Lakewood

Chapter 11

Early morning: Harry woke me up to go outside. He and I sat on the front porch. I wrapped up in a wool sweater and several blankets up to my neck. Harry plopped down on the Adirondack, his body curled across my feet while his legs hung over the sides. I sipped a hot cup of coffee. The vapors feathered up around my face like ghosts disappearing past my ears. No boats were on the lake, and no cars in town. Across the lake, before closing my eyes, I watched a few headlights travel west toward Dewittville.

When daylight broke, I drove to The Big Tree for breakfast, a restaurant in Sherman’s Bay. The ceiling fan wobbled like elephant ears flapping, while men and women read their newspapers, pulling down the corner edge whenever someone walked in. The food was good. I will eat there often.

Afterwards, I visited the Lakewood d**g Store for a journal-book or some direction on how to keep a journal, but all I found were pink, flowery diaries that some young girl’s grandmother would buy her. I was too lazy this morning to walk all the way to the university bookstore to look for one.

Mr. Barone, the pharmacist, was behind the counter whistling and when I asked if he had any other kinds of journals, he said no, but he could order one.

“It’ll take a few weeks to arrive.”

“No thanks. I wanted to buy it today.”

“I don’t have much demand for journals, but I have some fine pens up by the counter.”

I think William Faulkner wrote in a journal. Hemingway, too. I’ll just keep typing on single sheets of paper in the meantime. I have no direction. I will make up my own rules. Life has no plot.

Mr. Barone did not recognize or remember me, but my mother grew up with him. I once helped his daughter fix the chain on her bicycle. I think it was his daughter. Maybe. Maybe not. Now that I think about it, it was Mr. Card’s daughter. When I was a kid, he installed a new ceiling in our kitchen. Lisa had a small pink Schwinn with streamers hanging from the white grips. She said she had a cat named Blossom. Down by the park, she had gotten her shoestrings caught in the chain and could not hop off her bike without falling over because the strings had wound so tightly that her sneaker was pressed against the chainguard.

“I have an idea,” I told her. “Let me pull your foot out and then you can sit on the sidewalk while I unhook your shoe.”

And that is what we did. It took about thirty seconds to free her shoe, but the laces were covered in black, dirty oil and had a few puncture marks.

I tied her shoes for her so she did not get her fingers oily.

“Do you know how to double tie your laces?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Watch this. It’ll keep your laces from coming undone.”

§

Since starting this housesitting gig, I’ve walked through the house, sat on each chair and sofa, some with lion-clawed legs, and studied the paintings and pictures hanging on the walls. I tried as hard as I could to conclude something—what, I don’t know. Moments ago, I typed that life has no plot. That’s not true. Sometimes the plot is slow. But plot is getting into trouble then getting out.

The same men who drove nails into the beams of this house over one hundred years ago continue to live in this house. The energy it took to pound the nails continues to reside in the wood. It’s Einstein’s dynamism at work. The man who cut the timber, his energy is in the beams.

In the kitchen, there is a dumbwaiter from when the house was a hotel in the 1920s and ’30s. The dumbwaiter didn’t work when I lived here, and my father never fixed it, though he tried once. He found a rat’s nest with baby rat skeletons in it.

The basement, when I lived here, was my hideout. Me and my friends were outlaws and bandits on a cattle drive, playing down there in the winter when it was too cold to go outside. It’s still dark and has a musty smell to it. There’s a sign: BE CAREFUL LOW ENTRANCE, written in marker on a small board. The basement looks older than before, unsafe. The steps creak and may be rotted. Thick layers of dust hang like a collection of fog. The walls are lined with graffiti: stick people, stick cats and dogs, tic-tac-toe games, and rudimentary trees, which my parents allowed Kimberly and me to paint. My mom and dad painted the picket fence along her side of the wall. It’s watercolor, and although it’s faded, some imprints of the pickets remain. They painted fort posts on my side of the basement.

Fort Apache (me) always conquered the Queen of England (Kimberly) when push came to shove in a battle of clay balls. There are a few grease marks on the walls from where the clay hit and stuck. One time when I stood up, Kimberly hit me in the mouth with a clay ball.

My favorite room in the house has always been where we had our piano, which Emily and Dr. Laighles use for entertaining. It’s been years since I studied piano. Mrs. Grattan-Smith came to our house every Wednesday afternoon to give me and Kimberly piano lessons. My parents sold the piano when we moved to Atlanta, along with everything else. It was my great-great-grandfather’s piano (on my mother’s side), Antom Siguler.

“Your great-great-grandfather was a Civil War hero,” my mom said throughout my childhood. “I never met him, but he saved a lot of soldiers during the war.”

The piano worked but was in need of repair, as it sounded like a snapping cable each time a key was struck. My parents convinced me that we would get another piano in Atlanta, but we never did. Maybe I will mention that to them the next time I call home.

Harry and Bess follow along after me when I walk around. They sniff the air as if searching for Emily and Dr. Laighles. My favorite game is throwing their ball down the stairs, and when they chase after it, I run through the house, and down the spiral staircase in the back. As soon as they realize I’m nowhere to be found, they start barking and try to find me. There are two staircases in the house, one in the front and one in back. The one in back is a spiral staircase, which has always been spooky. I like to run up and down it because it connects the upstairs hall to the kitchen.

§

I have not spoken to my former girlfriend, Ashley Brown, or my former best friend, Will Croon, since last year. A year as of yesterday. Maybe I should have made note of it yesterday, but I’d forgotten the date. I have not read the six letters Ashley has mailed. I have not heard from Will, and if I don’t in another twenty years, that will suit me right fine.

I am still in love with Ashley, but I cannot forgive her or Will for what they did. When I call home, my mother weaves her into the conversation. I’ve known Ashley since fourth grade. My mother always asks if I’ve heard from her, and though I say no, I’m sure she knows I’m lying. She told me that Ashley has stopped by the house to talk to her, to ask me to call, to get my mailing address. I hope she hasn’t told my mother why we broke up.

Ashley was a year behind me in school, and I was scheduled to start classes at the University of Georgia in the fall. A huge graduation party was thrown at Kyle Onderdonk’s house by his parents—there must have been one hundred kids in their backyard—and at around midnight, Ashley and I snuck into their pool shed. There, we started making out on a broken lounger with a foam cushion with a seashell and starfish print. We had our bathing suits off.

“What’s the problem with you?” she asked as she put her clothes on. It took less than a minute for Ashley to get fully dressed.

“We don’t have any protection. I don’t want to get you pregnant.”

There was no yelling.

“I want to go home.”

I sort of thought we’d hang out the next morning and talk about what happened. Well, what didn’t happen.

Around nine o’clock the next morning, Will Croon showed up in my driveway in his Plymouth Road Runner.

“Let’s go play Putt-Putt.”

On the third hole, Will said, “Last night, after everyone took off from the graduation party, I popped Ashley’s cherry.”

“What?”

“Yeah, man. She called me up and said, ‘let’s go for a ride.’ We drove around and ended up in Stone Mountain, deep in the Kentucky picnic area. She jumped in the back seat, so I did, too. We kissed for about five seconds, then she undid my belt. I yanked off her shorts and broke that s**t wide open.”

“What the f**k, Will? That’s my girlfriend.”

“She said you wouldn’t do it with her, so I did. What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you a homo?”

“No.”

“Well, damn, boy, she loved it.”

I didn’t even think about it, I just cracked him in the jaw with a wild uppercut. I laid him out in the bushes and walked away. I handed the putter to the man at the golf booth who saw the whole thing.

“Was he cheating?” the man asked.

I walked away and hitchhiked home. That is how my friendship with Will Croon ended.

My mother wouldn’t understand, nor my father. When I got home, I told them I was not going to college at U.G.A.

When my dad asked me why, I said, “I’ve changed my mind. I am going to Chautauqua or Clemson.”

I gave them no details beyond the fact that Georgia did not have the program I wanted. That was it. No argument. I told them I was leaving in three days, and if anyone called or knocked on the door for me, I was not home. By the end of the afternoon, I had decided on Chautauqua University over Clemson, but it was a close call.

I wanted to have s*x with Ashley, but I knew it would be a mistake. Maybe if we’d prepared for it, things would have been different. I took responsibility for her safety and her future. Maybe I should have slept with her just so I could stop thinking about it all the time.

I guess Will and I are enemies now. We had a lot of fun growing up together, especially at his grandfather’s farm down in Cochran.

When Will and I walked home from baseball practice after sunset, we were scared to walk down the dark streets, and every time we came upon a house or a car parked in the street where someone could jump out at us, we raised our voices about how much we had learned in karate class that night. It must have worked as no one ever bothered us.

Will’s father was almost never around, and since his mother worked nights, Will slept over at my house on many school nights. He would ride the bus to school with me the next day. Sometimes, he did not want to stay over, so my mother drove him back home about one o’clock after his mother finished her shift.

I was thirteen the first time I visited Will’s grandfather. He was retired and did nothing but sit on the front porch of his shack listening to WSB, chewing tobacco, strumming his dulcimer, drinking corn whiskey, and rocking in his chair.

Will’s grandfather was always handing out advice, as if for years he’d been storing up nuggets of wisdom for hillbillies, one-legged men, and women with six kids and a broken heart.

“You boys remember this—you need to find you a way of making cash money. Don’t never let the government tax your money. Lie like hell if you got to ‘cause those bastards are lying to you about every goddamned thing. Don’t never let the IRS know where all your money is or how much you’re making.”

He rarely left the porch, save to use the outhouse, which consisted of an old refrigerator on bricks with a hole cut in the bottom that you stood over or bent down to use. Individual preference, I suppose. When the four-foot hole in the ground filled up, Will’s grandfather made Buddy Lee and Ralston (Will’s cousins) dig a new hole a few feet away and place the refrigerator over it. They threw lime down the old hole and covered it up with the dirt from the new hole. The refrigerator outhouse had small peep holes cut on each side to let anyone who was in it look out. To keep the door closed, there was a string to wrap around your hand. It was a huge refrigerator. Two people could have sat in it.

As I type, it’s eleven o’clock at night and the Buffalo news is on the TV. The big story: CIA director Richard Helms stated that H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s aide, asked the CIA to take responsibility for Watergate.

I’m beginning to think the President might be in trouble.

For a few hours now, I have been angry. Angry at Will. Angry at Ashley. I’ve been feeling disappointed and hurt by what they did to me. I’m trying to lighten my mood but it’s not as easy as turning a switch on and off. I can be light-hearted, but deep within me, the pain won’t leave.

Dr. Laighles gave me an envelope containing $250, my salary for the summer. It’s sitting next to the typewriter on the porch and is as volatile as a shotgun. On the back of the envelope, he scribbled:

We’ll call occasionally. Take good care of the dogs. Eat up the food in the fridge and cupboards. Don’t break too many hearts this summer.

~ Floyd Laighles