The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (3 page)

He closed his cell phone and sighed again, this time just for his own benefit, because if you couldn’t feel sorry for yourself once in a while, where was the pleasure in life? He trudged around the building toward where his truck was parked by the curb. He’d have to go wander around in the woods for a while now, just to keep up appearances for Harry.

Ordinary people like me shouldn’t have to mess around with folks like the Scullens
, he thought. The ones on the
other
side—the few elders on the reservation who knew the secret of the Scullens, and had secrets of their own—were bad enough, but at least they were human
most
of the time. The Scullens were never human at all anymore. Really made a guy want to pause and reflect on how his life had gotten to this point, maybe wish things had gone a different way, but oh well. If wishes were horses, beggars would eat.

IMITATIONS

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

I
got off the plane in Minneapolis and went to the baggage claim, where I made a great show of almost falling over while attempting to haul my bag off the carousel. On cue, a couple of frat boy types jumped in to help me carry them. Nobody likes to see a pretty girl overexert herself, except in certain situations of a private nature, the dream and hope and imagination of which situations certainly motivated the strapping young men who offered to serve as my luggage-bearers.

So they were probably none too pleased when a police car—rather mud-splattered but still recognizable—pulled up to the curb and a big man in a law officer’s uniform climbed out of the driver’s seat, gave the fellas his best hard-eyed cop glare, and took the bags from them. “Much appreciated,” he said, “but I can help my
daughter
from here.” The brothers frat exchanged a glance and mumbled something to me which I didn’t bother to hear before they slumped off into the terminal.

“Thought I was going to have to take a cab, Daddy,” I said, leaning in to kiss his slightly stubbly cheek.

“Aw, I’m sorry, hon, I’m not used to all this big city traffic, I didn’t time it right.”

“And a police car? Do you want me to ride in the back like a criminal?”

“I wouldn’t advise
that
,” Harry said, popping the trunk and loading my bags in. What an
interesting
trunk. I noted with interest that Harry had to shove aside crime scene tape, road flares, orange traffic cones, boxes of ammunition, and some interesting-looking gray plastic cases which probably contained more lethal cop supplies. Harry went on. “I make the drunks clean up their puke when they have an accident back there, but drunks are, as a rule, pretty terrible when it comes to hungover car detailing. You can ride up front with me.” He grinned. “I’ll even let you run the lights and sirens. You loved doing that when you were little.”

“I’m not so little anymore, Dad.” I thought about pointing my chest at him and giving him
that look
, the one I use to make Miranda’s boyfriend uncomfortable and to distract male teachers and other officials who were maybe starting to make dangerous mental connections that linked me and certain unsavory events, but I held back. Harry was predisposed to be on my side, a protector and ally, and there was no reason to poison a well that could be so useful. Funny how I’d never thought about the advantages of living in a town where I was the only daughter of the chief of police. You could never underestimate the benefit of having friends in high places, even in a low place like Lake Woebegotten. “But that sounds like fun.”

Once we were in the car and on our way, Harry said, “How’s your mom?”

“Oh, you know Mom. She’s fine.”

Harry grunted. “Listen, I know being driven to school in a cop car wouldn’t be much fun, so… I got you a car.”

“Really? But all those years when I was a little girl I asked for a
pony
,” I teased.

He laughed. “I don’t see you cleaning up after a pony, Bon-bon.”

Ha. I’d cleaned up worse things. I gave him the laugh he thought he’d earned, but I had to grit my teeth a little. “Bon-bon.” I’d forgotten that nickname. “Seriously, Dad, a car? That’s really nice of you.” Saying “dad” felt funny, but it didn’t take a genius at social engineering to know that calling him “Harry” would cool the warmth he felt toward me.

“Well, don’t expect anything too fancy. You remember my friend Willy Noir?”

“Hmmm… no.”

“Old buddy, lives down by Pres du Lac, we used to go fishing with him when you visited in the summers, and we still go hunting together sometimes.”

I’d come to stay with Harry in the summers from ages five to twelve, but the years from before I was nine or so were pretty fuzzy, all running together into one blurry boring summer. But I remembered Pres du Lac, the itty-bitty Indian reservation on the far side of Lake Woebegotten, even if I didn’t remember Mr. Noir. “Ah, fishing, my favorite activity. Was there ever a year when I
didn’t
fall out of the boat?”

He laughed. “Maybe one. I thought you did it on purpose, just for the attention. Anyway, Willy’s getting on in years, doesn’t drive much anymore, so he sold me his old truck. Like I said, nothing fancy, but it runs good, and it’s survived a lot of winters—”

“How many winters are we talking about?” Being the exotic new girl in school wouldn’t work as well if I had to drive some old beater. I could work around it, but it was certainly a handicap I’d need to overcome.

“Let’s just say the truck remembers when Eisenhower was president.”

Oh well. I made grateful noises, and after that we lapsed into a silence that might have been uncomfortable for Harry, but wasn’t for me. We drove away from the city limits, such as they were, and into the endless flatness of the prairie. Less the middle of nowhere than the far outer reaches of nowhere. I was used to cliffs, ocean waves, hills, redwoods, cars with surfboards or kayaks on top… but this was just flatness, and trucks spattered with mud. I was thousands of miles from the sea. How awful. Without the ocean, where do they hide the bodies?

I kid. I’d never hide a body in the ocean, at least, not without taking a boat some ways out first. Tides are a bitch.

After an interminable period, we reached the tiny town of Lake Woebegotten. Downtown was like something from a movie: park with a bandstand, City Hall with a dumb little dome, square grassy town common, little mom-and-pop stores. One stop light. A single parking meter, which was pretty funny, since there were a million empty places to park for free. It looked like the kind of place tailor-made for fourth of July parades and speeches by local politicians and ceremonies crowning the Pig Queen or whatever they had here. The sun should have been shining and making everything look even more corny, like Pure Americana Extract, but it was pretty overcast. Funny, I remembered summers in Lake Woebegotten—hot, sticky, and humid—but I had no idea what autumns and winters were like. Guess I was going to find out soon.

Harry pulled the police car over to the sidewalk. “I know you probably just want to get home and stop traveling, but there’s not a thing to eat in the house but a freezer full of walleye and maybe some maraschino cherries, so how about I pop into Cafe Lo here and get us something to eat?” A horrible thought must have occurred to him. “Uh, are you, you know… Like your mother?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“A vegetarian,” he said.

“Oh, no,” I assured him. “Absolutely carnivorous.”

He made a show of wiping sweat off his forehead in a broad gesture of relief. “I remember you used to eat a hamburger of your own and then do your best to eat mine too, but all those years you’ve been out in Santa Cruz, I wasn’t sure…”

“The hippies did not convert me,” I said.

“Burgers it is. Julie makes the best ones I’ve ever had, even better than her grandpa who used to run the diner.”

I was happy to sit in the car while Harry went inside. I’d been traveling all day, and I was tired and puffy and probably a bit smelly—hardly ideal for a first impression, and I had a feeling anyone I met in this town I’d be seeing again and again.

I looked out the window toward the town common… and that’s when I saw him. Or, rather,
them
, but even from the first moment, it was really mostly
him
.

There were five of them, walking across the grass like kings and queens of the Earth. The wind itself seemed to hold its breath in their presence. They
looked
like teenagers, but they
moved
like they owned the town. In a way, they were an odd bunch: three boys, two girls, all different… but all physically striking. It would have been remarkable in an individual, but with all of them together, the effect was almost overwhelming. The girls were gorgeous, irritatingly so, even in jeans and button-down shirts—I might not be the prettiest girl here after all, which could complicate matters, though I could already see ways to use it to my advantage. They were even paler than me, though one was a petite red-haired thing and the other was proportioned like a runway model and ice blond. Of the boys, one was nearly seven feet tall, black-haired, dressed in red flannel and big enough across the shoulders to be one of Dwayne’s linebacker friends. Another was blond, shorter—though still tall by any ordinary standards—and muscular in a wiry sort of way.

The last was slimmer, wearing a long dark coat that was halfway stylish, with a mop of brown hair almost exactly the same shade as mine. He had cheekbones so sharp you could have used them for bottle openers, and his lips… More about his lips later. He was the one who fascinated me the most instantly, and when he turned his head and looked at me, I felt an electric shock pass through me. He didn’t stop walking, and if I hadn’t been staring at him with all of my considerable attention I might not even have noticed, but he
hesitated
, a long pause between one footfall and the next, and he stared right into me in that instant before walking on, murmuring to the others, who didn’t so much as glance at me. Who
very conspicuously
didn’t so much as glance at me, I thought.

Harry reappeared with brown paper sacks and plastic cups. “Who are they?” I asked gesturing toward their departing backs. “Do they go to my new school?”

After glancing and squinting, Harry nodded. “Oh, sure, those are Doc Scullen’s kids. Well, not his
kids
, he’s only maybe ten years older than they are, they’re adopted, or foster kids, or something, except for the Scales, who are cousins or off-relations of the doc’s wife…. Let’s see, the big bear of a fella is Hermet Scullen, and the little redhead is Pleasance, and the one in the long coat is their brother Edwin. The blonde girl is Rosemarie Scale and the other guy is her brother Garnett. Heck of a family. Just moved here two, three years ago, but the Doc’s been a great addition to the community, and the kids seem all right, never get into any trouble.”

“Maybe I’ll meet them at school tomorrow,” I said.

“You could fall in with a worse crowd,” Harry said agreeably.

BROOD TYPE

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

H
arry’s house was a little gray farmhouse just outside town, bordered on three sides by fields, with a stand of trees in the back. Hardly a match for mom’s house over by Westcliff Drive in Santa Cruz, but I could cope. And there in front of the house was a truck—my truck, I guessed. I’d been expecting a beat-up old pick-up, possibly with the vague stink of pig manure clinging to it… but this… the thing was almost as big as a tractor-trailer rig, glossy black, with bulging headlights, a grille like a giant robot’s grin, and a flatbed in back big enough to carry a normal-sized pickup truck.

“It’s a 1938 Ford V8 one and a half ton Marmon-Herrington,” Harry said, getting out of the car and beckoning for me to follow. “All wheel drive. Marmon-Herrington made trolley cars—and
tanks
—but they also did business with the military converting ordinary trucks into, well, pretty much super-trucks. This one used to belong to the Belgian army, Willy says, which means it’s more well-traveled than me, and I don’t doubt it’s made it through a few wars and could make it through a few more.” He coughed. “I know it might be… a lot of truck… but it’s gonna be the safest thing on the road by a good margin. Those little aluminum tin cans rolling around on the highways today couldn’t even make a dent in her.”

“Her?” I strolled over to the truck and patted the hood, which was so tall I’d need a stepladder to look inside. “I think it’s definitely a him.”

“Well, anyway, it runs great, Willy’s grandson Joaquin is some kind of mechanical genius. Still a stick shift, though. Is that going to be a problem? Your mom said you could drive a manual, but this one…”

I’d once driven a tractor trailer to the edge of a cliff and then put a cinderblock on the gas pedal to send it over the edge, so I wasn’t too worried about wrestling with an old Ford’s transmission, but there was no need to go into specifics. “I’ll manage. I love it, Daddy. Thank you.”

And I really did. I’ve always found it easier to love objects and machines than people. If you maintain them properly, and know how to use them, machines will do exactly what you want them to, every time, without variation. If only people were half so reliable.

Harry led me into the house, and we feasted on our burgers and fries. The place was exactly as I remembered but—cliché, I know—it seemed smaller. I don’t know if it was all his years as a bachelor or just some sort of fundamental self-sufficiency, but Harry didn’t hover around me or try to make much more small talk. He took my bags upstairs to my room, which was just like it had been the last time I visited. I doubted the sheets had even been changed; Harry probably hadn’t changed
his
sheets in the years since I’d been here last. The room was essentially an anonymous place for a summer visitor. Well, I was settling in now, for at least the next several months. I told Harry I was tired after my long day, and he gave me my space.

I got ready for bed, locked my door, and stretched out on the bed… which crinkled under me. I pulled up the covers and hissed through my teeth. There was an old plastic cover underneath the sheets. I’d had some… issues… with bedwetting when I was younger, and I felt a surge of humiliation and anger that Harry hadn’t thought to remove the plastic since my last visit.