Lake Overturn (48 page)

Then, in the corner of his eye, he had seen a woman come out of the station and recognize him.

Enrique’s split-second reaction to being recognized by an adult was to inhale to say hello. But then he remembered where he was—watching the men’s room door at the bus station—and leaped onto his bike.

He sped across town toward home. The fact that he had believed, for a moment, that he had been caught gave Enrique an awful realization: he had sat there on the curb, all those times, for all those hours, in plain view of all of Eula. What was he thinking? It didn’t matter that the woman was some crazy-eyed drifter—no one he knew. He made the decision, and knew that this time it was for real: he would never go back there.

No more experiments; no more bus station. He had lost both his hobbies at once. Thank God he still had his bike.

“M
OM
!” G
ENE BARKED
as he entered the trailer, breathless from the long walk.

Connie sat at the table, soaking in the cool and quiet of home after her trip. When she had pulled in an hour ago, Lina had come out onto her porch. “Back early,” she had said.

“Yes.”

“That’s good, ’cause I don’ want Gene coming over here no more.”

Connie had responded to this only with a placid smile.

“I don’ like the way he looks at my Jay.”

This was a test, a Temptation. How best to respond? But before she could decide, Lina had gone back inside, letting the screen door bang.

“Sit down, Gene,” Connie now said.

He inhaled to tell her about the corpse and the policemen who put the weeping bus driver’s hands in cuffs—not for having killed the man, but for having dumped all the kids out on the road—and who told him, Gene, to skedaddle. Then he saw that his mother would hear nothing of it and shut his mouth.

He must see that I’m different
, Connie thought when she saw Gene’s expression shift. “Sit down.”

He sat.

“We’ve never been much like mother and son, have we, Gene?”

He scowled and looked away.

“It’s all right, Gene. Look at me. It’s all right. We’ve just got to acknowledge it, that’s all. I want to ask you something. What do you
need
from me, Gene?”

“Nothing,” Gene said.

“Nothing? Nothing at all? You don’t need food, or clothes, or a house, or a ride to the library?”

Gene gave one of his wild, exasperated shakes of the head. “Yes, I do need
those
things.”

“Then those are the things you’ll get, nothing more,” Connie said, gently and with finality.

Gene rose and went to his room. He shut the accordion door between them and rattled the handle till the magnet caught, leaving Connie alone in the presence of Christ, as she had been before. There was no room for games and false niceties in this new life—only truth.

In the minutes that followed, the light faded in the house. Then the door opened again with a series of slaps, and Gene stood outlined in gold by the bedroom light, blinking his tiny eyes.

“Yes?” Connie said.

Gene put his hand to his chin. “It’s getting scratchy.”

It was true. Yesterday, when she tilted up his chin to say good-bye, Connie had noticed that his beard was no longer soft.

“You want me to teach you how to shave? Is that what you need from me?”

Gene nodded.

Had he come up with this in those minutes alone? So be it.

Connie didn’t know, though, that the most upsetting thing about the corpse today wasn’t its skin, speckled purple like granite, or the acid smell, or the foam that had dried to a crust at one corner of the gaping mouth, or the jumble of yellow teeth inside. The most disgusting thing had been the matted white beard that, since the head had rolled back, stood out from the man’s neck like the fanned leaves of a Rolodex. Now more than ever Gene hated the texture of his own beard. It was like something alien that had taken up residence on his face, an invasion of needles.

“All right, then,” Connie said.

They went to the bathroom, and Connie seated Gene on the toilet seat. She worked a bar of soap up into a lather, which she then spread onto his face, then took one of her pink disposable razors from its package under the sink and put it into his hand. She put the hand mirror in his other hand and tilted it so he could see himself. “You’ve got to open your eyes, Gene, or you’ll cut yourself.” Connie put her hand over Gene’s and guided him in making short, gentle strokes at his cheek with the razor.

W
ANDA SHOVED HER
bag onto the overhead rack and sat gingerly into the seat. The muscles of her legs were knotted, and her shoulder throbbed. The boy had run away. She shouldn’t think about it.

The other passengers were arranging their belongings, rustling potato chip bags, cracking open pop cans. Beneath Wanda the idling bus made a comforting rumble. She liked how the tinted windows mellowed the world. She felt a little safer already.

The bus shuddered and began to move.

Another wave of pain racked Wanda’s abdomen at the outskirts of Eula, and another after Payette, yet she sat frozen in her seat, worried that if she were so much as to acknowledge the pain with a wince, the baby might come loose. She felt the need to move her bowels, but resisted. These waves of pain were deceitful, begging her to push when that was the last thing she should do. But as the bus crossed the blank landscape toward the Oregon border, acid rose in Wanda’s throat and, at last, she rose and made her way back to the bathroom, clutching one headrest, then the next.

She had been right—standing made it worse. She pulled the stiff door closed just as a wave went through her, causing her knees to buckle. Her hands were tingling, numb, as was the top of her scalp. This cylindrical metal room was like the inside of a pop can, and it smelled sweet, like pop; the thick blue liquid that swirled around the toilet bowl had successfully masked any foul smell. A thought occurred to Wanda:
Coop could use that stuff to cover the smell of death in the living room.
Nonsense. Her mind was doing its flipping-fish thing, resisting at all costs settling onto the hot-skillet fact that the boy had run away; that she was losing her boy—the two were one.
No!
If she made it to Melissa’s house, if she kept him inside her body till then, they’d be safe.

She closed the toilet seat, sat down, set the miniature faucet to dribbling, and tried to fill the cup of her hand. Now a different pain arose: cramping, low down, like when she had her period. Wanda brought water to her mouth and began to cry. With wet hands she undid her belt and, without rising, scooted her jeans down. There, on her underwear, just as she had feared, was a speck of blood.
“No, no, no, no,”
she cried, as one would cry to a baby.
“Don’t do this.”
She half-rose to pull some paper towels from the holder, and another cramp seized her and bent her into angles. She braced herself against the wall, put her towel-wrapped hand between her legs, and pushed up. It came away bloody, a black clot at the tip.
“No, please,”
she whimpered. This couldn’t be happening. But it already had. The boy had run away. Sickly fascinated, in a miserable trance, she rubbed the clot between her fingers till it came apart.

There was a knock on the door.

“Go on!” Wanda shouted.

She heard the shuffling of feet, then, a minute later, another knock.

“I’m sick! Leave me alone!”

Wanda could hear voices outside the door—“Says she’s sick”—followed by more footsteps. Then she heard a hiss of hydraulics and she pitched against the door with the slowing of the bus. “No!” she cried. The bus veered and stopped. More footsteps. “No!” she begged. “Keep going!”

Step Seven:
Presentation

Chapter 24

T
he milking barn at Frieson’s Dairy, spacious and dark inside as a warehouse, stayed in operation day and night. Fifty at a time, the cows filed into the barn and up a chute onto a great horseshoe-shaped catwalk—the milking parlor—where their udders were at eye level. They hardly needed guidance as they entered their individual stalls, because they did this twice a day for most of their short lives and knew that they would be let out the other side of the barn into the feeding lot afterward. A worker made his way swiftly around, attaching the milking-machine suction cups. No sooner had he hooked up the last cow than it was time to unhook the first, swab her teats with antibiotic, and send her off to breakfast with a slap to the rump. The suctioned milk traveled through tubes and pipes out to a gleaming steel vat that was refrigerated and insulated from the July sun.

Sprinklers tossed silvery arches over the mint fields beyond the dairy. It was eight a.m., and the water would soon be turned off until sundown, to avoid scorching the leaves with drops that evaporated on contact. A hot breeze periodically drew the mist of one sprinkler into a curtain over the road. Enrique and Tommy noticed this and ran faster to pass through one and be cooled.

“What’s the time?” Enrique gasped. With every inhale it felt like his lungs would burst from their cage.

Tommy raised his wristwatch. “Ten after eight.”

“Hurry!” was all Enrique could manage. If they didn’t get to the dairy in time, they’d have to walk home.

The events of that weekend back in May had left Enrique with few options of how to spend his time. If he wasn’t going to spend his after-school hours hanging around the bus station, if he wasn’t going to perform experiments on his friends and family—what, then? Ride his bike in endless circles around Eula? So, the following Monday he swallowed his pride, found Annie Schiff in the lunchroom, and apologized for the cruel trick he had played at track practice. She forgave him and led him back into the good graces of the team. It was too late for Enrique to re-join, but he attended some meets as an observer.

At one of these, Mr. Dodd climbed the bleachers to where Enrique sat.

“May I?”

At Enrique’s nod he draped himself over the bleachers, crossing his ankles on the seat below and propping his elbows on the seat above. They watched the meet in silence until Mr. Dodd said—coolly, as if the subject had already been broached—“If you want to join cross-country in the fall, you’ve got to train over the summer.”

Early morning was the only time cool enough.

The boys reached the Frieson’s Dairy sign and ran down the lane. Enrique noticed with relief that Jay’s car was still there. He began to gradually slow his pace, and Tommy followed suit; their running shoes raised dust clouds in the lane as they braked. They reached the lot and walked around the car a few times with their hands on their hips, catching their breath. Tommy gathered the hair from his face and wrung it out like a rag. Both boys had grown their bangs long at the command of Miriam, who was spending the summer with Penny in California and periodically called with fashion alerts.

Jay emerged from the barn, squinting in the sunlight and unzipping his white coveralls to reveal a sweat-soaked undershirt. There was a gap in one of Jay’s eyebrows, a narrow, naked scar that changed the shape of that eye, exposing it. His front tooth was chipped, and his arm still hadn’t regained its color after hatching from its cast. But other than this, he had healed.

“What time did you guys start?” he asked.

“Quarter to seven.”

“From home or from Tommy’s?” Jay shrugged out of the sleeve to look at his watch.

“Tommy’s. Not bad, huh?”

“Not good. What, did you guys skip the whole way?”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s go.”

They drove toward Eula. “I’ll bet by September we’ll be down to a six-minute mile,” Tommy said.

“That still won’t win any races,” Jay replied.

“We’ll be down to five,” Enrique said.

“Tell you what. The day you get down to a five-minute mile, Enrique, I’ll give you this car.” Jay had put a down payment on a used Corvette in Boise and, given the increased wages he earned working graveyard, he’d be able to afford it by Christmas.

“What’ll
I
get?” Tommy asked.

“A ride to school,” Enrique answered.

P
RINCIPAL
C
AMPBELL SET
out on a quick tour of duty before heading home for lunch. He was operating summer school with a skeleton crew and had to keep an eye on things himself. Better to have a figure of authority passing by the classroom window now and then to keep these summer-school students—delinquents, most of them—in line.

When doing tasks that required little expertise or attention to detail, Campbell liked to practice a speech he might someday give to a Rotary Club or Oddfellows meeting.
Great men
, he would say,
are not born great. That’s the common misperception. Great men are regular fellas who come upon great positions and fill them. Any man can be great.
(With this he’d sweep the crowd with his gaze, making them all feel as if he had looked beyond their eyes and seen their inner lives.)
All it takes is the luck of finding the job and the gumption to do it.
He himself had been a less-than-average man, but he took the job, filled the position,
became
the principal. Now Eula High was operating below budget, test scores were up, dropouts were down, and, thanks to his zero-tolerance policy, there were few discipline problems. The board of education in Boise had been poking around for ideas, and Fred imagined a job offer would come after a year or two. Maybe someday he’d run for public office—who knew?

With his hands bulging in the pockets of his chinos, Campbell left the academic buildings and strolled across the lawn and through the woodshop. The janitor had found cigarette butts behind the table saw last week, and Campbell was itching to catch the perps in the act. But the room was empty, and a thin film of sawdust muffled his footsteps. Then he passed through the garage. Ironic, to remember that autumn afternoon when he had dreaded to come here and confront Coop about his beer purchases. Compare that to the day in the spring when he fired Coop, telling him with relish that leaving the kids out on a country road was nothing less than psychopathic, and that if it were up to Campbell, he’d send Coop to Blackfoot for an evaluation. Coop had patiently nodded through this, his eyes pinched at the corners and his lips drawn up in that hateful smile of his. That was the last Campbell had seen of the man, though he had overheard in the teachers’ lounge that Coop had married some Indian out near Homedale and had become a truck driver. Good riddance. Shouldn’t be around kids.

Why had Campbell feared people so? Once he achieved a single-minded vision of how the school would operate, everything fell into place, and tasks became pleasurable. Yes, Campbell felt he understood great men now: Joseph Smith, Ronald Reagan, and even (although he’d never say so to the Rotary Club) Jesus Christ.

He walked across the lawn, into Building D, and peeked into the room where Cafferty’s speech class was convened. Here, speaking before class, was another example—that girl Abby Hall. The old Campbell would have let her be valedictorian, even though she hadn’t completed her course load. He would have melted the moment she started crying in his office. But not the new Campbell.
One day she’ll be grateful
, he thought, and moved on.

Inside the classroom, the mood was dreary. Mr. Cafferty, unhappy with having been given a summer school class, had turned the first assignment into a punishment for his students. The subject on which they had to speak was “Why I Am in Summer School.”

Yesterday’s speeches had been one after another contrite retelling of the school’s policy that every graduating senior have speech class under his belt, full of excuses for why the speaker had failed on the first try. Today’s started off a little better, with a girl’s ironic claim that she hated sunlight and loved homework. And now Abby Hall was up.

To this point, Abby had not said a word in class. She had sat through Cafferty’s lectures on the proper structure of a speech, argument-building, and voice projection, staring glumly down her long nose at her notebook. Now she took her place at the podium without notes and slowly raised her great, orb-like eyes to the class, the eyes of an old woman set in the face of a girl.

“Why I am in summer school.

“I was accepted to Stanford University, which is the best and hardest-to-get-into school west of the Mississippi. All I need now is a high school diploma, and I’m out of this crappy town for good. It doesn’t matter what grade I get in this class as long as I pass and, Mr. Cafferty, you have no choice but to pass me as long as I show up and do all the assignments. I was supposed to be doing an internship at an engineering firm in California this summer. My best friend, Liz, is there already, doing her own internship at a newspaper. We were supposed to be roommates. But our principal refused to let me do the work for this class anywhere but here, as he says I have to give these speeches in front of an audience; otherwise it’s a violation of school curriculum.”

Here, she caught a glimpse of the very man at the door, turning away.

“Our principal, Fred Campbell, is an idiot,” she said in a heightened voice, though he couldn’t hear.

“So here I am, stuck in front of you losers, and there you are, forced to listen to my speeches, which I promise you, will all be made up as I go along.

“Why I am in summer school. I am in summer school because my mom died. She had cancer in her cervix—that’s the opening into the uterus at the top of the vagina. First she had a hysterectomy. That didn’t work. They did treatments where they stuck a needle up there and burned the area with radiation. That didn’t work either. The cancer metastasized to her lungs. She had polyps, sores inside her lungs that produced fluid, and this fluid would fill up her lungs. She’d start to drown without even being in water. Every week I’d take her to the hospital to have a long needle stuck into her back, through the tissue, into her lungs. They’d suck the fluid out and she’d be able to breathe again for a few days before her lungs started to fill up again.

“They gave her chemotherapy, which is where they hooked her up to an IV and fed poison into her bloodstream. This made her much sicker than the cancer did. I wiped up her vomit and bathed her when she was too weak to bathe herself. She was not the type of mom who liked her daughter to see her naked, but she had no choice. Her hair fell out and her mouth was so full of sores she couldn’t eat. She lost her beauty, her happiness, her sense of humor, and I had no choice but to sit by her side and watch. And she lost her dignity. There were times I was holding her like a helpless baby, and I could see in her eyes that she was ashamed. I think that was the worst part. No, actually. In doping her up to ease her pain, we robbed her of the chance to say good-bye.
That
was the worst part. And after she died, everyone gathered around to tell me it was good that she was dead, because she was in heaven now—people who didn’t really know her or me and hadn’t seen the hell she had gone through.”

Abby looked at the clock on the wall. The speech had to be at least five minutes long.

“Here’s a little story that took place not long before she died: my mom wasn’t vain, but she did like having nice fingernails. She’d go to Boise to get them done. They’d put these extensions on so they were medium-length and very hard—you’d never guess they were fake—and they’d paint them a nice color, sometimes two colors. Even when she was really sick and we were staying in Salt Lake, we’d still go get them done. It made her happy.

“Now, the chemicals they use in chemotherapy attack any cell that’s breeding quickly, whether it’s a cancer cell or one of your own. That’s why your hair falls out. But it has other effects, too. You get mouth sores. Constipation, too, because the chemicals attack the cells in your intestines that push stuff through.

“One night, my mom had really bad constipation. She was waking up again and again and calling out for me like a frightened little girl. I’d come in and help her—carry her, basically, because she could hardly walk—onto the toilet. Then I’d wait outside the door and listen to her cry out in pain. Then she’d give up, and I’d carry her back to bed. Then, near morning, she actually got something out and was finally able to sleep.

“The next day, I kept smelling something. I thought she had had an accident in bed, but I couldn’t find anything. I looked all through her blankets and I got her up to search the cracks in the easy chair, but there was nothing.

“Finally I found it. It was her fingernails. They were filthy, encrusted. And I realized what she had finally done the night before—she had reached in with her pretty fingernails to pull the shit out.

“It took a long time soaking her hands and working on her fingernails with Q-Tips to get them clean. My dad showed up, and he and my grandparents kept giving me these sweet looks, like I was giving her a manicure out of kindness or boredom.”

Abby looked up at the clock again and said, “So that is why I am in summer school. The end.”

W
HEN THE SUN
moved past its crest in the sky, Coop nudged Maria. She quickly lifted her pole. “I got one,” she said.

“That was me. You’ve been asleep for an hour. Your bait’s long since washed away.”

“I think this creek’s been fished dry,” she said, reeling in her line. “I don’t know how you stay awake.”

“Hope, my dear—pure and simple.”

They slowly broke down their poles, sorted their sinkers and hooks, folded their chairs, and brushed off the seeds that had settled on their clothes. “I didn’t tell you this before, Coop, because I didn’t want you marrying me for the wrong reasons, but as a member of the Shoshone Tribe I’m allowed to fish certain protected stretches of the Salmon River.”

Coop froze.

“And as my husband, well . . .”

“God damn,” he said. They packed up the car. “How long were you gonna wait to tell me that?”