The Summer Guest (14 page)

I awoke knowing it would be a last morning: not the last morning, but a morning of final things.

I have always been a deep sleeper. My nights are long and restful, dependable as a hammer. The usual gripes of men my age-the acid reflux, pinched plumbing, and insomniac dread that send us prowling the halls to mull over every missed field goal, botched kiss, and embarrassing pratfall of our lives-have yet to affect me, and though I know the day can’t be far off, that one of these nights the boom will fall, for now I sleep the sleep of the dreamless dead. According to Lucy I don’t even snore. I just kind of snuffle every once in a while into the pillow, like a good golden retriever.

So I awoke that morning as always, 5:10 on the dot without an alarm to tell me so, just the feel of the turning world doing its work and my mind as empty as a bucket, and the first thought that came to me as I lay under the blankets in the chilly room was the fact that Harry had not died, because somebody would have come to tell me if he had; and then this other notion, a strange one: this idea of final things.

Lucy was already up and about; I heard the shower running, then the groan of the old pipes as she turned the water off. Lucy wasn’t one to dawdle in the bathroom, and it wouldn’t do for her to find me still in bed. I rose and dressed quickly for the day. Khakis and an old denim shirt frayed at the collar and wrists, a Synchilla vest that Kate had given me for Christmas, wool socks and Birkenstocks, which I’d trade for boots when things got rolling; on my belt, a Buck knife and one of those all-in-one tools in a leather holster, the only gizmos I carried. Once we were closed down for the season, I’d planned to do something about those groaning pipes, maybe even rip down the bathroom once and for all and make it nice, with some new fixtures and tile. I’m a man, a hole in the ground is pretty much all I need, but redoing the john was just the sort of project I enjoyed, and it would have made a nice present for Lucy. But those plans were now moot-a relief, in a way, and also strangely depressing. Outside the sky was paling, not black to gray but easing into a kind of mellow tan color, meaning a clear day ahead, and hot: the last real day of summer.

I was standing at the window when Lucy entered the room, wearing a bathrobe and squeezing the water from her hair into a towel.

“So,” she said, and looked at me expectantly. “A quiet night?”

“Looks like Harry may get his wish. I think we would have heard if anything had happened.”

“I thought so too.” She sat down heavily on the bed and looked at her feet. “God, I hardly slept at all.”

From the look in her eyes I knew that she was thinking about her own father, who had passed four years before. By then my in-laws, Phil and Maris, had sold the sawmill and moved down to Orchard Beach, into an apartment complex that pretended it wasn’t an old folks’ home but of course was: no kids allowed, not a single resident under sixty, ramps on all the stairways and handholds in the johns. Phil’s arthritis had gotten pretty bad by this point-all that standing around on the hard ground through too many Maine winters-and he was deaf as a fence besides, from listening to the saws; like those old-time hockey players who skate without a helmet, Phil never once used earplugs, though he made everyone else wear them. He and Maris had talked about Arizona or even Las Vegas, someplace warmer and drier for Phil’s knees, though this was just talk; they’d never been to either place that I knew of, even to visit. Phil Hansen and I had been through our rough patches over the years. I think we had far too much in common to be completely comfortable with one another, and I sometimes held it against him, the poor care he took of himself. But in the end we’d let bygones be bygones, and when he’d died of a stroke-actually three strokes spread over as many weeks, bringing him down slowly, like a chopping axe blade-I had served as one of the pallbearers, weeping the whole way from church to gravesite. The funny thing was, it had taken Maris all of six months to pull up stakes and settle in Scottsdale, where she was now keeping company with a widowed dermatologist and had a golf handicap in the low teens. I was pretty sure Phil wouldn’t have minded all that much, though Lucy fumed for days whenever we got a postcard from her mother, always with the picture of some golf course on it and three blandly cheerful sentences saying, more or less, why the hell didn’t I do this before?

I sat beside Lucy on the bed. She was wriggling into a pair of jeans, and when she stood to pull them over her hips, I stayed where I was. My head felt oddly heavy, and for a second I even considered going back to sleep.

Lucy drew a sweater on over her head and looked at her watch. “Five thirty, Joe. You have a party, don’t you?”

I nodded. “The lawyers, cabin five.”

“No rush, then.” Lucy rolled her eyes a little. “I think you’ll find they won’t mind a little extra shut-eye.”

I’d heard them, too, as I was going to bed. They’d arrived the afternoon before, up from Springfield or Worcester or some other midsize New England city down on its luck, and spent most of the day in town ogling the scenery and laying in enough snacks, beer, and ice to feed a frat house. They asked me after dinner if I could take them out the next morning, “someplace special.” A pleasant enough bunch of fellows, I thought, though lately it had seemed to be raining lawyers. They’d said they wanted to get an early start, though everybody does.

“They want to get drunk, it’s their problem.” I heard the grumpiness in my voice and let it ride. “They said early, early’s what they’ll get. I thought I’d take them up to the old Zisko Dam. Not much action anywhere else.”

At the mirror, Lucy pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “The show must go on, I guess. I’ll put together some box lunches for them. Bring the radio with you, too, all right?”

I was watching her face in the mirror. “The radio? Why do I need the radio?”

She turned back to me with a correcting look and slid into her shoes. “For Harry, Joe,” she said. “For Harry.”

By the time the pickup was loaded it was just six, the sky already lit from end to end though dawn was still a few minutes off. I thought I’d give the lawyers a few extra minutes of sleep, so I drank a quick cup of coffee with Lucy in the kitchen; we had two girls from the high school helping out that summer, but they wouldn’t come in till six thirty when their shifts started. I helped Lucy with the sandwiches and snacks and pop-if the lawyers wanted anything harder, it was on their nickel-put these in the truck with the rest of the gear, and drove down the trace to their cabin.

By my reckoning, the lawyers were going to be feeling a lot less chipper this morning than they had the night before: I counted twenty-six empty beer cans on the porch, and enough cigar and cigarette butts to send the surgeon general into orbit. An empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s Green Label was sitting on the floor, and beside it, a capsized pint bottle of what I guessed was schnapps or something worse. This bothered me not one bit-we’re hardly the Ritz, or, for that matter, the St. Regis; get drunk as a monkey on Sterno if that’s what you like, just try to keep it down-and in fact, the mess they’d made was just the sort of opener I needed: cleaning it up would take a few minutes and make enough noise to get my lawyers out of bed while also letting them know that perhaps a little better citizenship was the order of the day. I fetched a garbage bag from the truck, tied it to one of the porch posts, and was launching the last of the empties into it when the door swung open and one of them stepped out, a heavyset guy with a tonsure of gray hair, smacking his lips and blinking at the sunlight. I’m good with names, and I remembered his: Bill Owens. The reservation had been in his name, though the American Express he’d given me at check-in was a corporate card, billed to the chemical company they all worked for, an outfit called Sentocor Industrial Lubricants. If anyone needed a little time away in the woods, I figured, it’d be these guys.

“Morning, Joe.” He surveyed the wreckage and quickly grabbed a beer can off the floor. “Sorry about the mess. I guess we were all in pretty high spirits last night.”

Somebody had left a burning cigar on one of the porch rails, searing a brown rut into the wood. I picked up what was left of it with thumb and forefinger and dropped it in the bag. “Not a problem. You’re here to have a good time. I’ll have somebody get you guys a bucket of sand for the butts.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Right-o. Got it.”

“Like I said, it’s not a problem.” I tied off the bag and took it down to the truck. Lucy had made me a thermos of coffee, but Bill looked like he needed it more than I did. I brought it up to the porch and poured him a cup.

“Here, this should set you straight. Hope you don’t mind the cream and sugar, that’s how I take it. We better get a move on, though. We can grab you guys a little breakfast on the way.”

He took the coffee like a shot of whiskey and gave his head a horsey shake. I could tell he was feeling pretty bad, though part of him was enjoying this fact; the pain was ironclad proof that he was having the time of his life.

“That goddamn bourbon,” he said cheerfully. “Whose fucking idea was that?” He raised the cup in a little toast. “Though a shot of it in the coffee would be pretty good about now.”

In the cabin I heard footsteps, water running, the low murmurs of men complaining about their hangovers and laughing about it. Bill took another long sip of the coffee, leaned his head back, and actually gargled. You can take the boy out of the frat house, I thought, but thirty years later he’ll still gargle his coffee and chew his aspirins dry.

“Okeydokey.” He shook the last drops over the edge of the porch and deposited the empty cup on the rail with a purposeful thump. “We are locked and loaded, first sergeant. Give me a minute to round up the troops?”

“Take what you need. It’s your day.”

“By god, you’re right. One hundred percent right.” He stepped to the rail with his hands in his pockets and gave a long, hungry-eyed look at the lake, like a Roman general looking over the green fields of Gaul. The air had already begun to thicken with the day’s building heat, and I felt the first beads of perspiration popping in a damp line along my forehead. The wool socks and vest would have to go.

“This goddamn place,” he declared. “Just unbelievable. Like Switzerland or something. Why don’t people know about it?”

“A few do. Not many, though.”

He stood another moment with his back to me, jangling something in his pockets, keys or loose change, then turned from the rail and squinted his eyes in a way that made me wonder what he thought he’d discovered about me.

“Well, mum’s the word, my man,” he said, and gave me a chummy wink. It was just the sort of practiced gesture that had probably worked magic on any number of juries trying to decide if his bosses had poisoned the playground or not. “You got kids, Joe?”

“Just the one. Kate’s a junior at Bowdoin. She was at the front desk when you checked in.”

He nodded. “Sure, Kate. Right. How about that?” I waited to hear about his own-the son in law school following in the old man’s footsteps, the grown daughter married to an architect and pregnant with twins-but all he did was cross his arms over his chest and shake his head with an expression of something like wonder.

“Well.” He clapped his palms together. “As you said, time marches on.” Never mind that I had said the opposite; it was what he needed to hear. “I’ll get these guys moving.”

I waited by the truck for five minutes until they emerged. Fresh handshakes and first names all around: besides Bill there was Mike, fifty and change, a wiry, loose-limbed guy with a cropped beard who looked like one of those old-time marathon runners; Pete, a puffy youngster in his mid-thirties-probably the baby of the outfit-who seemed to be suffering the most, if his moist handshake was any indication; and Carl, fat and happy as a hamster, whom they all called Carl Jr. Bill, Mike, Pete, and Carl: four bleary-eyed middle-aged corporate counsels from the poison factory, nursing sour guts and ice-pick whiskey headaches, a little slow out of the gate but on the whole willing to re-up for a second tour and give the day their best manly try.

“Weren’t there five of you?” I had counted five the day before.

They all looked at each other and burst into laughter. “Right you are,” Bill said, and slapped me on the back. “But I don’t think you’ll be seeing him for a while. Poor slob looked like he died.”

At the deli in town we picked up egg sandwiches, powdered doughnuts, and more coffee all around, then headed south on county 21. It wasn’t a particularly pretty drive, the highway hemmed on both sides by mucky lowland swamps, but I took it at a crawl; those wet little shoots were like moose catnip, and hardly a summer went by that some unlucky soul (nobody local; we know better) totaled his car, and sometimes himself, on this very stretch of road. A mature bull with a full antler spread is a sight to behold even when it’s nothing new to you, but it’s not the size of the thing that does the damage: it’s the geometry. Nearly all that weight is suspended four feet in the air on legs as skinny as pipe cleaners, so you catch one broadside, driving, let’s say, a late-model Ford Taurus, and before you can say “what the goddamn,” seven hundred pounds of permanently startled moose flops right over the hood and through your windshield-what the EMTs up here call “a Maine lap dance.” It doesn’t take a bull, either; even a yearling can do serious damage.

Bill was riding in the truck with me, his buddies following in Pete’s BMW. A good rule of thumb is thirty-five at dusk or dawn, and in the rearview mirror I could see pasty-faced Pete, sighing with exasperation and banging his hands on the wheel. He mouthed a sentence I heard as “Will you fucking go?” I was already thinking I maybe didn’t like him, and that I wasn’t the only one.

Beside me, Bill polished off a second doughnut and cracked the lid on a fresh cup of coffee. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and frowned.

“Oh, don’t mind him, that prissy little fuck. Doesn’t know when he’s having a good time.” He slurped his coffee and opened his window to smoke. “You mind?” I shook my head no, and he pulled out a Pall Mall from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it off the dashboard lighter.