulder a couple of times and then walked away, back to a wife who did not understand his longing for alien worlds.
Jack ordered another tall one and watched the crater burn. A crew of firemen were spraying the edge with jets of water, as if that could solve anything.
“Hello, Jack.” A familiar voice, that husky, low rattle he used to love. “A little birdie told me you were back in town.”
7 Samantha took the stool Nils had warmed and regarded Jack with a hesitant smile.
Her hair was not quite red and not quite brown. Copper, she called it, though that wasn’t quite right. Cinnamon? Rust? It was uniquely Sam, like so many things. It was cut differently. Bangs. And straight. Not layered, like before. It made her look older. Time had marched on in his absence—a rude sonofabitch. He remembered her with chubby childish cheeks that made her eyes small. Those cheeks were gone now, and her eyes were wider. She wore a thin plaid shirt opened to the third houndstooth button, her neck and nose awash in a galaxy of spring freckles. He used to count them as he lay beside her, naked, while she dozed away an afternoon. Once, he had gotten as far as 141.
“You look old,” she said, that half smile twisting up.
“Yeah,” he said, touching the silver hairs at his temples. “It’s the kids.”
She knew he taught history to high schoolers the same way she knew he was here. “Jean called me.”
“I figured.”
Shelly marched out to ask if Sam wanted a beer. “No thanks. I just stopped in for a second.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Jack when they were alone again.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m sorry Tony ran away, left you behind to deal with all his shit.”
She looked at him closely. “Oh,” she said. “You really think he ran away.”
“Why … what do you think?”
“Tony killed himself, Jack. I watched him go crazy. It was quick. At the beginning of June, he was fine. By the first of July, he was out of his mind. I think he drowned himself in Claytor Lake. Filled his pockets with rocks and walked into the water like Virginia Woolf.”
“What?”
“He was fighting depression, maybe schizophrenia. If you really think about it, all the symptoms were there, all the way back to when we were kids. Remember that night out at the lake?”
Jack flinched.
“Of course you do. The day before he disappeared, he went back there. I know he was there because he tracked sand all through the kitchen when he came home.”
Jack looked around, but the couple in the booth behind them were oblivious to their conversation. “Didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Not then,” she said. “Life insurance won’t pay out on suicide. I thought if he stayed missing long enough, I could just declare him dead. But then the cops found out about the money he was stealing from the hospital and it looked like he was running. I tried to get a judge to issue a death certificate just last month, but the prosecutor filed a motion to block it, because of their open investigation. It’s fucked. I know I sound like a heartless bitch for just caring about the money…”
“Sam…,” he started.
“But he shut me out completely in the end. It was hell. And, well, fuck him for doing it, you know? Leaving me like that. So selfish.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Your visit couldn’t have come at a better time, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I need some help. Do you feel like helping me, Jack?”
He didn’t, actually. But Virginia, for all her faults, had raised him better. “What do you need?”
Sam was instantly relieved. She looked younger again. More like the girl he’d left behind.
“I need you to find Tony’s bones and pull them up out of that lake.”
8 Someone was tickling his feet.
In the darkness Jack forgot where he was, that he’d come home to Franklin Mills and was sleeping in the bedroom where he’d slept as a child. He was quite startled for a second, sure some pervert burglar was caressing his toes. He shot up against the frame.
Paige jumped and scream-giggled with delight. Her shadow was framed by soft light from the hall. Her hair was done up in pigtails that stood out from her head at ten and two. “Mommy told me to wake you up, Uncle Jack! Up, up! It’s a great day for up!” She bounded down the hall, and a moment later he heard her galloping down the stairs.
He remembered, now, leaving a note for Jean to wake him. Sam had asked Jack to meet her at her shop. He had agreed, though he told himself he had no real intention of helping her pull the remains of her dead husband out of Claytor Lake—he didn’t even know if such a thing was possible. It was too deep. Too dangerous. And it couldn’t be drained because the miners had blown a hole into the aquifer back in ’52.
Jack showered and dressed in jeans and a Miami U sweatshirt. He came down, sat next to his niece at the kitchen table, and devoured a bowl of Honeycombs. The house reeked of high-octane coffee. Jack hated the smell—it reminded him of Sister Mary Agnus’s dragon breath. But if coffee and cigarettes were what it took to keep his sister clean, he’d keep his mouth shut. The Captain reclined in his bed in the living room, watching Fox & Friends.
Jack often wondered how two die-hard conservatives had produced such liberal children. His father had never cared for his chosen profession (“Public schools are how the socialists indoctrinate the masses”), but the Captain forgot his son was a teacher as soon as the dementia set in. Jack wondered if there wasn’t some subconscious part of his father directing the destruction of his memories, an algorithm to his forgetting. A happy foreman of the mind. Nonunion, of course.
“The bus!” screamed Paige, jumping up so fast she knocked a bit of milk out of Jack’s bowl. She grabbed her backpack off a hook by the shoe rack, gave her mother a wave, and was halfway down the drive before the door settled behind her. Jack watched the yellow bus come to a stop. It said John F. Kennedy Local Schools on the side. Jean could not afford to send Paige to St. Joe’s.
“You better be off,” said Jean, looking at him in a curious way he didn’t care for.
“I’m not getting involved,” he told her. “I’m just going to hear what she has to say.”
“Who are you?” the Captain asked from the other room.
I hardly know, at present, he thought. “I’m Jack,” he said. “I’m your son.”
“No, you’re not. Jack was here yesterday.”
9 He drove the familiar route into town and it felt a little like stepping back through time.
* * *
The summer after Jack’s sophomore year, Sam moved to Franklin Mills from Warren, a factory town near the Pennsylvania border. One summer afternoon, Jean found her sunning on the shore of Claytor Lake—which was officially closed by then but overrun by neighborhood kids who claimed it as their own private beach from June to September. Sam and Jean were on their way to eighth grade.
Jack didn’t think much of her at first.
For one thing, Sam was too young to be on his radar. He still thought of his sister as a little girl, and, by extension, all her friends must be little girls. For another, Sam was annoying. Around noon, she and Jean would take a break from swimming and walk to the house for lunch. Most days, he was inside with Tony playing Nintendo—Duck Hunt, Master Blaster—and the girls would sit on the couch behind them with their sandwiches, enveloped in a cloud of sun and coconut, and Sam would start in on her whispering. Sam was always whispering to his sister. Like she couldn’t be bothered to talk in Jack’s company. And after the whispers came the giggles. Or worse—the high-pitched screams. She was flat-chested and wore long rock-and-roll T-shirts (Journey, KISS) over her bikinis. Also, Jack was in love with Jessica Farley that summer. She was a young woman, a blonde, in his own grade. Sure, Jessica had never spoken to him, but he had a plan for when they would see each other again in the fall—he had written a list of conversation starters cut into a square and laminated that he kept in his wallet, at the ready. For many reasons, Jack did not see Sam. Not until the week of the county fair.
It was mid-August and Franklin Mills was suffocating. It was the kind of heat wave that pushes down the branches of the trees and turns blacktop into a bubbling mess. A stubborn high-pressure system had settled over northeast Ohio like a giant dome. Dick Goddard, the godfather of Cleveland meteorology, called it a once-in-a-lifetime event. Scientists at NASA’s Lewis Research Center said it was like a mini version of the red spot on Jupiter. It was ninety-six degrees in the shade when the Captain returned from Arizona on turnaround and the Felters packed the Suburban for the journey to the county fair—a cooler of soda and beer, sunblock and mosquito repellent, blankets for the ride home. Jack got to bring Tony. Jean brought Sam.
They split up when they arrived at the fairgrounds, a bluegrass field covered with long white tents. Clickety steel rides sparkled aggressively in the hot sun. Virginia had promised to volunteer at the St. Joe’s sausage sandwich stand and the Captain wanted a good seat for the demolition derby. The girls set off for the 4-H barn and Jack and Tony headed for the carny games, loaded down with singles the Captain had pulled from a pocket.
“There’s tricks to beating some of these games,” Tony said, leading the way. Tony always walked with his hands in his pockets, leaning forward like he was fighting the wind. Jack tried to keep up, snaking through the crowd of people in Dale Earnhardt tees and cut-off jean shorts. “There,” he said, pointing to a rugged man in a red-and-white-striped top hat standing beside a mechanical scale.
“You can beat guess-your-weight?” asked Jack.
“It’s never just guess-your-weight. It’s guess-your-age, guess-your-birthday, too.”
The carny was talking to a plump young woman with a pretty face. Even Jack could tell she was pushing two hundred. Why she had asked the man to guess her weight instead of her age or birthday would forever remain a mystery.
The carny scribbled something on a piece of paper, handed the slip to the woman with an air of condescension, then leaned back on his display of prizes.
The woman sniffed. “The hell you say,” she spat.
The carny shrugged. “Step on the scale,” he invited. “Prove me wrong.”
For a moment, she considered it. “You have it rigged high.”
“The scale is as true as a St. Joe’s girl on her wedding day,” he said.
“Give me back my money,” she demanded.
“All sales are final. Pick age next time. You have a young face.”
She opened her mouth to say something, then restrained herself. Her friends patted her on the back and then escorted her toward the funnel cake booth.
“I’ll take that bet,” said Tony. “And I’ll take that when we’re done.” He pointed to a slingshot tucked in the upper corner of the prize wall. It didn’t look street legal.
“That’s an upper-level prize,” said the carny. “I have to guess wrong on your age, weight, and birthday for an upper-level prize. How about a frosted Foghat mirror?”
Tony pulled out a wad of cash. “I have ten dollars. It’s three dollars a guess, right? How about we put the whole ten on just one guess, my birthday, and if I win I get the slingshot?”
The carny looked around. The stream of the crowd continued down the main drag. Nobody was looking their way. The carny pocketed the greenbacks and pulled out his notepad. When he wrote this time his hand was precise with its penmanship.
Jack had a sinking feeling in his stomach. They were dealing with a professional and he had pegged Tony as a mark. And maybe he was. And now he would have to front his friend enough money to make it through the rest of the day. Still, the odds were technically in Tony’s favor—the carny had to come within two months of his correct birthday, after all. But there must be some advantage he didn’t see. Some secret carny mind-reading hoodoo.
“What’s your birthday?”
Tony smiled. “October twenty-seventh.”
The carny wadded up the piece of paper and chucked it at them. “You fuckin’ cheat,” he said.
Jack reached down and grabbed the paper, held it tight.
“The slingshot,” said Tony, pointing.
“Take your money back,” the carny said, pulling the singles out of his apron pocket.
“No,” said Tony. His voice had never sounded so adult. “The slingshot. Or double my money. Unless you want to take it up with the fair chief.”
Jack doubted there was such a thing as a “fair chief,” but the carny got the drift. He dug back into his apron and came out with twenty dollars. “Here,” he said. “Now scram. Get the fuck away from me.”
Tony pushed the bills into his jeans and grabbed Jack’s arm, “C’mon,” he said, pulling them toward the rides. As they walked, Jack opened the crumpled paper. It was hard to read. Just three letters. Jack thought it might be “Jan” for “January.”
“He made it hard to read on purpose,” Tony explained. “That way, he can say it means January, June, or July. Since he gets a two-month handicap, he’ll always win unless your birthday is in October.”
“How did you know that?”
“My old man has a book about how to beat carny games,” Tony said, nonchalantly. “If you know the tricks you can really clean up when they come to town. My dad used to take me to fairs all over Ohio. We’d come back with a trunkload of merch.”
Tony treated Jack to a roll of tickets and they spent the next hour riding not-quite-up-to-code death traps. At the end of the main drag was the Caterpillar.
The Caterpillar was a long train of white pyramidal pods, each enclosed under Plexiglas. The train rolled around a giant loop, carrying its passengers upside down, over and over, before reversing direction and going around the other way. The gimmick was that the pods were arranged in pairs, facing each other, and when the Caterpillar climbed the loop, the car in front of you collided against your own, bringing you to within a few inches of another person’s shocked face.
“Ah, man,” said Tony, pointing out their windshield at Jean and Sam in the pod across from them. Jean flicked him off. Sam, seated directly across from Jack, whispered something funny in his sister’s ear.
The car hitched forward, pulling them up the loop. Jean and Sam’s pod was traveling backward. Then the force of gravity brought Sam’s car crashing against Jack’s. It was a thunderous clap. It was the sound of the pods colliding. It was the sound of Jack’s future altering course, the sound of his destiny snapping like an elastic band drawn past its breaking point.
Sam’s face was inches away from his own, and for the first time he looked into her eyes. Dark as volcanic rock. They pulled at him like mini black holes. And he saw her: her billion freckles, her copper hair, the gap between her two front teeth, the way her hot-pink T-shirt fell off one shoulder. He noticed a thousand little things in that second of time: the way her hair was so sun-bleached near her scalp that it was hard to tell where it grew from her forehead; her thin little eyebrows; her cracked lower lip. She stared back at him, daring. He had never looked into a girl’s eyes for so long. She smiled and mouthed a single word, “Hi.”
They looked at each other, thin smiles playing at their mouths, until the ride ended. When it was over, Jean pulled Sam toward the 4-H tent. Jack watched Sam go. Some distance away, nearly lost in the mob of people, she turned to find him looking after her.
The back of the Suburban was set up with sleeping bags for their journey home when the fair closed at eleven that night. Before they were on the highway, Jean and Tony had nodded off. Jack’s hand found Sam’s. She stroked his fingers. He reached over and gently touched her arm. They held each other the whole way back, his face in her long hair that smelled of the sun and the earth and the hot Ohio air.
10 Nostalgia was at the corner of State Route 14 and Tallmadge, across from the Driftwood, an emporium full of repurposed antiques. Sam was a picker before picking was a thing. When they were dating she used to drag Jack all over Ohio searching for dilapidated barns full of treasures in forgotten corners of the state, places with names like Knockemstiff and Mingo Junction. She’d dress in overalls and pull her hair back in a ponytail. She could talk a farmer out of a handwoven Amish rocker for thirty dollars. He’d seen her do it. They never knew what hit them.
In college Sam learned how to refinish her finds and flip them on Craigslist. Enough for beer money. Made a name for herself in Ravenna. After Tony disappeared, she cashed in their savings and bought the corner of the new plaza and placed a sandwich board outside, made herself too busy to think about what was happening.
Jack stepped inside Nostalgia at five to eight, the cowbell above the door clinking softly. The place was a cluttered, cozy mess: half-open drawers full of wood stamps, shelves of Underwood typewriters, cabinets full of jade figurines, a rolltop desk stacked with paperback books, Grossvater beer logos. The air was dusty and smelled of industrial binding glue.
“Back here!” she hollered from another room behind the big-button cash register. He walked through the polka-dot sheet that served as a door. Beyond was her workshop. Sam crouched beside a chifforobe, sanding a stubborn corner. She dropped the scour, wiped her hands on her bibs, then pulled off a pair of plastic safety goggles. “What d’ya think?”
“It’s you,” he said.
“I meant to say so last night, but I was real sorry to hear about the Captain,” said Sam, leaning against the dresser.
“Thanks.”
“He did a big favor for me right before he had his first stroke.”
Jack felt a hitch in his chest. The thought of his father doing anything for Sam made him feel ugly inside.
“This place is great,” he said at last. “Really great. Perfect for you. Is it going well?”
“No,” she said. “That’s why I need your help. Why we need to find Tony’s body.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Most weeks I don’t see a dime from Nostalgia. I can barely pay the utilities. There’s nothing left over. Tony’s life insurance will pay out seven hundred thousand. And that will settle things.”
“But you said it was suicide. They wouldn’t pay on a suicide, right?”
Sam waved the thought away. “My lawyer says that if we found the body, they’d never be able to determine it was suicide,” she said. “Not after all this time. They’d have to call it an accidental drowning.”
Jack watched her wipe away the tear that leaked from the corner of her left eye and let her pretend it was dust. There was an emotional center under that steel. He’d seen it once or twice. This was survival mode, her armor against the world, her default state. “So just go to the cops,” he said. “Tell them you think he took a swim or something that night. Never came back. They’ll be able to search the bottom.”
“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “I tried that. This fucking detective tells me they have proof Tony drew money from one of his accounts after he disappeared. They’re not going to waste their time.”
“Well, if they have evidence he’s alive…”
“It was me,” said Sam. “I withdrew that money. It was five hundred bucks. I did it every other week until they froze it. Tony told me to. It was for bills. I didn’t know it was a business account. How was I supposed to know? All that kiting check stuff? He wasn’t kiting checks. I was withdrawing money from the hospital’s petty cash. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. But ignorance isn’t a defense, right? It was me. It was all me. I tell the police, and now I’m on the hook for it.”
Jack rubbed the bridge of his nose and tried to collect his thoughts. “What set Tony off?” he asked after a moment.
“He was working out at Haven,” she said. “Up on Fisher? He got this new patient he was all excited about. Then he got sick real quick. Paranoid. He started boiling water before he would drink it. He said the fluoride in the water was making us crazy. The day he went out to Claytor Lake, Tony told me there were jet planes outside spraying chemicals into the air.”
Sam walked to a squat hundred-year-old cherrywood drafting table. She reached into a drawer and withdrew a plastic Target shopping bag stuffed with papers and handed it to Jack.
“This is everything I found in his desk,” she said. “It’s all crazy talk. Read it. You get a pretty good sense of where his mind was in the end. Maybe he was just sane enough to realize he might hurt me if he got any worse. I think he was worried he might be like his father.”
Jack sighed.
“I know you’re the last person I should be asking for help,” she said. “But I don’t have anybody else.”
I should have listened to my mother, he almost said. Virginia had warned him that Sam was damaged goods. A barracuda, she’d called her, like that Heart song.
Instead, he nodded. “Let me see what I can do,” he said. “No promises.”
11 Jack returned home just before noon. There was a sick feeling in his stomach, a tug of unease paired with a sense of urgency. What he finally decided was that he felt manipulated, pushed in a direction toward some unseen end. Manipulated by whom? By what? By the unnamed disease that stole his father’s memories, corrupting a bond he’d taken for granted? By Sam, who could still pull his strings?
The question was as old as history itself: Why are these things happening to me?
At least Jean had always been true. Always with him, honest.
If anyone had reason to complain, it was her. She’d gotten tangled up with a member of Sam’s family, too. And had barely survived. She had the Captain to deal with now. And yet she seemed to enjoy the defeating work of keeping their father alive. Jack felt guilty for being so selfish.
“You okay?” asked Jean as he walked to where she waited for him on the porch.
Jack reached out and pulled his sister to him, tightly. “I love you,” he said, his energy draining out of his body, from his mouth to her shoulder, in a long, aching sigh. “I don’t know how you stay. You’re so much stronger than me.”
Copyright © 2015 by James Renner